Rolf Boldrewood - The Crooked Stick; Or, Pollie's Probation

'Oh, you darling old pet!' she cried, as she walked up to his shoulder, passing her taper fingers over his velvety face and smooth neck, silken-skinned and delicate of touch even after the trials of so hard a season. 'And your dear old legs look as clean as ever! Was it starved and ill-treated in that nasty bare paddock? Never mind, there's a load of corn come up. I know who'll have his share now, however the rest may come off. Now go on with your breakfast, sir, for I must get mine, and we'll have a lovely gallop after lunch.'

The grand old hackney, nearly thorough-bred, and showing high caste in every point, looked at the speaker with his mild, intelligent eyes, and then waving his head to and fro, as was his wont when at all excited, betook himself once more to his corn.

The day wore on slowly, wearily, with a dragging, halting march, as it seemed to the impatient maiden. The sun rose high in the hard blue sky, and glared, as was his wont, upon the limitless pastures, dry and adust, the pale-hued, melancholy copses, the fast-falling river, the forgotten creeks. The birds were silent; even the flies held truce in the darkened rooms – there was a deathlike absence of sound or motion. Hot, breezeless, unutterably lifeless, and for all less vigorous natures relaxing and depressing, was the atmosphere. To this girl, however, had come by inheritance, under the mysterious laws of heredity, a type of quenchless energy, a form combining the old Greek attributes of graceful strength and divinely dowered intellect, impervious alike, as were her anti-types, to sun and shade, to fatigue or privation, to climatic influence or untoward circumstance.

'Mother,' she said, after tossing about from sofa to chair, from carpet to footstool, the while the elder woman sat patiently sewing as if the family fortunes depended upon the due adjustment of

'I must go and put on my riding-habit. I shall die here, I'm certain, if I stay indoors much longer. I feel apoplexy coming on, or heart disease, I'm sure. Besides, there is a breeze always outside, or we can make one, Wanderer and I, on the plain.'

'My darling, it's surely too hot to go out yet,' pleaded the mother.

'It's twice as hot indoors,' retorted the wilful damsel, rising. 'I'll ride as far as the Mogil Mogil clump; you can send little Tarpot after me as soon as he gets the cows in. But a gallop I must have.'

The sun was declining as the girl rode out of the paddock gates, but no hint of coolness had as yet betokened the coming eve. The homestead was still and solitary of aspect, as a Mexican hacienda at the hour of the siesta, but for a different reason. Hot and wearisome as had been the day, every man about the place had been hard at work in his own proper department, and had been so occupied since sunrise.

In Australia, however scorching the day, how apparently endless and desolating the summer, no man, being of British birth or extraction, thinks of intermitting his daily work from sunrise to nightfall, except during the ordinary hours allotted to meals.

So the overseer was away on his never-ending round of inspection of stock – 'out on the run,' as the phrase is – to return at, or perhaps long after, nightfall. The boundary riders were each and all on their different beats – some at the wells; others at the now treacherous and daily more dangerous quagmires surrounding the watering-places, from which it was their duty to extricate the feeble sheep. No one was at home but a small native boy named Tarpot, with whose assistance Pollie managed to saddle her loved steed. Leaving injunctions with him to follow her as soon as he should have brought up the cows, she turned her horse's head to the broad plain; and as he snuffed up the fresh dry air and bounded forward in a stretching gallop along the level sandy track, the heart of the rider swelled within her, and she wished it was not unfeminine to shout aloud like the boy stock-riders who occasionally favoured the musters of Corindah with their company.

The well-bred animal which she rode was fully inclined to sympathise with his mistress's exhilaration. Tossing his head and opening his nostrils, Wanderer dashed forward along the far-stretching level road, just sufficiently yielding to be the most perfect track a free horse could tread at speed, as if he were anxious to run a race with the fabled coursers of that sun now slowly trailing blood-red banners and purple raiment towards his western couch. Mile after mile was passed in a species of ecstatic eagerness, which for steed and rider seemed to know no abatement. The homestead faded far behind them, and still nothing met the view but the endless grey plain; the mirage-encircled lines of slender woodland opening out north and south, each the exact counterpart of the other. An ever-widening, apparently illimitable waste, a slowly retreating sun, a sky hopeless in unchanging, pitiless splendour of hue, looking down upon a despairing world of dying creatures.

'The Mogil Mogil clump is a short ten miles,' she said, as she reined her impatient steed and compelled him to walk. 'I mustn't send along the poor old fellow so fast; he's not quite in form yet. I shall be there before the coach passes, and then have plenty of time to ride home in the cool. What a blessed relief this is from that choking atmosphere indoors!'

Another half-hour and the clump is reached. Still no sign of the stage-coach visible, as it should be for a mile or two, even more on that billiard table of a plain. The girl's impatient spirit chafed at the unlooked for delay. As she gazed upon the red sun, the far-seen crimson streamers, the endless, voiceless plain, the spirit of rebellion was again roused within her. She sat upon her horse and looked wistfully, wearily over the arid drought-stricken levels. She marked the sand pillars, whirling and eddying in the distance. They seemed to her fanciful imagination the embodied spirits of the waste – the evil genii of the Eastern tale, which might at any time, unfolding, disclose an Afreet or a Ghoul. The thought of long years to be spent amid these vast solitudes seemed to her hateful – doubly unendurable. Before her rose in imagination the dull familiar round of all too well known duties, occupations, tasks, and pleasures, or but feeble, pulseless alternations from the mill-horse track which people call duty.

'Was I born only for such a fate?' she passionately exclaimed. 'Is it possible that the great Creator of all things, the Lord and Giver of Life, made this complex, eager nature of mine to wear itself out with aimless automatic movements, or frantic struggles against the prison bars of fate? Oh! had my father not been cut off in his prime, in what a different position we should have been! We could have afforded to travel in Europe, to revel in the glories of art, science, and literature, to look upon the theatres of the great deeds of mankind – to live , in a word. We do not live in Corindah – we grow.'

Overcome by the emotions which the enthusiasm of her nature had suffered temporarily to overwhelm her ordinary intelligence, she had not noticed that the stage-coach, bringing its bi-weekly freight of letters, newspapers, and passengers, had approached the clump of wild orange trees, on the edge of which she had reined her steed. The sensitive thorough-bred, more alive to transitory impressions than his mistress, aroused by a sudden crack of the driver's whip, started, and as she drew the curb-rein, reared.

'What a naughty Wanderer!' she exclaimed, as, slackening her rein, she leaned a little forward, stroking her horse's glossy neck, and soothing him with practised address. At the same moment the four-horse team swept past the spot, and revealed the unwonted apparition to the gaze of the passengers, male and female, who, from the fixed attention they appeared to bestow upon her, were much interested in the situation. Apparently the young lady was not equally gratified, inasmuch as she turned her horse's head towards the distant line of timber which marked the line of the homestead, and swept across the plain like the daughter of a sheikh of the Nejd.