Dorothy Eden (19 page)

‘I would have been here at the beginning if I had known. I woke up and saw the lights. Tell me what to do.’

‘Just walk up and down letting the black smoke coat the vines. We’re almost finished. Daylight will show us whether we’ve wasted our time.’

‘I didn’t know about the frost.’

There was such distress in her voice that Gilbert slowed down to walk beside her.

‘What’s it to you?’ he asked.

‘I would hate to see the crop fail, sir.’

‘Are you afraid of losing a comfortable home?’

She ignored his sarcasm, saying simply, ‘I like the vines. I enjoyed vintage last summer. It would be a wicked shame if there wasn’t one next summer.’

He was surprised and strangely grateful for her concern.

‘Watch that flame. You don’t want to set the vineyard on fire. That would certainly finish off the frost damage.’

‘It looks pretty,’ said Molly Jarvis, watching the flaring lights. ‘Like a procession.’ She began to cough. ‘But the smoke gets down your throat.’

‘Don’t swallow it. Keep it out of your face.’

She gave a low laugh. ‘Perhaps my baby will be born black, after this.’ She sounded excited, in spite of her distress about the situation. She moved off down the furrow, a strong upright figure, broad with the child she carried. Gilbert watched until in the darkness she couldn’t be distinguished from the men. But he knew she was there. He felt more cheerful, and set off briskly to encourage the tired men. It was strange that he had ceased to feel tired himself.

An hour later the darkness began to lift. There was a faint glow on the horizon. The yellow tongues of flame from the blackened pots became paler.

Gilbert raised his voice. ‘All right, everybody. Sun’s coming up. We’ll soon know the worst.’

‘As soon as that?’ Mrs Jarvis was behind him.

‘Yes. The frost is like a black hand. The vines we haven’t saved will have withered.’

The men gathered round silently. The light grew, and the whites of their eyes showed in their blackened faces. They all shared this moment of suspense.

The light on the horizon deepened to gold. A flame burst through as the sun rose. The mist dissolved, showing the glittering frost rime, the rows of blackened vines.

Like a tattered diseased army they drooped in immobile exhaustion.

For a little while no one moved or spoke. Then abruptly Molly Jarvis began to cry, with a small wailing sound.

Gilbert looked at her impatiently, suddenly wanting to strike her, to vent his impotent anger on somebody.

‘That’ll do no good,’ he said curtly.

He strode off to inspect the whole of his vineyard. He couldn’t believe that it was all like this. Some of the vines must have survived. His dream could not be collapsing before it had fairly begun.

He walked for an hour. He began counting the vines that remained healthy. A few acres on the lower slopes, the muscatels which he had been inclined to despise since he was more interested in brewing wine than making raisins, were almost untouched by the scorching frost. There was also an area of the more firmly established vines that he had brought from Bordeaux and Portugal in the year in which he had become engaged to Eugenia. But the entire planting of the cuttings which had come out on the ship with Eugenia was lost, as well as a large area of the sauternes.

He could estimate a harvest of a quarter of his crop—if that managed to survive other hazards such as too much rain or humidity, the pest of the furry caterpillar, a swarm of locusts, a drought.

He would not be able to pay his debts this year. Neither would he be able to replace his lost vines unless the bank would advance him a loan. He had been too extravagant, and too optimistic. He had tied up his entire capital in Yarrabee, building a house that was too ambitious, because he was marrying a woman who needed that kind of setting, because that was how he had planned his life. His dreams had leapt ahead of reality. Three good years and a growing market had made him over-confident. He had over-spent and been a fool.

Now he would have to go humbly to that sour-faced Andrew Jackson, his bank manager, and admit that his cautions in the past had been justified. ‘Keep a reserve against a rainy day.’ The fellow had harped on that theme in his dry meticulous way. But Gilbert had had a bride arriving, and a great deal of necessary spending to do. And anyway, it wasn’t rain but frost that had now defeated him.

Defeated? That was not a word in his language. He would write for another consignment of vine cuttings immediately. He would make a trip down the Hunter River, and see what replacements he could get from vignerons there. Some of them no doubt would be in financial difficulty and glad to sell part of their stock.

He would replant his stricken acres. He would learn patience. His plans had been set back three years in this one disastrous night. But he was still only thirty. There was plenty of time. Eugenia would have to wait a little for those treasures from the Orient. Yarrabee could not be another Vaucluse for some years.

If next year’s crop also failed…

Gilbert stuck out his chin pugnaciously. He had always defied fate. He would do so again.

All the same, as the sun rose he could scarcely bear the sight of his ravished vineyard. Hot moisture trickled out of his eyes. He clenched his fist, rubbing his knuckles fiercely across his cheeks.

Tom Sloan’s voice sounded behind him.

‘It’s cruel, sir. But there’s no use brooding over it.’

He turned sharply on the man, blackened face looking at blackened face.

‘I’m not brooding. I’m planning.’

‘You can’t bring the vines back to life,’ said Sloan pessimistically. ‘They’re finished.’

‘Nor have I any intention of trying to.’

‘Better get in and have some breakfast, sir. Things don’t seem so bad on a full stomach.’

Gilbert walked away, not answering. He didn’t want sympathy. But he suddenly remembered Mrs Jarvis.

‘Have you sent the men down?’

‘Yes, sir. They’re black as coons. Mrs Jarvis, too. She’s a strong woman, that one. She worked like a slave.’

‘Yes, yes, she will be duly rewarded. You can give the men an issue of rum. Well, that’s how it is, Sloan. But don’t imagine I’m beaten.’

‘I didn’t imagine that, sir. Not you.’

‘Thanks, Tom. You’re loyal. And I sent your woman away, too.’

‘I’m glad you did that. I’ve lost my taste for the dusky ladies.’

‘Then you’d better find a white woman and get married.’

‘I was thinking of that, sir.’ Sloan had an alert monkeyish face, tough, hardened. Gilbert would never have paid for his passage from England if he had not been sure of his durability. He was a little slow-thinking, a little too fond of rum, and indiscriminating to the point of folly in his choice of women, but Gilbert liked a man with virility, and in every other way Tom Sloan was reliable, honest and loyal.

He was pleased to hear that the tough little man, getting near forty now, was going to settle down. He would be glad to improve his living accommodation to include a wife.

‘You’ve picked one out, have you?’ Gilbert’s voice was a little absent, his mind not fully on the matter. The rising sun had not warmed the atmosphere. The frost was penetrating his bones.

‘Yes, sir, I have. When she’s got over her present problem.’

‘Problem?’

‘Having a young one, sir. I don’t object to being father to another man’s child. Not when Molly Jarvis is the mother.’

‘Molly—you mean Mrs Jarvis?’ Gilbert stopped abruptly in his tracks.

‘That’s who I mean. She’s a fine woman. I don’t give two hoots for her past.’ Sloan sensed something in Gilbert’s manner. ‘Now don’t you or Mrs Massingham be upset, sir. She’ll stay on in the big house. She’ll only be Molly Sloan instead of Molly Jarvis.’

The fellow was too familiar. It was difficult to control these characteristics in such a raw country. In the great spaces and the loneliness, all men were equal. One got down to the basic fact of survival. Gilbert had treated Sloan as a friend when they had set out together to conquer this corner of the wilderness. They had talked late into the starlit nights, discussed the universe, made plans. They had faced a party of hostile natives with spears and sent the ugly brutes packing, once Gilbert had saved Sloan’s life when the little man had been swept down the Hawkesbury River in one of the sudden summer floodings. That fact above all bound them together. But now, suddenly, Sloan was intolerably familiar.

‘Do you think she’ll have you?’ he heard himself saying in a tight unsympathetic voice.

‘I shouldn’t think there’d be much doubt. I’m not speaking for my personal charms, I’m only thinking a woman like her wants a home for her child.’

‘She’s got that already.’

‘In a manner of speaking, sir.’ The earnest eyes in the blackened face peered up at Gilbert, saw something uneasy, and were immediately repentant. ‘I oughtn’t to be talking about my affairs at a time like this. Don’t know how I came to. It was you mentioning Yella.’

Gilbert began striding swiftly towards the house.

‘You’ve got a child there whom you might feel an obligation towards. Mrs Jarvis’s is nothing to do with you.’

Eugenia was waiting at the door. She was wrapped in a dressing-gown, and looked distraught.

‘Gilbert, please hurry—’ She stopped, seeing his sooty face with the white runnels down the cheeks. ‘Gilbert, is it as bad as that?’

‘As bad as what?’

‘You have been—you have marks on your cheeks.’

‘So would you cry if you’d seen what I’ve been looking at,’ he said harshly. ‘What are you doing down here in the cold? You aren’t even dressed. Go back to bed. I don’t want my son lost as well as my vineyard.’

She had made a movement towards him as if she would have embraced him, in spite of his dirty dishevelled condition. But now she stepped back, and her face went still.

‘I was only going to tell you that someone must go to Parramatta for a doctor. Mrs Jarvis is having her baby.’

Mrs Jarvis—Tom Sloan—the ruined vineyard—his own feeling of terrible exhaustion—that accounted for the strange fact that he hadn’t in that moment wanted his wife in his arms, that he had repelled her first truly spontaneous gesture towards him.

It was the timing that was wrong. Everything was wrong. Now Molly Jarvis, through working too strenuously on his account, would probably lose her baby. She would be able to marry Sloan with no impediments.

‘Is she far gone yet? Have I time to clean up?’ he asked wearily.

‘I don’t know. Mrs Ashburton is with her. She won’t allow me in the room.’ Eugenia’s face contorted angrily. ‘I’m not so useless as all that. You all pamper me too much. It’s ridiculous!’

‘Mrs Ashburton is perfectly right. Thank heaven she is here,’ Gilbert said absently, and turned to bellow for one of the maids to go and tell Murphy to have his horse saddled. ‘Go upstairs, my love,’ he said over his shoulder to Eugenia; ‘I’m just going to wash and change my jacket. I’ll be back in no time.’

‘Gilbert, you didn’t tell me—the vineyard—’

‘Later.’

It gave him a feeling of dull surprise that there was something of more urgency than his ravaged vines.

Underneath his surprise was a sharp sense of shock, a truth he didn’t want to face at this particular moment. No other woman in labour except his wife would have had prior importance to his own disaster.

E
UGENIA THOUGHT THAT IT
had been the most terrible day of her life. The acres of frost-blackened vines were bad enough, and the air of melancholy in the house. Even when the sun rose and streamed through the windows, and the day became crisp, brilliant and beautiful, nobody made much noise except Erasmus who had recently picked up a phrase of Mrs Ashburton’s, ‘I declare to goodness,’ and now had a notion to practise it with exhausting repetitiveness.

Eugenia was haunted by the two worst moments of the day. The first had been when she had encountered her husband in the doorway, looking like a man who had come up from a coalpit. His wild haggard appearance would have made her shrink from him if there had not been the telltale white marks down his cheeks where the tears had run. Those had made him so painfully vulnerable that she had wanted to throw her arms round him, to cradle his black-smeared face against her breast. But he hadn’t noticed her impulsive gesture and the shaft of tenderness that had pierced her died away as he curtly told her to go back to bed. Suddenly she saw her marriage as such a meagre thing, a body for his use at night, a vessel in which to carry his child, an ornament for his house. It was a paralysing realization that had made her neither able to embrace him nor to sympathize with him in the loss of his vines. She had watched in a frozen stillness as he had dropped his filthy clothes on the bedroom floor, flung himself into clean ones, and then hurried downstairs to leap on his horse which had been brought to the front door.

Someone else could have ridden for the doctor. But who else? All the men had toiled all night and Gilbert was a good and conscientious master, not asking anyone to do more than he could do himself. Also, he would count Mrs Jarvis his especial responsibility, since her premature labour was due to her hard work on his behalf.

Everyone, Eugenia thought, was of use except herself. She was not a useless person and she refused to be treated as one on this day of crisis. Instead of going back to bed as Gilbert had ordered, she went across the courtyard still glistening with frost to the kitchen quarters, and then down the passage leading to the maids’ bedrooms. Mrs Jarvis occupied the one at the end. As housekeeper she was entitled to the best room. It had a window leading on to its own verandah beside the glass-roofed potting shed and the kitchen garden. The baby, when it was born, would be able to sleep in its basket on the verandah on warm days. The quarters had been planned originally for a man and wife, so that now they were ideally suitable for a widow with a child.

Listening outside the closed door, Eugenia heard Mrs Ashburton’s voice, followed by a long low moan.

Her heart fluttered. She told herself that this was a natural sound. Childbirth was extremely painful. Her mother had given her that information, in carefully phrased sentences, just before she left England.