She dragged herself out of the ghastly dream into which she had sunk, past caring, and saw the beloved face close to hers, the strong black hair with two white wings in its darkness now, the fine aristocratic features a little more lined, more patient if possible, and the blue eyes looking into hers with love and longing. How had she ever confused Luke with him? There was no one like him, there never would be for her, and she had betrayed what she felt for him. Luke was the dark side of the mirror; Ralph was as splendid as the sun, and as remote. Oh, how beautiful to see him!
"Ralph, help me," she said.
He kissed her hand passionately, then held it to his cheek. "Always, my Meggie, you know that."
"Pray for me, and the baby. If anyone can save us, you can. You're much closer to God than we are. No one wants us, no one has ever wanted us, even you."
"Where's Luke?"
"I don't know, and I don't care." She closed her eyes and rolled her head upon the pillow, but the fingers in his gripped strongly, wouldn't let him go.
Then Doc Smith touched him on the shoulder. "Your Grace, I think you ought to step outside now."
"If her life is in danger, you'll call me?"
"In a second."
Luddie had finally come in from the cane, frantic because there was no one to be seen and he didn't dare enter the bedroom. "Anne, is she all right?" he asked as his wife came out with the Archbishop.
"So far. Doc won't commit himself, but I think he's got hope. Luddie, we have a visitor. This is Archbishop Ralph de Bricassart, an old friend of Meggie's."
Better versed than his wife, Luddie dropped on one knee and kissed the ring on the hand held out to him. "Sit down, Your Grace, talk to Anne. I'll go and put a kettle on for some tea."
"So you're Ralph," Anne said, propping her sticks against a bamboo table while the priest sat opposite her with the folds of his soutane falling about him, his glossy black riding boots clearly visible, for he had crossed his knees. It was an effeminate thing for a man to do, but he was a priest so it didn't matter; yet there was something intensely masculine about him, crossed legs or no. He was probably not as old as she had first thought; in his very early forties, perhaps. What a waste of a magnificent man!
"Yes, I'm Ralph."
"Ever since Meggie's labor started she's been asking for someone called Ralph. I must admit I was puzzled. I don't ever remember her mentioning a Ralph before."
"She wouldn't."
"How do you know Meggie, Your Grace? For how long?" The priest smiled wryly and clasped his thin, very beautiful hands together so they made a pointed church roof. "I've known Meggie since she was ten years old, only days off the boat from New Zealand. You might in all truth say that I've known Meggie through flood and fire and emotional famine, and through death, and life. All that we have to bear. Meggie is the mirror in which I'm forced to view my mortality."
"You love her!" Anne's tone was surprised.
"Always."
"It's a tragedy for both of you."
"I had hoped only for me. Tell me about her, what's happened to her since she married. It's many years since I've seen her, but I haven't been happy about her."
"I'll tell you, but only after you've told me about Meggie. Oh, I don't mean personal things, only about what sort of life she led before she came to
Dunny. We know absolutely nothing of her, Luddie and I, except that she used to live somewhere near Gillanbone. We'd like to know more, because we're very fond of her. But she would never tell us a thing-pride, I think." Luddie carried in a tray loaded with tea and food, and sat down while the priest gave them an outline of Meggie's life before she married Luke. "I would never have guessed it in a million years! To think Luke O'neill had the temerity to take her from all that and put her to work as a housemaid! And had the hide to stipulate that her wages be put in his bank- book! Do you know the poor little thing has never had a penny in her purse to spend on herself since she's been here? I had Luddie give her a cash bonus last
Christmas, but by then she needed so many things it was all spent in a day, and she'd never take more from us."
"Don't feel sorry for Meggie," said Archbishop Ralph a little harshly. "I don't think she feels sorry for herself, certainly not over lack of money. It's brought little joy to her after all, has it? She knows where to go if she can't do without it. I'd say Luke's apparent indifference has hurt her far more than the lack of money. My poor Meggie!" Between them Anne and Luddie filled in the outline of Meggie's life, while Archbishop de Bricassart sat, his hands still steepled, his gaze on the lovely sweeping fan of a traveler's palm outside. Not once did a muscle in his face move, or a change come into those detachedly beautiful eyes. He had learned much since being in the service of Vittorio Scarbanza, Cardinal di Contini Verchese.
When the tale was done he sighed, and shifted his gaze to their anxious faces. "Well, it seems we must help her, since Luke will not. If Luke truly doesn't want her, she'd be better off back on Drogheda. I know you don't want to lose her, but for her sake try to persuade her to go home. I shall send you a check from Sydney for her, so she won't have the embarrassment of asking her brother for money. Then when she gets home she can tell them what she likes." He glanced toward the bedroom door and moved restlessly. "Dear God, let the child be born!"
But the child wasn't born until nearly twenty-four hours later, and Meggie almost dead from exhaustion and pain. Doc Smith had given her copious doses of laudanum, that still being the best thing, in his old-fashioned opinion; she seemed to drift whirling through spiraling nightmares in which things from without and within ripped and tore, clawed and spat, howled and whined and roared. Sometimes Ralph's face would come into focus for a small moment, then go again on a heaving tide of pain; but the memory of him persisted, and while he kept watch she knew neither she nor the baby would die. Pausing, while the midwife coped alone, to snatch food and a stiff tot of rum and check that none of his other patients were inconsiderate enough to think of dying, Doc Smith listened to as much of the story as Anne and Luddie thought wise to tell him.
"You're right, Anne," he said. "All that riding is probably one of the reasons for her trouble now. When the sidesaddle went out it was a bad thing for women who must ride a lot. Astride develops the wrong muscles." "I'd heard that was an old wives' tale," said the Archbishop mildly. Doc Smith looked at him maliciously. He wasn't fond of Catholic priests, deemed them a sanctimonious lot of driveling fools. "Think what you like," he said. "But tell me, Your Grace, if it came down to a choice between Meggie's life and the baby's, what would your conscience advise?"
"The Church is adamant on that point, Doctor. No choice must ever be made. The child cannot be done to death to save the mother, nor the mother done to death to save the child." He smiled back at Doc Smith just as maliciously. "But if it should come to that, Doctor, I won't hesitate to tell you to save Meggie, and the hell with the baby."
Doc Smith gasped, laughed, and clapped him on the back. "Good for you! Rest easy, I won't broadcast what you said. But so far the child's alive, and I can't see what good killing it is going to do."
But Anne was thinking to herself: I wonder what your answer would have been if the child was yours, Archbishop?
About three hours later, as the afternoon sun was sliding sadly down the sky toward Mount Bartle Frere's misty bulk, Doc Smith came out of the bedroom.
"Well, it's over," he said with some satisfaction. "Meggie's got a long road ahead of her, but she'll be all right, God willing. And the baby is a skinny, cranky, five-pound girl with a whopping great head and a temper to match the most poisonous red hair I've ever seen on a newborn baby. You couldn't kill that little mite with an axe, and I know, because I nearly tried."
Jubilant, Luddie broke out the bottle of champagne he had been saving, and the five of them stood with their glasses brimming; priest, doctor, midwife, farmer and cripple toasted the health and well-being of the mother and her screaming, crotchety baby. It was the first of June, the first day of the Australian winter.
A nurse had arrived to take over from the midwife, and would stay until Meggie was pronounced out of all danger. The doctor and the midwife left, while Anne, Luddie and the Archbishop went to see Meggie. She looked so tiny and wasted in the double bed that Archbishop Ralph was obliged to store away another, separate pain in the back of his mind, to be taken out later, inspected and endured. Meggie, my torn and beaten Meggie... I shall love you always, but I cannot give you what Luke O'neill did, however grudgingly.
The grizzling scrap of humanity responsible for all this lay in a wicker bassinet by the far wall, not a bit appreciative of their attention as they stood around her and peered down. She yelled her resentment, and kept on yelling. In the end the nurse lifted her, bassinet and all; and put her in the room designated as her nursery.
"There's certainly nothing wrong with her lungs." Archbishop Ralph smiled, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Meggie's pale hand. "I don't think she likes life much," Meggie said with an answering smile. How much older he looked! As fit and supple as ever, but immeasurably older. She turned her head to Anne and Luddie, and held out her other hand. "My dear good friends! Whatever would I have done without you? Have we heard from Luke?"
"I got a telegram saying he was too busy to come, but wishing you good luck."
"Big of him," said Meggie.
Anne bent quickly to kiss her check. "We'll leave you to talk with the Archbishop, dear. I'm sure you've got a lot of catching up to do." Leaning on
Luddie, she crooked her finger at the nurse, who was gaping at the priest as if she couldn't believe her eyes. "Come on, Nettie, have a cup of tea with us. His Grace will let you know if Meggie needs you."
"What are you going to call your noisy daughter?" he asked as the door closed and they were alone.
"Justine."
"It's a very good name, but why did you choose it?" "I read it somewhere, and I liked it."
"Don't you want her, Meggie?"
Her face had shrunk, and seemed all eyes; they were soft and filled with a misty light, no hate but no love either. "I suppose I want her. Yes, I do want her. I schemed enough to get her. But while I was carrying her I couldn't feel anything for her, except that she didn't want me. I don't think Justine will ever be mine, or Luke's, or anyone's. I think she's always going to belong to herself."
"I must go, Meggie," he said gently.
Now the eyes grew harder, brighter: her mouth twisted into an unpleasant shape. "I expected that! Funny how the men in my life all scuttle off into the woodwork, isn't it?"
He winced. "Don't be bitter, Meggie. I can't bear to leave thinking of you like this. No matter what's happened to you in the past, you've always retained your sweetness and it's the thing about you I find most endearing. Don't change, don't become hard because of this. I know it must be terrible to think that Luke didn't care enough to come, but don't change. You wouldn't be my Meggie anymore." But still she looked at him half as if she hated him. "Oh, come off it, Ralph! I'm not your Meggie, I never was! You didn't want me, you sent me to him, to Luke. What do you think I am, some sort of saint, or a nun? Well, I'm not! I'm an ordinary human being, and you've spoiled my life! All the years I've loved you, and wanted to forget you, but then I married a man I thought looked a little bit like you, and he doesn't want me or need me either. Is it so much to ask of a man, to be needed and wanted by him?" She began to sob, mastered it; there were fine lines of pain on her face that he had never seen before, and he knew they weren't the kind that rest and returning health would smooth away.
"Luke's not a bad man, or even an unlikable one," she went on. "Just a man. You're all the same, great big hairy moths bashing yourselves to pieces after a silly flame behind a glass so clear your eyes don't see it. And if you do manage to blunder your way inside the glass to fly into the flame, you fall down burned and dead. While all the time out there in the cool night there's food, and love, and baby moths to get. But do you see it, do you want it? No! It's back after the flame again, beating yourselves senseless until you burn yourselves dead!"
He didn't know what to say to her, for this was a side of her he had never seen. Had it always been there, or had she grown it out of her terrible trouble and abandonment? Meggie, saying things like this? He hardly heard what she said, he was so upset that she should say it, and so didn't understand that it came from her loneliness, and her guilt. "Do you remember the rose you gave me the night I left Drogheda?" he asked tenderly.
"Yes, I remember." The life had gone out of her voice, the hard light out of her eyes. They stared at him now like a soul without hope, as expressionless and glassy as her mother's.
"I have it still, in my missal. And every time I see a rose that color, I think of you. Meggie, I love you. You're my rose, the most beautiful human image and thought in my life."
Down went the corners of her mouth again, up shone that tense, glittering fierceness with the tang of hate in it. "An image, a thought! A human image and thought! Yes, that's right, that's all I am to you! You're nothing but a romantic, dreaming fool, Ralph de Bricassart! You have no more idea of what life is all about than the moth I called you! No wonder you became a priest! You couldn't live with the ordinariness of life if you were an ordinary man any more than ordinary man Luke does!
"You say you love me, but you have no idea what love is; you're just mouthing words you've memorized because you think they sound good! What floors me is why you men haven't managed to dispense with us women altogether, which is what you'd like to do, isn't it? You should work out a way of marrying each other; you'd be divinely happy!" "Meggie, don't! Please don't!"
"Oh, go away! I don't want to look at you! And you've forgotten one thing about your precious roses, Ralph-they've got nasty, hooky thorns!" He left the room without looking back.
Luke never bothered to answer the telegram informing him he was the proud father of a five-pound girl named Justine. Slowly Meggie got better, and the baby began to thrive. Perhaps if Meggie could have managed to feed her she might have developed more rapport with the scrawny, bad-tempered little thing, but she had absolutely no milk in the plenteous breasts Luke had so loved to suck. That's an ironic justice, she thought. She dutifully changed and bottle-fed the red-faced, red-headed morsel just as custom dictated she should, waiting for the commencement of some wonderful, surging emotion. But it never came; she felt no desire to smother the tiny face with kisses, or bite the wee fingers, or do any of the thousand silly things mothers loved to do with babies. It didn't feel like her baby, and it didn't want or need her any more than she did it. It, it! Her, her! She couldn't even remember to call it her. Luddie and Anne never dreamed Meggie did not adore Justine, that she felt less for Justine than she had for any of her mother's younger babies. Whenever Justine cried Meggie was right there to pick her up, croon to her, rock her, and never was a baby drier or more comfortable. The strange thing was that Justine didn't seem to want to be picked up or crooned over; she quieted much faster if she was left alone.
As time went on she improved in looks. Her infant skin lost its redness, acquired that thin blue-veined transparency which goes so often with red hair, and her little arms and legs filled out to pleasing plumpness. The hair began to curl and thicken and to assume forever the same violent shade her grandfather Paddy had owned. Everyone waited anxiously to see what color her eyes would turn out to be, Luddie betting on her father's blue, Anne on her mother's grey, Meggie without an opinion. But Justine's eyes were very definitely her own, and unnerving to say the least. At six weeks they began to change, and by the ninth week had gained their final color and form. No one had even seen anything like them. Around the outer rim of the iris was a very dark grey ring, but the iris itself was so pale it couldn't be called either blue or grey; the closest description of the color was a sort of dark white. They were riveting, uncomfortable, inhuman eyes, rather blind-looking; but as time went on it was obvious Justine saw through them very well. Though he didn't mention it, Doc Smith had been worried by the size of her head when she was born, and kept a close watch on it for the first six months of her life; he had wondered, especially after seeing those strange eyes, if she didn't perhaps have what he still called water on the brain, though the textbooks these days were calling it hydrocephalus. But it appeared Justine wasn't suffering from any kind of cerebral dysfunction or malformation; she just had a very big head, and as she grew the rest of her more or less caught up to it. Luke stayed away. Meggie had written to him repeatedly, but he neither answered nor came to see his child. In a way she was glad; she wouldn't have known what to say to him, and she didn't think he would be at all entranced with the odd little creature who was his daughter. Had Justine been a strapping big son he might have relented, but Meggie was fiercely glad she wasn't. She was living proof the great Luke O'neill wasn't perfect, for if he was he would surely have sired nothing but sons. The baby thrived better than Meggie did, recovered faster from the birth ordeal. By the time she was four months old she ceased to cry so much and began to amuse herself as she lay in her bassinet, fiddling and pinching at the rows of brightly colored beads strung within her reach. But she never smiled at anyone, even in the guise of gas pains. The Wet came early, in October, and it was a very wet Wet. The humidity climbed to 100 percent and stayed there; every day for hours the rain roared and whipped about Himmelhoch, melting the scarlet soil, drenching the cane, filling the wide, deep Dungloe River but not overflowing it, for its course was so short the water got away into the sea quickly enough. While Justine lay in her bassinet contemplating her world through those strange eyes, Meggie sat dully watching Bartle Frere disappear behind a wall of dense rain, then reappear.
The sun would come out, writhing veils of steam issue from the ground, the wet cane shimmer and sparkle diamond prisms, and the river seem like a great gold snake. Then hanging right across the vault of the sky a double rainbow would materialize, perfect throughout its length on both bows, so rich in its coloring against the sullen dark-blue clouds that all save a North Queensland landscape would have been paled and diminished. Being North Queensland, nothing was washed out by its ethereal glow, and Meggie thought she knew why the Gillanbone countryside was so brown and grey; North Queensland had usurped its share of the palette as well.
One day at the beginning of December, Anne came out onto the veranda and sat down beside her, watching her. Oh, she was so thin, so lifeless! Even the lovely goldy hair had dulled.
"Meggie, I don't know whether I've done the wrong thing, but I've done it anyway, and I want you at least to listen to me before you say no." Meggie turned from the rainbows, smiling. "You sound so solemn, Anne! What is it I must listen to?"
"Luddie and I are worried about you. You haven't picked up properly since Justine was born, and now The Wet's here you're looking even worse. You're not eating and you're losing weight. I've never thought the climate here agreed with you, but as long as nothing happened to drag you down you managed to cope with it. Now we think you're sick, and unless something's done you're going to get really ill."
She drew a breath. "So a couple of weeks ago I wrote to a friend of mine in the tourist bureau, and booked you a holiday. And don't start protesting about the expense; it won't dent Luke's resources or ours. The Archbishop sent us a very big check for you, and your brother sent us another one for you and the baby-I think he was hinting go home for a while-from everyone on Drogheda. And after we talked it over, Luddie and I decided the best thing we could do was spend some of it on a holiday for you. I don't think going home to Drogheda is the right sort of holiday, though. What Luddie and I feel you need most is a thinking time. No Justine, no us, no Luke, no Drogheda. Have you ever been on your own, Meggie? It's time you were. So we've booked you a cottage on Matlock Island for two months, from the beginning of January to the beginning of March. Luddie and I will look after Justine. You know she won't come to any harm, but if we're the slightest bit worried about her, you have our word we'll notify you right away, and the island's on the phone so it wouldn't take long to fetch you back." The rainbows had gone, so had the sun; it was getting ready to rain again. "Anne, if it hadn't been for you and Luddie these past three years, I would have gone mad. You know that. Sometimes in the night I wake up wondering what would have happened to me had Luke put me with people less kind. You've cared for me more than Luke has."
"Twaddle! If Luke had put you with unsympathetic people you would have gone back to Drogheda, and who knows? Maybe that might have been the best course." "No. It hasn't been pleasant, this thing with Luke, but it was far better for me to stay and work it out."
The rain was beginning to inch its way across the dimming cane blotting out everything behind its edge, like a grey cleaver. "You're right, I'm not well," Meggie said. "I haven't been well since Justine was conceived. I've tried to pull myself up, but I suppose one reaches a point where there isn't the energy to do it. Oh, Anne, I'm so tired and discouraged! I'm not even a good mother to Justine, and I owe her that. I'm the one caused her to be; she didn't ask for it. But mostly I'm discouraged because Luke, won't even give me a chance to make him happy. He won't live with me or let me make a home for him; he doesn't want our children. I don't love him -I never did love him the way a woman ought to love the man she marries, and maybe he sensed it from the word go. Maybe if I had loved him, he would have acted differently. So how can I blame him? I've only myself to blame, I think."
"It's the Archbishop you love, isn't it?"
"Oh, ever since I was a little girl! I was hard on him when he came. Poor Ralph! I had no right to say what I did to him, because he never encouraged me, you know. I hope he's had time to understand that I was in pain, worn out, and terribly unhappy. All I could think was it ought by rights to be his child and it never would be, never could be. It isn't fair! Protestant clergy can marry, why can't Catholic? And don't try to tell me ministers don't care for their flocks the way priests do, because I won't believe you. I've met heartless priests and wonderful ministers. But because of the celibacy of priests I've had to go away from Ralph, make my home and my life with someone else, have someone else's baby. And do you know something, Anne? That's as disgusting a sin as Ralph breaking his vows, or more so. I resent the Church's implication that my loving Ralph or his loving me is wrong!" "Go away for a while, Meggie. Rest and eat and sleep and stop fretting. Then maybe when you come back you can somehow persuade Luke to buy that station instead of talking about it. I know you don't love him, but I think if he gave you half a chance you might be happy with him."
The grey eyes were the same color as the rain falling in sheets all around the house; their voices had risen to shouting pitch to be audible above the incredible din on the iron roof.
"But that's just it, Anne! When Luke and I went up to Atherton I realized at last that he'll never leave the sugar while he's got the strength to cut it. He loves the life, he really does. He loves being with men as strong and independent as he is himself; he loves roaming from one place to the other. He's always been a wanderer, now I come to think of it. As for needing a woman for pleasure if nothing else, he's too exhausted by the cane. And how can I put it? Luke is the kind of man who quite genuinely doesn't care if he eats his food off a packing crate and sleeps on the floor. Don't you see? One can't appeal to him as to one who likes nice things, because he doesn't. Sometimes I think he despises nice things, pretty things. They're soft, they might make him soft. I have absolutely no enticements powerful enough to sway him from his present way of life."
She glanced up impatiently at the veranda roof, as if tired of shouting. "I don't know if I'm strong enough to take the loneliness of having no home for the next ten or fifteen years, Anne, or however long it's going to take Luke to wear himself out. It's lovely here with you; I don't want you to think I'm ungrateful. But I want a home! I want Justine to have brothers and sisters, I want to dust my own furniture, I want to make curtains for my own windows, cook on my own stove for my own man. Oh, Anne! I'm just an ordinary sort of a woman; I'm not ambitious or intelligent or well educated, you know that. All I want is a husband, children, my own home. And a bit of love from someone!"
Anne got out her handkerchief, wiped her eyes and tried to laugh. "What a soppy pair we are! But I do understand, Meggie, really I do. I've been married to Luddie for ten years, the only truly happy ones of my life. I had infantile paralysis when I was five years old, and it left me like this. I was convinced no one would ever look at me. Nor did they, God knows. When I met Luddie I was thirty years old, teaching for a living. He was ten years younger than me, so I couldn't take him seriously when he said he loved me and wanted to marry me. How terrible, Meggie, to ruin a very young man's life! For five years I treated him to the worst display of downright nastiness you could imagine, but he always came back for more. So I married him, and I've been happy. Luddie says he is, but I'm not sure. He's had to give up a lot, including children, and he looks older than I do these days, poor chap." "It's the life, Anne, and the climate."
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun; the sun came out, the rainbows waxed to full glory in the steamy sky; Mount Bartle Frere loomed lilac out of the scudding clouds.
Meggie spoke again. "I'll go. I'm very grateful to you for thinking of it; it's probably what I need. But are you sure Justine won't be too much trouble?"
"Lord, no! Luddie's got it all worked out. Anna Maria, who used to work for me before you came, has a younger sister, Annunziata, who wants to go nursing in Townsville. But she won't be sixteen until March, and she finishes school in a few days. So while you're away she's going to come here. She's an expert foster mother, too. There are hordes of babies in the Tesoriero clan." "Matlock Island. Where is it?"
"Just near Whitsunday Passage on the Great Barrier Reef. It's very quiet and private, mostly a honeymoon resort, I suppose. You know the sort of thing-cottages instead of a central hotel. You won't have to go to dinner in a crowded dining room, or be civil to a whole heap of people you'd rather not talk to at all. And at this time of year it's just about deserted, because of the danger of summer cyclones. The Wet isn't a problem, but no one ever seems to want to go to the Reef in summer. Probably because most of the people who go to the Reef come from Sydney or Melbourne, and summer down there is lovely without going away. In June and July and August the southerners have it booked out for three years ahead."
On the last day of 1937 Meggie caught the train to Townsville. Though her holiday had scarcely begun, she already felt much better, for she had left the molasses reek of Dunny behind her. The biggest settlement in North Queensland, Townsville was a thriving town of several thousands living in white wooden houses atop stilts. A tight connection between train and boat left her with no time to explore, but in a way Meggie wasn't sorry she had to rush to the wharf without a chance to think; after that ghastly voyage across the Tasman sixteen years ago she wasn't looking forward to thirty-six hours in a ship much smaller than the Wahine.
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