We quarrelled badly then—that first hour in our new home. I know now whose fault it was.
I got my hat and went out and started to walk down the creek. I didn’t feel bitter against Mary—I had spoken too cruelly to her to feel that way. Looking back, I could see plainly that if I had taken her advice all through, instead of now and again, things would have been all right with me. I had come away and left her crying in the hut, and James telling her, in a brotherly way, that it was all her fault. The trouble was that I never liked to ‘give in’ or go half-way to make it up—not half-way—it was all the way or nothing with our natures.
‘If I don’t make a stand now,’ I’d say, ‘I’ll never be master. I gave up the reins when I got married, and I’ll have to get them back again.’
What women some men are! But the time came, and not many years after, when I stood by the bed where Mary lay, white and still; and, amongst other things, I kept saying, ‘I’ll give in, Mary—I’ll give in,’ and then I’d laugh. They thought that I was raving mad, and took me from the room. But that time was to come.
As I walked down the creek track in the moonlight the question rang in my ears again, as it had done when I first caught sight of the house that evening—
‘Why did I bring her here?’
I was not fit to ‘go on the land’. The place was only fit for some stolid German, or Scotsman, or even Englishman and his wife, who had no ambition but to bullock and make a farm of the place. I had only drifted here through carelessness, brooding, and discontent.
I walked on and on till I was more than half-way to the only neighbours—a wretched selector’s family, about four miles down the creek,—and I thought I’d go on to the house and see if they had any fresh meat.
A mile or two farther I saw the loom of the bark hut they lived in, on a patchy clearing in the scrub, and heard the voice of the selector’s wife—I had seen her several times: she was a gaunt, haggard Bushwoman, and, I supposed, the reason why she hadn’t gone mad through hardship and loneliness was that she hadn’t either the brains or the memory to go farther than she could see through the trunks of the ‘apple-trees’.
‘You, An-nay!’ (Annie.)