“The rain has come, Myra, thank God,” he said, and then he added quietly, “I have more good news for you in the morning.”
Mrs. Harrington said she was quite aware of the rain having come—the disgusting noise of the thunder had made the children scream. Had Miss Alleyne come back? And brought the cows? His other good news could keep till the morning.
Harrington turned away from her with a feeling of dulled resentment. He knew what the girl had suffered, and his wife’s heartlessness cut him to the quick.
As he stood watching Banks and the black boys filling every available tank and cask on the station from the downpour off the roof, Nellie rose from the couch on which she had been lying, and touched his arm timidly.
“Don’t you believe in God’s goodness now, Mr. Harrington? See, He has sent the rain, and He has granted my daily prayer to Him that I, too, might help you. And Banks says that this is not a passing thunderstorm, but that the drought has broken up altogether—for see, the wind is from the south.”
Harrington raised her hand to his lips. “I have always tried to believe in God and in His mercy, Miss Alleyne.”
“Not always, Mr. Harrington,” she said softly. “Don’t you remember when all the Big Swamp! mob were bogged and dying, that you said that if He would not hear the moans and see the agonies of the beasts He had created, that He would not listen to the prayers of human beings who were not suffering as they suffered? And to-day, as Sandy and I rode along to the Canton Reef, I prayed again and again, and always when I passed a dying beast I said, ‘O God! have mercy upon these Thy dumb creatures who suffer much agony!”
Harrington’s chest heaved. “And I prayed as you prayed, Miss Alleyne; but I said, ‘O God! if there is a God.’”
She put out her hand to him and her dark eyes filled with tears. “He has answered our prayers.... And now, good night… I wish I could go out into the rain; I feel I could dance for joy.... Mr. Harrington, do let me go to the Canton Reef with you to-morrow. Everything will be all right to-morrow, won’t it? But there, how thoughtless I am.... I am going to milk those two cunning cows till they are dry; poor little Harry does so want some fresh milk. Good night, Mr. Harrington; I shall sleep happily to-night—everything will be all right to-morrow.”
At breakfast-time next morning the rain was still falling steadily, and Mrs. Harrington decided to join her husband at the morning meal.
Harrington rode up to the door and smiled brightly at his wife. “Waiting for me, dear? I won’t be long. The river is running now, Myra—running after two years! I’m off to Miss Alleyne’s reef as soon as I’ve had a bit of tucker. Where is she?”
“In bed, I presume,” said Mrs. Harrington acidulously. “She might have remembered that I was very much upset last night by that horrible thunder, and have risen earlier and attended to the children.”
A look of intense disgust came over her husband’s face.
“Myra, the girl was done-up, dead beat! Won’t you go and see if she is able to get up?”
Mrs. Harrington rose stiffly. “Oh, certainly, if you wish it. But I think it is a great mistake. She really ought to have considered the children, and–”
The head stockman’s wife met her at the door, and looking past her mistress, spoke to Harrington in terrified tones–
“Miss Alleyne is dead, sir!”
Harrington sprang from his chair. “Dead, Mrs. Banks!”
“Yes, sir. I was only just in time. She on’y sez, ‘Tell Mr. Harrington that I am so glad that everythink will be all right now.’ An’ then she smiled, sir, and sez as I was to kiss Master Harry and Miss Mabel for her, as she was agoin’. And then she sez, ‘Isn’t God good to send the rain, Mrs. Banks? Everything will be all right now for poor Mr. Harrington—rain and gold.’ Then she just laid quiet for a minute, an’ when I looked at her face again, I saw she was dead.”
A year later, Jack Harrington, again one of the wealthiest cattle men in North Queensland, and the owner of one of the richest gold mines in the colony, was riding home to his station. Behind him he heard the clatter and clash of the twenty-stamper battery that on the “Canton Ridge” was pounding him in so many thousands of pounds a month; before him lay the sweeping grassy downs and thickly timbered creeks of a now smiling country. His wife and children had long before returned to the cooler South, and in his heart was a great loneliness. Not, perhaps, for them, but because of the memory of the girl whose prayer to the Almighty had been answered, and who was resting on the bank of the Gilbert under the shade of a big Leichhardt tree.