In the general sense of the word, Daisy Barton was not a pretty girl, inasmuch as she possessed not one regular feature. But it was such a calm, quiet, pleasant face, out of which dark blue eyes looked so tenderly and honestly at you, that one forgot to search for details in the charm of the whole. Add to this, one of the neatest, trimmest, most loveable little figures imaginable, and you may have some faint idea of the pleasant picture she made as she sat thinking which of the two spare rooms should be got ready for the new inmate. Mrs Barton was never at the station. [210] ]She was a confirmed invalid, and resided permanently in a far southern town. Daisy and an old Irishwoman kept house.
In due course the ‘highly connected’ one arrived, bringing with him as much luggage as sufficed to fill the extra room.
He was a tall, good-looking Englishman, and he gazed around at the small bare house with its strip of burnt-up, dusty garden, and background of sombre eucalypti; at the squalid ‘hut;’ the sluggish, dirty river; and the barren forlornness of everything, with a look on his face that caused Mr Barton to chuckle, and think to himself that the new-comer’s stay would be short. The manager had expected a youngster, not a grown man of five or six and twenty, and he was rather puzzled.
This self-possessed, languid sort of gentleman, with well-cut features, long moustache, and slow, pleasant-sounding, if rather drawling, speech, wasn’t by any means the sort of creature that Mr Barton was accustomed to associate with the term ‘jackaroo,’ and its natural corollary, ‘licking into shape.’
‘A fellow with lots of money, I expect,’ he said to Daisy that night after their guest, pleading fatigue, had retired. ‘One of those chaps who just come out to have a look around, and then off home again with wonderful stories about the wild Australian Bush.’
‘Yaas; shouldn’t wondah, now, Mistah Barton, if you ah not quaite correct,’ laughed Daisy, mischievously. [211] ]‘Oh, papa, do all the folk in England talk as if they were clean knocked up?’
‘Only the highly-connected ones, my dear,’ replied her father, smiling. ‘It’s considered quite fashionable, too, amongst our own upper ten. He’ll lose it after he’s been bushed a few times. I shouldn’t imagine from his looks, however, that he’s got much backbone. He’ll be away again presently—too rough a life.’
And, in fact, poor Fortescue at first often did get bushed.
Luckily for him, perhaps, a camp of blacks settled at Tarnpirr shortly after his arrival, and these made a regular income by hunting for and bringing him back. And he was very considerate.
Once, when he had been missing for three days, and Mr Barton and Daisy were half out of their minds with fright, he made the blacks who were bearing him home, tattered and hungry, and faint from exposure, go ahead for clean clothes and soap and water before he would put in an appearance. This incident only confirmed Mr Barton the more in his idea that he had to do with a man lacking strength of character—a dandy willing to sacrifice everything to personal outward show. His daughter thought quite otherwise.