Part 15

“We’ll go together,” he said. “If you do care a straw about seeing her again, come on quietly with me.”

He yielded for the moment, but it required one continuous effort on Anderson’s part to keep him up to it. Plainly his reason was gone, and the other man, growing weaker and weaker, found by the time the sun was high in the heavens that the effort was more than he could make. It was the end, or so close that he could only hope and pray the end would come quickly. The young fellow had struggled on so bravely, so hopefully, and now it had come to this. They had left the scrub behind them and Anderson made his way to a tree, the only specimen of its kind in all the wide plain, and lay down beneath its branches--to rest? No, he felt in his heart it was to die. Helm he could not persuade to lie down. He kept staggering on hopelessly round and round the tree, struggling to keep in the shade, fancying, as many a lost man has done before him, that he was “pushing on.”

It was the same old story. Anderson had heard it told hundreds of times over the camp fire, one man will lie down to die quietly, and the other will go raving mad. So Helm had gone mad, poor chap; and then he remembered his passionate prayer to him, not to let him go mad, to shoot him if he saw he was going mad, and he lay and looked up at the hard blue sky through the leaves, and at the watching crows, and knew that he was only waiting for death, knew that he was too utterly weary to aid in any way his mate. He listened to him muttering to himself for a little, watched him as he went monotonously round and round. It was not so hard after all--not near so hard for him as for Helm. If only the boy were dead, he thought wearily, if only the boy were dead he would be glad that this should end it, his life was never worth much, he had failed all through, he would be glad to be at rest--if only the boy were there before him; but the boy--the poor little helpless thing, he must make another effort for the boy’s sake, and he struggled to his feet again. But the burning landscape was a blood-red blur before his eyes, and then, quite suddenly it seemed to him, sight and hearing left him. He was dying--was this death? How merciful death was--if only the boy--

*****

Very wearily he opened his eyes. Could it be that some one was pouring water down his throat? Some one was bathing his face.

“He’s coming to,” said a voice in his ear. “By Jove, it was a narrow shave. The other poor chap’s done for, isn’t he, Ned?”

“Quite dead. He went mad evidently, clean off his head. Why, the poor chap had begun on his own grave.”

When Anderson came to himself he found he had been picked up by the other exploring party.

“We picked up your tracks away by the ‘dead finish’ there,” said the leader, “and I thought it must be pretty near up with you. You ‘ve had the devil’s own luck, mate. Why, you were within five miles of Gerring Gerring Water, and over by the ‘dead finish’ you passed within three miles of a very decent waterhole, quite good enough to have kept life within you. You shot the horse?”

“My mate did. He was mad, poor fellow.”

“Poor beggar, he seems to have had a bad time, but it’s all over now.”

It was indeed all over now. They had wrapped him in a blanket and were digging a shallow grave. He had begun it himself, they said, and had been digging with his long knife, though whether it was for water, or whether it was really intended for a grave, no one could now say. His sufferings were ended.

They left him there in the desert, the young fellow who had fought so hard for his life and set so much store by it, and as soon as Anderson was a little recovered, set out for Yerlo again.

It was over a week before he reached the station, so far had he wandered out of the track, and as he rode up to the house a stable boy lounged up to him.

“What a while you ‘ve been away, Boss,” he said. “We ‘d most given you up for lost. The mail’s in and there’s a pile of letters for Mr. Helm. None for you though.”

“Is everything all right?” asked Anderson, feeling like a man who had come back from the grave.

“N-o-o, there’s mighty bad news. I don’t like to tell though.”

“Out with it, man, don’t keep me waiting.”

The lad looked away and turned his pipe from side of his mouth to the other.

“It ‘s your youngster,” he said. “He had convulsions last Sunday. Mrs. Brook--she said as nothing couldn’t have saved him. ‘It was a blessed release,’ she said.”

Anderson flung the reins to the lad and walked quietly into the house. It was a mistake, he clearly saw, coming back from the grave. He wished he had died within five miles of Gerring Gerring Water.

THE LOSS OF THE “VANITY

“You don’t care. Oh! Susy, you don’t care!

“But I do,” she sobbed. “You know, you know I care.”

They were standing on a jutting headland, looking away out over the Southern Ocean, and the sea, blue and calm as the sky above, stretched out before them. Behind them were the low forest-clad ranges that bounded the coast line, shutting out the lonely selection from the rest of the colony of Victoria, and the only sign of human habitation was the weatherboard farmhouse the girl called home. Even that was hardly visible from where they stood, hidden as it was by the swell of the hill, and alone here with this man, alone with the sea and sky around her, with the soft South wind blowing among her curls, with the plaintive cry of the seagulls in her ears, the salt savour of the sea in her nostrils, she was sorely tempted to throw off the trammels of her education, to do the thing her heart prompted her to do, to tell this man he was dearer, as she felt in her heart he was dearer, than anything on earth. But so much stood in the way. For twenty years she had lived secluded in this lonely corner of the earth, all her thoughts, her hopes, her fears, bounded by the horizon of her own home, and the narrow limits of the township, just five miles away on the other side of the ranges. And now this sailor man, brought home by her young apprentice brother, had come into her life, bringing new thoughts, new ideas, new--she whispered it to herself, with a hot blush--hopes.

Five-and-twenty years ago now, Angus Mackie and his wife had emigrated from the cold and stormy western isles of Scotland to this sunny South land, and they had brought with them to their new home the stern faith of the old Puritan, the rigid adherence to the old rules, the hard, straitlaced life, and so had they brought up the children that grew up around their hearth. And Susy was the eldest, Susy with the blue eyes and rose-leaf complexion, and waving chestnut hair. So pretty she was, this daughter of the South, it hardly seemed possible she could be the child of the stern Puritan parents, and yet she had grown up in their ways, grave and obedient, walking in the narrow path set so straight before her without a question, and without a doubt. Never for one moment had she looked over the hedges with which she was set about--hardly had she realized there were hedges--and now this man had come like a fresh breeze from the sea, and he had taught her--what had he not taught her? At his glance all the passion born of the blue skies and the bright sunlight, and the warm breezes of her native land, awoke to life, and filled her heart with thoughts and longings that she, untutored, and ignorant of the world’s ways, hardly understood. Only she leaned against the rock that cropped up out of the hillside, and pressed up against it till the hard stone marked her hands. Perhaps the physical pain brought her some rest from the mental disquietude which was so new to her.

The man who stood beside her was a sailor every inch of him. Not handsome perhaps, but certainly good-looking, with honest blue eyes, and a steadfast strong face. A man who had read and thought, and even though now at five-and-twenty he was but second mate of the Vanity, had lived his life to some purpose, for the fates had been against him; it had been an uphill struggle always, and in uphill struggles we have little time for the niceties of life. And now this girl, this dainty, fair, feminine thing had come across his path like a gleam of the sunshine of her own land, and when he felt he had fairly won her, his very honesty set a barrier in his way.

“You know I care,” she sobbed. She would have used a stronger word, but shyness prevented her, and she put her face down on her clasped hands, and sobbed aloud.