“It’s very tiresome.” The lady’s tone is peevish, and she fans herself languidly with a large fan lying by her side. “I can’t conceive what makes your father so irregular at mealtimes. Do bring me something cool to drink, Ruby, like a good child. This heat is intolerable.”
The “station” is built in a quadrangle, and across one corner of this quadrangle Ruby has to go ere she reaches the kitchen. If it is hot in the living room, it is ten times hotter here, where Jenny, a stout, buxom Scotchwoman of forty or thereabouts, who for love of her mistress has braved the loneliness of bush life, is busy amidst her pots and pans getting ready the Christmas dinner.
“Dad’s not come yet, Jenny,” Ruby says as she reaches down a tumbler and prepares the cooling drink which her step-mother has requested. “Do you think the pudding will keep all right?”
“It’ll be none the waur if he’ll no be that long,” Jenny returns, giving the fire a stir-up. “I’d no mind the cookin’ if it wasna’ for the heat; but the heat’s maist awfu’. It near sends a body gyte. To think o’ the Christmas they’ll be havin’ in Scotland too. It a’most gars me greet to think o’ it a’, Miss Ruby, and us awa’ in this queer-like place. It’s fine enough to say that fortunes can be made out here; but I wad rather dae wi’out the fortune an’ stay at hame.”
“But, you see, this is home now,” Ruby says, stirring up her decoction gravely. “That’s what papa always says when mamma gets cross. Mamma doesn’t like staying here, you see. She says Scotland never seemed so bonnie as when she’s away from it. And I’m Scotch, too.” Ruby gives her head rather a proud little toss. “But I call this home. But of course I don’t remember Scotland—hardly,” the little girl admits slowly.
The tumbler has received its final stir-up now, and Ruby carries it through the blazing sun of the courtyard to her step-mother, still lying on the sofa.
“I’ll fan you, mamma, while you’re drinking it, and that’ll make you feel cooler.”
“Thanks, dear; you are a good little girl,” her mother says, with an approving pat for the small hand wielding the fan.
Ruby’s heart gives a great leap of joy. It is so seldom that her step-mother speaks to her like this. Not that Mrs. Thorne is unkind to her husband’s little daughter; but, wrapped up in herself and her own ailments, she has but small sympathy to waste on others. Had she seen the gladness which shone out of the child’s eyes at the unaccustomed words of kindness, she might have spoken them oftener. Though she loves her husband as much as it is possible for such a nature to love any one, it has been a bitter trial to Dora Thorne, reared midst the refinements of a Scottish home, to leave friends and kindred for his sake, and to exchange the well-known, well-loved heather-hilled land of her birth for the hardships and uncertainties of the Australian bush. So perhaps it is no wonder that her time is so taken up in commiserating herself that she has but little leisure left to commiserate or sympathize with any one else.
Suddenly Ruby raises her head, a “listening” look on her face.