“No, no, whatever would Little Bradmarsh do without you?” said Ephraim.
“They did without me well enough,” she said bitterly. Indeed her first fine faith in human nature could not be mended as easily as the broken bridge, nor did the depreciatory allusions of her old customers to the deceased coach, and their compliments at her return, soften her cynicism. And as she spoke, she felt a sudden yearning to be done with them all: the infection of the new world began to steal into her veins too, but she knew her own exodus was impossible while her grandfather lived, and though she played with the idea and asked if she might copy Hezekiah’s instructions for the passage, her real design was to gather information for Will’s sake. It was very worrying though to copy the recommendations in the original spelling. “Of kors i don’t now wot the shipps is like nowerdies, but the nu chums ses they dont give no solt, onni roc-solt (solt is peny a pound here, peper 2d. nounc) and you’ll want thik warm close and moor beding.” There was an elaborate list of provisions necessary to supplement the ship’s dietary during the four weary months—it hardly needed copying, since it embraced a little of everything edible that would keep—but she was glad again that Will was not a temperance man when she found a bottle of brandy recommended as an indispensable medicine for the contingencies of the voyage.
Neglecting even the last instalment of her debt to Miss Gentry—had not the dressmaker given her the alternative of working it out?—Jinny began to acquire the longest-lived comestibles, storing them secretly in one of the ante-room chests. And it was by this concentration on Will’s interests that she managed to live through his dreadful silence, nay, to enjoy long spells of day-dreaming in which these edibles were for their joint Australian larder. The goldfields her imagination dismissed as bristling with “desperado diggers.” It was on the more idyllic images of her magazine article, written before the days of the discovery of gold, that her imagination fed. For though the writer denigrated the urban labour market, he admitted that there was plenty of room for rural labour, and then—with what seemed so uncanny a prying into her affairs that it flushed her cheek and made her heart beat faster—he postulated a young couple without capital setting up housekeeping together, and instructed them to take employment with a farmer while saving up enough to buy a small farm or herd of their own. The system, it appeared, was that the employer supplied rations as well as money-wages, and that while the husband worked on the land, the wife could do the farm cooking. (How lucky she had had so much experience, Jinny thought.) Nay, these rations, said the article (pursuing her affairs to what the blushing reader thought the point of indelicacy) would practically suffice for the children too, and when they grew up—-but her delicious daydream rarely went so far as this calculation of them as independent labour-assets.
The happy couple would also be permitted to keep a few cows, pigs, and fowls. Here the thought of Methusalem would intrude distressfully, and the difficulty of transporting him to the Antipodes. But when he had been left at Frog Farm in the loving hands of Caleb and Martha (become almost his parents-in-law), under promise of leisurely grazing for the rest of his life, with perhaps a rare jaunt to Chipstone market for their household needs, this ideal solution only reminded her of the phantasmal nature of the whole scheme, for Frog Farm could certainly not be saddled with her grandfather. But lest she should remember too cruelly its visionary character, the day-dream would at this point dart off swiftly on the journey through the Bush in quest of an idyllic spot free from blacks and provided with a generous employer.
Fortunate that this journey was to be so inexpensive, there being no inns (not even “The Bull and Bush”), but every settler being compelled by a wise decree of this wonderful State to give the bona fide traveller board and lodging for nothing. What a lovely journey that would be—if only one dodged the blacks and the diggers and the swamps with the alligators. She saw herself and Will bounding along like kangaroos (with Nip of course in attendance, she did not intend to take up with a dingo instead) through mimosa-bushes (like the scrub on the Common, only gaudier), and eating their dinner-packets under giant gum-trees, so enchantingly blue, whose tops, five hundred feet high, one might climb so as to survey the route for signs of native camps or friendly farmers. If there was no settler in sight by the time darkness fell, they would just perch themselves like birds in a nest of high branches out of all danger, and go to sleep under the starry heaven, which she saw vividly with the old constellations.
Closer to the real was her picture of the tenement with which the ideal farmer (when found) would provide his young couple. There would just be a few poles driven into the ground to support the roof of gum-bark, with its hole to let out the smoke. But of course one need not live much indoors in that climate—despite the occasional vagaries of the “Southerly Buster”—and it would be all the easier not to have to spend money on furniture. Why, put in Nip’s basket, lay out Will’s razor and slippers, set out her Spelling-Book and the Peculiar Hymn-Book the young rebel had thrown into the bushes, hang up his hat and her bonnet, and the place already begins to look like home. As for Will’s box—presumably conveyed to the chosen spot by the local carrier in a bullock-cart—it is so large it will crowd out everything else and furnish the place of itself. Decked with a rug it will serve as sofa, covered with a cloth it becomes a table. Lucky she has not brought a box of her own, but has squeezed her things into his—in that wonderful, incredible fusion of two existences!
It was hard to wake from these day-dreams to the wretched reality, and yet Uncle Lilliwhyte profited from one of these awakenings, for her Australian hut had reminded her of his English specimen, and she hurried to see it and him. She found them both in a bad way. His wading overmuch in the flood in quest of salvage had brought back more than a touch of his rheumatism, while the winds and rain had left his shanty leakier than ever. They were both breaking up, the ancient and his shell, and she now did her best to patch both up. Already in her new affluence she had called in young Ravens to mend her grandfather’s bedroom ceiling and redaub the gaps in the walls, and it was simple to turn this Jack-of-all-trades and fountain of melody on to the derelict hut in the woods. The poor old “Uncle” had hitherto built his fire as well as he could on the ground on the leeward side of his hut; Jinny now installed an old stove which she bought up cheap at the pawnbroker’s and conveyed to the verge of the wood. But the hole in the roof that might serve for Australia would not do for England, and after Ravens had re-thickened the walls with fresh faggots and re-thatched the hut with shavings presented by Barnaby, Jinny was amused to find that what seemed an iron chimney turned out on closer inspection to consist of three old top-hats. Where the ancient had picked up these treasures—whether in the flood or in his normal scavenging—he refused to say. “Happen Oi’ve got a mort o’ culch ye don’t know of,” he cackled, enjoying her admiration of his architecture. She wanted to have a floor to the hut, but this, like the exchange of his sacking for a pallet-bed, he opposed strenuously. “Gimme the smell o’ the earth,” he said. “Ye’ve shut out the stars and that’s enough.” He accepted, however, a bolster for a pillow.
By such interests and devices, aided by her regular rounds, Jinny staved off too clear a consciousness of the inevitable parting, which would not even have the grace of a parting. But the inexorable moment was like a black monster bearing down upon her—and yet it was not really advancing, it was rather something retreating: it could not even be visualized as a shock against which one could brace one’s shoulders. There was the horror of the impalpable in this silent drift away from her.
But when at last the day of departure was named, and came vibrating to her across a dozen subtle threads, the negative torture turned to a positive that was still more racking. It was on the Friday—unlucky day!—that Will was to leave for London, and here was already Tuesday. Some of her threads conveyed even the rumour that, in order to save a little cash for his start at the Antipodes, he meant to work his passage. And here was she unable to pack his box or even to slip her provisions into it; doomed by all the laws of sex and proper spirit to watch—bound hand and foot as in a nightmare—the receding of the mate whose lips had sealed her his. By the Wednesday morning even her grandfather observed something was wrong.
“Ye ain’t eatin’ no breakfus.”