style="font-size:15px;"> A faint light in a moonless sky:A voice that from the silent grave
Sounds sad in one long bitter cry.
I know not, sweet, where you may stand,
With shining eyes and golden hair,
Yet I know, I will touch your hand
And kiss your lips somewhere—
Somewhere! Somewhere!—
When the summer sun is fair,
Waiting me, on land or sea,
Somewhere, love, somewhere!”
The second verse was very similar to the first, and when Felix finished a murmur of applause broke from every one of the ladies.
“How sweetly pretty,” sighed Julia. “Such a lot in it.”
“But what is its meaning?” asked Brian, rather bewildered.
“It hasn’t got one,” replied Felix, complacently. “Surely you don’t want every song to have a moral, like a book of Aesop’s Fables?”
Brian shrugged his shoulders, and turned away with Madge.
“I must say I agree with Fitzgerald,” said the doctor, quickly. “I like a song with some meaning in it. The poetry of the one you sang is as mystical as Browning, without any of his genius to redeem it.”
“Philistine,” murmured Felix, under his breath, and then vacated his seat at the piano in favour of Julia, who was about to sing a ballad called, “Going Down the Hill,” which had been the rage in Melbourne musical circles during the last two months.
Meanwhile Madge and Brian were walking up and down in the moonlight. It was an exquisite night, with a cloudless blue sky glittering with the stars, and a great yellow moon in the west. Madge seated herself on the side of the marble ledge which girdled the still pool of water in front of the house, and dipped her hand into the cool water. Brian leaned against the trunk of a great magnolia tree, whose glossy green leaves and great creamy blossoms looked fantastic in the moonlight. In front of them was the house, with the ruddy lamplight streaming through the wide windows, and they could see the guests within, excited by the music, waltzing to Rolleston’s playing, and their dark figures kept passing and re-passing the windows while the charming music of the waltz mingled with their merry laughter.
“Looks like a haunted house,” said Brian, thinking of Poe’s weird poem; “but such a thing is impossible out here.”
“I don’t know so much about that,” said Madge, gravely, lifting up some water in the palm of her hand, and letting it stream back like diamonds in the moonlight. “I knew a house in St. Kilda which was haunted.”
“By what?” asked Brian, sceptically.
“Noises!” she answered, solemnly.
Brian burst out laughing and startled a bat, which flew round and round in the silver moonlight, and whirred away into the shelter of a witch elm.
“Rats and mice are more common here than ghosts,” he said, lightly. “I’m afraid the inhabitants of your haunted house were fanciful.”
“So you don’t believe in ghosts?”
“There’s a Banshee in our family,” said Brian, with a gay smile, “who is supposed to cheer our death beds with her howlings; but as I’ve never seen the lady myself, I’m afraid she’s a Mrs. Harris.”
“It’s aristocratic to have a ghost in a family, I believe,” said Madge; “that is the reason we colonials have none.”
“Ah, but you will have,” he answered with a careless laugh. “There are, no doubt, democratic as well as aristocratic ghosts; but, pshaw!” he went on, impatiently, “what nonsense I talk. There are no ghosts, except of a man’s own raising. The ghosts of a dead youth—the ghosts of past follies—the ghosts of what might have been—these are the spectres which are more to be feared than those of the churchyard.”
Madge looked at him in silence, for she understood the meaning of that passionate outburst—the secret which the dead woman had told him, and which hung like a shadow over his life. She arose quietly and took his arm. The light touch roused him, and a faint wind sent an eerie rustle through the still leaves of the magnolia, as they walked back in silence to the house.
Chapter XXIV.
Brian Receives a Letter
Notwithstanding the hospitable invitation of Mr. Frettlby, Brian refused to stay at Yabba Yallook that night, but after saying good-bye to Madge, mounted his horse and rode slowly away in the moonlight. He felt very happy, and letting the reins lie on his horse’s neck, he gave himself up unreservedly to his thoughts. ATRA CURA certainly did not sit behind the horseman on this night; and Brian, to his surprise, found himself singing “Kitty of Coleraine,” as he rode along in the silver moonlight. And was he not right to sing when the future seemed so bright and pleasant? Oh, yes! they would live on the ocean, and she would find how much pleasanter it was on the restless waters, with their solemn sense of mystery, than on the crowded land.
“Was not the sea
Made for the free—
Land for courts and slaves alone?”
Moore was perfectly right. She would learn that when with a fair wind, and all sail set, they were flying over the blue Pacific waters.
And then they would go home to Ireland to the ancestral home of the Fitzgeralds, where he would lead her in under the arch, with “CEAD MILLE FAILTHE” on it, and everyone would bless the fair young bride. Why should he trouble himself about the crime of another? No! He had made a resolve, and intended to keep it; he would put this secret with which he had been entrusted behind his back, and would wander about the world with Madge and—her father. He felt a sudden chill come over him as he murmured the last words to himself “her father.”
“I’m a fool,” he said, impatiently, as he gathered up the reins, and spurred his horse into a canter. “It can make no difference to me so long as Madge remains ignorant; but to sit beside him, to eat with him, to have him always present like a skeleton at a feast—God help me!”
He urged his horse into a gallop, and as he rushed over the turf, with the fresh, cool night wind blowing keenly against his face, he felt a sense of relief, as though he were leaving some dark spectre behind. On he galloped, with the blood throbbing in his young veins, over miles of plain, with the dark-blue, star-studded sky above, and the pale moon shining down on him—past a silent shepherd’s hut, which stood near a wide creek; splashing through the cool water, which wound through the dark plain like a thread of silver in the moonlight—then, again, the wide, grassy plain, dotted here and there with tall clumps of shadowy trees, and on either side he could see the sheep skurrying away like fantastic spectres—on—on—ever on, until his own homestead appears, and he sees the star-like light shining brightly in the distance—a long avenue of tall trees, over whose wavering shadows
