Read Online Return to Coolami by Eleanor Dark - Free Book Online Page B

the road, climbing disdainfully on to this contemptible highway whose like it had never yet beheld, setting off along it, lurching and swaying, while Bret and Susan ducked their heads from overhanging branches—
    Millicent said with genuine admiration, clinging to the side of the door:
    â€œIt’s really – surprising— It – doesn’t jar one – at all.”
    And Drew, manœuvring gingerly among water-washed chasms, thought proudly that the rocking was like the rocking of a cradle—
2
    It came, Millicent thought, suddenly, but peacefully. There was something dream-like about it, and you came to it in rather the same way that you came to a dream. You found yourself in the midst of it with no clear conception of time either before or behind you. You felt only a sense of spiritual expansion, a rapturous absorbing of unbelievable colour, as a flower might open to take in draughts of sun.
    â€œIf,” thought Susan, “you’d been blind from birth, blue wouldn’t mean anything to you. And then you’d get your sight and they’d point to the sky and say, ‘That’s blue.’” And she felt, her eyes incredulously staring, that until this moment she’d been blind and now knew for the first time what blue was really—
    Languorous, unfathomable, it drowned the valley in an other-worldly light of living colour. Yes, living, and that was strange because of its stillness, its faraway silence, its infinite and dreaming calm.
    It hurt, she thought, feeling a sudden wave of misery and pain, it was nerve-racking, agonising; it had that quality of emotion which some music has – she couldn’t look at it – couldn’t bear to look at it—
    She jumped out of the car and went quickly away towards the bush, her back to a loveliness that had become unendurable. She began to pick up sticks for the billy, seeing them blurred and distorted through a haze of sudden tears.
3
    Bret watched her go. Drew and Millicent were still staring wordlessly down into the valley. He got out of the car, took the hamper and looked round for a spot to picnic. A doubt in his mind was beginning to worry him acutely. Yes, he’d been bluffing about the divorce. It had been simply one of the reckless things one says when one is half silly with anger, weariness, desperation. And he’d taken it for granted that when she had said, “What a pity – I was just being glad you’d saved me the trouble of asking for it myself,” she’d been bluffing too. Just letting off steam because she’d been miserable and was furious that he should have caught her crying. But now—
    He was amazed that he hadn’t thought of it months before. Realised that it might be, to her, a veritable deliverance. Because he’d never been able to take quite seriously that staggering assertion of hers, made so calmly and deliberately in the garden at Ballool, the day before their marriage—
    And he wasn’t quite sure, knowing nothing at all of women and their odd reactions, whether, taking her love for him as a fact, it made the position better for her, or worse?
    He found two big stones near him, and brought a third to complete his fireplace. He rummaged in the bottom of the car for the billy and filled it from the canvas water-bag swinging muddily on the luggage-carrier. Then he got out his pocket-knife and went off to cut a green sapling.
    Well, if she did want it, what then? She must have it, of course. There was nothing against it except therather unpleasant details. The baby had died, and with it had gone the whole reason for their marriage, the whole basis of their compact. It was quite obvious to him now that as soon as she was out of the hospital he should have offered to free her legally of an obligation from which she had already been morally released. His failure to do so – his failure even to think of doing so, puzzled him. It must have been that