“Why not? If I can’t stand being asked, I have no business to keep the pictures about. Only—you see it was on just such a day as this that we lost her—fearfully hot, and ending in a big thunderstorm. Just like to-day—and whenever one comes, I go nearly mad. I can’t keep still, and all the time I’m listening and looking. I know it’s terribly foolish, but I can’t help it. Jack knows; he always understands, and he doesn’t go away from me these days unless he can’t get out of it.”
She stopped, and they felt her shivering.
“You see, we lost her in the scrub,” she said, dully.
“What!”
“She slipped away into the timber. She was only just three, and no little child has much chance in the Bush. How would they have? It’s so big and lonely, and cruel—oh, how I hate it! We hunted—we were hunting so soon! and all the district turned out, and we got the black trackers. But it was so hot—and then the big storm came up, and when it was over there were no tracks.”
She ceased, looking out of the window—so long silent that it seemed that she had forgotten them.
“So we never found her,” she said at length, quite calmly. “The Bush just took her and swallowed her up. We looked for weeks; long and long after all the other people had given it up—and they didn’t give up soon—Jack and I were hunting. All day long, and often all night too; calling and calling, as long as we thought that she could answer. And after that we hunted, only we did not call. And then, like a fool, I got brain fever, and while I was ill the big Bush fires came and burnt all that part of the scrub. It’s fifteen months ago, now.”
Jean was sobbing softly. But Norah could only cling to the hard, work-worn hand she held, very tightly.
“I often think how lucky mothers are who see their kiddies die,” the tired voice went on. “They know they helped them as much as was possible, and they have their graves to look after. I haven’t got anything—no grave, and no memories. Then I think of her lost and wandering in that horrible green prison—tired and frightened, and calling me; and I don’t know how much she suffered. Why, it scares men to get lost in the Bush—and my little Babs was only three. If I knew—if I knew that she died easily. It isn’t fair on a mother not to know, when she was such a baby thing. It isn’t fair.”
She had quite forgotten them now. It was as if she was talking to herself.