A Difficult Young Man by Martin Boyd Page B

herself and Wolfie to spend two or three days at Westhill. She would not save her daughter from ruin until the following day as there was a chicken for dinner. Then as they missed the midday train, they did not arrive until the late afternoon. The Langtons were very fond of their children, and like the sacred pelican,frequently bled themselves on their behalf, though with Diana this bleeding was purely emotional. As they drove from Dandenong, quite forgetting the object of her journey, she was looking forward to being greeted with demonstrative affection by Daisy, but when they alighted from their hired wagonette at Westhill, the place appeared to be deserted, and Diana, deprived of her anticipated display of maternal emotion, was cross. When Sarah, returning from the farmyard with a basket of eggs, came round the corner of the house, Diana remembered why she had come, and demanded anxiously where was Daisy? Sarah said she was out riding with Dominic, and that they spent every day out riding together.
    â€˜Are you a complete fool?’ exclaimed Diana. ‘After Baba’s maids.’
    Sarah went for her like an angry hen, but in the middle of the discussion Daisy and Dominic came up the drive, walking their horses for the last hundred yards, as we were made to do. When they saw the Flugels they rode up to them, instead of turning into the stable yard.
    â€˜Hullo, mummy!’ cried Daisy, and she greeted Diana with all the affection she could require, and Dominic looked so cheerful and wholesome, that again Diana put Baba’s warning out of her head as sheer squalid nonsense. She took Daisy into the house, leaving Dominic with Wolfie, whom she had told to give him a serious talking to. Wolfie, being pompous,enjoyed the prospect, and was not going to be deprived of the pleasure of administering a rebuke by the fact, evident from Diana’s complete change of manner, that there was no occasion for it. He began by asking:
    â€˜Why did you take my daughter into the forest?’ Although he had been twenty years in Australia, he still had a German accent, being so absorbed in his music that he could not give his full attention to the English language, and his conversation sounded rather like a Wagnerian libretto. He had anyhow a Teutonic heaviness of touch, and it is possible that with his poor command of English he used crude expressions which were wildly offensive to Dominic. If ever the latter had felt that he was a harmless member of society, it was during these few weeks at Westhill. Wolfie’s insinuations were revolting to him. All his sense of responsibility and his ideas of chivalry would have made it impossible for him to treat with anything but the greatest delicacy a young girl placed in his charge, though they might not keep him from the rollicking invitations of farm girls. These ideas are old-fashioned but they were prevalent at the time. When he gathered from Wolfie what people thought of him, his soul was eclipsed by its blackest emanations. Wolfie seeing Dominic droop before his eyes, looking no doubt as he did as we drove back from Alice’s funeral, was very pleased with his powers of rebuke, andwent in to Diana and said with satisfaction:
    â€˜I have spoken to him.’
    â€˜Oh, that’s all nonsense,’ said Diana carelessly. Then she heard a sound of galloping, and through the window she saw Dominic on Tamburlaine tearing off down the drive, and my pony which Daisy had been riding, and which she had asked him to take round to the stables, running loose on the croquet lawn.
    â€˜What’s Dominic doing?’ she asked sharply. ‘He’s let the pony loose. It’s marking the lawn. Wolfie, go and take it round to the stable.’
    â€˜I do not like horses,’ said Wolfie.
    Diana shrugged her shoulders, and went out and caught the pony. Tom Schmidt was in the stable yard and she asked him where Dominic had gone.
    â€˜I don’t know, Mrs Von,’ said