“Fill your pipe, dad, before we start.”
“Fill it for me, Miss,” and Fraser threw a piece of tobacco upon the table, together with his pocket-knife.
“And yours too, Mr Gerrard. I am a great hand at cutting up tobacco; I wish I were a man, and could smoke it. Oh, Mr Gerrard, I'm 'all of a quiver' to know that I shall see your little Mary.”
“So am I, 'quite a quivering,” and then as Gerrard looked at her beautiful face, he remembered his own scarred features, and something between a sigh and a curse came from his lips.
CHAPTER XIX
As Mrs Westonley had told Gerrard in her letter that she and Mary would not leave Marumbah for quite two months and proceed direct to Somerset, where she hoped he would meet them, he decided to lose no more time at Port Denison; and so a week after the abandonment of Fraser's Gully, he and his friends found themselves on board a steamer bound to the most northern port of the colony, just then coming into prominence as the rendezvous of the pearling fleet, although Thursday Island was also much favoured.
Before leaving Port Denison, he had written to his sister, and told her that he would meet her on her arrival at Somerset. “Jim is off his head with delight,” he added; “in fact we both are, at the prospect of seeing you and Mary so soon. In one way I am glad that it will be barely three months before you get to Ocho Rios, for I want to get a new house put up; the present one isn't of much account”—this was his modified way of saying that there was no house there at all, it having been reduced to ashes, but he did not wish her to have the faintest inkling of any of his misfortunes, for fear that she would then refuse to add to his troubles and expenses by becoming a charge upon him. “And I have already bought some decent furniture, which I will take round with me in one of the pearlers. I do hope you will like the place, but you will look upon it at its very worst, for there have been heavy bush fires all about the station, which have played the deuce with the country for hundred of miles about. But the annual rains will begin to fall in four months, and then you will see it at its best. I am also going to make a garden, and plant no end of vegetables and flowers and things. There is a lovely little spot on one of the creeks; and Jim and I have been going over a thumping big box of seeds which I bought yesterday. You can consider that garden as made, with rock-melons and watermelons, and 'punkens' and other fruit growing in it galore.”
When Elizabeth Westonley read the letter she smiled—the first time almost since her husband's death. “How nice of your uncle, is it not, Mary? I should miss a garden dreadfully, and it is very thoughtful of him when he has so much work to do with his cattle. And see, he has sent me a draft for one hundred pounds for our expenses up to Somerset.”
“Are we very, very, poor now, Aunt?”