An Australian Girl. Catherine Martin
of Contents
It was one Sunday afternoon in the middle of December and in the province of South Australia. The grass was withered almost to the roots, fast turning gray and brown. Indeed, along the barer ridges of the beautiful hills that rise in serried ranks to the east of Adelaide, the herbage was already as dry and bleached as carded flax. In the gullies, thickly timbered and lying in perpetual shade, the ground still retained the faint graying green distinctive of Australian herbage in a state of transition from spring verdure to summer drought.
But soon even the shadiest recesses would bear witness to the scorching dryness of the season. For even before the middle of this first month of summer, two or three of those phenomenal days had come which furnish anecdotes for many successive months alike to the weather statist and the numerous class who cultivate community of soul by comparing experiences of those dreadful days on which 'the hall thermometer stood at 104° before noon.' This Sunday had not quite been one of the days that make the oldest residents turn over heat averages extending to the early dawn of the country's history. But, nevertheless, it was a very hot, still day, without a breath of wind stirring, and in the distance that faint shimmering bluish haze which, to the experienced eye, tells its own tale of days to come.
The masses of white, silver and messmate gum-trees that clothe these same Adelaide hills so thickly, formed a grateful resting-place for the eye, wearied with the steadfast glare of sunshine. So did the vineyards that dot their declining slopes, and the gardens and orchards that are scattered broadcast to the east of the town. But even Adelaide itself is interwoven with the foliage of trees, which do so much to mitigate, both for eye and body, the severities of a semi-tropical climate. This fascinating embroidery of trees is more especially observable in glancing over North Adelaide. This extensive and important suburb, which is divided from Adelaide proper by the Torrens Lake and Park Lands, lies considerably above the city and adjacent suburbs. So large a proportion of the houses are surrounded by gardens, that from some points of view North Adelaide looks like a well-trimmed wood, thickly studded with houses.
And these gardens are, as a rule, neither suburban slips, with precocious trees selected for their speedy power of growth, nor the painfully pretentious enclosures which auctioneers delight to term 'grounds.' No, they are genuine gardens—roomy, shadowy, well planted, well watered; rich in flowers and many fruit-trees, bending in due season under their fertile loads; haunted with the hum of rifling bees, fragrant with the perfume of old-world blossoms. In such a garden on this Sunday afternoon a young man and woman were slowly pacing up and down a broad central walk, thickly trellised with vines. The gadding tendrils, the wealth of wide emerald leaves, the countless oval clusters of ripening grapes—Crystal, Black Prince, and delicate Ladies' Fingers—which clothed the trellis on the sides and overhead, made a delightful picture. So did the great rose-trees hard by, garlanded after their kind with pale pink, yellow, white and blood-red roses. Parallel with this vine arcade there were loquat trees loaded with thick clusters of clear-skinned creamy fruit, and orange-trees, with dark-green globes nestling among glossy boughs, sheeted in waxen blossoms, whose penetrating odour loaded the atmosphere. But as so often happens when a young man and woman are engaged in a tête-à-tête, neither the objects round them nor any topic of wide social importance engrossed their attention.
'Do you know why I asked you to come out into the garden, Stella?' said the young man, breaking a pause that had followed some previous talk.
'Oh, to admire the roses, and flick the poor vine-leaves with your riding-whip now and then.'
'I wouldn't mind betting a thousand to one you know as well as I do; but that's the way with you. You'll never help a fellow out of a hole. Why didn't you come to Melbourne last month?'
'Ted, that reminds me. Shouldn't I congratulate you on your horse winning the Melbourne Cup? Or is it an old stupid story by this time?'
'It's the things that don't come off which make the stupid stories.'
'Well, I congratulate you, then. How long have you been on the turf?'
'I haven't been on the turf at all, in one way. I've bred racehorses, and bought and sold them, ever since my uncle died, leaving me Strathhaye; that's now six years ago, come Easter.'
'Well, for six years you have been more deeply interested in young horses than in anything else in the world——'
'You know a jolly sight better than that.'
'You have talked of them, dreamt of them, been with them; several times you have nearly died for them; always you have lived for them, and now at last you have won the blue ribbon of the Australian racing world. How did you feel when you saw your horse pass the winning-post?'
'I didn't see him at all. He was a dark horse, and sold the bookmakers right and left. There was a packed mob of them yelling like devils, calling out this horse and the other. When the number was put up, and people kept shouting "Konrad!" I saw blue stars for a bit.'
'It must be delightful for something to happen that makes you see blue stars. I almost wish I had been there.'
'I wish you had. I would have had a new drag in your honour, and a team that would have made most of those there look silly. Why didn't you come when Laurette wrote to ask you?'
'Oh, let me see! I know there were very good reasons, but I forget them.'
'Now, Stella, don't sham. You wouldn't forget them if they were very good reasons.'
'What nonsense! the better they are the more completely they go under sometimes. Think what good reasons there are for being good, and things of that sort.'
'Now, I'm not going to be put off. You've often served me that trick. I ask you a question and you start a new quarry, and the night after I wake up thinking, "Stella never told me whether she still writes to Billy Stein," or whatever it may be. Why didn't you come?'
'Must you know?'
'Yes, certainly.'
'Well, as I was walking by the Torrens, I found a little palm-basket sewn up in the most cunning manner with a red worsted thread. I unpicked it, and out flew a little milk-white dove, crying: "Don't go to the Melbourne Cup, don't go to the Melbourne Cup!"'
'Well; I'll be hanged if ever I saw a girl that can make up a fib patter than you can when you like!'
'Now I know why you wanted to come into the garden—so that my mother shouldn't overhear you talking like a jockey.'
'Oh, that's all you know about the way jockeys talk! You never heard them. Besides, you know, you shouldn't tell a crammer.'
'It's not a crammer—it's a parable.'
'That's blasphemy, isn't it, calling yarns you make up as you go along after things in the Bible?'
'Do you think there are no parables except those in the New Testament?'
'I know a parable is when a fellow asks for a long drink in everlasting fire, and the other chap in Isaac's bosom won't even wet his lips. By Jove, I've often thought there wasn't much to choose between them for goodness! One had his good time here and turned his back on the beggar; but the beggar was more spiteful—he had all eternity to behave better, but didn't.'
'Oh, Ted! you are too delightfully literal.'
'I wish to the Lord you really believed I was too delightfully anything. Surely you might have dropped a fellow a line when Konrad won, seeing you had the naming of him.'
'Did I? When?'
'Why, a month after he was foaled. Don't you remember that frightfully stupid ball at Government House, where a fellow couldn't put a hoof down without treading on some old tabby's train? There was Mrs. Bartholomew Gay with one from here to the Polar regions—white satin embroidered with Chinese dragons, or something. I had to stand with one foot in the air, like a circus-tumbler, so often, for fear of stamping on her tail; at last I firmly planted my foot on it, and tore it out of the gathers. By Jove, didn't she look daggers at me! But she trundled it off the floor after