Ada Cambridge

“ Mary introduced him. He was spick-and-span, with shining cheeks and a damp and glossy top-knot, and his blue eyes stared at the strange crowd stolidly for several minutes before he suddenly crumpled up his face and uttered a howl of terror.
"What is it?" queried Dalzell, with raised brows, pretending that he had never seen such a thing before.
"It's a baby," Frances explained, dancing round it. "Baby! Baby!"—shaking the new rattle that was one of its Christmas gifts—"look at me, baby! It is Mr Carey's baby. Oh, come and speak to him, Mr Carey! He is frightened of so many strangers." ”

“ Rose continued, with soft but firm persistence. "She must have a father too, Deb, and Peter would not give his job away any more than I would give mine. He thinks the world of them all. He is just as good a father as he is a husband," with a lift of head and lighting of eye. "Come to me, my precious!" as the baby whimpered. "Come to its own mother, then! No, no, Debbie dear, you be a mother yourself in the natural and proper way; you will find it a deal better than being rich. Marry some good, kind man straight away, before you waste any more of your young years. ”

“ There was Nannie, her godchild, shot up slim and tall from the dumpling baby that her aunt remembered, showing plainly the milky-fair, sunny-faced, wholesome woman that she was presently to become. Deb gazed at her with aches of regret—she had thought them for ever stifled in Claud's all-sufficing companionship—for her own lost motherhood, and of lesser but still poignant regret that she had not been allowed to adopt Nannie in Bob Goldsworthy's place. The joy of dressing and taking out a daughter of that stamp—of having her at home with one, to make the tea, and to chat with, and to lean on! ”

“ They sat in the pony-carriage on the dam embankment, gazing silently. A flock of wildfowl had been scared away by their approach, and now not a wing, not an eye was near. At a great distance curlews wailed, only to make the stillness and solitude more exquisite, more profound. The purple of the hills grew deeper and softer, the lake a mere pulseless shimmer through the twilight haze. And then, last touch of magic, the moon swam up—the same moon that had transfigured Five Creeks garden and Alice Urquhart last night.
He poured out his soul to Deborah Pennycuick. ”

“ Deb gazed at her sister's rapt face, glowing in the firelight, and wondered if the brain behind it could be altogether sane.
"To call that HAPPINESS!" she ejaculated, with sad irony and scorn.
"If you must fix a name to it—yes," the widow considered thoughtfully.
"After all, 'unmiserable' does not go far enough. I AM happy. For, Debbie"—turning to look into the dark, troubled eyes—"I'm clean now—I never thought to be again—to know anything so exquisitely sweet, either in earth or heaven—I'm clean, body and soul, day and night, inside and outside, at last." ”

“ No bride who had married money, and was setting out by P. & O. upon her luxurious European tour, could have been more keenly sensible of the romance of foreign travel than she, crossing Hobson's Bay in a borrowed Customs launch; while the squally darkness surrounding and isolating her and her mate immeasurably enhanced the charm. "I want to see it—to feel it!" she pleaded. "The air is so clean and fresh! The sea is so grand tonight! How beautiful it smells! Guthrie, I must have been born for a sailor's wife—I love it so!" ”

“ She turned to Miss Goldsworthy and clung to her. "Save me! save me!" was what the desperate clutch meant, but what the paralysed tongue could not articulate.
She was in a high fever and delirious on her wedding night, and a week later at death's door. When she came out of her illness, reconciled to her family, meekly obedient to her husband, she was a wreck of herself—a prisoner for life, bound hand and foot, more pitiable than she would have been as a dead body fished out of the dam. ”

“ Then he began to think of Deb—in the same new way that Carey had begun to think of her after discovering a dangerous rival in the field. To Claud, Guthrie was dangerous in his rude bulk and strength, the knitted brute power that the sea and his hard life had given him; to Guthrie, Claud was dangerous in the highbred beauty and finish of his person, clothes and manners, and in the astounding "cleverness" that he displayed. Each man feared the force of those qualities which he lacked himself, and was secretly ashamed of lacking. ”

“ The moon sways more than ocean tides. In broad day Deb would no more have stalked a man than she would a crocodile; in this soft, free, empty, irresponsible night the primal woman was out of her husk, one with the desert-prowling animal that calls through the moonlit silence for its mate. Twenty times had she snubbed an ardent lover at the behest of all sorts of reasons and so-called instincts cultivated for her guidance by generations of wise men, now, all in a moment, came this moon-born impulse to give herself to him unasked. ”

“ Miss Keene, spoiled at Redford as they had been, was as unfit for crude housework, and she aggravated her incompetence by weeping over it. She had not gathered from Deb's letters that the change in the family fortunes was as great as it now proved to be; and Deb had not anticipated the effect of adversity upon one so easily depressed. She had no 'heart', poor thing. She struggled and muddled, sighing for flowers for the vases while the beds were unmade; and when she saw a certain look on Deb's face, wept and mourned and gave up hope. ”

“ The mite was a waif too, alone in the world when his father was at sea, pathetically helpless, with no defence against blows and unkindness. The reflection brought dimness to the man's hard blue eyes, and turned his steps houseward.
He arrived to find a large four-horsed brake at the door. The body was filling with other persons—the sailor knew not, cared not whom. He looked up at the radiant figure in front. She looked down on him with heart-melting kindness, as if nothing had happened.
"Why, Mr Carey, aren't you coming to church?" she called to him. ”

“ Love—great, solemn, immortal Love, passionate and suffering—was a thing unknown to comfortable, commonplace Rose, as doubtless to Peter also. They were dear, good people, and fortunate in their ignorance and in what it spared them; but it was annoying when ignorance assumed superior knowledge, and wanted to teach its grandmother to suck eggs. Was it come to this—that marriage and a family were synonymous terms? No, indeed, nor ever would, while intelligent men and women walked the earth. Deb reserved the more sacred confidences for Mary's ear. ”

“ But I don't care, except for Deb. I do hate her to have to cry, through me, and to be so kind at the same time. She scolds Francie for being horrid—that does no good, she says, and she is quite right—and then asks me if I have any love left for her, and all that kind of thing. It makes me feel like a selfish brute; and yet it would not be unselfish to sacrifice Peter. ”

“ Out of it, like sea-stripped wrecks, dead sticks of rose-bushes poked up, and ragged things that had gone to seed. The turf was parched away, like the grass of the surrounding paddocks; the mounds were cracked; the head-stones—several of them ornate and costly—stained with the drip from the trees and birds, and some distinctly out of the perpendicular.
"It ought not to look like this," Deb apologised for it. "It ought to have been seen to. We used to come often, and bring water from the dam. But one forgets as time goes on; one doesn't think—or care. Poor dead people! How out of it they are! ”

“ Rose sweetly jeered her—"even for a kingdom!"
"You have five more, and may have another five—or twenty-five. It looks like it."
"But none to spare. Besides, you won't want other people's children when you get your own. How about her being the heiress then?"
"I shall never have children of my own," said Deb, with tightened lips. "That is why I want to adopt one." Rose laughed the idea to scorn.
"Of course you will!" cried she. "You must. All the money in the world is nothing compared with a baby. ”

“ That the fine plumage is for the sun was a fact well understood by Frances, at any rate. And she was wild at the wrongs wrought by sordid circumstances—her father's and sister's heedlessness—upon herself. She thought only of herself. Deb was getting old, and she deserved to suffer anyway; but what had Frances done to be deprived of her birth-right, of all her chances of success in life? Eighteen, and no coming out—beautiful, and nobody to see it—marriageable, and out of the track of all the eligible men, amongst whom she might have had her pick and choice. ”

“ Claud Dalzell, drifting from one resort of the wealthy to another—deer-stalking in Scotland, salmon-fishing in Norway, shooting in the Rockies, hunting in the Shires, yachting everywhere, and everywhere adored of a crowd of women as idle as himself—was loafing at Monte Carlo when he heard of Mr Thornycroft's death and Deb's accession to his throne. Ennui and satiety possessed the popular young man at the moment—for he was made for better things, and his dissatisfied soul tormented him ”

“ After tea, Rose was invited to show her house—a further proof of her sister's tact and powers of divination. Now Peter was left behind—he used the opportunity to cut flowers for Deb to take away with her—and the little matron was in her glory. From top to bottom, and every cupboard and corner, and the numerous up-to-date appliances, and the stocks of silver, linen, china, the ample furnishings of every part, the solid goodness of every bit of material—all was displayed with modest pride, the complacence of one who knows there is nothing to hide or apologise for. ”

“ Miss Pennycuick. She's here now. And couldn't believe it when they told her—though, when you come to think of it, it was a natural thing for him to do, having been such friends with the old man, and she his god-daughter. A lucky young woman—my word!" Jim's swelled heart collapsed and sank like a burst balloon. His dream-house vanished in thin air, to be built no more.
"That settles it," he said to himself. According to his code of manly honour and self-respect, a man could not possibly, even with five thousand pounds in hand, ask a girl with a quarter of a million to marry him. ”

“ How peacefully the still water lay under the shining moon—that moon which is capable of making, not soft young lovers only, but the toughest old stagers sentimental—nay, maudlin—at times; an intoxicant purged of the grossness of spirituous liquors, but acting on the brain in precisely the same way. Mr Goldsworthy, already uplifted by good Redford wine, felt the effect of the lovely night in dim poetic stirrings of his sordid little soul. ”

“ Mary remained silent.
"Well, I must go," said Deb, jumping up, as if washing her hands of a disappointing job. "The carriage must be there, and Bob will be starving for his dinner. No use asking you to join us, I know. But you must come to Redford soon, Molly—or somewhere out of this—when you feel better and able. You shall have rooms entirely to yourself, and needn't see anybody. I will come tomorrow, and you must let me talk to you about it." ”

“ It is quite hopeless! Here I live in my own home without a friend, and he is treated like a pariah, my poor dear boy! He has been to see me two or three times, as he has a perfect right to do, and they have just had him shown into the drawing-room, and left him to me, neither of them coming near. And this while Bennet Goldsworthy loafs all over the house, as if it was his own, and presumes to look at me in a superior sort of way, as if I was one of his dirty little Sunday-school children in disgrace. They bring him up into the attic even—our own private room—mine as much as theirs ”