Accept it, Meggie Cleary. Meggie ONEILL. The someone you want is Ralph de Bricassart, and you just can't have him. Yet as a man he seems to have ruined you for anyone else. All right, then. Assume that a man and the someone to love can't occur. It will have to be children to love, and the love you receive will have to come from those children. Which in turn means Luke, and Luke's children.
Oh, dear God, dear God! No, not dear God! What's God ever done for me, except deprive me of Ralph? We're not too fond of each other, God and I. And do You know something, God? You don't frighten me the way You used to. How much I feared You, Your punishment! All my life I've trodden the straight and narrow, from fear of Y. And what's it got me? Not one scrap more than if I'd broken every rule in Your book. You're a fraud, God, a demon of fear. You treat us like children, dangling punishment. But You don't frighten me anymore. Because it isn't Ralph I ought to be hating, it's Y. It's all Your fault, not poor Ralph's. He's just living in fear of You, the way I always have. That he could love You is something I can't understand. I don't see what there is about You to love.
Yet how can I stop loving a man who loves God? No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to do it. He's the moon, and I'm crying for it. Well, you've just got to stop crying for it, Meggie ONEILL, that's all there is to it. You're going to have to content yourself with Luke, and Luke's children. By hook or by crook you're going to wean Luke from the wretched sugar, and live with him out where there aren't even any trees. You're going to tell the Gilly bank manager that your future income stays in your own name, and you're going. to use it to have the comforts and conveniences in your treeless home that Luke won't think to provide for you. You're going to use it to educate Luke's children properly, and make sure they never want. And that's all there is to be said about it, Meggie O'neill. I'm Meggie O'neill, not Meggie de Bricassart. It even sounds silly, Meggie de Bricassart. I'd have to be Meghann de Bricassart, and I've always hated Meghann. Oh, will I ever stop regretting that they're not Ralph's children? That's the question, isn't it? Say it to yourself, over and over again: Your life is your own, Meggie O'neill, and you're not going to waste it dreaming of a man and children you can never have.
There! That's telling yourself! No use thinking of what's past, what must be buried. The future's the thing, and the future belongs to Luke, to Luke's children. It doesn't belong to Ralph de Bricassart. He is the past. Meggie rolled over in the sand and wept as she hadn't wept since she was three years old: noisy wails, with only the crabs and the birds to hear her desolation.
Anne Mueller had chosen Matlock Island deliberately, planning to send Luke there as soon as she could. The moment Meggie was on her way she sent Luke a telegram saying Meggie needed him desperately, please to come. By nature she wasn't given to interfering in other people's lives, but she loved and pitied Meggie, and adored the difficult, capricious scrap Meggie had borne and Luke fathered. Justine must have a home, and both her parents. It would hurt to see her go away, but better that than the present situation. Luke arrived two days later. He was on his way to the CSR in Sydney, so it didn't cost him much time to go out of his way. Time he saw the baby; if it had been a boy he would have come when it was born, but news of a girl had disappointed him badly. If Meggie insisted on having children, let them at least be capable of carrying on the Kynuna station one day. Girls were no flaming use at all; they just ate a man out of house and home and when they were grown up they went and worked for someone else instead of staying put like boys to help their old father in his last years. "How's Meg?" he asked as he came up onto the front veranda. "Not sick, I hope?"
"You hope. No, she's not sick. I'll tell you in a minute. But first come and see your beautiful daughter."
He stared down at the baby, amused and interested but not emotionally moved, Anne thought.
"She's got the queerest eyes I've ever seen," he said. "I wonder whose they are?"
"Meggie says as far as she knows no one in her family."
"Nor mine. She's a throwback, the funny little thing. Doesn't look too happy, does she?"
"How could she look happy?" Anne snapped, hanging on to her temper grimly. "She's never seen her father, she has no real home and not much likelihood of one before she's grown up if you go on the way you are!" "I'm saving, Anne!" he protested.
"Rubbish! I know how much money you've got. Friends of mine in Charters Towers send me the- local paper from time to time, so I've seen the ads for western properties a lot closer in than Kynuna, and a lot more fertile. There's a Depression on, Luke! You could pick up a beauty of a place for a lot less by far than the amount you have in the bank, and you know it." "Now that's just it! There's a Depression on, and west of the ranges a bloody terrible drought from Junee to the Isa. It's in its second year and there's no rain at all, not a drop. Right now I'll bet Drogheda's hurting, so what do you think it's like out around Winton and Blackall? No, I reckon I ought to wait."
"Wait until the price of land goes up in a good wet season? Come off it, Luke! Now's the time to buy! With Meggie's assured two thousand a year, you can wait out a ten-year drought! Just don't stock the place. Live on Meggie's two thousand a year until the rains come, then put your stock on."
"I'm not ready to leave the sugar yet," he said, stubbornly, still staring at his daughter's strange light eyes.