McKeith explained again. He had stopped a week, he said, at the last outpost of Leichardt's land civilisation. The telegraph master there lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard—there were four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an assault by the natives, and of rifles at work through gun-holes in the zinc tower.
Lady Bridget listened in silence. Now and then, she looked up at McKeith, and, though her eyes gave forth ominous red-brown sparks, they had in them something of the same unwilling fascination Joan Gildea had noticed in the eyes of Colin McKeith.
CHAPTER 10
In the drawing room, before the men came in, Bridget talked to Joan Gildea. They hadn't yet had, as Biddy reminded her, a regular outpouring. The outpouring it should be stated, was always mostly on Bridget's side.
'When did you start Socialism?' Mrs Gildea asked. 'That's something new, isn't it?'
Biddy gave one of her slow smiles in which lips, eyes, brows, what could be seen of them under her towzle of hair—all seemed to light up together.
'Why, I've always been a Socialist—in theory, you know. I've ALWAYS rebelled against the established order of things.'
'But latterly,' said Joan, 'I haven't heard anything about your doings—not since you wrote from Castle Gaverick after—after Mr Willoughby Maule's marriage?'
The light died out of Bridget's face. 'Ah, I'll tell you—Do you know, Rosamond saw them—the Willoughby Maules before we all left. She met them at Shoolbred's—buying furniture. Rosamond said SHE was dragging after him looking—a bundle—and cross and ill; and that he seemed intensely bored. Poor Will!'
There was silence, Bridget's thoughts seemed far away.