【荆棘鸟】第四章 02

"No, Paddy's the Catholic. Naturally the children have been reared as Catholics, every last one of them, if that's what's worrying you." "It never occurred to me. Do you resent it?"

  "I really don't care one way or the other."

  "You didn't convert?"

  "I'm not a hypocrite, Father de Bricassart. I had lost faith in my own church, and I had no wish to espouse¹ a different, equally meaningless creed²." "I see." He watched Meggie as she stood on the front veranda³, peering up the track toward Drogheda big house. "She's so pretty, your daughter. I have a fondness for titian hair, you know. Hers would have sent the artist running for his brushes. I've never seen exactly that color before. Is she your only daughter?"

  "Yes. Boys run in both Paddy's family and my own; girls are unusual." "Poor little thing," he said obscurely.

  After the crates⁴ arrived from Sydney and the house took on a more familiar look with its books, china, ornaments⁵ and the parlor⁶ filled with Fee's furniture, things began to settle down. Paddy and the boys older than Stu were away most of the time with the two station hands Mary Carson had retained to teach them the many differences between sheep in northwest New South Wales and sheep in New Zealand. Fee, Meggie and Stu discovered the differences between running a house in New Zealand and living in the head stockman's residence on Drogheda; 

there was a tacit understanding they would never disturb Mary Carson herself, but her housekeeper⁷ and her maids were just as eager to help the women as her station hands were to help the men. Drogheda was, everyone learned, a world in itself, so cut off from civilization that after a while even Gillanbone became no more than a name with remote memories. 

Within the bounds of the great Home Paddock lay stables, a smithy, garages, innumerable sheds storing everything from feed to machinery⁸, dog kennels⁹ and runs, a labyrinthine¹⁰ maze¹¹ of stockyards, a mammoth¹² shearing¹³ shed with the staggering number of twenty-six stands in it, and yet another jigsaw¹⁴ puzzle of yards behind it. 

There were fowl¹⁵ runs, pigpens, cow bails¹⁶ and a dairy, quarters for the twenty-six shearers, small shacks¹⁷ for the rouseabouts, two other, smaller, houses like their own forstockmen, jackaroos'' barracks, a slaughter¹⁸ yard, and woodheaps.