A Little Bush Maid | Page 3

of her own devising. Norah hated rats, but nothing could induce her to wage war against the mice. "Poor little chaps!" she said; "they're so little--and--and soft!" And she was quite saddened if by chance she found a stray mouse in any of her shrewdly-designed traps for the benefit of the larger game which infested the stables and had even the hardihood to annoy Bobs!
Norah had never known her mother. She was only a tiny baby when that gay little mother died--a sudden, terrible blow, that changed her father in a night from a young man to an old one. It was nearly twelve years ago, now, but no one ever dared to speak to David Linton of his wife. Sometimes Norah used to ask Jim about mother--for Jim was fifteen, and could remember just a little; but his memories were so vague and misty that his information was unsatisfactory. And, after all, Norah did not trouble much. She had always been so happy that she could not imagine that to have had a mother would have made any particular difference to her happiness. You see, she did not know.
She had grown just as the bush wild flowers grow--hardy, unchecked, almost untended; for, though old nurse had always been there, her nurseling had gone her own way from the time she could toddle. She was everybody's pet and plaything; the only being who had power to make her stern, silent father smile--almost the only one who ever saw the softer side of his character. He was fond and proud of Jim--glad that the boy was growing up straight and strong and manly, able to make his way in the world. But Norah was his heart's desire.
Of course she was spoilt--if spoiling consists in rarely checking an impulse. All her life Norah had done pretty well whatever she wanted--which meant that she had lived out of doors, followed in Jim's footsteps wherever practicable (and in a good many ways most people would have thought distinctly impracticable), and spent about two-thirds of her waking time on horseback. But the spoiling was not of a very harmful kind. Her chosen pursuits brought her under the unspoken discipline of the work of the station, wherein ordinary instinct taught her to do as others did, and conform to their ways. She had all the dread of being thought "silly" that marks the girl who imitates boyish ways. Jim's rare growl, "Have a little sense!" went farther home than a whole volume of admonitions of a more ordinarily genuine feminine type.
She had no little girl friends, for none was nearer than the nearest township--Cunjee, seventeen miles away. Moreover, little girls bored Norah frightfully. They seemed a species quite distinct from herself. They prattled of dolls; they loved to skip, to dress up and "play ladies"; and when Norah spoke of the superior joys of cutting out cattle or coursing hares over the Long Plain, they stared at her with blank lack of understanding. With boys she got on much better. Jim and she were tremendous chums, and she had moped sadly when he went to Melbourne to school. Holidays then became the shining events of the year, and the boys whom Jim brought home with him, at first prone to look down on the small girl with lofty condescension, generally ended by voting her "no end of a jolly kid," and according her the respect due to a person who could teach them more of bush life than they had dreamed of.
But Norah's principal mate was her father. Day after day they were together, riding over the run, working the cattle, walking through the thick scrub of the backwater, driving young, half-broken horses in the high dog-cart to Cunjee--they were rarely apart. David Linton seldom made a plan that did not naturally include Norah. She was a wise little companion, too; ready enough to chatter like a magpie if her father were in the mood, but quick to note if he were not, and then quite content to be silently beside him, perhaps for hours. They understood each other perfectly. Norah never could make out the people who pitied her for having no friends of her own age. How could she possibly be bothered with children, she reflected, when she had Daddy?
As for Norah's education, that was of the kind best defined as a minus quantity.
"I won't have her bothered with books too early," Mr. Linton had said when nurse hinted, on Norah's eight birthday, that it was time she began the rudiments of learning. "Time enough yet--we don't want to make a bookworm of her!"
Whereat nurse smiled demurely, knowing that that was the last thing to be afraid of in connexion with her child. But she worried in her responsible old soul all the same;