III
The custom of St. Peter's Orphanage was to allow farmers and local residents generally to choose an orphan, as they might pick out a heifer or a colt from a stockyard, and take him away for good--or ill. I believe the only stipulation was that the orphan could not in any case be returned to St. Peter's. If the selector found him to be a damaged or incomplete orphan, that was the selector's own affair, and he had to put up with his bargain as best he might. The person who chose an orphan in this way became responsible for the boy's maintenance while boyhood lasted, and I believe it was not customary to send out lads under the age of ten or twelve years. After a time the people who took these lads into their service were, theoretically, supposed to allow them some small wage, in addition to providing them with a home.
It was rather a blow to my self-esteem, I remember, to see my companions being removed from the institution one by one as time ran on, and to note that nobody appeared to want me. I may have been somewhat less sturdy than the average run of 'inmates,' but I think we were all on the spare and lean side. It is possible, however, that in view of my father's legacy to St. Peter's, the authorities felt it incumbent upon them to keep me. The departure of a boy always had an unsettling effect upon me; and when, as happened now and again, an ex-inmate paid us a visit on a Sunday, possibly with members of the family with whom he worked, I was filled with yearning interest in the life of the world outside our island farm and workshop.
But these yearnings of mine were quite vague; mere amorphous emanations of the mind, partaking of the nature of nostalgia, and giving birth to nothing in the shape of plans, nor even of definite desires. Then, suddenly, this vague uneasiness became the dominant factor in my daily life, as the result of one of those apparently haphazard chances upon which human progress and development so often seem to pivot.
In the late afternoon of a visitors' Sunday, as I was making my way down to the milking-yard with a pail on either arm, my eyes fell upon the broad shoulders of a man who was leaning contemplatively over the slip-rails of the yard. The sight of those shoulders sent a thrill right through me; it touched the marrow of my spine. I, who had thought myself the most forlorn and friendless of orphans; I had a friend, and he was here before me. There was no need to see his face. I knew those shoulders.
'Ted!' I cried. And positively I had to exercise deliberate self-restraint to prevent myself from rushing at our Livorno friend and factotum, and flinging my arms about him, as in infantile days I had been wont to make embracing leaps at Amelia from the kitchen table of the house off Russell Square.
'God spare me days! Is it you, then, chum?' exclaimed Ted, as he swung round on his high heels. (In those days the Sunday rig of men like Ted Reilly comprised much-polished, pointed-toe, elastic-side boots with very high heels, and voluminously 'bell-bottomed' trousers.) I rattled questions at him, as peas from a pea-shooter; and when I had laid aside my buckets he pumped away at my right arm, as though providing water to put a fire out.
It seemed he had only that week returned to the district, after a long spell of wandering and desultory working in southern Queensland. No, he had not had time yet to go out to the Livorno, and he had not heard of my father's death--'Rest his soul for as good an' kindly a gentleman as ever walked!' And so--'Spare me days!'--I was an orphan at St. Peter's! The queer thing it was he had taken it into his head to be wandering that way, an' all, having nothing else to do to pass the time, like! How I blessed the casual ways of the man, the marked absence of 'Systum' in his character, that led him to make such excursions! He squatted beside me on his heels, whilst I, fearing admonition from above, got to work with my cows, and saw the rest of the milking gang started.
Passionate disappointment swept across my mind when I learned that he had been several hours on the island before I saw him, and that it wanted now but ten minutes to five o'clock, the hour at which the punt made its last trip with visitors. And in almost the same moment joy shook and thrilled me as I realised the romantic hazard of our meeting at all, which was accentuated really by the narrowness of our margin of time. A matter of minutes and he would be gone. A matter of minutes and I should never have seen him at all. But that could not have been. I refused to contemplate a life at St. Peter's in which this inestimable amelioration (now nearly five minutes old) played no part. The hopeless emptiness of life at the Orphanage without a meeting with Ted was something altogether too harrowing to be dwelt upon. It could not have been borne.
'You'll be here first thing next visitors' Sunday, Ted--first thing?' I charged him, as he rose in response to the puntman's bell. 'I couldn't stand it if you didn't come, Ted.'