by Lucy Walker
Secretary, she knew, would have sent some message through to him. Whether it had gone by fire signals, birds winging their way in the wrong direction, or by mundane radio via Pandanning, she didn’t ask. She knew that Secretary would have told Bern everything, and that there was nothing happening at Malin’s Outpost that Bern didn’t know. He did not send any messages to her; nor she to him. There was nothing they could say to one another; except to one another.
The day of Bern’s home-coming had to come.
It was the day before the wedding and he brought not only Andrew, wedding presents and bridesmaids’ presents, but a co-pilot with the pilot.
This, he told Katie, was so there would be two witnesses to all Company documents that had to be signed. He wanted ‘outsiders only’ for that. He had made Katie and Andrew members of the Company.
He brought with him a peace-making gift for Tom Ryde. This was a packet of shares, some of his own, in the company. They weren’t an overwhelming lot, but they were some.
‘The Rydes live too near not to be one with us in this thing,’ he told Tom over a handshake when they drove over to Ryde’s Place that night. He had known Tom’s motives in his courting of Katie all along. But he said nothing of this. Neither did Tom.
It had been arranged that all should sleep at Ryde’s Place, including the two air-pilots ‒ in a long row on the back veranda.
Bern’s home-coming ‒ over at Malin’s Outpost ‒ had been climax then anti-climax.
When Katie had seen him walking up from the plane, the pilots on either side of him, she felt as if all heaven was there.
When she went to meet him she had a wild irrational longing for him to put his arms around her: and kiss her.
‘Hallo, Katie ‒’ was all he had said, though the smile he had for her was the kind that turned her heart into apple pie.
He had put one arm along her shoulder while he introduced the pilots.
So she made no overtures herself. Now, as Bern would have remarked himself, was not the time.
Would the right time ‒ Katie wondered half sadly ‒ ever come?
The diggers had come in from afar and thrown up their makeshift shelters under the wandoo trees. Ryde’s Place seemed to Katie to be as full of people as that hotel in Perth. Only much much nicer.
After the wedding Bern and Katie were to drive back to Malin’s Outpost; Andrew was to stay another week with the Rydes.
‘Which means with Taciturn,’ Jill said scoffing. ‘If he can’t have anyone as civilised as Secretary to hobnob with, then Taciturn is the next best.’
They had a party the night before the wedding at Ryde’s.
‘The last before you’re leg-roped and haltered, old man,’ Tom said to Bern. ‘When the girls are tired enough to go to bed we’ll go down and join the men. They’re celebrating something a darn side more important than a wedding anyway.’
There was gentle irony in Bern’s smile at this oblique remark of Tom’s.
‘I’m glad you’re celebrating too,’ was all he said.
The men, camped under the wandoos, were out to enjoy themselves. Only they knew how well those vast ilmenite deposits had been surveyed and mapped. They had waited long, and with hope, for this moment. There had been a dozen times when they had feared someone else was marking those old survey pegs. They had been wrong. The someone had always turned out to be an amateur who occasionally found one or two pegs but then veered off in the wrong direction.
Gideon Dent Ltd. had won the Government mining rights against all comers. Bern Malin had come back with the news. No wonder he was getting married on the strength of it!
Celebrate? No one else had ever understood the full meaning of the word, they announced.
The girls and Mrs. Ryde had gone to bed; exhausted by the preparations and anticipations of the next day. Andrew had retired to his own corner of the veranda long since. Earlier he had been turned back by Secretary from the men’s jollifications under the trees.
‘Too young. Not for you, young feller. Wait till you’re six feet high and old as a tree,’ Secretary had said.
Andrew had had all the ginger ale he could hold and more ice-cream than he could digest. Bed was the only place that offered him solace against a swollen stomach and rejection from Secretary’s company.
Bern, Tom, and the two pilots went down to join the men, when the womenfolk had called it a day, and gone to bed.
Katie alone in the homestead was awake. She turned on her bed on the side veranda where Jill and Stella slept, hoping not to disturb them yet desperately longing for sleep.
She needed all her nerve for to-morrow. Funny how the wedding that had swept her on and up into a new world for more than two weeks, could now suddenly loom as something terrifying.
What if her knees wobbled, or she fainted; or even cried or something?
Why should she? She didn’t know. She was afraid.
Of what? She dared not delve for fear the truth she found might be painful. This time ‒ coming from the plane ‒ Bern had been coming towards her and not walking away. His face was a beloved face, even if he did not bend his head and kiss her. He had had the air of a faintly weary hero ‒ bringing long-awaited news to his diggers: yet inscrutably though certainly bringing himself home to Katie.
Noiseless so as not to disturb the girls, Katie slipped out from under the single cover of her bed. The night was warm and bright with starlight.
Perhaps, if she went for a walk outside ‒
She slipped Jill’s cotton housecoat over her shortie pyjamas, then tiptoed in bare feet to the door of the side veranda and out on to the path that ran round the homestead.
It was better out here. She was free of the house. She could hear the men singing down by their camp fire under the wandoo trees. She could see dark figures moving about in the firelight.
Why hadn’t Gideon Dent come with the men? This was what was troubling her. Secrecy was done with now. The whole area of mineral sands along the ancient inland sea-bed had been surveyed. Gideon Dent Ltd. had been granted the mining rights. The whole world could come in battalions, or one at a time, and it wouldn’t matter. The area belonged irrevocably to Gideon Dent Ltd.: to a registered company.
A company and not a man.
He was a man who was never seen: who was a myth ‒ a shadow in the bush who never emerged ‒
Bern had said he had filed his ‒ Bern Malin’s ‒ claims when she had asked him.
Yet Gideon had written to her about sending Andrew to him. He had put his arms around her in the dark. Strong arms.
Katie walked unthinkingly down towards the wandoos. The shadows of the men sitting and moving about had become figures of men. She leaned against a tree and watched them as the firelight played over them.
He hadn’t come: unless he was late ‒ buried down there in the party amongst his own men.
Strong arms that had held her tightly. Bern had strong arms too ‒ Bern had said ‒ his claims!
Katie brushed her hands across her eyes as if brushing gauze away.
She watched the men’s figures.
One figure, dark as the shadows of tree and rocks, came round from behind a group of men stooping over their barrel of beer. It was like a shadowy figure coming round a clump of rock in a jagged gorge out there on a night when there were stars but no moon.
A night when there was no moon ‒ no light at all except starlight!
Katie turned and ran back to the house. She tiptoed round the path to the back veranda where Andrew slept. His was the only bed occupied, for all the men had gone down to the party under the trees.
Katie sat on the side of the bed and touched her brother, first gently, so as not to wake him too suddenly; then more firmly. As he stirred she shook his arm.
‘Andrew,’ she pleaded urgently. ‘Wake up. Please wake up. Right up. I have to ask you something. It’s dreadfully important.’
Andrew wriggled, turned, yawned, stretched, then sat up.
‘What do you w
ant, Katie? It’s late at night.’
‘When you went with Bern to the Mines Department to register the claims, in whose name did Bern register them?’
‘Gideon Dent Ltd. Bern Malin, Chairman.’
‘Then there was no Gideon Dent ‒ as a person ‒ in it?’
Andrew yawned again. ‘There is no Gideon Dent, Katie. Only a name. He died years ago. The men in the diggings and the aborigines used to work for him; so Bern Malin put them in the company too ‒’
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Andrew?’
The grief in Katie’s voice stirred Andrew to full awareness.
‘Why should I, Katie? I didn’t know you didn’t know. Besides it wasn’t good manners for me to be listening. I couldn’t help hearing, that’s all. I always hear what’s going on ‒ or read the papers and notices. I read the notice Bern filled in and had to leave on the counter while he went in to see someone in the office. I didn’t mean to, and I didn’t think till after that maybe I shouldn’t have done it. So I didn’t say anything. You’d have been mad at me ‒’
‘Listen to me, darling, because I want you to tell me something more. It’s terribly important to me. It might mean my whole life’s happiness ‒’
‘All right, Katie. Go on. I’ll tell you if I know anything.’
‘Bern Malin told me, when we first came to Malin’s Outpost ‒ oh, ages ago, that old Gideon Dent had a son. Bern wouldn’t have told a lie. Where is the son, Andrew? Is he dead? Or where … who …’
Andrew was staring at his sister, his face white in the moonlight that now swept like a great flood, washing silver everywhere on the veranda, and across the world outside.
Suddenly he was terribly aware of a beloved sister in distress.
‘Please, Andrew,’ Katie begged. ‘You know ‒ otherwise you would have said something. You would not be looking at me like that.’
‘Why don’t you know, Katie? I guessed. Why couldn’t you guess ‒’
‘How could I? I’m not curious, like you. I don’t ask endless questions. I don’t read street signs and odd notices and look at furniture; and people ‒’ Her voice was nearly breaking now. ‘I’m not like you, Andrew. I’m young, and naive. At least that’s what Bern said. Perhaps I’m a little stupid. Perhaps that is why he doesn’t love me. Not really ‒’
‘He does love you, Katie. I know by the way he looks at you when you’re not looking. It’s why he doesn’t want to hurt you. He thinks you’re a sort of flower … well, something like that. I don’t know how to put it …’
‘Do you think Bern was afraid it would hurt me if he told me there was no real Gideon Dent?’
‘Well, there is one, in a way ‒’ Andrew said cautiously. ‘Please, Katie, go and ask him. I don’t want to tell any more because I’m not sure I know. I only guess.’
‘You only guess!’ Katie said in despair. She put her head down on the pillow beside Andrew. She did not cry but when Andrew’s finger touched her cheek he felt a tear.
‘Please go to bed, Katie,’ he begged. ‘You have to get married to-morrow. You can ask Bern then ‒’
‘Yes, I’ll go to bed,’ Katie said soberly, sitting up. ‘First I might sit on the front step a little while. I can see the lights down at the camp fire from there. They flicker and that is sure to make me sleepy ‒’
‘Good night, Katie. You’re not mad at me?’
‘No, I’m not mad at you, Andrew. Only at myself: at the pity of Katie being a stupid Katie.’ She stood up and looked down at her brother. Suddenly she stooped and kissed him on the forehead. ‘I’ll never be mad at you,’ she said. ‘I love you too much. You have to grow wings and go away ‒ then fly away. It’s like destiny: sometimes so sad ‒’
She dropped another kiss on his forehead; then slipped across the veranda, round by the path to the front step.
She sat there a long time watching the camp fire and the shadows of the men around it.
To-morrow was a forgotten day. There was too much in her heart for this moment.
She did not know how long she sat there, nor how much time had passed when she saw a shadow, the tall lean figure of a man coming up from the wandoos towards the house. He had a small shadow beside him, walking with him.
It took her a minute to realise the small figure was Andrew in pyjamas. She stood up and held the veranda post with one hand.
They came towards her. She had no idea how she felt, except that something inside her might break apart at any minute.
They came through the narrow band of short grass that hemmed off the garden from the waste of silver-lit land that stretched on away down to the wandoos ‒ away to the hills behind, and on farther and farther to the coast and the Indian Ocean, then out into darkness ‒ hundreds and hundreds of miles of it.
The man held Andrew by the hand but as they came towards the steps, Katie knew who he was.
‘Don’t be mad at me, Katie,’ Andrew said. ‘You were crying when you sat on my bed. I know because I felt your cheek was wet. And you wouldn’t go to bed. You just sat there ‒ so I went down and told him.’ The boy looked up at the man. ‘You make her go to bed, please. To-morrow she has to get married. She’ll be too tired.’
‘I’ll make her do that, Andrew. You shoot off round the side path now and go to bed yourself. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Andrew said. ‘I guess she’s all right now you’re taking care of her.’
They stood in silence and looked at one another; not really seeing because the moonlight played tricks making light and shade, so that only Katie’s eyes were flooded with light. His were dark pools. His shadow was the shadow of a man emerging from rocks, clefts and gullies.
‘Gideon Dent?’ she said carefully, as if the words were strange jewels that were priceless beyond value but of which she was terribly afraid.
‘Himself. None other!’ His voice held a baffled regret in it. ‘A wearisome fellow with whom I have not been able to part since the hour I was born. I suffered him gladly till the day I collected you at Malley’s Find, Katie.’
She closed her eyes. He put out one hand and took hers.
‘Will you come to him, Katie? Or must you cling to that veranda post for ever?’
He drew her to him, put his arms around her and held her tightly, but not yet possessively.
Her forehead was against his shoulder. He rested his cheek on the top of her hair.
‘Please ‒ why didn’t you tell me?’ It was a very muffled voice, yet he heard it.
‘I couldn’t. I had to protect you, Katie, but I had also to protect my men. One slip, one error and they, too, lost all.’ He tightened his arms. ‘They haven’t names with which to sign papers ‒ leases and rights. They are bushmen. They know nothing of laws and regulations. They helped old Gideon Dent in their dogged, loyal way, to find those mineral sands. They were his men; then my men. They had to trust me when it came to science and law. Are you listening, Katie?’
‘Yes‒’
‘No living soul would have wrung from me Gideon Dent’s identity, as no being on earth would have wrung it from them. You had to wait and suffer, Katie. It’s the law of bush mateship. Can you understand that?’
‘Yes. Sam said so. If you could have told me to-day ‒ when it didn’t matter any more‒’
‘I wanted to tell you. You had such a look in your eyes as you waited, then watched the men coming in ‒ ones and twos and occasionally quite a party. I knew you were waiting for Gideon Dent to come to your wedding. Hoping ‒’
He stopped. Then went on. ‘I felt brutal. I couldn’t tell you then, not for the life of me.’
He released her, and held her at arm’s length, looking into her moon-white face.
‘I warned you, Katie my darling, he was a selfish fellow. One for himself entirely. “To-morrow night,” I thought, “when I take Katie home to Malin’s Outpost alone; to my homestead and my bed, I’ll make her understand ‒ my way”.’
There was a long silence. Her eyes did not leave his face.
‘Katie James,’ he said gently. ‘It isn’t possible to be no more than almost in love. You were not expecting anything very cosmic to-morrow, my sweetheart. I was. I meant to make it that.’
He drew her against him again. She was without will of her own.
‘Can you bear any more of Gideon Dent after that? Or Bern Malin? Can you stand the fellow at all?’
Her cheek was against his breast.
Her arms crept round him, and she held him too; as he held her.
‘Katie?’
She nodded, barely moving her cheek from its resting-place, not taking her arms from where they were wound round him, as his were wound round her.
‘I love you,’ she said at last. ‘I thought I loved you with everything I had, except pride, but now I love you with that too. Because you are Gideon Dent. I love you twice over ‒ till it hurts ‒ even if you are not old Gideon Dent’s son ‒’
He shook her away from him.
Taking her hand he pulled her down on the step beside him. He held the hand very firmly as he leaned his head against the veranda post.
‘I am his son. Can you listen to quite a story, Katie?’ She nodded. She had so few words; no words at all, really. She was like someone who had emerged from a sea of troubled thoughts to find heaven was a moonlit place on the edge of the Never.
‘My mother married again after my father died. My name was changed by deed poll and my stepfather became my guardian, as I hope to be Andrew’s guardian. “Gideon” I’m afraid was never more than my second name, but I was known by it around Malley’s Find when I was a child. Old Gideon and young Gideon! It was like that. It was Malley’s gold find back there through the Gap that sent my father out through these plains following, for ever following his star ‒ a petering gold reef. But he found the mineral sands at the same time. No use for them in the old days. But he marked and recorded them. So, one day, I came back.’
‘And when I wrote to Malley’s Find?’
‘There are one or two old-timers there who would have remembered the son. They would have known he was a grown man and had had a geological training. When a letter came, and news of it edged through to the diggers’ camp, there was consternation, Katie. Someone might think there was something findable out here if Gideon Dent’s son had come back. The letter had to be collected, of course‒’