Gripped By Drought Read online

  “I’m glad av that. For sure, I’m wanting to do me best this night,” Mary said, her face suffused with a flush of pleasure.

  Feng was listening intently.

  “That must be Miss Shelley coming now. I will ring, Mary, when I want dinner served.”

  “You won’t keep it above half an hour after now, will you?” inquired Mary, looking at the mantel clock.

  “No. I will keep note of the time.”

  Feng was standing at the gate to welcome Ann Shelley when her car slid to a stop before him.

  “Hallo, Feng!” she cried, laughingly squeezing his hand with the affectionate bonhomie of long friendship. “Do you know, I just love you in a dinner suit. Thank you for asking me this evening! Miss Watts has a headache, so I did not press her to accompany me. Bold, am I not? Unconventional, and all that stuff?”

  If ‘Stuff’ is an apt word, Ann. But come, let us go in. May I offer you a glass of wine? A cocktail? No? Iced coffee, then?”

  “Iced coffee? Where did you get the ice?”

  “We have here an ice-making plant now. Mrs. Mayne insisted on it.”

  “You lucky man! I am going to have iced coffee, please.”

  Seated in Feng’s studio-drawing-room, Ann sipped her coffee and smoked a cigarette in the reflected glow of the sunset. Feng, who sat with his back to the light, dared a harsh Fate to twist the knife in his heart whilst steadily he examined the lovely Saxon face.

  “Have you heard from them recently?” asked his first guest.

  “You mean Frank and his wife? Oh yes! They left Sydney for New Zealand last Friday. Frank said that already the change was benefiting Mrs. Mayne.”

  Ann Shelley, looking hard at her host, tried to penetrate the shadow lying across his face. She said impatiently:

  “I did not know that Ethel had been poorly.”

  “Not exactly ill,” Feng said precisely. “The heat, however, tried her nerves severely, and, I understand, there were moments when she was almost hysterical.”

  For a space little neither spoke. Then:

  “Feng–I can’t help it, really–but I am sometimes saddened by a little suspicion that old Frank has made a mistake,” she said softly.

  “Let us hope not,” he said defensively. “We must allow for the effects our lonely living must have on one who always has been used to city life.”

  More emphatically impatient, Ann said:

  “You speak as though Ethel Mayne is singular in leaving England to live here. What of the thousands who have come to Australia and settled on the land to make for themselves farms or a living here in the bush? What of Eva, the house-maid, Tom Mace the rabbiter, Mrs. MacDougall, my Miss Watts? Since being in Australia have they had hysterics? A wife to such a man as Frank, with a station homestead to occupy her time, should have no time for hysterics.

  She is not an invalid. I can see nothing deficient about her.”

  “Doubtless it is a matter of breeding,” murmured Feng. “We are not so highly strung as Mrs. Mayne. You and I cannot view people and things from her angle. I have read of those cathedral city societies, and if what I’ve read is true to life, we certainly must appear to Mrs. Mayne–well, let us say, difficult. Assisted by time, she will come to accept our valuation of things. When once she can value a man and a woman for what they are rather than for what their parents were, she will fit better into the Seat of Atlas with Frank.”

  “You are wasting your time at Atlas, Feng.” “Indeed!”

  “You could be of great service as a diplomat in a foreign capital.”

  “You flatter me, Ann.”

  “Not a bit. You seat me here so that you can watch my face, and seat yourself so that I cannot see yours distinctly. Then you calmly array a lot of excuses in defence of Ethel, who has hysterics when she should be busy and happy in the well-being of her angel of a boy and her husband. It won’t do. Why does Ethel have hysterics?”

  “I did not say that she had hysterics, Ann.”

  “Do not let us split hairs. What’swrong with Frank’s wife?”

  “I do not know,’ Feng replied calmly, “if you decline to accept my explanations.”

  “Then I will tell you.” Ann selected and lit her second cigarette. “You know me sufficiently well, Feng, to be sure that I am above petty jealousy. Ever since we heard that Frank was married I have been honestly glad that he was happy. I could be jealous of no woman who made Frank happy. Since they returned to Atlas I have dined here six or seven times, and I have been forced to the conclusion that Ethel is not making Frank so happy as she could do. You see now all my cards. Show me yours.”

  For three seconds Feng remained quite still. Then he got to his feet abruptly and moved his chair so that he, too, faced the light. He laid his hand over the back of hers which rested on her chair-arm.

  “Even as Frank’s greatest friends we cannot discuss his wife too intimately,” he said quietly. “I agree with all you have said. But, even so, we must be tolerant. Ethel has not been long enough on Atlas to prove herself. Even as you, Ann dear, I am not jealous of Ethel, but I am jealous for Frank’s happiness” Ann sighed deeply.

  “I cannot understand the type of English mind which persists in regarding us as uncouth Colonials with whom it is an act of condescension to mix,” she said thoughtfully. “That type will admit nothing of good in Australia, and seems to take a perverse delight in comparing us and this country to the English and England to our disadvantage. What such people expected to find in Australia I don’t know; but, really, they are dreadfully boring. I do hate unintelligent people, don’t you?”

  2

  “How is Atlas going on?” Ann Shelley asked, when Feng Ching-wei offered no further comment about Ethel Mayne.

  Feng leaned back in his chair the better to observe the deepen-ing light falling about the tresses of Ann’s brown hair. How well he loved this woman, with her clear mind and her musical voice, who had just expressed without reserve the thoughts of disapproval she was too honest to keep hidden! In reply to her question he said:

  “As well as can be expected. We shore over sixty-six thousand sheep. Too many! I have been constantly regretting not having sold those wether sheep at the beginning of the year.”

  “I urged it.”

  “I know. Yet I did not think that the winter would be dry.”

  “Never mind! Conditions will improve later this summer.

  Fortunately, I sold all my wethers last March, and had I not done so I should have been overstocked. Mr. Leeson says that Tin Tin is in a good position to face a dry spell. By the way, is the Atlas domestic staff being kept on?”

  “No, excepting Eva, who remains to look after the house. Mrs. Morton, you know, left last month. She felt she could no longer occupy a servant’s position.”

  “I think that Mrs. Morton, like Aunty Joe, was treated badly.”

  Feng was quick to note the gleam in her grey eyes. Silently he concurred, but was naturally more reserved than she was. The arrival of Sir John Blain in the Atlas car was, he felt, opportune. Ann rose, Feng stood beside her, then followed her to the wide creeper-covered veranda, via the french window. When she placed a slim hand on his arm the frown was gone and she was smiling.

  “Feng, please don’t talk banalities for long,”she whispered. I am dying to see my picture.”

  Sir John alighted from the Atlas car as once he would have alighted from his carriage at the portals of his London club. Over his dinner-suit he wore a fawn-coloured raincoat. A light silk muffler was flung loosely round his neck. An immaculate top hat was set at a semi-rakish angle on his head. Whilst he walked the short distance from gate to veranda steps, a gold-headed ebony stick under one arm, he elegantly removed the kid gloves from his work-hardened hands. His booming voice floated away across the empty river.

  “Good evening, Feng! My dear Ann, as always, you look superb. Every time my eyes are pleasured by the sight of you, I wish profoundly I was a modern Dr. Faust.”

  “Surely you would no
t pay M’sieur Mephisto’s price?”

  “When you look at me as you are now doing–yes, and be damned to Mephisto!”

  “Sir John! You will spoil me with your flattery.”

  “Tut-tut! Whoever heard of anyone spoiling a bush aristocrat? I put it to you, Feng. Is it possible?”

  “Certainly not. But come in, Sir John. Come in, both of you. I want to show you Ann’s portrait, which I have just finished.”

  “Ah! You capture my interest. This will be the second?” “Yes,” Ann interjected. “Feng was dissatisfied with the first and destroyed it.”

  “Destroyed it, Feng! I am surprised. I considered that other portrait exceptionally well done. It was lifelike. Well, well, well! You might have given it to me, Feng.”

  “It was not satisfactory,” Feng said suavely whilst conducting them to a shallow, curtained alcove. He turned down an electric light switch and quickly drew aside a curtain, to reveal a picture lighted by cunningly placed bulbs.

  For almost a minute no one spoke. Neither Ann nor Sir John Blain were art critics. They knew nothing of the jargon of the studio, and valued a picture only according to the success of its photographic reproduction of life. They looked on the head of Ann Shelley. There was the sheen of gold in the carefully arranged brown hair. In the eyes was Ann’s fearless outlook on life, direct, frank; the lips were daintily curved as her lips were curved when her mouth was in repose. The contours of cheeks and chin were alluring. The whole picture was an artistic triumph. The living subject sighed. She turned to Feng quickly, impulsively.

  “Thank you, Feng! It’s wonderful.”

  Evidently her soft voice aroused Sir John.

  “Excellent! Excellent!” he boomed. Turning to Feng he added: “My boy, it is a striking portrait. It’s–it is a–a camera study in colours. Yet–pardon an old fool criticizing–I liked that other best.”

  “From the artist’s point of view, this pleases me much better,” Feng stated crisply, himself continuing to gaze at the picture. “This does not create in me the feeling of disappointment that that other did. You like it, Ann?”

  “I think it just great. You have caught my face as it is, and not as sometimes I would like it to be.” Again they fell silent. The old man stood with beetling white brows, his big hands clasped behind his back, his monocle screwed into his left eye as though failing to render the assistance it was intended to do, the tall straight figure now bent forward from the hips. Old John was puzzled, because in the picture before him there was a vital something lacking which Feng’s first picture possessed. On this point he could not appeal to Ann, for she had not seen the first picture. Still puzzled, he regarded Feng shrewdly, but made no further comment.

  3

  At dinner, with Ann Shelley seated on his right and Sir John on his left at the small square table of rosewood, Feng Ching-wei entertained his guests with the polished grace of a mandarin of the first degree. Eight hundred miles from Sydney, four hundred from Adelaide, surrounded by hundreds of miles of virgin bush, the voices of the night-birds drifting in upon them on the balmy air, Sir John decided that, save for the lumbering Mary O’Doyle, he might well have been dining at Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo. The table decorations were right, the lights were right, the wines were right, his fellow diners were right. “You will be going to Menindee to-night, Sir John?” Ann inquired lightly.

  “Yes. Yes, I have business at Menindee at the end of every quarter,” replied Sir John briskly. “I shall have to reprimand Trench for not sending me my account for the last quarter’s stores. There are the four old-age pensioners who have now come to look for me and a Treasury note four times a year. And, of course, I must pay my usual visit to Mrs. Longfellow.”

  “She always makes me sad, yet I feel I must see her when I go to Menindee,” Ann said soberly.

  “She is a wonderful old lady. Her husband lived in Menindee when Burke and Wills, the rash explorers, went through on their last fatal expedition. Always waiting for that doctor son of hers to come home. Always so full of news of his progress in Adelaide. It is strange how she should suffer illusion on but that one point. Yet she receives a measure of comfort. Lying paralysed and blind, it is her only sustaining joy–that she will one day hear the steps of her son coming along the passage.”

  “Young Mrs. Longfellow ought to take the picture of him from the room, don’t you think? Supposing the dear old soul recovered her sight!”

  “It is most unlikely, Ann. Anyway, it is not the picture itself which would give her a shock,” the old man pointed out. “If, after all these years, Mrs. Longfellow were to recover her sight–if, after many years, during which she has suffered the delusion that her son was doing well in his profession, she were to read at the bottom of the picture: ‘Richard Longfellow, killed in action, Gallipoli, August 1915–the shock, I’m sure, would kill her. But the daughter says that if she attempted to remove the picture, the sightless and helpless old lady would know instantly.”

  “You always have been so kind to poor Mrs. Longfellow, Sir John. Will you tell me just why?”

  “Well, her helplessness appeals to my sense of chivalry, Ann, for one thing. And, for another, Robert Longfellow in the picture is much like my own son.”

  “Will you be absent long?” interjected Feng, sensing that the spirits of his guests were becoming shadowed.

  “About the usual fortnight, Feng,” Sir John said a trifle sharply, as though he resented the question as too personal.

  Mary O’Doyle’s mincemeat embedded in Todd Gray’s famous pastry provided a pleasant interlude. The small, stick-like pies recalled to Sir John the days of his boyhood at Blain Chase, and of that Lady Blain, his mother, whose absorbing hobby had been cooking.

  “Demnition fine!” was his vocal verdict. “You are to be congratulated, Feng, on a jewel of a cook.” Which praise caused Mary O’Doyle, then hovering about the service table, to remember only that her mission in life was to feed men unaided by “la-de-da” tables. Thrusting a dish before Sir John, she said:

  “They’re as good as me gran’mither ever made ’em. ’ave another?”

  The old aristocrat, leaning back in his chair, gazed upward at the round weather-beaten face, showing many of the scars of life. What he saw now in the twinkling blue eyes prompted his suggestion:

  “Thank you, Mary, I will. I would really appreciate a few of them to eat on the journey to Menindee. Would you make me up a little parcel of them?”

  “Shure an’ I would, Sir John. What about you, Miss Ann?”

  “Just one, please. I have never before tasted such divine mincemeat.”

  Mary, had her reward.

  Later Ann Shelley smoked a cigarette with the men. In mental power and in poise there was a lot of masculinity in the very feminine Ann. She could so talk that men forgot their masculine superiority, and were able easily to admit her to their level. What greater terror for men is there than that of the clever woman compelling them to recognize her cleverness? Whilst Sir John discussed the results of recent excavation work in Crete, with Feng and herself interpolating intelligent questions, her mind now and then dwelt on the exact business that was taking Sir John to Menindee that night, as it had done about every quarter day for many years, seeing in that “business” the pity and the shame resultant from the tragedy that had ruined the life of this lovable old gentleman.

  Afterwards she played the piano whilst Sir John and Feng reclined in chairs on the veranda. From his position Feng now and then was able to steal a glance at her, at those moments when Sir John’s attention was given to his cigar. They three each had their visions–Ann Shelley seeing pictures of Mayne’s child, Feng thinking of her, and Sir John deciding what a demnition shame it was that Feng Ching-wei just happened to be a Chinaman.

  Presently, from across the river, beyond the moon-silvered gums, came the growing hum of an approaching car. Ann thought that Sir John was just a trifle too ready to leave his chair. Barlow came to the garden gate, carrying the mail-bag over his
sloping shoulder. Mary O’Doyle brought out Sir John’s hat and stick, coat and gloves. She brought, too, a small wicker basket containing a half-bottle of port, a glass and several of her pies wrapped in a doily. Himself carrying his suitcase and the wicker basket Sir John departed with Barlow, his voice booming back to them: “Au revoir, my dear! Au revoir, Feng! And thank you for a delightful dinner.”

  Reseating themselves in silence, they could hear distinct voices from across the river, could hear the voices of Sir John and old Barlow whilst crossing the dry bed above the great hole directly below the Atlas garden. The car-engine burst into a roaring hum five minutes later, died with the changing of gear, broke out again, died and lived a third time, then grew imperceptibly softer whilst the mail-car continued on its way to Menindee with mails and passengers.

  Five minutes–to Feng, golden, living minutes, and Ann went in to get her hat and Feng to take down the recently completed picture, wrap it in cloth and secure it in the Tin Tin car.

  “It is very good of you, Feng, “she said when settling herself behind the steering-wheel, and when the black boy gate-opener was climbing into the dicky. “I shall prize that picture as no other. When–when do you expect them home?”

  “Not until April, I think. Good night, Ann!”

  “Good night…and thank you again!”

  As always, he stood quietly watching the tail-light of her car till it disappeared, thoughtfully then to re-enter the drawing-room. He switched on the mantel light and his face was revealed, calm, without expression save that habitual one of bland suavity. Below the light hung an oil painting of the Darling River in flood, and at this he gazed for some few moments. The frame of the picture was very deep. It was a double frame, holding two pictures back to back. When he reversed the frame, the picture he now gazed on was that of Ann Shelley, the portrait he so often had said he had destroyed.