Irralie's Bushranger/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
P. S.
At the age of sixty-eight, the late Lord Fullarton, who had been no traveller in his youth, set out to winter in Australia against all advice; and returned to tell of his experiences for another decade.
He landed in Melbourne one October, and sailed from Sydney in the following March, but saw no other cities; spending the whole of his time (with the exception of short visits to such near neighbors as, for example, the Quandong people) upon his son's Riverina station of Arran Downs. And he found Greville (who was on the tug to meet him in Hobson's Bay) rather stout, very brown, bearded to the chest, but most altered by an extraordinary access of energy and enthusiasm; and very full indeed of the merits and character of his own son, then six months old.
Grandchildren were no novelty to Lord Fullarton, whose saintliest son was not a celibate; and the nature of the wife, whom Greville had picked up in the bush, provoked a more apprehensive curiosity than that of the child. This lasted until the exact moment when Irralie was seen rushing from the veranda with both hands outstretched, unable to say a word, but with her eyes divinely glistening with love and welcome. And of those same orbs Lord Fullarton talked so freely, when he did get home, that there were small jealousies in the family; too small to speak about, however, and indulged in only by the husbands of the other wives, not the wives themselves.
"Never saw such eyes in my life!" said he. "The moment I looked in them my mind was at rest; and I wasn't mistaken. She is a girl with a true religious feeling; uncultivated, no doubt, but deep, and sincere, and strong. The only pity is that they haven't a church within a hundred miles of them. But I was glad to find that Greville was keeping up the excellent custom of a Sunday evening service, started by that good man, Irralie's father—who is, without a doubt, one of the Villierses, though it had never occurred to him till I made the welcome discovery. He is now managing an even larger station for the same company which used to own Arran Downs; we paid them a visit, and they keep up the evening service; but, to my horror, they neither stood to praise nor knelt to pray; and when we turned to the east they thought something was the matter. Irralie was so tractable in such things. We had two services every Sunday while I was there, and early celebration once a month. I only wish they could continue it! I wanted to send them out a chaplain; some young fellow with weak lungs might be very glad, and would tutor the boy in due course. It is certainly the grandest climate in the world; hot, but deliciously dry, and the night-air exactly like champagne!"
One thought Lord Fullarton had a way of expressing aloud, and quite apart from any context, especially in his last illness. "And so fond of her husband!" he would end long silences by exclaiming. "I never saw anything like it in my life!"
"You mean Irralie, of course?"
"Well, my dear, I did; and you'll understand it when they come over. I was thinking of the day after I got there. They had been telling me the rights of that extraordinary affair which got into the papers, you remember, immediately after Greville's arrival. They don't know yet who the wretched man really was; but he's in Darlinghurst Gaol, at Sydney, for the term of his life; and I felt I should like to visit him when I was there, but the authorities dissuaded me. Well, they had shown me the pianos he played on, and Greville had explained (what I never could quite understand) why it was he didn't himself say what had happened to him when he first arrived. The whole affair hinged on that, if you remember; but I quite understood when he told me what was the general attitude toward young fellows from home, or 'new chums,' as they call them in the bush. They are always ready to make fools of them, as Greville found out on his way up-country; and he felt his life wouldn't be worth living there if he arrived upon the scene with such an ignominious tale. So he kept it to himself. And the very next day after my arrival, Irralie took me out in a buggy and showed me just where everything happened.
"She showed me the clump of trees and the exact spot where she and Greville first met, and the gate where she escaped from the bushranger, and the place in the fence where the wretched man recaptured her. On the farther side of that same paddock (as they call it) is the Seven-mile hut where the tables were eventually turned. But we didn't go quite as far on that occasion; and when we got back, Irralie showed me a most impressive thing—a clearing in a pine plantation, and the grave of a poor young fellow who was shot by another outlaw some years before. His family had actually had a broken column sent up from Melbourne and erected to his memory in that desolate spot. I was only sorry it was not a cross.
"But it was Greville who took me into the iron-store in which they shut him up, and from which Irralie helped him to escape. He showed me the sheet of corrugated iron she unfastened to get him out. They keep it in their room to this day."
Lord Fullarton had made friends with many of the men, who, it is to be feared, did not always receive his ministrations in the spirit his simple mind supposed. He described his son, however, very justly, as being "particularly fortunate in his overseer; an earnest-minded young man with whom I had many conversations on spiritual matters. He has been on the station for years, and is not likely to leave (I should say), judging by his really beautiful devotion to Greville and Irralie alike, to say nothing of the boy." And another character who impressed him was "a decent, rugged soul, who does all the odd jobs about the homestead, and is Irralie's factotum; unluckily, the poor fellow is quite deaf, but I both spoke and read into his ear-trumpet, and he faithfully promised to be confirmed."
The great wish of his last months was to live long enough to see his son and Irralie when they brought the boy over to send him to his first school. And this wish crystallized in the desire to look once more in Irralie's eyes.
"They are like her own native skies," said the late lord, simply. "I never saw them wet, nor yet cloudy, but twice while I was there. The first time was when I arrived, and the second when I bade her good-by."
But there came a third.
THE END.