‘He was a rough bushman,’ he confessed, ‘not in the habit of hiding his feelings. On such a subject as this he could not bear the agony of anxiety or delay. He must know his fate, even if the doom of banishment, of just anger at his imprudence, went forth against him. He expected nothing else. But if, before condemning him to go back to his far-off home (little she knew of its peculiar characteristics) a lonely, despairing man, she would only give consideration to his claims, rashly but respectfully urged, she might deign to accept a manly heart, the devotion of a life that henceforth, in good or had fortune, was hers, and hers only.’
Mr. Hardy Baldacre had an imposing, stalwart figure, by no means unfashionably attired, and Nature, while unsolicitous about his moral endowments, had gifted him with a handsome face. If not in the bloom of youth, he had not passed by a day the matured vigour of early manhood. As he bent his dark eyes upon Antonia and poured forth his not entirely original address, but which, heard in the tones of a pleading flesh-and-blood lover, sounded a deal better than it reads, Antonia felt a species of mesmeric attraction to the fatal and irrevocable ‘yes,’ which should open a new phase of life to her and obliterate the maddening, hopeless, endless past. For one moment, for one only, the fate of Antonia Frankston wavered on the dread eternal balance. She fluttered, birdlike, under the fascination of his serpentine gaze. Her words of regret and courteous dismissal refused to find utterance. At length she said, ‘I must have time to consider your flattering but quite unexpected offer. You will, I am sure, not press for an immediate answer. I will see you again. Meanwhile let me tell you that I value your good opinion, and shall always recall with pleasure your very kind intention of to-day.’
But, with that still hour of evening meditation in which Antonia was wont to indulge before retiring, came calmer, humbler, more tranquillising thoughts. As she sat at her chamber window, looking out over the wide waters of the bay, in which a crescent moon caused the endless bright expanse of tremulous silver, the frowning headlands, the garden slopes, to be all clearly, delicately visible,—as she heard the rhythmical, solemn cadence of the deep-toned eternal surge,—she recalled the moon-lighted eves, the soul-to-soul communing, of ‘that lost time.’
A strong reactionary feeling occupied her heart. It seemed as if, like the rushing of the tide, the stormy sway of the ocean she loved so well, her heart had surged in rising tempest and with passion’s flow, to ebb with yet fuller retrogression. Surely such were the words of this murmuring sea-song on the white midnight strand, which calmed, as with a magic anodyne, her restless, rebellious mood.
‘I have been wayward and wicked,’ she half sighed to herself, ‘false to my better self, to the teaching of a life, unmindful of my duty to my father, who loves me better than life, of my duty to One above, who has shielded and cherished me, all undeserving as I am, up to this hour. I will repent of my sin. I will abase myself, and by prayer and penitence seek strength where alone it can be found.’
It was long ere Antonia Frankston sought her couch; but she slept for the first time that night, since a serpent trail had passed over the Eden flowers of her trusting love, with an untroubled slumber and a resolved purpose.
Pale, but changed in voice and mien, was she when she joined her father at breakfast.
‘I see my little girl’s own face again,’ said Paul, as he embraced her, with tenderest solicitude in every line of his weather-beaten countenance. ‘I thought I had lost her. She must not be hasty; she was never so before. All may come right in the end.’
‘I have been a very naughty girl,’ said she, with a quiet sob, ‘ungrateful, too, and wicked. I have come to my senses again. It must have been the dreadful drought, I think, which is going to be the ruin of us all, body and mind. Fancy losing one’s daughter, as well as one’s money, because of a dry season!’
This small pleasantry did not excite Paul’s risible muscles much, but he was more pleased with it than with a volume of epigrams. It showed that experienced mariner, accustomed to slightest indications of wind and wave, that a change of weather had set in. His soul rejoiced as he took his daughter in his arms and exclaimed, ‘My darling, my darling, your mother is with the angels, but she watches over you still. Think of her when your old father is too far off or too dull to advise you. If she had lived——’ But here there were tears in the old man’s eyes, and the rugged features worked in such wise as to fashion a mask upon which no living man had ever gazed. There was a long confession. Once more every thought of Antonia Frankston’s heart lay unfolded before her parent.