Challis stepped into the little room.
CHAPTER XX
Miss Browne
'I shall have no man's love
For ever, and no face of children born
Or tender lips upon me.
Far off from flowers or any love of man
Shall my life be for ever.'
What was it that broke the barriers down? The wet eyelashes of the little music-maker? The droop of her soft mouth? Or came there across that poor room one of those divine waves of sympathy and understanding that wash at times from a richly endowed soul to a lonely stunted one?
Miss Browne found herself telling anything and everything that had happened in her life, and even the things that might have happened. Not that the whole of them made a sum of any account, if you condensed them; but, told ramblingly and with pauses for tears, they fell pathetically on the young listening ears.
Thirty-eight grey years! Life in this country town and that country town, in this crowded suburb or on that out-back station or selection—a hireling always. The first twenty-five had dragged by under English skies that even in summer had no sun for a motherless, fatherless girl, pupil-teacher from the age of fourteen. She bore twelve years of it patiently enough, and indeed would have borne another score, but two friends, stronger, more restless souls than she, though chained to the same life, told her they were going to break through it all, strike out of the stagnant waters of suburban England into the fresh, glittering sea the other side of the world.
They were saving their salaries to pay their passage to Australia. Governesses were royally paid out there, they had heard, and more than that—they whispered this a little ashamed—husbands grew on every bush.
Miss Browne scraped and saved for a year, cheerfully shivering without a winter jacket, happily heedless of the rain that came through the holes of her umbrella. If it had been a question of economising in her diet, she would have brought herself down to a crust a day, in her eagerness to make a plunge into a different life, but fortunately governesses are 'all found.' The three women cheerfully cramped their bodies third-class for the voyage, letting their souls soar boundlessly in the pleasant evenings on deck.
They came to their new land, saw it, and after a few years were conquered. Almost the same conditions of life, the same sickening struggle of a multitude of educated women for one poor place, the same grey outlook. One found a husband; he took her to some heaven-forgotten corner of North Queensland, where she had for neighbours Japanese and Chinese and Javanese, and he drank, as the men all do in those forgotten corners, where alligators are to be found on the river-banks, and coloured labour crowds out the white man's efforts. She bore him six children in eight years, and then died thankfully. The second woman went into a hospital and became a nurse; for the last five years she had been in Western Australia, kept busy with the typhoid in Perth. Once in a while she wrote to Miss Browne; once or twice she had eagerly said she was 'all but engaged,' but later letters never confirmed the hope, and now a dull commonplace had settled down over the correspondence.