The crisis was passed, and with it the last of Ted's shamefaced constraint. It was admitted between us that he must be off again to his wandering, and that I must stay behind. And now Ted had no thought for anything but my welfare. There was no more awkwardness between us, but only the warmth of this good fellow's real affection, and the almost agreeable melancholy and self-righteous consciousness of wise denial which possessed me. Ted fumbled under his coat with a packet of some food he had brought me: 'Spare me days, the cats might give a lad a bit o' bread to his breakfast--drat 'em!'--and, finally pressed it into my hands, with injunctions to be careful in opening it, as he had put a scrap of writing in with it, for me to remember him by.
And so we parted, with no shadow on our friendship, on the track down to the punt.
But though my friend was gone, after these three Sunday visits, and I was alone again, the influence of his coming remained. I should not revert to the unhoping inertia of my previous state. Some instinct told me that. And the instinct was right. My curiosity had been too fully roused. My relationship to the world of people outside St. Peter's had been definitely re-established by the kindly, rather childlike, bushman, and would not again be allowed to lapse. The mere talk of swimming to the wharf, of cutting the painter, of walking forth into the real world which was not ruled by a Sister-in-charge--all this had wrought a permanent change in me.
The 'scrap of writin'' fumblingly inserted into the packet of cakes was no writing of Ted's, but a crumpled, greasy one-pound Bank of New South Wales note; one of his little store, useless to me at St. Peter's--yes; but, even as my eyes pricked to the emotion of gratitude, some inner consciousness told me my friend's gift would yet prove of very real use to me outside the Orphanage, one day. And, before Ted came, I had been unable to descry any future outside the Orphanage.
V
I do not remember the exact period that elapsed between Ted's departure and the visit of the artist, Mr. Rawlence. But it must have been early winter when Ted was at Myall Creek, because my fifteenth birthday fell at about that time; and it was spring when Mr. Rawlence came, for I know the wattle was in bloom then. Very likely it was in August or September, three or four months after Ted's departure. At all events my mind was still much occupied by thoughts of the outside world and of my future.
Some one had told me that a Sydney artist, a Mr. Rawlence, had permission to land on the island, as he wished to sketch there. But he had not been much about the house or the yards, and I had not seen him. And then, one late afternoon, when I had arrived at the milking-yards a few minutes before the others of the milking gang, I stood with two pails in my right hand, leaning over the slip-rails at the very spot upon which I had caught my first glimpse of Ted at St. Peter's. I was thinking of that Sunday when I had recognised his broad shoulders, and recalling the thrill that recognition had brought me.
The romantic hazardousness of life had for some considerable time now made its appeal felt by me. It seemed infinitely curious and interesting to me that I and my father ever should have known Ted intimately, as one who shared our curious life on the Livorno; Ted who was born and bred there in Werrina; we who came there across thousands of miles of ocean from the world's far side, from Putney, from places whose names Ted had never heard. And then that I should have walked down to that milking-yard with my pails, and, so to say, stumbled upon Ted, after his long wanderings in Queensland, where at this moment he was probably wandering again, hundreds of miles away and, possibly, thinking of me, of that same milking-yard, of these identical slip-rails and splintery grey fence. A wonderful and mysterious business, this life in the great world, I thought; and with that I threw up my left hand to lift the rails down.
'Oh, hold on! Don't move! Stay as you were a minute!'
I jumped half out of my skin as these words, apparently spoken in my very ear, reached me; and, wheeling abruptly round, I saw a man wearing a very large grey felt hat, and holding pencils and a paper block in his hands, peering at me from a little wooded hummock at the end of the cowshed. The skin about his eyes was all puckered up, he held a pencil cross-wise between his white teeth, and was shaking his head from side to side as though very much put about over something.