A Little Bush Maid | Page 3

box, there was the dim,
fragrant loft, where the sunbeams only managed to send dusty rays of
light across the gloom. Here Norah used to lie on the sweet hay and
think tremendous thoughts; here also she laid deep plans for catching
rats--and caught scores in traps 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