Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Mrs Roxburgh, while vague about the past, has no definite plans for the future. She is only roused when the fate of Chance, the bolted convict, comes in question. Then she grows most passionate, demanding a pardon for him on his recovery by us, and for which no doubt she will petition Yr Excellency soon after you receive this dispatch. There is no reason to disbelieve her story that the man brought her to a farm on the outskirts of the Settlement, though the lady is unwilling to contribute any but the barest details of their journey, probably out of modesty, for she was discovered by Sergt. and Mrs Oakes without a stitch of clothing after the convict had turned and fled back into the bush, either from delicacy on his part, or fear of retribution.

I propose to send out search parties for this probably deranged wretch, and if, as I hope, we recover him, I wld add my own recommendations for clemency to Mrs Roxburgh’s petitions. Granted the man committed a foul murder in a London slum, and was sentenced for life, but it is my humble opinion that he will have been broken by what he has endured and that he has redeemed himself by delivering the lady into our hands, alive and subsequently restored to health.

I have the honour to be

Sir

your most obedt …’

Captain Lovell was so relieved to have got this deucedly delicate matter down on paper that he could not resist adding an extra flourish to his normally florid signature.

The morning was more limpid, less equivocal, than the emotions the cutter’s departure provoked. The captain had gone on ahead in the skiff with some of his crew and his passenger Mr George Jevons. They had already boarded Princess Charlotte when the whale boat with the larger party consisting of the Commandant and his lady, their children either shouting or crying, Miss Scrimshaw, Mrs Roxburgh (it must be she, hidden inside the widow’s veil) their formal luggage, and a great variety of less orthodox bundles, rounded the last bend separating it from the cutter.

More than anybody Mr Jevons was of assistance in the ticklish operation of hauling the ladies and children aboard. Mrs Lovell, who had been rendered quite weak and tearful at thought of the approaching separation, could only hang on her husband’s arm until Miss Scrimshaw produced her smelling-bottle. Miss Scrimshaw herself, breathing deep to inhale the ‘ozone’, declared to anybody interested that she ‘never felt so free as when embarking on an ocean voyage’.

Mrs Roxburgh was silent, but raised her veil for a clearer view of the mangrove banks and the brown river, the latter of which had come out in blue for the occasion.

‘Is it not a picture?’ Miss Scrimshaw remarked approaching her friend.

‘Yes,’ Mrs Roxburgh agreed. ‘A picture.’

For that was what it looked, a canvas painted in turgid oils, as opposed to the iridescent watercolour of Hobart Town, each in its particular way remote from reality as she had experienced it.

Evidently partial to the company of ladies, Mr Jevons the merchant strolled to where the two were standing at the bulwark, ‘I would say that a more valuable picture, to Mrs Roxburgh’s mind, will be the view of London River when she first sets eyes on it.’

Mrs Roxburgh remained so strangely silent that Miss Scrimshaw felt it her duty to take a hand and pat the conversation onward. ‘Ah, don’t be unkind, Mr Jevons, to those who will be left in the Colony! You will have me homesick.’

At the risk of ignoring Miss Scrimshaw Mr Jevons hoped that Mrs Roxburgh would allow him to introduce her to his family circle at Camberwell, over which his sister presided as housekeeper, and foster mother to his three young daughters.

He seemed most anxious to soften what might be the harshness of her arrival, but Mrs Roxburgh was only embarrassed that her friend should be excluded, though inevitably as things stood, from an invitation she must so much desire.

Instead Miss Scrimshaw showed every sign of unaffected approval. ‘There! What a ready-made home-coming!’ It could, of course, have been an excess of ozone making her sound ebullient.

Mrs Roxburgh was somewhat put out by the spinster’s unreluctant acquiescence. She drew away, and at once saw her opportunity for addressing the Commandant in private, a move she had postponed till the last.

‘Captain Lovell,’ she said, ‘I cannot thank you enough for your kindness, and for what I know will be the outcome of your interceding with the Governor.’

Never averse to a bout of moral coquetry, he tapped her on the arm with the sealed dispatch he would shortly deliver into the hands of Captain Barbour. ‘You trust me, then?’

She stood as though still considering. ‘I hope I do.’

The light glancing off the river struck at the scarlet seal, which glittered like blood only recently clotted.

The Commandant could not help but notice the pulse beating in the throat of this woman who moved and disturbed him more perhaps than domesticity and his official position warranted.

Soon after, the company was summoned to what Miss Scrimhaw described as a déjeuner à la fourchette , which they gladly demolished, and Captain Lovell took leave of his tearful wife and excited children.

But as he stood in the moored skiff his attention may have been concentrated rather, on the woman in black.

Mrs Roxburgh was standing alone at the bulwark, staring it seemed, at the foreshore of grey mangroves, at their oily reflections in muddy water, for the sun had gone in and the sky removed the last of its blue twitching streamers from the brown surface of the river. So the Commandant observed, so too, Mr Jevons, so Miss Scrimshaw, more closely than any. She would always remember what sounded like a sudden cry of pain, as quickly suppressed as it was briefly uttered.

She went forward to offer sympathy and support, but Mrs Roxburgh had veiled herself; her step was firm, her voice dry and steady. ‘Let us go below,’ she decided. ‘We have said goodbye. I have done my duty, I hope, by everybody.’

During the afternoon the two ladies rested in the cabin allotted to them. Mrs Roxburgh, in the end, must have fallen into a heavy sleep. When she awoke, her companion had removed herself, no doubt to attend to the duties for which she had been engaged.

In the diminishing light the narrow cabin was yet so neat, so admirably accoutred in teak and brass, the sound of water on the vessel’s timbers so unrelated to the terrors which the more demoniac side of the ocean’s nature can rouse in the voyager, she should have had fewer qualms for her re-entry into the rational world of civilized beings. If misgivings persisted, they were occasioned more than anything by her friend’s capricious behaviour of earlier that day. What seemed like Miss Scrimshaw’s renunciation of the kindly, but rather boring merchant, together with the spinster’s uncharacteristically indiscreet treatment, if not actual patronage, Mrs Roxburgh ventured, of herself, was something which frankly puzzled her.

But she continued only vaguely puzzling as she rose in the dusk, and soothed by the sea sounds, the rattling of brass handles, the voices of the crew muffled by distance, refreshed her face and hands with eau de Cologne, and changed her dress. Not until then did she light a candle, the better to attend to her still fairly scanty hair, and was seated at the glass coaxing a ringlet or two when her companion returned.

‘Not in the dark, but almost!’ Miss Scrimshaw accused. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘you are wearing the gown I always thought would suit you!’

‘I put it on,’ Mrs Roxburgh replied, ‘because it is my only change of clothes.’

‘It sets you off, if I may say so.’

Mrs Roxburgh did look unwillingly resplendent in the garnet silk. As for Miss Scrimshaw, if she had changed her dress during Mrs Roxburgh’s nap, it was for yet another brown, to which she now added as finishing touch a string of onyx recklessly dashed over her head.