Part 39 (1/2)

'That's true; and I've hurt her deepest of all.'

Mary detected the expression of his face with quick alarm. She had said too much.

'There, there, Jimmy boy,' she said anxiously; 'we mustn't be forgetting that Joy's the strong sort. She'll come again, fresh and rosy and merry as ever--bet your life on it.'

Jim went into the tent that had been his sick-room, and sat for over an hour in deep thought, and his thoughts were all of Aurora. He missed her--missed her at every turn, and in every hour of his convalescence. As a reward for her love and tenderness, he had afflicted her with the greatest bitterness her brave heart could bear. His eyes were fixed upon the floor, and eventually discovered two oval objects half buried in the hard earth. He stooped to pick them up, and found them to be the halves of the locket that contained Lucy Woodrow's miniature. The case had been stamped into the floor with the heel of a boot, the pieces were torn apart, and the portrait ground off the ivory on which it was painted.

With the fragments of the locket in his hand, Jim pursued a new train of thought, but there was no comfort in it. He recalled Joy's words: 'I won't bind the strange man you may be to-morrow.' Her love had been too strong for her philosophy. What of his? Had he ever seriously considered the possibilities of a life wholly apart from her? His mind flew to Lucy, but by no effort could he devote his thoughts to either of the women who had so deeply influenced him.

It was no longer possible to keep the truth about Mike Burton from the invalid, and Mary broke the news to him as gently as she could, The shock seemed to stun Jim's sensibilities for a time. As the numbness wore off, a bitter, blind hatred grew in his heart against the men he chose to regard as Mike's murderers, and he had a ferocious longing for vengeance.

Again law and order, the forces of society, had intervened to embitter him. His subsequent sorrow over his mate was deep and lasting. He felt now that although their friends.h.i.+p had been free of demonstrativeness, it had been warmed with a generous sincerity.

Done awakened one day, with some sense of fear, to the knowledge that he was drifting back into a morbid condition. He found he had bred a disposition to brood over his weakness. The loss of Mike and the disappearance of Aurora were becoming grievances that he cherished with youthful unreason. He determined to rejoin the Peetrees at once, and, although far from being his old self physically, began to make preparations for the return to Jim Crow.

'There's somethin' I'd like you to be doin' fer me afore you go, mate,'

said Ben Kyley to Jim one evening.

'Well, you know I'll do it.

'I reckoned you would. You see, I've been thinkin' of marryin' my wife, an' I'd like you to be bes' man.'

'You've been thinking!' cried Mary. 'No, Jimmy, I've been doing the thinking: Kyley merely agrees. One of these days we're going to build a big hotel in Ballarat, and settle down. It won't be till the rushes peg out, as they're bound to do in time; but certificates of marriage are getting quite common amongst married people here, and we thought it would be as well to be in the fas.h.i.+on.' Mrs. Ben laughed boisterously.

'Well,' said Jim, smiling, 'a couple who disagree as pleasantly as you do can't go far wrong in marrying.'

'The customers at a decent family hotel would expect it, I think,' Mary added soberly.

'Jonathan Prator married his wife a week 'r two back, an' he's skitin'

about it,' grumbled Ben.

So Jim remained for the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Kyley, which was quite a public ceremony. He was Ben's best man, and he gave the rosy bride the prettiest brooches, rings, and bangles he could buy in Ballarat, and left, the blushless couple to the enjoyment of their honeymoon with his warmest blessing. Mary nearly smothered him in a billowy hug as he was trying to thank them for their goodness.

'Leave a kind word for my poor girl,' she said, 'and the minute she comes back I'll write you.'

'Tell her I shall be a miserable devil till I hear of her dancing jigs on Mary Kyley's bar counter again,' said Jim. 'And tell her she wrongs me when she says there is nothing of her in this heart of mine. She is an ineradicable part of it.'

Done found the Peetrees working a fairly profitable mine at Blanket Flat, a sort of tributary field to Jim Crow, and situated about three miles distant from the original rush. Harry stood in with Done, and the two pegged out a claim and set to work; but Jim did not derive the satisfaction he had expected from this return to his friends and his familiar pursuits. His weakness clung to him, and he was subject to pains in the head. His missed Mike more than ever now, and permitted the idea that he had blasted Aurora's happiness to worry him a good deal. He remembered the blithe heartiness of the girl in the early days of their acquaintance, and the image of the pale, worn face he had last seen haunted him with an abiding reproach. He could not enjoy the life, the scenes, and the companions.h.i.+p that had delighted him, and believed the capacity would never come back to him.

He had been on Blanket Flat less than a fortnight when one morning Harry thrust his head into the tent.

'Blowed if there ain't a lady here to see you, Jim!' he said.

'A lady?' Jim's first thought was of Aurora. 'Don't you know her?'

He stepped from the tent as he spoke, and was astonished to find that his visitor was Lucy Woodrow. She was riding a splendid bay horse, and leading a small, st.u.r.dy-looking chestnut, and was dust-stained and tired.

Her face was gray with anxiety. She did not smile as he approached her, but held a letter towards him.

'Read,' she said. 'He says you will understand.'

'But, Lucy, won't you dismount? You are tired.'