They were at breakfast when the summons came — breakfast, the hardest meal of any to get through without friction. Richard invariably ate at top speed and with his eyes glued to his plate; in order, he said, not to be obliged to see Zara’s dusty crepe and bombazine, the mere sight of which on these hot mornings took away his appetite. But he also hoped by example to incite Zara to haste: now she was there, the meals dragged out to twice their usual length. For Zara had a patent habit of masticating each mouthful so-and-so many times before swallowing; and the children forgot to eat, in counting their aunt’s bites. With their ears cocked for the click at the finish. Mamma said it was her teeth that did it, and it was rude to listen. Aunt Zara called her teeth her MASHWAR. Why did she, and why did they click? But it was no good asking HER. She never told you anything . . . except lessons.
Yes, Mary had got her way, and for a couple of weeks now, Zara had been installed as governess. As a teacher she had not her equal. She also made a very good impression in the township, looking so much the lady, speaking with such precision and all that. But — well, it was a good job nothing had been said to Richard of her exaggerated offer to wash dishes and scrub floors. How he would have crowed! Apart from this, she had landed them in a real quandary by arriving with every stick of furniture she possessed: her bed, her mahogany chest of drawers, a night-commode. In the tiny bedroom which was all they had to offer her, there was hardly room to stand; while still unpacked portmanteaux and gladstone-bags lined the passage, Zara having turned nasty at a hint of the outhouse. And directly lessons were over, she shut herself up among her things with a bottle of French polish.
Of course, poor soul, they were all that was left her of her own home: you couldn’t wonder at her liking to keep them nice. And the main thing was, the children were making headway. Reward enough for her, Mary, to hear them gabbling their French of a morning, or learning their steps to Zara’s: “One, two, CHASSEZ, one!” Such considerations didn’t weigh with Richard though. Just as of old, everything Zara said or did exasperated him. He was furious with her, too, for grumbling at the size of her room. — But there! It wasn’t only Zara who grated on his nerves. It was everybody and everything.
On this particular day all her tact would be needed. For the message Maria had looked in during breakfast to deliver was a summons to Brown’s Plains; and if there was one thing he disliked more than another, it was the bush journeys he was being called on to face anew. “What! . . . again? Good God!” he looked up from his gobbling to ejaculate. Which expression made Zara pinch her lips and raise her eyebrows; besides being so bad for the children to hear. She, Mary, found his foot under the table and pressed it but that irritated him, too, and he was nasty enough to say: “What are you kicking me for?” Breakfast over, she sent Maria to the “Sun” to bespeak a buggy; looked out his driving things, put likely requisites in his bag — as usual the people hadn’t said what the matter was — and, her own work in the house done, changed her dress and tied on a shady hat. Now that Zara was there to mind the children, she frequently made a point of accompanying Richard on these drives.
The buggy came round: it was another of her innovations to have it brought right to the door; he had nothing to do but to step in. But at the gate they found Cuffy, who began teasing to be allowed to go, too. He had no one to play with; Lucie was asleep and Maria was busy, and Aunt Zara shut up in her room; and he was SO tired of reading. Thus he pouted, putting on his special unhappy baby face; and as often as he did this it got at something in his mother, which made her weak towards her first-born. So she said, oh, very well then, if he wanted to so much, he might; and sent him in to wash his hands and fetch his hat. Richard, of course, let loose a fresh string of grumbles: it would be hot enough with just the pair of them, without having the child thrown in. But Mary, too, was cross and tired, and said she wasn’t going to give way over every trifle; and so Cuffy, who had shrunk back at the sharp words, was hoisted up and off they set. — And soon the three of them, a tight fit in the high, two-wheeled, hooded vehicle, had left the township behind them, and were out on bush tracks where the buggy rocked and pitched like a ship on the broken waters of a rough sea.
Cuffy had never before been so far afield, and his spirits were irrepressible. He twisted this way and that, jerked his legs and bored with his elbows, flinging round to ask question after question. It fell to Mary to supply the answers; and she had scant patience with the curiosity of children, who hardly listened to what you told them in their eagerness to ask anew. But her “I wonder!” “How do I know?” and “Don’t bother me!” failed to damp Cuffy, who kept up his flow till he startled her by exclaiming with a vigorous sigh: “Ugh! I DO feel so hot and funny.” His small face was flushed and distressed.
“That’s what comes of so much talking,” said Mary, and without more ado whisked off his sailor-hat, with its cribbing chin-elastic, undid his shoes, slid his feet out of his socks.
Thus much Cuffy permitted. But when it came to taking off his tunic, leaving him to sit exposed in his little vest, he fought her unbuttoning hands.
“DON’T, Mamma — I won’t!”
“But there’s nobody to see! And it wouldn’t matter if they did — you’re only a little boy. No, you WOULD come. Now you must do as I tell you.”
And when she knew quite well how he felt! Why, not even Lucie was allowed to see him undressed. Since they had slept in the same room she had always to go to bed first, and turn her face to the wall, and shut her eyes tight, while he flew out of his clothes and into his nightshirt. To have to sit in broad daylight with naked arms, and his neck, too, and his braces showing! All his pleasure in the drive was spoiled. At each turn in the road he was on thorns lest somebody should be there who’d see him. Oh, WHY must Mamma be like this? Why didn’t she take her own clothes off? His belonged to him. (He HATED Mamma.)
Nursing this small agony, he could think of nothing else. And now there was silence in the buggy, which lurched and jolted, Richard taking as good as no pains to avoid the foot-deep, cast-iron ruts, the lumpy rocks and stones. Over they went sideways, then up in the air and down again with a bump. “Oh, gently, dear! DO be careful.” He wasn’t the driver for this kind of thing. She never felt really safe with him. — And here there came to her mind a memory of the very first time they had driven together: on their wedding journey from Geelong to Ballarat. How nervous she had been that day . . . how home-sick and lonely, too! . . . beside some one who was little more than a stranger to her, behind a strange horse on an unknown road, bound for a place of which she knew nothing. Ah well, it was perhaps a wise arrangement on the part of Providence that you DIDN’T know what lay ahead . . . or you might never set out at all. Could SHE have foreseen all that marriage was to mean: how Richard would change and the dance he would lead her; all the nagging worry and the bitter suffering; then, yes then, poor young inexperienced thing that she was, full of romantic ideas, and expecting only happiness as her lot, she might have been excused for shrinking back in dismay. — Her chief objection nowadays to driving was the waste of time. To make up for having to sit there with her hands before her, she let her mind run free, and was deep in her usual reckonings — reducing grocer’s and butcher’s bills, making over her old dresses for the children — when a violent heave of the buggy all but threw her from her seat: she had just time to fling a protective arm round Cuffy, to save the child from pitching clean over the dashboard. Without warning, Richard had leant forward and dealt the horse a vicious cut on the neck. The beast, which had been ambling drearily, started, stumbled, and would have gone down, had he not tugged and sawed it by the mouth. For a few seconds they flew ahead, rocking and swaying, she holding to the child with one hand, to the rail with the other. —“Do you want to break our necks?”
Mahony made no reply.
Gradually the rough canter ceased, and the horse fell back on its former jog-trot. It was a very poor specimen, old and lean; and the likelihood was, had been in harness most of the morning.
Again they crawled forward. The midday heat blazed; the red dust enveloped them, d............