I often wondered what Nan thought of it all, and if things startled her as much as they sometimes did me. Perhaps it was a good thing for me, that I had the new work and the queer experiences and the “copy” to think of; they helped me to reconcile myself to my disappointment, though I never saw Nan and Nick without a nasty pain at my heart, and at first I rather avoided seeing them at all.
I cannot think why Nick didn’t marry Nan straight off—why he hadn’t married her in Sydney, when she arrived, and brought her to Eungella as his wife.
He was rich enough. He had a good claim, and was turning out gold hand over hand. I believe that was what he wanted and intended, but Nan had some romantic notion that she wasn’t educated enough to be his equal, and that it would be right of her to give him a little time before the knot was irrevocably tied, so that he might be quite certain of his own mind.
She was a noble creature, and I am not sure that she wasn’t right. And she wouldn’t take any more money from Nick, but insisted on working for herself. She talked it over with the doctor’s wife, and they got her nursing jobs to do, and she was called there, as she had been called in the hospital, she said, “Sister Nan.”
There was sickness enough at Eungella—accidents in the mines, and touches of fever and sunstroke cases as the great heat came on. It was early in November when we got to Eungella, and hot indeed then. But that heat was nothing to what came later.
Sometimes on the blazing December days, when the sun would beat on the zinc roofs, and the glare be reflected from the white stones and the mullock heaps, and when there was no shade to be got under the straight lank gum-trees, and the miners, red and grimy and perspiring, would loaf about the street, and the bars would be filled with the sound of swearing, I used to fancy that, if you wanted to find an earthly similitude of Hades, you couldn’t go to a more likely place than Eungella Diggings.
There were drink cases, too—plenty of them, only Nick drew the line there. Though he humoured Nan’s pride and independent spirit, he watched her as carefully as Dummy, the dog, had done in days gone by.
It was to last only a few months—this probation and testing of each other.
“Miners, red and grimy and perspiring, would loaf about the street.” (Page [174])