60 / COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH
Fee snorted. "Trying to keep a secret in this family is impossible. No, he won't catch Frank in Wahine, he knows that. He's gone to send a telegram to the police and the army in Wanganui. They'll bring him back." "Oh, Mum, I hope they find him! I don't want Frank to go away!" Fee slapped the contents of the butter churn onto the table and attacked the watery yellow mound with two wooden pats. "None of us want Frank to go away. That's why Daddy's going to see he's brought back." Her mouth quivered for a moment; she whacked the butter harder. "Poor Frank! Poor, poor Frank!" she sighed, not to Meggie but to herself. "I don't know why the children must pay for our sins. My poor Frank, so out of things..." Then she noticed that Meggie had stopped ironing, and shut her lips, and said no more. Three days later the police brought Frank back. He had put up a terrific struggle, the Wanganui sergeant on escort duty told Paddy. "What a fighter you've got! When he saw the army lads were a wakeup he was off like a shot, down the steps and into the street with two soldiers after him. If he hadn't had the bad luck to run into a constable on patrol, I reckon he'd a got away, too. He put up a real wacko fight; took five of them to get the manacles on." So saying, he removed Frank's heavy chains and pushed him roughly through the front gate; he stumbled against Paddy, and shrank away as if the contact stung. The children were skulking by the side of the house twenty feet beyond the adults, watching and waiting. Bob, Jack and Hughie stood stiffly, hoping Frank would put up another fight; Stuart just looked on quietly, from out of his peaceful, sympathetic little soul; Meggie held her hands to her cheeks, pushing and kneading at them in an agony of fear that someone meant to hurt Frank. He turned to look at his mother first, black eyes into grey in a dark and bitter communion which had never been spoken, nor ever was. Paddy's fierce blue gaze THE THORN BIRDS / 61
beat him down, contemptuous and scathing, as if this was what he had expected, and Frank's downcast lids acknowledged his right to be angry. From that day forward Paddy never spoke to his son beyond common civility. But it was the children Frank found hardest to face, ashamed and embarrassed, the bright bird brought home with the sky unplumbed, wings clipped, song drowned into silence. Meggie waited until after Fee had done her nightly rounds, then she wriggled through the open window and made off across the backyard. She knew where Frank would be, up in the hay in the barn, safe from prying eyes and his father. "Frank, Frank, where are you?" she said in a stage whisper as she shuffled into the stilly blackness of the barn, her toes exploring the unknown ground in front of her as sensitively as an animal. "Over here, Meggie," came his tired voice, hardly Frank's voice at all, no life or passion to it. She followed the sound to where he was stretched out in the hay, and snuggled down beside him with her arms as far around his chest as they would reach. "Oh, Frank, I'm so glad you're back," she said. He groaned, slid down in the straw until he was lower than she, and put his head on her body. Meggie clutched at his thick straight hair, crooning. It was too dark to see her, and the invisible sub- stance of her sympathy undid him. He began to weep, knotting his body into slow twisting rails of pain, his tears soaking her night- gown. Meggie did not weep. Something in her little soul was old enough and woman enough to feel the irresistible, stinging joy of being needed; she sat rocking his head back and forth, back and forth, until his grief expended itself in emptiness.