Few things are pleasanter, in their way, than staying in an agreeable
house, while the welcome, the local recreations, the allotted leisure,
are alike in the fresh bloom of unexhausted enjoyment. Your justifiable
curiosity as to your friends’ intellects, experiences, and power of
amusing you is for a while unsatiated. All is new and delightful; to
be savoured with the full approval of conscience. The gardens are
enchanted, the ladye peerless fair, the stranger knights courteous,
the host an incarnation of appreciation and generosity. All this
glamour lasts undiminished for the first fleeting week or two, possibly
survives the month. Then the process of disenchantment commences.
Either you have business external to the castle, or you have not. In
the former case, you begin to feel darkly fearful of neglect, and
conscience, if you keep one, self-interest if you do not, commences to
be ‘faithful,’ even to inconvenience. If you own no care, or tie, or
duty, which may not be postponed to the ‘Cynthias of the minute,’ and
still prolong your stay, you cease to be a guest and fall into the more
prosaic _rôle_ of _habitué_, inmate, lodger, amenable to family rules
and to criticism. Then the fair ladye, if she be the sole cause of
detention, is at times sharply scanned, lest the proverbial chandelier
bear hard on the value of the entertainment. On the whole, a state of
perpetual arrival at the mansions of favourably prejudiced strangers,
combined with comparatively early departure,—unerringly anticipating
the first shade of social satiety,—would probably comprise most of the
pleasurable sensations permissible in this imperfect existence.
Mr. Neuchamp had, from the first, no thought of trenching upon even
the border of this ‘debatable land’; for after a very short trial of
this pleasant life he told Miss Frankston that if he stayed for twelve
months, he should still find new objects of interest. He thereupon
completed the painful process known as ‘making up one’s mind,’ and
arranged to leave for the interior on the following day. Not that he
was peculiarly sensible to any state of uncertainty. His enthusiastic
temperament saved him from indecision. Having, with what he believed to
be sufficient care and circumspection, elaborated a plan, he was uneasy
and incapable of enjoyment until an advance in line was made. His, the
fervid temperament, which delights itself with intensifying the action
of all warfare, declared against circumstance, ever the foe of generous
youth and ardent manhood.
So impatient was Mr. Neuchamp to hear the first shot of his campaign
fired, that he had the stern virtue to refuse to remain another week
for a certain picnic, at which all the notabilities of the metropolis
were to be present, and at which the purest form of social pleasure
might be anticipated.
‘My dear Miss Frankston,’ replied he, when urged upon this subject by
Antonia, ‘I grieve that I cannot consistently comply with your kind
request. But I feel myself so rapidly turning into a mere town lounger,
that I am sure another week or two would complete the transformation,
and my moral ruin. For besides, unfortunately’—here he smiled at his
expressed regret—‘I fixed to-morrow for my departure from your most
pleasant and hospitable home, and I _never_ alter my plans.’
‘I should be very sorry to wish you to alter them for our sake,’ said
the girl, unable, however, to suppress a slight tone of pique. ‘No
doubt you will be much happier exploring the highway across the Blue
Mountains, which, of course, will be a great novelty to you. But I
should not have thought a few days would have made any difference. You
will find it dull enough at Garrandilla, where you are going.’
‘Dull!’ said he, ‘dull! in the heart of a new continent, a new world,
with untold stores of new plants, new companions, new experiences, the
outset of a new life. My dear Miss Antonia, how _can_ it be dull to any
person of ordinary intelligence?’
‘Well,’ answered she, smiling, ‘perhaps it is I who am dull for
thinking so. Most young men who have left our house for the interior
have been of that opinion. But I will not attempt to cloud your
anticipations. Only, I really _do_ think you ought not to walk.’
‘Why not? What possible difference can it make how I get over the
twenty or thirty miles a day before I reach the station, to which your
father has so kindly given me letters of introduction? Such jolly
walking tours as I have had in England and Wales, in Ireland, and one
lovely vacation tour in our old home, Normandy.’
‘What a charming thing to be able to see the place where one’s
ancestors lived a thousand years ago!’ said she eagerly. (Mr. Neuchamp,
having let slip the admission of the early settlement of his family
in that rather stirring Norse colony, had been cross-questioned upon
the subject.) ‘How you must have enjoyed it! That’s the worst of
Australia—there’s nothing a hundred years old in it, except a red-gum
tree. But seriously, you may find yourself exposed to inconveniences by
walking, like a labouring man. It is not the fashion in our country for
gentlemen to walk.’
Miss Antonia had entirely settled the matter by the last observation.
Fashion had been through life one of the deadliest enemies to the peace
of Ernest Neuchamp. In his own country he had alarmed his relatives
and scandalised his neighbours by his wild defiance of that successor
of Thor and Odin, as he profanely termed the social belief of decorous
Christians. Was he to bow the knee to this false god in a strange land,
which at least he hoped to be pure from the idolatries of the effete
civilisation from which he had fled? Not so, by St. Newbold! the patron
saint of his house. He smiled with great gentleness as he answered,
with half sad but most irrevocable decision—
‘My dear Miss Frankston, I did not become a colonist with any idea of
being trammelled by usages or customs. You will pardon me, I am sure,
if I retain my first intention.’
‘Most certainly,’ said she. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if you had a friend or
two in England who called you obstinate. But you will tell me some day
how you got on, and whether there was _any_ small portion of reason in
the advice given you.’
‘I shall for ever feel grateful,’ he said warmly, ‘for the intention
of the advice, and for the great kindness which has accompanied it.
Whether or not I succeed in Australia, I shall always have one pleasant
remembrance to look back upon.’
‘My father, and I also, will be glad if you feel thus,’ she said, with
the ordinary calm kindness of her tone; ‘and now, I must go to town.
You leave to-morrow?’
‘Yes; I am sorry, in one way, to say so.’
‘Then papa will be able to give you his final counsels to-night. I know
he wishes to have some last words with you.’
Dinner over and the night being fine, as usual, an adjournment to the
sea-balcony was carried unanimously. When the first cigar was half
through, Mr. Frankston thus addressed his guest—
‘So you are off to-morrow, Antonia tells me, and can’t be persuaded to
wait for the grand picnic. I don’t say you’re wrong. When the ship’s
ready and the wind’s fair, it’s better to wait for no repairs. You’re
going to walk, too. It’s a long way; but you’re young and strong, and
you’ll find out all I can tell you for yourself; if you don’t, all
the telling in the world won’t help you. Now, see here, we’ll arrange
everything for the first twelve months, or two years, if you don’t care
to change.’
‘You’re most kind and generous, my dear sir, and I don’t know what I
should have done without you,’ said Ernest.
‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Frankston; ‘we’ll see about that in about five
or six years, if we all live so long—we can’t tell just yet. I may be
persuading you not to buy in with a rising market, which would double
your money in three years, or I may be saving you from losing all but
what you stand upright in in about the same time. I think it’s the
last, but we can’t tell. This is an uncertain country, particularly
about rain. And rain means fat stock, cheap money, and general
prosperity.’
‘But can’t one provide against the want of rain?’ inquired Mr.
Neuchamp, who was prone to array himself against Providence, holding
that all things might be met or conquered by energy and foresight.
‘Irrigation, for instance.’
‘There is _no_ provision that can be made,’ said the man of experience,
‘except on a small scale, and irrigation means labour; and paying for
labour in Australia, except to a very limited extent, means ruin. A
great drought is like a heavy gale at sea; you may be saved, or you
may go down with all hands. One visitation is as easy to stop or to
calculate about as the other.’
‘And is it a drought now?’
‘Yes; and one of the worst ever known.’
‘Then what will happen?’
‘Stock,’ said the old man, ‘will keep on falling in price. Many
stockholders will be ruined, including Selmore, if he does not clear
out Gammon Downs to a——’
‘A black hat,’ laughed Ernest. ‘I shall remember that joke. It came
near, as our American fellow-passenger would say, costing me five
thousand pounds.’
‘But they won’t be all ruined,’ continued Mr. Frankston; ‘and what
I strongly advise you to do is this—you’ve left your money, for a
year certain, in the Bank of New Holland, for which you’ll get tidy
interest, and it’s as safe as the Bank of England—you go, where I give
you this letter of introduction, to Forrester, who is a good fellow and
knows me, and it’s a good station, Garrandilla; that’s a great matter,
as you will find. There you will be treated like a gentleman. It will
cost you nothing but your clothes. There you’ll learn all that can
be learnt about stock. In a couple of years, say (here Mr. Neuchamp
winced), or perhaps eighteen months, you’ll be fit to look after a
station, and able to buy one for yourself.’
‘Don’t you think a year’s experience,’ pleaded Mr. Neuchamp, ‘might——’
‘No, I don’t,’ stoutly asserted the senior; ‘and in two years it’s my
belief that your five thousand pounds will buy as large a station as
ten thousand would now.’
The following morning saw Mr. Neuchamp, who had risen early and made
all his arrangements, fully prepared for the momentous plunge into
real life. He had attired himself in an old tourist’s suit of rough
serviceable tweed, and donned a pair of thick-soled lace-up boots
fitted for climbing mountain sides, and the roughest pedestrian work
that might occur. He had filled his knapsack with the requisites
that a gentleman cannot dispense with, even in the lightest marching
order, and had adopted a brown wide-awake hat, which he trusted would
relieve him henceforward from any injurious sobriquet. Thus armed at
all points, he awaited breakfast and the arrival of Antonia Frankston,
to whom he felt inclined to bid a more heartfelt farewell than he had
thought any young lady in the southern hemisphere would have earned the
right to receive.
Let me not be understood to assume for a moment that Mr. Neuchamp was
wholly insensible to the tender passion. But he was fully possessed and
occupied for the present by the ‘enterprise of great pith and moment’
which he contemplated. And the boy-god found the tenement of his heart
for the time so thoroughly filled by busy, unsympathetic ideas, that he
was fain to hover like a bird round a populous dovecote, vainly seeking
a single unoccupied pigeon-hole.
‘Friendship, indeed,’ Mr. Neuchamp confessed to himself, ‘had sprung
up of an intellectual and truly fraternal nature between himself
and this girl, who had but few companions, and fewer intimates of
her own age.’ But he told himself that it was a prosaic alliance of
intelligence, natural, and almost inevitable between two people not
very different in age, whose temperaments were rather widely apart, but
whose tastes and feelings assimilated closely. Just the kind of feeling
he might have had for his lady cousins in England, but that they showed
no respect for his opinions and openly jeered at his aspirations.
Now Antonia Frankston paid the compliment of respect to all the
principles and opinions which he enunciated, even while doing battle
unyieldingly against their practical application.
‘It is a great matter to be thoroughly comprehended,’ he had said to
himself. ‘One may be right or one may be wrong. I am the last person
to deny free exercise of opinion, and the healthful effect of free
antagonism. But I must own to a preference of being understood by my
critics.’
Under this stimulus he had poured forth, in the leisure time which
he had abundantly enjoyed with Miss Frankston, his plans for the
regeneration of society, and of Australian life in particular. He had
foretold the reign of abstract justice, and the coming dethronement of
shams. He saw afar a general refinement in manners, pervading culture,
which was harmoniously to fuse classes, now so unhappily divided; the
co-operation of labour with capital, and the equal partition of the
public lands. In a word, all the fair visions of the higher life, the
splendid possibilities of the race which commend themselves to ardent
youth and generous manhood, in that springtime of the heart when
beautiful emanations are evolved in multiform glory, to be chilled and
withered by colder age and hard experience.
To the record of these and similar aspirations, as they poured forth
from the enthusiastic soul of Ernest Neuchamp, tinged with poetic
thoughts and dignified by a pure ‘enthusiasm of humanity,’ had Antonia
listened, by no means without interest. It was new to her to hear
projects free from the taint of selfish gain or personal advantage. And
though she entered her protests, gently but firmly, against many of his
conclusions, there was to him a deep interest in dialogues in which he
secured so patient, so fair a listener, gifted with a high and cultured
intelligence.
Thus Mr. Neuchamp made all necessary adieux, and having received his
credentials, in the shape of a letter of introduction to the owner of
Garrandilla, where he was to abide during his novitiate, and a letter
of credit in case he should have unexpected need of money, departed
from the hospitable gates of Morahmee.
With his knapsack on his back he paced through the city. Being not
sufficiently philosophical, I must confess, to avail himself of the
George Street pavement, he crossed Hyde Park, and turning round to take
one last look at the blue waters and the grand headland, it may be
that his eyes rested lingeringly upon the nearest point which he could
recognise to Morahmee.
Then he turned his back upon nature’s loveliness and fond regrets, and
strode resolutely onward towards the far untried Waste—to him the land
of hope and of endeavour.
Taking a somewhat diagonal course adown and across the old-fashioned
dingy streets, where the aged, decrepit, but in some instances
picturesque dwellings tell a tale of the earliest colonial days, Mr.
Neuchamp presently debouched upon the great arterial thoroughfare
which, before the advent of the steam king, led to that somewhat
mysterious domain, vaguely designated as ‘the bush.’
Here he began to put on his tourist pace, and no longer trammelled by
fear of the fashionable world, exerted those powers of progression
which had won him fame in Scottish Highlands, by Killarney’s fair lake,
and on the cols and passes which, amid eternal snow, girdle the monarch
of the Alps.
Mile after mile, at a rattling pace, went he, pleased to find himself
once more upon a highroad, though comparatively disused, as the Dover
and Calais route, where the great empty posting-houses tell of ‘ruin,’
and the ‘ruthless king,’ which has driven coach and guard, ostler and
landlord, boots and barmaid, all off the road together. Such had been
the doom of this once inevitable and crowded highway; and Mr. Neuchamp
noted with interest the remains of a former state, long passed away.
‘Really!’ soliloquised he, ‘I have come upon a locality adapted
for antiquarian research. I did not expect that in Australia. As I
perceive, those old buildings are massive and imposing, with walls
of solidity far from common. What fine trees are in the orchards! I
must see what o’clock it is. This venerable mansion seems inhabited; I
wonder if I could get a glass of beer?’
This latter outcome of the inner consciousness, not particularly
germane to antiquarian research, was the result of a discovery by
Mr. Neuchamp that he was uncommonly heated. The truth was that he
had, in the ardour of his feelings, been pelting along at the rate of
four miles and a half an hour, forgetting that the thermometer stood
at 85 in the shade; hence his complexion was much heightened; his
shirt-collar limp to a degree whence hope was fled for ever; ‘his
brow was wet with honest whatsyname,’ while a general and unpleasant
saturation of his whole clothing told the tale of a temperature
unknown to his European experiences. To his great contentment, the
hostelry was inhabited and still offered entertainment to man and that
fellow-creature, whose good example had the more highly organised
vertebrate followed what romances of crime had remained unwritten; what
occupations, literary and sensational, had been gone; what reputations,
even of Ouida, Miss Braddon, and that ‘bright particular star,’ of the
firmament of fiction, the great George Eliot herself, had been faint
and prosaically mediocre! The surviving of the past favourites of the
‘shouting multitude’ owed its spirituous existence to the fact of a
byroad from certain farms, here reaching the old highway. By dint of an
early start, and a little night-work, the farmers and dealers were able
to reach and return from the metropolis within the day, thus dispensing
with the swift and, to provincial ideas, somewhat costly train. But the
long hours and late and early travelling necessitated beer; hence this
relic of past bibulousness with ancient porch hard by a real milestone,
the twelfth, which our wayfarer hailed with joy, eagerly scanning the
deeply-graven numerals.
He found the outer room presided over by an excessively clean old
woman, whose starched cap and general get-up reminded him of a
well-known Cambridge landlady. Espying a pewter, he demanded a pint of
ale, and sitting down upon a bench, disposed of the cool draught with
the deep enjoyment which the pedestrian or the worker alone knows.
This duty completed, he consulted his watch, and finding that mid-day
was passed, decided upon a slight refection of bread and cheese, and a
halt.
‘So you still keep the house open?’ he observed to his hostess. ‘I see
a good many of those along the road are closed.’
‘So should we ’a been closed too,’ said the ancient dame, ‘but this
road, as the fruit-carts and firewood and small farming loads comes in
by, keeps a little trade up, and we’ve not a big family; there’s my
husband, as is out, and my son, as works in the garden, and does most
of the work about the place, and Carry.’
‘And you have lived here a long time, I suppose?’
‘Over forty years, since my husband, John Walton, got a grant of land,
and we came here just after we married. We built the house after we’d
made a bit of money, and planted the orchard, and did every mortal
thing as is done.’
‘And you lost all the traffic when the train commenced to run.’
‘All the paying business; everything but this small line as we used
to despise. Father, he was for clearing out, but I couldn’t bear to
leave the old place; we’d saved a bit o’ money, and says I: “Well,
father, suppose we live on here comfortable and steady, and don’t
change. There’s Jem and Carry fit to do all the work; we don’t need no
servants, you can potter about the garden, and the pigs and poultry,
and bee-hives, and they all makes a bit of money, or saves it, and
we’ll, maybe, do as well as those that goes up into the bush, and
goodness knows where.” But you’ll have some lunch, sir—please to walk
this way.’
Mr. Neuchamp was forthwith inducted into an old-fashioned room, the
size and pretensions of which showed the different style of the
entertainment once supplied. Leading from this were several bedrooms,
to the open door of one of which the old dame pointed. Here, with
the help of a sufficiency of cold water and the cleanest towels, he
restored himself to a condition favourable to the proper appreciation
of lunch.
When he returned he found the table being laid by a neatly-dressed,
modest-looking young woman of five or six and twenty.
‘I suppose you are Carry?’ he said, mentally comparing her with an
English country girl of the same rank and condition, and concluding
that the damsel before him did not show to any great disadvantage.
‘Mother’s been telling you, sir, I suppose,’ said the girl, smiling;
‘she’s glad to talk about old times with any one, it’s nearly all she
has to do now.’
‘Well, we had a chat about the state of the roads,’ affably rejoined
Mr. Neuchamp; ‘you have a very nice old place here, and I think you
were very wise to stay.’
‘I don’t mind it,’ said the girl, ‘though it is awfully dull sometimes.
I’m used to a quiet life; but it’s rather hard upon Jem, my brother
that is, sir, for he might have bettered himself in many ways.’
‘How do you think he might?’
‘Why, ever so many times he’s had offers of employment, but he won’t
leave the old people; and then, he might go into the bush.’
‘The bush! and is every one who goes into the bush certain to do well?’
‘Oh no, sir; but every young man of spirit in the colony likes to have
a turn, and run his chance there some time or other. Excuse me, sir,
but you haven’t been very long out, have you?’
‘How the deuce does she know that?’ inquired Mr. Neuchamp of himself.
‘Is there anything written on this brow, and so on? However, I
have catechised her sufficiently, and cannot object to a little
cross-examination in return.’
‘Well, Carry, the truth is that I have _not_ been very long out from
home, as you very wisely have discovered; that’s the reason I am a
little inquisitive about your country. But how did you know?’
‘By lots of things,’ said Carry, rather mischievously; ‘by your having
such a fresh complexion, and so many mosquito-bites,—they don’t bite us
natives that way; and by your clothes, and your shirt-collar, and your
boots, and your pack, or whatever it is—and by your being on foot.’
‘What a long list, Carry! and the worst of it is, that if I was asked
how I should know whether you are a native, as you call yourself, and
not an English girl, I should not have half as many things to swear by.’
‘And what would they be, sir?’
‘Let me see. I think you are a little paler, for one thing—but that’s
the heat, I suppose—and rather taller—and a little, only a very little
slighter—and your hands are smaller; just let me look, for I can’t be
sure; and, on the whole, rather prettier than most English girls are.’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ interrupted Carry at this point, with a not wholly
displeased expression. ‘I don’t believe half of it. I’m sure everybody
says English girls have such lovely complexions and figures, and cut
out us poor “currency lasses” altogether.’
‘That’s not true, Carry, my dear,’ protested Mr. Neuchamp with warmth.
‘I can assure you that no one would think to look at you that you had
lived all your life in a climate something like a greenhouse, with the
door shut. It can’t be such a very had one after all, if it turns out
such very nice specimens of——’
Here Miss Carry pretended to hear her mother calling, and discreetly
departed.
Ernest was too experienced a pedestrian to overwork himself, and
blister his feet the first day, thereby converting the remaining
portion of the journey into a penance; so finding himself in pleasant
quarters, he determined to wait till the cool of the evening, and go on
as far as the ancient and venerable town of Parramatta, which he was
led to believe reared its double spires about eight miles farther on.
After enjoying the home-baked bread, the well-cured bacon, the fresh
butter, and another tankard, he occupied himself with observing the
pictures, which in rather grand gilt frames adorned the room. They
smacked of the good old days. There was ‘The Tally-ho Coach leaving
the Post-office, Sydney.’ A true English four-insider, with a team
of highly improbable grays, proceeding at an impossible pace, from
a pillared edifice with an enormous clock. The celebrated racehorse
‘Jorrocks,’ as he appeared winning his forty-fifth race, the majority
of the cheering crowd depicted as wearing cabbage-tree hats. There was
also the terrific finish at the Five Dock Steeplechase between Fergus
and Slasher, with a sketch of the astonishing struggle, when Traveller
beat Chester for the Sydney Cup after the fifth heat, on the old Sandy
Course. This turf triumph had occurred about forty-five years since.
Much meditating upon the comparative antiquity and hoary age of
incidents, even in a colony, Mr. Neuchamp paid his modest bill,
shouldered his knapsack, and prepared to depart from this beer fountain
in the desert. Meeting the pleasant glance of Carry as he was passing
the door, he turned and said, ‘I must come down to Sydney next year,
and I’ll be sure to pay you a visit, Carry.’
‘Oh, do!’ she said; ‘mother will be so pleased. But you haven’t told me
your name; how shall we hear of you?’
‘If any one talks about Ernest Neuchamp to you, it will be of me.’
‘Ernest is a pretty name,’ said the girl, ‘but “Newchum!” that is not
your real name, is it? of course you are a new chum, though it would be
rude to say so.’
‘And what is “a new chum,” Carry? That is not my name, though the
pronunciation is not so far unlike.’
‘Why, a new chum is a new arrival—a gentleman that——’
‘A black hat?’ suggested he.
‘Well, it’s all the same, I believe,’ she answered; ‘it means somebody
who has just come and doesn’t know anything about the country.’
‘And a most extraordinary country it is,’ muttered he; ‘it appears that
it is not to be known very readily, even after a short stay. Well, here
is my card, Carry; you can spell it at your leisure. Good-bye, my dear,
and take care of yourself till I come back next year.’
‘Good-bye, sir; be sure you stop at the “Red Cow,” at Parramatta.’
This badinage over, Mr. Neuchamp pursued his journey, much refreshed
in body, but exercised in mind by the similarity of his name to the
accusation of newness and cockneyism, so to speak, which the colonial
appellation conveyed. ‘Most vexatious!’ said he to himself; ‘I thought
I saw Antonia look warningly more than once at her father, when he
seemed disposed to dwell on the pronunciation of my name. That must
have been the _mot_ she forbade.’
The sun was low as he strolled into the quiet, old-fashioned, rather
hot town of Parramatta. Here he beheld, within a dozen miles of the
thronged and eager metropolis, a population for the most part more
incurious and unenterprising than if their habitation had been five
hundred miles inland. Every one walked or sauntered down the streets
with that thoroughly provincial absence of hurry which is so refreshing
to the wearied mental labourer.
Among the lower classes, generation after generation had been born and
grown, and aged, since the first occupation of the wonderful land,
which has made such haste to become a nation. There seemed a large
population of well-to-do retired capitalists, something under the
millionaire class, who, having built cottages and planted orangeries
(the export of oranges is the great trade feature of the locality),
felt a calm confidence that here they could wear out life with less
than the usual friction.
He was much surprised and pleased to observe the unusually large
number of oaks, elms, and ash trees which had by the pious founders
been planted in and around the town. Many of these were of great age,
speaking in an Australian sense, and had grown to be ornamental and
dignified of aspect, besides being useful in point of shade.
As he walked slowly down the principal street he was pleased to see
wide stretches of grass, a river, gardens, and a considerable exemption
from the brick-and-mortar tyranny of latter days. The air was becoming
pleasantly cool; a certain amount of loitering and musing, dear to
Mr. Neuchamp’s artistic mind, was observable. A few schoolboys passed,
one pair with arms round one another’s neck, sworn friends and tellers
evidently of some mutually thrilling tale. The cabs were delightfully
old-fashioned. The very air had a Rip Van Winkle flavour about it,
so utterly foreign to the genius of a new country, that Mr. Neuchamp
lamented to himself, as he captured a barefooted urchin and ordered him
to show him to the Red Cow Inn, that he could not prolong his stay.