# Our Lady of the Plain

Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
OUR LADY OF THE PLAIN
BY G. B. LANCASTER
Illustrated by Percy F,. S. Spence.
ALITTLE dust-demon lifted itself lazily from the white cross-track beaten out yesterday by the passing of many thousand sheep, and fled over the tussock with desire to reach the purple horizon-hills that make New Zealand's back-bone. But the heat caught it and smothered it with the coming night; and, restlessly, stillness over-crept the plain and lay there. Crandeck's saddle-grip tightened ever so little with the tightening of his heart-cords, and the whistle lost sound on his lips. For the power-charged silence that fell away to the four wide corners of earth was hateful to him. It was the sea, without life, without movement. It was the empty beginning of the world before man moved on the face of it. And, more truly than all, it was the rimless, mysterious country that had clogged his feet through the dreams of many years, and he feared it.
There was evil in the sensuous smell of flax-swamp that rose to windward; and in the clumps of stiff, wide headed cabbage-trees that whispered together with a feverish tapping of dried fronds; and in the tussock that rolled out eternally before the stumbling hoofs to meet the livid sky afar off.
There had been yellow tussock below Harton through all the slow day's grilling, and there had been molten sky above. But he shook the stoop from his shoulders and snuffed the flax-smell in contentment. “It's good to get the reek of town out of your head,” he said. “Jamison talks of draining this swamp. That's the little game he'll get you on to, Crandeck.”
“He's got a hope,” said Crandeck, clacking his stirrup-irons wearily. “I'll have to put in my year, because the dad has stumped up the premium. But I'm not going to stay longer, and I'm not going to learn to farm this ocean. Farm! I'd sooner dig up all England with a toothpick! What's the matter with this country, Harton? It's brutal.”
“It's—hard,” admitted Harton, looking out on the dumb world that held such promise of unturned wealth for them that understood. “But that's because it's young. Wait ten years—twenty. Wait till we've tamed the plain, and cropped it, and——”
His mare blundered into a smudge that was low matakuri scrub, and out into another that was sword-edged Spaniard.
Crandeck drew off, with a grin on his mouth. “D'you want to start on that stuff to-night? For if it's all the same to you I'd sooner get to our diggings first. It'll be as black as sin directly.”
Harton's keen gaze ran out into the night. At all angles was blank dusky distance, jagged with clumps of scrub. “Can't. No perspective left. I guess we'll have to wait.”
“Wait! wait! here!” Crandeck said some private words of his own. “Wait for what? Day?”
“Our Lady. She'll be lighting up directly. You got any matches, Crandeck?”
Crandeck handed them over. And stained-glass visions mixed themselves in his brain with moons and stars and Colonial wax matches.
“Our who?” he said.
“Jamison's daughter. “Harton's rough voice took a softer note. “Our Lady of the Plain, and the only woman for thirty-odd miles round, bar Jamison's old housekeeper. We all call her 'Our Lady.'”
“The only woman!” said the man from England. “Great heavens above! The only woman!”
Harton's saddle creaked. He was gathering himself for direct speech.
“The only woman,” he said. “But you are not the only man, and you needn't begin to think it. There are always half a score fellows knocking about Jamison's station——”
“Quite so. Of course there would be. Where do you come in?”
“That's no business of: yours,” said Harton in sudden curtness. “Look here, Crandeck, it's as well to be plain about this. We—we all think a lot of Our Lady——”
“Sort of syndicate. I see.”
“You don't,” said Harton, losing his temper. “Our Lady is a child, and we are her playmates; and if you dare to put other thoughts into her head, and to wake her out of her childhood, you'll suffer for it, Crandeck. We'll all see to that.”
“I've noticed before that you have a nice way of putting things,” said Crandeck slowly. “I should call you a tactful man, Harton; and I mean to treat your Lady of the Plain exactly as I like. The ruck of you can reckon with me afterwards if you want to. And as we're speaking from the shoulder, I should like to tell you that I think you're infernally impertinent. Now, how much longer have we got to wait for that light?”
“There she goes. Come on. Steer clear of that blind creek.”
“And what is the light?” demanded Crandeck, gaining sweetness from Harton's evident wrath.
“Lantern from a flagstaff on Jamison's hill, for benefit of fellows who would otherwise peg out in Jamison's water-holes. Keep to starboard unless you want to bog the colt, can't you!”
The red eye drew them through the night by its steady glare, Harton biting his beard-corners in trouble of mind, and Crandeck saddle-worn and sulky to the cursing line. Then a low-browed house, with yellow streaming lights and many dogs, and men speaking an uncouth and entirely genial language.
In the following hours Crandeck learnt this talk for the common tongue of the Colonial and run-holder. He watched some half-score lean virile faces through the blue tobacco-reek; and he shivered more than a little at the strenuous life laid before him in all its nakedness by these men, whose talk ran up and down the land as they hammered out the power of this strong country to be, and told of lawless deeds and of the swift justice that came after, in straight words and very forcible.
A clean-faced boy who owned some forty thousand acres of freehold commanded the thickening smoke-reek.
“... An' that's what I think about him! A cattle-puncher, and a rotten bad one at that. I told Payne how he nailed thirty of my calves and banged them along with his own lot 'fore I could get on his trail. What? Certainly I'd know them, bang or no bang; though he swore himself blue over it, the rotter. So I swore——”
“I'll be bound you did, Tony, murmured Verenin, opening an eye.
“Tony, Tony! Come out—quick! I've chased that weka into the koromiko bush by the tin fence, and I can't catch him by myself. Tony! Is he asleep in there, boys?”
Jamison pulled out his pipe. “Lassie ... come here! Harton and Crandeck——”
Our Lady came to the window, and the frank brightness of her young face met Crandeck's curious eyes.
“Did they give you any tea?” she said. “Whisky and pipes! Oh, how very silly! You'll have a head in the morning, you know. Vic always has a head when he comes back from town, You do, Vic, and then you're not fit to speak to. Was he fit to speak to coming up, Crandeck?”
“Don't ask it,” said Payne. “There's never any sense in telling too much truth. Has no one ever taught you that, my lady?”
“You learnt instead,” said Our Lady. And, when the men grinned aloud, she added swiftly underbreath: “Yes, I heard all about it. No, Tony didn't tell me—nor dad. But I want to speak to you in the morning. Letters? Oh, who for? Everybody but me! I wish some one would write me a letter.”
“I will,” volunteered Verenin. “I say, don't laugh. I can. I won an essay prize at school once.”
“'Spect they judged by weight 'stead of merit that year,” said Our Lady demurely, “Tony, are you coming? Hurry up, then. No, you shan't have a gun. You shot three chickens last time.”
The night where the young moon walked took them both with their laughter; and Crandeck lay back in his chair, crossing one foot over his knee.
“The raw material,” he murmured. “And the only woman, Harton said. Oh, Lord! How shall I stand it for a year?”
Then he went to his room, staring through the uncurtained window uneasily. For the wide frank plains that had cradled Our Lady in freedom belonged to no world in which he had part; and yet the great sweep of its silences gripped him with its horrible familiarity.
“I hate it,” he said, and struck his shut hand on the sash, “I hate it—and where have I seen it before?”
In the morning he learned that Jamison's acres lay bare to the welter of sunlight, and to all the winds that blew. For fences were not in those days—neither crops, nor any trees; and kennelled boundary-dogs strung off the invisible line that severed the runs throughout the plains.
Through the forenoon Crandeck blistered his hands over the sinking of a post-hole and jarred his spine with the bar. The sun caught the nape of his neck, and the sweat dropped off him; and the eternal roar of dogs and men down at the sheep-yards irritated him beyond wisdom.
He slung down the bar, and cursed it and all else. Then he looked up and Our Lady's stern young eyes held his.
“I came to bring you some tea——” began Our Lady.
“That's awfully good of you”; but Our Lady stepped back from the eager hands, and poured the jug out on the tussock.
“And you're not going to get it,” she ended evenly.
Crandeck lost speech for the instant. Then he said: “Why the devil——”
“That's why,” said Our Lady, with dignity. “Don't you understand? If Vic or Tony or even Payne heard you talking like that when I'm about they'd punch your head, you know. I can't do that; but I can spill your tea.”
“If you'd be gracious enough to let me know when you intend to be about,” said Crandeck, with a laboured politeness that swelled his neck-veins.
“I'm always about,” said Our Lady cheerfully. “I live here—on the plain, you know. And it tells me such lots of things. It will tell you, too, when you begin to know it. And then I think you won't lose your temper so easily, Crandeck.”
Crandeck shook between laughter and wrath.
“Won't I? That's good hearing. And what sort of things does it tell you?”
Our Lady dropped down under the shade of a manuka-bush, and laid her rosy palms on the naked ground.
“Oh, so much,” she said softly. “When I can feel it breathing like this, you know. It hurts sometimes in the evenings when it's lonely and grey, and crying out things that I can't understand, though I listen and listen. But I learn how to bear pain ... and what to say to the boys when they ask me for advice ... and how to manage Pint-o'-Beer Dick when dad gets angry and wants to thrash him.”
Crandeck gasped, and his brain went giddy. Well he knew the over-seas women of delicate speech and limb; but this young thing with the clear eyes and the straight child-figure was made from a different earth and fire.
“That's all very interesting, I'm sure,” he said, patronisingly. “But you're out of your element here, I think. You ought to go to a finishing-school, and—er—learn the more necessary things. You're too pretty and too young for this sort of life.”
Our Lady came to her feet in one lithe movement, and her eyes blazed. “If you say another word,” she cried, “I'll thump you, Crandeck! It's no business of yours. I love the plain better than anything—'cept dad—and I'll never go away from it. Never! Never! It's beautifuller than Revelation, because it's really here now. And the tussock is like the sea of glass in heaven; and when the mountains are all purple and scarlet and green they are like God's throne, and—and—you're a perfect beast, Crandeck!”
Crandeck flung back his head and laughed. Our Lady, standing her ground with quivering lips, stared in anger. Then the laugh ran into her eyes.
“You don't understand,” she said; “but some day you will. And you don't understand how to dig a post-hole. You'd better put a bucket of water in that hole to soften it a bit if you want to get done to-day. It's a disgraceful-looking thing as it is.”
Crandeck stooped over her with the voice and the face that he used for women alone.
“Thank you,” he said. “And—will you teach me other things, too, my lady?”
“Of course,” said Our Lady frankly, and gave her little firm hand into his blistered one.
In the days that came after Our Lady sparred with Crandeck and with the boys of the plain. She played cricket and rounders with them, and flung her clear treble into the rousing choruses on the wide verandah of nights. And they brought their troubles to her as of old—save the one trouble which Payne growled in Tony's ear one night in hot summer, with Crandeck's violin calling the sweet of the manuka-bloom to listen.
“I don't like that fellow,” said Payne. “He—he's not playing the game, Tony.”
Tony rumpled up his fair hair, and grunted. But his boy-face was undistressed.
“He hasn't an earthly,” he said. “None of us have. You know that well enough. Besides, he's not the sort of chap to take a girl's fancy.”
“Now, when were you a girl to know that?” demanded Payne, and Our Lady's voice rang along the verandah.
“Tony will know. Tony! Come here and tell me why, if a country with mountains is called mountainous, one with hills is not called hilarious? It should be.”
“It would be if you lived there,” said Tony promptly.
“That's no answer! And one with valleys should be valorous——”
“And one with trees treasonable,” added Crandeck.
Our Lady looked at him with a scorn that made Payne breathe a little prayer of thanksgiving. “I wonder why a joke loses its point as soon as it hits you, Crandeck,” she said. “Treasonable has nothing to do with 'us,' has it, Tony?”
“Nothing,” said Tony; and underbreath, “Crandeck, my child, Our Lady isn't quite the kind of stuff you've ever handled before.”
Crandeck saw this for himself in the next week when he went the round of the boundary-dogs with Our Lady. She drove the tip-tray through the creeks and scrub, and Crandeck guarded the water-billies and the piles of raw meat when the grades were steep. The smell of the wide dun plain was growing yet more horrible with the weeks; and with the taste of it in his mouth he spoke to her.
“What's the best thing to do with anything you hate and can't get away from?”
Our Lady glanced at him under the flicker of black eyelashes. “I don't hate many things—'cept two swaggers who tried to burn out our bit of bush, and Jabe Wilson.”
“And what did you do about them?”
“Called my fowls after them—and ate the fowls.”
Crandeck chuckled—immoderately. “Witchcraft, eh? You—you're not going to call a fowl after me, are you?”
“No,” said Our Lady softly. “I—I wouldn't eat it if I did.”
Crandeck's hand came over hers where it shut on the rein. Women and flirtations were necessaries in his life. And that which might come after did not matter. “Why, dear?”
“It would be so tasteless,” explained Our Lady, pulling up. “Throw Rage's meat on the far side of his kennel, Crandeck, or he'll go for you while you're filling his water-tin.”
Over the feeding of the dog Crandeck made a plan. The first move came as he climbed back to the cart. “You know this place as I never shall,” he said. “I want you to interpret it to me. It is very lonely ... and silent ... and—and unheeding; and it's very terrible too. It's been alive once—perhaps it's alive now. And it knows things. It is brutally real.”
Our Lady turned on him with glad glowing face and eyes. “Do you feel that? Oh, do you? Do you? None of the boys understand. But it is alive, you know. I am part of it, and so I am quite sure.”
“You are—part of it?”
Our Lady nodded, crushing a handful of scented manuka-flower to her cheek.
“Yes. And when I die I'll be more still. I mean to be buried up under the flagstaff where I light the lantern at nights. Then the plain will talk to me all the time, and I shall be better able to understand what it says. And I'll tell you, too, if you ask me, and I can hear. But you'll have to shout loud, for there will be so much to hear and think of——”
“You've a funny notion of enjoying yourself,” said Crandeck, looking at her curiously. “At your age you should think of love—not death.”
“But they are both one,” said Our Lady very gravely. Then she wrenched the reins to rightward, and flung up her arm. “There's Tony! Shout, Crandeck, Shout loud! I want him!”
Crandeck shouted without result until Our Lady sprang on the seat beside him, and put her hands to her mouth so that her cry went out over the yellow ripple of distance,
At the third repeat the far-off black rider put his horse about slowly, and Crandeck said: “Doesn't seem in much of a hurry to see you.”
“He isn't,” said Our Lady calmly. “He knows that he's in for a jolly good scolding.”
Crandeck's eyebrows went up. “By Jove! You don't mean to say? Does he let you wig him, then? What's he been doing?”
“I don't think,” said Our Lady, “that it's any business of yours, Crandeck. This is between Tony and me. When I have to lecture you I won't tell the universe either, so you can just smoke your pipe on that.... Well, Tony; I'm going to walk back with you.”
Tony's half-broken colt sheered from the smell of raw meat in the dray, and Tony's good-looking face puckered up.
“'Fraid it's too far for you, dear. And—er—I'm in a tearing hurry, I want to see your father——”
“Dad's over at Kaiti Creek, and he won't be back till evening. It's no good, Tony. Drive on, Crandeck. You'll have to finish feeding the dogs by yourself.”
Tony's clear skin reddened as she dropped to the tussock. “Well, if you will, I suppose you will. But you won't like it, my lady. I'm not going to take that back, and you can't make me.”
You can clear, Crandeck,” said Our Lady; and Crandeck cleared with an inward amazement that led him to ask straight questions of Harton on the very next day.
Harton was re-boarding the side of a cow-house. But he stood up, and gave explanation with all the wisdom that forty years had built in him. And so it was that Crandeck learned how all the wild young lives of the boys of the plain were known to Our Lady. How in her innocence she judged them by her own pure standard of good and evil; how she kept them from sin in many ways that she did not guess at, and gave them heart again through her large sweet wisdom and pity. Pint-o'-Beer Dick was an Honourable, and a hopeless drunkard, in his own right; and that which he never spoke of had stripped from Payne the name of honest man or ever he came across the sea. But before Our Lady they stood to such clean manhood as was left them; and her faith was never shaken, nor her trust betrayed.
“It's quite right,” said Harton, and hunted a nail out of his kit. “It will never smirch her—anything we'd tell her, you know. And she's got a wide grip of things that seems unlike a girl, somehow. She says she gets it from the plain. But ... there are times when a fellow needs just the sort of help that a woman only can give—another man's no use; and who would do it but Our Lady? And she knows how to use a whip when we deserve it, too. By George, she does!”
Crandeck was angry and disgusted. Because it pleased him to take interest in Our Lady, he did not care to hear that these other men held a claim to her.
“It's iniquitous,” he said. “No good can come to a girl who tries to lead a man's life. I shall tell Jamison so.”
“Do,” said Harton dryly. “And you'll get a flea in your ear—or worse.”
“She's too pretty and too—too uncommon for this life. She should marry and go away from it. In England, women aren't allowed to——”
“Don't talk piffle,” said Harton, driving a nail home steadily; “and don't come to me for comfort if you let those ideas out on Our Lady. We can't get along without her, and she can't get along without us. So you'd best take those sheep of yours, and be off home, young man. It's going to be a snorter of a night.”
“I think that very probably I shall marry her and take her away myself,” said Crandeck unheeding.
Harton dropped the hammer, and his face was suddenly stern.
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes.”
“On your honour?”
“What the devil——?”
“Because if you mean it you love her. And if you love her you won't speak to her yet. She's too young, and—she is not ready for that kind of love. Jamison is a blind fool on some heads, and so—we fellows have made a trust of Our Lady, Crandeck.”
“I can break it.”
“But I think you won't. The plain means too much to her yet. You've got a bigger rival there than you understand, my boy. And now, I'd advise you to make tracks and keep a shut mouth, unless you want to get into trouble.”
Very slowly Crandeck tailed his half-score strayed sheep over the crawling sea of tussock, where the nor'wester raved through the raw autumn sunset. He hated the plain through the stern width and length of it; and he hated the life of it, with the grubbing of turnips and the straining of wire-fences and the patient rounding-up of sheep. But above all he hated the clammy fear that it laid on him of nights when it seemed to wake to watching life under the stars. For it was too dear to Our Lady, and too strong, and too real.
Then winter came sudden and savage; and Crandeck spent his evenings in the flax-swamp when the red west sunk to pale opals and greens, and the grey duck and heron. came in to squabble about house-rents with the angular long-legged pukaki. Our Lady shot with him there sometimes, or helped him stalk wekas and wild pig through the manuka and tawhina scrub. And, without doubt, she was an excellent shot.
“You've wiped my eye twice in one little hour,” he said, in the disgust that is the nature of a man at such times, and he shifted the string of duck on his shoulder, looking down on them through the dusk. There were two brace of teal on the string, and they had fallen to Our Lady's gun.
She climbed the little hill, and ran along the track to the flagstaff; and the bite of crystal air had brought the red to her cheeks and the gay laugh to her mouth. “Do you feel like a demon or a god?” she asked. “I feel like both every time I shoot. It is so wonderful and so very terrible to have power over life and death——”
“One god shoots only to wound,” said Crandeck, drawing closer. “With bows and arrows——”
“And he binds up the wounds with true-lovers' knots—which come undone quicker than any others. They are stupidest of all—except granny knots, and—and dad's 'Must nots' when I want to do something and he won't let me. Take the ducks down to the kitchen, Crandeck. I'm going to light the lantern.”
No man dare lay hand on the flagstaff if it was not Our Lady's will, and Crandeck slid down over the frozen tussock until he bumped into Harton with such a force that over-set his temper.
It was near dark among the cabbage-trees and the rows of young gums round the house. Harton caught Crandeck's arm and spoke low, with a gasp. “Where is she?”
“Go and look for her if you want her,” said Crandeck, freeing himself sulkily.
Harton's keen ear picked up the whine of the rope through the sheave as Our Lady lowered the lantern.
“Listen then,” he said. “Jamison's dead. Shot himself over on our boundary, and Tony brought him in just now. He—he—did you know things were going wrong with him? Good God, man; did you know? You're in the house, and if you'd given me a hint I might have—have——” He was sobbing in his throat as a man sobs under the sudden smite of a wound. But Crandeck knew that his sorrow was not for Jamison.
“I can't tell her!” he cried. “What did you come to me for? I can't tell her. I can't! I can't. She'd never forgive any one who brought her such—— Ah, my poor little darling! My poor little girl!”
“No. I suppose I shall have to tell her,” said Harton tonelessly.
“You won't tell her that he——?”
“D'you think I'm a brute?” Then Harton's fury dropped from him. “Go on in, Crandeck. Tony's there, and Verenin, and you might be able to help——”
They did not ask him questions when he brought Our Lady back to the house. Neither did they ask when they sat round the unlighted room, with its jovial comfort broken to the root by the dim sight of the dead man's chair against the wall.
By reason of his age and knowledge, the disentanglement of this thing fell naturally on Harton. He smoked many pipes there, with Our Lady's face before him in the darkness, and his brows furrowed under his sunken eyes. Then a free quick step came down the passage, and a door banged.
Tony sprang up. “She's gone out! Now! And it's freezing hard!” He dragged the heavy tablecloth away with him, and ran out into the night.
From the uncurtained window Crandeck saw him overtake something that ran up the tussock hill, and he whistled surprisedly. “She's gone to light the lantern! To light the lantern! And her father just dead! I thought she'd more heart than that! But, of course, Jamison wasn't any great shakes as a father——”
Payne had lit a candle that he might read The Field. Harton looked at Crandeck in the light of it.
“If you want to break her heart, you'll tell her that. The lantern was Jamison's idea. Isn't that enough for you?”
But it was given to Tony to possess clearer insight; and Our Lady, knowing, spoke to him out of her full heart. “I mustn't forget the plain, Tony; not even for dad. It would know, you see. And it's always been so good to me—and it knows how I love it. Tony, dear—if you'd just go away.... I think I could understand better.... Oh, Tony, Tony, please go away.”
There was a great solemnness in the cold still night, with its high stars and its far, far level horizon. Night is Nature's church, and Tony knew that it was good for Our Lady to say her prayers there. “I'll send Harton up directly, dear—unless you'd like Crandeck?” But Our Lady lay face down on the frozen spines of the tussock, and whispered to the plain in words that Tony did not hear.
At close of the next week Harton called a meeting of the boys at his own station, “Tony and I have been through many things,” he said, standing with his back to the fire; “and I think it's highly probable that poor old Jamison couldn't face the fact that he'd got to the end of his tether. There's not a halfpenny left, boys. The station and stock will pay off part of the debts, and I thought—I guess we can make up the rest between us, eh?”
“Of course,” said Verenin. “But what about Our Lady?”
“I—blest if I know. She has no relations. I suppose—we might send her to school—a boarding school. She's only eighteen.”
There was a groan of mixed derision and pain.
“Our Lady! Harton, you cruel brute! Fancy ruling Our Lady into a dame-school. Besides, we can't get along without her.”
“I think you'll have to—now. Can't you see that things must be different?”
“What d'you mean to do then?” demanded Payne. “S'pose you'll marry her to someone—or to yourself.”
Harton came to his feet as Crandeck swung round.
“S'pose you'd better shut up,” he said sharply. “Do you think any of us would speak to her of marriage with this sorrow upon her? She is more ours to guard than ever. No.... We'll keep the house-block, and Mrs. Rooney and Our Lady shall live on there till we see how things turn out. And no man shall say a word of love to her without consulting us first. We are on our honour, now, boys.”
Tony and Harton bought the land that Jamison's boundary-dogs had guarded, and gave them new places whereon to beat their flint-hard circles in the tussock. But all the plain was Our Lady's birthright, and she ran through the familiar ways of fern and scrub and cabbage-tree, and lighted the lantern for those strayed on the tracks that had passed to others, and so won through the frost-bound silent winter to the sweet mutter of spring wind and the leagues of loosened yellow tossing to the blue horizon.
Then Crandeck called the boys together and spoke to them. “I've waited long enough,” he said. “Now I mean to marry her, and take her away. It's not a life for a girl. It makes no difference what you fellows choose to say; but I wanted to tell you before I spoke to her. You've done so much for her.”
Verenin swore in stolid fashion. “I'm hanged if you're going to patronise us for it,” he said. “She is Our Lady. But she ought to go—though God knows how we'll, get on without her.”
Harton stared through the window at the flushed sunset over the plain. “You're right,” he said slowly. “It's not a life for a girl. She stays out half the night talking to the wind and the cabbage-trees and things. I've heard her. And the joy has gone out of her. But—I don't know if this is the way. She doesn't love you, Crandeck.”
“What does that matter?” said Crandeck, and laughed. “She's only a child. I can make her love me.”
The assurance of the man had nettled Harton from the beginning. “You meant to play with her all you liked, and then ride away. The boot is on the other foot now, I think.”
“Yes,' said Crandeck simply. “I love her.” He gripped his hands on the chair-back, and spoke with difficulty. “If she'll come to me I can make her happy. But you must tell her to come, Harton.”
“I—I! Man, you're mad!”
Then Tony's young voice took command. “Crandeck's got more sense than I gave him credit for. Our Lady will give obedience to you, Harton, if you tell her in the name of us all. But no other earthly power will move her away from the plain.”
“I'll do it,” said Harton; and got up and went out into the night.
And Payne was muttering low to Verenin: “This is a tough bone for any of us. But it's old Harton has to break his teeth over it.”
Next morning Harton tracked Our Lady to the patch of manuka beyond the creek, and she looked up from her half-plaited stock-whip gravely.
“This is the first time I've seen you this week, Vic. And the others are worse. Are you all tired of me now? And I'm so lonely!”
“Dear, we'd give all we have to make you happier. But there's only one way—one way we can do it, my lady.”
“Yes?” she said wearily.
Harton laid his rough hand on her swift-moving fingers. “Listen, dear. It is not good for you to be here any longer. You—are too fanciful ... and it's not a life for a woman. Not for a woman like you. So we have decided it is better for you to marry—to marry one of us——”
“No! no! no! Not that! Never that! You don't understand. “There is only—only——”. She looked over the plain with her lips drawn together, and a sudden unnamed fear shook Harton.
“This is foolishness,” he said sharply. “You are quick flesh with life and love before you. That is dead earth. No, you shall listen. It is dead earth, and you have no part in it. No part! You will do as I tell you, dear. You will marry——”
She put up her hands to hide his bent shoulders and grizzled head. “Not you! Oh, Vic—please don't make me marry you, Vic.”
Harton could not trust his voice at once. “It is Crandeck, dear. He wants to take you away, and we have all decided that you must go. Your father would have wished it, and—there is no other way.”
“Let me stay here! Let me stay! Don't you understand? I am part of the plain, and it is part of me. I shall never care for anything else. I shall never love anything else. It will be always calling—calling in the night; and—I shall come back to it, Vic. I shall come back, if he takes me over the sea——”
“Let him take you and try,” said Harton. “And—my faith, dear—I think it is about time. If you were a boy I should tell you you were talking tommyrot, my lady.”
She turned from him then, her hands hanging loose. All power for fight had gone out of her. “Very well,” she said. “It doesn't matter. You are too strong for me. But—I don't know if you are too strong for—it.”
Then Harton ground his heel into the tussock of the plain, and departed, cursing in his beard.
Harton did not speak of this to any man until the night before Our Lady's wedding, when he and Tony rode home through the night past what had once been Jamison's eastern boundary.
Tony nodded at the bald recital. “Yes,” he said. The plain is not even good arable land to Crandeck. But to her, none of us know a tithe of what it is to her.”
“Don't be a fool! How can it be anything to her?”
“That depends on whether inanimate things have soul-power over humans.”
“Bah!” said Harton; “you're talking drivel.” But he smoked uneasily until Tony brought both horses to a halt with quick hands on the bridle-reins.
“Listen! Great powers above! It's Our Lady singing! Out here! Harton——”
But Harton was peering past the ragged grey cabbage-tree trunks to the open tussock where Our Lady stood with wide arms and her young face clear in the moon.
“Hush!” he said in his throat. “Listen!” And in the silence knowledge rose in him that the plain listened too.
“Good-bye,” sang Our Lady, with a wild high chant that dragged at the heart-strings. “Good-bye, dear wind of the red dawn and the evening. Good-bye, mountains and smell of the flax, and the nor'west that talks to me. It's all done with and dead. Dead, did you know? No more yellow tussock for me; no more of the nights that we love. Dear, did you know? Did you know? Ah, why did you teach me to love you? Why did I ever understand? Call me back, for I'll want you. l want you. Oh—good-bye! Good-bye!”
Harton looked where the mighty bulk of it lay to the moon, with the great regular movement of wind-stirred tussock like breath that quickened the chest of a giant; and the stillness that is not placid, but that tingles with curbed waiting, was about him.
Tony brought Our Lady a crown of white manuka-flowers for her marriage day; and the sun was golden over a golden earth, and over the wide verandah where a little group of men surrounded he white frock which was Our Lady being married to Crandeck.
But when the Presbyterian minister from forty miles away had said all the “Amens,” and Crandeck stooped to kiss his wife before all the boys, the assertive scent of the manuka stung him to sudden jealousy. “Take it off, sweetheart. You've nothing more to do with the plain and its belongings. You're mine, now—mine, and nobody else's. Do you hear?”
“Confound it all!” cried Verenin, “you needn't rub it in like that. You won't forget us, my lady? And I'll let you know how that turnip crop on the swamp turns out.”
Our Lady laughed with her head held high, and her lips white as the broken wreath at her foot. “I'm all right. Yes, I'm ready. Good-bye, boys. Good-bye, Tony, and——”
“I'll remember the light, dear,” said Tony, with close hands on hers.
Then Payne let his team out, and the sea-wind and the smell of the town blew up out of the far distance to greet Our Lady.
Because the day's work had been long, it was nine of the following evening before Tony rode over the half-mile of tussock and swamp to light Jamison's lantern, On the wooden verandah the dead manuka-wreath lay still where Crandeck had flung it, and Tony's eyes were troubled as he climbed the little hill through the windy dark.
At the foot of the flagstaff he stumbled, and fell over something soft that gave to his weight without sound. He felt it over with his hands. Then he knelt upright, and spoke to the march of triumphant wind that was the voice of the plain. “Well—you've got her safe at last! You needn't make such a row about it, need you?”
The spurred boots that brushed the tussock over the hill-crest were Crandeck's, and Crandeck said: “Where is she? I know she's here. She left me. Give her to me, Tony.”
Tony lit the lantern and strung it half-mast. But he did not speak, for the plain had made them understand at last.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1961, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 62 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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