A Little Bush Maid

by Mary Grant Bruce

There was a huge front garden, not at all a proper kind of garden, but a great stretch of smooth buffalo grass, dotted with all kinds of trees, amongst which flower beds cropped up in most unexpected and unlikely places, just as if some giant had flung them out on the grass like a handful of pebbles that scattered as they flew. They were always trim and tidy, and the gardener, Hogg, was terribly strict, and woe betide the author of any small footmarks that he found on one of the freshly raked surfaces. Nothing annoyed him more than the odd bulbs that used to come up in the midst of his precious buffalo grass; impertinent crocuses and daffodils and hyacinths, that certainly had no right there. “Blest if I know how they ever gets there!” Hogg would say, scratching his head. Whereat Norah was wont to retire behind a pyramid tree for purposes of mirth.

Hogg’s sworn foe was Lee Wing, the Chinese gardener, who reigned supreme in the orchard and the kingdom of vegetables—not quite the same thing as the vegetable kingdom, by the way! Lee Wing was very fat, his broad, yellow face generally wearing a cheerful grin—unless he happened to catch sight of Hogg. His long pigtail was always concealed under his flapping straw hat. Once Jim, who was Norah’s big brother, had found him asleep in his hut with the pigtail drooping over the edge of the bunk. Jim thought the opportunity too good to lose and, with such deftness that the Celestial never stirred, he tied the end of the pigtail to the back of a chair—with rather startling results when Lee Wing awoke with a sudden sense of being late, and made a spring from the bunk. The chair of course followed him, and the loud yell of fear and pain raised by the victim brought half the homestead to the scene of the catastrophe. Jim was the only one who did not wait for developments. He found business at the lagoon.

The queerest part of it was that Lee Wing firmly believed Hogg to be the author of his woe. Nothing moved him from this view, not even when Jim, finding how matters stood, owned up like a man. “You allee same goo’ boy,” said the pigtailed one, proffering him a succulent raw turnip. “Me know. You tellee fine large crammee. Hogg, he tellee crammee, too. So dly up!” And Jim, finding expostulation useless, “dried up” accordingly and ate the turnip, which was better than the leek.

To the right of the homestead at Billabong a clump of box trees sheltered the stables that were the unspoken pride of Mr. Linton’s heart.

Before his time the stables had been a conglomerate mass, bark-roofed, slab-sided, falling to decay; added to as each successive owner had thought fit, with a final mixture of old and new that was neither convenient nor beautiful. Mr. Linton had apologised to his horses during his first week of occupancy and, in the second, turning them out to grass with less apology, had pulled down the rickety old sheds, replacing them with a compact and handsome building of red brick, with room for half a dozen buggies, men’s quarters, harness and feed rooms, many loose boxes and a loft where a ball could have been held—and where, indeed, many a one was held, when all the young farmers and stockmen and shearers from far and near brought each his lass and tripped it from early night to early dawn, to the strains of old Andy Ferguson’s fiddle and young Dave Boone’s concertina. Norah had been allowed to look on at one or two of these gatherings. She thought them the height of human bliss, and was only sorry that sheer inability to dance prevented her from “taking the floor” with Mick Shanahan, the horse breaker, who had paid her the compliment of asking her first. It was a great compliment, too, Norah felt, seeing what a man of agility and splendid accomplishments was Mick—and that she was only nine at the time.

There was one loose box which was Norah’s very own property, and without her permission no horse was ever put in it except its rightful occupant—Bobs, whose name was proudly displayed over the door in Jim’s best carving.

Bobs had always belonged to Norah, He had been given to her as a foal, when Norah used to ride a round little black sheltie, as easy to fall off as to mount. He was a beauty even then, Norah thought; and her father had looked approvingly at the long-legged baby, with his fine, well-bred head. “You will have something worth riding when that fellow is fit to break in, my girlie,” he had said, and his prophecy had been amply fulfilled. Mick Shanahan said he’d never put a leg over a finer pony. Norah knew there never had been a finer anywhere. He was a big pony, very dark bay in colour, and “as handsome as paint,” and with the kindest disposition; full of life and “go,” but without the smallest particle of vice. It was an even question which loved the other best, Bobs or Norah. No one ever rode him except his little mistress. The pair were hard to beat—so the men said.

To Norah the stables were the heart of Billabong. The house was all very well—of course she loved it; and she loved her own little room, with its red carpet and dainty white furniture, and the two long windows that looked out over the green plain. That was all right; so were the garden and the big orchard, especially in summer time! The only part that was not “all right” was the drawing-room—an apartment of gloomy, seldom-used splendour that Norah hated with her whole heart.

But the stables were an abiding refuge. She was never dull there. Apart from the never-failing welcome in Bobs’ loose box, there was the dim, fragrant loft, where the sunbeams only managed to send dusty rays of light across the gloom. Here Norah used to lie on the sweet hay and think tremendous thoughts; here also she laid deep plans for catching rats—and caught scores in traps of her own devising. Norah hated rats, but nothing could induce her to wage war against the mice. “Poor little chaps!” she said; “they’re so little—and—and soft!” And she was quite saddened if by chance she found a stray mouse in any of her shrewdly-designed traps for the benefit of the larger game which infested the stables and had even the hardihood to annoy Bobs!

Norah had never known her mother. She was only a tiny baby when that gay little mother died—a sudden, terrible blow, that changed her father in a night from a young man to an old one. It was nearly twelve years ago, now, but no one ever dared to speak to David Linton of his wife. Sometimes Norah used to ask Jim about mother—for Jim was fifteen, and could remember just a little; but his memories were so vague and misty that his information was unsatisfactory. And, after all, Norah did not trouble much. She had always been so happy that she could not imagine that to have had a mother would have made any particular difference to her happiness. You see, she did not know.