When Miss Neuchamp found herself installed in a large, cool upper
chamber at Morahmee with a glorious view of the harbour, while on her
table stood a great rapturous bouquet all freshly gathered, roses
intermingled with delicate greenhouse buds, she commenced to wonder
whether all her previously formed ideas of Australia were about to be
seriously modified.
A good sound reserve of prejudice reassured her, and she bided her
time. She had tasted the fullest measure of comfort perceivable in
Australian country life at the house of Mr. Middleton, where she had
sojourned several weeks. Now she was about to experience whatever best
and pleasantest the metropolis could afford.
Mr. Frankston had brought home with him Count von Schätterheims and Mr.
Jermyn Croker, so that he and Mr. Middleton, having endless semi-stock
and station lore to interchange, each of the ladies was provided with a
cavalier.
The Count, who had been informed by Paul that Miss Neuchamp was an
English heiress of vast wealth, travelling to indulge her eccentric
insular taste, paid great attention to that young lady, cutting in
from time to time, to the speechless wrath and exasperation of Jermyn
Croker, who renewed his former acquaintance with great success.
The fair Augusta was entertained, and not wholly displeased, with their
manifest admiration.
As the verandah was voted by far the pleasantest place after dinner,
the whole party adjourned to this invaluable retreat, where Paul and
his friend were permitted to light their cigars, and all joined in
conversation with unaffected freedom impossible in a drawing-room.
‘Sing something, my darling,’ said the old man, ‘and then, perhaps, the
Count will give us that new song of his, which I hear all Sydney is
raving about.’
As the rich tones of the grand Erard came forth to them, luxuriously
softened by the intervening distance, Miss Neuchamp tasted a pleasure
from which she had for an age, it would seem, been debarred. She did
not herself perform with more than the moderate degree of success which
can be attained by those who, without natural talent, have received
thoroughly good teaching. But her training, at least, enabled her to
appreciate the delicacy of Miss Frankston’s touch, her finished and
rare execution, and the true yet deep feeling with which she rendered
the most simple melodies as well as the most complicated operatic
triumphs.
Somewhat to the discomposure of the Count, who had commenced to believe
the opportunity favourable, she rose, and with an expression of delight
passed on to Antonia’s side. Miss Neuchamp had seen too many counts
to attach importance to that particular grade of continental rank;
and this particular specimen of the order she held in fixed distrust,
derived from the recollection of comments to which she had listened at
Rainbar.
‘_La belle Anglaise_ prefers music to your compliments, Count,’ said
Mr. Croker.
‘_Chacun à son tour_,’ replied the injured diplomatist. ‘Dey are both
ver good in dere vay.’
Whatever might be the Count’s shortcomings, a deficiency of
self-control could hardly be reckoned among them. He twirled his
enormous moustache, condoled with Paul and Mr. Middleton, and explained
that his steward in Silesia had written him accounts of an unusually
wet season.
‘Ah, dat is de condrey! You should see him, my dear Monsieur Paul: such
grops, such pasdures, such vool, so vine as de zilks.’
‘How about labour?’ said Mr. Middleton. ‘I suppose you are not bothered
as we are every now and then with a short supply, and half of that bad?’
‘De bauer—vat you call “beasand” in my condrey—he vork for you all
de yahres of his live, and pray Gott for your brosperity—it is his
brivilech to be receive wid joys and danks. De bauer, oh, de bauer is
goot man!‘
‘I wish our fellows received their lot with joy and thanks; half of my
Steam Plains shepherds have gone off to these confounded diggings. But
don’t your men emigrate to America now and then? I thought half Germany
went there.’
‘I vill dell you one dale,’ said the Count earnestly. ‘I had one
hauptman, overzeer, grand laboureur, ver goot man—he is of lofdy
indelligence, he reat, he dinks mooch, he vill go to Amerika. I
consoolt mit my stewart, he say Carl Steiger is ver goot, he is so goot
as no oder mans what we have not got. I say, “Ingrease his vages, once,
twyei, dree dime—he reach de vonderful som of _fivedeen bount_ per
yahr. He go no more. De golten demdadion is doo crade; he abandon his
shpirit-dask to leat mankint, he glass my vools now dill his lives is
ofer.”‘
‘Ha! he wanted a summer on the wallaby track to open his mind,’ said
Mr. Middleton; ‘that would have been a “wanderyahr” with different
results, I am afraid. But I really think many of our fellows would
do better if they had more of the thrift and steady resolve of your
countrymen, Count. I remember when wages were much lower than now
in the colony, and when the men really saved something worth while,
besides working more cheerfully. Don’t you, Croker?’ But Mr. Croker
had departed in the midst of the Count’s story, and was charming Miss
Neuchamp with such delightful depreciation of the Australias, and
all that in them is, that she became rapidly confirmed in her first
opinion, formed soon after her arrival, that he was the best style of
man she had as yet met in the colony. Mr. Croker, on his side, declared
himself to be encouraged and refreshed by thus meeting with a genuine
English lady not afraid to speak out her mind with respect to this
confounded country, and its ways, means, and inhabitants.
The Count, fearing that the evening would be an unprofitable investment
of his talents and graces, particularly in the matter of Miss Neuchamp,
by whom he was treated with studied coldness, departed after having
sung his song. This effort merely recalled to Augusta some occasion
when she had heard it very much better performed in the Grand Opera at
Paris. Jermyn Croker, who had never heard it before, openly depreciated
the air, the words, the expression, and execution. With more than one
household languishing for his presence, this was a state of matters
not to be continued, so the Count, with graceful apologies and vows of
pressing engagements, took his departure.
‘You and I, Middleton, can go home to the club together, now that the
_chevalier d’industrie_—beg your pardon, Frankston—I mean, of the
Order of the Legion of Honour, Kaiser Fritz, and all his other orders,
medals, and decorations—— But I daresay the first represents his truest
claim.’
‘You are always charitably well informed, we know that, Croker,’ said
Mr. Middleton. ‘Mind, I don’t put my trust in princes or counts of
_his_ sort. I wonder how he gets along. Still swimmingly?’
‘Don’t think the fellow has a shilling in the world myself—never did,’
replied Croker, with cheerful disbelief. ‘But from what I heard the
other day, he will have to make his grand _coup_ soon, now that it’s
known his chance of marrying Harriet Folleton is all up.’
‘Is it finally unsettled, then, Mr. Croker?’ said Antonia. ‘Every one
said she admired him so much.’
‘She is quite equal to that or any other madness, I believe,’ said the
well-informed Jermyn; ‘and, with her mother’s extraordinary folly to
back her, there is no limit to the insanity she is capable of. But the
old man _has_ a little sense—people who have made a pot of money often
have—and he stopped the whole affair last week.’
* * * * *
Mr. Neuchamp was, perhaps, more disturbed in mind than he had ever been
since his arrival in Australia when he received the unusually laconic
letter referred to from Paul Frankston. Surprise, anger, uncertainty by
turns took possession of his soul. A wholly new and strangely mingled
sensation arose in his mind. Had he misinterpreted his own emotions as
well as those of Antonia? That such was the case as to his own feeling
was evidenced by his sudden and unreasonable rage when he thought of
Hardy Baldacre in the character of an accepted suitor for the hand of
the unconventional, innocent girl whose half-childish, half-womanly
expressions of wonder, admiration, dislike, or approval, called forth
by incidents in their daily studies, he could _now_ so clearly remember.
Had he, then, won that priceless gem, the unbought love of a pure and
loving heart—no fleeting fancy, born of vanity or caprice, but the
deeply-rooted, sacred, lifelong devotion of an untarnished virgin-soul,
of a cultured and lofty intellect?
This heavenly jewel had been suspended by a crowned angel above his
head, and had he not, with sordid indifference, bent earthward, all
unheeding, save of hard and anxious travail? He had narrowed his mind
to beeves and kine, dry seasons and wet, all the merest workaday
vulgarities of short-sighted mortals, resolute only in the pursuit of
dross.
Had he, from neglect, heedlessness, absence, however indispensable,
chilled the fond ardour of that lonely heart, cast the priceless
treasure into careless or unworthy hands? Who was he, that a girl so
much courted, so richly dowered in every way, as Antonia Frankston,
should wait till youth was over for his deliberate approval? And yet,
if she _had_ delayed but for a short while longer—till _the rain
came_, in fact. Ah me! was not all the Australian world waiting with
exhausted, upturned eyes for that crowning, long-delayed blessing?
Fancy such a reason being proffered in England. Weddings, in that happy
land, were occasionally postponed till a semblance of fine weather
might be calculated upon, but surely only in this antipodean land of
contrast and confusion did any one defer the great question of his life
until the _departure_ of fine weather. Antonia was, doubtless, besieged
by hosts of suitors, among them this infernal, lying scoundrel of a
cad, Hardy Baldacre, besides Jermyn Croker, the Count, Hartley Selmore,
and numberless others. Madness was in his thoughts—he would go down,
rain or no rain, wet or dry, tempest or zephyr, hurricane or calm. He
would hunt for the ruffian Baldacre, and slay him where they met.
Nevertheless he must at once answer Paul’s letter, which he did to
the effect that, ‘He wondered that his old friends should believe any
mere fabrications, unsupported by testimony, to his prejudice. Not
that there was anything discreditable about the report, if true; but
this was _not_ true. His cousin, with misplaced heroism, had visited
him in his solitude; a refined and highly educated woman, as would
be apparent to all, she certainly was. But as a _wife_ he had never
thought of her, nor could he, if their existence ran parallel for
years.’ Having despatched the letter, Ernest felt easier in mind, more
removed from that condition the most irritating and intolerable of all,
the accusation of wrong without the power of justification. It was
hard to resist an almost uncontrollable desire to rush down to Sydney
then and there to set himself right with his friends. But, as he ran
over the obstacles to such a course, it seemed, on cooler thought, to
be unadvisable in every way. First, there was the extreme difficulty
of performing the journey: he had not a horse at Rainbar capable of
carrying him across to the mail station. When he got there it was
problematical whether the contractor was running a wheel mail or not.
It would be undesirable, even ridiculous, to find himself a couple of
hundred miles from home, stranded on the endless, dry, hopeless plain.
To make a lengthened stay in Sydney, should he get there, was not to be
thought of under his present circumstances of debt and anxiety. ‘No,’
he said, as he crushed the feeling back with a self-repression more
nearly allied to heroism than mere ostentatious efforts of courage,
‘no, my colours are nailed to the masthead, and there shall they hang
till the cry of “victory” is once more heard, or till the fight is lost
beyond mortal hope.‘
So, sadly yet steadfastly, Ernest Neuchamp turned himself to the
monotonous tasks which, like those of sailors on a desert island, or
of the crew of a slowly-sailing ship, were yet carried on with daily,
hopeless regularity. Still the ashen-gray pastures became more withered
and deathlike. Still the sad, staggering lines of cattle paced in
along the well-worn dusty trails to their watering-places, and paced
back like bovine processions after witnessing the funeral obsequies of
individuals of their race, which experience, in truth, was daily theirs.
Then the diet, once not distasteful to the much-enduring palate of
youth, became wellnigh intolerable: the flaccid unfed meat, the daily
bread with never a condiment, the milkless tea, the utter absence of
all fruit, vegetable, herb, or esculent. Truly, as in those ancient
days when a pastoral people record their sorrowful chronicles of the
dry and thirsty region where no water is, ‘the famine was sore in the
land.’
At this time, so dreary, so endless, so crushing in its isolated,
unchanging, helpless misery, Ernest was unutterably thankful for the
hope and consolation which his studious habits afforded him. His
library, the day’s work done, filled up his lonely evening as could
no other employment possible under the circumstances. He ransacked
his moderate references for records of similar calamities in all lands
which, unlike the ‘happy isles’ of Britain, are from time to time
invaded with drought, the chief agent in all the recorded wholesale
destruction of animal life. He noted with painstaking and laborious
accuracy the duration, the signs, the consequences, the termination
of such dread seasons. From old books of Australian exploration he
learned, almost by heart, the sad experiences of the pioneers of the
land when they stood face to face with what to them were new and
terrible foes.
‘It is hard,’ said he to himself, as he paced his room at midnight,
after long hours of close application to such studies, ‘it is hard and
depressing to me, and to many a wretched colonist who has worked longer
and has more on the hazard than I, to see the fruit of our labours
slowly, pitilessly absorbed by this remorseless season. But what,
after all, is a calamity which can be measured, like this, by a money
standard, compared to one which, like this latest famine in Hindostan,
counts its _human_ victims by tens of thousands, by millions? See the
dry record of a food failure, which comprehends the teeming human herds
which cover the soil more thickly than even our poor starving flocks!
‘Can we realise thousands of lowly homes where the mother sits
enfeebled and spectral beside her perishing babes, whose eyes ask for
the food which she cannot grant; where the frenzied peasant rushes, in
the agony of despair, from his cabin that he may not hear the hunger
cries, the death groans of his wife and babes; where the dead lie
unburied; where the beast of prey alone roams satiated and lordly;
where nature mourns like a maniac mother with tears of blood for her
murdered offspring?
‘Such is not, may never be, the fate of this wide, rich, peaceful land,
vast and wondrous in its capabilities in spite of temporary disasters.
Let us take heart. Our losses, our woes, are trifling in comparison
with the world’s great miseries. We are, in comparison, but as children
who lose their holiday gifts of coin or cakes. Our lives, our health
and strength, are all untouched. We have hope still for our unbartered
heritage, the stronger for past dangers of storm and tide. The world
is yet before us. There are other seas, untried and slumbering oceans,
where our bark may yet ride with joyous outspread sail. Let us still
labour and endure, until Fate, compelled by our steadfastness, shall be
once more propitious.
‘Si fractus illabitur orbis
Impavidum ferient ruinæ.
I hardly expected to be quoting Horace at Rainbar, but the old boy
probably had some experience of untoward seasons, sunshiny desolation,
like this of ours. I don’t know whether “Impavidum” applies strictly to
any one but Levison. I am afraid that the “fractus orbis” pertains to
our cosmos of credit, which, shattered to its core, will strike us all
soon and put us to the proof of our philosophy.‘
A trifling distraction was created about this time, much to Ernest’s
relief, by the arrival of Mr. Cottonbush, who had received instructions
from Mr. Levison to muster, brand, and take delivery of the small
herd of cattle, the single flock of sheep, and the lot of horses
which that far-seeing speculator had purchased from the brothers
Freeman. This pastoral plenipotentiary, a wiry, reticent individual,
utterly impervious to every wile and stratagem which the art of man in
Australia had hitherto evolved from the very complicated industry of
stock-raising, first informed the Freemans of his mission, producing a
written authority with the awe-striking signature of Abstinens Levison,
and then reported himself to Mr. Neuchamp.
‘It _is_ a bad season, sir,’ he said, in answer to that gentleman’s
greeting, which of course comprehended the disastrous state of the
weather, ‘and many a one wouldn’t bother mustering these three or four
hundred crawling cattle. They might be all dead in three months for all
we can see. But Mr. Levison isn’t like any one else. He sends me a line
to do this, or go there, and I always do it without troubling about the
reasons. _He_ finds them for the lot of us, and pretty fair ones they
generally are when time brings ’em out.’
‘I think _I_ know why he made this bargain,’ said Ernest, ‘and I must
say I wonder more about it every day. But I am so far of your opinion,
now that I am becoming what you call an “old hand,” that I shall
imitate your example in letting Mr. Levison’s reasons work themselves
out in practice.‘
‘That’s the best way, sir,’ assented the colonel of cavalry under this
pastoral general of division. ‘I’ve never done anything but report and
obey orders since I’ve been with Levison, this many a year. I used to
talk and argue a bit with him at first. I never do now, though he’s a
man that will always hear what you’ve got to say, in case he might pick
something out of it. But I never knew him alter his mind after he’d got
all the information he wanted. So it’s lost time talking to him.’
‘And what do _you_ think about this terrible season?’ asked Ernest,
anxiously looking at this iron man of the desert, whose experience
was to his, he could _now_ in this hour of wreck and ruin realise, as
immeasurably superior as the grizzled second mate’s to the cabin boy’s
when the tempest cries aloud with voice of death and the hungry caverns
of the eternal deep are disclosed.
‘It’s bad enough,’ assented Mr. Cottonbush thoughtfully, ‘bad enough;
and there’s many a one will remember it to his dying day. In some
places they’ll lose most of their stock before the winter’s on for want
of feed, and all the rest, when it _does_ come, from the cold. There
were ten thousand fat sheep (or supposed to be fat) of Lateman’s caught
in the Peechelbah mallee the other day as they were going a short cut.
When I say “caught,” the water had dried up that they reckoned on, and
was only found out when they was half way through. The sheep went mad
and wouldn’t drive. So did the chap in charge, very nigh. When he got
out he had only some four thousand three hundred odd left. That was a
smash, wasn’t it?‘
‘Sheep are not so bad as cattle in one way,’ said Mr. Neuchamp; ‘you
can travel them and steal grass. A good many people seem unprincipled
enough to resort to the meanness of filching from their neighbours and
the country generally what no man can spare in this awful time.’
‘Well,’ said Mr. Cottonbush, smiling and wincing slightly, ‘it ain’t
quite the clean potato, of course; but if your sheep’s dying at home,
what can you do? Every man for himself, you know; and you can’t let ’em
stop on the run and die before your eyes. We’ve had to do a bit of it
ourselves. But the old man, he bought two or three whacking big bits of
country in the Snowy Mountains, Long Plains, the Gulf, Yarrangobilly,
and two or three more, enough to feed all the sheep in the country,
and started ours for it directly after shearing, while the roads were
good. _He_ knew what was coming and provided in time, same as he always
does. Blessed if he didn’t lease a lot of the country he could spare
to people who were hard pushed and came late, so he got his own share
cheap.’
‘And was there abundance of grass and water?’
‘Green grass two feet high, running creeks all the summer, enough to
make your mouth water. If we get rain down before the snow comes next
month our flocks will come back better than they went, and with half as
much wool again as the plains sheep.’
That day Mr. Cottonbush informed the Freeman family that, inasmuch as
the Rainbar stockyard was a strong and secure enclosure, and as his
employer, Mr. Levison, was a very particular man in having cattle that
he bought properly branded up, he didn’t like any to be left over, and
they must yard every mother’s son of ‘em.
So, as Mr. Neuchamp had kindly given permission for his yard to be
used, the entire Freeman clan, including a swarm of brown-faced,
bare-legged urchins, arrived on the following day with the whole of
their herd. It was a strange sight, and not without a proportion of
dramatic interest. The cattle were so emaciated that they could hardly
walk; many of them staggered and fell. In truth, as they moved up
in a long woebegone procession, they looked like a ghostly protest
against man’s lack of foresight and Heaven’s wrath. The horses were so
weak from starvation that they could barely carry their riders. One
youngster was fain to jump off his colt, that exhausted animal having
come to a dead halt, and drive him forward with the cattle.
Even the men and the boys had a wan and withered look. Not that they
had been on short commons, but, dusty, sunburned, and nervously anxious
to secure every animal that could walk to the yard, they harmonised
very fittingly with their kine.
When they arrived at the yard Mr. Cottonbush counted them carefully in,
and then signified to the vendors that, in his opinion, it would be
wise of them to go back and make a final ‘scrape,’ as he expressed it,
of their pasture-ground, lest there might inadvertently have been any
left behind.
‘That sort of thing always leads to trouble, you know,’ said he;
‘there’s a sort of doubt which were branded and which were not. Now,
Mr. Levison bought every hoof you own, no milkers reserved and all
that; he don’t believe in having any of the best cattle kept back. So
you’d better scour up every beast you can raise before we begin to
brand. We can tail this mob, now they’re here.’
This supplementary proceeding resulted in the production of about
thirty head of cattle, among which there curiously happened to be, by
accident, half a dozen cows considerably above the average in point of
breeding and value.
This very trifling matter of a ‘cockatoo’s’ muster having been thus
concluded, all the horses having been yarded, and the flock of sheep
driven up—Mr. Levison having made it a _sine quâ non_ that he would
have all or none—the fires were lighted and the brands put in.
To the wild astonishment of the Freemans, Mr. Cottonbush, having
put the [Ǝ]NE brand in the fire, commenced to place that conjoined
hieroglyph upon every cow, calf, bullock, and steer, assisted by Mr.
Windsor, Charley Banks, and the black boys.
‘Why, “the cove” ain’t bought ‘em, surely?’ said Joe Freeman, with a
look of much distrust and disapproval. ‘Where’s he to get the sugar, I
want to know; or else it’s a “plant” between him and old Levison.‘
‘When the stock’s counted and branded you’ll get your cheque,’ said
the imperturbable manager; ‘that’s all you’ve got to bother your head
about. It’s no business of yours, if you’re paid, whether Levison
chooses to sell ’em, or boil ’em, or put ’em in a glass case.’
‘Well, I’m blowed,’ said Bill Freeman, ‘if we ain’t regularly sold. If
I’d a-known as they was a-comin’ here, I’d have seen Levison in the
middle of a mallee scrub with his tongue out for water before I’d have
sold him a hoof. One comfort: the cash is all right, and half of these
crawlers will die before spring.‘
‘Not if rain comes within a month,’ said Mr. Cottonbush cheerily.
‘You’d be surprised what a fortnight will do for stock in these places,
and the grass grows like a hotbed. These cattle are smallish and weak,
but not so badly bred. They’ll fill out wonderfully when they get their
fill. You’d better wait and see them counted, and then you can have
your cheque.’
Jack Windsor and Charley Banks worked with a will, so did the younger
members of the yeomanry plantation. The grown cattle were of course
pen-branded. By night-fall every one was marked very legibly and
counted out. Four hundred and seventy head of cattle over six months
old, eighty-four horses, and twelve hundred mixed sheep, principally
weaners. These last were fire-branded on the side of the face,
provided with a shepherd, and kept near home.
The necessary preliminaries being concluded, Mr. Cottonbush handed a
cheque, at the prices arranged, to Abraham Freeman, and turned the
horses and cattle out of the yard.
‘You haven’t a horn or a hoof on Rainbar now,’ said he composedly;
‘perhaps you have ’em in a better place, in your breeches pockets; and
remember I’ll be up here next November, or else Mr. Levison, to take up
your selections as agreed. Then, I suppose, you’ll be fixing yourself
down upon some other miserable squatter. You’re bound not to stop here,
you know.’
Having thus accomplished his mission clearly and unmistakably, Mr.
Cottonbush, whose acquaintance Ernest had first made at Turonia when
he took delivery of Mr. Drifter’s cattle, declared his intention of
starting at daybreak. Waste of time was never laid to the charge of
Mr. Levison’s subordinates. ‘Like master like man’ is a proverb of
unquestionable antiquity. There is more in it than appears upon the
surface. Whatever might have been the moulding power, it is certain
that his managers, agents, and overseers attached great importance to
those attributes of punctuality, foresight, temperance, and thrift
which were dear to the soul of Abstinens Levison.
‘I’m glad these crawlers of cattle are branded up and done with while
it’s dry, likewise the horses. All this kind of work is so much easier
and better done in dry weather,’ said the relaxing manager. ‘They’re
not a very gay lot to look at now. But I shouldn’t wonder to see you
knocking ten pounds a head out of some of those cats of steers before
this day two years.’
‘Ten pounds a head!’ echoed Ernest. ‘Why not say twenty, while you’re
about it?’
‘You don’t believe it,’ said Mr. Cottonbush calmly, rubbing his tobacco
assiduously in his hands preparatory to lighting his pipe. ‘Levison
writes that stock are going up in Victoria to astonishing prices, and
that what they’ll reach, if the gold keeps up, no man can tell. So your
cattle _might_ fetch twenty pounds after all.’
‘What would you advise me to do with the Freemans’ stock, now that I
have got them?‘ asked Ernest.
‘If I was in your place,’ said Mr. Cottonbush judicially, ‘I should
stick to the cattle, for every one of them, down to the smallest calf,
will be good money when the rain comes. The sheep also you may as well
keep: they’ll pay their own wages if you put ’em out on a bit of spare
back country, and there’s plenty that your cattle never go near. You
could bring ’em in to shear them, and they’ll increase and grow into
money fast enough. You might have ten thousand sheep on Rainbar and
never know it.’
‘I don’t like sheep much,’ said Ernest; ‘but these are very cheap, if
they live, and there is plenty of room, as you say. And the horses?’
‘Sell every three-cornered wretch of ’em—a set of upright-shouldered,
useless mongrels—directly you get a chance,’ said Mr. Cottonbush with
unusual energy of speech. ‘And now you’re able to clear the run of
’em, being your own, which you never could have done if they remained
theirs. You’d have had young fellows coming for this colt or that filly
till your head was gray.’
‘I hope not,’ said Ernest, laughing; ‘but I am glad to have all the
stock and land of Rainbar in my own hands once more.’
Mr. Cottonbush departed at dawn, and once more Ernest was alone in the
gray-stricken, accursed waste, wherein nor grass grew nor water ran,
nor did any of these everyday miracles of Nature appear likely again to
be witnessed by despairing man.
Still passed by the hungry hordes of travelling sheep, still the bony
skeletons of the passing cattle herds. No rain, no sign of rain! All
pastoral nature, brute and human, appeared to have been struck with the
same blight, and to be forlorn and moribund. The station cattle became
weaker and less capable of exertion; ‘lower,’ as Charley Banks called
it, as the cold autumn nights commenced to exhibit their keenness. The
Freemans relinquished all control over their cattle, and chuckled over
the weakly state of the Rainbar herd.
The autumn had commenced, a peerless season in all respects save in the
vitally indispensable condition of moisture. The mornings were crisp,
with a suggestive tinge of frost, the nights absolutely cold, the days,
as usual, cloudless, bright, and warm. If there was any variation it
was in the direction of a lowering, overcast, cloudy interval, when the
bleak winds moaned bodingly, but led to no other effect than to sweep
the dead leaves and dry sticks, which had so long passed for earth’s
usual covering, into heaps and eddying circular lines. The roughening
coats on the feeble frames of the stock, now enduring the slow torture
of the cold in the lengthening nights, told a tale of coming collapse,
of consummated, unquestioned ruin. Daily did Ernest Neuchamp dread
to rise, to pass hours of hopeless despondency among these perishing
forms, dying creatures roaming over a dead earth during their brief
term of survival! Daily did he almost come to loathe the sight of the
unpitying sun, which, like a remorseless enemy, spared not one beam of
his burning rays, veiled not one glare of his deadly glance. He had an
occasional reminiscence of the steady, reassuring tones, the unwavering
purpose of which abode with the very presence of Abstinens Levison.
But for these he felt at times as though he could have distrusted the
justice of an overruling Power, have cursed the hour of his birth, and
delivered himself over to despair and reprobation.
While Mr. Neuchamp was not far removed from this most unusual and
decidedly unphilosophical state of mind, it so chanced on a certain
afternoon (it was that of Wednesday, the eighteenth day of May, as was
long after remembered) that he and Jack Windsor were out together,
a few miles from home, upon the ironical but necessary mission of
procuring a ‘fat beast.’ This form of speech may be thought to have
savoured too much of the wildly improbable. The real quest was, of
course, for an animal in such a state of comparative emaciation
as should not preclude his carcass for being converted into human
food. The meat was not palatable, but it supported life in the hardy
Anglo-Saxon frame. It was all they had, and they were constrained to
make the best of it.
‘Look at these poor devils of cattle,’ said Jack, pointing to a number
of hide-bearing anatomies moving their jaws mechanically over the
imperceptible pasture. ‘They have water, but what the deuce they find
to eat I can’t see. There’s that white steer, that red cow, and one or
two more, with their jaws swelled up. There’s plenty of ’em like that.’
‘From what cause?’ asked Mr. Neuchamp. ‘Cancer is not becoming
epidemic, I hope.’
‘It comes from the shortness of the feed, _I_ think,’ returned Jack;
‘you see the poor creatures keep licking and picking every time they
see a blade of grass, if it’s only a quarter of an inch long; half
their time they miss their aim and rattle their jaws together with
nothing between them. That’s what hurts ’em, I expect, and after a bit
it makes their heads swell.’
‘I wonder what they would think in England of such an injury, occurring
in what we always believed to be a rich pastoral country.’
‘So it is, sir, when the season’s right. I expect in England you have
your bad seasons in another way, and get smothered and flooded out with
rain; and the crops are half rotten; and the poor man (I suppose he is
_really_ a poor man there, no coasting up one side of a river and down
the other for six months, with free rations all the time) gets tucked
up a bit.’
‘As you say, Jack, there are bad seasons, which mean bad harvests,
in England,’ answered Ernest, always inclined to the diversion of
philosophical inquiry; ‘and the poor man there, as you say, properly so
called, inasmuch as he requires more absolute shelter, more sufficient
clothes in the terrible winter of the north, than our friends who
pursue the ever-lengthening but not arduous track of the wallaby in
Australia. They may in England, and do occasionally, I grieve to say,
if unemployed and therefore unfed, actually _starve to death_. But what
are those cattle just drawing in?’
‘Those belong to a lot that keeps pretty well back,’ answered Jack,
‘and they’re different in their way from these cripples we’ve been
looking at, as they’ve had something to _eat_, but they’re pretty well
choked for a drink. I don’t know when they’ve had one. That’s how it
is, you see, sir; half the cattle’s afraid to go away for the water,
and the rest won’t leave what little feed there is till they’re nearly
mad with drouth. It’s cruel work either way. I’m blest if that wasn’t a
drop of rain!’
This sudden and rare phenomenon caused Ernest to take a cursory
examination of the sky, which he had long forborne to regard with
hope or fear. It was clouded over. But such had been the appearance
of the firmament scores of times during the last six months. The
air was still, sultry, and full of the boding calm which precedes
a storm. Such signs had been successfully counterfeited, as Ernest
bitterly termed it, once a month since the last half-forgotten showery
spring. He had observed a halo round the moon on the previous night.
There had been dozens of dim circular rings round that planet all the
long summer through. The rain was certainly falling now. So had it
commenced, on precisely such a day, with the same low banks of clouds,
many a time and oft, and stopped abruptly in about twenty minutes, the
clouds disappearing, and the old presentment reverting to a staring
blue sky, a mocking, unveiled sun therein, with the suddenness of a
transformation scene in a pantomime.
‘I think that spotted cow looks as near meat as anything we’re likely
to get, sir,’ said Jack Windsor, interrupting the train of distrustful
reverie. ‘It begins to look as if it meant it. Lord send we may get
well soaked before we get home!’
Mr. Windsor’s pious aspiration was appropriate this time. They reaped
the benefit of a genuine and complete saturation before they reached
the yard with the small lot of cattle they were compelled to take in
for companionship to their ‘fat beast.’ There was no appearance of
haste about the rain, no tropical violence, no waterspout business. It
trickled down in slow, monotonous, still, and settled drizzle, much as
it might have done in North Britain. It only did not stop; that was
all. It was hopefully continuous all the evening. And when Mr. Neuchamp
opened his casement at midnight he thankfully listened to the soaking,
ceaseless downpour, which seemed no nearer a sudden conclusion than
during the first hour.
Before dawn Mr. Neuchamp was pacing his verandah, having darted out
from his couch the very moment that he awoke. The temperature had
sensibly fallen; so had the clouds, which were low and black; and still
the rain streamed down more heavily than at first. There was apparently
no alteration likely to take place during the day. The water commenced
to flow in the small channels. The minor watercourses, the gullies,
and creeks were filling. Wonder of wonders—it was a settled, set-in,
hopelessly wet day! What a blessed and wonderful change from last week!
Ernest had a colloquy with Charley Banks about things in general, and
then permitted himself a whole day’s rest—reading a little, ciphering a
little, and looking up his correspondence, which had fallen much into
arrear. As the day wore on the rain commenced to show determination,
heavily, hour after hour, with steady fall, saturating the darkened
earth, no longer dusty, desolate, hopelessly barren. The gaping
fissures were filled. The long disused ruts and gutters ran full and
foaming down to their ultimate destination, the river. That great
stream refused to acknowledge any immediate change of level from so
inconsiderable a cause as a rainfall so far from its source. But,
doubtless, as Charley Banks pointed out, in a week or more it would
‘come down’ in might and majesty, when the freshets at the head waters
should have time to gather forces and swell the yellow tide. It was
well if there was not then a regular flood, but that would do them no
harm; might swamp out the Freemans, perhaps, but as long as Tottie
wasn’t drowned, and the old woman, the rest of the family might be
swept down to Adelaide for all he, Charley, cared. So let it rain till
all was blue. There was no mistake this time. It was a general rain.
We should have forty-eight hours of it before it stopped. Every hoof
of stock was off the frontage now and away back, where there was good
shelter and a trifle of feed. In a fortnight after this there would be
good ‘bite’ all over Rainbar run. We should have a little comfort in
our lives now. What a pull it was, that old Cottonbush had branded up
those last stores before the rain came.
Thus Mr. Charles Banks, jubilantly prophetic, with the elasticity of
youth, having thrown off at one effort all the annoyance and privation
of the famine year, was fully prepared for an epoch of marvels and
general prosperity.
The day ended as it had commenced. There was not a moment’s cessation
from the soaking, pouring, saturating, dripping downpour of heaven’s
precious rain. ‘As the shower upon the mown grass,’ saith the olden
Scripture of the day of David the King. Doubtless the great City of
Palaces was erst surrounded by shaven lawns, by irrigated fields and
gardens. But on the skirts of the far-stretching yellow deserts,
tenanted then as now by the wild tribes, to whom pasture for their
camels and asses, and horses and sheep, was as the life-blood of their
veins, doubtless there were thousands of leagues all barren, baked
sterility, until the long-desired rain set in, when, as if by magic,
herbs and waving grains and flowerets fair sprang up, and rejoiced the
hearts of the tribe, from the silver-bearded sheik to the laughing
child.
So it would be at Rainbar. Ernest knew this from many a conversation
which he had had upon the subject with Jack Windsor and Charley
Banks. In this warm, dry-soiled country, the growth of pasture under
favourable circumstances is well-nigh incredible. Nature adapts herself
to the most widely differing conditions of existence with amazing
fertility of resource. In more temperate zones the partial heat which
withers the flower and the green herb when cut down, slays the plant
and destroys germination in the seed for evermore. Here, in the wild
waste, when the fierce and burning blast revels over scorched brown
prairies, and the whirlwind and the sand column dance together over
heated sands, the plant life is well and truly adapted to the strange
soil, the stranger clime. The tall grasses grow hard and gray, or faint
yellow, under the daily desiccation which spares no tender growth; but
they remain nutritive and life-sustaining for an incredible period, if
but the necessary cloud water can be supplied at long intervals. Then
the hard-pushed pastoral colonist, when he found that his flocks had
bared to famine pitch the pastures within reach of the watercourses,
which were his sole dependence in the earlier days, was compelled to
resort to the most ancient practice of well-digging, of which he might
have gained the idea from the familiar records of a hard-set pastoral
people in the sandy wastes of Judea. Receding to the wide plains and
waterless forests of the vast region which lay cruelly distant from
any known stream or fountain, which was in summer regularly abandoned
by the aboriginal denizens of the land, he sank, at much expense, wells
of great depth—at first with uncertain result; but, though much of the
water thus painfully obtained—for from three to five hundred pounds for
two to three hundred feet sinking was no uncommon expense in a single
well—was brackish, much salt, still progress was made. The stock was
enabled in the midst of summer heat or protracted autumn drought to
feed upon these previously locked-up pastures, upon the saline herbs
and plants, the nutritious, aromatic shrubs peculiar to this land,
where no white man had ever before seen stock except in winter.
By degrees it began to be asserted that ‘back country,’ _i.e._ the
lands remote from all visible means of subsistence for flocks and
herds, as far as water was concerned, paid the speculative pastoral
occupier better than the ‘frontage,’ or land in the neighbourhood of
permanent creeks, and of the few well-known rivers. _There_ roamed
that unconscionable beast of prey, the all-devouring free selector. He
could select the choicest bends, the richest flats, the deepest river
reaches, even where the squatter had fenced or enclosed. For were
not the waters free to all? He naturally appropriated the best and
most tempting conjunctions of ‘land and water.’ These were precisely
those which were most profitable, most necessary, occasionally most
indispensable to the proprietor of the run.
But it was not so with the back blocks. There capital yet retained much
of its ancient supremacy. The wielder of that implement or weapon was
enabled to cause his long-silent wilderness to blossom as the rose, by
means of dams and wells. He was in a position also to drive off, keep
out, and withstand the invading pseudo-grazier, with his sham purchases
and his wrongful grass rights.
Thus, by a wise provision of the Land Act, all improvements of a
value exceeding forty pounds sterling, when placed by the pastoral
tenant upon the Crown lands which he was facetiously supposed to rent,
protect the lands upon which they stand, or which, in the case of a
well, they underlie; that is to say, a five-hundred-guinea well or a
hundred-pound dam cannot be free-selected or taken cool possession of
as a conditional purchase by the land marauder of the period. Some
people might see a slight flavour of fairness in this provision which
has not always in other colonies, Victoria notably, been granted by the
democratic wolf to the conservative lamb. However the Government of
New South Wales may have erred in other respects, it has in the main
so far ruled the outnumbered pastoralists with a courtesy, fairness,
and freedom from small greed such as might be expected from one body of
gentlemen in responsible dealing with a class of similar social rank.
One successful well or dam, therefore, converted a block of country
hitherto useless for nine months out of the twelve into a run capable
of carrying ten thousand sheep all the year round. Of course, any
portion of the Crown estate the conditional purchaser might ‘take up,’
or, without notice, occupy. But where was he to procure his water from?
He had not often five hundred pounds, or if so, did not ‘believe’
in such solemn disbursement for ‘mere improvements.’ Therefore he
still haunted, cormorant-like, the rivers and creeks—the ‘permanent
water’ of the colonist. To the younger sons of ancient houses, scions
of Howards, Somersets, and of the untitled nobility of Britain, he
conceded the right to live like hermits in the Thebaid, upon their
artificially and expensively watered back blocks.
A special peculiarity of the ocean-like plains of inmost Australia is
the miraculous growth of vegetation after the profuse irrigation which
invariably succeeds a drought. In the warm dry earth, now converted
into a bed of red or black mud, saturated to its lowest inch, and rich
for procreation of every green thing, lies a hoard of seeds of wondrous
number and variety of species. Broad and green, in a few days, as the
vivid growth from the aged, still fruitful bosom of mysterious Nile,
along with the ordinary pasture appear the seed leaves of unknown,
half-forgotten grasses, reeds, plants, flowers, never noticed except
in an abnormally wet season. In cycles of ordinary moisture, the true
degree of saturation not having been reached, they lie death-like year
after year, until, aroused by Nature’s unerring signal, they arise and
burst forth into full vitality. In such a time an astonishing variety
of herbs, plants, and flowers is to be seen mingling with gigantic
grasses, such as Charley Banks described to Mr. Neuchamp when he
prophesied, after forty-eight hours of steady rain had fallen, that
on the Back Lake Plains this year he would be able to tie the grass
tops together before him, _as he sat on horseback_. Mr. Neuchamp had
never before discovered his lieutenant in a wilful exaggeration; but on
this occasion he felt mortified that he should still be supposed a fit
subject upon which to foist humorous fabrications.
‘I see you don’t believe me,’ said Charley, rather put out in turn at
not being credited. ‘Let’s call Jack. You ask him the height of the
tallest grass he ever saw in this part of the country in a real wet
season. There he goes. Here, Jack, Mr. Neuchamp wants to ask you a
question.’
‘I wish to know,’ said Ernest gravely, ‘to what height you have ever
known the grass grow up here in a firstrate season?’
‘Well, I don’t know about measurement,’ said Jack, ‘but I remember at
Wardree one year we had to muster up all the old screws on the run to
give the shepherds to ride.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because they couldn’t _see_ their sheep in the long grass; and out on
a plain where the grass was over their own heads, it was hard work not
to lose themselves. Of course it was an out-and-out year; something
like this is going to be, I expect. Why, I’ve tied the grass over my
horse’s shoulder in the spring, as _I’ve been riding along_, many a
time and often.’
Charley Banks smiled.
‘That will do, John,’ said Mr. Neuchamp.
‘I apologise fully,’ said Ernest, as soon as they were alone. ‘I
promise never to lack that confidence in your statements, my dear
fellow, which I must say I have hitherto found in every way deserved.
How are the cattle doing? You have been out all day, and must have been
soaked through and through.’
‘I didn’t put on anything that water could hurt,’ said Charley, ‘or
very much in the way of quantity either. Jack and I only wanted to be
sure of the line the cattle took, so as to get after them to-morrow. We
could track them as if they had been walking in batter pudding. If they
got off the run now we should have no horses to fetch them back with,
and if we left them away till they got strong, they’d be broken in to
some other man’s run, which would be so much time lost. Luckily they
all made for the Back Lake, where there’s some sandy ridges and good
bedding ground. Freeman’s cattle are mixed up with the “circle dots,”
which is all the better, as they know the run well, and can’t be got
off it. Lucky they’re branded.‘
‘And how about the old herd?’
‘We didn’t tire our horses going after them, but, by the main run of
the tracks, the nearest of them will stop at the Outer Lake timber; and
the head cattle will go slap back to the very outside boundary. We’ve
no neighbours at the back, so the farther back they go the fresher the
feed will be. _They’re_ right.’
‘I suppose they will begin to improve in a few months?’
‘Improve?’ echoed Mr. Banks; ‘if this weather is followed up, every
beast on Rainbar run, down to a three-months-old calf, will be mud fat
_in three months_, and you may begin to take away the first draft of
a thousand head of fat cattle that we can send to market—and a rising
market, too—before next winter.’
Mr. Neuchamp did not shout aloud, nor cast any part of his clothing
into the air, like Jack Windsor: his way of receiving sudden tidings of
weal or woe was not demonstrative. But he grasped Charley Banks’s hand,
and looked into the face of the pleased youngster with a gleam in his
eye and a look of triumph such as the latter had rarely witnessed there.
‘We have had to wait—“to suffer and be strong,”—Charley, my boy,‘ he
said, ‘but I think the battle is won now. You shall have your share of
the spoils.’
When Mr. Neuchamp sallied forth on the second day after the rain, he
could not but consider himself in a somewhat similar position to one
of the Noachian family taking an excursion after the flood. True, his
flood had been of a temporary and wholly beneficial nature, but not the
less had it entirely altered the expression upon the face of Nature.
Aqueous effects and results were prominently apparent everywhere. Mud
and hardened sandy spaces, already flushed with green, had succeeded to
the pale, dusty, monotoned landscape.
Thus, once more, short as had been the time of change, the eye was
relieved by the delicate but distinct shade of green which commenced
to drape the long-sleeping, spellbound frame of the mighty Mother.
Even in the driest seasons, except on river flats, there are minute
green spikelets of grass at or just below the surface. Let but one
shower of rain fall, softly cherishing, and on the morrow it is
marvellous to perceive what an approach to verdure has been made. Then
the family of clovers, long dead and buried, but having bequeathed
myriads of burr-protected, oleaginous seed vessels to the kind keeping
of the baked and powdered soil, reappear in countless hosts of minute
leaflets, which grow with incredible rapidity. It is not too much to
say that in little more than a week after the ‘drought broke up’ at
Rainbar there was grass several inches high over the entire run. The
salt bushes commenced to put forth tender and succulent leaves. All
nature drew one great sigh of relief, every living creature—from the
small fur-covered rodents and marsupials which pattered along their
minute but well-beaten paths when the sun was low to the water, from
the wild mare that galloped in snorting through the midnight, with
her lean, tireless offspring, to sink her head to the very eyes in
the river when she reached it, to the thirsty merino flock at the
well-trough, or the impoverished herd that struggled in hungered and
athirst to muddy creek or treacherous river bank—every living creature
did sensibly rejoice and give thanks, audibly or otherwise, for this
merciful termination to the long agony of the Great Drought.
That morning of the 18th May was a fateful morn to many a struggling
beginner like Ernest Neuchamp; to many a grizzled veteran of pioneer
campaigns and long wars of exploration, of peril of body and anguish of
mind; to many a burdened sire with boys at school to pay for, and the
girls’ governess to consider, whom the next year’s losses, if _the rain
held off_, would compel the family to dispense with.
On the night which preceded that day of deliverance Ernest Neuchamp
went to bed utterly ruined and hopelessly insolvent; he arose a rich
man, able within six months to pay off double the amount of every debt
he owed in the world, and possessed beside of a run and stock the
market value of which exceeded at least four-fold what he had paid for
it.
This was a change, sudden as an earthquake, swift as a revolution,
almost awe-striking in its shower of sudden benefits, dazzling in its
abrupt change from the dim light of poverty, self-denial, and anxiety,
to an unquestioned position of wealth, reputation, and undreamed-of
success.
How differently passed the days now! What variety, what hope, what
renewed pleasure in the superintendence of details ever leading upward
to profit and satisfaction in a hundred different directions!
Day by day the grass grew and bourgeoned and clothed the flats with a
meadow-like growth akin to that of his native country. None of this
amazing crop, however, was used except by the flocks of travelling
sheep returning strong and well-doing to their long-abandoned homes.
These passing hosts made so little impression upon the wonderfully
rapid growth that, as Mr. Banks averred, ‘you could not see where they
had been.’ The station cattle, and even the small flock of sheep were
‘well out back,’ and, presumably, were content to leave the ‘frontage’
as a reserve for summer needs.
Concurrently with this plenty and profusion, in which every head of the
Rainbar stock revelled, from Mr. Levison’s ‘BI,’ whose skin now shone
with recovered condition, and who snorted and kicked up his heels as he
galloped into the yard with the working horses, to the most dejected
weaner of the Freeman ‘crawlers,’ came strangely exciting news of the
wondrous discovery of gold in Victoria, and the rapid rise in the price
of meat.
Fat stock were higher and higher in each succeeding market, until
the previously unknown and, as the democratic newspapers said,
unjustifiable and improper price of ten pounds per head for fat cattle
was reached, with a corresponding advance for sheep. As this astounding
but by no means dismaying intelligence was conveyed to Mr. Neuchamp in
the hastily-torn-open newspaper which he was glancing at outside, just
as Jack Windsor had directed his attention to the gambols of ‘BI,’ who,
with arched neck and perfect outline, fully justified Mr. Levison’s
encomium upon his shape, that gentleman’s prophecy as to the enhanced
value of Rainbar reaching twenty thousand pounds when ‘BI’ kicked up
his heels seemed likely to be fulfilled to the letter.
Mr. Windsor, in his enthusiasm concerning the condition of the horse
left in his charge, and that of the stud generally, had for the moment
omitted to open an unpretending missive delivered by the same post
which lay in his hand. As Ernest turned to walk towards the house he
was stopped by the sound of a deep and bitter curse, most infrequent
now upon the lips of his much altered follower.