Strong-minded Miss Methuen.
By E. W. Hornung.
HEN Canon Methuen was offered the least tempting of Australian bishoprics, strong hopes of a refusal were entertained by admirers of that robust and popular divine. His chances of a much more desirable preferment, if he would but wait for it, were, on the one hand, considerable; and on the other hand was his daughter Evelyn. Miss Methuen, an only unmarried child, was not the one to suffer transportation to the bush, while she was the one—the very one—to influence her father's decision. So said those who knew her, showing, as usual,
how little they did know her. For whatsoever was novel, romantic-sounding, or
unattractive to her friends, most mightily attracted Evelyn Methuen; and the Australian bishopric possessed all these merits. Her friends were right about the girl's influence in general with their beloved Canon; they did not over-rate the weight of her say in this particular matter; but beyond this their fond calculations proved sadly adrift. Evelyn never even paused to consider the thing, say in the light of transportation and live burial; she jumped at it; and on this occasion she did not jump back. Her father, who knew her, gave her time for the customary rebound. But this time she knew her mind, and on the fifth day the world learnt that the offer of this Colonial bishopric (of which it had never heard before) had been definitely accepted by the Reverend Canon Methuen.
Miss Methuen had done it, and apparently she knew no regrets. That repentance at leisure of which her father had disquieting visions, founded on past experience of her, did indeed become conspicuous, but only in a delightful manner. She was not, of course, without a proper sorrow at departure: the spires at sunset made her pensive; she duly cried when the wrench came, but performed that wrench strong-mindedly, notwithstanding. This was her accredited characteristic, strength of mind. It enabled her to tear herself away from a grand old town for which she had an unaffected veneration—where she spent most of her life, where her mother lay buried, where two sisters lived married: from some precious Extension Lectures, in the middle of the Browning Course from her own little room, made pretty with her own hands, at small cost, with fans and Aspinall and photographs in frames from those very young men who were foolish about her at this time; and almost as easily, six weeks later, from the more mature and less impossible admirers of the outward voyage. But—though, to be sure, she had never had absolute occasion for a refusal of marriage—she would have refused Lord Shields himself—the fellow-passenger—on the voyage out. Her heart was set upon the wilderness, and on that Bishop's Lodge there, her future home. And the only men for her now were the gallant bushrangers of some stories she made a point of reading before landing—their kind, at least, which of course must still infest the wilderness.
Before reading these romances—that is, until the prospect came of living in Australia—Miss Methuen's ideas of that continent had been very vague, very elementary, and rather funny. Her timely reading gave shape and background to her ideas, but left them funnier than ever; at all events, it did not prepare her for the place she was going to; it did not pretend to do so, that romantic literature; only Miss Methuen had chosen to assume that all Australian scenery would be in the same style. She was prepared, in short, for gullies, gum-trees, caves, ranges, kangaroos, opossums, claims, creeks, snakes in the grass, and chivalrous robbers on the high-road; but she was not prepared for a dead level of sandy desert, broken only by the river-timbers of a narrow, sluggish stream,
