IN TWO YEARS’ TIME.
BY
ADA CAMBRIDGE.
_IN TWO VOLUMES._
VOL. I.
[Illustration]
LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,
NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
1879.
(_All rights reserved._)
PRINTED AT THE CANTON PRESS, BECCLES.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. NARRAPORWIDGEE 1
II. AN UNEXPECTED PLEASURE 18
III. PEARS AND GREENGAGES 46
IV. ARCADIA 74
V. DESPAIR 93
VI. TOM SMITH’S FAMILY DIAMONDS 110
VII. ON THE MAIL STEAMER 141
VIII. SOME ENGLISH RELATIONS 166
IX. ELEANOR ARMYTAGE 192
X. MY INTRODUCTION TO MRS. GRUNDY 218
XI. LORD WESTBROOK 248
IN TWO YEARS’ TIME.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I.
NARRAPORWIDGEE.
“Seven o’clock!” exclaimed father, throwing his hat (with a very dirty
puggaree on it) upon the drawing-room sofa. “Isn’t that confounded boy
back yet?” Mother looked up from a low chair with her gentle face of
reproof. She had a great objection to strong language, and, to do him
justice, father seldom used it; but he was hot and tired, poor man,
after drafting sheep all day in a north wind, and, moreover, the boy
in question had gone to post for the English letters, and was half an
hour beyond his usual time for returning.
“He started late,” said mother. “Pat Malony wanted him to help to put
out a fire in the lake paddock. Go and change your dress, my dear, and
we’ll have dinner. I think the wind is turning; it is not quite so hot
as it was.”
Father obediently took himself off, puffing and blowing and wiping his
forehead vigorously, his dirty puggaree flapping against his dirty
grass-cloth coat (I don’t think he would have presented himself to us
in that costume if it had not been mail day). Mother folded up her
work and laid it neatly in her basket. I rushed out upon the verandah
to consult the stable weathercock, and, finding that it indicated a
blessed south sea-breeze coming round, flourished up all the blinds
and flung open all the windows, which had been tight shut since early
morning from the oven heat outside.
“Gently, my dear!” called mother after me, as the tail of my thin dress
whisked round a rough bole of grape vine clasping a verandah post, and
the bottom flounce parted with half a yard of lace. “I wish you would
move more quietly, Kitty.”
“I wish I could, mother, but this lovely air is intoxicating,” I
responded, tucking up my tail and dancing down upon the lawn and back
again, with my hands stretched out. “I believe it will be _cold_ by
bed-time, really.”
The dinner bell rang, and I went indoors through the dining-room
window, and took my seat at table. Father, spruce and fresh after a
bath and change of clothes, stood up over a pair of boiled fowls,
and shut his eyes, and muttered briskly, “For what we are going to
receive--wing or breast, my dear?”--as if it were all one sentence
(another little habit he had which mother would have liked to break him
of, if she had not known her place too well). And mother, looking with
her calm eyes upon the sun-browned, arid landscape beyond the garden
gate, remarked, as she helped herself to a slice of pork, “I see Sandy
now, crossing the ford. Let us get dinner over before we open the bag.”
We generally did what she told us, and we did now; but dinner was a
brief ceremony in consequence. The fowls gave place to the puddings,
and the puddings to the cheese, with a celerity that Ah Foo, the
Chinaman cook, was not used to these hot days, and we left a lovely
dish of raspberries and cream untouched for the first time that year.
(N.B.--It was nearly the end of January, and they were just going out
of season at Narraporwidgee.) Mother rose with her accustomed dignity,
and went into the hall to sort the servants’ letters into the hands of
Bridget the parlour-maid. She selected her own correspondence from the
remainder, gave several letters and a bundle of newspapers to father,
and then deliberately hung up the bag on its proper peg. Finally, we
went out and seated ourselves on the verandah, now cool and breezy,
with one of those sudden evening changes peculiar to the Australian
climate; and father commenced operations by reading his newspaper
telegrams aloud, as usual, and then tearing open the one English letter
he had received.
“Well!” he exclaimed presently, and continued gazing at his letter,
with a complacent smile on his honest face. Of course mother and I
looked up at him expectantly.
“The market not gone down yet?” she inquired.
“No,” he replied; “I believe the tide is on the turn, but it hasn’t
turned yet. Prices may even rise a little more, Norton thinks.”
“Dear me, I am very glad,” said mother; and so she looked, though she
never visibly excited herself. She knew quite well that the price of
wool, even at its then rate, if it lasted long enough (until father’s
shipment arrived in London) meant an increase of a great deal to our
income for the year; and she knew, too, that that increase meant so
much more promise for her of the fulfilment of a great hope and scheme
that she had cherished for many years. It was pathetic to see the
wistful eyes that she lifted to his, as he continued to look in her
face steadily.
“Yes, I know what you’re thinking of,” said he; “and I have been
thinking of it too. I believe it might be managed now. I said to myself
only this morning, while I was drafting those ewes, ‘If wool makes as
much this year as it did last, I can afford to turn the whole concern
over to somebody else, and Mary shall have her wish.’ So you shall,” he
added, letting his broad palm fall upon her shapely shoulder. “We’ll
wait till we hear the bales are in the market, and we’ll start home by
the very next mail, if you like.”
I looked at mother, and her face was a study. A delight that would have
overbalanced the self-possession of anybody else struggled to break
through her cloak of dignified reserve, and she would not let it. Her
eyes grew moist, and her mouth twitched at the corners; but she just
took father’s hand from her shoulder, and laid it to her lips, and
replied, gently, “Thank you, my dear; I shall be very glad. It will be
such a good thing for Kitty.”
When father was a young man (what he calls a young man, about
thirty-eight or forty years of age), he and mother came out to
Australia to seek their fortunes, bringing me, a baby, with them. My
grandfather had died several years before, leaving a home-made will,
and my uncle, his eldest son, his sole executor; and uncle James,
of whose integrity and uprightness no one had ever had the faintest
suspicion, was tempted by some flaws in that irregular testament to
take a mean advantage of his brother and sisters. My father, who was
the last to see evil in any one, let things drift a little while, not
suspecting mischief; but when the truth was suddenly forced upon him he
arose to do battle for himself and his sisters with all his might and
main. Aunt Alice and aunt Kate were both married, and of course their
husbands joined the fray, with their respective family solicitors; and
very soon the affair got into Chancery, and into the hands of about
fifty lawyers (speaking roughly), and, after two or three years of
suspense and misery, my father and my aunts--who had only right on
their side, while uncle James had the law on his--found themselves
no better off than if grandpapa had left them nothing, and, indeed,
rather worse. Aunt Alice’s husband was a wealthy London merchant, and
scorned to consider the loss of such a trifle as £5000; and aunt Kate’s
husband, who was a dignified country rector of old family and ample
means, paid his fees gracefully, and comforted aunt Kate by an extra
allowance of pin-money thenceforth. But my poor daddy, hot and sore
with indignation and defeat, reckless and disgusted with everybody
and everything, gathered together what few hundreds he could call his
own, told mother to pack up her clothes, and her plate and linen, and
anything else she cared to keep, advertised his house and furniture,
took our passages in the _Great Britain_, and shook the dust of his
native land from off his feet for ever. “For ever” was what he said,
and mother made no protest at the time against a sentence of perpetual
banishment which almost broke her heart. Everything comes to those who
wait, it is said: mother was wise and waited, and the things she wished
for certainly did seem to come to her, sooner or later.
They had had hard times in their early years of exile. Father had
not felt his privations on his own account: he was a vigorous,
enterprising, hopeful man, to whom difficulties came with a certain
pleasant zest. He was a born gentleman, too (though I say it that
shouldn’t), and so was never troubled with those scruples of gentility
which cause such poignant distress to many people in what they
call “reduced circumstances.” He delighted in his skill as groom
and gardener, builder and bricklayer, wood-cutter and butcher, and
Jack-of-all-trades, and understood that the doing of all that rough
work well conferred a new dignity of manhood upon him. As far as
himself was concerned, I believe those struggling years were the
happiest of his life, judging from the tone of his reminiscences, which
is always tender, and heartfelt, and vaguely regretful. It was mother
who suffered--poor mother!--without a word of complaint, of course.
She had to be left alone whole days together, while father was working
on his run, and the blacks used to prowl about the house and terrify
her. There were swagmen turning up at all hours for rations--very shady
characters, some of them; and there were the bushrangers (who, to be
sure, never came, but _might_ have come, which was almost as bad).
The snakes used to glide between the shrunk boards of the floors; the
wild dogs used to make her blood run cold with that dreadful howl of
theirs at nightfall, when they came sniffing round after the sheep; the
native cats were her torment in the poultry-yard, and the opossums as
bad in the orchard. Worse than any of these, there were the wretched
trolloping women--that was father’s description of them--that she had
to do with for servants, when lucky enough to get servants at all,
who wore her life out with coarse words and ways. Little brothers and
sisters were born in the wilderness, and poor mother had to fall back
upon an awkward man and a little child (me) to wait on her properly,
and make her a decent cup of gruel when she wanted it. And the babies
died in the wilderness, too, with little or no doctor’s skill to help
them, and had to be laid in their little graves under a wattle tree,
with only their parents’ love and tears to consecrate the ground.
But these were very old times. Father made money rapidly, as no steady
and persevering man could well help doing, under the circumstances;
and money, of course, brought us comfort in all sorts of ways. As
fences meandered all over the run, and stock increased, and the value
of wool with it, the weatherboard house grew bigger and bigger, and
its new rooms were furnished more and more luxuriously. Then a better
class of domestics, and many more of them, appeared in the colony,
railways were opened, townships were founded and grew and flourished,
lawyers and doctors, and police magistrates and bankers, began to
organize some system of society in those little centres of population.
We were able to drive to church over a macadamized road, instead of
being restricted to a family service in the dining-room at home, as
for ten years had been the case; and I was fortunate enough to possess
in my governess an accomplished and well-bred lady. By-and-by, from a
well-to-do squatter, father became an extensive landowner and a rich
man. He bought his land easily by instalments before free selectors
had discovered its value; and then land in Victoria suddenly rose to a
great price, and his erewhile moderate estate became worth £60,000 at
the lowest market rate. He had preferred sheep to cattle always; and at
this time the owners of sheep stations had such a run of luck, in good
seasons and high prices, for a few years, as they probably never had
before, and seem never likely to have again.
Just at this flood-time in his fortunes, and before the evil days of
drought and bad government fell upon the colony in general, and the
class in particular to which he belonged, that memorable mail arrived
from England which decided him to sell his property and go home. Just
at first (when mother and he talked over their plans on the verandah
that night) he seemed disinclined to sell, and proposed to leave a
manager in charge of everything. But mother, without in the least
assuming to give advice, suggested the difficulty of finding a man at
once capable and trustworthy enough for so responsible a post, and
the probability that such years of prosperity as we had had latterly
would not, in the nature of things, last much longer. It had always
been a land of vicissitudes, in which men made and lost fortunes with
equal celerity; and suppose now (she hinted in the most modest manner)
that droughts came and the stock died from starvation, or suppose the
scab broke out again and swept them off, or suppose these high prices
fell, as they were bound to do some time or another, or an ignorant
Government succeeded in turning everything upside down.
“Then, perhaps, it would be wisest to sell,” said father, in a tone of
deliberation that meant he had made up his mind to do so; but he sighed
as he thought of all his improvements, and what a nice place he had
made of it.
The fact was, father had an idea of coming back again, and I am sure
mother never meant he should, if she could help it.