'No I shouldn't. Choose me one, won't you—two—if I may have one to keep.'
'Why to keep?' She selected two of the dainty gold-tipped cigarettes, and he received them almost as if they had been sacred symbols. One he placed carefully, notwithstanding her laughing protest, in a letter-case which he carried in an inner pocket. She tilted her face forward for him to light the other cigarette at hers, and he did so, always with that suggestion of reverence which sat so oddly upon him. Mrs Gildea watching the pair was immensely struck by it.
He smoked in silence for a few moments, his eyes still apparently fascinated by the glittering initials on the case which now Bridget attached to her chatelaine chain. She threw away the end of her cigarette.
'Well, so you've become the Governor's unconstitutional adviser?' she said. 'Joan, do you know that Luke Tallant kept Mr McKeith talking and smoking in the loggia just below my bedroom for hours last night after every one had gone—I know, because I couldn't get to sleep.'
McKeith had all compunction, 'I'm downright sorry for that, Lady Bridget. I'd have gone away if I'd only guessed your room was up above.'
'Oh, it didn't matter. I'd lots to think about—my own shortcomings and Luke's responsibilities.'
'He takes them—hard,' hazarded McKeith.
'I hope you gave him good advice,' put in Mrs Gildea.
McKeith's lips twisted into a humorous smile.
'Well, I told Sir Luke that I didn't think he need bother himself just yet awhile over that northern tour of inspection he's talking about.'
'He wants to make a kind of royal progress, Joan, through the Back-Blocks,' said Lady Biddy.
'It'll mean a bit of stiff riding,' said McKeith, 'but I've offered to show him round the Upper Leura anyway, and to find him a quiet hack.'
'Rosamond flatly declines the Royal Progress,' said Bridget. 'I'm coming instead of her.'
'Can you ride?' he asked.
'CAN I ride—Can any O'Hara ride! You needn't find ME a quiet hack.'
'All right,' said McKeith. 'But I wouldn't make sure of that by putting you on a buckjumper. It's a bargain then, Lady Bridget.'
'A bargain—what?'
'You promise to pay me a visit when the Governor makes his trip north—when he carries out his notion of establishing military patrols and a Maxim gun or two to put down Trades-Unionism and native outrages in the Back-Blocks?'
Lady Bridget looked at him thoughtfully. He had pulled out his tobacco pouch and was filling a well-worn pipe. 'You won't mind my pipe, will you—as you're a smoker yourself. Mrs Gildea likes it best—And so do I.'
Lady Bridget sniffed his raw tobacco and made a tiny moue. 'Well, if you prefer that—No, of course I don't mind. I see,' she went on, 'that you favour the Maxim gun idea, Mr McKeith. I understand that you're one of the Oppressors; and you and I wouldn't agree on that point.'
Mr McKeith returned her look, all the hardness in his face softening to an expression of almost tender indulgence.
'We'd see about that. I might convert you—but in the Back-Blocks.'
'Or I might convert YOU.'
He shook his head, and then laughed in a shy, boyish way.
'There's no knowing what might happen—but in the Back-Blocks.'
Lady Bridget leaned forward. 'Tell me about them—Tell me about your life in the Bush and what makes you hate the Blacks.'
'What makes me hate the Blacks?' he repeated slowly and the soft look on his face changed now to one very dour and grim.
'You do hate them, don't you? Mr McKeith, the Premier told me something about you last night, which simply filled me with horror. If I believed it—or unless I knew that what you did had been in honourable warfare, I don't think I could bear to speak to you again. Now, I'm going to ask you if it's true.'
'If what is true? Lady Bridget, I'll tell you the truth if you ask me for it, about anything I've done. But—I warn you—ugly things happen—in the Back-Blocks.'
'The Premier said that you were the terror of the natives. He told me about a gun you have with a great many notches on the barrel of it, and he said that each notch represented a black-fellow that you had killed.'
'I never killed a black-fellow except in fair fight, or under lawful provocation. Many a time one of them has sneaked a spear at me from behind a gum tree; and I'd have been done for if I hadn't been keeping a sharp look-out.'
'But you were taking their land,' Lady Bridget exclaimed impetuously, 'you had come, an invader, into their territory. What right had you to do that? You were the aggressor. And you can't judge them by the moral laws of civilised humanity. They fought in the only way they understood.'
'Lady Bridget, there are moral laws, which all humanity—civilised or savage understands. I'm not saying that no white man in the Bush has ever violated these laws, I'm not saying that the Blacks hadn't something on their side. I'm only saying that in my experience—it was the black man and not the white man who was the aggressor. And when you ask me what made me hate the Blacks—well—it isn't a pretty story—but, if you like, I'll tell it to you some time.'
'Tell me now,' she exclaimed, 'Oh, Joan ... Won't your notes keep?'
Mrs Gildea had got up, a sheaf of pencils and a reporter's note book in her hand.
'Yes, for a few minutes. But I've just remembered something I've got to refer to in one of Mr Gibbs' letters. Don't mind me; I'll be back presently.'
McKeith seemed to take no heed of her departure; his eyes were fixed on Lady Bridget; there was in them a light of inward excitement.
'Please go on,' she said, 'I want so much to hear.'
He thought for a few moments, shook the ashes from his pipe and then plunged into his story.
'I've got to go back to when I was quite a youngster—taken from school—I went to St Paul's in the Hammersmith Road—just before I was seventeen. You see before that my father had scraped together his little bit of money and we'd been living in West Kensington waiting while he made out what we were all going to do. He wasn't any great shakes, my father, in the way of birth, and fortune. I daresay, you guessed that, Lady Bridget?'
She tossed her head back impatiently. 'Oh what DOES that matter! Go on, please.'
'He'd been a farmer, Glasgow way'—McKeith still pronounced it 'Glesca,' 'and my mother was a minister's daughter, as good a woman and as true a lady as ever breathed. But that's neither here nor there in what turned out a bad business. Well, we all emigrated out here, and, after a while, my old dad bought a station on the Lower Leura—taken in he was, of course, over the deal, and not realising that it was unsettled country in those days. So the whole family of us started up from the coast to it.... He drove my mother and my two sisters just grown up, and a woman servant—Marty—in a double buggy, and Jerry the bullock driver and me in the dray with him and taught me to drive bullocks. There were stock-boys, two of them riding along side.
'It took us three and a half weeks, to reach the station, averaging about thirty miles a day and camping out each night.
'I'd like you to camp out in the Bush sometime, Lady Bridget, right away from everything—it'ud be an experience that 'ud live with you all your life—My word! It's like nothing else—lying straight under the Southern Cross and watching its pointers, and, one by one, the stars coming up above the gum trees—and the queer wild smell of the gums and the loneliness of it all—not a sound until the birds begin at dawn but the HOP-HOP of the Wallabies, and the funny noises of opossums, and the crying of the curlews and native dogs—dingoes we call 'em.... Well, there! I won't bother you with all that—though, truly, I tell you, it's the nearest touch with the Infinite I'VE ever known.... Lord! I remember