My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin [ebook offline .TXT] 📗

become cynical, bitter, and sceptical of there being any disinterested good in human nature. Suffering the cold heart-weariness of this state myself, I felt anxious at any price to save Harold Beecham from a like fate. It would be a pity to let one so young be embittered in that way.

There was a shortcut across the paddocks to a point of the road where he would pass; and with these thoughts flashing through my mind, hatless and with flying hair, I ran as fast as I could, scrambling up on the fence in a breathless state just as he had passed.

“Hal, Hal!” I called. “Come back, come back! I want you.”

He turned his horse slowly.

“Well, Syb, what is it?”

“Oh, Hal, dear Hal! I was thinking too much to say anything; but you surely don’t think I’d be so mean as to care a pin whether you are rich or poor⁠—only for your own sake? If you really want me, I will marry you when I am twenty-one if you are as poor as a crow.”

“It is too good to be true. I thought you didn’t care for me. Sybylla, what do you mean?”

“Just what I say,” I replied, and without further explanation, jumping off the fence I ran back as fast as I had come.

When halfway home I stopped, turned, looked, and saw Harold cantering smartly homewards, and heard him whistling a merry tune as he went.

After all, men are very weak and simple in some ways.

I laughed long and sardonically, apostrophizing myself thus:

“Sybylla Penelope Melvyn, your conceit is marvellous and unparalleled! So you actually imagined that you were of sufficient importance to assist a man through life⁠—a strong, healthy young man too, standing six feet three and a half in his socks, a levelheaded business man, a man of high connections, spotless character, and influential friends, an experienced bushman, a man of sense, and, above all, a man⁠—a man! The world was made for men.

“Ha ha! You, Sybylla, thought this! You, a chit in your teens, an ugly, poor, useless, unimportant, little handful of human flesh, and, above, or rather below, all, a woman⁠—only a woman! It would indeed be a depraved and forsaken man who would need your services as a stay and support! Ha ha! The conceit of you!”

XXV Because?

The Beechams were vacating Five-Bob almost immediately⁠—before Christmas. Grannie, aunt Helen, and uncle Jay-Jay went down to say goodbye to the ladies, who were very heartbroken about being uprooted from Five-Bob, but they approved of their nephew settling things at once and starting on a clean sheet. They intended taking up their residence⁠—hiding themselves, they termed it⁠—in Melbourne. Harold would be detained in Sydney some time during the settling of his affairs, after which he intended to take anything that turned up. He had been offered the management of Five-Bob by those in authority, but could not bring himself to accept managership where he had been master. His great desire, now that Five-Bob was no longer his, was to get as far away from old associations as possible.

He had seen his aunts off, superintended the muster of all stock on the place, dismissed all the female and most of the male employees, and surrendered the reins of government, and as Harold Augustus Beecham, boss of Five-Bob, on Monday, the 21st of December 1896, was leaving the district forever. On Sunday, the 20th of December, he came to bid us goodbye and to arrive at an understanding with me concerning what I had said to him the Sunday before. Grannie, strange to say, never suspected that there was likely to be anything between us. Harold was so undemonstrative, and had always come and gone as he liked at Caddagat: she overlooked the possibility of his being a lover, and in our intercourse allowed us almost the freedom of sister and brother or cousins.

On this particular afternoon, after we had talked to grannie for a little while, knowing that he wished to interview me, I suggested that he should come up the orchard with me and get some gooseberries. Without demur from anybody we set off, and were scarcely out of hearing before Harold asked me had I really meant what I said.

“Certainly,” I replied. “That is, if you really care for me, and think it wise to choose me of all my sex.”

Ere he put it in words I read his answer in the clear brown eyes bent upon me.

“Syb, you know what I feel and would like, but I think it would be mean of me to allow you to make such a sacrifice.”

I knew I was not dealing with a booby, but with a sensible clear-sighted man, and so studied to express myself in a way which would not for an instant give him the impression that I was promising to marry him because⁠—what I don’t know and it doesn’t matter much, but I said:

“Hal, don’t you think it is a little selfish of you to want to throw me over just because you have lost your money? You are young, healthy, have good character and influential connections, and plenty of good practical ability and sense, so, surely, you will know no such thing as failure if you meet the world bravely. Go and be the man you are; and if you fail, when I am twenty-one I will marry you, and we will help each other. I am young and strong, and am used to hard work, so poverty will not alarm me in the least. If you want me, I want you.”

“Syb, you are such a perfect little brick that I couldn’t be such a beggarly cur as to let you do that. I knew you were as true as steel under your funny little whims and contrariness; and could you really love me now that I am poor?”

I replied with vigour:

“Do you think I am that sort, that cares for a person only because he has