“I don’t know,” Mrs. Archdale said, her cheek against Bab’s black curls. “I suppose I may be foolish—but it seems to me it was a bit because you cared so much. It—it seemed to hurt you, just like it did Jack and me.”
“And lots of people would never have noticed that the kid wasn’t really a picaninny,” Archdale put in. He put his great hand down and took Bab’s little bare foot in it, looking at it with eyes half misty, half proud. “Well, thank the Lord, you wasn’t born flat-footed, my kid!” he said—and Babs chuckled greatly.
She climbed down from her mother’s knee presently, and after falling over Jim and Wally, and treating each with impartial affection, toddled off round the corner of the house, on a voyage of discovery. It was curious to see how little she had forgotten, and what joy she found in the old familiar places. Archdale watched her go, and with the last flutter of the scanty blue frock heaved his long form up from the step, and followed slowly.
“It don’t seem safe to let her get out of one’s sight,” he said as he went. “I wouldn’t trust that black gin not to be hanging round in the timber.”
Mrs. Archdale followed them both with her eyes.
“Jack swears he’ll tell the police if old Black Lucy shows up,” she said. “But I don’t want him to. It wouldn’t do any good—and I’m too happy now to care. She had lost all her kiddies, poor thing—and, after all, she took care of my baby.”
“You would have been sorry for her if you’d seen her,” Norah said. “I know you would.”
“Well, after all, you can’t judge them by our standards,” said the squatter. “They are only overgrown children, and we haven’t left them so much that we can blame them altogether for seizing at a chance of happiness. Probably old Black Lucy’s family owned Billabong, and can’t quite see why I should hold it now; and certainly she would find it hard to understand why her babies should all die while other women keep their children.”
“To be broken-hearted with loneliness—and then to find a little child wandering alone in the scrub—oh, I don’t know that I blame her,” said Bab’s mother, wistfully. “You—you’d really think it was sent to you. I only lost one, and I thought my trouble was greater than I could bear. And she had lost three!”
“Yes—but you can’t quite look at it that way,” Mr. Linton said. “The blacks don’t regard a child’s life quite as we do.”