CHAPTER XXX
Mr. Neuchamp, having now occasional leisure to reflect, discovered that he was provided with an extensive and valuable property which hehadpartly come to Australia to seek, and with an affianced bride, whom he had not at all included among his probable possessions. As for the great project of Colonial Reform, which had stood out grandly dominating the landscape in the future of his dreams, with the solitary exception of the conversion of Jack Windsor, he could not aver that he had accomplished anything.
His co-operative community had notably failed in practice. But for the aid and counsel of Mr. Levison, it might have overthrown his own fortune, without particularly benefiting the individuals of this society.
Whenever he had acted upon his own discretion, and in furtherance of advanced views, he had been conspicuously wrong. Where he had followed the ideas of others, or been forced into them by circumstances, he had been invariably right. Where he had been generous, he had been deceived; where he had been cautious, he had found himself extravagant in loss; where he had beenrash, riches had rolled in upon him with flowing tide. His most elaborate estimates of character had been ludicrously erroneous. His advice had been inapplicable, his theories unsound. Practice—mostly blindfold—had alone given him a glimmering knowledge of the relatively component parts of this most contradictory, unintelligible antipodean world.
Mr. Neuchamp, having reached the very visible landmark of an engagement in his pilgrimage of love, was much minded to press for an immediate union, believing, now that the rain had come, there existed no rational impediments in the way of this last supreme success. Well-informed persons will know that no such outrage uponles convenancescould for a moment be tolerated. Baffled but not despondent, he returned to the charge with such determination that the event was fixed to take place in about two months, as being the earliest hour anything so dreadful could be thought of.
So much being gained, Ernest became speedily aware that being at all hours and seasons subject to the raids of milliners‘attendants and others was a state of existence out of harmony with a poet’s soul. Thus, after divers unsatisfactory and interrupted interviews with Antonia, he took his passage by the mail, and heroically started for Rainbar.
This brilliant combination of business with necessity would, he thought, serve to while away the weary hours between the scorned present and the beautiful future. Rainbar and Mildool had to be visited at some time or other. Although the luxurious life of the metropolis had gained upon him, Ernest Neuchamp always arose, Antæus-like, fresh to the call of duty.
When he quitted the railway terminus and entered the mail-coach which was to convey him to his destination, the full magnitude of the mighty change of seasonburst upon him. During his stay in Sydney the short, bright southern spring-time had been born and was ripening into summer, with what effect upon plant life it was now a marvel of marvels to see.
Mr. Neuchamp’s novitiate had been served during the latter years of a ‘dry cycle.’ He had seen fair growth of pasture towards Christmas time, but of the amazing crop of grass and herbage uncared for, wasted, or burned, in what Mr. Windsor called ‘an out-and-out wet season,’ he had no previous experience.
From the moment that the coach cleared the forest parks which skirted the plains, Ernest found himself embarked upon a ‘measureless prairie,’ where the tall green grass waved far as eye could see in the summer breeze. A millennium of peace and plenty had apparently arrived for all manner of graminivorous creatures. How different was the aspect of these ‘happy hunting grounds,’ velvet-green of hue, flower-bespangled, brook-traversed, with the forgotten sound of falling waters ever and anon breaking on the ear, with hum of bee and carol blithe of bird, as the sleek-coated, high-conditioned coach-horses rattled the light drag merrily over the long long road! What a wondrous transformation! Would Augusta,la belle cousine, have believed that all this glorious natural beauty had been born, grown, and developed ‘since the rain came’?
When at length the journey was over, and the proprietor of Rainbar and Mildool was deposited, with his portmanteau, at the garden gate of the former station, Mr. Neuchamp was constrained to confess that he hardly knew his own place. There had been much growth and greenery when he left with the fat cattle; but the riotous extravagance of nature in that direction couldnot have been credited by him without actual eye-witness.
Around the buildings, the garden fence, the stockyard, the cowshed, was a growth of giant herbage, composed of wild oats, wild barley, marsh-mallows, clover, and fodder plants unnamed, that almost smothered these humble buildings and enclosures. A few milch cows fed lazily, looking as if they had been employed in testing the comparative merits of oilcake and Thorley’s cattle-food, for an agricultural experiment. The river-flats below the house were knee-deep in clover and meadow grasses, causing Mr. Neuchamp to wonder whether or no it would be worth while to go in for a mowing-machine and a few horse-rakes, for the easy conversion of a fraction of it into a few hundred tons of meadow hay, to be stored against the next, ‘dry year.’ The mixed grasses, as he had tested in a small way, made excellent hay. But how far off looked such a calamity! Thus ever with ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm’ do we lightly measure the future, recking neither of stormy sky nor of the ravening deep.
After Mr. Neuchamp had sufficiently admired the grassy wilderness, thoughts arose respecting dinner, and also a feeling of wonder where everybody was. The station appeared to be minding itself. The cook was absent, though recent indications of his presence were visible in the kitchen. Charley Banks was away and Jack Windsor, probably at Mildool; also Piambook, whose open countenance and dazzling teeth would have been better than nothing. Where was Mrs. Windsor,néeWalton? He had rather looked forward to having a talk with her under new conditions of life. She could not be at Mildool, as there was no shelter for a decentwoman there. What in the name of wonder had become of them all? There were no Indians in this country, or he might have turned his thoughts in the direction of Blackfeet or Comanches, the ‘wolf Apaché and the cannibal Navajo.’ Not even a Mormon settlement handy enough to organise a ‘mountain-meadows massacre’! He never thought Rainbar so lonely before. He went into the cottage, and in a leisurely way unpacked his portmanteau in the snug bedroom which he had so long inhabited—where he had so often, before the rain came, lain down in sorrow and arisen in despair. What a tiny wooden box it seemed! Yet he had thought it comfortable, even luxurious. Like those of many other distinguished travellers and heroes long absent from the scene of early conflict or youthful habitation, the eyes of Mr. Neuchamp had altered their focus.
After three months’ familiarity with the lodging of clubs and villas, the neat but necessarily contracted apartments of his bush cottage appeared like cupboards, or even akin to a watch-box which he had once dwelt in at Garrandilla.
However, he knew by former experience that a week or two of station life would restore his vision, his appetite, and his contentment with the district. Further than that he did not go. At the present price of cattle, it was not likely that he would need ever again to spend as many months consecutively at Rainbar as he had devoted to that desirable but isolated abode before the ‘drought broke up.’
Having had ample time for comparison and appropriate reflections, he was at length set free from the apprehension that he was the sole inhabitant of Rainbar by the appearance of old Johnny, the cook, who expressedgreat delight and satisfaction at seeing him, and, explaining his absence by the statement that he had taken a walk of five miles down the river in order to buy a bag of potatoes from a dray loaded with those rare esculents, proceeded to place him in possession of facts.
‘Every one about the place was away mustering at Mildool,’ he said, ‘including Mr. Banks, both the blackfellows, Jack Windsor, and even Mrs. Windsor, who, finding that there was an unoccupied hut formerly belonging to a dairyman at Mildool, had joined the mustering party. He (Johnny) hadn’t had a soul to talk to for three weeks since the muster began, and was as miserable as a bandicoot.’
The old man bustled about, laid the cloth neatly, and cooked and served an inviting meal, which Ernest, after the reckless preparations supplied to coach passengers, really enjoyed. It was far into the night when the sound of horses‘hoofs was heard, and Mr. Banks, carrying his saddle and bridle, which he placed upon the verandah, let go his courser to graze at ease, entered the spare bedroom, undressed, and was in bed and asleep all in the space of about two minutes and a half, as it seemed to Mr. Neuchamp, from the first sound of his arrival. He did not care to make himself known to the wearied youngster, and reserved that sensation, very wisely, as might be many other pieces of news and matters of business, until morning light.
With the new day arising, the active youth was much astonished, and even more gratified, to find his employer again under the same roof. At the daylight breakfast of the bush—de rigueurwhen unusual work of any kind is going forward—he favoured Ernest with a full recital of all the exciting news.
‘Everything was well as could possibly be. All the cattle at Rainbar were fat as pigs—all the “circle dot” cattle, all Freemans‘lot, which had really turned out a famous bargain. A dealer from Ballarat had been up a week since, and to him he had sold the whole of the Freeman horses at fifteen pounds a head, cash, young and old. He didn’t think, when old Cottonbush put the brand on them, that they’d ever see a ten-pound note for the whole boiling. He had the dealer’s cheque—a good one too, or he wouldn’t have taken it—for twelve hundred and fifteen pounds! There were just eighty-one head.
‘As for the back country, it looked lovely. Grass and water everywhere. The Back Lake was full; the river was bank high, and if there was a flood—a regular big one—he wouldn’t say but what the water might flow into the canal after all and fill the Outer Lake. By the way, there were some back blocks for sale at the back of Rainbar and Mildool, and if he had his way they should be bought, as it would give them the command of all the back country as far as Barra Creek, and keep other people from coming in by and by, and perhaps giving trouble; nothing like securing all your back country while it is cheap.
‘With regard to Mildool, it was the best bargain he (Charley Banks) had ever seen. All unbranded stock were to be given in, and there would be calves and yearlings enough to brand to pay two years’ wages to every man employed on both runs. They had pretty well got through the count; there would be a two or three hundred head over the muster number, which would be no harm, and it was only ordinary store price for half fat cattle broken in to the run. As to fat stock, you might go on to any camp and cut out with your eyes shut; youcouldn’t go wrong; they were all fat together, young and old. Mooney, the dealer, stayed a night last week, and said he would give seven pounds all round for a thousand head, half cows, to be taken in three months. He thought it was a fair offer. It saved all the bother of sending men on the roads, and when you let the mob out of your yard you get your cheque, or draft, as the case might be. He was always for selling on the run, as long as the buyers were known men.‘
‘How was Mrs. Windsor?’
‘Oh, she was a brick—a regular trump—something like a woman! When she found Jack would only come back from Mildool once a week, she inquired whether there was any sort of a hut that could hold a small family at Mildool; was told there was the old dairyman’s hut at Green Bend, about a mile from the station. So she said she would rather live in a packing-case than be separated from her husband; and as Mildool was to be their home, they might as well go there at once. The end of it was that she made Jack take her traps over, and she has got the old place so neat and comfortable that any one might live there, small as it is, and enjoy life. She was a downright sensible woman, as well as a deuced good-looking one, and she would make Jack a rich man before he died.’
‘Was there anything else to tell?’
‘Well, not much. He was going to let Jack have Boinmaroo at Mildool, and keep Piambook here; when they mustered at either place they could join forces. Oh! the Freemans. Well, they had all gone a month back. Joe and Bill had gone to take up more land in the Albury district. Wish them joy wherever they go. We’re quit of them, that’s one comfort. Abraham Freemanand his lot cleared out for his old place at Bowning. They’ll do well there in a quiet way. Poor Tottie was sorry to leave Rainbar, and cried like fun. Had to comfort her a bit when the old woman wasn’t looking. It’s a beastly nuisance having other people’s stock on your run, and other people’s boys galloping about all over the country, whether you like it or not. Was deuced glad to see their teams yoked and their furniture on, I can tell you. Suppose you’d like to ride over to Mildool, now you are here?’
Mr. Neuchamp thought he might as well, although fully satisfied that the muster would have been satisfactorily completed without him. So the two men rode over that day and had a look at the humours of a delivery muster.
There was, as usual, great skirmishing about the ownership of calves temporarily separated from their maternal parents, one stockman averring that he remembered every spot on a certain calf’s hide since its early infancy, others corroborating his assertion that it ‘belonged to,’ or was the progeny of, his old black ‘triangle-bar’ cow; Mr. Windsor, as counsel for the Crown, declaring, on the other hand, that no calf should leave the Mildool run unless provided with a manifest mother, then and there substantiating her claim to maternity by such personal attentions or privileges as could not be fabricated or misunderstood. To him the adverse stockman would remark that, if he was going to talk like that, he might stick to every blessed clear-skin on the river. Mr. Windsor retorting that he doesn’t say for that, but if people think they can collar calves for the asking, they’ve come to the wrong shop when they ride to Mildool muster. And so on, and so on.
Nathless, in course of time all things are arranged, in some shape, with or without a proportionate allowance of growling, as the men say. It being apparent that Mr. Windsor, now full-fledged overseer of Mildool, knows a thing or two, and will stand up stoutly for his master’s rights, fewer encroachments are, let us suppose, attempted.
The cattle are counted and finally gathered, and are discovered to exceed, by three hundred odd, the station number. The former manager feels complimented that he has been able to muster beyond his books. The purchaser is satisfied, as the additional cattle are merely charged to him at store cattle price, and, being ‘to the manor born,’ will swiftly ‘grow into money.’ The strange stockmen depart, carrying with them a large mixed drove of strayed cattle. The ex-overseer pays his men and then leaves for down the country, there to wait on the agents, and receive hiscongéor further employment, as the case may be. Charley Banks and the black boys, Jack Windsor, and Mr. Neuchamp are left in undisputed possession of the new kingdom.
With such a season, with such prices ruling, the management is the merest routine work, a few hundred calves to brand, arrangements to make for an early muster to show the herd to the great cattle-dealer, who wants to buy a thousand head fat to be taken away in three months, and paid for by his acceptance at that date. Mr. Mooney happens to come before Ernest leaves for Sydney, and the negotiation being successful, the new proprietor of Mildool sets out for the metropolis with a negotiable bill in his pocket for seven thousand pounds—more than a third of the purchase-money of the run.
While Mr. Neuchamp was possessing his soul in tranquillityat Rainbar, he was surprised at receiving a letter from his erstwhile Turonia comrade, Mr. Bright. That cheerful financier wrote as follows:
Turonia,10th December 18—.My dear Neuchamp—I hear you are to be married to the nicest girl in Sydney. I thought it only reasonable, considering our two or three larks here, to offer my congratulations; and, by the bye, talking of things happening, that fellow Greffham, whom you remember my helping to arrest, was hanged last Wednesday at Medhurst.The evidence, joined to his paying away the numbered notes, known to be in the escort parcel, was awfully strong against him. He made no confession, and was as cool and unconcerned to the very last, as you and I ever saw him at the billiard-table. What a wonderful uphill game he could play! It is just possible he might have got off; but Merlin fished up additional evidence which fixed him, in the eyes of the jury, I think—-the groom at the inn, who swore he saw a small parcel covered with a gray rug on his saddle, as he returned from the direction of Running Creek, which he had not when he passed up. You ought to have seen him and Merlin look at each other when Merlin asked the Crown prosecutor to have Carl Anderson called. It was a ‘duel with eyes.’ But, even without that, I don’t see how he could have accounted for the notes.I happened to be in Medhurst the day he was to be turned off. I received a message that he wanted to see me, so I went to the gaol. I knew the sheriff well. They showed me into his cell at once.When I got in, Greffham nearly had finished dressing, and had only to put on his frock-coat to be better turned out, if possible, than he was for the lawn party Branksome gave when the Governor came up. He happened to be cleaning his teeth—you remember how white and even they were—as I came through the door.‘Sit down, old man,’ he said, just as usual, shying his toothbrush into the corner of the cell. ‘I daresay they’ll do; and I suppose I shan’t wantthatany more. What should you say? ’Pon my soul, there isn’t a chair to offer you; devilish close about furniture, aren’t they now? But it’s very kind of you, Bright, to come and see a fellow, when he’s—well—peculiarly situated, eh?’Here he laughed quite naturally, I give you my word—not forcedat all. He certainlywasthe coolest hand I ever saw; and he died as he lived.‘What I wanted to see you for, Bright, was this’—here his voice shook and hedidappear to show a little feeling—‘you’ll take these two letters for me, like a good fellow; one I want you to send to —— after I am gone; the other you can openthen. Make what use you like of the contents. I shan’t care then; say nothingnowto gratify curiosity. As to what I may have done, or not done, I hold myself the best judge of my reasons. You know what my life has been. Open and straightforward, if somewhat reckless. My cards have always been on the table. I have risked all that man holds dear on a throw before. This time I have lost. I pay the stakes; there is no more to be said. Lionel Greffham is not the man to say “I repent.” He is what he is, and will die as he has lived. My time on earth has not been spun out much, but, measured by enjoyment, with a front seat mostly at life’s opera, it adds up fairly. Give me a Havannah from your case. You will see me pretty “fit” for the stage when they ring in the leading performer. By the way, I told them to give you my revolver; and while I think of it, just remember this, if you want to makevery close shootingat any time, only put in three parts of the powder in the cartridge.‘I really believe these were his last words, except to the —— hang-man.He finished his cigar, and lounged up to the gallows, where he died in the face of a tremendous crowd, calmly and scornfully, just as he was accustomed to bear himself to them in life. Jack Ketch was a new hand, and nervous. I heard Greffham say, just as if he was rowing a fellow for awkwardness in saddling his horse, ‘You clumsy idiot, what are you trembling for? Hang me, if I can see what there is to make a fuss about! I’ll bet you a pound I tuck you up in ten minutes without any baggling.Now, you’re right. AmIstanding quite square?’‘You’re all right, sir,’ the man said respectfully. The drop fell, and poor Greffham (I can’t help saying it, although he was a precious scoundrel) died without the least contrition. Showed perfectly good taste to the last. Deuced rum people one meets on a goldfield, don’t you, now?I suppose you’re not likely to come this way again. We’re not quite so jolly as we were. The Colonel has gone back to India. Old De Bracy has got a good Government appointment, for which he looks more suited than market-gardening, though he was hard tobeat at that, or anything he tackled. I hear you’ve made pots of money. Parklands was here the other day, and told me. I have a deuced good mind to turn squatter myself. My regards to old Frankston, and ask him if he remembers the last story I told him. Ha, ha!—Yours sincerely,John Wilder Bright.
Turonia,10th December 18—.
My dear Neuchamp—I hear you are to be married to the nicest girl in Sydney. I thought it only reasonable, considering our two or three larks here, to offer my congratulations; and, by the bye, talking of things happening, that fellow Greffham, whom you remember my helping to arrest, was hanged last Wednesday at Medhurst.
The evidence, joined to his paying away the numbered notes, known to be in the escort parcel, was awfully strong against him. He made no confession, and was as cool and unconcerned to the very last, as you and I ever saw him at the billiard-table. What a wonderful uphill game he could play! It is just possible he might have got off; but Merlin fished up additional evidence which fixed him, in the eyes of the jury, I think—-the groom at the inn, who swore he saw a small parcel covered with a gray rug on his saddle, as he returned from the direction of Running Creek, which he had not when he passed up. You ought to have seen him and Merlin look at each other when Merlin asked the Crown prosecutor to have Carl Anderson called. It was a ‘duel with eyes.’ But, even without that, I don’t see how he could have accounted for the notes.
I happened to be in Medhurst the day he was to be turned off. I received a message that he wanted to see me, so I went to the gaol. I knew the sheriff well. They showed me into his cell at once.
When I got in, Greffham nearly had finished dressing, and had only to put on his frock-coat to be better turned out, if possible, than he was for the lawn party Branksome gave when the Governor came up. He happened to be cleaning his teeth—you remember how white and even they were—as I came through the door.
‘Sit down, old man,’ he said, just as usual, shying his toothbrush into the corner of the cell. ‘I daresay they’ll do; and I suppose I shan’t wantthatany more. What should you say? ’Pon my soul, there isn’t a chair to offer you; devilish close about furniture, aren’t they now? But it’s very kind of you, Bright, to come and see a fellow, when he’s—well—peculiarly situated, eh?’
Here he laughed quite naturally, I give you my word—not forcedat all. He certainlywasthe coolest hand I ever saw; and he died as he lived.
‘What I wanted to see you for, Bright, was this’—here his voice shook and hedidappear to show a little feeling—‘you’ll take these two letters for me, like a good fellow; one I want you to send to —— after I am gone; the other you can openthen. Make what use you like of the contents. I shan’t care then; say nothingnowto gratify curiosity. As to what I may have done, or not done, I hold myself the best judge of my reasons. You know what my life has been. Open and straightforward, if somewhat reckless. My cards have always been on the table. I have risked all that man holds dear on a throw before. This time I have lost. I pay the stakes; there is no more to be said. Lionel Greffham is not the man to say “I repent.” He is what he is, and will die as he has lived. My time on earth has not been spun out much, but, measured by enjoyment, with a front seat mostly at life’s opera, it adds up fairly. Give me a Havannah from your case. You will see me pretty “fit” for the stage when they ring in the leading performer. By the way, I told them to give you my revolver; and while I think of it, just remember this, if you want to makevery close shootingat any time, only put in three parts of the powder in the cartridge.‘
I really believe these were his last words, except to the —— hang-man.
He finished his cigar, and lounged up to the gallows, where he died in the face of a tremendous crowd, calmly and scornfully, just as he was accustomed to bear himself to them in life. Jack Ketch was a new hand, and nervous. I heard Greffham say, just as if he was rowing a fellow for awkwardness in saddling his horse, ‘You clumsy idiot, what are you trembling for? Hang me, if I can see what there is to make a fuss about! I’ll bet you a pound I tuck you up in ten minutes without any baggling.Now, you’re right. AmIstanding quite square?’
‘You’re all right, sir,’ the man said respectfully. The drop fell, and poor Greffham (I can’t help saying it, although he was a precious scoundrel) died without the least contrition. Showed perfectly good taste to the last. Deuced rum people one meets on a goldfield, don’t you, now?
I suppose you’re not likely to come this way again. We’re not quite so jolly as we were. The Colonel has gone back to India. Old De Bracy has got a good Government appointment, for which he looks more suited than market-gardening, though he was hard tobeat at that, or anything he tackled. I hear you’ve made pots of money. Parklands was here the other day, and told me. I have a deuced good mind to turn squatter myself. My regards to old Frankston, and ask him if he remembers the last story I told him. Ha, ha!—Yours sincerely,
John Wilder Bright.
Now the great muster and delivery at Mildool was over and everyday life at Rainbar had again to be faced, Ernest began to feel like one Alexander, sometimes called Great, who had conquered his way into the kingdom of Ennui. He was the possessor of a fortune and of a bride, both above his utmost hopes, his loftiest aspirations; but he began to fear that he had lost that which leaves life very destitute of savour—he feared with a new and terrible dread that he had lost his Occupation!
For life seemed so much more easy, so much less necessary to take thought about, now that he had two stations than when he had but one—one likely to be wrested from him. So is it that Difficulty is oft our friend in disguise, Success but the veiled foe which smiles at our faltering footsteps and watches to destroy. He saw now, that with Jack Windsor at Mildool, and Charley Banks, alert, energetic, fully experienced, at Rainbar, his life henceforth would be that of a visitor, a supernumerary—unless indeed he employed his mind in the construction and organisation of ‘improvements’! Ha, ha! ’Vade retro, Sathanas!‘ The Genie was safe immured in his brazen sealed-up vessel. There should he remain.
Still was there one ‘improvement’ in which he had never altogether lost faith, long and dispiriting as had been the divorce between formation and utility. This was the cutting the connecting channel between the Back Lake and the ‘Outer Lake.’ Long had the ‘master’sditch’ been as useless as a fish-pond in the bosom of the Sahara, as a rose-garden in a glacier, as an oyster-bed in a steppe. Cattle had walked over it; grass had grown in it; stockmen and thoughtless souls had jeered at it, and at the English stranger who had thrown away upon its construction the money of which he possessed a quantity so greatly in excess of his apparent intelligence. As long as he remained the proprietor of the run, it would be hardly in keeping with the manner of the bush to call it ‘Neuchamp’s Folly.’ But had failure or absence chanced to occur in his case, the satirical nomenclature would not have been deferred for a week. In the solitary rides and musings to which, in default of daily work and labour, Mr. Neuchamp was fain to betake himself, it chanced that he had repeatedly examined that portion of this great sheet of water, which rang with the whistling wings of wild fowl, and on breezy days surged with long rippling waves against its bank.
While in Sydney a number of back blocks, at no greater distance from this outer lake than it was from the former ‘frontage,’ had been put under offer to him. What if he should accept the terms—the price was low—and trust to the chance of the next great flood in the full-fed chafing river sending the water leaping down his tiny canal, and thus giving a value never before dreamed of to this splendidly grand but unnatural region. In spite of his half-settled determination to accept no other speculative risks, but, like a wise man, to rest contented with proved success, the next post conveyed instructions to Messrs. Paul Frankston and Co. to close for all the blocks, each five miles square, from A to M, comprising all the unoccupied country at the back of Rainbar and Mildool, at the price named.
On the following morning the weather was misty and unusually cloudy, with an apparent tendency to rain. No rain fell, however; but the raw air, the unusual bleakness of the atmosphere, seemed abnormal to Ernest Neuchamp.
‘I should not wonder,’ said Mr. Banks, in explanation, ‘that it was raining cats and dogs somewhere else, snowing, or something of that sort. Perhaps at the head of the river. If that’s the case, we shall have a flood and no mistake. Such a one as none of us has seen yet. However, we’ve neither hoof nor horn nor fleece on the frontage. It can’t hurt us, that’s one comfort.’
Mr. Banks’s prognostications were correct. Within three days—
... like a horse unbroken,When first he feels the rein,The furious river struggled hard,And tossed his tawny mane,And burst the curb and bounded,Rejoicing to be free,And whirling down in fierce careerBattlement and plank and pier,Rushed headlong to the sea.
... like a horse unbroken,When first he feels the rein,The furious river struggled hard,And tossed his tawny mane,And burst the curb and bounded,Rejoicing to be free,And whirling down in fierce careerBattlement and plank and pier,Rushed headlong to the sea.
... like a horse unbroken,When first he feels the rein,The furious river struggled hard,And tossed his tawny mane,And burst the curb and bounded,Rejoicing to be free,And whirling down in fierce careerBattlement and plank and pier,Rushed headlong to the sea.
... like a horse unbroken,
When first he feels the rein,
The furious river struggled hard,
And tossed his tawny mane,
And burst the curb and bounded,
Rejoicing to be free,
And whirling down in fierce career
Battlement and plank and pier,
Rushed headlong to the sea.
Battlement and plank and pier were in this case represented by hut slabs and rafters, haystacks and pumpkins, from the arable lands and meadows through which the great river held its upper course; while drowned stock and the posts and rails of many a mile of submerged fencing represented the latter floating trifles. There was much that was grand in the steadily deepening, broadening tide which slowly and remorselessly crawled over the wide green flats, which undermined the great waterworn precipices of the red-clayed bluffs, bringing down enormous fragments and masses, many tons inweight, which fell, foamed, and disappeared in the turbid, hurrying wave. Who could have recognised in this fierce, swollen, tyrant river, yellow as the Tiber, broad as the Danube, resistless as Ocean, the shallow, pellucid streamlet, rippling over its sandy shallows, of the dead, bygone famine year?
On the larger flats it was miles wide. The white, straight tree-trunks stood like colonnades with arches framed in foliage, disappearing in endless perspective above a limitless plain of gliding waters.
By night, as Mr. Neuchamp awoke in his cottage, which was built upon an elevation said by tradition to be above the reach of floods, the ‘remorseless dash of billows’ sounded distinctly, unpleasantly close in the darkness.
On the following day, the flood still continuing to rise, Piambook was despatched to the Back Lake to report, and upon his return stated that ‘water yan along that one picaninny blind creek like it Murray, make haste longer Outer Lake.’ Full of hope and expectant of triumph, Mr. Neuchamp started out for ‘Lake country,’ accompanied by Mr. Banks.
When they arrived at the first lake the unusual fulness and volume of the water in that reservoir showed that the main stream must have been forced outwards along the course of the ancient, natural channel, by which in years of exceptional high floods—and in those years only—the lake had been filled.
Now, thought Mr. Neuchamp, the hour, long delayed, long doubted, has surely come. Who could have dreamed but a few short months since, when our very souls were adust and athirst with perennial famine, that our eyes should behold the sight which I see now? How shouldit teach us to hoard the garnered gold of truth, the ‘eternal verity’ in our heart of hearts! ‘My lord delayeth his coming.’ Was that held to be a reason, an excuse for the unfaithful, self-indulgent? Truly this would seem to some as great a miracle as the leaping water which followed the stroke of the prophet’s staff in that other desert of which we read of old.
And now his eyes did actually behold the first trickling, wondrous motion of the brimming reservoir to advance, gravitation-led, along the narrow path to its far-distant sister lake. Slowly the full waters rose to the very lip of the vast natural cup or vase, and then, first saturating the entrance, poured down the narrow outlet which the forecasting mind of man had prepared for it. It trickled, it flowed, it ran, it coursed, foaming and rushing, along the cutting, of which the fall at first exceeded that of the general passage. It was done! It was over! A proud success!
Charley Banks threw up his hat. Together they rode recklessly onward to the Outer Lake, and there Ernest Neuchamp enjoyed silently the deep satisfaction—then known but to the projector and inventor—of witnessing the waters of the Inner Lake, for the first time since the sea had ceased to murmur over these boundless levels, flow fast and flashing forward, driven by the pressure of the immense body behind, into the vast, deep, grass-clothed basin of the Outer Lake.
This was a triumph truly. For this alone it was worth while to have journeyed across the long long ocean tide, to have toiled and suffered, waited and watched, to have eaten his heart with fear and sickening dread of the gaunt destroyer ‘Ruin,’ ever stalking nearer and nearer. This was true life—real adventure—thehazard and the triumph which alone constitute true manhood.
In the ecstasy of the moment Ernest Neuchamp forgot the fortune he had gained, the bride whom he had won, the home of his youth, the grand and glorious future, the not uneventful past. All things seemed as dreams and visions by the side of this grand and living Reality.
As he sat on his horse and gazed, still flowed the glorious wave into the century-dry basin by the channel which he, Ernest Neuchamp, had, in defiance of Nature, opinion, and society, conceived, formed, and successfully completed. Seasons might come and go; another dry time might come; the water might periodically evaporate and disappear,—but nothing could evade the great fact henceforth in the history of the land, that he had established the connection between the river and this distant, long-dry, unthought-of reservoir. There would be no more hint or menace of Neuchamp’s Folly—more likely, Neuchamp’s River.
Lake Neuchamp! Pshaw! it was an inland sea. Why not name it now? Why not render immortal, not his own perhaps ancient patronymic, but the lovely and beloved name of his soul’s divinity? Now was the hour, the minute, when the virgin waters were falling for the first time in creation into the flower-besprinkled lap of the green earth before their eyes!
‘Charley, my boy,’ he said to Mr. Banks, ‘take off your hat. Piambook, do liket me,’ he said, removing his own. ‘I name this water, now about to be filled for the first time within the memory of man, “Lake Antonia.” So mote it be. Hip, hip, hurrah!‘ and the echoes of the waste rang to the unfamiliar sounds of the great British shout of welcome, of salutation, of battle-joy, of death-defiance,which England’s friends and England’s foes have had ere now just cause to know.
‘Hurrah!’ joined in Charley Banks with genuine feeling. ‘By George! I never thought to see this sight—last year particularly; but, of course, we might have known it wasn’t going to be dry always, as Levison said. We don’t see far beyond our noses, most of us. But itwashard to conjure up any notion of a regular out-and-out waterfall like this with a twelvemonth’s dust, and last year’s burnt feed keeping as black as the day it took fire. I believe there will be thirty feet of water in this when it’s full up, and it soon will be at this rate.’
‘Budgeree tumble down water that one,’ said Piambook. ‘Old man blackfellow yabber, debil-debil, make a light here when he yan long that one scrub.’
Another occasion of congratulation awaited Mr. Neuchamp, the pleasure and pride accompanying which were perhaps only second in degree to the feelings inspired by the engineering triumph of Lake Antonia. His stud of Austral-Arabian horses had shared in the general advance and development of the property; they were now a perfect marvel of successful rearing.
He had them brought in daily from the sandhills near the plain where they ordinarily grazed, and passed hours in reviewing the colts and fillies, the yearlings, the mares and the foals. Every grade and stage, from the equine baby which gambolled and frisked by the side of its dam, to the well-furnished three-year-old filly—‘Velut in latis equa trima campis ludit exsultim, metuitque tangi,’—all were satin-coated, sleek and round, fuller-fleshed, stronger, swifter; more riotously healthy could they not have been had they been fed with golden oats in an emperor’s stable. Daintily now they picked the half-ripened tops from thefields of wild oats or barley which spread for leagues around. They drank of the pure clear waters of every pool and brooklet. They lay at night in the thickly-carpeted sandy knolls, and snuffed up the free desert breeze, fresh wafted from inmost sands or farthest seas. Partaking on one side of their parentage of the stately height and generous scope of their southern dams, culled from the noble race of island steeds which bear up the large frames of the modern Anglo-Saxon, they inherited a strong, perhaps overpowering infusion of the priceless blood of the courser of the desert. Their delicate heads, their wide nostrils, their adamantine legs, their perfect symmetry, all told of the ancient lineage of Omar the Keheilan, whose dam was Najima Sabeh or the Morning Star, of the strain Seglawee Dzedran, which, as every camel-driver of the Anezeh knows, dates back to El Kamsch, that glorious equine constellation, the five mares of Mahomet!
Here, again, was another instance of what Ernest could not but acknowledge gratefully as the generosity of Fate. Had but the season continued obdurate, his utter irrevocable ruin could not have been stayed. As a consequence, this stud, so precious, so profitable, so distinguished as it was apparently destined to be (for Mr. Banks told him that numbers of offers had already been received for all available surplus stock, while the agent of a large dealer had implored him to put a price upon the whole stud), would doubtless have passed under the hammer as most unconsidered trifles, to be sneered at, scattered, for ever wasted and lost, as had been many a good fellow’s pet stud ere now.
At length the day arrived when, having witnessed the satisfactory conclusion of every conceivable business dutyand task which could be transacted at Rainbar or Mildool, Mr. Neuchamp took his place in the mail for Sydney, which city he had calculated to reach within a week of the dread ceremonial which was to seal his destiny. The coach didnotbreak down or capsize, fracturing Mr. Neuchamp’s leg in two places. The train fulfilled its appointed task, and the stern steam-giant did not select that opportunity for running off the rails or equalising angles. Something of the sort might have been reasonably expected to happen to a hero so near the rapturous denouement of the third volume, in which, indeed, every hero of average respectability is killed, mysteriously imprisoned, or married.
Mr. Neuchamp had undergone trials and troubles, risks and anxieties, losses and crosses; but the season of tribulation was for ever past for him. He had henceforth but to submit to the compulsory laurel crown, to the caresses of Fortune’s favourite delegates, to listen to the plaudits of the crowd, to withstand the whispers and glances of beauty. He was now wise, beautiful, strong, and brave, a conqueror, an Adonis—in a word, he wasrich!
He stood successful, and the world’s praises, grudgingly bestowed upon struggling fortitude, were showered upon the obviously victorious speculator. All kinds of rumours went forth about him. His possessions were multiplied, so that Rainbar and Mildool stood sponsors for a tract of country about as large as from Kashgar to Khiva.
The canal was magnified into the dimensions of its namesake of Suez, and a trade was prophesied which would overshadow Melbourne and revolutionise Adelaide. He had contracted for the remount service for the wholeMadras Presidency, such a matter being quite within the scope of his immense and high-bred studs. His herds of cattle were to supply Ballarat and Sandhurst with fat stock, and Melbourne buyers were on their way to secure everything he could deliver for the next two years! Ernest Neuchamp of Rainbar was the man of the day; the popular idol. Squatter though he might be, some of Jack Windsor’s grateful utterances had been circulated, and a democratic but strongly appreciative and generous populace adored him. Portraits of Mr. Neuchamp and his faithful retainer, Jack Windsor, contending victoriously with a swarthy piratical crowd, led on by the Count with a cutlass and a belt full of revolvers, appeared in the windows of the print-shops. Heroism and unselfish generosity, like murder, ‘will out.’
Whether accidentally or otherwise, the Morahmee conflict had transpired. I make no reflections upon the well-known inviolable secrecy which shrouds all postnuptial communications. I content myself with stating a fact. Mr. Windsor was now a married man.
Ernest was at first annoyed, then surprised, lastly, unaffectedly amused, when a highly popular dramatic version of the incident appeared at the Victoria Theatre, wherein he was represented as defying the Count, and assuring him that ‘berlood should flow from Morahmee Jetty to the South Head Lighthouse ere he relinquished the two maidens to his lawless grasp,’ while Jack Windsor’s representative, with a cabbage-tree hat and a hanging velvet band broad enough to make a sash for Carry, placed himself in an exaggerated, pugilistic attitude, and implored the foreign seamen to ‘come on and confront on his own ground, by the shore of that harbour which was his country’s pride, a true-born Sydney native!’This brought down the house, and occasioned Mr. Neuchamp such anguish of mind that he began to think Jermyn Croker not such a bad fellow after all, and to feel unkindly towards the great land and the warm-hearted people of his adoption.
Incapable of being stimulated by flattery into a false estimate of himself, these exaggerated symptoms of appreciation but pained him acutely; they disturbed his philosophical mind, ever craving for the performance of justice and intolerant of all lower standards of right.
As for Antonia Frankston, like most women, she was gratified by these tokens of the distinction which had been so profusely accorded to her hero. He was a hero who, in her eyes, though worthy of triumphs and processions, evaded his claims to such distinctions. He was too prone, she thought, to be over Scriptural in his social habitudes, and unless roused and incited, to take the lower rather than the higher seat at the board. Now that the people, wavering and impulsive, but still a mighty and tangible power, had endorsed and adopted him, Antonia’s expansive mind recognised the brevet rank bestowed upon him. After all, had he not done much and dared greatly? Was it not well for the world to know it? If he was to be decorated, few deserved it more. So Antonia accepted serenely and in good faith the plaudits and universal flattery which now commenced to be showered upon the hero of her choice, the idol of her heart, the image of all written manhood.
The days which Mr. Neuchamp spent in Sydney after his return from Mildool and Rainbar were certainly more tedious than any which he had ever known in the pleasant city; but at length they passed away and were no more—strange thought! those atoms from the mighty massof Time—drops from his flowing river—draughts, alas! quaffed or spilled from life’s golden chalice. They were past, faded, dead, irrevocably gone, as the days of the years before Pharaoh, before the shepherd kings, before the dawn of human life, Eden, or the first gleam of light which flashed upon a darkened, formless world!
Sad, pathetic even, is the death of a day! Its circling hours have known peace, joy, loving regard, social glee, charity, justice, mercy, repose. The allotted task has been done. The parent’s smile, the wife’s love, the babe’s prattle, have all glorified earth during its short season. And now the day is done! its tiny term is over, lost in the shoreless sea of past immensities! The brightly inconstant orb shines tenderly on the new-born stranger, full of joyous hope or dread expectancy. Who can tell what this, the new and garish day, may bring forth? Let us weep for the loved, fast-fading Child of Time, in whose golden tresses, at least, twined no cypress wreath.
Then, heralded by calm and cloudless hours, did the wondrous unit, the Day of Days, dawn for Ernest Neuchamp. Rarely—even in that matchless clime, where the too ardent sun alone may be blamed by the husbandman, rarely by the citizen or the tourist—did a more perfect, unrivalled, wondrous day steal rosy through the ocean mists, the folded vapours, to change into fretted gold and Tyrian dyes the tender tints of flushed dawn. All nature visibly, audibly rejoiced. The tiny wavelets murmured on the milk-white sands of the Morahmee beach, that their darling—she who loved them and talked with them in many a hushed eve, in many a solemn starry midnight—was this day to be wed. The strange foreign pines and flower trees of the Morahmee plantation, brought from many a distant land to please thelady of the mansion, echoed the sound as they waved to and fro with oriental languor and tropical mystery. The flowerets she daily tended turned imperceptibly their delicately various sheen of petals to each other and sighed the tender secret. With how many secrets are not the flowers entrusted? Have they not been sworn to silence since those days of the great dead empires, when the vows and pleadings, songs and laughter, beneath the rose-chaplets were sacred evermore?
Her gems, of which Antonia had great store—for there was more difficulty in preventing Paul from overlading her caskets than of replenishing them—even they knew it. They flashed and glittered, and reddened, and sent out green and purple light, for they are envious, hard, and remorseless of nature, as they noted the arrival of a bediamonded necklace, and a brooch outshining in splendour any of their rich and rare and very exclusive ‘set.’
The pensioners, her dependants, of the house, among the humble, and the very poor, knew it and raised for her welfare the brief unstudied prayer which comes from a thankful heart. The poor, in ordinary acceptation, are, and have always been, in Australia, difficult to discover and to distinguish. But to the earnest quest of the unaffectedly charitable, anxious to do good to soul or body, to succour the tempted, to help the needy, to save him that is ready to perish, worthy occasions of ministration have never been absent from the outskirts of every large city.
The forlorn spinster, friendless and forsaken, the overworked matron,—the shabby genteel sufferers too secure to starve, too poor to enjoy, too proud to complain, and, occasionally, what seemed to be an example of unmercifuldisaster,—among these were the rich maiden’s unobtrusive but unremittingly performed good works, of which none heard, none knew, but the recipients, and perhaps the discreetest of co-workers.
And thus, with the day just dawned, had the maiden life of Antonia Frankston come to an end. From this day forth her being was to merge in that of one who, falling with the suddenness of a shipwrecked mariner into their society, had been, as would have been such a waif, treated with every friendly office, with the ample up-springing kindness of a princely heart, by her fond father. That father, no mean judge of his fellow-man, had seen in his early career but the noble errors of a lofty nature and an elevated ideal. Such disproportions between judgment and experience but prove the natural dignity of the mind as fully as the precocious wisdom of the gutter-bred urchin waif, his base descent and companionship.
Paul Frankston had long foreseen that, when the lessons of life should have cleared the encrustation from the character of hisprotégé, it would shine forth bright and burnished as Toledo steel—all-sufficient for defence, nay, equal to spirited attack, should such need arise. He saw that the future possessor and guardian of his soul’s treasure was a ‘man’ as well as a ‘gentleman.’ On both of these essentials he laid great weight. For the rest, his principles were high and unfaltering, his habits unimpeachable. Whatever trifling defects there might be in his character were merely such as were incident to mortality. They must be left to the influence of time, experience, and of Antonia.
‘If she doesn’t turn him out a perfect article,’ saidPaul, unconsciously quitting the mental for the actual soliloquy, ‘why, nothing and no one can. If I had been any one else, and she had commenced early enough at me, I really believe that she’d have changed old Paul Frankston into a bishop, or, at any rate, a rural dean at least; even Charley Carryall——’
But whether Captain Carryall’s utterances and anecdotes were scarcely of a nature calculated to harmonise with bishops and deans, or whether Mr. Frankston’s many engagements at this important crisis suddenly engaged his attention, can never be known with that precision which this chronicler is always anxious to supply. One thing only is certain, that he looked at his watch, and hastily arising from his arm-chair, departed into the city.
For the information of a section of readers for whom we feel much respect and gratitude, it may be mentioned that the wedding took place at St. James’s, a venerable but architecturally imperfect pile in the vicinity of Hyde Park. There be churches near Morahmee more replete with ‘miserable sinners’ in robes of Worth and garments of Poole, but Mr. Frankston would none of them. In the old church had he stood beside his mother, a schoolboy, wondering and wearied, but acquiescent, after the manner of British children; in the old church had he plighted his troth to Antonia’s sainted mother; in the old church should his darling utter her vows, and in no other. Are there any words which can fitly interpret the deep joy and endless thankfulness which fill the heart and humble the mind of him who, all unworthy, knows that the chalice of life’s deepest joy is even then past all risk and danger, steadily uplifted to his reverent lips?
Doubts there have been, delays that fretted, fears that shook the soul, clouds that dimmed, darkness that hid the sky of love. All these have sped. Here is naught but the glad and gracious Present, that blue and golden day which, pardoning and giving amnesty to the Past, beseeches, well-nigh assures, the stern veiled form of the Future.
Some of these reflections would doubtless have mingled with the contemplations of Ernest Neuchamp at Aurora’s summons on that glad morn but for an unimportant fact—that he was at that well-known poetical period most soundly asleep.
Restlessly wakeful during the earlier night-watches, he slept heavily at length, and only awoke, terrible to relate, with barely time for a careful toilet. Hastily disposing of a cup of coffee and a roll, he betook himself, in company with Mr. Parklands, who, I grieve to relate, had been playing loo all night, and was equally late and guilty, to the ancient church, where they were, by the good fortune of Parklands‘watch being rather fast—like all his movements—exactly, accurately the canonical five minutes before the time. Both of the important personages, being secretly troubled, looked slightly, becomingly pale. But the pallor of Parklands, entirely due to an unprosperous week, involving heavier disbursements and later sittings than ordinary, told much in his favour with the bridesmaids, so much so, that he always averred, in his customary irreverent speech, that ‘his flint was fixed’ on the occasion.
Probably owing to the calmly superior aspect of Mr. Hartley Selmore, or the tonic supplied by Jermyn Croker’s patent disapprobation and contempt of the whole proceedings, the protagonist and his acolouthoswent through the ordeal with that exact proportion of courage, reverence, deftness, and satisfaction, the full rendering of which is often hard upon him who makes necessarily ‘a first appearance.’ As for Antonia’s loveliness on that day, when, radiant, white-robed, and serene, she placed her hand in that of her lover, and greeted him with the trustful smile in which the virgin-soul shines out o’er the maiden-bride’s countenance, Ernest Neuchamp may be pardoned for thinking that the angel of his dreams had been permitted to visit the earth, to rehearse for his especial joy a premature beatific vision.
Mr. Parklands effected a sensation by dropping the bridal-ring, but as he displayed much quickness of eye and manual dexterity in regaining it, the incident had rather a beneficial effect than otherwise. Everything was happily concluded, even to the kissing of the bridesmaids, Mr. Parklands, with his usual energy and daring, having insisted on carrying out personally that pleasing portion of the programme, supposed to appertain of right to the holder of the ancient and honourable office of groomsman. This compelled the chasing of two unwilling damsels half-way down the aisle, after which the slightly scandalised spectators quitted the church, while the wedding-guests betook themselves to Morahmee.
There, as they arrived, Mr. Frankston, sweeping the bay mechanically with long-practised eye, exclaimed, ‘What boat is that heading for our jetty at such a pace?—a whaleboat, too, with a Kanaka crew. There’s a tall man with the steer oar in his fist; by Jove! it’s Charley Carryall for a thousand.’
And that cheerful mariner and successful narrator it proved to be when the weather-beaten boat came foaming up to the little pier, drawn half out of the water by herwild-looking, long-haired crew, encouraged by their captain, who was backing up the stroke as if an eighty-barrel whale depended upon their speed.
‘Frantically glad to see you, Charley, my boy,’ shouted Paul; ‘never hoped for such luck; the only man necessary to make the affair perfect—absolutely perfect. Isn’t he, Antonia? But how did you guess what we were about, and get here in time? I see the oldBanksiais only creeping up the harbour now.’
‘Thatguided me,’ said the Captain, pointing to the profusely decorated Morahmee flagstaff—an invariable adjunct to a marine villa. ‘I was sure all that bunting wasn’t up for anything short of Antonia’s wedding. So I dressed and came away. The operculums I was bringing our little girl here will just come in appropriately. They’re the first any of you have seen, I daresay.’
The faintly subdued tone which is usual and natural in the pre-banquet stage could not be reasonably protracted after the first fusilade of Paul’s wonderful Pommery and Veuve Clicquot, Steinberger and Roederer.
The guests were many and joyous, the day brilliant, the occasion fortunate and mirth-inspiring, the entertainment unparalleled, and henceforth proverbial in a city of sumptuous and lavish hospitality.
Small wonder, then, that the merriment was as free and unconstrained as the welcome was cordial, and the banquet regal in its costly profusion. How the jests circulated! how the silvery laughter rang! how the bright eyes sparkled! how the fair cheeks glowed! how the soft breeze whispered love! how the blue wave murmured joy!
Did not Mr. Selmore propose the health of the bride and bridegroom with such pathetic eloquence that theuninstructed were doubtful as to whether he was Antonia’s uncle or Mr. Neuchamp’s father? He referred to the mingled energy, foresight, acuteness, and originality displayed by his valued, and, he might add, distinguished friend Ernest Neuchamp. By utilising qualities of the highest order, joined with information always yielded, he was proud to say, by himself and other pioneers, he had achieved an unequalled, but, he must add, a most deserved success, which placed him in the front rank of the pastoral proprietors of New South Wales.
Any one would have imagined from Mr. Hartley Selmore’s benevolent flow of eulogy that he had carefully nursed the infancy of Mr. Neuchamp’s fortunes instead of ruthlessly endeavouring to strangle the tender nursling. He himself, by means of luck and much discount, had managed to hang on, ostensible proprietor of his numerous stations, until the tide turned. Now he was a wealthy man, and needed not to call the governor of the Bank of England his cousin.
With prosperity his character and estimation had much improved. There were those yet who said he was an unprincipled remorseless old humbug, and would none of him. But in a general way he was acceptable; popular, in private and in public. His natural talents were great; his acquirements above the average; his manner irresistible; it was no one’s particular interest or business to bring him to book,—so he dined and played billiards at the clubs, buttonholed officials, and greeted illustrious strangers, as if the greater portion of the pastoral interior of Australia belonged to him, or as though he were one of the Conscript Fathers, distinguished for an excess of Roman virtues, of this rising nation.
Mr. Parklands indeed desired to throw some missileat him for his ‘cheek,’ as he confided to a young lady with sensational blue eyes, but desisted from that practical criticism upon being implored by his fair neighbour not to think of it, for her sake, and that of the ladies generally. The speaker was pretty enough to speak with authority, and so Hartley, like other fortunate conspirators and oppressors, departed in triumph, with the plaudits and congratulations of the unthinking public. For the rest, the affair went off much as such society fireworks do. Augusta Neuchamp, in a Paris dress, looked so extremely well that Jermyn Croker congratulated himself warmly, and mingled such vitriolic scintillations with his pleasantries, that every one was awed into admiration. The mail steamer was to sail in a few days, and he flattered himself that he had contrived a surprise for all his friends, which should contain an element of ignoring contempt so complete in conception and execution, that his departure from the colony should faithfully reflect the opinions and convictions formed during his residence in it.
Having, after considerable hesitation, finally determined to enter upon the frightfully uncertain adventure of matrimony, he had offered himself and heart, such as it was, in marriage to Miss Augusta, with many apologies for the apparent necessity of the ceremony being performed in a colony. That young lady had endeared herself to Mr. Croker by her unsparing criticisms, by her ceaseless discontent with all things Australian, by her unmistakable air oftonand distinction. He did not entirely overlook her possession of a moderate but assured income.
With his customary disregard for the feelings of others, he had insisted upon being married, without the usual time-honoured ceremonies and concomitants, on themorning upon which the mail steamer started for Europe. By going on board directly afterwards, the Sydney people would be precluded from hearing of the event until after their departure; while their fellow-passengers, most of them strangers, would be ignorant as to whether the newly-married couple were of a week’s date or of six months.
This arrangement, in which he had no great difficulty in persuading Miss Augusta to acquiesce, would have excellently answered Mr. Croker’s unselfish expectations but for one circumstance, which he doubtless noted to the debit of colonial wrongs and shortcomings—he had neglected to procure the co-operation of the elements.
No sooner had the ceremony, unwitnessed save by Paul Frankston and Mr. and Mrs. Neuchamp, taken place, and the happy pair been transferred to theNubia, their luggage having been safely deposited in that magnificent ocean steamer days before,—no sooner had the great steamer neared the limit of the harbour, when a southerly gale, an absolute hurricane, broke upon the coast with such almost unprecedented fury that till it abated no sane commander of the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s service would have dreamed of quitting safe anchorage.
For three days the ‘tempest howled and wailed,’ and most uncomfortably theNubialay at anchor, safe but most uneasy, and, as she was rather crank, rolling and pitching nearly as wildly as she could have done in the open sea.
It so chanced that one of Mr. Croker’s few weak points was an extraordinarily extreme susceptibility tomal de mer. On all occasions upon which he had cleared the Heads, for years past, he had suffered terribly. Butnever since his first outward-bound experience in early life had he suffered torments, prostration, akin to this. He lay in his cabin death-like, despairing, well-nigh in collapse.
Miss Neuchamp, in spite of her much travelling, was always a martyr during the first week of a voyage, if the weather chanced to be bad. Now it certainly was bad, very bad; and in consequence Miss Augusta lay, under the charge of a stewardess, in a stern cabin, well-nigh sick unto death, heedless of life and its chequered presentments, and as oblivious, not to say indifferent, to the fate of Jermyn Croker as if she had yesterday sworn to love and obey the chief officer of theNubia.
This was temporary anguish, mordant and keen, doubtless. But Time, the healer, would certainly in a few days have set it straight. The fact of an unknown lady and gentleman being indisposed at the commencement of the voyage afflicts nobody. But here was apparently the finger of the fiend. A ruffianly pilot, coming off in his hardy yawl, brought on board a copy of theSydney Morning Heraldof the day following their attempted departure, in which it was duly set forth how, at St. James’s Church, by Canon Druid, Jermyn, second son of Crusty Croker, Esq., of Crankleye Hall, Cornwall, was then and there married to Augusta, only daughter of the Rev. Cyril Neuchamp, incumbent of Neuchamp-Barton, Buckinghamshire, England. Now the joke was out. Even under such unpromising circumstances it told. Here were two mortals, passionately devoted of course, and in that state of matrimonial experience when all things tend to the wildest overrating, so cast down, so utterly prostrated by the foul Sea Demon, that they positively did not care a rush for each other. The greatJermyn lay, faintly ejaculating ‘Steward, Ste-w-a-ar-d,’ at intervals, and making neither lament nor inquiry about his similarly suffering bride. As for Augusta, she had scarce more strength of body or mind than permitted her to moan out, ‘I shall die, I shall die’; and apparently, for all she cared, in that unreal, phantasmal, pseudo-existence, which only was not death, though more dreadful, Jermyn Croker might have fallen overboard, or have been changed into a Seedee stoker. Then for this to happen to Jermyn Croker, of all people! The humour of the situation was inexhaustible!
And though the fierce south wind departed and theNubiadrove swiftly majestic across the long seas that part Cape Otway from the stormy Leuwin, though in due time the spice-laden gales blew ‘soft from Ceylon’s isle,’ and the savage peaks of Aden, the lofty summit of the Djebel Moussa rose to view in the grand succession of historical landscapes; yet to the last day of the voyage a stray question in reference to the precise effects of very bad cases of sea-sickness would be directed, as to persons of proved knowledge and experience, to Mr. and Mrs. Jermyn Croker, by their fellow-passengers.
It is due to Mr. Croker, as a person of importance, to touch lightly upon his after-career. His wife discovered too late that in reaching England he had only changed the theme upon which his universal depreciations were composed. ‘Non animam sed cœlum mutant qui trans mare currunt.’ He abused the climate and the people of England with a savage freedom only paralleled by his Australian practice. Becoming tired of receiving 3 or 4 per cent for his money, he one day, in a fit of wrath, embarked one-half of his capital in a somewhat uncertain South American loan. His cash was absorbed, toreappear spasmodically in the shape of interest, of which there was little, while of principal it soon became apparent that there would be none.
Reduced to the practice of marked though not distressing economy, Mr. Croker enjoyed the peculiar pleasure which is yielded to men of his disposition, of witnessing the possession of luxuries by others and a style of living which they are debarred from emulating. He was gladdened, too, by the occasional vision of an Australian with more money than he could spend, who rallied him upon his grave air, and bluntly asked why he was such a confounded fool as to sell out just as prices were really rising. Finally, to aggravate his sufferings, long unendurable by his own account, Mr. Parklands had the effrontery to come home, and, in the very neighbourhood where he, Croker, was living for economy, to buy a large estate which happened to be for sale.
The unfailing flow of the new proprietor’s high spirits, his liberal ways, and frank manners, combined with exceptional straight going in the hunting-field, rendered him immensely popular, as indeed he had always contrived to be wherever fate and speculation led his roving steps. But it may be questioned whether his brother-colonist ever saw his old friend spinning by behind a blood team, or heard of his being among the select few in a ‘quick thing,’ without fulminating one of his choicest anathemas, comprehending at once the order to which he and Parklands had belonged, the country they had quitted, and the one in which they now sojourned.
Mr. Banks remained in the employment of Mr. Neuchamp at Rainbar until, having saved and acquiredby guarded investment a moderate capital, he had a tempting offer of joining, as junior partner, in the purchase of a large station in new country. Always a good-looking, manly fellow, he managed to secure the affections of a niece of Mr. Middleton, whom he met on one of his rare trips to Sydney, and, before he left for the Tadmor Downs, Lower Barcoo, they were married.
Mr. Joe Freeman had employed some of the compulsory leisure time rendered necessary during his fulfilment of the residence clause for Mr. Levison, in an exhaustive study of the Crown Lands Alienation Act. From that important statute (20 Vic. No. 7, sec. 13) he discovered that, provided a man had children enough, there is but little limit to the quantity of the country’s soil that he can secure and occupy at a rate of expenditure singularly small and favourable to the speculative ‘landist’ of the period.
Thus Joe Freeman, after considerable ciphering, made out that he could ‘take up’ for himself and his three younger children a total of twelve hundred and eighty acres of first-class land! He had determined that as long as there was an alluvial flat in the colony his choice should not consist ofbadland. Added to this would be a pre-emptive grazing right of three times the extent. This would come to three thousand eight hundred and forty acres, which, added to the freehold of twelve hundred and eighty acres, gave a total of five thousand one hundred and twenty acres. The entire use of this territory he could secure by a payment of five shillings per acre for thefreehold portiononly—say, three hundred and twenty pounds.
‘Of course his three children were compelled, by law, to reside on their selections. As two of these wereunder five years old, some difficulty in the carrying out of the apparently stringent section No. 18 might be anticipated.
This difficulty was utterly obliterated by building his cottageexactlyupon the intersecting lines of the four half-sections, thus: