“Where the banana grows the animal system is indolent, and pampered at the cost of the higher qualities; the man is sensual and cruel.”—Emerson.  
I
T is a blazing winter day in Northern Queensland; a morning when it is quite a pleasure to turn one’s eyes from the sun-scorched, shadowless “open country” outside to the cool, thatched verandah of “Government House” (head station-house), where Mr. Wilson Giles, the owner of Murdaro run, resides. It is particularly grateful to do so to-day, for in addition to the soft green shade of crimson-blossomed Bougainvillias and other northern floral favourites, the presence of a fair female form in a cool, light dress—that sight so dear to men imprisoned in up-country, societyless wilds—lends 144 a double charm to the already attractive shelter from the sun’s rays. The young lady who is now to engage our attention for a brief period is Miss Lileth Mundella, to whose future hopes and ambitions we have already alluded in Chapter V. On the day in question she sits in the shelter of the verandah, slowly rocking herself in a great cane-chair, the embroidery of light and shadow cast by the motionless leaves falling in picturesque chiaroscuric effect upon her handsome, artistically-draped figure.
 
Miss Mundella is in deep thought, and the long, dark lashes of her half-closed eyes are turned earthwards as she gently rocks herself to and fro. In front of the low-eaved station-house, on a withered grass-plot,—a futile attempt at a tennis-lawn,—two of the house cats are bounding in turns over a small brown snake, trying to get an opportunity of breaking the angry reptile’s back with their sharp teeth. Upon the verandah a few emerald lizards are chasing the house-flies; and, looking through the passage to the quadrangle at the back of the house, where the store, bachelors’ quarters, and kitchen buildings are situated, we can see the dark-skinned, brightly-dressed aboriginal “house-gins” as they prowl about, grinning and chattering over the preparation of “tucker long a boss,” or master’s dinner. It is nearly “tiffen time,”—a term for the midday repast copied by Australians from their Anglo-Indian brethren,—and Miss Mundella, who acts as housekeeper to her uncle, having finished her light household duties for the day, is now giving herself up to her thoughts anent the scheme which so nearly concerns our young friend Claude Angland.
 
A casual male observer, with the average amount 145 of discernment and experience of the fair sex, would doubtless have decided in his own mind that this young thinker, with the low forehead and dark, pronounced eyebrows, was pondering over her next new costume, or perhaps of some rival’s successes. For the young lady’s thoughts are evidently intense, and also unpleasant. But neither dress, envy, nor in fact any of those other common troubles that come to ruffle the soft feathers of ordinary maidens’ meditations, ever disturb the firm balanced mind of Miss Lileth Mundella.
 
“I will make myself honoured, obeyed, perhaps even loved, by means of that one talisman that has survived the ages, and can still work efficiently in this extremely practical world in which I find myself. Money alone will give me the social position which will make life worth living. I will strive to make myself rich.” This had been the young lady’s keynote of thought and action since the day when she found herself dependent upon an uncle’s generosity. Much had it marred the original beauty of her pure, ?sthetic soul.
 
In addition to her duties as hostess and commander-in-chief over the native contingent of her widower-uncle’s household, Lileth was also his secretary.
 
The ladies of an up-country squatter’s family very often act in this capacity, for they are generally better educated than the ‘boss,’ and, moreover, have plenty of leisure time.
 
Miss Mundella was glad to find herself in this position of trust, for it afforded her the means she sought of strengthening her hands for the ambitious coup d’état, that she intended to put into practice 146 some day. Already Giles’s niece had profited by the opportunities her secretaryship gave her, by learning far more of her uncle’s past career than that jolly-looking, selfishly-cunning, middle-aged gentleman had any idea.
 
Wilson Giles was afraid of his niece. A fast youth had enervated his mental powers considerably, and without knowing it, he fell by degrees nearly entirely under the almost mesmeric influence of Lileth’s dark eyes and powerful will, whilst yet he fondly half-flattered himself that he was only acting the part of the “generous relation.” The two had only had one serious struggle for supremacy: it was in reference to Miss Mundella’s brother. This young man had held a position in a southern bank for some years, but being discovered in running a nice little private discount and loan business over the “teller’s counter” at which he presided, he was forced to seek fresh fields of labour.
 
Lileth won the battle with her uncle, “hands down,” and her brother became a “rouse about” (apprentice on a run) at Murdaro station.
 
That her uncle was indebted to a large amount to the late Dr. Dyesart she knew well; she believed the two men, also, to be partners in the run. But this was one of the few things she found herself unable to pry fully into. Miss Mundella had taken charge of the letter from the dead explorer, which faithful Billy had curiously brought to the very station his late master had been so much interested in. She had, moreover, carefully opened the packet which contained the message from the dead; not from idle curiosity, but with the idea that it probably contained something147 that would assist her in her plans. The words of the letter she saw at once clearly pointed to three things: firstly, a reparation or gift to be made to some one through the nephew; secondly, a command to this nephew to visit the grave of the writer; thirdly, a suspicion of the honesty of squatters,—possibly a concealed distrust of her uncle Wilson Giles himself.
 
Miss Mundella’s first thoughts were to destroy the letter, but upon consideration she thought she saw in it a means of obtaining further command over her uncle, and so sent it on its road to New Zealand.
 
She must act, and act quickly, for her brother had informed her from Sydney of young Angland’s departure for the north; but before she could move in the matter she must know more of the relations that had existed between Dyesart and her uncle.
 
The young lady is sitting wrapped in these cogitations, oblivious of the snake-hunting cats and meteoric lizards, when we first see her, rocking herself gently under the cool and shady verandah. Presently a light step is heard in the large room whose French windows open upon Miss Mundella’s leafy retreat, and the little figure of an aboriginal girl appears, her dark limbs and cream-coloured gown making her resemble one of those composite statues of bronze and marble.
 
It is Dina, Miss Lileth’s special handmaiden. Caught as a child, she is the sole surviving member of a once great Otero, or tribal-family, which was annihilated by the Black Police some eight years before, at a “rounding-up” of the natives in the neighbourhood.
 
148
 
It is she alone, as we see her, of all the house-gins, or unpaid native women, who are employed about “Government House,” that is decorated with that insignia of civilized female servitude,—a white lace cap; and though Dina looks to-day slightly untidy, one generally sees her glossy, luxuriant locks of jetty hair as neatly stowed away beneath the natty ornament before mentioned as Phyllis of old herself could have desired.
 
Dina stalks slowly towards her mistress, with a grin of respectful humility wrinkling her dark, shiny face, which would be beautiful but for that excessively triangular appendage, her nose. Suddenly, however, remembering that “missie” has threatened her with a flogging if she appears before that lady without her stockings on, she sneaks off again, softly as a bat upon the wing, and presently reappears with her calfless lower limbs clothed in neat white cotton and shod with highly polished shoes.
 
The girl stands for some time with her arms akimbo, and her white-palmed hands resting open upon the waistband of her short gown, meekly waiting for her mistress to notice her. But Miss Mundella’s thoughts are far away. So Dina at last looks round for something with which to while away the time.
 
A large beetle, with tesselated-pavement back and enormous antenn?, presently attracts her attention, and squatting down the dusky maiden plays with it, till the frightened insect escapes through a joint between the floor-boards. However, she soon finds fresh amusement in the troubles of a mantis religiosa, which has foolishly attempted to cross the thin brown stream of hurrying ants that extends from 149 the house to their mound, a hundred yards away. Dina’s childish face beams with fun as she watches the contest. She is not cruel,—few Australian natives delight in seeing pain in any form,—but she is, like many of her sex, white and black, indifferent, that is all; content to be amused, and forgetful of the suffering anything may feel so long as it pleasantly tickles her sense of the humorous. The mantis on the path by the verandah is invulnerable to the ants’ attack, save at two points,—its soft tail and long, facile neck. On the other hand, the mode of warfare employed by those tiny, insect bull-dogs, the emmets, is simplicity itself. Laying hold of whatever part of the intruder’s awkward body happens to come near them, they “freeze on,” their hind legs being used as drag-breaks to impede the mantis’s forward march. The mantis, although covered with busy foes, marches on, with that prayerful aspect—the beseeching, upturned head and pious, folded, hand-like front-legs—that has earned it its name. Ever and anon some enterprising ant ventures to attack the weak points already alluded to of this insect Achilles; then are the lately-folded mandible claws deliberately brought into play, and the enemy is crushed, even as a nut is broken in a pair of nut-crackers.
 
The solemn, preoccupied air of the bigger insect, and the plucky onslaught of its tiny foes, at last cause Dina to forget her state of bondage, also the august presence of her mistress, and she bursts into a merry fit of laughter. Her hilarity, however, ceases as suddenly as it commences.
 
“Dina, what are you doing there?” comes the clear, contralto voice of Miss Mundella.
 
150
 
The culprit stands before “missie” with downcast eyes and trembling figure.
 
“Your cap is half off your head, and your stockings are coming down. You have forgotten to tie your shoe-laces. And why have you not an apron on? Don’t you remember the flogging you received for forgetting what I told you about your coming to me in an untidy state? Be off and get yourself straight at once, and hurry that lazy Sophy with tiffen. Marmie (master) will soon be back.”
 
Miss Lileth always refrains from employing that foolish pigeon-English that generally obtains amongst Australian settlers in their conversations with aborigines. And she has found herself perfectly understood and implicitly obeyed since she first arrived at the station, and established her authority by having the house-gins flogged for the slightest misbehaviour, till they were thoroughly “broken into her ways,” as she pleasantly termed it.
 
Dina, who had come to ask her mistress for leave of absence for the next day, is afraid to do so now, and instead bursts into a theatrical cry, with her knuckles rubbing her eyes and tears rolling down her ludicrously-wrinkled face and dusky bosom. The moment the girl thinks herself out of sight, however, she is transformed into a laughing little nigger once more.
 
She stands in the passage giggling with all her might at the sight of the youngest house-gin, Lucy, ?tat ten summers, who out in the quadrangle at the back is up to one of her favourite tricks. This consists of imitating the ungraceful waddle of that head of the culinary department, “Terrible Billy,” the old man-cook.
 
151
 
Poor little, large-mouthed, wriggling Lucy loves to get behind the spare, hardship-twisted, little old man as he crosses the yard, and burlesque his every action, to the delight of the black heads that appear at the doors and windows, and grin white-teethed plaudits at the little actress’s histrionic powers.
 
Every action of Lucy’s lithe little body, every gleam of her cunning little black eyes, was wicked to a degree. Needless to say, her powers of mimicry were perfect. Nothing escaped her active examination. To see the suddenness with which she could flash from merriment to passive stupidity when discovered in her pranks, or when Terrible Billy—a harmless, old periodical-drunkard retainer of Mr. Giles, whose awkward, stumbling gait she imitated exactly—turned round, was worth a good deal. Her bended little body shaking with bubbling merriment in her single garment of an old gown; the thin, ugly little face, against which her tiny black hands are pressed, as if to stifle the sound of her giggles, whilst she hobbles after the dilapidated old model; and then when he turns, flash! Lucy has changed as quickly into a dull, sad-looking child, who has apparently never known what laughter means, and has thoughts for nothing evidently but her work, to which she is sullenly creeping when “the Terrible” changes his position, and looks suspiciously at her with his bleared old eyes.
 
Dina is looking at and enjoying the fun, and quick as both she and Lucy are, they are caught by Miss Mundella, who has followed her untidy handmaid to the door.
 
Lileth says nothing, but rebukes the laggard Dina with a look so fraught with cruel meaning that the152 black girl melts into real tears this time, as her mistress returns to her seat on the verandah.
 
The sound of wheels is now heard approaching, and a buck-board buggy (a kind of light chaise) appears, driven by an elderly gentleman, with a very red face and very white linen suit and hat.
 
The trap is pulled up near the house, and the driver, taking a boatswain’s whistle from his pocket, blows a couple of shrill notes thereon, when two native boys, in dirty moleskin trousers turned up to the knee and grey flannel shirts, hasten up and take their station at the horses’ heads.
 
The occupant of the buggy, however, does not release the reins, but, calling up first one boy and then the other, hits each a couple of stinging cuts with his driving whip round their bare legs, and makes the recipients roar with agony.
 
“I’ll teach you to keep me waiting, you black beggars!” the red-faced man roars. “Couldn’t you hear me coming? Now, Tarbrush, yer’d better look out, for, swelp me, but if I have any more of your durned laziness I’ll flay you alive, like I did your cursed brother Bingo!”
 
“Now, look alive, and take the mare and water her,” the speaker continues in a calmer voice, “and mind you put a soft pair of hobbles on her. You can let Joe go in the horse paddock. It’s your turn, Dandie, to get the horses to-morrow, and if you keep me a minute after seven o’clock I’ll loosen some of your black hide, swelp me if I don’t.”
 
The speaker, who is Mr. Wilson Giles, now gets out of the trap, and taking his whip in one hand and a revolver that he always has with him in the buggy153 in the other, he toddles with the usual short steps of a bushman to the house, just nodding a brief “good-morning” to his niece as he crosses the verandah.
 
Mr. Giles is, as we have said, an elderly man, but he has rather grown old through his kind of life than the number of his years. A somewhat corpulent man too is he, with a heavy, sensual countenance, on the sides of which, in pale contrast to his scarlet face, are ragged, light-red whiskers. The expression upon this gentleman’s face before strangers is generally either a look of suspicious cunning or an affected one of jolly frankness,—the latter having once formed an ample cloak for many a mean action, but, being now worn threadbare, is less useful than its owner still fondly imagines it to be.
 
After copious “nips” of whisky and soda-water, Mr. Giles presently throws himself into a chair before the elegantly provisioned table, where his niece and a middle-aged gentleman have already taken their places, and immediately betrays the fact, by the impartial way in which he thrusts his knife into meat, butter, cheese, and preserves, that he is either an eccentric or an ill-educated man.
 
“Come outside, I want to speak to you,” he grunts to his niece, when he has finished a very rapid repast, quite ignoring throughout the presence of the third person at the table. This is Mr. Cummer............