Over the roof-tops, through the moon haze streaming about the chimneys came a vision of the spaewife riding to Flodden after her man, riding from Flodden with the twin children wrapt in the Southrons' pennants. Marcella smiled a little. Louis frowned and fell in with her way of thinking. He suddenly felt flabby again. She felt taut as a steel spring.
The next day she wrote to her uncle for money, telling him the truth. It was not pleasant, but it had to be done. As soon as he saw that she was quite decided on going, and showed no signs whatever of falling in dead faints about the house, Louis entered into the spirit of the adventure. The lure of wild places got into his feet. As he wrote down a careful list of the things they were to take in their swags he looked up and actually suggested that she should wire to her uncle for the money so that they need not waste a day more. As for the prospect of work, that worried him not at all.
"You're always sure of a meal, anyway, if you're a sun-downer," he said. "And usually there's a job of sorts that'll keep you in grub. I say, old girl, we'll have to live on damper and billy-tea. It's the finest stuff going!"
He argued long with himself about how many blankets to take, how much tea and flour; he talked about the kind of boots best fitted for walking on unmade roads: one day when they went out together he discovered a patent "swaggie's friend"—a knife at one end of a composition handle and a fork at the other.
"It's a good thing to take a fork," he said reflectively, "you needn't eat with your fingers if you do. Fried sheep eaten with the fingers is rather messy at times."
They arranged for Mrs. King to collect and forward their letters from home as soon as they gave her an address; Marcella did not mention the chief reason for getting away from Sydney now. She had an instinctive feeling that Mrs. King would think she was raving mad to run away into the Bush with an unborn child.
"I hope you'll be happy, kid," she said, as they talked over plans. "But I doubt it, with him. You want more than I do—"
"I want everything," said Marcella, decidedly.
"I don't care so long's my back isn't too bad, and he scrubs down for me, and I can pay my way. I've got this house paying proper now, and the young chaps treat me as if I was their mother."
Marcella felt it was well that she was getting away from this atmosphere of dull acceptance of misery, of the worst in life. Anyway, she told herself, she would make a quick end to things with fire or knife before she got like that. Expediently keeping a drunken man quiet; expediently kissing him and fondling him for fear he would get drunk again to-morrow in spite or pique: content with a man who would scrub floors for a "livener"! It was better, far, to be homeless wanderers in the Bush where there was no need to be expedient for the sake of others, where they would have to stand up on their own intrinsic strength or fall; where they need not be respectable and where she could, if he were weak, alternately shake him up and soothe him without spectators. She would never, never, never allow herself to get into this cringing habit of being thankful for the small mercies of life when the big justices of life were there, so very big and shining.