A Fringe of Leaves Read Online Free PDF Page A

a corner.
    On and off, the native flower would blaze and intrude. They had found it the day before on one of their enforced rambles round the water’s edge at Sydney Cove, waiting for the breeze which would carry them home.
    There were times when Mr Roxburgh held Captain Purdew responsible for the defected wind; at others he all but accused his wife; he had grown so devilishly irritable.
    ‘Yet nothing would satisfy you’, she had to remind him, ‘but that we should set out on this voyage across the world.’
    ‘Yes,’ he gasped, for the rocky slope robbed him of his breath and made him stumble, ‘it was my idea—and a bad one. I’ll go as far as to—admit —that !’
    Each listened to the ferrule of Mr Roxburgh’s stick striking the adamant colonial stones, in some case scarring them, in others driving them deeper into barren sand, where the activity of ants illustrated in parallel the obtuseness of so much human endeavour.
    Back turned to him as she climbed, Mrs Roxburgh’s voice whipped over her shoulder, as did the fringe of her loosely draped, mazy shawl. ‘Is it too much for you? There’s no need to follow, but I’m determined to see whatever lies beyond this knoll.’
    An infernal wind blowing from the wrong quarter caused her voice to flicker like the landscape; the latter in no way appealed to him.
    ‘I am not impotent!’ he protested, his cheeks sunken as he worked at sucking on the air through blenching nostrils.
    They struggled on, asunder and in silence, until he stood beside her on the rocky headland it had been her intention to conquer. In their common breathlessness they made a show of peering out at the scene spread before and below them.
    ‘I’ve not made you ill?’ she asked from between her teeth.
    He did not answer, but accepted her fingers in his free hand.
    ‘A fine prospect’, he remarked, ‘for the future inhabitants of Sydney’ and added, ‘How happy I should be to wake, and find ourselves at home at Cheltenham.’
    ‘Oh, my dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘We are back where we began! When I thought the sight of this blue water would cure you at least temporarily.’
    Disappointment made her withdraw her hand, to pick at the twigs of a bush which drought and wind had not prevented from putting out flowers: golden harsh-coated teasels alongside grey, hairy effigies of their former splendour.
    In her distraction, Mrs Roxburgh’s fingers dwelt indiscriminately on the live and the dead. ‘You can’t deny that the visit to your brother made you happy.’
    ‘And you scarce at all.’
    ‘My whole concern was not to come between two brothers parted for years, who have a great affection for each other. So I went my own way. I discovered another world. Which will remain with me for life, I expect. Every frond, and shred of bark. My memories are more successful than my sketches. I know your opinion of those, and there I agree with you.’
    In her attempt to lighten the situation colour must have flown into her cheeks; she intercepted that expression which suggested he would have drunk up every drop of an elixir he liked to believe might be his salvation.
    ‘Weren’t you a little jealous?’ he accused.
    Her lips swelled with answers, unutterable because immodest. ‘Mr Roxburgh,’ she managed at last, ‘you sometimes ask the unkindest questions.’
    There was no trace of archness in her addressing him thus: the austerity of his Christian name, together with the difference in their ages, discouraged her from using it.
    ‘You were, in fact, more than a little jealous,’ he persisted in baiting her; ‘and your riding off alone amongst tree-ferns and over mountains made it appear more obvious.’
    Resisting the moan of protest she could feel rising in her throat, she tore one of the tassel-shaped flowers from a gnarled branch, and directed her attention at it. ‘I wonder what they call this extraordinary thing. We must try to find someone who knows.’
    For the moment she was only