A Fringe of Leaves Read Free Page B

confidences, had not her husband, in company with the emancipist Delaney, appeared round the corner of the latter’s house. As always when in any way rattled, Mrs Merivale was materially reinstated by the presence of the man she had married, though she would have preferred not to have him carrying the Toongabbie pork, inelegantly, by the ears of the sack in which it had travelled.
    The two men approached. The emancipist, a reddish, freckled individual, might have behaved obsequiously had he not done so well for himself. Bull-shaped, he was none the less got up in cloth of superior quality with a flash of gold across the waistcoat. If the rim of his neckcloth was soiled, as it was soon possible to observe, it went to show that the habit of acting had survived that of giving orders.
    When the two had shared the last of some masculine joke, and put it away, and Delaney had made his last grab at the sack, the weight of which he only half-intended to take, they arrived at the carriage, where the emancipist stuck in his head, and asked somewhat rudely, Mrs Merivale thought, whether the ladies would step inside for a bite of something.
    ‘Oh dear, no,’ she replied, ‘and the girls waiting to dish up our dinner!’
    From her throne she returned the stare of this preposterous subject, too round-eyed and solemn for the size of the favour he was asking. But the emancipist wasn’t Irish for nothing: foreseeing how he would be received, his mouth had shut in a saucy grin as he reached the end of his proposition.
    ‘The ladies are in low spirits,’ the surveyor thought to explain, ‘after taking their leave of friends on a ship homeward bound.’
    ‘Not I! And scarcely friends,’ Mrs Merivale protested. ‘Nor can I waste sympathy on those who needlessly risk their lives.’
    ‘Then, Miss Scrimshaw is sad,’ her husband would not be put off. ‘My wife is more practical than sentimental. But Miss Scrimshaw too, must leave us soon.’
    Delaney, his eyes grown smaller in concentration, examined these two females, the fat, soft, satiny thing, and the stringy, craftier one in brown whose beak was raised to parry what was only a playful blow on the surveyor’s part. They would never admit him to their world, but it amused the emancipist to regard them as being of his.
    ‘Miss Scrimshaw is for the Old Country? Good luck to her then!’ He laughed softly, and let them interpret it how they pleased.
    Mrs Merivale simmered, not because her friend’s sensibility might have been offended by the interest of a rough, common man, but because a convention had been flouted.
    ‘Far from it,’ Miss Scrimshaw answered with a return to that meekness which did not altogether go with her.
    ‘Miss Scrimshaw is leaving us’, Mrs Merivale condescended, ‘on an extended visit to Moreton Bay—to Mrs Lovell, the Commandant’s wife.’
    Invested by her patroness with grandeur, Miss Scrimshaw should have risen to the occasion, had not all Sydney known (or anyway, its politer circles) that the Commandant had engaged a companion for his wife, exhausted by bearing children in quick succession, and isolated from refined society in a remote and brutal settlement.
    In the circumstances, Miss Scrimshaw was not comforted by the probability that this Irishman was unaware.
    The latter at least realized something was amiss, and had not enough control over his natural propensity for cruelty to resist ruffling the feathers of the two foolish birds before him. He began to look cunning, and to wet his lips, and to turn to the surveyor only half in confidence.
    ‘I did not mention’, he lowered his eyelids, and clicked his tongue, ‘that Mr Isbister arrived but recently from Moreton Bay, after calling in on Mr McGillivray of Murrumbopple, where they told him a tale—not unheard before, worse luck, in the country we live in.’
    The ladies sighed, and smoothed themselves, and prepared for endless men’s talk.
    Mr Merivale would have nodded to the coachman to