for a few minutes. But I've just remembered something I've got to refer to in one of Mr Gibbs' letters. Don't mind me; I'll be back presently.'
McKeith seemed to take no heed of her departure; his eyes were fixed on Lady Bridget; there was in them a light of inward excitement.
'Please go on,' she said, 'I want so much to hear.'
He thought for a few moments, shook the ashes from his pipe and then plunged into his story.
'I've got to go back to when I was quite a youngster—taken from school—I went to St Paul's in the Hammersmith Road—just before I was seventeen. You see before that my father had scraped together his little bit of money and we'd been living in West Kensington waiting while he made out what we were all going to do. He wasn't any great shakes, my father, in the way of birth, and fortune. I daresay, you guessed that, Lady Bridget?'
She tossed her head back impatiently. 'Oh what DOES that matter! Go on, please.'
'He'd been a farmer, Glasgow way'—McKeith still pronounced it 'Glesca,' 'and my mother was a minister's daughter, as good a woman and as true a lady as ever breathed. But that's neither here nor there in what turned out a bad business. Well, we all emigrated out here, and, after a while, my old dad bought a station on the Lower Leura—taken in he was, of course, over the deal, and not realising that it was unsettled country in those days. So the whole family of us started up from the coast to it.... He drove my mother and my two sisters just grown up, and a woman servant—Marty—in a double buggy, and Jerry the bullock driver and me in the dray with him and taught me to drive bullocks. There were stock-boys, two of them riding along side.
'It took us three and a half weeks, to reach the station, averaging about thirty miles a day and camping out each night.
'I'd like you to camp out in the Bush sometime, Lady Bridget, right away from everything—it'ud be an experience that 'ud live with you all your life—My word! It's like nothing else—lying straight under the Southern Cross and watching its pointers, and, one by one, the stars coming up above the gum trees—and the queer wild smell of the gums and the loneliness of it all—not a sound until the birds begin at dawn but the HOP-HOP of the Wallabies, and the funny noises of opossums, and the crying of the curlews and native dogs—dingoes we call 'em.... Well, there! I won't bother you with all that—though, truly, I tell you, it's the nearest touch with the Infinite I'VE ever known.... Lord! I remember the first night I camped right in the Bush—me rolled in my blanket on one side of the fire, and Leura-Jim the black-boy on the other. And the wonder of it all coming over me as I lay broad awake thinking of the contrast between London and its teeming millions—and the awful solitude of the Bush.... I wonder if your blood would have run cold as mine did when the grass rustled under stealthy footsteps and me thinking it was the blacks sneaking us—and the relief of hearing three dismal howls and knowing it was dingoes and not blacks.'
'I'd have loved it' murmured Bridget tensely. 'Go on, please.'
'Well, I've got to come to the tragedy. It began this way through an act of kindness on our journey up. We were going through the bunya-bunya country not far from our station, when out of the Bush there came a black gin with two half-caste girls, she ran up and stopped the buggy and implored my mother's protection for her girls because the Blacks wanted to kill and eat them.'
'O ... oh!' Biddy made a shuddering exclamation.
'Didn't I say the Blacks hadn't everything on their side—I ought to explain though that in our district were large forests of a kind of pine—there's one in this garden,' and he pointed to a pyramidal fir tree with spreading branches of small pointed leaves spiked at the ends, and with a cone of nuts about the size of a big man's head, hanging from one of the branches.
'That's the bunya-bunya, and the nuts are splendid roasted in the ashes—if ever that one gets properly ripe—it has to be yellow, you know—I'll ask Joan Gildea to let me roast it for you. Only it wouldn't be the same thing at all as when it's done in a fire of gum logs, the nuts covered with red ashes, and then peeled and washed down with quartpot tea....'
'Quartpot tea! What a lot you'll have to show me if—if I ever come to your station in the Back-Blocks.'
'Different from your London Life, eh? ... Your balls and dinners and big shows and coaching meets in Hyde Park, and all the rest of the flummery! Different, too, from your kid-glove fox-hunts over grass fields and trimmed hedges and puddles of ditches—the sort of thing you've been accustomed to, Lady Bridget, when you've gone out from your castle for a sporting spree!'
'A sporting spree!' She laughed with a child's merriment, and he joined in the laugh, 'It's clear to me, Mr McKeith, that you've never hunted in Ireland. And how did you know, by the way, that I'd lived in a castle?'
'I was led to believe that a good many of your kind owned historic castles which your forefathers had won and defended with the sword,' he answered, a little embarrassed.
'That's true enough.... But if you could see Castle Gaverick! My old Aunt is always talking of restoring it, but she never will, and if my cousin Chris Gaverick ever does come into it, he'd rather spend his money in doing something else.... But never mind that.... I want to hear about the black gin and the half-caste girls, and if your mother saved them from the cannibals ... and why the blacks wanted to eat their own kind. Dog doesn't eat dog—at least, so they tell one.'
'It's this way. Our blacks weren't regular cannibals, but in the bunya season they'd all collect in the scrubs and feed on the nuts and nothing else for months. Then after a bit they'd get meat-hungry, and there not being many wild animals in Australia and only a few cattle in those outlying districts, they'd satisfy their cravings by killing and eating some of themselves—lubras—young girls—by preference, and, naturally, half-castes, as having no particular tribal status, for choice.'
'Half-castes!' She repeated, a little puzzled.
'These ones had Chinky blood in them—daughters of a Chinaman fossicker.... We're not partial to the Chinese in Australia—only we don't eat them, we expel them—methods just a bit dissimilar, but the principle the same, you see.... Anyway, of course we took on the gin and her girls, and for about a year didn't have any particular trouble at the station with the blacks—though there was a shepherd speared in one of the out-huts.... That was his fault, however, poor devil—the old story—but it don't matter. The trouble came to a head with a black boy, called Leura-Jimmy, that Jerry the bullock-driver brought up with him and left at the station where he went down to the township for store supplies—He took me with him—I told you I was learning bullock-driving....'
McKeith paused, and the dark look came upon his face.
'And Leura-Jimmy?' put in Bridget.
'Oh, he was a fine, big fellow—plausible, too, and could speak pidgin English—he was never weaned from his tribe, and he was a treacherous scoundrel at heart.... As a precautionary measure, my father forbade the blacks to come up to the head-station. But Jimmy fell in love with the eldest of the half-caste girls. She encouraged him at first, then took up with one of the stock-boys....
'It was the bunya season again, and the girls' old tribe, under their King Mograbar—a devil incarnate in a brute—I sent him to Hell afterwards with my own hand and never did a better deed'—McKeith's brown fists clenched and the fury in his eyes blazed so that he himself looked almost devilish for a moment. His face remained very grim and dour as he proceeded.
'Jimmy had got to know through the half-caste girl about our ways and doings, and he made a diabolic plot with King Mograbar to get the blacks into the house.... Every
