[CHAPTER XLIII.]
Esmeralda lay in her hammock slung in the shadow of the hut. It was a lovely evening with the day’s heat lingering in the air, and as she lay back, in perfect comfort, she could look over the superb tract of country upon which the sun was beginning to shed a glory of crimson and gold.
It is good to lie in a hammock at most times, it is peculiarly and particularly good so to lie on the brow of an Australian hill with an Australian view to look at; and if you happen to have just come through a dangerous and trying illness, it is about the best thing you can do.
Esmeralda looked very fragile, as if a violent puff of wind would blow her clean out of the hammock and into the valley below. She was pale still, the freckles had nearly disappeared, her hands were white and thin, but the light was beginning to return to her eyes, and though they were still wistful and touched with melancholy, they had lost that wild and despairing expression which the doctor had watched for so many weeks. A bunch of flowers lay in her lap beside a book, but she was not reading, and she was scarcely thinking; she was just gazing across the valley to the opposite range of hills, in that dreary state which the invalid alone seems able to manage. Her mind had worked so hard through her delirium that it was taking a rest now; it declined to worry her, or, in fact, to execute its usual functions in any way whatever. She was just capable of feeling that it was rather good to be alive still, that it was decidedly good to be lying in a hammock with the murmur of multitudes of insects in her ears, the perfume of the flowers stealing over her senses. She was not even thinking of Trafford. Though neither the doctor, nor her two women nurses had mentioned his name, she had a vague idea that he was not very far from her. But she had not inquired for him; she was not quite sure that she wanted him; not so sure as that she should want her beef-tea in an hour’s time. She had seen Varley for a minute or two, and by a look and a kiss had granted him full absolution for his misdirected shot; she had asked after Taffy and MacGrath, and the rest of the boys; had even seen some of them at a distance, but she had made no mention of Trafford.
As a matter of fact, she was living in a kind of dreamland, in which all the characters of her past history were so vague, so intangible as to seem more like persons in some story she had read, than real living beings with whom she had lived and loved and suffered. Most invalids feel like this, and it is a very good thing for them that they do; for while the mind is asleep and dreaming, the body has time to look around and grow strong.
Mother Melinda came out of the hut presently, with a pitcher and a can in her hand, and stood beside the hammock to regard her patient with critical affection.
“How do you feel now, dearie?” she asked.
Esmeralda looked up at her with half-closed eyes, and the smile which repaid Mother Melinda for all the weary and anxious nights.
“Delightful,” said Esmeralda in a voice that was not so feeble as soft and sleepy. “I feel as contented as a fraud always does. And I am a terrible fraud, Melinda! I wouldn’t admit it to everybody, but I don’t mind telling you—because you know it very well already—that I am quite well, and quite strong enough to get up and go about as usual.”