Sisters | Page 9

his splendid
sea-seasoned constitution, for months, which proved the poignant
insistency of his grief, making thinking a disease instead of a healthy
function. He performed his duties mechanically, rigidly, like an engine
stoked from the outside. He no longer had pleasure or interest in them.
The flavour was gone from life; it had become a necessary burden, to
be borne as best he could. At one time he even questioned the right of
the Moral Law to ask him to bear it, under the circumstances. He used
to look at the blue water beneath him, and long to be beneath it, sharing
the fate of his loved and lost. He did not want to live without her-- he
wanted to die. At twenty-one!
At twenty-three he was a man again, physically and mentally sound,
doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife--a flawless angel in
the retrospect--while finding natural solace in the company of living
women who were also young and fair. The living women were much in
evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from
trying to comfort him. A big fellow, with a square, hard face, and a fist
to fell an ox--that was just the kind of man to call for coddling, apart
from the fact that he was a widower--had been married for as long as
five weeks altogether--with his heart in his wife's grave, and with that
pathetic adjunct, a baby. When he would consent to recognise the world
of affairs again, and the claims of youth and manhood against it, he
found--but of course there is no need to specify all the things he found.
One was a batch of invitations awaiting each arrival of his ship in
port--first two, then four, then half-a-dozen women's notes, begging
him to come to as many hospitable houses for change and rest, and to
"bring the baby". He could not bring the baby, for reasons which he did

not honestly present, as a rule, but which he reluctantly disclosed to
Alice Urquhart one night at Five Creeks. Alice had written one of the
six notes (they were six because it was Christmas time), for she was the
sister of Jim Urquhart, who was the friend of an ex-squatter down on
his luck through droughts, and reduced to balancing ledgers in a
Melbourne office, who was the friend of one of those doctors of
Williamstown whose skill had brought Guthrie Carey to life after he
had been drowned. Jim, having made the acquaintance of the latter,
took his sister to inspect the ship, and to have tea in the mate's cabin;
hence the return visit, which the captain, who loved his chief officer,
stretched a point to sanction.
There were at Five Creeks station, besides Jim, a Mrs Urquhart and
several children; but Alice, the eldest of the family, was the general
manager of her household, ever struggling with her brother, who
maintained it, to lift it and herself out of the ruts in which her father had
left it stuck. She was close on thirty, sad to say, and there were three
girls below her; and nothing happened from year to year, and she was
weary of the monotony. "Do come and see us," she wrote to Guthrie
Carey--one of the finest-looking men she had ever known, not
excepting the splendid Claud Dalzell--"do come and see us, and bring
the baby. Country air will do it good, and the house is full of nurses for
it."
He went himself, out of friendship for Jim, and after dinner sat in the
verandah with Alice, and explained why he had not brought the baby.
Jim had then gone off to doctor a sick horse, and Mrs Urquhart was
putting children to bed.
"I believe," Alice rallied him, "that you thought it INFRA DIG."
He protested earnestly that she was wrong. No, it was not that--not
THAT.
Ignorant of the details of the tragedy of his life, she scented a mystery
about the child. Was it, perhaps, not right in its head, she wondered--or
afflicted with a hare lip?

"Son or daughter?" she ventured cautiously. "A boy," said Guthrie
Carey, still with that unfatherly air of discontent. "Sometimes I wish it
was a girl. She could look after me by-and-by; I could have her trained
to be my housekeeper, and sew my buttons on--that sort of thing, you
know."
"You would have to wait a long time," said Alice, turning admiring
eyes upon his comely person, noting with regret that he could not be
within several years of her own age. "It is quite a young infant, isn't it?"
"Yes; that is--let me see--fifteen months and a little over. Yes, it will be
fifteen months on Thursday since he lost his mother." Time had done
so