“Oh yes,” I retorted, turning up my nose, “The Queen, and Myra’s Journal, and Belgravia, I suppose. Well, I hope the men will be an improvement on the girls. They mostly are, fortunately.”
“Don’t express that opinion in public, Kitty, I beg of you.”
“No, mother, of course not; I’m going to be the pink of propriety now.”
“I hope so, darling. Good-night. God bless you.”
CHAPTER IX.
ELEANOR ARMYTAGE.
There was to be a great gathering of the family at aunt Alice’s house next day, in honour of our arrival. Uncle Armytage and aunt Kate were coming up from their country rectory with their daughter Eleanor, a girl of my own age, and their son Rupert, a young fellow lately from Oxford, now reading for holy orders. Aunt Kate had three more children, but they were in the school-room, and were to be left at home with their governess. In the evening Reginald Goodeve, whom his sisters had proudly told me was “an officer,” and now quartered in some suburban barracks, was coming up to dinner, and was to bring two of his fellow-officers with him to make up the proper complement of men for the party.
In the middle of the afternoon I was sitting in my room by myself. I had been sorting away my clothes in the drawers and cupboards assigned to them, having no maid of my own, and not wishing for anybody else’s, and I had refused to go out when this was done on the plea that I wanted to write letters. Of permitted correspondents I don’t think I had any that I cared for sufficiently to wish to make such a sacrifice to please them, for I disliked writing letters, and I had an intense desire to drive in the park, and see the costumes and equipages displayed there at this season and on such a lovely day. But I had discovered that the Australian mail was on the point of leaving, and I had determined to send an account of our voyage and news of our safe arrival to little Mrs. Barton, our late clergyman’s wife, because I knew she would gossip about it to the people who went to church the Sunday after she got the letter, and that my dearest Tom would hear it all. Father had said “Next mail will be time enough,” and “People never make themselves anxious about travellers nowadays,” when I suggested to him the propriety of writing a line to the Smiths, or of asking mother to do so; but, of course, they did not take into account the weary longing for good tidings that my poor, dear, lonely boy would feel. So I allowed my cousins to carry off mother for a drive without me, and I spread out my materials on a little table near the window, and sat down to my task.
I had not begun to write. I was resting my head on my hand, and looking down dreamily upon the trees and bushes in the square below—very tiny trees and bushes, but green and shady, and sweet with early summer blossoms—and my thoughts were very sad ones. I was thinking of the little bush township and the little brick church, with its shingle roof and its bell tinkling cheerily from the limb of a gum-tree, wondering whose buggy would appropriate the particular corner of the fence where ours used to stand, and who would sit in the choir instead of me, and how my dear love was bearing the dreadful new solitude that had come to him. How vividly I pictured what the Sundays would be to him now! No merry drive home through the parrot-haunted bush, one buggy at the tail of the other; no stopping at Narraporwidgee for the immemorial “cold collection” (for the new owner was a retired storekeeper, ambitious, like the merchant princes at home, in his smaller way, of becoming a country gentleman and a J.P.); no happy talks under the apple-trees in the warm afternoons; no hand-in-hand rambles by the river in the lovely moonlight. I knew so well how he would go wandering about by himself, while his father nodded over his English papers, and his mother dozed in her armchair—how he would sit on that stump at the water’s edge, with our two dogs running races round him, with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and think of his Kitty at the other side of the world, and wonder if she would keep true to him through those two long, long years.
“Oh, Tom,” I murmured aloud to the empty air, while my tears dropped fast upon the white sheet before me, “what shall we do without one another? Oh, what shall we do?”