The Barrakee Mystery

Chapter Two

The Sin of Silence

MRS THORNTON was a small woman whose fragility of figure was somewhat deceptive. Her age was forty-three, and, although it is not generally politic to state a woman’s precise age, it has here to be done to prove that hardship, constant battling against odds, and self-denial, do not necessarily impair the bloom and vigour of youth. Vitality, both physical and mental, radiated from her plain yet delicately-moulded features.

On the morning following the visit of William Clair to the blacks’ camp she sat sewing on the wide veranda of the Barrakee homestead. The weather was warm, Nature drowsed in the shade, and the only sound came from the big steam-engine operating the pumps.

Now and then Mrs Thornton glanced between the leaves of the morning glory creeper shading the veranda to observe a tall, blue-shirted man digging the earth above the roots of the orange-trees beyond the lawn. Which of the men it was she could not make out, and uncertainty made her irritable.

At the sound of a heavy iron triangle being beaten by the men’s cook, announcing the morning lunch, the worker disappeared. For a moment the mistress of Barrakee allowed the sewing to fall to her lap, and a look of balked remembrance to cloud her brown eyes.

A moment later the house gong was struck, and the little woman went on with her task with a sigh. Came then the sound of ponderous steps on the veranda boards, and round an angle of the house there appeared, carrying a tray, an enormously fat aboriginal woman. Like a tank going into action the gin rolled towards Mrs Thornton, near whom she placed the tray of tea-things on a small table.

Mrs Thornton gazed up at the beaming face with disapproving eyes. Without an answering smile she noted the woman’s flame-coloured cotton blouse, some six times wider at the waist than at the neck, then at the dark blue print skirt, and finally at the bare flat feet. At first the feet were stolid, immobile. Then at the continued steady gaze the toes began to twitch, and at last under the pitiless silent stare one foot began lightly to rub the other.

When Mrs Thornton again looked up, the gin’s eyes were rolling in their sockets, whilst the beaming smile had vanished.

“Martha, where are your slippers?” asked her mistress severely.

“Missy, I dunno,” Martha gasped. “Themslippers got bushed.”

“For twenty years, Martha, have I tried to encase your feet in footwear,” Mrs Thornton said softly, but with a peculiar grimness of tone. “I have bought you boots, shoes and slippers. I shall be very angry with you, Martha, if you do not at once find your slippers and put them on. If they are bushed, go and track them.”

“Suttinly, missy. Metrack um to hell,” came the solemn assurance. Then, bending over her mistress with surprising quickness in one of her avoirdupois, she added in a thrilling whisper:

“King Henry! Hecome back to Barrakee. You ’member King Henry?”

For fully thirty seconds brown eyes bored into black without a blink. The white woman was about to say something when the sound of a wicket-gate beingclosed announced the approach of her husband. The gin straightenedherself and rumbled back to her kitchen.

Almost subconsciously the mistress of Barrakee heard her husband banteringly reprove Martha for the nakedness of her understandings, heard the woman’s mumbled excuses, and with an effort of will regained her composure. She was pouring tea when Mr Thornton seated himself beside her.

“Martha lost her shoes again?” he asked with a soft chuckle.

He was a big man, about fifty years of age. Clean-shaven, his features, burned almost brown, denoted the outdoor man and dweller under a sub-tropical sun. He had clear, deep-grey, observant eyes.

“Wasn’t it Napoleon who, after restoring order in France, tried all he could to make her one of the Great Powers, if not the greatest?” she asked, with apparent irrelevance.

“I believe it was,” agreed the squatter, accepting tea and cake.

“Wasn’t it his ambition, when he had brought chaos to order, to maintain order by a European peace?”

“Well, what of it?” counter-queried Mr Thornton, reminded of his wife’s hero-worship of the great soldier of France.

“Only, that every time he enforced peace on the continent of Europe, to allow his governmental machine to run smoothly, it was constantly being put out of action by the grit of a fresh coalition formed by England. England was his bugbear. Martha’s naked feet are my bugbear.”

“Well, well, we must remember that Martha once was a semi-wild thing,” Thornton urged indulgently. “Doesn’t it ever surprise you that Martha, who has been with us for twenty years, has never wanted to return to her tribe?”

“It does sometimes.”

“It’s the one exception to the rule,” he said. “And that’s that. I suppose you’re now counting the hours?”

“I am. Ralph’s train reaches Bourke at eleven, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. They should be here about three.”

“I quite expect he will have grown enormously,” she said with wistful eyes.

“He will certainly be a man. Nineteen years old yesterday. Even five months makes a big difference to a lad of that age.”

For a while they were silent. Having finished his morning tea, the man lit a cigarette and the woman pensively picked up her sewing. Her boy was coming home from college, and she ached for the feel of his strong arms around her. To her it had been a sacrifice to agree to his spending the last Christmas vacation with friends in New Zealand. She had not seen the boy, whom she passionately loved, for five long months, and was as tremulous as a woman standing on a jetty watching the arrival of her sailor husband’s ship.

“More than once it’s occurred to me,” drawled her life-partner, “that as Ralph is almost of age it would be a wise thing to tell him the truth regarding his birth.”

“No, John… No!”

And before he started the fight Thornton knew he had lost it, seeing the iron will reflected in his wife’s face. That Mrs Thornton was strong-willed, a woman who invariably had her own way, he had known long before marriage. It was that trait of dominance in her character which had attracted him. He had been comparatively poor when the need of a partner was felt first; and, like a wise man, knowing the trials and hardships of the Australian bush, he did not select a weak, clinging woman, doubtless an ornament to a city drawing-room. His choice was reflected by his poise as well as his bank balance.

“But what we have to remember, Ann, is that Ralph one day may find out,” he argued. “Would it not be better for us to tell him gently, than for someone to tell him roughly that he is not your son, but the son of a woman who was our cook?”

“I see neither the reason nor the necessity,” she said, her eyes on the darting needle. “Mary, his mother, is dead. The doctor who brought him into the world is dead. Don’t you remember how ill I was when Ralph was born, ill and nearly mad with grief because my baby died? In her last moments Mary gave him to me. She saw me take the baby with a cry of joy, and cover it with hungry kisses. And when Mary died she was smiling.”

“But-”

“No, no, John. Don’t argue,” she pleaded. “I made him mine, and mine he must be always. If he knows I am not his real mother there will be a difference, there will arise a barrier between him and me, no matter how we try to keep it down.”

The woman’s passionate desire for a baby, and subsequently her sublime love for another woman’s child, had always been a matter of wonder to John Thornton. He, no less than his wife, had been deeply grieved at the death of his day-old heir, and he, with her, had opened his heart to the adopted boy. But he was a man who hated secrets, or subterfuge. His mind would have been relieved of the one burden in his life had his wife agreed to their adopted son being informed of his real parentage. Still he struggled:

“Ralph is too fine a lad to allow the knowledge to make any difference,” he said. “We know that Mary would not name her betrayer to us, but the man, likely enough, is alive and knows our secret. We can never be safe from him. He may come forward any day, probably try to blackmail us. If such a thing should happen, we should be obliged to tell Ralph, and the boy would then be perfectly justified in blaming us for our silence.”

“Mary’s betrayer would have come forward long ago if he intended to get money by blackmail,” she countered.

“But the possibility remains. Again, one day Ralph will marry. It might be Kate, or Sir Walter Thorley’s daughter. Think of the recriminations that would occur then. Can’t you see that absolute frankness now would be better for the lad, and better for us?”

“The past lies buried twenty years deep, John. Ralph is safe. I made him my baby. Do not ask me to put him from me.”

The man gave the sigh of the vanquished. Rising to his feet, he said:

“All right! Have it your own way. I hope it may be for the best.”

“I am sure it will, John,” she murmured. And then, by way of final dismissal of the subject, she changed it. “Who is it working among the orange-trees? Is he a new hand?”

The squatter paused in his walk along the veranda to say:

“Yes. I put him on this morning. I thought I knew him at first, but he says he has been all his life in Queensland. He answers to the name of William Clair.”

Mrs Thornton leaned back in her chair, her eyes closed as though relieved from great strain. And about her firm mouth was the ghost of a smile.