"Why are you and I chumming here together on this hole-in-a-corner of an island, for instance, with no end of a silly yarn between us? Likely you'd much rather be somewhere and doing something else—I'm blessed, but I should. Yet here we are; and both our lives, from a world apart, have led us up to this very minute. Now why? Coincidence maybe. Well, coincidence must be worked a bit threadbare explaining things for people.
"Take my own case: I was born in the Riverina of New South Wales, the back lots—sheep country. That's where I belong—and look at me! Quite a gap to bridge—what?...
"My father went out there as a jackaroo, without a penny; and before he died he could ride straightaway all day across his own paddocks. Nothing ever turned him from his natural destiny, which was raising good sheep, and plenty of 'em. In twenty years I don't suppose he was off the station twice; it suited him. It would have suited me too. Roving and changing and mucking about in crowds—no; I was fed up with that when he sent me away to school. After his death I stepped into his place, of course, and I never had any notion except to carry on as he had done before me to the end of my billet. Never any notion up to a day about three months ago, when there came a cablegram from England.
"Well, it's what I say—a man is better off if he has some simple and handy system of accounting for life. He goes to bed in his own private heaven and he wakes up in the general hell. And what's the reason? There isn't any, unless you believe in black cats or astral influence, or the curse of Shielygh—or something.
"That cablegram was to inform me that my father had left another family back home. Previous, so to speak. Previous and legitimate. Naturally everything he'd acquired in Australia in near half a century belonged to them: the stock; the land; the house I was born in; the very picture of my mother on the wall—everything but me, being an encumbrance on the estate.... A fair knockout, wasn't it?"
His voice held the level acerbity that no man with a boy's eyes has any right to know.
"Did I fight? I started to—rather! At first, you see, I didn't begin to understand what it was had hit me. I took my two years' wages as overseer—I'd a right to that, at least—and I came on to England, with my comb over one eye, regularly scratching after trouble. And then I found the only people I could fight were three elderly gentlewomen who lived together on a Yorkshire lane in a little cottage covered with climbing roses. They were most polite and had me in to tea; and we talked about something—a sale of work in aid of the local church, I think.... At that it was rather heroic of them, you know. The entertainment of a new and unsuspected half brother—sinister, hey?—must present difficulties to the maiden mind.
"I made none, of course. I saw their solicitor next day and helped straighten out his papers for him. After which I departed.
"The only thing I took away was a bit of family history."
Such was his blunt way of putting it; yet I was not so dull as to miss a glimpse of what it meant, the sacrifice he had made in his bitter grievance; the true and knightly spirit he must have shown toward those three innocent gentlewomen, so lightly and whimsically touched in his narrative.