Page:Catherine Carmichael; Or Three Years Running.pdf/4

her, unless it was this dry old man. The young man certainly did not want her. Then in her sorrow she allowed herself to be crushed, in spite of the strength for which she had given herself credit. She was astounded, almost stupefied, so that she had no words with which to assert herself. When she was told that the hard, dry man would find a home for her, she had no reason to give why it should not be so. When she did not at first refuse to be taken away across the mountains, she had failed to realize what it all meant. When she reached Warriwa, and the waters in the pathless, unbridged rivers had not closed over her head,—then she realized it.

She was the man's wife, and she hated him. She had never known before what it was to hate a human being. She had always been helpful, and it is our nature to love those we help. Even the rough men who would lure her father away to drink had been her friends. "Oh, Dick," she would say, to the roughest of the rough, putting her hand prayerfully on the man's sleeve, "do not ask him to-night;" and the rough man would go from the shanty for the time. She would have mended his jacket for him willingly, or washed his shirt. Though the world had been very hard to her, she had hated no one. Now, she hated a man with all the strength of her heart, and he was her husband.

It was good for the man, though whether good for herself or not she could never tell, that he did not know that he was hated. "Now, old woman; here you'll have a real home," he said, as he allowed her to jump out of the buggy in which he had driven her all the way from Christchurch; "you'll find things tidier than you ever had 'em away at Hokitika." She jumped down on the yard into which he had driven, with a bandbox in her hand, and passed into the house by a back door. As she did so a very dirty old woman,—fouler looking, certainly, than any she had ever seen away among the gold-diggings,—followed her from the kitchen, which was built apart, a little to the rear of the house. "So you be the new wife, be ye?" said the old woman.

"Yes; I am Mr. Carmichael's wife. Are you the servant?" "I don't know nothing about servants. I does for 'un,—what he can't do for 'imself. You'll be doing for 'un all now, I guess." Then her husband followed her in and desired her to come and help to unload the buggy. Anything to be done was a relief to her. If she could load and unload the buggy night and day it would be better than anything else she could see in prospect before her. Then there came a Maori in a blanket, to assist in carrying the things. The man was soft and very silent,—softly and silently civil, so that he seemed to be a protection to her against the foul old woman, and that lord of hers, who was so much fouler to her imagination.

Then her home life began. A woman can generally take an interest in the little surroundings of her being, feeling that the tables and the chairs, the beds and the linen are her own. Being her own, they are dear to her and will give a constancy of employment which a man cannot understand. She tried her hand at this, though the things were not her own,—were only his. But he told her so often that they were his that she could not take them to her heart. There was not much there for a woman to love; but little as there was, she could have loved it for the man's sake, had the man been lovable. The house consisted of three rooms, in the centre of which they lived, sleeping in one of the others. The third was unfurnished and unoccupied, except by sheepskins, which, as they were taken by the shepherds from the carcases of sheep that had died about the run, were kept there till they could be sent to the market. A table or two, with a few chairs; a bedstead with an old feather bed upon it; a washing-basin with a broken jug, with four or five large boxes in lieu of presses, made up nearly all the furniture. An iron pot or two and a frying-pan, with some ill-matched broken crockery, completed the list of domestic goods. How was she to love such as these with such an owner for them?

He had boasted that things were tidier there than she had known them at the diggings. The outside of the house was so, for the three rooms fronting on to the wide prairie-land of the sheep-run had a verandah before them, and the place was not ruinous. But there had been more of comfort in the shanty which her father and brothers had built for their home down in the gold-gully. As to food, to which she was indifferent,