Before reading those romances — that is, until there came the prospect of living in Australia — Miss Methuen’s ideas of that continent had been very vague, very elementary, and rather funny. Her timely reading gave shape and background to her ideas, but left them funnier than ever; it did not prepare her for the place she was going to, perhaps it did not pretend to do so, that romantic literature; but Miss Methuen had chosen to assume that all Australian scenery would be in the same style. She was prepared for gullies, gum-trees, caves, ranges, kangaroos, opossums, claims, creeks, snakes in the grass, and chivalrous robbers on the highroad; but she was not prepared for a dead level of sandy desert, broken only by the river-timber of a narrow, sluggish stream, nor for a wooden township where the worst weapons of man were strong drink in the head and strong language on the tongue; and this was what she found. Great was the disillusion, and in every respect; it discounted and discoloured all things, even to the Bishop’s Lodge, which, with its complete margin of creeper-covered verandah, was charming in everything but situation.
“Call this the bush! — where are the trees?” she said rather petulantly to her father; and, as she looked at his long dust-coat of light-coloured silk, duck trousers, and pith helmet, she might have added: “Call you a Bishop! — where are your gaiters?”
In fact, Miss Methuen’s contentment wore away, very nearly, with the novelty. The Bishop saved the situation by taking her with him on his first episcopal round up country. He wore, too, on that round, his gaiters (with a new chum’s stout shooting-boots underneath) and black garments, for the cool weather was coming on. They had a delightful cruise among the sheep-stations of the diocese (a little district the size of England), their pilot being the Bishop’s Chaplain, who, as it happened, was a son of the soil. They gave the hospitality of the squatter a splendid trial, and found that celebrated Colonial quality rated not at all too high. The Bishop held services in the queerest places, and administered holy rites to the most picturesque ruffians, winning in all quarters the respect and admiration of men not prone to respect or to admire, for his broad shoulders and grizzled beard and his erect six feet, as well as for the humanity and virility of every sentence in his simple, telling addresses. Evelyn, perhaps, was admired less; but she did not suspect this, and she enjoyed herself thoroughly. There were gentlemanly young overseers at nearly all the stations. These young men, naturally taken with the healthy colour and good looks of the English girl, were sufficiently attentive, and seemed duly impressed by her conversation. So they were. But clever Evelyn was not clever in her topics; she talked Browning to them, and culture, and the “isms”; and they mimicked her afterwards — the attentive young men. This she did not suspect either. She returned from the cruise in the highest spirits, her preconceptions of the bush not realised, indeed, but forgotten; and after weeks among the stations the wooden town seemed a different and a better place, and the Bishop’s Lodge a paradise of ease and beauty.
But during the less eventful period of the Bishop’s ministry at headquarters, the satisfaction on his daughter’s part tapered, as it invariably did in the absence of variety. She began systematically to miss things “after old England”; and here the Bishop could sympathise, though the forced expression of his sympathy galled his contented and tolerant nature. He pointed out that comparison was scarcely fair, and hinted that it lay with Evelyn, as with himself, at once to enjoy and to improve the new environment. Naturally there were matters for regret, occasions for a sigh. The service of the sanctuary was necessarily less sumptuous here than in the old English minster; and Evelyn had a soul of souls for high mass, and the exaltation of the spirit through the senses. Then when the service was over, there were no young curates of culture to step in to Sunday supper or dinner, as the case might be. This was a want of another kind; it is not suggested that it was the greater want. The social void, certainly, was an unattractive feature of Bishop’s Lodge, where even the young overseers of the back-blocks, who had barely heard of Browning and were not ashamed of themselves would have been royally welcomed visitors. As it was, almost the only visitors were the Chaplain and his wife, who did not count, since they practically lived at the Lodge. Nor was either of this excellent couple to Evelyn’s taste. The Chaplain, indeed, was but a bushman with a clean mouth; clerical, to the eye, in his clothes only. No one could have accused him of polish, nor yet, on the other hand, of laziness or insincerity. Evelyn, however, tilted her nose at him. As for the Chaplain’s wife, she was just one of those kind, unpretentious women who are more apt to be spoken of as “bodies.” She did many things for Evelyn; but she had also many children, and spoilt them all; so that Evelyn could do nothing but despise her. For, in her reputed strong mind, Miss Methuen nursed a catholic contempt for human weaknesses of every shade.
When, however, the time came for further episcopal visitations, Evelyn, who accompanied her father as before, once more enjoyed herself keenly. Her pleasure was certainly enhanced by the fact that the ground traversed was not the old ground. But this turned out to be her last treat of the kind for some time to come. The next round of travels was arranged with the express object of Confirmation, and the Bishop seemed to feel that in this connection the companionship of his daughter might be out of place. He decided, at all events, to take no one but the Chaplain. So Evelyn was left behind with the Chaplain’s wife, and neither lady had a very delightful time. The girl spent most of hers in writing exhaustive letters to her friends, prolix with feminine minutiae, but pathetically barren of the adventures which she longed to recount, if not to experience. In particular she corresponded with some old friends in Sydney, at whose fashionable residence she had spent a night before accompanying her father up country. These people sympathised with her on many sheets of expensive note-paper. The letters became mutually gushing; and long before the Bishop’s return, Evelyn had arranged to spend the term of his next absence with her opulent friends in Sydney.
When he did return, Evelyn, as it happened, was not in the house. In point of fact, she was reading under the gum-trees by the sluggish little river, but, as usual, the Chaplain’s wife was not in the unnecessary secret of her whereabouts. Evelyn’s book on this occasion had itself a strong odour of the gum-trees, for it chanced to be the Poems of the bush poet, Lindsay Gordon. Now Evelyn, having attended University Extension Lectures on the subject of “Modem Poetry,” was of course herself an authority on that subject; equally of course she found much to criticise in these bush ballads. What, however, not even Miss Methuen could find fault with was their local colour. She had seen it herself up the country; she only wished she had seen more of it — more of Gordon’s bush and Gordon’s bushmen. Oddly enough, though in his book, the verses that attracted her most were never written by Gordon at all: —
“Booted, and bearded, and burnt to a brick,
I loaf along the street;
I watch the ladies tripping by,
And I bless their dainty feet.”
She liked these lines well enough to learn them as she walked back to the house; and it was impossible to avoid glancing at her own dainty feet in doing so. Why did she never encounter the booted bushman who had seen better days?
“I watch them here and there,
With a bitter feeling of pain;
Ah! what wouldn’t I give to feel
A lady’s hand again!”
“Ah!” echoed Evelyn, looking at her own small hand, “and what wouldn’t I give — to pull some poor fellow to the surface with you!”
And indeed she was ready to give much, having some soul for the romantic, and being bored.
Looking up from her book, she was startled to see her father hurrying towards her, his fine face beaming with gladness. Evelyn beamed too, and they embraced in the road, very prettily. The Bishop explained his early arrival; the last stages he, even he, had driven furiously — to get back to his darling girl. Then he thrust his strong, kind arm through hers, and led her home. But as they neared the Lodge his steps hesitated.
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“My dear, I have a confession to make to you!”
“A confession! Have you done something naughty, father?”
“Yes! I have taken pity on an undeserving young man. You know, Evelyn, this colony is full of educated young men who have gone hard down hill until reaching the bottom here in the bush. I have come across I can’t tell you how many instances up country, men from our Universities and public schools, living from year’s end to year’s end in lonely huts, mere boundary-riders and whim-drivers.”
“Contemptible creatures!” exclaimed Miss Evelyn, with virtuous vigour. “I have no sympathy with them, not an atom!”
Though Gordon was still under her arm, the bushman who had seen better days had vanished quite out of her head, which contained, as we know, a strong mind, and was perhaps rather swollen by conscious strength.
The Bishop was not pleased.
“Come, come, Evelyn! I do not like to hear my dear girl settle questions in that way — questions of humanity, too. It was not our blessed Lord’s way, Evelyn, my darling! However, the young man I speak of has done nothing to merit any one’s contempt — nothing, nothing,” averred the Bishop, with disingenuous emphasis. “He is merely a young fellow who came out to the Colonies and — and has not as yet done so well as he hoped to do. And I found I had been at school with his father!”
“Where is he now?” asked Evelyn, divining that he was not far off.
“Here in the house,” confessed the Bishop. “He goes on in the coach — it leaves in an hour, at seven; and, Evelyn, my dear, I’d rather you didn’t see him before he went. He is going down to Sydney to get himself some decent clothes, and I have also asked him to have his beard shaved off, as he is quite a young man. The fact is, he will be back here in a fortnight, and you will see him then; for he is coming back as my Lay Reader!”
They covered some yards in silence. Then Evelyn casually inquired the young man’s name, and her father told her that it was Follet; Christian name Samuel, after the Bishop’s old schoolfellow. As they approached the house, the Bishop persuaded his daughter to efface herself until the coach had gone; it was not fair, he said, to meet the young man as he was, when in a few days he would come back a different being. It would have been inevitable, such a meeting, had Evelyn been in when they arrived; but now that it was so easily avoidable, would she not have the strength of mind to avoid it? He knew she must feel very inquisitive. So she did; but she loved, above most things, an appeal to her strength of mind. She promised. To see, however, was not to meet. And strong-minded Evelyn contrived to see, through a window of the room in which the future Reader was waiting, herself unseen in the gathering shades.
She could not see much: a slim young man sitting over the fire; a bronzed face, illumined by the flames with flickering patches of orange; thick black hair, a thin beard, moleskins, leggings, Crimean shirt, and a felt wideawake on the floor between his feet. This was absolutely all that Evelyn saw. But it was enough. The contempt she felt or affected for weak humanity did not trouble her just then. Miss Methuen forgot it. Miss Methuen, for one rare moment, forgot herself. She saw before her the burnt and bearded bushman who had known better days, and the sight was good in her eyes.
In a fortnight he would be back there as Lay Reader!
How a Bishop, who was also a man of the world, came to make so injudicious an arrangement, only Bishop Methuen could explain. The chances are that in contemplation of the evils from which it was to be his blessed privilege to rescue this young man, he lost sight of others of a less shocking description. Certainly that night, when he removed his pipe from his teeth (for this prelate smoked like any shearer) to kiss goodnight to his daughter, and when Evelyn said, really meaning it at the moment, that she would do all she could for the permanent reformation of poor Mr. Follet — certainly it did not seem to the Bishop, just then, that he had made an injudicious arrangement.
Within the fortnight Follet duly reappeared — a quietly-dressed, clean-shaven, earnest young man. And within the week after that he found it impossible to sail under false colours with one so honest and high-souled, so frank and strong-minded as Miss Methuen. He told her his story, including the worst part of it, which the Bishop had not told her, in a sudden burst of mingled shame and thankfulness, and in a chance five minutes in the starlit verandah. His curse had been drink. Yet Miss Methuen heard this revolting confession without being visibly revolted — even without that contemptuous curl which came too easily to her lips.
“Forgive me,” he murmured, “forgive me for telling you! I couldn’t help it! I can’t go on pretending to have been what I have not been — not to you, who are so honest, and open, and strong!”
“How do you know I am strong?” asked the girl, colouring with pleasure; for he had flattered her to the quick.
“I see it.”
“Oh, but I am not.”
“You are! you are!” he exclaimed, contradicting her almost as vehemently as she desired. “And now you can never think the same of me again — though you will not show it!”
“You are wrong,” whispered Evelyn, in her softest tone. “I will think all the more of you — for having climbed out of that pit! You are going on climbing now: only think how much nobler it will be to have climbed from the bottom of the horrible pit, than had you started from the level land, and never fallen!”
And indeed the sentiment itself was not free from nobility. As she uttered it she gave him her hand, frankly and cordially. Then she left him alone in the starlight, inspired to do and to dare glorious things, and burning to scale the glittering heights of divine enterprise — always supported by the strong soul of Evelyn Methuen.
The obvious sequel of that starry night took place just two months later — it was surely very creditable to both parties that it did not take place much sooner. At length, however, on a similar night of stars, only in the warmer air of November, Miss Methuen found herself in the angle of Follet’s arm — heard him whisper to the sweet end what others, mere boys, had but timidly and tentatively begun in the old days at home — found her head lying back upon his shoulder — and breathed, scarcely knowing it, a little word which was pleasant speaking, even though the sound of it on her own lips vaguely alarmed her soul. You see, it was the first time she had been properly and definitely asked in marriage, the incomparable Miss Methuen.
Then Bishop Methuen made the force of his character unpleasantly apparent For so gentle and godly a man, he showed a truly amazing capacity for anger — and anger of a very downright, usual, and Britannic description. Angry, however, as he was with the culprits, he was still more angry with himself; and — what was not usual, but the very reverse — this made him blame the culprits less and himself more. Putting the pair on parole, he promised to give the matter fair consideration, and he did so in portentous privacy. Then emerging, like the jury, after a mercifully “short delay,” he gave what was really, on the whole, a most merciful verdict. Evelyn was to go down to Sydney, and stay with her fine friends there as many months as they would have her — six if possible. There were to be no letters, no direct communication of any kind. But if they were both of the same mind when Evelyn came back, and always supposing Follet was as zealous and earnest a worker then as now, then the Bishop would consider the whole matter afresh. They need not look for an unconditional consent even then. The very promise of reconsideration was essentially conditional.
So Miss Methuen went down to Sydney a month before Christmas; and the Bishop, in his human inconsistency, granted her a long interview with Follet on the eve of her departure. Nor did Dr. Methuen’s goodness end then or there: he was ridiculously good to Follet from that time forth. The very next day he made the young man fetch his trunks from the Chaplain’s house, where hitherto he had lodged, and keep bed and board henceforward at the Lodge. Both were free; and it was the Bishop, of course, who had paid for those trunks and their contents, not as a present (so he said), but as an advance of salary. He would have had us remember that th
e young fellow was his old schoolfellow’s son. The young fellow, however, had amiable characteristics of his own. More than this, he was of real use to the Bishop, being, in spite of his sins, more to the manner born than the honest (but indigenous) Chaplain. A strong mutual affection came into being between the old man and the young one, and daily increased; an attachment apart from gratitude. Follet’s gratitude was a thing by itself, something never expressed in words nor by any conscious look or act. Unconsciously he expressed it every day. And these bonds were supplemented by the impalpable bond of Evelyn. They seldom spoke of her; never in any but the most casual connection. But Follet loved to think of the good old man as Evelyn’s father. The Bishop, on the contrary, hated to think of Follet as her lover. He knew Evelyn not only better than Follet knew her, but better than Evelyn knew herself.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 404