‘I would be most interested to know,’ she faltered, ‘in what way,’ placing her words as though they had been ivory chess-pieces, ‘this Mrs Roxburgh struck you as being — as you said’, Mrs Merivale became aware of the heat of her own breath, ‘a mystery,’ she heard herself practically hiss.
Now that it was out, her own inquisitiveness left her feeling distressingly exposed, a situation intensified by Miss Scrimshaw’s continued failure to express either interest or approval. But no professional pythoness can afford to remain indefinitely silent, and turning at last in the direction of the suppliant she trained on her a pair of eyes, normally piercing and lustrous, but now so far shuttered by the lids, they might not be prepared to illuminate more than half a secret.
‘I cannot give you an exact account, Mrs Merivale,’ she said, ‘of the impression Mrs Roxburgh made on me. Unless — to put it at its plainest — she reminded me of a clean sheet of paper which might disclose an invisible writing — if breathed upon. Do you understand?’
Mrs Merivale did not.
And Miss Scrimshaw said, ‘If I were able to explain away a mystery, then it would no longer be one, would it?’
Such horrid logic confounded Mrs Merivale. ‘Ah,’ she murmured, and her lips hung open in a manner she herself might have found vulgar in anybody else.
‘But’, she pleaded, ‘can you give me no inkling?’ Mrs Merivale’s ‘inkling’ tinkled piteously inside the carriage.
‘I will tell you one thing,’ Miss Scrimshaw vouchsafed. ‘Every woman has secret depths with which even she, perhaps, is unacquainted, and which sooner or later must be troubled.’
Mrs Merivale was terrified, who had never, ever, been ‘troubled’, unless during the journey on a dray into the interior of New South Wales; and would not have dared ask Miss Scrimshaw whether she suspected her too, of having the invisible writing on her.
‘But this Mrs Roxburgh!’ she could not suppress what emerged as a wail.
‘Ah,’ Miss Scrimshaw replied, ‘who am I to say? I only had the impression that Mrs Roxburgh could feel life has cheated her out of some ultimate in experience. For which she would be prepared to suffer, if need be.’
Perhaps it occurred to the sibyl that she was unveiling herself along with Mrs Roxburgh, for she hesitated, then hurried on. ‘Of course, as we all know, any of us may suffer, at any moment, worse than we ever bargained for. And will continue to offer ourselves, out of bravado.’
Mrs Merivale might have remained confused, not to say alarmed, by her friend’s esoteric 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 start for home. Instead he smiled, out of politeness, into the sun, which was lowering itself by now in a cloudless winter sky.
‘Yes?’ he felt bound to encourage, though the colour had gone from his voice.
‘It appears’, the emancipist informed them, ‘that two shepherds in a remote corner of the run had fallen foul of the natives. Some matter — excuse me, ladies — of women.’
The ladies pricked their ears, but hoped it had gone unnoticed. Weren’t their eyes so decently lowered?
Delaney cleared his throat; in other company he would have spat.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘to cut a story short and come to the point however tragical, the two men — honest fellers both of ’em — had just been found, their guts laid open (savin’ the ladies presence). Stone cold, they were, an’ the leg missin’ off of one of ’em — a mere lad from Taunton, Somerset.’
Mrs Merivale might have been impaled; Miss Scrimshaw on the other hand, continued distantly watching a scene, each detail of which filled her with a fascinated horror.
She said finally, ‘It is what some — not all of us — have chosen. To live in this country. Suffering is often a matter of choice.’
Her friend Mrs Merivale was rasping with disgust. ‘Tell him to drive on!’ she asked, or more precisely, ordered her husband. ‘Loathsome savages!’ she gasped.