Part 29 (2/2)
”Ah, good-day to you, doctor!--Yes, as you see, enjoying a little nap.
I was out early.”
He got down from the buggy and, with bent knees and his hands in his pockets, stretched the creased cloth of his trousers, where this had cut into his flesh. He was a big, brawny, handsome man, with a ma.s.sive nose, a cloven chin, and the most companionable smile in the world. As he stood, he touched here a strap, there a buckle on the harness of his chestnut--a well-known trotter, with which he often made a match--and affectionately clapped the neck of Mahony's bay. He could not keep his hands off a horse. By choice he was his own stableman, and in earlier life had been a dare-devil rider. Now, increasing weight led him to prefer buggy to saddle; but his recklessness had not diminished. With the reins in his left hand, he would run his light, two-wheeled trap up any wooded, boulder-strewn hill and down the other side, just as in his harum-scarum days he had set it at felled trees, and, if rumour spoke true, wire-fences.
Mahony admired the splendid vitality of the man, as well as the indestructible optimism that bore him triumphantly through all the hards.h.i.+ps of a colonial ministry. No sick bed was too remote for Long, no sinner sunk too low to be helped to his feet. The leprous Chinaman doomed to an unending isolation, the drunken Paddy, the degraded white woman--each came in for a share of his benevolence. He spent the greater part of his life visiting the outcasts and outposts, beating up the unbaptised, the unconfirmed, the unwed. But his church did not suffer. He had always some fresh scheme for this on hand: either he was getting up a tea-meeting to raise money for an organ; or a series of penny-readings towards funds for a chancel; or he was training with his choir for a sacred concert. There was a boyish streak in him, too. He would enter into the joys of the annual Sunday-school picnic with a zest equal to the children's own, leading the way, in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, at leap-frog and obstacle-race. In doctrine he struck a happy mean between low-church practices and ritualism, preaching short, spirited sermons to which even languid Christians could listen without tedium; and on a week-day evening he would take a hand at a rubber of whist or ecarte--and not for love--or play a sound game of chess. A man, too, who, refusing to be bound by the letter of the Thirty-nine Articles, extended his charity even to persons of the Popish faith. In short, he was one of the few to whom Mahony could speak of his own haphazard efforts at criticising the Pentateuch.
The Archdeacon was wont to respond with his genial smile: ”Ah, it's all very well for you, doctor!--you're a free lance. I am constrained by my cloth.--And frankly, for the rest of us, that kind of thing's too--well, too disturbing. Especially when we have nothing better to put in its place.”
Doctor and parson--the latter, considerably over six feet, made Mahony, who was tall enough, look short and doubly slender--walked side by side for nearly a mile, flitting from topic to topic: the rivalry that prevailed between Ballarats East and West; the seditious uprising in India, where both had relatives; the recent rains, the prospects for grazing. The last theme brought them round to Dandaloo and its unhappy owner. The Archdeacon expressed the outsider's surprise at the strength of Glendinning's const.i.tution, and the lively popular sympathy that was felt for his wife.
”One's heart aches for the poor little lady, struggling to bear up as though nothing were the matter. Between ourselves, doctor”--and Mr.
Long took off his straw hat to let the air play round his head--”between ourselves, it's a thousand pities he doesn't just pop off the hooks in one of his bouts. Or that some of you medical gentlemen don't use your knowledge to help things on.”
He let out his great hearty laugh as he spoke, and his companion's involuntary stiffening went unnoticed. But on Mahony voicing his att.i.tude with: ”And his immortal soul, sir? Isn't it the church's duty to hope for a miracle? ... just as it is ours to keep the vital spark going,” he made haste to take the edge off his words. ”Now, now, doctor, only my fun! Our duty is, I trust, plain to us both.”
It was even easier to soothe than to ruffle Mahony. ”Remember me very kindly to Mrs. Long, will you?” he said as the Archdeacon prepared to climb into his buggy. ”But tell her, too, I owe her a grudge just now.
My wife's so lost in flannel and brown holland that I can't get a word out of her.”
”And mine doesn't know where she'd be, with this bazaar, if it weren't for Mrs. Mahony.” Long was husband to a dot of a woman who, having borne him half a dozen children of his own feature and build, now worked as parish clerk and district visitor rolled in one; driving about in sunbonnet and gardening-gloves behind a pair of cream ponies--tiny, sharp-featured, resolute; with little of her husband's large tolerance, but an energy that outdid his own, and made her an object of both fear and respect. ”And that reminds me: over at the cross-roads by Spring Hill, I met your young brother-in-law. And he told me, if I ran across you to ask you to hurry home. Your wife has some surprise or other in store for you. No, nothing unpleasant! Rather the reverse, I believe. But I wasn't to say more. Well, good-day, doctor, good-day to you!”
Mahony smiled, nodded and went on his way. Polly's surprises were usually simple and transparent things: some one would have made them a present of a sucking-pig or a bush-turkey, and Polly, knowing his relish for a savoury morsel, did not wish it to be overdone: she had sent similar chance calls out after him before now.
When, having seen his horse rubbed down, he reached home, he found her on the doorstep watching for him. She was flushed, and her eyes had those peculiar high-lights in them which led him jokingly to exhort her to caution: ”Lest the sparks should set the house on fire!”
”Well, what is it, p.u.s.s.y?” he inquired as he laid his bag down and hung up his wide-awake. ”What's my little surprise-monger got up her sleeve to-day? Good Lord, Polly, I'm tired!”
Polly was smiling roguishly. ”Aren't you going into the surgery, Richard?” she asked, seeing him heading for the dining-room.
”Aha! So that's it,” said he, and obediently turned the handle. Polly had on occasion taken advantage of his absence to introduce some new comfort or decoration in his room.
The blind had been let down. He was still blinking in the half-dark when a figure sprang out from behind the door, barging heavily against him, and a loud voice shouted: ”Boh, you old beef-brains! Boh to a goose!”
Displeased at such horseplay, Mahony stepped sharply back--his first thought was of Ned having unexpectedly returned from Mount Ararat. Then recognising the voice, he exclaimed incredulously: ”YOU, d.i.c.kybird?
You!”
”d.i.c.k, old man.... I say, d.i.c.k! Yes, it's me right enough, and not my ghost. The old bad egg come back to roost!”
The blind was raised; and the friends, who had last met in the dingy bush hut on the night of the Stockade, stood face to face. And now ensued a babel of greeting, a quick fire of question and answer, the two voices going in and out and round each other, singly and together, like the voices in a duet. Tears rose to Polly's eyes as she listened; it made her heart glow to see Richard so glad. But when, forgetting her presence, Purdy cried: ”And I must confess, d.i.c.k.... I took a kiss from Mrs. Polly. Gad, old man, how she's come on!” Polly hastily retired to the kitchen.
At table the same high spirits prevailed: it did not often happen that Richard was brought out of his sh.e.l.l like this, thought Polly gratefully, and heaped her visitor's plate to the brim. His first hunger stilled, Purdy fell to giving a slapdash account of his experiences. He kept to no orderly sequence, but threw them out just as they occurred to him: a rub with bushrangers in the Black Forest, his adventures as a long-distance drover in the Mildura, the trials of a week he had spent in a boiling-down establishment on the Murray: ”Where the stink wa so foul, you two, that I vomited like a dog every day!”
Under the force of this Odyssey husband and wife gradually dropped into silence, which they broke only by single words of astonishment and sympathy; while the child Trotty spooned in her pudding without seeing it, her round, solemn eyes fixed unblinkingly on this new uncle, who was like a wonderful story-book come alive.
In Mahony's feelings for Purdy at this moment, there was none of the old intolerant superiority. He had been dependent for so long on a mere surface acquaintance with his fellows, that he now felt to the full how precious the tie was that bound him to Purdy. Here came one for whom he was not alone the reserved, struggling pract.i.tioner, the rather moody man advancing to middle-age; but also the d.i.c.k of his boyhood and early youth.
He had often imagined the satisfaction it would be to confide his troubles to Purdy. Compared, however, with the hards.h.i.+ps the latter had undergone, these seemed of small importance; and dinner pa.s.sed without any allusion to his own affairs. And now the chances of his speaking out were slight; he could have been entirely frank only under the first stimulus of meeting.
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