An Australian Girl. Catherine Martin
intend it; but sometimes circumstances are more merciful than one's intentions.'
'Has any fellow come along that you care for more than me?'
'N—no.'
'Thank the Lord for that! All you know have been in love with you already—Willy Stein, Wigram, Lindsay, Andrew——'
'Ted, you really are too absurd! Don't you think it is wrong to trifle away the precious moments that never come back again?'
'Ah, yes, they do. When I've been with you the time comes back over and over again. Besides, Stella, how can you call it trifling when I ask you to marry me? Will you?'
'No, thank you.'
'You speak just as if I offered you a mouldy bit of bread.'
'No; as if you offered me some rich cake for which I have no appetite.'
'What if you did not get another chance of refusal?'
'Do you suppose I expect you to turn up periodically all my life, asking me if I am "game" to come out with you into the garden?'
'Well, it's what I'll do, unless you get married to someone else.'
'Or unless you get married yourself.'
'I shall never marry any woman but Stella Courtland, and that's as sure as my name is Edward Ritchie.'
The two had paused in their pacings to and fro, and stood facing each other at the end of the vine arcade furthest from the house, close to a great white Fortuniana rose-tree, thickly covered over with roses and buds in all stages of unclosing.
The girl was tall and very finely formed. Her face in repose was apt to be rather cold and pale. The eyes were extremely beautiful—starry, large, deep and liquid. When we try to describe eyes or flowers, we find that language is extremely destitute in precise colour terms. They were dark gray-blue—sea-blue is, perhaps, the term that most nearly approximates to the hue of this girl's eyes, and as that tint in the waves is subject to rapid changes, to deepening intensity and gleaming flashes of paler light, so did those bewitching orbs reflect each passing emotion. They were as sensitive to her moods as the surface of water is to the sky's influence. Thus it will be seen that their range of expression was infinite. The same might be said of the whole countenance. When moved or animated, it glowed and sparkled as if a light shone through it. The brow was singularly noble, and gave promise of unusual mental power. The complexion was very fair and clear, and when she talked it was often tinged with swift delicate rose-pink, that died away very slowly, leaving a soft warm glow in the cheeks like that often seen in a moist sea-shell. It was a face whose every line and feature indicated that Stella was endowed with rare qualities of intellect and imagination, quick to feel, to see, to think. And yet a very woman, far from indifferent to admiration and the sense of power that the homage of men gives a girl. Yet, withal, liable to that quick disdain of the more frivolous aspects of life, which to those who understood but one side of her complex nature appeared in the light of wilful caprice. She made a captivating picture as she stood under the thick woof of clustering grapes and vine-leaves that threw flickering shadows over her well-poised head, with its abundant coils of silky hair, which had a slight wave and was of that deep golden-brown colour that is seldom retained after childhood.
The young man was good-looking in a not uncommon and distinctly unintellectual way. He was close on six feet in height, with a well-knit, athletic figure, a sun-bronzed face, inclining to be florid. The forehead was low and square; the eyes dark-brown; the hair lighter in tone, cut close, but crisply curling to the roots. The nose was thick, but straight and well defined. The jaws were too heavy, and the lips, partly concealed under a heavy drooping moustache, were over-full. Altogether, it was the face of a man who could be firm and determined in action, yet morally lacking in force of will.
The contrast between the two faces in form, development, and expression was so striking that a casual onlooker might conclude there was that essential difference of nature and temperament which might somehow form a basis for marriage. This impression would be strengthened by a lurking air of indecision in the young woman's face as her companion delivered his resolve in a voice that well carried out the robust air of knowing what he wanted, and a determination to compass it, which was conveyed by his general demeanour.
'I don't know whether I should say that I am sorry or glad you are going to be a bachelor,' she said reflectively. 'Will you grow very thin and cross, or stout and good-natured? The worst of it is, if you get stout you will hobble and have a bad toe. It will be really gout, you know, but you'll call it a sprain or something. And then, when you come to see me, you will tread on dear Dustiefoot's paws. I suppose I may be a little deaf by that time. Ah, I can never bear to think of growing old or dying!' and Stella stopped abruptly with a little shrug of the shoulders.
'Why didn't you finish your fancy sketch? If you were a little deaf I would bawl at you: "Do you remember that Sunday in December when the garden was full of roses, and that little beggar of a bird was singing?" And then you'd say: "Ah, Ted, why didn't we get married when we were young?" … You know, Stella, you'll have to give way in the end. Twice you've named a horse for me, and twice it's turned out most lucky. Now, tell me—suppose we had been married this morning at church, what would you think the very worst part of the concern?'
'That you wouldn't drive to the railway-station and set off for Strathhaye—alone.'
'Well, that's flat. I often wonder what makes me so ridiculously soft about you, Stella. You say such horrid things to me, while every other girl I come across——'
'Now, Ted, if you boast, your very last fragment of a chance is gone.'
'Oh, I have got a fragment of a chance, then? Come, that's the best thing you've said yet. Look here, Stella, have you ever been in love? Now, honour bright?'
'Well, hardly—except with people in books.'
'But how the deuce could you be in love with people in books?'
'Oh, I assure you they are far the nicest people to fall in love with.'
'Because you can put them on a shelf and leave them there.'
'Yes, that is one great charm. It is partly what ruins life, the way people see so much of each other, till they know each other by heart, up and down—all their stories that once were funny, their pet theories, their stupid idiosyncrasies——'
'What are idiosyncrasies?
'Let me see. It is your idiosyncrasy to wish to marry; it is mine to think it too dangerous an experiment.'
'Fancy calling it an idiosyncrasy when a fellow is spoony. But I expect that is not the dictionary meaning. Well, you are all but twenty-three, and you have not been in love. You may depend, if you are not heels over head before you are twenty, you never will be. So you may as well save waiting any longer.'
The girl laughed out loud.
'Well, Ted, you are the first I have heard use inability to love as an argument for getting married. You are really very humble.'
'Oh! a fellow is always very humble when he's up to the hilt in love.'
'It is afterwards, when the fair is over, that he isn't quite so meek and beseeching.'
'Well, you wouldn't have him be a humble jackass at a distance all through? It's too much like making your dinner off peaches. Besides, a girl like you always has her own way, hand over fist, single or married; and when to that you add ever so many thousands a year——'
'Always when you have been to Melbourne you harp more and more on your money.'
'Maybe. You see, the more you see of the world the more you find how much people think of money, and how much it gets for you.'
'And yet to be poor in the midst of riches is the worst kind of poverty.'
'But you see,' said the young man eagerly, misinterpreting the drift of this remark, 'Strathhaye is none of your big leasehold affairs. It's nearly all freehold—a good deal of it fit to carry three or four