They decided who among the women were to be ‘called on’—or to be left out of the visiting circle. They acquired all necessary information on that head, inspected credentials, advised young men for their good—and generally constituted the higher public opinion which governed, with more or less authority, the manners and morals of their little state. They gave ‘teas’ at the Polo Club and race meetings, inviting desirable persons and excluding such as had given social offence. No hard and fast rule was openly promulgated, but in an unobtrusive way the combined influence made itself felt, and those who were hardy enough to withstand it found in the long run that they had taken up a wrong position.
Of course, among the heterogeneous community there were individuals and groups whose antecedents were shrouded in mystery.
All that was known of them or could be divined about their former professions or occupations, adventures, characters, or relations was that they had arrived by the mail boat of a certain date, and had been working in this alluvial claim or that reef—for the last year. They were certainly ‘human warriors,’ as Dickens’s taxidermist was wont to express it. Mr. and Mrs. Winstanley, admittedly good-looking, well-mannered, presentable—were suspected of not being legally married.
There was no proof, either one way or the other—if the rumour was not well founded, injustice was done to an innocent woman. If otherwise, those families who had permitted intercourse with wives and daughters repented in sackcloth and ashes when the truth came out. For it must not for one moment be assumed that the colonial social canons are one whit less rigid on such subjects than in the mother-land. If anything, Mrs. Grundy is a potentate whose power is greater and whose punishments are more terrible than in the ancestral home.
Mrs. Banneret had necessarily been drawn into closer association with Nurse Lilburne than with any other assistant in the hospital. She it was who had tended her husband through the most serious stages—the most dangerous crisis in the course of his deadly seizure. With his life actually trembling in the balance, she it was who had bathed the burning brow, had measured so carefully and administered so punctually the healing draught; had been in very truth the ministering angel of the poet’s fancy. No other woman, save and excepting his own wife, could have been so capable, so delicately deft, so conscientious—so devoted, even to the danger of her own health. She had brought him through the valley of the shadow, Dr. Horton said, and he did not believe another woman in Australia—let alone in Pilot Mount—would have done it. It may be imagined what gratitude was felt by Mrs. Banneret when she saw her husband by her side, fully recovered and looking, except for a certain pallor, which some people thought became him, better than ever. Now that they were able to drive about together—which the doctor had strongly recommended, as a daily recreation, favourable to perfect recovery—various novelties and unexpected discoveries in their new world of Arabian Nights treasure-land displayed themselves before her. Restricted to the routine of domesticity hitherto—an exacting though not unwelcome round of duties—her imagination, always daring and impatient of control, luxuriated in excursions around and amidst ‘the burghers of this desert city.’ What mysteries lay hidden in the past lives of the women, the men, who daily worked or strolled _en flâneur_ on the highways and byways!