First in the Field | Page 9

old friends. But tell me what made you start and colour like a great gyurl when I talked of making a convict of you?"
Nic was silent.
"Won't you tell me?" cried the lady, smiling at him in a winning, frank way, which unlocked the boy's lips at once and made him feel eager to confide in one who took so much interest in him.
"Yes, I'll tell you," he cried: "it's one of the boys--the biggest. He has set it about that my father is--is--is--"
"A convict?"
Nic nodded, and his brow contracted.
"The impudence!"
"And he nicknamed me Convict. And it isn't true, Lady O'Hara? Pray, pray tell me."
"About your father, Dr Braydon? Be ashamed of ye'self, boy, for ever thinking it. Your father's the finest gentleman in New South Wales, and the best friend that Sir John and I ever had in our hard life yonder."
Nic drew a long, deep breath. Something seemed to be swelling up in his throat, and he reached forward to catch hold of and retain the plump white hand, which returned his pressure.
"And so the big fellow called you Convict, did he, because your father's over the water!"
"Yes."
"And I see now: that accounts for the fighting?"
Nic nodded.
"I bore it as long as I could," he said eagerly; "and it began about something else."
"Sure, and why did you wait for that? You should have done it at once. I would."
Nic stared in wonder and admiration at his new friend.
"But tell me: did you give him a great big beating?"
"Yes, I'm afraid so."
"Then don't be afraid any more. It would do him good. There, I was thinking I was going to have the care of a tiresome young, monkey of a boy; but I promised your dear mother, and should have taken you back. But, do you know, Dominic, you and I are going to be great friends."
"I hope so," said Nic.
"I'm sure of it. There, I don't want to know any more about you. I only say that you're just the lad for over yonder, and your father will be delighted. Now, then: ask me anything you like."
"May I?"
"To be sure."
"Then what is my mother like now?"
"Look yonder," said the lady, pointing to a great mirror. "Now think of your face made thinner and more delicate, and with soft curls of silky grey hair, beside a very white forehead; and a gentle expression, not a hard look, like yours. That's your mother."
"And my father?" cried Nic eagerly.
"Look again," said the lady, "and fancy your face in thirty years' time, with dark grey hair, all in little rough half-curls, and a great many lines in the brown skin all over the forehead, and about the eyes."
"Yes," said Nic eagerly, as he stared at himself.
"And a look of a man who is strong as a horse; and that's all. No, stop: I forgot his birrd."
"His bird! Does he keep a bird?"
"The young ruffian! he's making sport of me," said the lady. "I said birrd: b-e-a-r-d, birrd. And it's all tinged grey and black. That's your father."
"And the girls?"
"Oh, just two bright sun-browned colleens, like you, only better looking. What next?"
"What sort of a place is it?"
"Place? Oh, there's a wooden house on a slope looking down a bluff at the edge of a great plain, from which you look over the Blue Mountains."
"Yes, they call them blue because they're green, I suppose?" said Nic, with a smile.
"And people say it's only we Irish who make bulls," cried the lady merrily. "No; they call them blue because in the distance they look as clear and blue as the loveliest amethyst. Ah! it's a beautiful place, Dominic, as you'll say."
"And big?"
"Big?"
The lady laughed softly.
"Yes, boy; it's big. There's plenty of land out yonder, and so the government's pretty generous with it. Here at home they count a man's estate by acres: we do it in square miles out there."
"Look here, Dominic," said the lady, after answering scores of questions, during what seemed to Nic the happiest hours he had ever spent in his life, "I've been thinking."
"Yes, madam."
"Say Lady O'Hara, boy," cried the visitor petulantly; and then, with a sad smile full of pathos on her quivering lip, she added softly, "I can't tell ye to call me mother: my son died, Dominic, just when he began to know me; but look here," she cried, brightening, though the lad could see tears in her fine dark eyes, out of which she seemed to peer as from passing clouds. "Sure, I tell ye I've been thinking. Your father said it was time you left school to finish your education out there."
"Education?" faltered Nic.
"Oh yes; but not book learning, boy: hunting, and shooting, and riding, and stock-keeping, and farming, and helping to make Australia a big young England for John Bull's sons and daughters, who want