It was such a sweet night, that it made me (even me) feel, all at once, a little melancholy. I began to think of some things I had forgotten in my first burst of excitement at the prospect of going home. It occurred to me, for the first time, to wonder whether I should really like England as well as my own dear Narraporwidgee? And could I part with Spring, my canine familiar, who was as much my shadow as any witch’s black cat? He was sniffing round my petticoats now, poking his wet black nose under my arm and into my face, as I leaned on the garden gate, in an attitude of contemplation that he was not used to, and could not understand.
The dear old dog! He seldom took a night’s rest anywhere but on the verandah outside my door—the glass door that was also the window of my bedroom; and if I did let him lie under my bed in the daytime when it was blinding hot outside, he was my dog, and it was nobody’s business but my own. Who would understand his ways and wants as I did? Who would take him down to the dam and the river for his swims, and see that he got the bits of mutton he liked best? And how could he bear his life without me?
At this stage of my meditations, when my eyes were filling with tears, and I was wildly resolving to pay his passage and smuggle him along with me somehow, if I had to sell my new watch and chain to do it, Spring jumped out of my embraces with a sudden energy that nearly knocked me over, and darted in pursuit of a wretched little opossum that was just scuttling up the trunk of my favourite plum tree. He scratched my arm with his iron claws, and I did not cry over him any more.
I began to think of the plums, which would be ripe enough for jam in another week or two. Oh, who would make the jam? And who would eat it? I had visions of strange people rudely criticizing our pretty house, rummaging about mother’s dainty store-rooms, and tramping over our sacred Persian carpet with muddy boots; and they made me very sad.
Then, by the vague moonlight, I saw the horses in the home paddock quietly sauntering about and enjoying the night air, and amongst them I easily recognized my own lovely Bronzewing—the most perfect lady’s horse, many people said, in the whole of the Western district. The pretty creature! I should know him from a thousand in any scrap of moonlight—the graceful droop and lift of his strong, supple neck, and the way he raised his feet as he trod the earth, that hardly seemed good enough for him to walk on. He whisked his silky tail from side to side, and nibbled, and glided from shadow to shadow, little thinking, poor dear Bronzewing, what was in store for him and me!
I wondered would daddy let me take my horse to England? Perhaps he would, if I made a great point of it; he never liked to refuse me anything if he could help it. Bronzewing was not like poor Spring; he really was valuable, in whatever part of the world he might be. His father and mother both came from England, to begin with. If daddy did not mind paying all that for the parents, he surely wouldn’t mind paying a little for the son, who had, as he always said, all the good points of both of them. It was hardly a month ago that the Indian buyer offered a hundred pounds for him, and father would not entertain the offer for a moment. So, feeling pretty comfortable about Bronzewing, I began to think of somebody else—Tom.
Tom was the only son of our next-door neighbour, and lived only five miles off, and he was my great friend. That is to say, he had been my great friend for years when we were children, until his father sent him home to Oxford, and then I did not see him for nearly four years. He had only been back about six months, and we had renewed our acquaintance on rather a different footing, for now we were both grown up. He was nearly twenty-three, and I was just over eighteen. But I could not say that we were not great friends still. He brought me some presents from Oxford when he came back—a pretty box for my handkerchiefs, and a book of photographs of the colleges, with a cardinal’s hat on the cover (he was a Christ Church man), and a set of Egyptian jewellery that he said was the fashion in England—and these were the greatest treasures I had in the world.
I had no girl friends that I cared for. A few young ladies lived around us, but mother did not consider them what she called “her sort,” and did not encourage any intimacy between them and me. (She was considered “stuck up” in consequence, which did not affect her in the slightest degree.) I seldom felt myself tempted to disregard her prejudices, for I don’t think they were my sort either. I did not like girls.
But Tom’s father was my father’s old friend, and his mother my mother’s “sort” exactly, the very image of her ideal gentlewoman, Mrs. Delany, as if she had stepped out of Lady Llanover’s book. And so, considering what near neighbours we were, Tom and I were intimate by the mere force of circumstances.
Did I say that his name was Smith—Tom Smith? I am very sorry, but so it was. He ought to have had a nobler name to match his noble height of six feet two and a half, and his noble, honest, handsome face, and the noble old blood that mother said he inherited on both sides; but—well, he hadn’t. And, after all, what does it matter? It is only in novels that names are always appropriate to the people who own them; it very seldom is so in real life.