11 - The Nationalists by William Stuart Long

Author:William Stuart Long [Long, William Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780440203544
Google: iTVLvBt33jMC
Amazon: 0440203546
Barnesnoble: 0440203546
Goodreads: 1907814
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1989-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Part II : 1900

Chapter XXI

The Aborigines, having no calendar, regarded the first day of a new year and even the first day of a new century as just another day. Their ceremonies for newness had to do with season, not a printed number on a paper hanging on the wall. Tolo Mason spent the morning of January 1, 1900, helping the stockmen move a small drove of cattle to better grass. With the cattle in the new pasturage he rode back to the house.

His first personal experience with death had come to him at the station. He had never forgotten the sight of the Aboriginal girl Daringa lying on the straw-littered floor of a barn; he carried in his mind a permanent picture of her in death, her neck broken and her features twisted. Soon afterward, he had watched the painful, wasting demise of his tutor, Dane de Lausenette, another type of death and one that aroused in him questions that continued to this day.

The loss of his father had at first been more of an abstraction than either of the two deaths he had witnessed previously. He had not been able to believe the news of the cablegram, the cold words printed on paper. He had experienced no feeling of loss, only a numbness, which was denial. It could not be, he had felt. Jon Mason was too real, too vital, too much a part of his life to be dead. Jon was there, somewhere, in England or on the sea, alive, and coming back to his wife and his son and the land that he had come to love.

When Jon did come home, in a sealed coffin, the fact became a bit more real for Tolo, but it was only at the funeral itself that his tears came, the ceremony bringing to the surface all the pain and rage of his loss.

Reaching the house, he dismounted and gave over his horse to an Abo boy, beat the dust from his trousers with his floppy-brimmed bush hat, and entered. The front rooms were insulated against the day’s heat by closed draperies; thus they retained a residual of the night’s coolness. He heard the clatter of pans from the kitchen, pressed on to see that the door to his father’s office was open. Misa was at the desk, her dark hair drawn into a loose bun, dressed in black for mourning, as convention required, but in a frock so well tailored that it seemed almost as if she had chosen it expressly for Jon, who had always enjoyed seeing her well and expensively dressed.

“Ah,” she said as her son appeared at the door, “you’ve come at a good time. I was going to send for you.”

Tolo sat down, crossing his long legs. He knew that she had been spending many hours in the office in the past few days.

“I gave you a copy of your father’s will the other day,” she said. “Did you read it?”

He made a face. He had not read the document.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.