A Fringe of Leaves Read Online Free PDF

conscious that his eyes continued looking at or into her; the stab of misery she experienced could not have been sharper.
    ‘And he went after you. To bring you back.’
    ‘Your brother Garnet could not have been kinder. Everybody was very kind. It was unfortunate—foolish of me—to lose my way—and let myself be thrown. Poor Merle was on other occasions the gentlest creature.’
    ‘But Garnet found you. And brought you back.’
    ‘Oh dear, yes! Yes!’
    She almost threw away the flower she was twirling between her fingers, for it had grown sharp-toothed and vicious.
    ‘Won’t you look at me?’ he asked.
    She did so, with the result that they were forced simultaneously into a bungling attempt to prove their love for each other, their lips as bitter-tasting as the leaves they had torn from exotic trees on arrival in an unknown country, their cheeks freshly contoured to fingers which might have been exploring them for the first time. She prayed it would remain thus; she was afraid of what she might find were she ever to arrive at the depths of his eyes.
    When he had mumbled a few last fragmented words, she who usually took the lead when it came to practical moves suggested, ‘We should go back, don’t you think? Perhaps we shall hear we are to sail. Otherwise I’ll begin to suspect that Captain Purdew and Mr Courtney are in league against us.’
    ‘Two such honest men,’ he murmured, his conscience still bruised; and followed her.
    Conscience for conscience, her own had been stricken to discover she disliked her brother-in-law on sight: his cleft chin, the rather too full, lower lip. In addition to aggressive health and spirits, Mr Garnet Roxburgh paraded the assured insolence of a lapsed gentleman.
    ‘I hope you will be happy at “Dulcet”, and consider it your home as long as you are here.’ The exertion of opening a jammed window turned admirable sentiments into a command.
    As the window shot upward she was again conscious of wrists which had repelled her as he sat holding the reins on the drive from Hobart Town. But she must not continue in this most unreasonable dislike. Beyond the window an orchard, its green fruit glistening amongst leaves transparent in a western light, showed every sign of expert husbandry. Again she experienced a twinge, from contrasting in her mind this opulent scene with another in which damsons racked by winds from across the moor clustered with an ancient, woody pear tree at the side of a cottage, in rough-hewn, weather-blackened stone. Her hands might still have been red and chapped. She hid them before realizing her foolishness, then resolved that in future her heart would have no room for unreasonable dislike and envy.
    Until now, far removed from the fat pastures of Van Diemen’s Land, leading her husband over the stony ground of this other, more forbidding landscape, Mrs Roxburgh could only bitterly admit that she had failed in her resolve, and that the moral strength for which she prayed constantly eluded her.
    Thus chastened, she continued stubbing her boots against the stones, until able to turn and announce to Mr Roxburgh, ‘See, my dear? There she is! It was not so far after all.’

    Since a wind from the right quarter proved as elusive as the moral strength for which Mrs Roxburgh prayed, they resumed their life of waiting in the narrow saloon and the improvised cabin at the farther end, and on the evening after the visit of the surveyor and his two ladies, there was only the native flower to trouble memory, or illuminate human frailty. Mrs Roxburgh was inclined to wonder at herself for keeping the golden teasel, but Spurgeon the lugubrious fellow who acted as their steward had provided an earthenware jar in which she had stubbornly arranged her spoil, and there it stood, as stubbornly, its blunt club throbbing with the last light reflected off the water outside.
    When Mr Roxburgh, without interrupting his reading, inquired, ‘Did somebody identify your