The new house stood in Webster Street. It was twice as large as the old one, had a garden back and front, a verandah round three sides. When Mahony bought it, and the piece of ground it stood on, it was an unpretentious weather-board in a rather dilapidated condition. The situation was good though — without being too far from his former address — and there was stabling for a pair of horses. And by the time he had finished with it, it was one of those characteristically Australian houses which, added to wherever feasible, without a thought for symmetry or design — a room built on here, a covered passage there, a bathroom thrown out in an unexpected corner, with odd steps up and down — have yet a spacious, straggling comfort all their own.
How glad he was to leave the tiny, sunbaked box that till now had been his home. It had had neither blind nor shutter; and, on his entering it of a summer midday, it had sometimes struck hotter than outside. The windows of his new room were fitted with green venetians; round the verandah-posts twined respectively a banksia and a Japanese honey-suckle, which further damped the glare; while on the patch of buffalo-grass in front stood a spreading fig-tree, that leafed well and threw a fine shade. He had also added a sofa to his equipment. Now, when he came in tired or with a headache, he could stretch himself at full length. He was lying on it at this moment.
Polly, too, had reason to feel satisfied with the change. A handsome little Broadwood, with a ruby-silk and carved-wood front, stood against the wall of her drawing-room; gilt cornices surmounted the windows; and from the centre of the ceiling hung a lustre-chandelier that was the envy of every one who saw it: Mrs. Henry Ocock’s was not a patch on it, and yet had cost more. This time Mahony had virtually been able to give his wife a free hand in her furnishing. And in her new spare room she could put up no less than three guests!
Of course, these luxuries had not all rained on them at once. Several months passed before Polly, on the threshold of her parlour, could exclaim, with an artlessness that touched her husband deeply: “Never in my life did I think I should have such a beautiful room!” Still, as regarded money, the whole year had been a steady ascent. The nest-egg he had left with the lawyer had served its purpose of chaining that old hen, Fortune, to the spot. Ocock had invested and re-invested on his behalf — now it was twenty “Koh-i-noors,” now thirty “Consolidated Beehives”— and Mahony was continually being agreeably surprised by the margins it threw off in its metamorphoses. That came of his having placed the matter in such competent hands. The lawyer had, for instance, got him finally out of “Porepunkahs” in the nick of time — the reef had not proved as open to the day as was expected — and pulled him off, in the process, another three hundred odd. Compared with Ocock’s own takings, of course, his was a modest spoil; the lawyer had made a fortune, and was now one of the wealthiest men in Ballarat. He had built not only new and handsome offices on the crest of the hill, but also, prior to his marriage, a fine dwelling-house standing in extensive grounds on the farther side of Yuille’s Swamp. Altogether it had been a year of great and sweeping changes. People had gone up, gone down — had changed places like children at a game of General Post. More than one of Mahony’s acquaintances had burnt his fingers. On the other hand, old Devine, Polly’s one-time market-gardener, had made his thousands. There was actually talk of his standing for Parliament, in which case his wife bid fair to be received at Government House. And the pair of them with hardly an “h” between them!
From the sofa where he lay, Mahony could hear the murmur of his wife’s even voice. Polly sat the further end of the verandah talking to Jinny, who dandled her babe in a rocking-chair that made a light tip-tap as it went to and fro. Jinny said nothing: she was no doubt sunk in adoration of her — or rather John’s — infant; and Mahony all but dozed off, under the full, round tones he knew so well.
In his case the saying had once more been verified: to him that hath shall be given. Whether it was due to the better position of the new house; or to the fact that easier circumstances gave people more leisure to think of their ailments; or merely that money attracted money: whatever the cause, his practice had of late made giant strides. He was in demand for consultations; sat on several committees; while a couple of lodges had come his way as good as unsought.
Against this he had one piece of ill-luck to set. At the close of the summer, when the hot winds were in blast, he had gone down under the worst attack of dysentery he had had since the early days. He really thought this time all was over with him. For six weeks, in spite of the tenderest nursing, he had lain prostrate, and as soon as he could bear the journey had to prescribe himself a change to the seaside. The bracing air of Queenscliff soon picked him up; he had, thank God, a marvellous faculty of recuperation: while others were still not done pitying him, he was himself again, and well enough to take the daily plunge in the Sea that was one of his dearest pleasures.— To feel the warm, stinging fluid lap him round, after all these drewthy years of dust and heat! He could not have enough of it, and stayed so long in the water that his wife, sitting at a decent distance from the Bathing Enclosure, grew anxious, and agitated her little white parasol.
“There’s nothing to equal it, Mary, this side Heaven!” he declared as he rejoined her, his towel about his neck. “I wish I could persuade you to try a dip, my dear.”
But Mary preferred to sit quietly on the beach. “The dressing and undressing is such a trouble,” said she. As it was, one of her elastic-sides was full of sand.
Yes, Polly was Mary now, and had been, since the day Ned turned up again on Ballarat, accompanied by a wife and child. Mary was in Melbourne at the time, at John’s nuptials; Mahony had opened the door himself to Ned’s knock; and there, in a spring-cart, sat the frowsy, red-haired woman who was come to steal his wife’s name from her. This invasion was the direct result of his impulsive generosity. Had he only kept his money in his pocket!
He had been forced to take the trio in and give them house-room. But he bore the storming of his hard-won privacy with a bad grace, and Mary had much to gloss over on her return.
She had been greatly distressed by her favourite brother’s ill-considered marriage. For, if they had not held Jinny to be John’s equal, what WAS to be said of Ned’s choice? Mrs. Ned had lived among the mining population of Castlemaine, where her father kept a public-house; and, said Richard, her manners were accordingly: loud, slap-dash, familiar — before she had been twenty-four hours under his roof she was bluntly addressing him as “Mahony.” There was also a peculiar streak of touchiness in her nature (“Goes with hair of that colour, my dear!”) which rendered her extremely hard to deal with. She had, it seemed, opposed the idea of moving to Ballarat — that was all in her favour, said Mary — and came primed to detect a snub or a slight at every turn. This morbid suspiciousness it was that led Mary to yield her rights in the matter of the name: the confusion between them was never-ending; and, at the first hint that the change would come gracefully from her, Mrs. Ned had flown into a passion.
“It’s all the same to me, Richard, what I’m called,” Mary soothed him. “And don’t you think Polly was beginning to sound RATHER childish, now I’m nearly twenty-four?”
But: “Oh, what COULD Ned have seen in her?” she sighed to herself dismayed. For Mrs. Ned was at least ten years older than her husband; and whatever affection might originally have existed between them was now a thing of the past She tyrannised mercilessly over him, nagging at him till Ned, who was nothing if not good-natured, turned sullen and left off tossing his child in the air.
“We must just make the best of it, Richard,” said Mary. “After all, she’s really fond of the baby. And when the second comes. . . you’ll attend her yourself, won’t you, dear? I think somehow her temper may improve when that’s over.”
For this was another thing: Mrs. Ned had arrived there in a condition that raised distressing doubts in Mary as to the dates of Ned’s marriage and the birth of his first child. She did not breathe them to Richard; for it seemed to her only to make matters of this kind worse, openly to speak of them. She devoted herself to getting the little family under a roof of its own. Through Richard’s influence Ned obtained a clerkship in a carrying-agency, which would just keep his head above water; and she found a tiny, three-roomed house that was near enough to let her be daily with her sister-in-law when the latter’s time came. Meanwhile, she cut out and helped to sew a complete little outfit (“What she had before was no better than rags!”); and Mrs. Ned soon learned to know on whom she could lean and to whom she might turn, not only for practical aid, but also for a never failing sympathy in what she called her “troubles.”
“I vow your Mary’s the kindest-hearted little soul it’s ever been me luck to run across,” she averred one day to Mahony, who was visiting her professionally. “So common-sense, too — no nonsense about HER! I shouldn’t have thought a gaby like Ned could have sported such trump of a sister.”
“Another pensioner for your CARITAS, dear,” said Mahony, in passing on the verdict. What he did not grieve his wife by repeating were certain bad reports of Ned lately brought him by Jerry. According to Jerry — and the boy’............