Fontenaye was always reasonably gay and truly hospitable; to the Australian division notably. Not unduly splendid, but comfortably and reasonably fine, on occasion. The nearest pack of hounds always met there on the first day of the season, when sometimes Lady Fontenaye, sometimes Mrs. Vernon Harcourt, appeared, superbly mounted and among the front rankers, after the throw off. Sheila was a frequent guest in her husband’s necessary absences at sea. Imogen was a little slow to accustom herself to be addressed and referred to as “your ladyship” and “her ladyship” at every turn, but took to it by degrees.
“Now, what became of Kate Lawless and her brother Dick?” asks an eager youthful patron of this veracious romance (not by any means wholly untrue, dear reader, though a little mixed up).
“And the roan pony mare ‘Wallaby’ that carried Kate ninety miles in a day to warn the police about Trevenna,” screams a still younger student. “You mustn’t leave her out.”
As might be expected, my dear boys, they came to a sad end. Dick and his sister disappeared after the fight at “the Ghost Camp.” They were rumoured to have been seen on the Georgina River, in the Gulf country. There were warrants out for both, yet they had not been arrested. But one day, word came to the police station at Monaro, that near a grave, at a deserted hut between Omeo and the Running Creek, something was wrong. The Sergeant, taking one trooper who drove a light waggonette, rode to the spot. “This is where Mrs. Trevenna’s child was buried, the little chap that was drowned,” said the trooper, “under that swamp oak. I was stationed here then and went over. She was wild, poor thing! I wonder if that’s her lying across the grave.”
It was even so. A haggard woman, poorly dressed, showing signs of privation and far travel, lay face downward on the little mound. “Lift her up, Jackson!” said the Sergeant; “poor thing! I’d hardly have known her. She came here to shoot herself, look about for the revolver. Just on the temple, what a small hole it made! Shot the mare too! best thing for both of ’em, I expect. So that’s the end of Kate Lawless! Who’d have thought it, when that flash crowd was at Ballarat! Handsome girl she was then, full of life and spirits too!”
“She never did no good after the boy was drowned,” said the trooper.
“No! nor before, either. But it wasn’t all her fault. Let’s lift her into the trap. She don’t weigh much. There’ll be the inquest, and she’ll have Christian burial. They can’t prevent that in this country. And she’s suffered enough to make a dozen women shoot themselves, or men either.”
So the dead woman came into the little township, and after the coroner’s jury had brought in their verdict that the deceased had died by her own hand, but that there was no evidence to show her state of mind at the time, poor Kate Trevenna (or Lawless) was buried among more or less respectable people.
There was a slight difference of opinion as to the identification of the woman’s corpse, but none whatever as to that of the mare, among the horse-loving bystanders around the grave, which was several times visited during the following days. “That’s old Wallaby, safe enough,” deposed one grizzled stockrider. “Reg’lar mountain mare, skip over them rocks like a billy-goat; couldn’t throw her down no ways. Ain’t she dog-poor, too? Kate and she’s had hard times lately. What say, boys, s’pose we bury her? the ground’s middlin’ soft, and if she don’t ought to be buried decent, no one does.”
The idea caught on, and a pick and spade contingent driving out next day, a grave was dug and a stone put up, on which was roughly chiselled—