‘Oh, what a joy that will be!’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands—which, as she held the whip in one of them, caused the pony mare to make a rush. For a hundred yards or so the pony refused to be stopped, but there were neither trees nor stumps on the road, so the hotel was safely reached. The mail letters had just come in, and from these it was learned that the children were well and matters generally all that could be wished. Things being in this blissful and satisfactory state, Mr. Banneret and his wife quitted Pilot Mount, the latter in a very different state of mind from that in which she had reached it. As for her stay at the field—she thought she should look back to it (after, of course, her husband’s recovery was assured) as really a most interesting and pleasant experience. Everything was so fresh and new, even to her who had been so many years a resident on goldfields. The people were, many of them, lately from Britain, America, or the Continent of Europe: all sorts of young men unattached, who had never seen Australia before, many of them of good, even aristocratic families, not occupied in any profession, eager and anxious to have their share of the treasure which Dame Nature was distributing with lavish hand; men from old colonial families, who brought their wives with them, or sent for them after they had secured an investment likely to be permanent. These were [116] ]the most solid and influential components of the hastily gathered and yet firmly welded framework of society.

They decided who among the women were to be ‘called on’—or to be left out of the visiting circle. They acquired all necessary information on that head, inspected credentials, advised young men for their good—and generally constituted the higher public opinion which governed, with more or less authority, the manners and morals of their little state. They gave ‘teas’ at the Polo Club and race meetings, inviting desirable persons and excluding such as had given social offence. No hard and fast rule was openly promulgated, but in an unobtrusive way the combined influence made itself felt, and those who were hardy enough to withstand it found in the long run that they had taken up a wrong position.

Of course, among the heterogeneous community there were individuals and groups whose antecedents were shrouded in mystery.

All that was known of them or could be divined about their former professions or occupations, adventures, characters, or relations was that they had arrived by the mail boat of a certain date, and had been working in this alluvial claim or that reef—for the last year. They were certainly ‘human warriors,’ as Dickens’s taxidermist was wont to express it. Mr. and Mrs. Winstanley, admittedly good-looking, well-mannered, presentable—were suspected of not being legally married.

There was no proof, either one way or the [117] ]other—if the rumour was not well founded, injustice was done to an innocent woman. If otherwise, those families who had permitted intercourse with wives and daughters repented in sackcloth and ashes when the truth came out. For it must not for one moment be assumed that the colonial social canons are one whit less rigid on such subjects than in the mother-land. If anything, Mrs. Grundy is a potentate whose power is greater and whose punishments are more terrible than in the ancestral home.

Mrs. Banneret had necessarily been drawn into closer association with Nurse Lilburne than with any other assistant in the hospital. She it was who had tended her husband through the most serious stages—the most dangerous crisis in the course of his deadly seizure. With his life actually trembling in the balance, she it was who had bathed the burning brow, had measured so carefully and administered so punctually the healing draught; had been in very truth the ministering angel of the poet’s fancy. No other woman, save and excepting his own wife, could have been so capable, so delicately deft, so conscientious—so devoted, even to the danger of her own health. She had brought him through the valley of the shadow, Dr. Horton said, and he did not believe another woman in Australia—let alone in Pilot Mount—would have done it. It may be imagined what gratitude was felt by Mrs. Banneret when she saw her husband by her side, fully recovered and looking, except for a certain pallor, which some people thought became him, better than ever. Now [118] ]that they were able to drive about together—which the doctor had strongly recommended, as a daily recreation, favourable to perfect recovery—various novelties and unexpected discoveries in their new world of Arabian Nights treasure-land displayed themselves before her. Restricted to the routine of domesticity hitherto—an exacting though not unwelcome round of duties—her imagination, always daring and impatient of control, luxuriated in excursions around and amidst ‘the burghers of this desert city.’ What mysteries lay hidden in the past lives of the women, the men, who daily worked or strolled en flâneur on the highways and byways!

That quietly dressed, not quite elderly, not quite young visitor from the old country, who was he? He had a military air, and the stamp which ‘formerly in the army’ invariably impresses on the individual so privileged. The ‘horsey man,’ the abscondu, the aristocratic tourist, on for a hasty inspection, with a view to chance a thousand or two on the Big Bonanza, or the Golden Horn,—they were there. It might turn up trumps—like Great Wolder, which had paid a million and a half in dividends and was going strong still. Others again, who played deeply, and were chiefly undesirable.

As the field increased in population and prestige, the stream of holiday or home-going capitalists made Perth their headquarters. Once there, the ‘Weld,’ an exclusive and fashionable club, naturally attracted notice, and afforded a more or less luxurious home for those who desired [119] ]to enjoy their sojourn by the waters of the Swan River, and to feel the ocean breezes on a sun-tanned cheek. As an honorary or permanent member, the candidate required to be proposed and seconded by leading members of the club, who were held responsible for his conduct and character, so that it may be imagined that both were subjected to close supervision. It was not, therefore, probable that the black sheep of other lands, much less of colonial families, would find pasture, even in that Terra Incognita, a West Australian goldfield.

[120]
]CHAPTER V

There was still, however, one haunting mystery, one problem unsolved, in the solution of which Mrs. Banneret felt more interest than in all the other uncertainties and sensational historiettes put together. Who and what was Mrs. Lilburne? Handsome, strikingly so, indeed—refined—cultured—aristocratic au bout des ongles; what strange movement of the hour hand of fate had brought her to the often distasteful work, the dire climatic hardships of a hospital nurse on a West Australian goldfield? Who could doubt her stainless purity who gazed on the banded hair—the calm, brave countenance, equally free from doubt or fear—the sweet, sad eyes which so rarely gave token of the spirit-light which illumined them, at rarest moments, ‘like melancholy stars,’ of which Mrs. Banneret said they always reminded her. Had she lost, by death, by desertion, by treachery, her soul’s idol, to whom she had been vowed in happy, radiant girlhood’s day? What a ‘phantom of delight’ must she then have appeared to her social world—at that entrancing age, when ‘standing with reluctant feet, where [121] ]the brook and river meet,’ she had so fully realised the poet’s dream!—the dream of all poets that ever strove to paint the delicious embodiment of soul and sense, the flower season of happy, innocent, loveliest girlhood.