Best Australian Short Stories (8 page)

She was the individual who eloped that morning, and she had come back to report that marriage had been a failure. The bride-groom had taken her home, and had straightway gone out with some old-time bachelor friends, and consequently she had packed her carpet-bag and her hat-box, and run for the old public-house in a repentant mood. As there was evidently nothing else to be done her male parent opened the door and threw the carpet-bag and the hat-box into the passage. Also, he admonished his daughter severely on the stairs, and, judging from sundry sounds that reached me, that young lady went to bed in a repentant mood.

Then I went to bed also, and lay down with the clothes rolled up in a hard ball on my chest, and fell asleep till the steamer at the wharf commenced to blow its whistle with a melancholy cadence that broke off into shrieks and variations at intervals, and filled the town with a solemn note of woe. At the same moment a rooster eight feet high began to offer a few remarks in the back-yard, and a man went by shoving a barrow with an ungreased wheel. I sat up in bed, and consigned the rooster, and the wheel-barrow, and the distracted mother in the next room, and the broken-hearted daughter with the carpet-bag to all the infernal gods, and then I began to smoke. It was rather difficult work, owing to the extreme steepness of the bed, and I had to hold my head down with both feet in order to preserve my equilibrium, but I got on pretty well for a while, and then—

Evidently the old woman was awake, and mourning for her absent child, and evidently also the stern male parent was consoling her with the information that the joy and sunshine of their domestic hearth had rushed home through the dust with her clothes in both hands, and was now sleeping in a contrite mood in the back room. There was a smothered scream to begin with, and I could hear the fond mother get out of bed with a “woosh!” and scuttle on two ponderous feet down a passage, and into the apartment on the other side of mine. Then I recognized that a crisis was at hand, and I grasped the floor with both hands, for it was certain that this explosive ancestor would either weep the roof off with tears of joy, or else would spank her prodigal daughter there and then, and in either case I expected the house to totter on its foundations. As it happened, she did both, but it only accelerated the row in a very small degree, and I felt comparatively resigned—on the floor. There was a reconciliation first of all, and the young wife rested her tired head on her parent’s capacious bosom and forgot her woes—the bosom was hollow, and the head seemed to be uncommonly hard, and I could hear the concussion as they came together. And when the first pathos of the scene was over the mother evidently remembered her off spring’s shortcomings, and hit her on both ears with a dishcloth or some similar weapon. But presently they became reconciled again and went to sleep in each other’s arms, and the old prosaic father slept placidly in the other room, and there was a great calm and oblivion that lasted till after daybreak. For a time I sat and looked at the lights and shadows which the moon described on the mountains beyond the river, but after a while the mountains grew hazy and indistinct, and the shadows commenced to dance a fantastic waltz before my eyes, and next I put the wrong end of my pipe in my mouth, and came back to consciousness just as I swallowed half a pint of ashes. I coughed up most of the consignment, and ate the rest, and then I retired once more, with my head at the lower end of the bed and my feet up in the air, and slept a dreamless sleep.

When I awoke at last someone was ringing a breakfast-bell at the keyhole, and there was over a quart of water in my upper ear. A tropical thunderstorm was raging outside, and a cooling stream of rain descended through the roof just above my head, while another cataract came down in a refreshing manner on my feet. Also the room was nearly afloat, so I dressed hurriedly in the passage. A wild, confused argument was in progress downstairs, for the bridegroom of yesterday had come along at an early hour to demand his wife, and was vociferating in. the bar. The storm, it appeared, had aroused him from a deep slumber at the back door of his deserted home, and inquiries in various directions elicited the information that the angel of his fireless hearth had been seen in a state of distraction outside her father’s public-house in the early hours of the morning. He demanded her immediate return, but the young lady remained in bed and sent down a message that for the future they must look upon each other as strangers, and the landlord sat on a keg in a corner and leaned his harassed head against the wall, and the landlady stood with a stony glare behind the bar, and professed to regard the visitor as a perfect stranger who had dropped in by accident in search of refreshment. This was the situation at nine o’clock, but at half-past nine the bride came downstairs and threw herself into her husband’s arms, and at a quarter to ten the husband was drinking affably along with his father-in-law, and at ten o’clock the landlady cast off both him and his wife in a tragic manner, and renounced them for ever. Viewed by daylight I discovered that the heroine was an exceedingly long girl of about seventeen, with a flame-coloured head and a nervous wink in the left eye.

When they were gone the bereaved mother proceeded, with an air of Roman fortitude, to count the horn-handled two-pronged forks and other portable articles. Whether they were all there or not I never heard.

My bill was twenty-five shillings.

THE old man gathered in his contemplation from elsewhere, and fixed his pink-edged eyes on mine. I coughed and then began: “Didn’t old Piety work the kilns above here? What sort of lime did he burn?” And I offered the old fellow my flask.

He picked up a battered jam-tin and gazed thoughtfully into it. Then he poked his finger in. Lastly, he emptied all my whisky into it, and drank it swiftly and suspiciously. “Eh?” he said. Then something began to work in the old man; his reserve seemed to crack and come to pieces; he burst-up slowly, as it were, and crumbled into speech. “What should you know about old Piety?” he asked, uneasily, in a sorrowful, whining tone. “Oh, he could burn lime,” he went on, “leastways, he thought he could. But there was as much difference between his kilns and mine as between oysters and cheese. Well! Well! You knowed him?” he whispered, stroking the bricks in the chimney behind him, thoughtfully.

“No” I replied, “only heard of him.”

“And heard wrong,” said the old man simply. “Now I’ll tell you the facks.” Then he went off in a low, quavering whine: “Piety owned these here kilns, an’ Piety burnt lime. Leastways, he said he did, but it was me as done it But when Piety put his finger in, the kiln was all stone. He worrited here, he worrited there, muddling and mulling every blessed kiln till he had me nigh crazed, and my fingers raw picking out stone. Jus’ give me the contrack,’ I’d say—‘the contrack to burn lime at so much a bushel.’ ‘No you don’t,’ says he. An’ that’s all I ever got out of him: ‘No, you don’t! Not in my day.’ And then he went and killed the kangaroo.” “The kangaroo?” I asked. “What kangaroo?”

“Bill’s kangaroo,” he replied, querulously. “Bill had a pet kangaroo—Bill, the old man’s grandson, as owns these here kilns now. They didn’t get on, the old man and Bill, and lived in different huts. Bill was an orphan. Well, the kiln was about half-f and burning—old Piety, he was great at half-kilns—when the kangaroo hopped on to the kiln bank and ate old Piety’s dinner, bread-and-butter and what not. Oho! he
was
wild when he found out. Then the beast came and rooted at him with its fore-paws, playing like. With that, he kicks it; but for’, the beast thought he was playing with it, so it just turns back upon him, a-twiddling its paws. Then he goes for it real spiteful, and give it a tremendous kick that sends it flying, right into the burning kiln.”

The old man paused here and stared into space, mumbling. Then he went on, monotonously: “Lad! You would have larfed to see that kangaroo jump. But, lor’! there’s no jumping out of a kiln. D’ye see the p’int?—But Bill he didn’t larf when he finds it all out. There was the last of the kangaroo smoking in the blue flame a-top of the kiln. ‘Oh, you old devil!’ he says to Piety; ‘it would serve you right to go through the kiln yourself!’ Then he cleared right away, and wouldn’t speak to nobody. But it was the childer as did it.” “Did what?” I asked.

“Well, it was like this,” he explained. “My fingers was red raw with the half-burnt stone, and I was a-tying them up with rags, and abusing of old Piety. ‘Couldn’t burn charcoal, let alone lime!’ I says. And the childer they took it round to Piety hisself. Well! the kiln was emptied, and we was going to start another, when he comes toddling down. ‘You old weather-beaten windbag, you!’ he cries. ‘It’s you that knows what spoils the kilns!’ he says; ‘just you clear out. I’ll put, the lime in myself this time.’ ‘And welcome,’ says I, ‘if you draw it yourself,’ says I.

“‘None of your cheek!’ he says, coming at me with the sieve, and so I clears away, larfing to myself at the mess he’d make of it, and waiting for his tantrum to blow over. Well, I camps here in the hut, day by day, and hears them bumbling away up the valley, putting in the kiln and lighting it. Then when it’s time to draw it, I goes up to the kiln, but no Piety.

“‘He’s not turned up,’ says the quarryman.

“‘And not likely,’ says I, ‘with a ki’ful o’ stone. I’d be ashamed to look a man in the face,’ I says. So I sets to work and draws the kiln as usual. But no Piety. And what’s more, he wasn’t about his hut, nor nowheres. Then I begins to think and think, and I draws that kiln slow and steady. But at last I draws a sort of bit o’ whitestick—lime like the rest. I has a good look at it, and then says to myself, says I—”

Here the maundering old man paused, looking into space, then pulling himself together went on:

“I says to myself: ‘Here he comes, feet first. I thought as much! It was the shin-bone.”

“Whose shin-bone?” I demanded.

“Why, old Piety’s, of course,” he replied.

“What?—he’d fallen into the kiln?” I asked, horrified.

The old man turned viciously upon me for damaging his story.

“There you go,” he cried—“blurting the thing out! Why, of course he’d fell in the kiln—what else would he do? There were his tracks to the kiln edge, and a few bricks gone where he lost his footing. Well, I jus’ leaves it there and put a bag over it. Then I goes down to Bill—a-digging in the orchard—and says to him: ‘About this here contrack. Will you ’gree to let me have the contrack after the old man’s dead?’

“That’s looking ahead with a vengeance,’ he says, grinning.

“‘Never mind,’ I says. ‘Good understandings makes long frien’s,’ I says.

“’Oh, just as you like,’ he says, digging away. ‘I’m not too pertickler!’

“‘That’s a bargain?’ I asks.

“‘That’s a bargain,’ he says, just to be rid o’ me. Then I says to him: ‘Come up to the kiln, I want yer to help me awhile.’ So he comes. Then I takes the bag off the bones. ‘Look at that!’ I says. “‘Well,’ says he, ‘and what about it?’

“I says, ‘that’s your respected gran’father; leastwise all that’s left of him.’

You could have knocked him down with a feather. When he come to see it all he took on dreadful.

“’Good Gawd,’ he says, and, ‘’Orrible! ’Orrible!’

“Then says I: ‘Be a man! It might have been wuss. It might have been
me,
’ I says—’or yerself,’ I says. It might have been
me
— and then who’s to burn the lime?’ But he took on all the same. He took that dreadful a view of it. Oho!” quavered the old fellow, wagging his head: “He took a gloomy view of it, a very gloomby view of it!”

“‘Now you go away!’ I says to him, ‘and I’ll draw this lime and bag it.’

“‘Bag that lime!’ says he, ‘and my gran’father amongst it!’

“’My wages is in it,’ I says, firm, ‘but I’ll get what I can of him out,’ and so I did, and put the bone or two on the shed roof, away from the childer. Put ’em there not thinking, for there came a shower of rain while I was away for the cart, and when I got back the bones had all slacked up.

“But look ye here,” went on the old man confidentially, “I had my own little idee so as old Piety’d not be lost sight of altogether. I takes about harf the lime the bones made—real lime, mind you—and makes up a bit of mortar for this here chimbley—which I was building at the time. So you see these here bricks and that bit mortar? Well, I reckon that’s old Piety’s monument. But as for the rest, Bill he buried it in the orchard, and when the perlice came up there was nothing left but the buttons.”