# Irralie's Bushranger/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV
NIGHT AND DAY
This was one of Irralie's bad nights. Like most strong characters, the girl had her complement of unexpected weaknesses, and one of these was an irritating inability to sleep in the least difficulty or the smallest vexation of the spirit. Another and a weaker trait was a certain tendency of Irralie's to meet the vexations half-way and to double the difficulties; but this was less generally known; for an unruly imagination was balanced by a reserve almost stoical, and yet little suspected by those who knew only the high-spirited outward girl.
Imagination and reserve were, indeed, characteristics of a nature otherwise breezily courageous and independent to a fault. They were the two quarrelsome elements in ​a harmonious whole. And not for the first time did they pray upon each other to-night and tear the heart of Irralie in two between them.
She imagined, or suspected, so much; and was so ashamed of her suspicions, or imaginations, that she would sooner have died than betray a word of them to living soul. So she reasoned with herself through. the long slow hours, and would prove her visions baseless, only to see them plainer than ever for her pains.
Here was the humor of it. The man was not the man he represented himself to be. Very well; then he must have an object for his imposture; and what possible object could there be? Exposure must follow soon or late, and if robbery were the design, how could impersonation expedite that? Plain robbery was easy enough in the bush, when there was anything to rob; but what was there here? Gold escorts were one thing, sheep stations another. And a drove of pure merinos were surely an unwieldy ​equivalent for a few handfuls of yellow dust.
Again, if it was a case of impersonation, what had become of the impersonated? He must be somewhere—then where? Irralie thought of novels that she had read with plots founded upon this idea; at the bottom of most there was a murder; but murder was the one suspicion which did not plague her on the head of the real or soi-disant Greville Fullarton.
Yet again: in such a case there would be reasonable precautions on the villain's part; but this villain took none. He showed his weapons, and he came just as he was, in his rough bushman's clothes, and with his candid, impudent, dare-devil smile. And at the conjured portrait the girl smiled too, for could a calculating desperado look like that? But the smile froze; for could a man who looked like that be the real owner, and an Earl's son?
No; there was something sinister and wrong and underhand; moreover, the man ​had nearly confessed to her what it was. He had been within an ace of throwing himself upon her mercy! Well, she was thankful he had not done that. Her suspicions she might keep to herself, but not the guilty confidences of the most attractive villain unhung. On the contrary, if she once knew him for that—well, then she would know also how to act.
And yet—and yet—had she not taken his part—taken it actively—already? Instinctively she had kept to herself his possession of arms; instinctively also she had come to his aid with the ready suggestion of a lost overcoat. And what did these instincts mean? She was a girl who looked things in the face; did they mean his innocence or her own infatuation? In an instant she was out of bed, and kneeling in the moonlight, and praying with all her soul that it might be the innocence of the man which alone put her on his side without her will. For she forgot to allow for a certain large, unreasonable chivalry in herself, ever likely to ​create in her a wilful sympathy with the unorthodox and the ungodly; more probably, however, she was unaware of the growth in her heart of this particular weed of original wickedness.
Morning came, and with it a few minutes of fevered sleep; but the girl's dreams were worse than her waking imaginations; they had the added terror of vagueness; and she fled, rather than rose, from her bed. The outer veranda, whereon her room opened, was as still and private as her room itself. From it she saw the red Riverina dawn, across a sea of sand flecked with sage-green salt-bush; and the touch of the dawn upon her face and feet gave her new strength and a first surcease from her shameful suspicions.
And shameful was no word for them a little later, when cold water and clean sunshine had done their work, and the station day had begun with all its immemorial humdrum regularity. It was a Sunday, and the girl knew it by all the old, unmistakable signs. ​On Sundays her young brothers ran up the horses; she heard their spurs in the veranda, their voices thick with biscuit, and finally their ponies cantering toward the horse-paddock gate. Irralie had then just shut her door; and when next she opened it the boys were returning with the drove of horses in a cloud of sand. The thunder of their hoofs was like the charge of cavalry, with stock-whips cracking for musketry. Nor was it possible to see and hear it for the thousandth time and to harbor one moment longer the preposterous notions of the night.
She walked round the house. The Chinaman was smoking his early morning pipe and bringing wood from the wood-heap for the kitchen fire. Irralie was greeted on every hand with the reassurance of the normal and the unromantic. A couple of chairs stood side by side on the veranda, an empty glass within reach of either. It was as though Irralie had seen her father and the owner drain and rise and part for the night ​at the latter's door. A little after she had occasion to pass the door herself, when she heard the owner whistling as he dressed. And a little later yet she met her father in his Sunday suit. Irralie kissed him, but left her palms upon his shoulders, and searched him with a smile that made him wonder what was coming.
"Well, father, what do you think of our friend?"
"Fullarton?"
"Yes."
"A very excellent fellow," declared the manager, with a conviction that brought a thankful flush to the girl's face. "We sat up quite late, and I haven't enjoyed a chat so much for a long time. But, mind you"—and he lowered his voice—"the man's no more like an Earl's son than you or I."
"How do you mean?" asked Irralie, paling in a moment. Luckily she was dealing with no close observer; indeed, this very thought contributed to her pallor: here was also the least suspicious of men.
​"How do I mean?" he said. "Well, it's a bit difficult to explain; I like him, and all that, much better than I expected; but then I expected a lot of gloss, and this fellow has less than none. It's all the jollier—only somehow it doesn't seem quite the thing. Look at his clothes, for instance!"
"He must have picked them up from some tramp and put them on for a joke," said Irralie on the spur. "But I'm glad you like him—and here he is!"
And there he was: in clothes which fitted him uncommonly well to have been picked up in the way suggested, but which looked worse than ever in the full glare of day. He was also unshaven, and a grimy blue from ear to ear; the gross effect, in the words of Mr. Villiers, was decidedly not "quite the thing."
Irralie returned a formal greeting and slipped away; her heart was once more throbbing with the black doubts of the night; and this time it was slowlier stilled. Her father and Fullarton drove off after ​breakfast to look for the lost overcoat. They returned before lunch without it; nor was Irralie surprised. She had known exactly what to expect; and anticipated with confidence the like result of a cognate quest, undertaken by the store-keeper, who had gone with the spring-cart to meet the mail and to bring back the new owner's luggage.
"I only hope it's there," he said to her, with deep meaning,
"I only hope so too!" she replied, with a deeper yet.
"Then in ten minutes you won't know me: I shall be shaved and clothed and in my right mind."
"You are certainly not in it now."
"Indeed?"
"Or you would never tempt Providence as you are doing!"
And the girl turned on her heel, loathing herself for the unpremeditated warning, and him for the inexplicable attraction which compelled the words in her own despite. Then for Irralie it was the night all over ​again—with its suspicions, doubts, arguments, lapses of involuntary introspection, and agonies of acute self-contempt. Only now she could wander and rend her spirit in the open air; she was no longer imprisoned in the dark between burning sheets. The scent of the pines was in her nostrils, the shadows of the pines striped and fluted the whiteness of her cool attire; and to look at her, with bent head and red sunshade and raven hair, her maiden meditations, if not fancy-free, might have been guaranteed free as a child's from grave concern. Yet there was mischief in her feet as in her mind. It led her to the broken column and the lonely grave; and there it held her, still with thought, and gazing at the inscription with eyes that read not; nor ever moving till a breaking twig broke also the spell that bound the girl.