Aside from the Hotel Imperial, the Catholic church, school, convent and presbytery were the only brick edifices in Gillanbone, even the big public school having to content itself with timber frame. Now that darkness had fallen, the air had grown incredibly chill; but in the presbytery lounge a huge log fire was blazing, and the smell of food came tantalizingly from somewhere beyond. The housekeeper, a wizened old Scotswoman with amazing energy, bustled about showing them their rooms, chattering all the while in a broad western Highlands accent.

Used to the touch-me-not reserve of the Wahine priests, the Clearys found it hard to cope with Father Ralph’s easy, cheerful bonhomie. Only Paddy thawed, for he could remember the friendliness of the priests in his native Galway, their closeness to lesser beings. The rest ate their supper in careful silence and escaped upstairs as soon as they could, Paddy reluctantly following. To him, his religion was a warmth and a consolation; but to the rest of his family it was something rooted in fear, a do-it-or-thou-shalt-be-damned compulsion.

When they had gone, Father Ralph stretched out in his favorite chair, staring at the fire, smoking a cigarette and smiling. In his mind’s eye he was passing the Clearys in review, as he had first seen them from the station yard. The man so like Mary, but bowed with hard work and very obviously not of her malicious disposition; his weary, beautiful wife, who looked as if she ought to have descended from a landaulet drawn by matched white horses; dark and surly Frank, with black eyes, black eyes; the sons, most of them like their father, but the youngest one, Stuart, very like his mother, he’d be a handsome man when he grew up; impossible to tell what the baby would become; and Meggie. The sweetest, the most adorable little girl he had ever seen; hair of a color which defied description, not red and not gold, a perfect fusion of both. And looking up at him with silver-grey eyes of such a lambent purity, like melted jewels. Shrugging, he threw the cigarette stub into the fire and got to his feet. He was getting fanciful in his old age; melted jewels, indeed! More likely his own eyes were coming down with the sandy blight.

In the morning he drove his overnight guests to Drogheda, so inured by now to the landscape that he derived great amusement from their comments. The last hill lay two hundred miles to the east; this was the land of the black soil plains, he explained. Just sweeping, lightly timbered grasslands as flat as a board. The day was as hot as the previous one, but the Daimler was a great deal more comfortable to travel in than the train had been. And they had started out early, fasting, Father Ralph’s vestments and the Blessed Sacrament packed carefully in a black case.

“The sheep are dirty!” said Meggie dolefully, gazing at the many hundreds of rusty-red bundles with their questing noses down into the grass.

“Ah, I can see I ought to have chosen New Zealand,” the priest said. “It must be like Ireland, then, and have nice cream sheep.”

“Yes, it is like Ireland in many ways; it has the same beautiful green grass. But it’s wilder, a lot less tamed,” Paddy answered. He liked Father Ralph very much.

Just then a group of emus lurched to their feet and commenced to run, fleet as the wind, their ungainly legs a blur, their long necks stretched out. The children gasped and burst out laughing, enchanted at seeing giant birds which ran instead of flying.

“What a pleasure it is not to have to get out and open these wretched gates,” Father Ralph said as the last one was shut behind them and Bob, who had done gate duty for him, scrambled back into the car.

After the shocks Australia had administered to them in bewildering rapidity, Drogheda homestead seemed like a touch of home, with its gracious Georgian façade and its budding wistaria vines, its thousands of rose-bushes.

“Are we going to live here?” Meggie squeaked.

“Not exactly,” the priest said quickly. “The house you’re going to live in is about a mile further on, down by the creek.”

Mary Carson was waiting to receive them in the vast drawing room and did not rise to greet her brother, but forced him to come to her as she sat in her wing chair.

“Well, Paddy,” she said pleasantly enough, looking past him fixedly to where Father Ralph stood with Meggie in his arms, and her little arms locked tightly about his neck. Mary Carson got up ponderously, without greeting Fee or the children.

“Let us hear Mass immediately,” she said. “I‘m sure Father de Bricassart is anxious to be on his way.”

“Not at all, my dear Mary.” He laughed, blue eyes gleaming. “I shall say Mass, we’ll all have a good hot breakfast at your table, and then I’ve promised Meggie I’ll show her where she’s going to live.”

“Meggie,” said Mary Carson.

“Yes, this is Meggie. Which rather begins the introductions at the tail, doesn’t it? Let me begin at the head, Mary, please. This is Fiona.”

Mary Carson nodded curtly, and paid scant attention as Father Ralph ran through the boys; she was too busy watching the priest and Meggie.

4

The head stockman’s house stood on piles some thirty feet above a narrow gulch fringed with tall, straggling gum trees and many weeping willows. After the splendor of Drogheda homestead it was rather bare and utilitarian, but in its appurtenances it was not unlike the house they had left behind in New Zealand. Solid Victorian furniture filled the rooms to overflowing, smothered in fine red dust.

“You’re lucky here, you have a bathroom,” Father Ralph said as he brought them up the plank steps to the front veranda; it was quite a climb, for the piles upon which the house was poised were fifteen feet high. “In case the creek runs a banker,” Father Ralph explained. “You’re right on it here and I’ve heard it can rise sixty feet in a night.”

They did indeed have a bathroom; an old tin bath and a chipped water heater stood in a walled-off alcove at the end of the back veranda. But, as the women found to their disgust, the lavatory was nothing more than a hole in the ground some two hundred yards away from the house, and it stank. After New Zealand, primitive.

“Whoever lived here wasn’t very clean,” Fee said as she ran her finger through the dust on the sideboard.

Father Ralph laughed. “You’ll fight a losing battle trying to get rid of that,” he said. “This is the Outback, and there are three things you’ll never defeat—the heat, the dust and the flies. No matter what you do, they’ll aways be with you.”

Fee looked at the priest. “You’re very good to us, Father.”

“And why not? You’re the only relatives of my very good friend, Mary Carson.”

She shrugged, unimpressed. “I’m not used to being on friendly terms with a priest. In New Zealand they kept themselves very much to themselves.”

“You’re not a Catholic, are you?”

“No, Paddy’s the Catholic. Naturally the children have been reared as Catholics, every last one of them, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“It never occurred to me. Do you resent it?”

“I really don’t care one way or the other.”

“You didn’t convert?”

“I’m not a hypocrite, Father de Bricassart. I had lost faith in my own church, and I had no wish to espouse a different, equally meaningless creed.”

“I see.” He watched Meggie as she stood on the front veranda, peering up the track toward Drogheda big house. “She’s so pretty, your daughter. I have a fondness for titian hair, you know. Hers would have sent the artist running for his brushes. I’ve never seen exactly that color before. Is she your only daughter?”

“Yes. Boys run in both Paddy’s family and my own; girls are unusual.”

“Poor little thing,” he said obscurely.

* * *

After the crates arrived from Sydney and the house took on a more familiar look with its books, china, ornaments and the parlor filled with Fee’s furniture, things began to settle down. Paddy and the boys older than Stu were away most of the time with the two station hands Mary Carson had retained to teach them the many differences between sheep in northwest New South Wales and sheep in New Zealand. Fee, Meggie and Stu discovered the differences between running a house in New Zealand and living in the head stockman’s residence on Drogheda; there was a tacit understanding they would never disturb Mary Carson herself, but her housekeeper and her maids were just as eager to help the women as her station hands were to help the men.

Drogheda was, everyone learned, a world in itself, so cut off from civilization that after a while even Gillanbone became no more than a name with remote memories. Within the bounds of the great Home Paddock lay stables, a smithy, garages, innumerable sheds storing everything from feed to machinery, dog kennels and runs, a labyrinthine maze of stockyards, a mammoth shearing shed with the staggering number of twenty-six stands in it, and yet another jigsaw puzzle of yards behind it. There were fowl runs, pigpens, cow bails and a dairy, quarters for the twenty-six shearers, small shacks for the rouseabouts, two other, smaller, houses like their own for stockmen, a jackaroos’ barracks, a slaughter yard, and woodheaps.

All this sat in just about the middle of a treeless circle whose diameter measured three miles: the Home Paddock. Only at the point where the head stockman’s house lay did the conglomeration of buildings almost touch the forests beyond. However, there were many trees around the sheds, yards and animal runs, to provide welcome and necessary shade; mostly pepper trees, huge, hardy, dense and sleepily lovely. Beyond in the long grass of the Home Paddock, horses and milch cows grazed drowsily.