In no way does the proof more plainly reach us of the sadly shortened
space of mortal life than by the distinct stages of experience and
mental growth.
Looking back upon the ideal fruition of a few years, we are startled
to find how far we have progressed from a given starting point. The
store of ripened experience would almost overwhelm with its garnered
richness, did not fate, with a malicious pleasure, forbid our profiting
by it.
A few lustra have rolled over, marked by fast whitening or receding
locks, and lo! we have attained to exact conclusions concerning many
things. No further fees are necessary. Cautious are we now who once
were so heedless. Regular and methodical in business, erst unpunctual
and dilatory, we preserve our acquittances. We are industrious without
spasmodic energy, cool with the discretion, not the madness, of valour!
But one bright-haired goddess has departed with our golden youth. Hope
lends no gladness to the summer breeze, gilds not the glowing eve,
smiles not on the flowers, beckons not from the cool shadows of the
murmurous glade.
Mr. Neuchamp was far on the hither side of these autumnal effects, so
it chanced that on one fine day— there had been no rain for about two
months—he found himself mounted on Osmund with his face turned towards
the Sydney road, and with an unwonted feeling of exultation in or
about the cardiac region. He was accompanied by Jack Windsor, who had
invested a portion of his shearing cheque in the purchase of Ben Bolt,
on favourable terms, as that interesting animal had thrown every other
one who had ever ridden him, causing Mr. Jedwood to be honestly glad to
be rid of him.
Mr. Windsor had completed what he called a very fair spell of work,
for him, and having secured a prominent cheque and a high character at
the settlement, after shearing, was in charity with all men, even the
police, and much minded to have a pleasure trip ‘down the country,’
as he phrased the transmontane towns. Hence, when Ernest invited him
to accompany him to Sydney, having extracted a confession that he had
never seen that ‘kingdom by the sea,’ or indeed had been a stroller by
the ‘poluphloisboio thalasses’ at any time, he readily and gratefully
accepted the offer.
‘Seems queer, sir, doesn’t it, that I’ve never seen our main city or
the big waterhole, as the blacks call it. Somehow I’ve always had the
luck to miss it. Not that I had any powerful great longing to go. I’ve
always had some pleasant place nigh home to spend my Christmas in,
after I’d made a bit of money; and somehow, when I was once comfortable
I didn’t care about stirring.’
‘But I wonder that an active, intelligent fellow like you, Jack, never
made up your mind to go all the way to Sydney, out of curiosity.’
‘Well, it _is_ a wonder, sir; only, somehow I’ve had no eddication, as
I told you before, and chaps like me, as don’t know much except about
bush things, haven’t as much curiosity, I think, as other people.
Sydney’s only a bigger town than Campbelltown, or Yass, or Goulburn,
and what’s there to see in them if fifty of ’em was rolled up together?
That’s the way I used to talk.’
‘But the sea, Jack, the sea! you haven’t the sea in Yass or Goulburn.’
‘Oh! I know that, sir. Bless you, now I am quite different, since you
took the trouble to learn me to read and write a bit.’ (Mr. Neuchamp
had so utilised the evenings at the cattle station and other quiet
places.) ‘I’m always thinking what a stupid beggar I’ve been to have
been contented with the life I used to lead. Just like an old working
bullock in a lucerne field, grubbing away and never raisin’ his head
till it was time to lay down. You’ve made a man of me, sir, that’s what
you have. I hope I’ll be able to make you think some day—“Well, he
wasn’t a bad fellow after all.”’
‘I think so now, Jack; I always have thought so from the first time I
saw you.’
Mr. Windsor here groaned out a curse upon some one of Eve’s daughters
unknown to this chronicler.
‘What a regular more-pork I was to be sure, to go and run my neck agin’
a roping-pole, and all for a—false jade, who’d have come to see me
hanged, I believe, and laughed at the sight—blank her.’
‘You are not the first man, Jack, and will not be the last,’ quoth
Ernest, ‘who has been started on the downward road by the same agency.
But I hope you will always perceive, when accusing another, that unless
you had been that particular sort of fool that bad luck is exciting one
to turn into a rogue, her influence would have been quite insufficient.
We may as well drop the subject, for ever; but it will do you no harm
to look sometimes, without witnesses, at the precipice you passed so
closely.’
Mr. John Windsor, naturally one of the cheeriest of mortals, for
which temperament he had to thank a Milesian ancestress, showed no
inclination to revert to this painful topic. On the contrary, as they
approached the more settled country which lay between Garrandilla
and the railway terminus, he entertained Ernest much by his _naïve_
and acute observations. His companionship was always valuable in
other respects. He knew all the by-tracks and short cuts, by availing
themselves of which the road was materially shortened.
At nightfall, wherever they happened to be, Jack took all charge and
responsibility as to the horses out of Ernest’s hands. He saw that
Osmund received full justice in the inn stables, if they happened to
stay at one of the village hostelries; or if compelled to turn out he
affixed the hobbles, and following the track (slotwise) at dawn of day,
regularly and efficiently produced the hackneys saddled and accoutred
at the proper after-breakfast hour. Full of anecdote, flavoured
with the purest Australian slang, all unconsciously used, he was a
never-failing mine of interest and amusement.
They passed the railway terminus, as Ernest had decided to ride
down the whole distance, being not unwilling to exhibit Osmund, now
‘prompt in his paces, cool, and bold,’ and after the summer grasses of
Garrandilla, sleek and ‘on his top’ in point of condition. He pictured
himself cantering along the pleasant seaside ways around Sydney, and
if a vision occasionally mingled with his reveries of a fair girlish
shape, all the more graceful in the riding-habit of the period, not
far from his side, was it not the natural outcome of the double summer
time, the pleasant season of the land, and the fairy-time that comes
but once—the thrice golden spring of youth? With these ‘companions
of Sintram’ not ominous and threatening, but full of high hope, of
purpose, and of all mighty dreams, pleasantly he paced on over the
rocky, fast descending mountain tracks.
‘Rum road this, sir, for coaching,’ said Mr. Windsor. ‘I’ve been up
and down here many a time, by night and day, good weather and bad, in
the old times, many years before the Zig Zag was chopped out of the
sidelings. I’ve been glad enough to see the bottom of the hill at Mount
Victoria, once or twice, with a queer team and the brake not over good.’
‘I should say if anything happened to _that_,’ said Ernest, looking
over the sheer drop of a couple of hundred feet which overhung the
rugged boulders below, ‘the insured passengers would have a chance of
realising on their policies, as a Yankee would say.’
‘Things went something in that line one night, when I was aboard,’
answered Jack, a little thoughtfully. ‘I never want to see another
start like it. Once is enough of that kind of fun.’
‘What was that?’
‘Well, sir,’ commenced Jack, settling himself on the watchful, untamed
animal, who thereupon promptly assumed an attitude of armed vigilance,
which caused Mr. Windsor to dig the spurs into him and adjure him to do
his worst, ’it was this way—
‘It was a dark, wet, stormy night, the roads fearful; we were that
heavy loaded that it took all Sacramento Ned could do (he was a
Californian, and the best whip _I_ ever saw that’s seen a few, and that
before King Cobb was heard of on the Sydney side) to keep from going
over in some of the waggon tracks. I was on the box with him, and we’d
made friends like, as he could see I was a bit in the horse line.
‘He was a great tall, powerful chap, with a big fair beard, and the way
he could rattle five horses and a loaded coach in and out of the creeks
and winding bush tracks, was a sight to see. Well, he’d been very
downhearted all day about something, and at last he says to me, “Jack,
old man, I can’t tell what in thunder’s come over me this trip; it’s my
last one on this line, for I’ve saved up a fairish pile and I’m going
back to my people, to turn farmer in the old state for the rest of my
days; I suppose it’s the infernal weather. Well, here we are; look
alive there, you chaps. Hold the reins for a minute, Jack, while I look
at the brake.”
‘Well, the fresh team was waiting by the door; they’re desperate
punctual those American chaps, and the time was none too much as they
had allowed them then.
‘I could hear him sing out for the blacksmith, whose forge was nigh the
inn—he contracted for their work. When he came, he swore at him in a
way _that_ man hadn’t been used to; by George, he _could_ swear when he
tackled it, though he was a quiet chap as didn’t talk much generally.
‘Well, he made him put in another bolt, and said he should report him
to the road manager; then he took hold of the reins the three leaders
was hitched to, and away we went.’
‘He wasn’t intoxicated, I suppose?’ inquired Ernest.
‘As sober as we are now, sir. For when he got up, he says, “I’d have
been all the better for a nip, Jack, but just because of the place
being risky, and the night extra bad, I wouldn’t have one.” We had the
five lamps, of course—two on each side, two higher up, and one atop of
all. Ned lit a cigar, pulled on his gloves, and off we went.
‘The team was in grand order, three leaders and a pair of great
upstanding half-bred horses at the wheel, all in top condition and fit
to pull any fellow’s arm off. However, they’d a _man_ behind ’em, and
when they jumped off he steadied ’em as easy as a pair of buggy horses.
‘You know what the road’s like. We rattled along a fair pace, but well
in hand, though the horses pulled like devils, and I had my foot on the
brake, on the near side, just to help him.
‘We were about half way down, and I was wondering what time we should
make Penrith, when I felt the near wheeler make a sudden rush, and Ned
said in a thick, changed voice—
‘“By——, the brake’s gone!”
‘“You don’t say so,” says I; “it can’t be.”—“You’ll darned soon find
out, Jack,” says he, gathering up the reins and bracing himself for the
struggle with death. “Blast that infernal blacksmith, he ought to be
along with us now.”
‘By this time the team had broken into a wild gallop, and were racing
down the narrow, winding road, with a couple of feet, sometimes less,
between us and a five hundred feet drop among the rocks. There was no
breeching harness on the wheelers; Americans don’t use it, but trust
all to the brake. Ours was gone. And the pace we were going down that
road was enough to scare the boldest man that ever handled leather.
‘Ned was as cool and determined as if it was a saltbush plain. He held
the mad team true and straight, and trusted, I could see, to pulling
them up on the long flat at the bottom of the hill. If we got there.
_If!_ Of course, the only little chance was to let them go best pace
and guide them. The slightest pull up would have sent us sideways over
the black rocks, half a mile below.
‘It was a strange sight, I tell you, sir. Ned’s face was pale but set
hard, the muscles of his arms showed like cords, his eyes shining and
steady, looking forward through the dark; the great lamps swinging wide
with the rolling of the coach. As we turned one corner we hung nearly
over the cliff, just shaved it. The women inside kept up a dismal
screaming; the men looked out and said nothing.
‘“We may do it yet, Jack,” he said, “if we can clear those cursed
guard-logs near the bottom.”
‘“Right you are, Ned,” says I, to cheer him. I was afraid of them
myself.
‘Now a’most at the bottom of the hill the road had been new metalled,
and as the track was broader and clear of the sideling, the road
contractor, damn him, had placed a whole lot of heavy logs on both
sides of the metal. I never could see the pull of it myself, except to
make accidents easy.
‘Well, at the last corner, Ned had to keep as near as he dared to the
edge to turn the coach. The pace was frightful by this time, the coach
on the swing; and before he could get in from his turn she hit one of
these ugly butts and, balancing for a bit, fell over with a crash that
I can hear now, dragged for a second or two, then lay on her side with
the top wheels still going round and the team struggling and kicking in
a heap together.
‘I don’t know how many rods I was pitched. But when I found I wasn’t
killed I picked myself up and went to help out the insides. It was an
ugly sight. Some were frightened to death, and wouldn’t stir. Some had
broken limbs. Two _were_ dead—one woman with her baby safe in her arms.
We got ’em all out of it with the help of those passengers who, like
me, were only shaken a bit.
‘“There’s something wrong with Ned,” says I, “or he’d have been among
us by this time. There’s _one_ lamp alight, fetch it along.” So we
looked about and round, and after a bit we found him lying on his face
with his whip in his hand, stone dead. Poor Ned!’
‘A sad and terrible accident,’ said Ernest. ‘What did you all do?’
‘We straightened the horses after a bit—there was two dead and one with
a broken leg of _them_; and I rode horseback to the next stage and sent
a team back for ’em. They got in next day. But I shall always think
poor Ned had a kind of feeling beforehand.’
‘It was not his fault, poor fellow.’
‘Fault, sir? he was the carefullest chap I ever see. It all lay between
that idle rascal of a blacksmith and the wooden-headed road contractor
that put them guard-logs down.’
‘It is safer on horseback, as we are,’ remarked Mr. Neuchamp, ‘unless
we travelled as I did coming up. I rather prefer a horse, though, I
must say.’
‘Well, it seems more natural like,’ said Jack reflectively, giving Ben
Bolt a playful touch with the spurs, which caused that tameless steed
to jump on one side in a fashion that might have been dangerous to a
less resolute horseman. ‘Nothing like a good horse under a man; then
he’s ready for anything or anybody.’
Once more the great meadows and broad river, majestically winding,
which needs but the ruined castle on its scarped sandstone cliff to
render it in some aspects equal in picturesque beauty to the ‘castled
Rhine.’ Once more the semi-tropical warmth; the soft, luscious,
enervating breeze of the southern seas; the half-effaced traces of
ancient labour; the patient, plodding industry and general evidence of
village life.
Ernest pressed on until they reached Walton’s inn, where he took it
into his head to stop for the night before they reached Sydney. Drawing
rein at the door, he left Osmund in charge of Mr. Windsor, and marched
into the clean taproom with a considerably altered air and general
expression from those of his first visit.
The old woman was absent, but Carry, hearing some one in the room, came
hastily in and stared for a moment in astonishment.
‘Well, I declare,’ said she at length, ‘if it isn’t Mr. Newchum! How
you have altered; got so sunburned too. I hardly should have known you.
Well, it’s very good of you to come and see us again. Mother will be
ever so pleased.’
‘I thank you for your welcome, Carry,’ said Ernest, smiling at the
honest pleasure so clearly shown in the girl’s face; ‘I have a servant
with me and two horses—can you put us up for the night?’
‘Oh yes. George will be round directly, if your man will take the
horses into the yard. So you’re not walking now?’ asked she, with
rather a mischievous look.
‘No, Carry, it takes too much time, not that it isn’t pleasant enough;
but I suppose I shall get into all your lazy ways in time. Mind you
take care of my man; he’s a capital fellow and a favourite of mine.’
‘Is he a native?’ asked the girl.
‘Yes, a countryman of yours,’ said Ernest.
‘Then he can take care of himself,’ said the damsel decidedly. ‘I’ll
show you your room, sir, and see about your tea.’
It may be safely held that nothing is much more enjoyable in its way
than a snug roadside inn, where the host and attendants are cheerfully
willing to minister to the comfort of the wayfarer. The food may be
plain, the cooking homely, but the prompt and unchilled service atones
fully for want of artistic merit; and if the traveller carries with
him the inimitable condiments of appetite and reasonable fatigue, the
simple meal is a banquet for the gods, and sweet sleep arrives without
delay to lull the satisfied traveller into luxurious dreamless rest.
Mr. Neuchamp thought that no club dinner had ever more thoroughly
satisfied his every sense than the broiled steak, the fresh butter,
the toast and eggs, all placed upon a snowy tablecloth, which the
neat-fingered Carry put before him.
Before retiring, Ernest made a point of visiting his horse, as should
every horseman worthy of the name. He found that trusty steed and the
uncertain Ben Bolt up to their knees in straw, with their racks full of
well-saved oaten hay, than which no horse, from England’s meads to the
sand-strewn pastures where the desert courser roams, can desire better
provender.
In returning from his excursion he chanced upon a _partie-carrée_
composed of George Walton, his mother, sister, and Mr. John Windsor,
who was evidently the lion of the evening, to judge by the way he was
holding forth, and the respectful admiration with which his tales of
flood and field were received. Among these moving adventures Ernest
caught the sound of some reference to a sailing match, in which, as
usual, fortune had smiled on the brave. Knowing that the mighty ocean
was as yet a wonder unwitnessed by the bold Australian, this experience
struck him as improbable, to say the least of it. However, he always
permitted Master Jack to encounter his _monde_ after his own fashion,
not doubting but that his ready wit and fertility of resource would
bring him forth unharmed of reputation.
On the following morning, therefore, after a breakfast worthy of the
glorious supper which he long afterwards recalled, horses and riders in
exuberant spirits, they set forth for the easy concluding stage.
The household turned out to witness their departure.
‘It puts me and my good man in mind of old times,’ said the aged
hostess, ‘to have a gentleman stay the night and see horses like them
in the stable again. Not as I like that chestnut willin.’ (Ben Bolt, by
the way, had nearly settled George Walton’s career in life, permanently
if not brilliantly, as he unguardedly approached the ‘irreconcilable.’)
’It’s done us all good, sir, and I hope you won’t forget to give us a
call when you’re leaving town.’
‘It has done _us_ good, I can vouch for,’ said Ernest heartily, as
he observed his follower’s bold eyes fixed upon Carry’s features
with unmistakable admiration. ‘I shall always think of you all as my
earliest friends in Australia. Good-bye, George; good-bye, Carry—we
must pay you another visit when we start back, after our holiday is up.’
‘That’s something like a place to stop at,’ observed Mr. Windsor, in
a tone of deep appreciation, as they passed cheerfully onward, after
a mile or two’s silence. ‘Real nice people, ain’t they, sir? What a
house they must have kept in the old coaching days! One thing, they
wouldn’t have had time to have waited much on us then, with the up
coach leaving and the down one just coming in, and the whole place full
of hungry passengers. How did you ever come to find the old place out,
sir?’
‘It was the first inn I saw in Australia that took my fancy, Jack.
I had had many a cruise on foot in England; gentlemen often take a
walking tour there for the fun of the thing; you know the distances
are not so great, the weather is cooler, and there is every inducement
for young strong men to ramble about the green hills and dales of
old England, where you may sit under the walls of a ruined castle a
thousand years old, or watch the same sort of trout in the brook by the
monastery that the monks loved on their fast days centuries ago.’
‘That must be jolly enough for a gentleman with his purse full of
money and his head chock-full of learning, knowing all the names of
the people as lived and died there before he was born. But for one of
us chaps, as can’t see nothing but a heap of old stones and a lot of
out-and-out green feed, why, there’s no particular pull in it.’
‘But there’s nothing to hinder a man like you from knowing as much as
other people in a general way, if you can read. Books are cheap, and
plentiful, Heaven knows.’
‘Well, sir, it does seem hard for a fellow like me to know very little
more than a black fellow, as one might say; that’s how lots of us takes
to drink, just for want of something to think about. Sometimes it’s
easy to do a chap good.’
‘But it always ruins a man in the long run, perhaps kills him right
out.’
‘That’s all very well, sir, only look at his part of it: a man comes
in from a long spell of bush work—splitting, fencing, dam-making,
cattle-droving, what not—into one of these bush townships. He’s tired
to death of sheep and cattle or gum-trees; or perhaps he’s been in some
place, all plains for a hundred miles with never a tree or a stone; all
he’s seen has been the overseer to measure his work, his mates that
he worked with, the regular tea, damper, and mutton, day after day;
perhaps flies and mosquitoes enough to eat him alive. Well, he’s had a
year of this sort of thing, perhaps two; say he’s never smelt grog all
the time.’
‘All the better for him too,’ said Ernest; ‘see what splendid hard
condition he’s in; fit to go for a man’s life.’
‘That’s all right, sir, but he’s so precious dull and hungry for a
change that he feels ready to go to h—l for a lark, as the saying is;
so he comes to the public-house bar, in some hole of a bush township,
and the first glass of grog he gets makes him _feel like a new man, in
a new world_.’
‘Well, why doesn’t he stop there?’
‘He can’t,’ continued Jack, ‘else he’d slip back, so of course he
takes another, and the stuff is ever so bad, rough, very like tobacco
in it, or some rascally drug, but it’s strong, and it’s the strength
he craves for, from the tips of his fingers to the very inside of the
marrow of his bones; when that glass is swallowed he has forgotten that
he is a poor, ignorant, working man; he _knows_ he’s a sort of king;
every good thing he’s thought of in his life is a-coming to him; he’s
to be rich, happy, clever, able to marry the girl he likes; if any man
looks at him he can knock his head off—ten men’s heads off! Drink?
Fifty glasses wouldn’t make _him_ drunk! Capital grog it is too; feels
more sober every glass he takes; landlord’s splendid fellow; must have
some more drink; and so on.’
‘But how do you know a man has all these grand ideas? I grant it’s
enticing.’
‘Because _I’ve passed through it all myself_,’ said the henchman
grimly, yet with a half air of shame and regret. ‘I’ve been on the
burst, as we call it, more than once or twice either, worse luck.’
‘I hope you never will again, Jack.’
‘I _think_ not, sir, if I know it. But a man shouldn’t be too sure.
It’s an awful craving, by——. It drags you by your very heart-strings,
once you get it right.’
‘But you don’t mean to say there’s any fun in a week’s drink at a
wretched pot-house, even if the first hour is as good as you say. Then
the waking up!’
‘But there _is_ fun in it,’ persisted the poor relation, ‘else why do
hundreds and thousands do it? All these chaps are not fools, much less
lazy; it’s the hardest workers and best hands among us working chaps
that’s the worst drinkers, by odds. As to the waking up, as you say,
it’s bad enough, but a strong man gets over it in a day or two, and
tackles his bread and meat, and his work, pretty much as usual till the
time of the next spree comes round.’
‘But what a fool a man must think himself,’ said Ernest, ‘at the end
of a week, when he finds that he has spent all the fruit of a year’s
labour, and is obliged to begin another solitary weary year.’
‘It _is_ bad, as you say, sir. You’re quite right; but right’s one
thing and human nature’s another, in the bush, anyhow. I remember
coming to myself in the _dead-house_ of a bush inn once, and I felt
like a dead man too; the parson had been preaching at our woolshed the
week before, and that text came into my head, and kept ringing through
it like a hundred bullock bells.’
‘And what was it, Jack?’
‘“In hell he lifted up his eyes.” I ain’t very likely to forget. He
gave us a great dressin’ down for drink and swearing, and bad ways, and
so on. We deserved it right enough, and his words struck.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘I just crawled into the bar, sir, and when the landlord gave me a nip
I put it on the counter and bent down to it; blessed if my hand wasn’t
too shaky to hold it.’
‘“How much is left of my cheque?” says I. “Forty-three twelve six, it
was.”
‘“Not a blessed shilling,” says he; “you’ve been treating all round,
and having champagne like water; it ain’t likely a small cheque like
that would last long.”
‘“Give me a loaf,” says I, “and we’ll cry quits.” A bushman never
disputes his grog score. If he’s been a fool, he’s willing to uphold
it. So off I went and walked straight along the road, and slept under
a tree that night. Next day I was better; and the third day I got a
billet, and was as well as ever I was in my life. I had one or two
sprees after that, but never such an out-and-out desperate one again.’
Ernest Neuchamp looked at the clear eyes and healthy bronzed skin of
the man as he spoke, noble in all the marvellous grace and strength of
godlike youth, and thought how deep the pity that such a spirit, such a
frame, should sink into the drunkard’s nerveless, hopeless, shapeless
life in death.
He rode onward more than a mile in silence and deep thought, then he
spoke—
‘I cannot say with truth, Jack, that I feel inclined to abuse and
condemn wholesale everybody and everything connected with intemperance,
casual or habitual. I see in it a habit—say a vice—to which the most
energetic, intelligent, and industrious of our race have been prone
since the dawn of history. Where circumstance is invariable there must
be an underlying law. I forget, you don’t understand this sort of talk.
But, you will admit that it’s a bad thing—a thing that grows upon a
man till it eats out his will, like a grub in the root of a plant, and
then, man or plant withers and dies. Now you’re a practical man of wide
experience, you know that I mean what I say chiefly, and I want to see
my way to do good in this matter. What’s the likeliest cure, in your
opinion?’
‘As to that, sir,’ said Mr. Windsor, settling himself so suspiciously
in the saddle that Ben Bolt arched his back and made ready for hostile
action, ‘I should be cock-sure that having an empty cobbra, as the
blacks say, was on the main track that led to the grog-camp, only that
the best eddicated chaps are the worst lushingtons when they give way
at all. Perhaps they remember old times too well, if they’ve come down
in the world. But I’ve noticed that a working man as likes reading, and
is always looking out for a new book, or thinks he knows something as
will alter the pull of money over labour—he’s a very unlikely card to
drink much. If he gets a paper with a long letter in it, or a working
man’s yarn in a book, he goes home as happy as a king, and reads away
to his wife, or sits up half the night spelling it out. _He_ don’t
drink. Even if he spouts a bit at the public, he talks a deal more than
he swipes.’
‘I am quite of your opinion, Jack; the more a man knows, the more he
wants to know. Then he must read; if he reads steadily all his spare
time, he finds his drinking companions low and dull, and thinks it a
great waste of time to be shouting out foolish songs or idle talk for
four or five hours that would put him half way through a new book.
Besides, he has become good company for himself, which your drinking
man is not.’
‘That’s the best reason of all, sir,’ heartily assented his follower.
‘It is hard lines on those chaps that can only talk about horses or
cattle, or crops, or bullock driving. When they’re by themselves they
can only sulk. It’s natural that they should want other men to talk to,
and then it’s hard work to make any fun without the grog.’
‘And there’s another very powerful beverage,’ continued Ernest, ‘that
has been known to preserve men from the snare of strong drink, when
nothing else would.’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘The influence of a good woman, John. The hope to win her some day by
prudence and self-denial; the endeavour to be worthy of her; or the
determination to give the best part of one’s life to the comfort and
happiness of her and her children, after she is a wife.’
‘By the holy poker, sir,’ shouted Mr. Windsor, roused out of his usual
cool demeanour, ‘you’ve just hit it there; there’s no man worth calling
a man as wouldn’t work himself to skin and bone, and suffer thirst till
his tongue hung out, if he could make himself of some account in the
eyes of some women I’ve seen. There’s a girl that we saw no later than
last night, sir—you know who I mean; by George, if she’d only hold up
her finger I’d live on rice and pickles like a Chinaman to the end of
my days, and sniff at a glass of grog like old Watch does.’
‘Very good resolution, Jack; and Carry Walton is as nice a girl, and
as good, I’m sure, as ever tempted a man to make good resolutions. I
quite approve of your taste. Indeed, she’s a great friend of mine, and
if you like to show what stuff you are really made of, I’ll see what I
can do to give you a helping hand.’
John Windsor did not speak for some time. He looked before him for
a few seconds as if watching the far sky-line on the great primeval
wastes where his youth had been passed. Then he turned with a grave
and sobered expression, very different from the one habitual to his
somewhat reckless demeanour. ‘I don’t like to say much, sir—talking
isn’t my line, when I mean anything—but if you’re good enough to be
bothered with me for a year or two, and if I get that girl for a wife,
and keep her as she ought to be kept by my own industry, you’ll have a
man as will work for you, ride for you, or fight for you, as long as
you want any one on this side.’
‘I know that, Jack,’ said Mr. Neuchamp, looking feelingly at the
heightened colour and speaking expression of his follower; ‘and if I
have any claim beyond gratitude, you cannot repay it more effectually,
and more agreeably to my mind, than by acting in such a way as to make
people talk of you by and by as an industrious, steady, and I am sure
they will add, clever and successful man.’
Jack’s manly face glowed, and his brown eyes glistened at this
encouraging statement; but he refrained from further speech until they
reached the broad arterial thoroughfare which, from all the great
western and southern provinces, leads into the most beautiful city in
Australia.
‘This looks something like a crowd, sir. What a mob of houses, people,
cabs, teams, men, women, and children! What in the name of fortune do
they all do, and where do they all go at night? Well, I never thought
the town was as big as this. Confound the horse’ (this to Ben Bolt, who
lashed out at a passing hansom), ‘he’ll kill some one yet before he’s
safe in the stable.’
Perhaps a city is never seen to such advantage as after a considerable
sojourn in the provinces, at sea, or in any such other distant or
isolated abode, where the dweller is necessarily debarred from the
required licenses of civilisation. At such a time the sensations,
keenly sharpened by abstinence, do more than justice to the real, even
to the apparent, advantages of that aggregation of human atoms known as
a city.
The returning or arriving traveller revels in the real and
supposititious treasures of this newly-discovered fairyland. The
predominance and accessibility of wonders; the daily presence of
friends, acquaintances, strangers, and notables, dazzle and deceive
the eye long accustomed to the rare presentment of such personages;
the public buildings, the parks, the intellectual and artistic
treasure-houses, the higher standard of appearance, dress—all combine
to excite and animate the mind.
Mr. Neuchamp had been familiar with divers capitals of considerably
greater pretensions, and of world-wide historic rank and reputation.
London had been his home, Paris his holiday retreat; Rome, Venice,
Vienna, his occasional residence. But he thought he had never before
felt so high and genuine a degree of exhilaration when returning to any
of those great cities after an absence, as he now acknowledged in every
vein and pulse, as he rode up the not particularly gorgeous avenue of
Brickfield Hill, and passing the railway station, decided to thread
George Street and, depositing the horses at a snug stable he knew of,
find his way once more to the office of Paul Frankston and Co.
It would be unjust to Mr. Neuchamp to say that this name and its
concomitant associations had not been many times unquestioned and
sole possessors of his thoughts. Many a time and oft had he wondered
whether the household remained exactly _in statu quo_. Did the old man
return nightly to his dinner, his cigar, his seat in the verandah, and
his unfailing request to Antonia to play and sing? He could fancy her
pleasant smile as she sat down to the instrument, and her cheerful
performance of the somewhat old-fashioned tunes and melodies that her
father loved.
And had she made any fresh acquaintances? Were any other newly-arrived
colonists kindly greeted and put upon terms of familiar hospitality
like himself? That sort of thing might be carried too far. Extremely
entertaining young fellows emigrated, and a few that he could name were
unmistakably ‘bad eggs.’
However, he would very soon see if anything of the kind, any shadow
of the falcon, was imminent. He had heard from time to time from old
Paul, who occasionally furnished a message from Antonia of a new book
she had been reading, a visit she had paid, a sailing excursion that
she and her father had enjoyed together; and lastly, something had
been said about an Austrian nobleman—Count or Baron, or of some such
objectionable rank—who was the acknowledged lion of Sydney just then,
and who had been several times at Morahmee.
This piece of information did not cause any of the pleasure almost
visible on the letter relating it to be conveyed to Ernest Neuchamp.
‘Count be hanged!’ he was English enough to say. ’I hate these
foreign fellows. Ten to one there’s something not quite correct about
a foreigner on his travels. Not that there’s any logical necessity for
it. I trust I am not sufficiently insular to deny a foreign nobility
all the graces and virtues that add lustre to our own. But we can
always find out and trace our “heavy gunners.” But in the countless (I
mean no harm) multitude of Counts and Barons, Grafs and Vons, who can
possibly tell whether the bowing, broken-Englished, insinuating beggar
that you introduce to your wife and daughters is Von Adelberg himself,
or his valet or courier levanted with the cash and purloining the title
as well as the clothes of his master?’
Osmund and Ben Bolt were safely bestowed in a snug but unpretending
stable not a hundred miles from Bent Street, and Mr. Windsor, as a man
who ’knew his way about,’ even in a strange city, was left temporarily
to his own guidance, merely being requested to report himself at
Morahmee.
Every Englishman knows what important step Ernest took next. His hair
reduced to the smallest visible quantity, and the luxuriance of his
beard, which he had lately permitted full liberty of growth, rationally
restricted, he betook himself to the well-known counting-house.
The grave head clerk, who had acquired such solemn doubts as to Mr.
Hartley Selmore’s final destination, smiled, under protest, when he
announced ‘a gentleman on business,’ by Ernest’s request. Old Paul
looked up with his usual good-natured expression, then stared in
unrecognising blankness at the bronzed and bearded figure before him,
finally to burst into a perfect tempest of laughter and chuckling,
shaking Ernest’s hands violently with both of his, and making as if he
could throw himself on the neck of his safe returning _protégé_.
‘Ha! ha! ha! so you’re back again, are you, Ernest, my boy? By Jove,
I’m glad to see you; burnt brown enough too—shows you’ve been working;
like to see it—none the worse looking for it, either, I know the girls
will say. But, I say—ha! ha! ha! known by the police, eh? Captain
Jinks, alias Gentleman Jack, and the _other prisoner_, eh, my boy? How
I roared at that till Antonia was quite savage—for _her_ you know.
Didn’t take your photo, did they? generally do, you know. Got an album,
for reference, at all the chief police stations. You’re coming out, of
course, to-night. Antonia will be awfully glad; don’t tell her I said
so.
‘Look here, my dear boy, I was just bothering this old head of mine
about some business matters—hang them. You run away out to Morahmee,
and tell Antonia to have dinner ready to the minute, or I’ll murder the
whole household. Now off with you!’
Ernest departed, nothing loath, and as he whirled out, hansom-borne,
along the well-remembered road, and gazed once more upon the blue
waters, the frowning headland, the green villa-dotted shores of
the unequalled harbour, he mentally contrasted these with the gray
monotonous plains of Garrandilla, or the equally monotonous waterless
woodlands.
‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘I feel like a schoolboy home for the holidays, or
a sailor back from a cruise; and all for the pleasure of returning to
Sydney, a place I had scarcely heard of a couple of years since. Am I
the same Ernest Neuchamp that knew Paris pretty well before he was of
age, and Vienna to boot?
‘However, all this sort of thing is like your club dinners. The menu
goes for little except you have the appetite; if you have _that_, you
can renovate soul and body upon bread and cheese.’ Here he deserted the
region of philosophic parallels, and began to picture the expression
of satisfaction, perhaps of unrestrained pleasure, that would illumine
Antonia Frankston’s countenance upon his arrival. ‘What a charming
thing a perfect friendship between two persons of different sexes might
be made!’ he thought, ‘if people would not insist upon complicating the
highest, noblest, and most exalted sentiment of which our nature is
capable with that ridiculous, half instinctive, undignified, inferior
passion which men call love. Of course inferior. Why, friendship must
necessarily be based upon an equality of culture, of social aims,
principles, and sympathies, while the other violent, unreasoning, and
unreasonable monopoly may exist between persons of the most widely
differing ages, positions, standards of refinement, and intellectual
rank; between the dotard and the maiden, the duke and the dairymaid,
the peeress and the parvenu, the rustic and the courtier, the
spotlessly pure and the incorrigibly base.’
From this it may be gathered that Mr. Neuchamp was not a man addicted
to falling violently and promiscuously in love. In point of fact, he
had a stupendously high ideal, which, not expecting to realise it in
everyday life, seemed to keep the subject a good deal out of his mind.
Then he thought a man should do some work under the sun first, and
set about a quest for the ‘sangreal’ afterwards. He regarded Antonia
Frankston with a deep feeling of interest, as a dear and highly
sympathetic friend. He had given her the advantage of many criticisms
with respect to the course of reading, very unusual for a girl of her
age, that she was pursuing when they first met, and since then had
advised and directed her intellectual progress.
Insensibly the natural sympathy between the master and a promising
pupil was quickened and intensified by the originality of mind which
Antonia evinced. When Ernest Neuchamp magnanimously departed for the
interior, he had commenced to notice the awakening of an unacknowledged
feeling that the hour’s talk and make-believe school at Morahmee was
the period of the day he was most eager to seize, most unwilling to
relinquish.
And now how altered and strengthened as to her intellectual grasp must
she be—this unsophisticated, unwon child of the fair south—with the
brooding fancies and absolute simplicity of a child, the instinctive
dignity, the curious aplomb, of a woman. As he reached this not
unpleasing stage of his reverie the wheels of the hansom ground
viciously the matchless gravel of the drive at Morahmee, and grazed
perilously close the snowy sandstone steps in front of the portico.
Ernest recalled the old delicious sense of stillness, the
beautiful silence all around,
Save wood-bird to wood-bird calling,
broken only by the calmly murmurous rhythmic plash of the wavelets on
the beach.
It was not a house where people were always coming and going, and he
did not remember often to have found Antonia otherwise than alone,
on the occasion of his former visits. What was she doing now? Should
he find her reading in the library, that pleasant room with the bay
window, in which slumberous calms the smiles and storms of ocean were
pictures set as in a frame? in the drawing-room? in the shrubbery? in
the rose garden? in the morning-room, which she usually affected, and
which, having a davenport, her favourite authors, and a cottage piano,
was able to supply, indifferently well, the distinguishing features of
three more pretentious apartments?
As he passed through the hall the notes of the piano, not of the
boudoir, but the grand Erard, with a bass of organ-like depth of
vibration, informed him that in the drawing-room he would probably find
the youthful _châtelaine_.
Almost simultaneously he heard the rich, deep notes of a strange male
voice accompanying the instrument, and recognised the concluding words
of a duet which he himself had sung with Miss Frankston full many a
time and oft.
As the second performer dwelt with perhaps unnecessarily tender
expression upon Heine’s thrilling ‘Bis in den tiefsten Traum,’ Mr.
Neuchamp became conscious of a distinct change of feeling—of a sudden
painful sense of disenchantment.
There was no tangible cause for uneasiness. A young lady was merely
singing one of Mendelssohn’s loveliest duets with an accredited musical
acquaintance. By the merest accident, no doubt. Still, let but a single
cloud darken the summer sky, the chill breeze once sigh, how faintly
soever, and the heart, that sensitive plant, shrinks instinctively at
nature’s warning. So smote the melody, albeit effectively rendered,
upon Ernest’s highly-wrought mind with a savour of bode and of dread.
And as he entered the open door of the apartment he knew himself to be
deeply changed from the eager visitor who had but a few moments since
so joyously alighted at the portals of Morahmee.