He was looking where she had directed his attention. ‘That’s a farm all right — at several hours walk, I’d say. That’s Oakes’s, I reckon. And beyond, in the distance, you can see the river. There was never such a vicious snake as Brisbane River.’
His voice might have sounded too flat, too evenly measured, had she given thought to it, but she could not wait to feel the ground under her feet. She slithered down. She was distressed thinking of her hair, still short enough to suggest it had been cropped as punishment for some crime she had committed.
‘Do you suppose they’ll take us for human beings?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked when he had rejoined her.
She could not stop touching her hair, her arms, her lashless eyelids, while he withheld from her the reassurance for which she was hoping. They reached the camp in silence.
Although evening was approaching, it was darker than it should have been; the light, the air foreshowed a storm.
‘At least we have food left over,’ Mrs Roxburgh pointed out. ‘We shall need all our strength for the last lap. Shouldn’t we eat before starting?’
‘Can’t you see there’s a storm’ll break at any moment?’
‘I’m not afraid of storms. There’s been too many.’ She had begun tearing at the left-over emu. ‘Eat!’ she commanded. ‘There’s plenty.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ he mumbled back.
Although tonight she first adopted a finical attitude towards her food, Mrs Roxburgh was soon gobbling the sinewy meat after wiping off a swarm of ants and any maggots. ‘All our strength,’ she repeated between mouthfuls.
He sat neither eating nor watching.
‘Oh, Jack,’ she called from a full mouth, ‘you are not — sulking, are you? Or is it the storm? Surely a man cannot be afraid of thunder and lightning?’
He did not trouble to answer.
Remorse pricked her for taunting him when she was pretty sure of the reason for his silence. She could never match his delicacy. Gluyas’s Ellen a regular gobble-gut — and otherways greedy slut. Self-knowledge caused her first to gulp, then to hiccup unmercifully.
The hiccups became downright violent when she noticed an aged aborigine standing at no great distance. He must have discovered them by accident. Too old and too frightened to effect an immediate retreat he was now fearfully observing them.
Jack Chance lost no time, but tried to make the stranger feel at home by talking with him. The old man replied only by desultory murmurs.
‘What does he want?’ she rasped between her hiccups.
The convict did not interrupt his attempts at conversation. If the aborigine kept his silence, he appeared gravely entranced by his vision of food.
Presently the convict hacked off part of the carcase with his axe. The old man silently accepted the meat, hid it under his bark shift, and left them by walking backwards.
In her nervous state Mrs Roxburgh was exasperated. ‘What did he say?’
‘We couldn’ understand each other good. His tribe is camped farther to the west. So it seems.’
‘But we should have held him!’ Nobody could accuse her of thinking ‘killed’ because they could not read her thoughts, or if they were to, she had grown, most understandably, agitated. ‘Now he will go back, and they will come and murder us unless we make a start at once.’
He reminded her that the blacks feared to travel by night, and that the storm would make them even less inclined.
She might have been convinced and pacified if her opinion of herself had not sunk so low. It was the hiccups too, which continued to rack her, and the swags of cloud billowing black almost upon the crests of the trees, and the wind which had risen, threatening to snap any but the stoutest trunks. She wished she was still the girl who understood the moods of nature through close association with them, or the lady she had studied to become, acquiring along with manners and a cultivated mind a faith in rational man (whether a condemned felon, or even that fragile gentleman her late husband answered this description, she was not sure). In the circumstances Mrs Roxburgh could only crawl inside a bush shelter and hope that Divine Providence would respect her predicament. She might also have wished to remain alone, but could hear Jack Chance the convict crawling in behind her.
Soon afterwards the wind fell. The rain which took over from it lashed at the dry earth and at the twigs and ineffectual leaves overhead. It was not long before the nakedness of the creatures huddled together inside the hut was completely sluiced.
During a pause in the watery onslaught Mrs Roxburgh ventured, ‘We shall never sleep, Jack. We’ll be too soaked and wretched for that. It would be more reasonable to push on and reach the farm.’
Curled on his side, he ignored her.
‘If there is a moon.’ She could not remember how much of a moon they might expect.
What she did see was the lamp standing on a farmhouse sill; she heard the people getting out of bed, running to the door, welcoming one of their own kind.
She chewed at a thumb-nail until she found herself biting on the quick.
‘You’re no company,’ she complained, ‘when we’ve every reason for celebrating.’
At least the rain had poured itself out; the storm was passing; a steely glimmer instead of total obscurity should have heartened the survivors in the hut.
Mrs Roxburgh had survived so much, she yawned and said, ‘I believe I look forward more than anything to my first mouthful of tea — from a porcelain cup.’ Then, to jolly her servant, she asked, ‘Do you enjoy your tay, Jack?’
He could only bring himself to mump, ‘It’s too long since I tasted what you’d call tea. At the settlement, ’twas no more ’n green stuff — sticks — if the crowminder ever smuggled us a pinch.’
‘What else, then,’ she tried again, ‘that you can remember? that you will ask for?’
She might have been coaxing her child, and at last, it seemed, she had roused him into taking an interest. ‘A dish o’ boiled beef. With the wegetables to it. And praps a ’ot dish o’ peas in addition.’
He was a simple man, and she could never help but feel fond of him.
She was smiling to herself for her own munificence as much as for the hearty meal her companion conjured up, when he cut her down. ‘Askin’ is all very well, but receivin’’, he reminded, ‘is a different matter.’
Whereupon, he broke.
She was alarmed to hear him sobbing like this in the dark and wet. ‘But my dear — my darling,’ she was pawing at the little child he had become, ‘you know I’ll make it up to you for all you’ve suffered. Nobody would do more for you,’ she herself was by now crying into the nape of his sopping neck, ‘not even Mab.’
She succeeded in forcing him round until he faced her. She was holding him close, against the wet flaps of her withered breasts: her little boy whom she so much pitied in his hopeless distress.
He did in fact nuzzle a moment at a breast, not like an actual child sucking, more as a lamb bunting at the ewe, but recovered himself to expostulate, ‘Mab is the reason why I’m ’ere in the Colony.’
‘Mab? How?’
‘I killed ’er. I slit ’er throat.’
They were shivering, shuddering, in each other’s arms.
‘That’s why I’m doin’ me life term.’
‘Perhaps there’s a reason’, she chattered, ‘why you’re not to blame.’ If there were not, they would have to find one, that no one should accuse her of complicity, in coupling with this murderer.
‘There’s often reason why the condemned is not to blame, but the law don’t always reckernize it — not what it don’t see written down.’
His arms tightening around her as though to impress an injustice on her, implicated her more closely with his crime.