Part 24 (1/2)
His reflections were cut short by old Oc.o.c.k, who leaned over the fence to bid his neighbours good-bye.
”No disturbance! Come in, come in!” cried Mahony, with the rather spurious heartiness one is p.r.o.ne to throw into a final invitation. And Polly rose from her knees before a clothes-basket which she was filling with crockery, and bustled away to fetch the cake she had baked for such an occasion.
”I'll miss yer bright little face, that I will!” said Mr. Oc.o.c.k, as he munched with the relish of a Jerry or a Ned. He held his slice of cake in the hollow of one great palm, conveying with extreme care the pieces he broke off to his mouth.
”You must come and see us, as soon as ever we're settled.”
”Bless you! You'll soon find grander friends than an old chap like me.”
”Mr. Oc.o.c.k! And you with three sons in the law!”
”Besides, mark my words, it'll be your turn next to build,” Mahony removed his pipe to throw in. ”We'll have you over with us yet.”
”And what a lovely surprise for Miss Amelia when she arrives, to find a bran'-new house awaiting her.”
”Well, that's the end of this little roof-tree,” said Mahony.--The loaded dray had driven off, the children and Ellen perched on top of the furniture, and he was giving a last look round. ”We've spent some very happy days under it, eh, my dear?”
”Oh, very,” said Polly, shaking out her skirts. ”But we shall be just as happy in the new one.”
”G.o.d grant we may! It's not too much to hope I've now seen all the downs of my life. I've managed to pack a good many into thirty short years.-- And that reminds me, Mrs. Townshend-Mahony, do you know you will have been married to me two whole years, come next Friday?”
”Why, so we shall!” cried Polly, and was transfixed in the act of tying her bonnet-strings. ”How time does fly! It seems only the other day I saw this room for the first time. I peeped in, you know, while you were fetching the box. DO you remember how I cried, Richard? I was afraid of a spider or something.” And the Polly of eighteen looked back, with a motherly amus.e.m.e.nt, at her sixteen-year-old eidolon. ”But now, dear, if you're ready ... or else the furniture will get there before we do.
We'd better take the short cut across Soldiers' Hill. That's the cat in that basket, for you to carry, and here's your microscope. I've got the decanter and the best teapot. Shall we go?”
Chapter II
And now for a month or more Mahony had been in possession of a room that was all his own. Did he retire into it and shut the door, he could make sure of not being disturbed. Polly herself tapped before entering; and he let her do so. Polly was dear; but dearer still was his long-coveted privacy.
He knew, too, that she was happily employed; the fitting-up and furnis.h.i.+ng of the house was a job after her own heart. She had proved both skilful and economical at it: thanks to her, they had used a bare three-quarters of the sum allotted by Oc.o.c.k for the purpose--and this was well; for any number of unforeseen expenses had cropped up at the last moment. Polly had a real knack for making things ”do”. Old empty boxes, for instance, underwent marvellous transformations at her hands--emerged, clad in chintz and muslin, as sofas and toilet-tables.
She hung her curtains on strings, and herself sewed the seams of the parlour carpet, squatting Turk-fas.h.i.+on on the floor, and working away, with a great needle shaped like a scimitar, till the perspiration ran down her face. It was also she who, standing on the kitchen-table, put up the only two pictures they possessed, Ned and Jerry giving opinions on the straightness of her eye, from below: a fancy picture of the Battle of Waterloo in the parlour; a print of ”Harvey Discovering the Circulation of the Blood” on the surgery wall.
From where he sat Mahony could hear the voices of the children--John's children--at play. They frolicked with Pompey in the yard. He could endure them, now that he was not for ever tumbling over them. Yes, one and all were comfortably established under the new roof--with the exception of poor Palmerston the cat. Palmerston had declined to recognise the change, and with the immoderate homing-instinct of his kind had returned night after night to his old haunts. For some time Mahony's regular evening walk was back to the store--a road he would otherwise not have taken; for it was odious to him to see Polly's neat little appointments going to rack and ruin, under the tenancy of a dirty Irish family. There he would find the animal sitting, in melancholy retrospect. Again and again he picked him up and carried him home; till that night when no puss came to his call, and Palmerston, the black and glossy, was seen no more: either he had fallen down a shaft, or been mangled by a dog, or stolen, cats still fetching a high price on Ballarat.
The window of Mahony's room faced a wide view: not a fence, hardly a bit of scrub or a tuft of gra.s.s-tree marked the bare expanse of uneven ground, now baked brown as a piecrust by the December sun. He looked across it to the cemetery. This was still wild and unfenced--just a patch of rising ground where it was permissible to bury the dead. Only the day before--the second anniversary of the Eureka Stockade--he had watched some two to three hundred men, with crepe on their hats and sleeves, a black-draped pole at their head, march there to do homage to their fallen comrades. The dust raised by the shuffling of these many feet had accompanied the procession like a moving cloud; had lingered in its rear like the smoke from a fire. Drays and lorries crawled for ever laboriously along it, seeming glued to the earth by the monstrous sticky heat of the veiled sun. Further back rose a number of bald hills--rounded, swelling hills, shaped like a woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And behind all, pale china-blue against the tense white sky, was the embankment of the distant ranges. Except for these, an ugly, uninviting outlook, and one to which he seldom lifted his eyes.
His room pleased him better. Polly had stretched a bright green drugget on the floor; the table had a green cloth on it; the picture showed up well against the whitewashed wall. Behind him was a large deal cupboard, which held instruments and drugs. The bookshelves with their precious burden were within reach of his hand; on the top shelf he had stacked the boxes containing his botanical and other specimens.
The first week or so there was naturally little doing: a sprained wrist to bandage, a tooth to draw, a case of fly-blight. To keep himself from growing fidgety, he overhauled his minerals and b.u.t.terflies, and renewed faded labels. This done, he went on to jot down some ideas he had, with regard to the presence of auriferous veins in quartz. It was now generally agreed that quartz was the matrix; but on the question of how the gold had found its way into the rock, opinions were sharply divided. The theory of igneous injection was advanced by some; others inclined to that of sublimation. Mahony leaned to a combination of the two processes, and spent several days getting his thoughts in order; while Polly, bursting with pride, went about on tiptoe audibly hus.h.i.+ng the children: their uncle was writing for the newspapers.
Still no patients worth the name made their appearance. To fend off the black worry that might get the better of him did he sit idle, he next drew his Bible to him, and set about doing methodically what he had so far undertaken merely by fits and starts--deciding for himself to what degree the Scriptures were inspired. Polly was neither proud nor happy while this went on, and let the children romp unchecked. At present it was not so much the welfare of her husband's soul she feared for: G.o.d must surely know by this time what a good man Richard was; he had not his equal, she thought, for honesty and uprightness; he was kind to the poor and the sick, and hadn't missed a single Sunday at church, since their marriage. But all that would not help, if once he got the reputation of being an infidel. Then, n.o.body would want him as a doctor at all.
Casually begun, Mahony's studies soon absorbed him to the exclusion of everything else.
Brought up in the cast-iron mould of Irish Protestantism, to which, being of a sober and devout turn of mind, he had readily submitted, he had been tossed, as a youthful student, into the freebooting Edinburgh of the forties. Edinburgh was alive in those days to her very paving-stones; town and university combined to form a hotbed of intellectual unrest, a breeding-ground for disturbing possibilities.
The ”development theory” was in the air; and a book that appeared anonymously had boldly voiced, in popular fas.h.i.+on, Maillet's dream and the Lamarckian hypothesis of a Creation undertaken once and for all, in place of a continuous creative intenention. This book, opposing natural law to miracle, carried complete conviction to the young and eager.
Audacious spirits even hazarded the conjecture that primitive life itself might have originated in a natural way: had not, but recently, an investigator who brought a powerful voltaic battery to bear on a saturated solution of silicate of potash, been startled to find, as the result of his experiment, numberless small mites of the species ACARUS HORRIDUS? Might not the marvel electricity or galvanism, in action on alb.u.men, turn out to be the vitalising force? To the orthodox zoologist, phytologist and geologist, such a suggestion savoured of madness; they either took refuge in a contemptuous silence, or condescended only to reply: Had one visited the Garden of Eden during Creation, one would have found that, in the morning, man was not, while in the evening he was!--morning and evening bearing their newly established significance of geological epochs. The famous tracing of the Creator's footsteps, undertaken by a gifted compromiser, was felt by even the most bigoted to be a lame rejoinder. His ASTEROLEPSIS, the giant fossil-fish from the Old Red Sandstone, the antiquity of which should show that the origin of life was not to be found solely in ”infusorial points,” but that highly developed forms were among the earliest created--this single prop was admittedly not strong enough to carry the whole burden of proof. No, the immutability of species had been seriously impugned, and bold minds asked themselves why a single act of creation, at the outset, should not const.i.tute as divine an origin of life as a continued series of ”creative fiats.”