"Ashes of roses," he said, mounting. "Let's get as far from the smell of roses as the moon. Tomorrow the house will be full of them."
He kicked the chestnut mare and cantered ahead of Meggie down the track to the creek, longing to weep; for until he smelled the future adornments of Mary Carson's coffin it had not actually impinged on his thinking brain as an imminent fact. He would be going away very soon. Too many thoughts, too many emotions, all of them ungovernable. They wouldn't leave him in Gilly a day after learning the terms of that incredible will; they would recall him to Sydney immediately. Immediately! He fled from his pain, never having known such pain, but it kept pace with him effortlessly. It wasn't something in a vague sometime; it was going to happen immediately. And he could almost see Paddy's face, the revulsion, the turningaway. After this he wouldn't be welcome on Drogheda, and he would never see Meggie again.
The disciplining began then, hammered by hoofs and in a sensation of flying. It was better so, better so, better so. Galloping on and on. Yes, it would surely hurt less then, tucked safely in some cell in a bishop's palace, hurt less and less, until finally even the ache faded from consciousness. It had to be better so. Better than staying in Gilly to watch her change into a creature he didn't want, then have to marry her one day to some unknown man. Out of sight, out of mind.
Then what was he doing with her now, riding through the stand of box and coolibah on the far side of the creek? He couldn't seem to think why, he only felt the pain. Not the pain of betrayal; there wasn't room for that. Only for the pain of leaving her.
"Father, Father! I can't keep up with you! Slow down, Father, please!" It was the call to duty, and reality. Like a man in slow motion he wrenched the mare around, sat it until it had danced out its excitement. And waited for Meggie to catch him up. That was the trouble. Meggie was catching him up. Close by them was the roar of the borehead, a great steaming pool smelling of sulphur, with a pipe like a ship's ventilator jetting boiling water into its depths. All around the perimeter of the little elevated lake like spokes from a wheel's hub, the bore drains dribbled off across the plain whiskered in incongruously emerald grass. The banks of the pool were slimy grey mud, and the freshwater crayfish called yabbies lived in the mud. Father Ralph started to laugh. "It smells like Hell, Meggie, doesn't it? Sulphur and brimstone, right here on her own property, in her own backyard. She ought to recognize the smell when she gets there decked in roses, oughtn't she? Oh, Meggie . . ."
The horses were trained to stand on a dangling rein; there were no fences nearby, and no trees closer than half a mile away. But there was a log on the side of the pool farthest from the borehead itself, where the water was cooler. It was the seat provided for winter bathers as they dried their feet and legs. Father Ralph sat down and Meggie sat some way from him, turned side on to watch him.
"What's the matter, Father?"
It sounded peculiar, his oft-asked question from her lips, to him. He smiled. "I've sold you, my Meggie, sold you for thirteen million pieces of silver."
"Sold me?"
"A figure of speech. It doesn't matter. Come, sit closer to me. There may not be the chance for us to talk together again."
"While we're in mourning for Auntie, you mean?" She wriggled up the log and sat next to him. "What difference will being in mourning make?" "I don't mean that, Meggie."
"You mean because I'm growing up, and people might gossip about us?" "Not exactly. I mean I'm going away."
There it was: the meeting of trouble head on, the acceptance of another load. No outcry, no weeping, no storm of protest. Just a tiny shrinking, as if the burden sat askew, would not distribute itself so she could bear it properly. And a caught breath, not quite like a sigh. "When?"
"A matter of days."
"Oh, Father! It will be harder than Frank."
"And for me harder than anything in my life. I have no consolation. You at least have your family."
"You have your God."
"Well said, Meggie! You are growing up!"
But, tenacious female, her mind had returned to the question she had ridden three miles without a chance to ask. He was leaving, it would be so hard to do without him, but the question had its own importance.
"Father, in the stables you said "ashes of roses." Did you mean the color of my dress?"
"In a way, perhaps. But I think really I meant something else." "What?"
"Nothing you'd understand, my Meggie. The dying of an idea which had no right to be born, let alone nurtured."
"There is nothing which has no right to be born, even an idea." He turned his head to watch her. "You know what I'm talking about, don't you?"
"I think so."
"Not everything born is good, Meggie."
"No. But if it was born at all, it was meant to be."
"You argue like a Jesuit. How old are you?"
"I'll be seventeen in a month, Father."
"And you've toiled all seventeen years of it. Well, hard work ages us ahead of our years. What do you think about, Meggie, when you've the time to think?"
"Oh, about Jims and Patsy and the rest of the boys, about Daddy and Mum, about Hal and Auntie Mary. Sometimes about growing babies. I'd like that very much. And riding, the sheep. All the things the men talk about. The weather, the rain, the vegetable garden, the hens, what I'm going to do tomorrow." "Do you dream of having a husband?"
"No, except I suppose I'll have to have one if I want to grow babies. It isn't nice for a baby to have no father."
In spite of his pain he smiled; she was such a quaint mixture of ignorance and morality. Then he swung sideways, took her chin in his hand and stared down at her. How to do it, what had to be done? "Meggie, I realized something not long ago which I ought to have seen sooner. You weren't being quite truthful when you told me what you thought about, were you?"
"I. . ." she said, and fell silent.
