You say that if this divorce took place, Bridget's reputation would not suffer, and that she could marry again without a stain upon her character as they say of wrongfully accused prisoners who are discharged. But again—is that the question?
I know nothing of your present circumstances—health, outlook on life—anything. Bridget once hinted to me that you might have your own reasons for desiring your freedom. She would give no grounds for the suspicion that there is any other woman in your life. I do not think anything would make me credit such a thing and I put that notion entirely out of court. I do not know—as your letter was dated from Leichardt's Town—whether you still live at Moongarr. It is possible you may have sold the place. I hear of severe droughts in parts of Leichardt's Land, but have no information about the Leura district. Now that Sir Luke Tallant has exchanged to Hong Kong, Bridget hasn't any touch with Leichardt's Land, and I have very few correspondents there.
Write to me—not a stilted, legal kind of letter like the last. Tell me about yourself—your feelings, your conditions. We are old friends—friends long before Bridget came either into my life or yours. You can trust me. If you do not want me to repeat to Bridget anything you may tell me, I will faithfully observe your wishes. But I can't bear that you, whom I should have thought so well of—have felt so much about—should be making a mess of your life, and that I should not put out a hand to prevent it.
Always your friend,
JOAN GILDEA.
CHAPTER 11
It was a long time before Mrs Gildea received an answer to her letter. She had begun to despair of ever getting another line from Colin McKeith, when at last he wrote from Moongarr, six months later.
MY DEAR JOAN,
Your letter has made me think. I could not write before for reasons that you'll gather as you go along. I shall do as you ask and tell you everything as straightly and plainly as I can. I feel it is best that you should know exactly the sort of conditions I'm under and what a woman would have had to put up with if she had been with me—what she would have to put up with if she were going to be with me. Then you can judge whether or not I'm right in the decision I have come to as the result of my thinkings. You can tell my wife as much as you please—of the details, I mean. Perhaps, you had better soften them to her, for you know as well as I do—or better—that her impulsive, quixotic disposition might lead her into worse mistakes than it has done already. Of course, she'll have to know my decision. I am sure that if she allows her reason play, she will agree it is the only possible one.
I'm not going to talk about what happened before she went away, or about that evidence—or anything else in that immediate connection. I was mad, and I expect I believed a lot more than was true. I don't believe—I don't think I ever did really believe—what I suppose you would call 'the worst.' But that doesn't seem to me of such great matter. It's the spirit, not the letter that counts. The foundation must have been rotten, or there never would have been a question of believing one way or the other—because we should have UNDERSTOOD. Explanations would not have been needed between true mates. Only we were not true mates—that's the whole point. There was too great a radical difference between us. It might have been a deal better if she HAD gone off with that man.
But to come now to the practical part of the situation. You know enough about Australian ups and downs to realise that a cattle or sheep owner out West, may be potentially wealthy one season and on the fair road to beggary the next. It will be different when times change and we take to sinking artesian bores on the same principle as when Joseph stored up grain in the fat years in Egypt against the lean ones that were coming. That's what I meant to do and ought to have done at any cost. But—well I just didn't.