A Little Bush Maid by Mary Grant Bruce

M >> Mary Grant Bruce >> A Little Bush Maid

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

A LITTLE BUSH MAID by MARY GRANT BRUCE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I BILLABONG
II PETS AND PLAYTHINGS
III A MENAGERIE RACE
IV JIM'S IDEA
V ANGLER'S BEND
VI A BUSH FIRE
VII WHAT NORAH FOUND
VIII ON A LOG
IX FISHING
X THE LAST DAY
XI GOOD-BYE
XII THE WINFIELD MURDER
XIII THE CIRCUS
XIV CAMPING OUT
XV FOR FRIENDSHIP
XVI FIGHTING DEATH
XVII THE END OF THE STRUGGLE
XVIII EVENING

CHAPTER I

BILLABONG

Norah's home was on a big station in the north of Victoria--so large
that you could almost, in her own phrase, "ride all day and never see
any one you didn't want to see"; which was a great advantage in Norah's
eyes. Not that Billabong Station ever seemed to the little girl a place
that you needed to praise in any way. It occupied so very modest a
position as the loveliest part of the world!

The homestead was built on a gentle rise that sloped gradually away on
every side; in front to the wide plain, dotted with huge gum trees and
great grey box groves, and at the back, after you had passed through the
well-kept vegetable garden and orchard, to a long lagoon, bordered with
trees and fringed with tall bulrushes and waving reeds.

The house itself was old and quaint and rambling, part of the old wattle
and dab walls yet remaining in some of the outhouses, as well as the
grey shingle roof. There was a more modern part, for the house had been
added to from time to time by different owners, though no additions had
been made since Norah's father brought home his young wife, fifteen
years before this story opens. Then he had built a large new wing with
wide and lofty rooms, and round all had put a very broad, tiled
verandah. The creepers had had time to twine round the massive posts in
those fifteen years, and some even lay in great masses on the verandah
roof; tecoma, pink and salmon-coloured; purple bougainvillea, and the
snowy mandevillea clusters. Hard-headed people said this was not good
for the building--but Norah's mother had planted them, and because she
had loved them they were never touched.

There was a huge front garden, not at all a proper kind of garden, but a
great stretch of smooth buffalo grass, dotted with all kinds of trees,
amongst which flower beds cropped up in most unexpected and unlikely
places, just as if some giant had flung them out on the grass like a
handful of pebbles that scattered as they flew. They were always trim
and tidy, and the gardener, Hogg, was terribly strict, and woe betide
the author of any small footmarks that he found on one of the freshly
raked surfaces. Nothing annoyed him more than the odd bulbs that used to
come up in the midst of his precious buffalo grass; impertinent crocuses
and daffodils and hyacinths, that certainly had no right there. "Blest
if I know how they ever gets there!" Hogg would say, scratching his
head. Whereat Norah was wont to retire behind a pyramid tree for
purposes of mirth.

Hogg's sworn foe was Lee Wing, the Chinese gardener, who reigned supreme
in the orchard and the kingdom of vegetables--not quite the same thing
as the vegetable kingdom, by the way! Lee Wing was very fat, his broad,
yellow face generally wearing a cheerful grin--unless he happened to
catch sight of Hogg. His long pigtail was always concealed under his
flapping straw hat. Once Jim, who was Norah's big brother, had found him
asleep in his hut with the pigtail drooping over the edge of the bunk.
Jim thought the opportunity too good to lose and, with such deftness
that the Celestial never stirred, he tied the end of the pigtail to the
back of a chair--with rather startling results when Lee Wing awoke with
a sudden sense of being late, and made a spring from the bunk. The chair
of course followed him, and the loud yell of fear and pain raised by the
victim brought half the homestead to the scene of the catastrophe. Jim
was the only one who did not wait for developments. He found business at
the lagoon.

The queerest part of it was that Lee Wing firmly believed Hogg to be the
author of his woe. Nothing moved him from this view, not even when Jim,
finding how matters stood, owned up like a man. "You allee same goo'
boy," said the pigtailed one, proffering him a succulent raw turnip. "Me
know. You tellee fine large crammee. Hogg, he tellee crammee, too. So
dly up!" And Jim, finding expostulation useless, "dried up" accordingly
and ate the turnip, which was better than the leek.

To the right of the homestead at Billabong a clump of box trees
sheltered the stables that were the unspoken pride of Mr. Linton's
heart.

Before his time the stables had been a conglomerate mass, bark-roofed,
slab-sided, falling to decay; added to as each successive owner had
thought fit, with a final mixture of old and new that was neither
convenient nor beautiful. Mr. Linton had apologised to his horses during
his first week of occupancy and, in the second, turning them out to
grass with less apology, had pulled down the rickety old sheds,
replacing them with a compact and handsome building of red brick, with
room for half a dozen buggies, men's quarters, harness and feed rooms,
many loose boxes and a loft where a ball could have been held--and
where, indeed, many a one was held, when all the young farmers and
stockmen and shearers from far and near brought each his lass and
tripped it from early night to early dawn, to the strains of old Andy
Ferguson's fiddle and young Dave Boone's concertina. Norah had been
allowed to look on at one or two of these gatherings. She thought them
the height of human bliss, and was only sorry that sheer inability to
dance prevented her from "taking the floor" with Mick Shanahan, the
horse breaker, who had paid her the compliment of asking her first. It
was a great compliment, too, Norah felt, seeing what a man of agility
and splendid accomplishments was Mick--and that she was only nine at the
time.

There was one loose box which was Norah's very own property, and without
her permission no horse was ever put in it except its rightful
occupant--Bobs, whose name was proudly displayed over the door in Jim's
best carving.

Bobs had always belonged to Norah, He had been given to her as a foal,
when Norah used to ride a round little black sheltie, as easy to fall
off as to mount. He was a beauty even then, Norah thought; and her
father had looked approvingly at the long-legged baby, with his fine,
well-bred head. "You will have something worth riding when that fellow
is fit to break in, my girlie," he had said, and his prophecy had been
amply fulfilled. Mick Shanahan said he'd never put a leg over a finer
pony. Norah knew there never had been a finer anywhere. He was a big
pony, very dark bay in colour, and "as handsome as paint," and with the
kindest disposition; full of life and "go," but without the smallest
particle of vice. It was an even question which loved the other best,
Bobs or Norah. No one ever rode him except his little mistress. The pair
were hard to beat--so the men said.

To Norah the stables were the heart of Billabong. The house was all very
well--of course she loved it; and she loved her own little room, with
its red carpet and dainty white furniture, and the two long windows that
looked out over the green plain. That was all right; so were the garden
and the big orchard, especially in summer time! The only part that was
not "all right" was the drawing-room--an apartment of gloomy,
seldom-used splendour that Norah hated with her whole heart.

But the stables were an abiding refuge. She was never dull there. Apart
from the never-failing welcome in Bobs' loose box, there was the dim,
fragrant loft, where the sunbeams only managed to send dusty rays of
light across the gloom. Here Norah used to lie on the sweet hay and
think tremendous thoughts; here also she laid deep plans for catching
rats--and caught scores in traps of her own devising. Norah hated rats,
but nothing could induce her to wage war against the mice. "Poor little
chaps!" she said; "they're so little--and--and soft!" And she was quite
saddened if by chance she found a stray mouse in any of her
shrewdly-designed traps for the benefit of the larger game which
infested the stables and had even the hardihood to annoy Bobs!

Norah had never known her mother. She was only a tiny baby when that gay
little mother died--a sudden, terrible blow, that changed her father in
a night from a young man to an old one. It was nearly twelve years ago,
now, but no one ever dared to speak to David Linton of his wife.
Sometimes Norah used to ask Jim about mother--for Jim was fifteen, and
could remember just a little; but his memories were so vague and misty
that his information was unsatisfactory. And, after all, Norah did not
trouble much. She had always been so happy that she could not imagine
that to have had a mother would have made any particular difference to
her happiness. You see, she did not know.

She had grown just as the bush wild flowers grow--hardy, unchecked,
almost untended; for, though old nurse had always been there, her
nurseling had gone her own way from the time she could toddle. She was
everybody's pet and plaything; the only being who had power to make her
stern, silent father smile--almost the only one who ever saw the softer
side of his character. He was fond and proud of Jim--glad that the boy
was growing up straight and strong and manly, able to make his way in
the world. But Norah was his heart's desire.

Of course she was spoilt--if spoiling consists in rarely checking an
impulse. All her life Norah had done pretty well whatever she
wanted--which meant that she had lived out of doors, followed in Jim's
footsteps wherever practicable (and in a good many ways most people
would have thought distinctly impracticable), and spent about two-thirds
of her waking time on horseback. But the spoiling was not of a very
harmful kind. Her chosen pursuits brought her under the unspoken
discipline of the work of the station, wherein ordinary instinct taught
her to do as others did, and conform to their ways. She had all the
dread of being thought "silly" that marks the girl who imitates boyish
ways. Jim's rare growl, "Have a little sense!" went farther home than a
whole volume of admonitions of a more ordinarily genuine feminine type.

She had no little girl friends, for none was nearer than the nearest
township--Cunjee, seventeen miles away. Moreover, little girls bored
Norah frightfully. They seemed a species quite distinct from herself.
They prattled of dolls; they loved to skip, to dress up and "play
ladies"; and when Norah spoke of the superior joys of cutting out cattle
or coursing hares over the Long Plain, they stared at her with blank
lack of understanding. With boys she got on much better. Jim and she
were tremendous chums, and she had moped sadly when he went to Melbourne
to school. Holidays then became the shining events of the year, and the
boys whom Jim brought home with him, at first prone to look down on the
small girl with lofty condescension, generally ended by voting her "no
end of a jolly kid," and according her the respect due to a person who
could teach them more of bush life than they had dreamed of.

But Norah's principal mate was her father. Day after day they were
together, riding over the run, working the cattle, walking through the
thick scrub of the backwater, driving young, half-broken horses in the
high dog-cart to Cunjee--they were rarely apart. David Linton seldom
made a plan that did not naturally include Norah. She was a wise little
companion, too; ready enough to chatter like a magpie if her father were
in the mood, but quick to note if he were not, and then quite content to
be silently beside him, perhaps for hours. They understood each other
perfectly. Norah never could make out the people who pitied her for
having no friends of her own age. How could she possibly be bothered
with children, she reflected, when she had Daddy?

As for Norah's education, that was of the kind best defined as a minus
quantity.

"I won't have her bothered with books too early," Mr. Linton had said
when nurse hinted, on Norah's eight birthday, that it was time she began
the rudiments of learning. "Time enough yet--we don't want to make a
bookworm of her!"

Whereat nurse smiled demurely, knowing that that was the last thing to
be afraid of in connexion with her child. But she worried in her
responsible old soul all the same; and when a wet day or the occasional
absence of Mr. Linton left Norah without occupation, she induced her to
begin a few elementary lessons. The child was quick enough, and soon
learned to read fairly well and to write laboriously; but there nurse's
teaching from books ended.

Of other and practical teaching, however, she had a greater store. Mr.
Linton had a strong leaning towards the old-fashioned virtues, and it
was at a word from him that Norah had gone to the kitchen and asked Mrs.
Brown to teach her to cook. Mrs. Brown--fat, good-natured and
adoring--was all acquiescence, and by the time Norah was eleven she knew
more of cooking and general housekeeping than many girls grown up and
fancying themselves ready to undertake houses of their own. Moreover,
she could sew rather well, though she frankly detested the
accomplishment. The one form of work she cared for was knitting, and it
was her boast that her father wore only the socks she manufactured for
him.

Norah's one gentle passion was music. Never taught, she inherited from
her mother a natural instinct and an absolutely true ear, and before she
was seven she could strum on the old piano in a way very satisfying to
herself and awe-inspiring to the admiring nurse. Her talent increased
yearly, and at ten she could play anything she heard--from ear, for she
had never been taught a note of music. It was, indeed, her growing
capabilities in this respect that forced upon her father the need for
proper tuition for the child. However, a stopgap was found in the person
of the book-keeper, a young Englishman, who knew more of music than
accounts. He readily undertook Norah's instruction, and the lessons bore
moderately good effect--the moderation being due to a not unnatural
disinclination on the pupil's part to walk where she had been accustomed
to run, and to a fixed loathing to practice. As the latter necessary, if
uninteresting, pursuit was left entirely to her own discretion--for no
one ever dreamed of ordering Norah to the piano--it is small wonder if
it suffered beside the superior attractions of riding Bobs, rat
trapping, "shinning up" trees, fishing in the lagoon and generally
disporting herself as a maiden may whom conventional restrictions have
never trammelled.

It follows that the music lessons, twice a week, were times of woe for
Mr. Groom, the teacher. He was an earnest young man, with a sincere
desire for his pupil's improvement, and it was certainly disheartening
to find on Friday that the words of Tuesday had apparently gone in at
one ear and out at the other simultaneously. Sometimes he would
remonstrate.

"You haven't got on with that piece a bit!"

"What's the good?" the pupil would remark, twisting round on the music
stool; "I can play nearly all of it from ear!"

"That's not the same"--severely--"that's only frivolling. I'm not here
to teach you to strum."

"No" Norah would agree abstractedly. "Mr. Groom, you know that poley
bullock down in the far end paddock--"

"No, I don't," severely. "This is a music lesson, Norah; you're not
after cattle now!"

"Wish I were!" sighed the pupil. "Well, will you come out with the dogs
this afternoon?"

"Can't; I'm wanted in the office. Now, Norah--"

"But if I asked father to spare you?"

"Oh, I'd like to right enough." Mr. Groom was young, and the temptress,
if younger, was skilled in wiles.

"But your father--"

"Oh, I can manage Dad. I'll go and see him now." She would be at the
door before her teacher perceived that his opportunity was vanishing.

"Norah, come back! If I'm to go out, you must play this first--and get
it right."

Mr. Groom could be firm on occasions. "Come along, you little shirker!"
and Norah would unwillingly return to the music stool, and worry
laboriously though a page of the hated Czerny.

CHAPTER II

PETS AND PLAYTHINGS

After her father, Norah's chief companions were her pets.

These were a numerous and varied band, and required no small amount of
attention. Bobs, of course, came first--no other animal could possibly
approach him in favour. But after Bobs came a long procession, beginning
with Tait, the collie, and ending with the last brood of fluffy
Orpington chicks, or perhaps the newest thing in disabled birds, picked
up, fluttering and helpless, in the yard or orchard. There was room in
Norah's heart for them all.

Tait was a beauty--a rough-haired collie, with a splendid head, and big,
faithful brown eyes, that spoke more eloquently than many persons'
tongues. He was, like most of the breed, ready to be friends with any
one; but his little mistress was dearest of all, and he worshipped her
with abject devotion. Norah never went anywhere without him; Tait saw to
that. He seemed always on the watch for her coming, and she was never
more than a few yards from the house before the big dog was silently
brushing the grass by her side. His greatest joy was to follow her on
long rides into the bush, putting up an occasional hare and scurrying
after it in the futile way of collies, barking at the swallows overhead,
and keeping pace with Bobs' long, easy canter.

Puck used to come on these excursions too. He was the only being for
whom it was suspected that Tait felt a mild dislike--an impudent Irish
terrier, full of fun and mischief, yet with a somewhat unfriendly and
suspicious temperament that made him, perhaps, a better guardian for
Norah than the benevolently disposed Tait. Puck had a nasty, inquiring
mind--an unpleasant way of sniffing round the legs of tramps that
generally induced those gentry to find the top rail of a fence a more
calm and more desirable spot than the level of the ground. Indian
hawkers feared him and hated him in equal measure. He could bite, and
occasionally did bite, his victims being always selected with judgment
and discretion, generally vagrants emboldened to insolence by seeing no
men about the kitchen when all hands were out mustering or busy on the
run. When Puck bit, it was with no uncertain tooth. He was suspected of
a desire to taste the blood of every one who went near Norah, though his
cannibalistic propensities were curbed by stern discipline.

Only once had he had anything like a free hand--or a free tooth.

Norah was out riding, a good way from the homestead, when a particularly
unpleasant-looking fellow accosted her, and asked for money. Norah
stared.

"I haven't got any," she said. "Anyhow, father doesn't let us give away
money to travellers--only tucker."

"Oh, doesn't he?" the fellow said unpleasantly. "Well, I want money, not
grub." He laid a compelling hand on Bobs' bridle as Norah tried to pass
him. "Come," he said--"that bracelet'll do!"

It was a pretty little gold watch set in a leather bangle--father's
birthday present, only a few weeks old. Norah simply laughed--she
scarcely comprehended so amazing a thing as that this man should really
intend to rob her.

"Get out of my way," she said--"you can't have that!"

"Can't I !" He caught her wrist. "Give it quietly now, or I'll--"

The sentence was not completed. A yellow streak hurled itself though the
air, as Puck, who had been investigating a tussock for lizards, awoke to
the situation. Something like a vice gripped the swagman by the leg, and
he dropped Norah's wrist and bridle and roared like any bull. The
"something" hung on fiercely, silently, and the victim hopped and raved
and begged for mercy.

Norah had ridden a little way on. She called softly to Puck.

"Here, boy!"

Puck did not relinquish his grip. He looked pleadingly at his little
mistress across the swagman's trouser-leg. Norah struck her saddle
sharply with her whip.

"Here, sir!--drop it!"

Puck dropped it reluctantly, and came across to Bobs, his head hanging.
The swagman sat down on the ground and nursed his leg.

"That served you right," Norah said, with judicial severity. "You hadn't
any business to grab my watch. Now, if you'll go up to the house they'll
give you some tucker and a rag for your leg!"

She rode off, whistling to Puck. The swagman gaped and muttered various
remarks. He did not call at the house.

Norah was supposed to manage the fowls, but her management was almost
entirely ornamental, and it is to be feared that the poultry yard would
have fared but poorly had it depended upon her alone. All the fowls were
hers. She said so, and no one contradicted her. Still, whenever one was
wanted for the table, it was ruthlessly slain. And it was black Billy
who fed them night and morning, and Mrs. Brown who gathered the eggs,
and saw that the houses were safely shut against the foxes every
evening. Norah's chief part in the management lay in looking after the
setting hens. At first she firmly checked the broody instincts by
shutting them callously under boxes despite pecks and loud protests.
Later, when their mood refused to change, she loved to prepare them soft
nests in boxes, and to imprison them there until they took kindly to
their seclusion. Then it was hard work to wait three weeks until the
first fluffy heads peeped out from the angry mother's wing, after which
Norah was a blissfully adoring caretaker until the downy balls began to
get ragged, as the first wing and tail feathers showed. Then the chicks
became uninteresting, and were handed over to Black Billy.

Besides her own pets there were Jim's.

"Mind, they're in your care," Jim had said sternly, on the evening
before his departure for school. They were making a tour of the
place--Jim outwardly very cheerful and unconcerned; Norah plunged in
woe. She did not attempt to conceal it. She had taken Jim's arm, and it
was sufficient proof of his state of mind that he did not shake it off.
Indeed, the indications were that he was glad of the loving little hand
tucked into the bend of his arm.

"Yes, Jim; I'll look after them."

"I don't want you to bother feeding them yourself," Jim said
magnanimously; "that 'ud be rather too much of a contract for a kid,
wouldn't it? Only keep an eye on 'em, and round up Billy if he doesn't
do his work. He's a terror if he shirks, and unless you watch him like a
cat he'll never change the water in the tins every morning. Lots of
times I've had to do it myself!"

"I'd do it myself sooner'n let them go without, Jim, dear," said the
small voice, with a suspicion of a choke.

"Don't you do it," said Jim; "slang Billy. What's he here for, I'd like
to know! I only want you to go round 'em every day, and see that they're
all right."

So daily Norah used to make her pilgrimage round Jim's pets. There were
the guinea pigs--a rapidly increasing band, in an enclosure specially
built for them by Jim--a light frame, netted carefully everywhere, and
so constructed that it could be moved from place to place, giving them a
fresh grass run continually. Then there were two young wallabies and a
little brush kangaroo, which lived in a little paddock all their own,
and were as tame as kittens. Norah loved this trio especially, and
always had a game with them on her daily visit. There was a shy
gentleman which Norah called a turloise, because she never could
remember if he were a turtle or a tortoise. He lived in a small
enclosure, with a tiny water hole, and his disposition was extremely
retiring. In private Norah did not feel drawn to this member of her
charge, but she paid him double attention, from an inward feeling of
guilt, and because Jim set a high value upon him.

"He's such a wise old chap," Jim would say; "nobody knows what he's
thinking of!"

In her heart of hearts Norah did not believe that mattered very much.

But when the stables had been visited and Bobs and Sirdar (Jim's
neglected pony) interviewed; when Tait and Puck had had their breakfast
bones; when wallabies and kangaroo had been inspected (with a critical
eye to their water tins), and the turtle had impassively received a
praiseworthy attempt to draw him out; when the chicks had all been fed,
and the guinea pigs (unlike the leopard) had changed their spot for the
day--there still remained the birds.

The birds were a colony in themselves. There was a big aviary, large
enough for little trees and big shrubs to grow in, where a happy family
lived whose members included several kinds of honey-eaters, Queensland
finches, blackbirds and a dozen other tiny shy things which flitted
quickly from bush to bush all day. They knew Norah and, when she entered
their home, would flutter down and perch on her head and shoulders, and
look inquisitively for the flowers she always brought them. Sometimes
Norah would wear some artificial flowers, by way of a joke. It was funny
to see the little honey-eaters thrusting in their long beaks again and
again in search of the sweet drops they had learned to expect in
flowers, and funnier still to watch the air of disgust with which they
would give up the attempt.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14