To spare her, Mahony turned his head
and looked out of the window. He would have liked to say: Run away,
child, run away, and don't let them see your confusion. Polly, however,
went conscientiously about her task, and only left the room when she had
picked up her full complement of plates.--But she did not appear again
that night.
Deserted even by Mrs. Beamish, the two men pushed back their chairs from
the table and drew tranquilly at their pipes.
The innkeeper proved an odd, misty sort of fellow, exceedingly backward
at declaring himself; it was as though each of his heavy words had to be
fetched from a distance. "No doubt about it, it's the wife that wears
the breeches," was Mahony's inward comment. And as one after another of
his well-meant remarks fell flat: "Become almost a deaf-mute, it would
seem, under the eternal female clacking."
But for each mortal there exists at least one theme to fire him. In the
case of Beamish this turned out to be the Land Question. Before the gold
discovery he had been a bush shepherd, he told Mahony, and, if he had
called the tune, he would have lived and died one. But the wife had had
ambitions, the children were growing up, and every one knew what it was
when women got a maggot in their heads. There had been no peace for him
till he had chucked his twelve-year-old job and joined the rush to Mount
Alexander. But at heart he had remained a bushman; and he was now all on
the side of the squatters in their tussle with the Crown.
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