“That really isn’t the point,” Max assured her amusedly. “Do you want to go home?”
When he put it, quite simply like that, she wanted so terribly to go home that she almost choked. The thought of being back among the dear and safe and familiar surroundings, with life in manageable proportions again, seemed so achingly desirable that she thought she must snatch at this fantastically generous offer without pause or thought.
But then, before she could do so, all that was best and most self-respecting in Juliet came rushing to the surface. By her own impulsive foolishness she had landed herself in this dilemma. Unless she were to own herself a poor, spineless, self-pitying creature, it was by her own efforts that she must get out of it.
“Thank you very, very much, Mr. Ormathon.” She managed to smile at Max, even though the thought of what she was refusing made her mouth tremble. “But I’d rather stay here and work and find my own way out of this business. I’d never be on good terms with myself again, if I didn’t. It was silly and ill-judged of me to come rushing out here—I know that now—but I’ll make the best of what I have done. When I go back to England, I’ll do so by my own efforts.”
“Good girl!” Max Ormathon said, and that was all. But he looked at Juliet as though, in some way, he saw her for the first time.
“I’m sure you won’t regret that,” Carol exclaimed. “I know just what you mean by saying that you couldn’t be on good terms with yourself again if you let this beat you.”
“Well—” Juliet’s smile was more certain that time “—I’ve got to change fine words into deeds before they mean much, I know. But I can’t believe that I shall not be able to earn my own living here.”
“Of course you will,” Carol declared.
“There’ll probably be some formalities,” Max told her, “before you can rank as a wage earner, since you came out here more or less as a visitor, I take it. But I’ll see you through those.”
“Thank you.” She looked at him that time rather as though
she
saw
him
for the first time, and they exchanged a smile of mutual respect and liking, which greatly astonished Juliet when she thought about it afterward.
“Well, if you’ve both finished your drinks, let’s go and have dinner,” Carol said, rising in one quick, graceful movement from her position on a stool by the fire. “Food always stimulates my ingenuity, and I daresay we shall think up some good ideas between us while we eat.”
The other two laughed, and together they went into the neighboring dining room.
As they did so, a gust of wind, shaking the windows, reminded Juliet for a moment of the outside world. Thousands and thousands of miles of unknown country lay outside those windows, and in all this great continent there was hardly a soul she knew—still less one who cared about her. She was alone in a sense she had never before imagined, even in the most frightening dreams of her childhood.
In spite of her brave words, the most heart-shaking terror seized upon her, and she seemed to see herself lost in an infinity of space—insignificant beyond expression and yet feeling instinctively the primitive terror of the utterly alone.
For a moment she saw nothing but the wastes of plain and mountain, forest and scrubland which lay outside this house. Then suddenly Max was smiling at her and saying, “Will you sit here—opposite me.”
Incredibly, six words reached out to her in the isolation of her terror and loneliness, and, at their sound, the world took on its right proportions again and the chilling tremors left her.
In the midst of the great vacuum she had visualized there was this little cell—this oasis—of friendliness and hope. By no planning of her own, she had been brought to it—and from here she would go out boldly to face whatever the future might bring.
CHAPTER FIVE
The following morning, almost before breakfast was over, Carol offered to take Juliet on an informal tour of the place. Max had already ridden off on some affairs of his own, and the two girls—with the children for company—were lingering over a second cup of coffee.
“Thank you. I would love it,” Juliet said. “But first of all, can I have some real idea of
where
I am? I mean—names don’t convey much to me, of course, but—am I still in New South Wales, for one thing?”
Carol laughed a good deal at this.
“Dear me, yes! How big did you think New South Wales was? You would have to go quite a long way farther before you tumbled over the edge of it, believe me.”
“It hasn’t got an edge,” announced Isobel, who had been following this conversation with great attention. “At least, not the sort you fall over. It’s flat. You can see it on my map.”
“A map!” exclaimed Juliet. “That the thing. Will someone show me where I am, on the map?”
“I will! I will!” cried Isobel, and rushed away in search of a map, closely followed by Peter, who panted in the rear, crying, “I’ll show her, too,” though he had only the vaguest idea of what he wanted to show to whom.
Both children returned in a few minutes with a somewhat tattered map of Australia, which Isobel proceeded to spread out on the table in front of Juliet. Then, kneeling on a chair, she hung over it, breathing loudly, while Peter climbed onto Juliet’s knee, saying, “I want to see, too,” and then, belatedly, “please.”
Juliet bent her head over the map.
“Here is Sydney.” She put a finger on the familiar spot, while Isobel poised an anxious pencil over the map, ready to pounce on the place she sought, as soon as she spied it. “And here is Katoomba.” Juliet bit her lip at the momentary recollection of the high hopes she had entertained while she lunched there. But she went on resolutely. “I’m not sure which direction we took after that. Across the mountains in some way...”
“Here we are!” shrieked Isobel triumphantly, and in her anxiety to point out the place she made a pencil mark that must have covered about eighty square miles. “Daddy says we’re just there, near that tri-tri-tributary of the river. That’s where our house is—just there, isn’t it, mommy?”
Laughing, Carol leaned over Juliet’s shoulder familiarly, so that she was deliciously conscious of being very much a part of a family group.
“Let me see. Ye-es. Near enough. Not more than a hundred miles out anyway. Here is Bathurst to the north, Juliet.” Taking Isobel’s pencil, she used it as a pointer, but without making the marks that her excited little daughter seemed unable to avoid. “And here we are—on the edge of the sheep country.”
“And is yours a sheep farm?” Juliet inquired.
“Station,” Carol amended, smiling. “Yes. Though we do a certain amount of mixed farming near the house itself. It’s rather unusual for the family to live on such a big station, but I was not prepared to live in town while Henry slaved away here.”
“I should think not!”
“Well, living here has it problems, of course, apart from the actual loneliness,” Carol said. “But
fortunately, we have all been w
onderfully well—” she lightly touched the table and smiled over her own small concession to superstition “—and we are within one circuit of the flying-doctor service. Isobel will be going to boarding school next year, but she is looking forward to that, aren’t you, pet?”
Isobel looked up from her map and nodded absently. It was obvious that she had long been used to the idea of boarding school and that it held no terrors for her.
“Anyway, whatever the disadvantages of such an isolated existence, I felt the main thing was for us to be all together,” Carol said. “And that’s why we built a house that was very much a home. I’ve never been to England, but I wanted something that was like an English country house.”
“It’s a beautiful house,” Juliet assured her warmly.
“It’s more unusual here than you realize,” Carol assured her with a smile. “You didn’t know, did you, that when you went upstairs to bed last night you were doing something few Australians do?”
“No. What was that?”
“Just the sheer going upstairs,” Carol said, and laughed. “A two-story house is quite unusual here, you know. Nearly all domestic building is of the bungalow type. That’s because we have so much space in which to expand, of course. We build outward because it’s unnecessary to go in for the more complicated building upward. But Max and I were brought up in a two-story house, and somehow I’ve always liked going upstairs to bed. So when Henry and I came to build our own place, he agreed to let me have it this way.”
“It’s very pleasant, anyway,” Juliet assured her.
For once—though Juliet gathered that this was a rare concession—Isobel was let off the morning lessons that she did with her mother, and the two children were allowed to accompany their mother and the visitor around the station.
Bakandi—for so the station was called, after the name of one of the native tribes that once inhabited that part of the country—was not unlike a big English farm in its nearby essentials. But in the tremendous sweep of its uncultivated extent it was like nothing else Juliet had ever seen.
“Oh, there’s no question of cultivating an area of this size,” Carol explained, in answer to Juliet’s questions. “There’s a certain amount of what one calls ‘pasture improvement’ to be done, and, of course, you take precautions to see that your merinos and other first-class sheep are not allowed to wander too far to be supervised and kept in vigorous condition. But, beyond that, distances are so great that I imagine our problems are very different from those in a small sheep farm at home.”
“Ye-es,” agreed Juliet, whose experience of sheep farms at home was extremely limited.
In company with Carol, however, and the two pleased and excited children, she enjoyed inspecting the shearing sheds and the stockyards, and she paused to admire, at a distance, the pretty bungalow houses and cottages that housed the rest of the station community: the overseer, the boundary riders, the rouseabouts and the jackeroos.
Delighted to find how much there was to tell this new visitor, Isobel—and even Peter, too, from time to time—offered odd bits of information, until Juliet laughed and declared she had never realized how much there was to know about sheep and sheep farming.
“Oh, the whole place revolves around the creatures,” Carol declared with a good-humored shrug. “Food supplies, water supplies, salt always available to keep them healthy—there’s no end to their care. But, of course, it’s like anything else. If you work hard at it, the results are good. If you leave them largely to pick up their own living, so to speak, they go all poor and peaky on you, and before you know where you are, you’ve lost half of them.”
“And the lambs are so sweet,” Isobel offered
sentimental
.
Peter said “I’d like a lamb. Can I have a lamb, please, mommy?”
Carol explained reasonably that it was rather too early for lambs yet, and Juliet said, “I’ll
never
get used to the seasons being all the wrong way around here!”
They all laughed then, and turned homeward again, pausing only when Juliet stopped, fascinated, to listen to the strange laughing call of a kookaburra from a nearby clump of trees. Then there was a flash of brilliant color against the dull green of the gum trees, and the bird was gone.
“You’ll hear and see plenty of them,” Carol promised her.
Now that there was not so much left to show the visitor, the children ran on ahead and, as they strolled along together, Juliet and Carol reverted once more to the rough plan for the future, which they had discussed the previous evening.
It had been Carol’s suggestion that Juliet should stay with her for the time being. As she said, it would be a relief to her to have someone to take on the simple, primary lessons that were necessary in Isobel’s case and also to help with the general management of the house and the children.
“Of course, the salary we could pay wouldn’t be the kind on which you would soon save your fare home, if that’s the principal consideration,” she had admitted frankly. “But in about ten days’ time, Max will be going to Melbourne, and he will find out for you just how free you are to take work in this country and what offers the best possibilities.”
It had been difficult for Juliet to express how grateful she felt for this offer of literal and figurative shelter at a time when she needed it so badly. But both brother and sister had smilingly and determinedly put that aside.
One aspect, however, had not been discussed, and Carol referred to that now.
“Juliet, what do you want Max to do about your family?”
“In what way?” Juliet looked slightly startled.
“Well, he’ll be seeing them in Melbourne, you know. Do you want him to ... tell them about you?”
“Oh...” She frowned, not much liking the thought of Verity’s and Aunt Katherine’s probable comments on the unfortunate Martin fiasco. “I wish he needn’t say anything about me, but, of course, that’s impossible. It would be ridiculous to make any mystery about it, so I’m afraid he had better tell them, with as little detail as possible.”
“They’re sure to want you to join them, then,” said Carol, who always expected people to react in the same way as herself.
Juliet smiled slightly and shook her head.
“I don’t think so. At least—my uncle might. But not the others.”
Carol glanced at her with frank curiosity.
“Do you know your cousin well—the one Max is going to marry, I mean?”
“Not ... very well,” Juliet said cautiously. “I only traveled out here with her on the plane journey. That doesn’t give you many chances for getting to know each other.”
“But what you saw you didn’t like?” suggested Carol shrewdly.
“Ob, my dear, if she is going to be your sister-in-law, you can’t expect me to air my own likes and dislikes,” protested Juliet, with a smile. “I don’t think we should ever hit it off very well temperamentally, but that isn’t any sort of criticism, you know.”
“No-o. I’m not quite sure why I asked.” Carol frowned, and seemed to examine her own impulse. “I suppose, in my heart or instinct or whatever you like to call it, I’m not entirely happy about this suggested marriage of Max’s.”
Juliet was slightly at a loss what to say. In spite of her protests, she felt she did know Verity pretty well, and she could not see her making an ideal sister-in-law for this warm, eager, generous-hearted girl. At the same time, she could only make mischief if she expressed any opinion about that.
So, diplomatically, she simply said, “Is the marriage quite settled?”
“No. And that, too, rather annoyed me. The way she hesitated, I mean,” Carol said.
“Hesitated?” Juliet looked astonished. “Why, I thought—” She checked herself. “Do you mean that Verity isn’t sure of her own mind?”
“Well, her story was that she was more than half-engaged to some man in Melbourne, before she took that trip to Europe. And she told Max she couldn’t agree to become engaged to him until she had seen the other man and cleared things up with him.”
Juliet was considerably surprised to hear that Verity had had any such scruples. But she said immediately, “I think she was right, though. Don’t you?”
“Oh, yes! If it was really as she said.”
“Oh... ” Juliet glanced at Carol with fresh respect for her natural acumen. “You mean that you think it wasn’t?”
“Well, I may be a suspicious-minded creature—and probably am where my one and only brother is concerned,” Carol admitted ruefully. “But I happen to know that other man. Not very well personally, but he was a business acquaintance of Henry’s father, and we met him once or twice when we were in Melbourne. He’s tremendously rich and influential, Juliet—not at all the kind of man whom you have a vague half-and-half arrangement with and then leave in the air while you drift off to Europe for some months.”
She hesitated for a moment, but Juliet said, “Do go on.”
“I can’t help feeling that what is much more likely is that this girl—I’m sorry! Your cousin, I mean—”
“That’s all right.”
“That she thinks she has some chance with the other man and wouldn’t hesitate to take him if she could. On the other hand, if, on her return, she finds that any hopes she had don’t materialize, she’ll be perfectly willing to take Max. And, frankly, I think my Max is too good to be treated as a second-best by a girl who can argue that way.”
“I—see.” Juliet pretended to give serious consideration to what had just been said because, again, she was at a loss to know what she could tactfully say.
Of course Carol was completely right in her estimate of the situation! Juliet was shocked and almost amused to find that anyone who had never even met Verity could sum her up so well. Knowing her as she did, Juliet could not doubt that Verity had argued on exactly the lines Carol suggested. And, with Carol, Juliet was beginning to feel that Max was too good to be treated like that.
At the same time, there was nothing she could do that would not rank as mischievous interference.
“Do you think,” she asked rather diffidently, “he is very much in love with Verity?”
“Oh—” Carol laughed crossly “—I don’t know. I suppose so. He always teases me when I talk of the things
I
think important. He says he isn’t the kind to fall violently in love with anyone, but I just think he hasn’t met the right girl yet. Of course, I know lots of happy marriages are built on less than a terrific love affair, and he may be right. But if she is a little bit calculating and he is very well-balanced about it all, are they ever going to strike the divine spark from each other?”