It is Dina, Miss Lileth’s special handmaiden. Caught as a child, she is the sole surviving member of a once great Otero, or tribal-family, which was annihilated by the Black Police some eight years before, at a “rounding-up” of the natives in the neighbourhood.
It is she alone, as we see her, of all the house-gins, or unpaid native women, who are employed about “Government House,” that is decorated with that insignia of civilized female servitude,—a white lace cap; and though Dina looks to-day slightly untidy, one generally sees her glossy, luxuriant locks of jetty hair as neatly stowed away beneath the natty ornament before mentioned as Phyllis of old herself could have desired.
Dina stalks slowly towards her mistress, with a grin of respectful humility wrinkling her dark, shiny face, which would be beautiful but for that excessively triangular appendage, her nose. Suddenly, however, remembering that “missie” has threatened her with a flogging if she appears before that lady without her stockings on, she sneaks off again, softly as a bat upon the wing, and presently reappears with her calfless lower limbs clothed in neat white cotton and shod with highly polished shoes.
The girl stands for some time with her arms akimbo, and her white-palmed hands resting open upon the waistband of her short gown, meekly waiting for her mistress to notice her. But Miss Mundella’s thoughts are far away. So Dina at last looks round for something with which to while away the time.
A large beetle, with tesselated-pavement back and enormous antennæ, presently attracts her attention, and squatting down the dusky maiden plays with it, till the frightened insect escapes through a joint between the floor-boards. However, she soon finds fresh amusement in the troubles of a mantis religiosa, which has foolishly attempted to cross the thin brown stream of hurrying ants that extends from the house to their mound, a hundred yards away. Dina’s childish face beams with fun as she watches the contest. She is not cruel,—few Australian natives delight in seeing pain in any form,—but she is, like many of her sex, white and black, indifferent, that is all; content to be amused, and forgetful of the suffering anything may feel so long as it pleasantly tickles her sense of the humorous. The mantis on the path by the verandah is invulnerable to the ants’ attack, save at two points,—its soft tail and long, facile neck. On the other hand, the mode of warfare employed by those tiny, insect bull-dogs, the emmets, is simplicity itself. Laying hold of whatever part of the intruder’s awkward body happens to come near them, they “freeze on,” their hind legs being used as drag-breaks to impede the mantis’s forward march. The mantis, although covered with busy foes, marches on, with that prayerful aspect—the beseeching, upturned head and pious, folded, hand-like front-legs—that has earned it its name. Ever and anon some enterprising ant ventures to attack the weak points already alluded to of this insect Achilles; then are the lately-folded mandible claws deliberately brought into play, and the enemy is crushed, even as a nut is broken in a pair of nut-crackers.
The solemn, preoccupied air of the bigger insect, and the plucky onslaught of its tiny foes, at last cause Dina to forget her state of bondage, also the august presence of her mistress, and she bursts into a merry fit of laughter. Her hilarity, however, ceases as suddenly as it commences.
“Dina, what are you doing there?” comes the clear, contralto voice of Miss Mundella.
The culprit stands before “missie” with downcast eyes and trembling figure.
“Your cap is half off your head, and your stockings are coming down. You have forgotten to tie your shoe-laces. And why have you not an apron on? Don’t you remember the flogging you received for forgetting what I told you about your coming to me in an untidy state? Be off and get yourself straight at once, and hurry that lazy Sophy with tiffen. Marmie (master) will soon be back.”
Miss Lileth always refrains from employing that foolish pigeon-English that generally obtains amongst Australian settlers in their conversations with aborigines. And she has found herself perfectly understood and implicitly obeyed since she first arrived at the station, and established her authority by having the house-gins flogged for the slightest misbehaviour, till they were thoroughly “broken into her ways,” as she pleasantly termed it.