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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
averring that he remembered every spot on a certain calf’s hide
since its early infancy, others corroborating his assertion that it
‘belonged to,’ or was the progeny of, his old black ‘triangle-bar’ cow;
Mr. Windsor, as counsel for the Crown, declaring, on the other hand,
that no calf should leave the Mildool run unless provided with a
manifest mother, then and there substantiating her claim to
maternity by such personal attentions or privileges as could not be
fabricated or misunderstood. To him the adverse stockman would
remark that, if he was going to talk like that, he might stick to every
blessed clear-skin on the river. Mr. Windsor retorting that he doesn’t
say for that, but if people think they can collar calves for the asking,
they’ve come to the wrong shop when they ride to Mildool muster.
And so on, and so on.
Nathless, in course of time all things are arranged, in some shape,
with or without a proportionate allowance of growling, as the men
say. It being apparent that Mr. Windsor, now full-fledged overseer of
Mildool, knows a thing or two, and will stand up stoutly for his
master’s rights, fewer encroachments are, let us suppose,
attempted.
The cattle are counted and finally gathered, and are discovered to
exceed, by three hundred odd, the station number. The former
manager feels complimented that he has been able to muster
beyond his books. The purchaser is satisfied, as the additional cattle
are merely charged to him at store cattle price, and, being ‘to the
manor born,’ will swiftly ‘grow into money.’ The strange stockmen
depart, carrying with them a large mixed drove of strayed cattle. The
ex-overseer pays his men and then leaves for down the country,
there to wait on the agents, and receive his congé or further
employment, as the case may be. Charley Banks and the black boys,
Jack Windsor, and Mr. Neuchamp are left in undisputed possession of
the new kingdom.
With such a season, with such prices ruling, the management is the
merest routine work, a few hundred calves to brand, arrangements
to make for an early muster to show the herd to the great cattle-
dealer, who wants to buy a thousand head fat to be taken away in
three months, and paid for by his acceptance at that date. Mr.
Mooney happens to come before Ernest leaves for Sydney, and the
negotiation being successful, the new proprietor of Mildool sets out
for the metropolis with a negotiable bill in his pocket for seven
thousand pounds—more than a third of the purchase-money of the
run.
While Mr. Neuchamp was possessing his soul in tranquillity at
Rainbar, he was surprised at receiving a letter from his erstwhile
Turonia comrade, Mr. Bright. That cheerful financier wrote as
follows:

Turonia, 10th December 18—.

My dear Neuchamp—I hear you are to be married to the nicest girl
in Sydney. I thought it only reasonable, considering our two or
three larks here, to offer my congratulations; and, by the bye,
talking of things happening, that fellow Greffham, whom you
remember my helping to arrest, was hanged last Wednesday at
Medhurst.
The evidence, joined to his paying away the numbered notes,
known to be in the escort parcel, was awfully strong against
him. He made no confession, and was as cool and unconcerned
to the very last, as you and I ever saw him at the billiard-table.
What a wonderful uphill game he could play! It is just possible
he might have got off; but Merlin fished up additional evidence
which fixed him, in the eyes of the jury, I think—-the groom at
the inn, who swore he saw a small parcel covered with a gray
rug on his saddle, as he returned from the direction of Running
Creek, which he had not when he passed up. You ought to have
seen him and Merlin look at each other when Merlin asked the
Crown prosecutor to have Carl Anderson called. It was a ‘duel
with eyes.’ But, even without that, I don’t see how he could
have accounted for the notes.
I happened to be in Medhurst the day he was to be turned off. I
received a message that he wanted to see me, so I went to the
gaol. I knew the sheriff well. They showed me into his cell at
once.
When I got in, Greffham nearly had finished dressing, and had
only to put on his frock-coat to be better turned out, if possible,
than he was for the lawn party Branksome gave when the
Governor came up. He happened to be cleaning his teeth—you
remember how white and even they were—as I came through
the door.
‘Sit down, old man,’ he said, just as usual, shying his toothbrush
into the corner of the cell. ‘I daresay they’ll do; and I suppose I
shan’t want that any more. What should you say? ’Pon my soul,
there isn’t a chair to offer you; devilish close about furniture,
aren’t they now? But it’s very kind of you, Bright, to come and
see a fellow, when he’s—well—peculiarly situated, eh?’
Here he laughed quite naturally, I give you my word—not forced
at all. He certainly was the coolest hand I ever saw; and he died
as he lived.
‘What I wanted to see you for, Bright, was this’—here his voice
shook and he did appear to show a little feeling—‘you’ll take
these two letters for me, like a good fellow; one I want you to
send to —— after I am gone; the other you can open then.
Make what use you like of the contents. I shan’t care then; say
nothing now to gratify curiosity. As to what I may have done, or
not done, I hold myself the best judge of my reasons. You know
what my life has been. Open and straightforward, if somewhat
reckless. My cards have always been on the table. I have risked
all that man holds dear on a throw before. This time I have lost.
I pay the stakes; there is no more to be said. Lionel Greffham is
not the man to say “I repent.” He is what he is, and will die as
he has lived. My time on earth has not been spun out much,
but, measured by enjoyment, with a front seat mostly at life’s
opera, it adds up fairly. Give me a Havannah from your case.
You will see me pretty “fit” for the stage when they ring in the
leading performer. By the way, I told them to give you my
revolver; and while I think of it, just remember this, if you want
to make very close shooting at any time, only put in three parts
of the powder in the cartridge.‘
I really believe these were his last words, except to the ——
hang-man.
He finished his cigar, and lounged up to the gallows, where he
died in the face of a tremendous crowd, calmly and scornfully,
just as he was accustomed to bear himself to them in life. Jack
Ketch was a new hand, and nervous. I heard Greffham say, just
as if he was rowing a fellow for awkwardness in saddling his
horse, ‘You clumsy idiot, what are you trembling for? Hang me,
if I can see what there is to make a fuss about! I’ll bet you a
pound I tuck you up in ten minutes without any baggling. Now,
you’re right. Am I standing quite square?’
‘You’re all right, sir,’ the man said respectfully. The drop fell, and
poor Greffham (I can’t help saying it, although he was a
precious scoundrel) died without the least contrition. Showed
perfectly good taste to the last. Deuced rum people one meets
on a goldfield, don’t you, now?
I suppose you’re not likely to come this way again. We’re not
quite so jolly as we were. The Colonel has gone back to India.
Old De Bracy has got a good Government appointment, for
which he looks more suited than market-gardening, though he
was hard to beat at that, or anything he tackled. I hear you’ve
made pots of money. Parklands was here the other day, and told
me. I have a deuced good mind to turn squatter myself. My
regards to old Frankston, and ask him if he remembers the last
story I told him. Ha, ha!—Yours sincerely,
John Wilder Bright.
Now the great muster and delivery at Mildool was over and everyday
life at Rainbar had again to be faced, Ernest began to feel like one
Alexander, sometimes called Great, who had conquered his way into
the kingdom of Ennui. He was the possessor of a fortune and of a
bride, both above his utmost hopes, his loftiest aspirations; but he
began to fear that he had lost that which leaves life very destitute of
savour—he feared with a new and terrible dread that he had lost his
Occupation!
For life seemed so much more easy, so much less necessary to take
thought about, now that he had two stations than when he had but
one—one likely to be wrested from him. So is it that Difficulty is oft
our friend in disguise, Success but the veiled foe which smiles at our
faltering footsteps and watches to destroy. He saw now, that with
Jack Windsor at Mildool, and Charley Banks, alert, energetic, fully
experienced, at Rainbar, his life henceforth would be that of a visitor,
a supernumerary—unless indeed he employed his mind in the
construction and organisation of ‘improvements’! Ha, ha! ’Vade retro,
Sathanas!‘ The Genie was safe immured in his brazen sealed-up
vessel. There should he remain.
Still was there one ‘improvement’ in which he had never altogether
lost faith, long and dispiriting as had been the divorce between
formation and utility. This was the cutting the connecting channel
between the Back Lake and the ‘Outer Lake.’ Long had the ‘master’s
ditch’ been as useless as a fish-pond in the bosom of the Sahara, as
a rose-garden in a glacier, as an oyster-bed in a steppe. Cattle had
walked over it; grass had grown in it; stockmen and thoughtless
souls had jeered at it, and at the English stranger who had thrown
away upon its construction the money of which he possessed a
quantity so greatly in excess of his apparent intelligence. As long as
he remained the proprietor of the run, it would be hardly in keeping
with the manner of the bush to call it ‘Neuchamp’s Folly.’ But had
failure or absence chanced to occur in his case, the satirical
nomenclature would not have been deferred for a week. In the
solitary rides and musings to which, in default of daily work and
labour, Mr. Neuchamp was fain to betake himself, it chanced that he
had repeatedly examined that portion of this great sheet of water,
which rang with the whistling wings of wild fowl, and on breezy days
surged with long rippling waves against its bank.
While in Sydney a number of back blocks, at no greater distance
from this outer lake than it was from the former ‘frontage,’ had been
put under offer to him. What if he should accept the terms—the
price was low—and trust to the chance of the next great flood in the
full-fed chafing river sending the water leaping down his tiny canal,
and thus giving a value never before dreamed of to this splendidly
grand but unnatural region. In spite of his half-settled determination
to accept no other speculative risks, but, like a wise man, to rest
contented with proved success, the next post conveyed instructions
to Messrs. Paul Frankston and Co. to close for all the blocks, each
five miles square, from A to M, comprising all the unoccupied
country at the back of Rainbar and Mildool, at the price named.
On the following morning the weather was misty and unusually
cloudy, with an apparent tendency to rain. No rain fell, however; but
the raw air, the unusual bleakness of the atmosphere, seemed
abnormal to Ernest Neuchamp.
‘I should not wonder,’ said Mr. Banks, in explanation, ‘that it was
raining cats and dogs somewhere else, snowing, or something of
that sort. Perhaps at the head of the river. If that’s the case, we shall
have a flood and no mistake. Such a one as none of us has seen yet.
However, we’ve neither hoof nor horn nor fleece on the frontage. It
can’t hurt us, that’s one comfort.’
Mr. Banks’s prognostications were correct. Within three days—
 ... like a horse unbroken,
When first he feels the rein,
The furious river struggled hard,
And tossed his tawny mane,
And burst the curb and bounded,
Rejoicing to be free,
And whirling down in fierce career
Battlement and plank and pier,
Rushed headlong to the sea.

Battlement and plank and pier were in this case represented by hut
slabs and rafters, haystacks and pumpkins, from the arable lands
and meadows through which the great river held its upper course;
while drowned stock and the posts and rails of many a mile of
submerged fencing represented the latter floating trifles. There was
much that was grand in the steadily deepening, broadening tide
which slowly and remorselessly crawled over the wide green flats,
which undermined the great waterworn precipices of the red-clayed
bluffs, bringing down enormous fragments and masses, many tons
in weight, which fell, foamed, and disappeared in the turbid,
hurrying wave. Who could have recognised in this fierce, swollen,
tyrant river, yellow as the Tiber, broad as the Danube, resistless as
Ocean, the shallow, pellucid streamlet, rippling over its sandy
shallows, of the dead, bygone famine year?
On the larger flats it was miles wide. The white, straight tree-trunks
stood like colonnades with arches framed in foliage, disappearing in
endless perspective above a limitless plain of gliding waters.
By night, as Mr. Neuchamp awoke in his cottage, which was built
upon an elevation said by tradition to be above the reach of floods,
the ‘remorseless dash of billows’ sounded distinctly, unpleasantly
close in the darkness.
On the following day, the flood still continuing to rise, Piambook was
despatched to the Back Lake to report, and upon his return stated
that ‘water yan along that one picaninny blind creek like it Murray,
make haste longer Outer Lake.’ Full of hope and expectant of
triumph, Mr. Neuchamp started out for ‘Lake country,’ accompanied
by Mr. Banks.
When they arrived at the first lake the unusual fulness and volume
of the water in that reservoir showed that the main stream must
have been forced outwards along the course of the ancient, natural
channel, by which in years of exceptional high floods—and in those
years only—the lake had been filled.
Now, thought Mr. Neuchamp, the hour, long delayed, long doubted,
has surely come. Who could have dreamed but a few short months
since, when our very souls were adust and athirst with perennial
famine, that our eyes should behold the sight which I see now? How
should it teach us to hoard the garnered gold of truth, the ‘eternal
verity’ in our heart of hearts! ‘My lord delayeth his coming.’ Was that
held to be a reason, an excuse for the unfaithful, self-indulgent?
Truly this would seem to some as great a miracle as the leaping
water which followed the stroke of the prophet’s staff in that other
desert of which we read of old.
And now his eyes did actually behold the first trickling, wondrous
motion of the brimming reservoir to advance, gravitation-led, along
the narrow path to its far-distant sister lake. Slowly the full waters
rose to the very lip of the vast natural cup or vase, and then, first
saturating the entrance, poured down the narrow outlet which the
forecasting mind of man had prepared for it. It trickled, it flowed, it
ran, it coursed, foaming and rushing, along the cutting, of which the
fall at first exceeded that of the general passage. It was done! It
was over! A proud success!
Charley Banks threw up his hat. Together they rode recklessly
onward to the Outer Lake, and there Ernest Neuchamp enjoyed
silently the deep satisfaction—then known but to the projector and
inventor—of witnessing the waters of the Inner Lake, for the first
time since the sea had ceased to murmur over these boundless
levels, flow fast and flashing forward, driven by the pressure of the
immense body behind, into the vast, deep, grass-clothed basin of
the Outer Lake.
This was a triumph truly. For this alone it was worth while to have
journeyed across the long long ocean tide, to have toiled and
suffered, waited and watched, to have eaten his heart with fear and
sickening dread of the gaunt destroyer ‘Ruin,’ ever stalking nearer
and nearer. This was true life—real adventure—the hazard and the
triumph which alone constitute true manhood.
In the ecstasy of the moment Ernest Neuchamp forgot the fortune
he had gained, the bride whom he had won, the home of his youth,
the grand and glorious future, the not uneventful past. All things
seemed as dreams and visions by the side of this grand and living
Reality.
As he sat on his horse and gazed, still flowed the glorious wave into
the century-dry basin by the channel which he, Ernest Neuchamp,
had, in defiance of Nature, opinion, and society, conceived, formed,
and successfully completed. Seasons might come and go; another
dry time might come; the water might periodically evaporate and
disappear,—but nothing could evade the great fact henceforth in the
history of the land, that he had established the connection between
the river and this distant, long-dry, unthought-of reservoir. There
would be no more hint or menace of Neuchamp’s Folly—more likely,
Neuchamp’s River.
Lake Neuchamp! Pshaw! it was an inland sea. Why not name it now?
Why not render immortal, not his own perhaps ancient patronymic,
but the lovely and beloved name of his soul’s divinity? Now was the
hour, the minute, when the virgin waters were falling for the first
time in creation into the flower-besprinkled lap of the green earth
before their eyes!
‘Charley, my boy,’ he said to Mr. Banks, ‘take off your hat. Piambook,
do liket me,’ he said, removing his own. ‘I name this water, now
about to be filled for the first time within the memory of man, “Lake
Antonia.” So mote it be. Hip, hip, hurrah!‘ and the echoes of the
waste rang to the unfamiliar sounds of the great British shout of
welcome, of salutation, of battle-joy, of death-defiance, which
England’s friends and England’s foes have had ere now just cause to
know.
‘Hurrah!’ joined in Charley Banks with genuine feeling. ‘By George! I
never thought to see this sight—last year particularly; but, of course,
we might have known it wasn’t going to be dry always, as Levison
said. We don’t see far beyond our noses, most of us. But it was hard
to conjure up any notion of a regular out-and-out waterfall like this
with a twelvemonth’s dust, and last year’s burnt feed keeping as
black as the day it took fire. I believe there will be thirty feet of
water in this when it’s full up, and it soon will be at this rate.’
‘Budgeree tumble down water that one,’ said Piambook. ‘Old man
blackfellow yabber, debil-debil, make a light here when he yan long
that one scrub.’
Another occasion of congratulation awaited Mr. Neuchamp, the
pleasure and pride accompanying which were perhaps only second
in degree to the feelings inspired by the engineering triumph of Lake
Antonia. His stud of Austral-Arabian horses had shared in the general
advance and development of the property; they were now a perfect
marvel of successful rearing.
He had them brought in daily from the sandhills near the plain
where they ordinarily grazed, and passed hours in reviewing the
colts and fillies, the yearlings, the mares and the foals. Every grade
and stage, from the equine baby which gambolled and frisked by the
side of its dam, to the well-furnished three-year-old filly—‘Velut in
latis equa trima campis ludit exsultim, metuitque tangi,’—all were
satin-coated, sleek and round, fuller-fleshed, stronger, swifter; more
riotously healthy could they not have been had they been fed with
golden oats in an emperor’s stable. Daintily now they picked the
half-ripened tops from the fields of wild oats or barley which spread
for leagues around. They drank of the pure clear waters of every
pool and brooklet. They lay at night in the thickly-carpeted sandy
knolls, and snuffed up the free desert breeze, fresh wafted from
inmost sands or farthest seas. Partaking on one side of their
parentage of the stately height and generous scope of their southern
dams, culled from the noble race of island steeds which bear up the
large frames of the modern Anglo-Saxon, they inherited a strong,
perhaps overpowering infusion of the priceless blood of the courser
of the desert. Their delicate heads, their wide nostrils, their
adamantine legs, their perfect symmetry, all told of the ancient
lineage of Omar the Keheilan, whose dam was Najima Sabeh or the
Morning Star, of the strain Seglawee Dzedran, which, as every
camel-driver of the Anezeh knows, dates back to El Kamsch, that
glorious equine constellation, the five mares of Mahomet!
Here, again, was another instance of what Ernest could not but
acknowledge gratefully as the generosity of Fate. Had but the
season continued obdurate, his utter irrevocable ruin could not have
been stayed. As a consequence, this stud, so precious, so profitable,
so distinguished as it was apparently destined to be (for Mr. Banks
told him that numbers of offers had already been received for all
available surplus stock, while the agent of a large dealer had
implored him to put a price upon the whole stud), would doubtless
have passed under the hammer as most unconsidered trifles, to be
sneered at, scattered, for ever wasted and lost, as had been many a
good fellow’s pet stud ere now.
At length the day arrived when, having witnessed the satisfactory
conclusion of every conceivable business duty and task which could
be transacted at Rainbar or Mildool, Mr. Neuchamp took his place in
the mail for Sydney, which city he had calculated to reach within a
week of the dread ceremonial which was to seal his destiny. The
coach did not break down or capsize, fracturing Mr. Neuchamp’s leg
in two places. The train fulfilled its appointed task, and the stern
steam-giant did not select that opportunity for running off the rails
or equalising angles. Something of the sort might have been
reasonably expected to happen to a hero so near the rapturous
denouement of the third volume, in which, indeed, every hero of
average respectability is killed, mysteriously imprisoned, or married.
Mr. Neuchamp had undergone trials and troubles, risks and
anxieties, losses and crosses; but the season of tribulation was for
ever past for him. He had henceforth but to submit to the
compulsory laurel crown, to the caresses of Fortune’s favourite
delegates, to listen to the plaudits of the crowd, to withstand the
whispers and glances of beauty. He was now wise, beautiful, strong,
and brave, a conqueror, an Adonis—in a word, he was rich!
He stood successful, and the world’s praises, grudgingly bestowed
upon struggling fortitude, were showered upon the obviously
victorious speculator. All kinds of rumours went forth about him. His
possessions were multiplied, so that Rainbar and Mildool stood
sponsors for a tract of country about as large as from Kashgar to
Khiva.
The canal was magnified into the dimensions of its namesake of
Suez, and a trade was prophesied which would overshadow
Melbourne and revolutionise Adelaide. He had contracted for the
remount service for the whole Madras Presidency, such a matter
being quite within the scope of his immense and high-bred studs.
His herds of cattle were to supply Ballarat and Sandhurst with fat
stock, and Melbourne buyers were on their way to secure everything
he could deliver for the next two years! Ernest Neuchamp of Rainbar
was the man of the day; the popular idol. Squatter though he might
be, some of Jack Windsor’s grateful utterances had been circulated,
and a democratic but strongly appreciative and generous populace
adored him. Portraits of Mr. Neuchamp and his faithful retainer, Jack
Windsor, contending victoriously with a swarthy piratical crowd, led
on by the Count with a cutlass and a belt full of revolvers, appeared
in the windows of the print-shops. Heroism and unselfish generosity,
like murder, ‘will out.’
Whether accidentally or otherwise, the Morahmee conflict had
transpired. I make no reflections upon the well-known inviolable
secrecy which shrouds all postnuptial communications. I content
myself with stating a fact. Mr. Windsor was now a married man.
Ernest was at first annoyed, then surprised, lastly, unaffectedly
amused, when a highly popular dramatic version of the incident
appeared at the Victoria Theatre, wherein he was represented as
defying the Count, and assuring him that ‘berlood should flow from
Morahmee Jetty to the South Head Lighthouse ere he relinquished
the two maidens to his lawless grasp,’ while Jack Windsor’s
representative, with a cabbage-tree hat and a hanging velvet band
broad enough to make a sash for Carry, placed himself in an
exaggerated, pugilistic attitude, and implored the foreign seamen to
‘come on and confront on his own ground, by the shore of that
harbour which was his country’s pride, a true-born Sydney native!’
This brought down the house, and occasioned Mr. Neuchamp such
anguish of mind that he began to think Jermyn Croker not such a
bad fellow after all, and to feel unkindly towards the great land and
the warm-hearted people of his adoption.
Incapable of being stimulated by flattery into a false estimate of
himself, these exaggerated symptoms of appreciation but pained him
acutely; they disturbed his philosophical mind, ever craving for the
performance of justice and intolerant of all lower standards of right.
As for Antonia Frankston, like most women, she was gratified by
these tokens of the distinction which had been so profusely accorded
to her hero. He was a hero who, in her eyes, though worthy of
triumphs and processions, evaded his claims to such distinctions. He
was too prone, she thought, to be over Scriptural in his social
habitudes, and unless roused and incited, to take the lower rather
than the higher seat at the board. Now that the people, wavering
and impulsive, but still a mighty and tangible power, had endorsed
and adopted him, Antonia’s expansive mind recognised the brevet
rank bestowed upon him. After all, had he not done much and dared
greatly? Was it not well for the world to know it? If he was to be
decorated, few deserved it more. So Antonia accepted serenely and
in good faith the plaudits and universal flattery which now
commenced to be showered upon the hero of her choice, the idol of
her heart, the image of all written manhood.
The days which Mr. Neuchamp spent in Sydney after his return from
Mildool and Rainbar were certainly more tedious than any which he
had ever known in the pleasant city; but at length they passed away
and were no more—strange thought! those atoms from the mighty
mass of Time—drops from his flowing river—draughts, alas! quaffed
or spilled from life’s golden chalice. They were past, faded, dead,
irrevocably gone, as the days of the years before Pharaoh, before
the shepherd kings, before the dawn of human life, Eden, or the first
gleam of light which flashed upon a darkened, formless world!
Sad, pathetic even, is the death of a day! Its circling hours have
known peace, joy, loving regard, social glee, charity, justice, mercy,
repose. The allotted task has been done. The parent’s smile, the
wife’s love, the babe’s prattle, have all glorified earth during its short
season. And now the day is done! its tiny term is over, lost in the
shoreless sea of past immensities! The brightly inconstant orb shines
tenderly on the new-born stranger, full of joyous hope or dread
expectancy. Who can tell what this, the new and garish day, may
bring forth? Let us weep for the loved, fast-fading Child of Time, in
whose golden tresses, at least, twined no cypress wreath.
Then, heralded by calm and cloudless hours, did the wondrous unit,
the Day of Days, dawn for Ernest Neuchamp. Rarely—even in that
matchless clime, where the too ardent sun alone may be blamed by
the husbandman, rarely by the citizen or the tourist—did a more
perfect, unrivalled, wondrous day steal rosy through the ocean
mists, the folded vapours, to change into fretted gold and Tyrian
dyes the tender tints of flushed dawn. All nature visibly, audibly
rejoiced. The tiny wavelets murmured on the milk-white sands of the
Morahmee beach, that their darling—she who loved them and talked
with them in many a hushed eve, in many a solemn starry midnight
—was this day to be wed. The strange foreign pines and flower trees
of the Morahmee plantation, brought from many a distant land to
please the lady of the mansion, echoed the sound as they waved to
and fro with oriental languor and tropical mystery. The flowerets she
daily tended turned imperceptibly their delicately various sheen of
petals to each other and sighed the tender secret. With how many
secrets are not the flowers entrusted? Have they not been sworn to
silence since those days of the great dead empires, when the vows
and pleadings, songs and laughter, beneath the rose-chaplets were
sacred evermore?
Her gems, of which Antonia had great store—for there was more
difficulty in preventing Paul from overlading her caskets than of
replenishing them—even they knew it. They flashed and glittered,
and reddened, and sent out green and purple light, for they are
envious, hard, and remorseless of nature, as they noted the arrival
of a bediamonded necklace, and a brooch outshining in splendour
any of their rich and rare and very exclusive ‘set.’
The pensioners, her dependants, of the house, among the humble,
and the very poor, knew it and raised for her welfare the brief
unstudied prayer which comes from a thankful heart. The poor, in
ordinary acceptation, are, and have always been, in Australia,
difficult to discover and to distinguish. But to the earnest quest of
the unaffectedly charitable, anxious to do good to soul or body, to
succour the tempted, to help the needy, to save him that is ready to
perish, worthy occasions of ministration have never been absent
from the outskirts of every large city.
The forlorn spinster, friendless and forsaken, the overworked
matron,—the shabby genteel sufferers too secure to starve, too poor
to enjoy, too proud to complain, and, occasionally, what seemed to
be an example of unmerciful disaster,—among these were the rich
maiden’s unobtrusive but unremittingly performed good works, of
which none heard, none knew, but the recipients, and perhaps the
discreetest of co-workers.
And thus, with the day just dawned, had the maiden life of Antonia
Frankston come to an end. From this day forth her being was to
merge in that of one who, falling with the suddenness of a
shipwrecked mariner into their society, had been, as would have
been such a waif, treated with every friendly office, with the ample
up-springing kindness of a princely heart, by her fond father. That
father, no mean judge of his fellow-man, had seen in his early career
but the noble errors of a lofty nature and an elevated ideal. Such
disproportions between judgment and experience but prove the
natural dignity of the mind as fully as the precocious wisdom of the
gutter-bred urchin waif, his base descent and companionship.
Paul Frankston had long foreseen that, when the lessons of life
should have cleared the encrustation from the character of his
protégé, it would shine forth bright and burnished as Toledo steel—
all-sufficient for defence, nay, equal to spirited attack, should such
need arise. He saw that the future possessor and guardian of his
soul’s treasure was a ‘man’ as well as a ‘gentleman.’ On both of
these essentials he laid great weight. For the rest, his principles
were high and unfaltering, his habits unimpeachable. Whatever
trifling defects there might be in his character were merely such as
were incident to mortality. They must be left to the influence of time,
experience, and of Antonia.
‘If she doesn’t turn him out a perfect article,’ said Paul,
unconsciously quitting the mental for the actual soliloquy, ‘why,
nothing and no one can. If I had been any one else, and she had
commenced early enough at me, I really believe that she’d have
changed old Paul Frankston into a bishop, or, at any rate, a rural
dean at least; even Charley Carryall——’
But whether Captain Carryall’s utterances and anecdotes were
scarcely of a nature calculated to harmonise with bishops and deans,
or whether Mr. Frankston’s many engagements at this important
crisis suddenly engaged his attention, can never be known with that
precision which this chronicler is always anxious to supply. One thing
only is certain, that he looked at his watch, and hastily arising from
his arm-chair, departed into the city.
For the information of a section of readers for whom we feel much
respect and gratitude, it may be mentioned that the wedding took
place at St. James’s, a venerable but architecturally imperfect pile in
the vicinity of Hyde Park. There be churches near Morahmee more
replete with ‘miserable sinners’ in robes of Worth and garments of
Poole, but Mr. Frankston would none of them. In the old church had
he stood beside his mother, a schoolboy, wondering and wearied,
but acquiescent, after the manner of British children; in the old
church had he plighted his troth to Antonia’s sainted mother; in the
old church should his darling utter her vows, and in no other. Are
there any words which can fitly interpret the deep joy and endless
thankfulness which fill the heart and humble the mind of him who,
all unworthy, knows that the chalice of life’s deepest joy is even then
past all risk and danger, steadily uplifted to his reverent lips?
Doubts there have been, delays that fretted, fears that shook the
soul, clouds that dimmed, darkness that hid the sky of love. All these
have sped. Here is naught but the glad and gracious Present, that
blue and golden day which, pardoning and giving amnesty to the
Past, beseeches, well-nigh assures, the stern veiled form of the
Future.
Some of these reflections would doubtless have mingled with the
contemplations of Ernest Neuchamp at Aurora’s summons on that
glad morn but for an unimportant fact—that he was at that well-
known poetical period most soundly asleep.
Restlessly wakeful during the earlier night-watches, he slept heavily
at length, and only awoke, terrible to relate, with barely time for a
careful toilet. Hastily disposing of a cup of coffee and a roll, he
betook himself, in company with Mr. Parklands, who, I grieve to
relate, had been playing loo all night, and was equally late and
guilty, to the ancient church, where they were, by the good fortune
of Parklands‘watch being rather fast—like all his movements—
exactly, accurately the canonical five minutes before the time. Both
of the important personages, being secretly troubled, looked slightly,
becomingly pale. But the pallor of Parklands, entirely due to an
unprosperous week, involving heavier disbursements and later
sittings than ordinary, told much in his favour with the bridesmaids,
so much so, that he always averred, in his customary irreverent
speech, that ‘his flint was fixed’ on the occasion.
Probably owing to the calmly superior aspect of Mr. Hartley Selmore,
or the tonic supplied by Jermyn Croker’s patent disapprobation and
contempt of the whole proceedings, the protagonist and his
acolouthos went through the ordeal with that exact proportion of
courage, reverence, deftness, and satisfaction, the full rendering of
which is often hard upon him who makes necessarily ‘a first
appearance.’ As for Antonia’s loveliness on that day, when, radiant,
white-robed, and serene, she placed her hand in that of her lover,
and greeted him with the trustful smile in which the virgin-soul
shines out o’er the maiden-bride’s countenance, Ernest Neuchamp
may be pardoned for thinking that the angel of his dreams had been
permitted to visit the earth, to rehearse for his especial joy a
premature beatific vision.
Mr. Parklands effected a sensation by dropping the bridal-ring, but as
he displayed much quickness of eye and manual dexterity in
regaining it, the incident had rather a beneficial effect than
otherwise. Everything was happily concluded, even to the kissing of
the bridesmaids, Mr. Parklands, with his usual energy and daring,
having insisted on carrying out personally that pleasing portion of
the programme, supposed to appertain of right to the holder of the
ancient and honourable office of groomsman. This compelled the
chasing of two unwilling damsels half-way down the aisle, after
which the slightly scandalised spectators quitted the church, while
the wedding-guests betook themselves to Morahmee.
There, as they arrived, Mr. Frankston, sweeping the bay
mechanically with long-practised eye, exclaimed, ‘What boat is that
heading for our jetty at such a pace?—a whaleboat, too, with a
Kanaka crew. There’s a tall man with the steer oar in his fist; by
Jove! it’s Charley Carryall for a thousand.’
And that cheerful mariner and successful narrator it proved to be
when the weather-beaten boat came foaming up to the little pier,
drawn half out of the water by her wild-looking, long-haired crew,
encouraged by their captain, who was backing up the stroke as if an
eighty-barrel whale depended upon their speed.
‘Frantically glad to see you, Charley, my boy,’ shouted Paul; ‘never
hoped for such luck; the only man necessary to make the affair
perfect—absolutely perfect. Isn’t he, Antonia? But how did you guess
what we were about, and get here in time? I see the old Banksia is
only creeping up the harbour now.’
‘That guided me,’ said the Captain, pointing to the profusely
decorated Morahmee flagstaff—an invariable adjunct to a marine
villa. ‘I was sure all that bunting wasn’t up for anything short of
Antonia’s wedding. So I dressed and came away. The operculums I
was bringing our little girl here will just come in appropriately.
They’re the first any of you have seen, I daresay.’
The faintly subdued tone which is usual and natural in the pre-
banquet stage could not be reasonably protracted after the first
fusilade of Paul’s wonderful Pommery and Veuve Clicquot,
Steinberger and Roederer.
The guests were many and joyous, the day brilliant, the occasion
fortunate and mirth-inspiring, the entertainment unparalleled, and
henceforth proverbial in a city of sumptuous and lavish hospitality.
Small wonder, then, that the merriment was as free and
unconstrained as the welcome was cordial, and the banquet regal in
its costly profusion. How the jests circulated! how the silvery
laughter rang! how the bright eyes sparkled! how the fair cheeks
glowed! how the soft breeze whispered love! how the blue wave
murmured joy!
Did not Mr. Selmore propose the health of the bride and bridegroom
with such pathetic eloquence that the uninstructed were doubtful as
to whether he was Antonia’s uncle or Mr. Neuchamp’s father? He
referred to the mingled energy, foresight, acuteness, and originality
displayed by his valued, and, he might add, distinguished friend
Ernest Neuchamp. By utilising qualities of the highest order, joined
with information always yielded, he was proud to say, by himself and
other pioneers, he had achieved an unequalled, but, he must add, a
most deserved success, which placed him in the front rank of the
pastoral proprietors of New South Wales.
Any one would have imagined from Mr. Hartley Selmore’s benevolent
flow of eulogy that he had carefully nursed the infancy of Mr.
Neuchamp’s fortunes instead of ruthlessly endeavouring to strangle
the tender nursling. He himself, by means of luck and much
discount, had managed to hang on, ostensible proprietor of his
numerous stations, until the tide turned. Now he was a wealthy
man, and needed not to call the governor of the Bank of England his
cousin.
With prosperity his character and estimation had much improved.
There were those yet who said he was an unprincipled remorseless
old humbug, and would none of him. But in a general way he was
acceptable; popular, in private and in public. His natural talents were
great; his acquirements above the average; his manner irresistible; it
was no one’s particular interest or business to bring him to book,—
so he dined and played billiards at the clubs, buttonholed officials,
and greeted illustrious strangers, as if the greater portion of the
pastoral interior of Australia belonged to him, or as though he were
one of the Conscript Fathers, distinguished for an excess of Roman
virtues, of this rising nation.
Mr. Parklands indeed desired to throw some missile at him for his
‘cheek,’ as he confided to a young lady with sensational blue eyes,
but desisted from that practical criticism upon being implored by his
fair neighbour not to think of it, for her sake, and that of the ladies
generally. The speaker was pretty enough to speak with authority,
and so Hartley, like other fortunate conspirators and oppressors,
departed in triumph, with the plaudits and congratulations of the
unthinking public. For the rest, the affair went off much as such
society fireworks do. Augusta Neuchamp, in a Paris dress, looked so
extremely well that Jermyn Croker congratulated himself warmly,
and mingled such vitriolic scintillations with his pleasantries, that
every one was awed into admiration. The mail steamer was to sail in
a few days, and he flattered himself that he had contrived a surprise
for all his friends, which should contain an element of ignoring
contempt so complete in conception and execution, that his
departure from the colony should faithfully reflect the opinions and
convictions formed during his residence in it.
Having, after considerable hesitation, finally determined to enter
upon the frightfully uncertain adventure of matrimony, he had
offered himself and heart, such as it was, in marriage to Miss
Augusta, with many apologies for the apparent necessity of the
ceremony being performed in a colony. That young lady had
endeared herself to Mr. Croker by her unsparing criticisms, by her
ceaseless discontent with all things Australian, by her unmistakable
air of ton and distinction. He did not entirely overlook her possession
of a moderate but assured income.
With his customary disregard for the feelings of others, he had
insisted upon being married, without the usual time-honoured
ceremonies and concomitants, on the morning upon which the mail
steamer started for Europe. By going on board directly afterwards,
the Sydney people would be precluded from hearing of the event
until after their departure; while their fellow-passengers, most of
them strangers, would be ignorant as to whether the newly-married
couple were of a week’s date or of six months.
This arrangement, in which he had no great difficulty in persuading
Miss Augusta to acquiesce, would have excellently answered Mr.
Croker’s unselfish expectations but for one circumstance, which he
doubtless noted to the debit of colonial wrongs and shortcomings—
he had neglected to procure the co-operation of the elements.
No sooner had the ceremony, unwitnessed save by Paul Frankston
and Mr. and Mrs. Neuchamp, taken place, and the happy pair been
transferred to the Nubia, their luggage having been safely deposited
in that magnificent ocean steamer days before,—no sooner had the
great steamer neared the limit of the harbour, when a southerly
gale, an absolute hurricane, broke upon the coast with such almost
unprecedented fury that till it abated no sane commander of the
Peninsular and Oriental Company’s service would have dreamed of
quitting safe anchorage.
For three days the ‘tempest howled and wailed,’ and most
uncomfortably the Nubia lay at anchor, safe but most uneasy, and,
as she was rather crank, rolling and pitching nearly as wildly as she
could have done in the open sea.
It so chanced that one of Mr. Croker’s few weak points was an
extraordinarily extreme susceptibility to mal de mer. On all occasions
upon which he had cleared the Heads, for years past, he had
suffered terribly. But never since his first outward-bound experience
in early life had he suffered torments, prostration, akin to this. He
lay in his cabin death-like, despairing, well-nigh in collapse.
Miss Neuchamp, in spite of her much travelling, was always a martyr
during the first week of a voyage, if the weather chanced to be bad.
Now it certainly was bad, very bad; and in consequence Miss
Augusta lay, under the charge of a stewardess, in a stern cabin,
well-nigh sick unto death, heedless of life and its chequered
presentments, and as oblivious, not to say indifferent, to the fate of
Jermyn Croker as if she had yesterday sworn to love and obey the
chief officer of the Nubia.
This was temporary anguish, mordant and keen, doubtless. But
Time, the healer, would certainly in a few days have set it straight.
The fact of an unknown lady and gentleman being indisposed at the
commencement of the voyage afflicts nobody. But here was
apparently the finger of the fiend. A ruffianly pilot, coming off in his
hardy yawl, brought on board a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald
of the day following their attempted departure, in which it was duly
set forth how, at St. James’s Church, by Canon Druid, Jermyn,
second son of Crusty Croker, Esq., of Crankleye Hall, Cornwall, was
then and there married to Augusta, only daughter of the Rev. Cyril
Neuchamp, incumbent of Neuchamp-Barton, Buckinghamshire,
England. Now the joke was out. Even under such unpromising
circumstances it told. Here were two mortals, passionately devoted
of course, and in that state of matrimonial experience when all
things tend to the wildest overrating, so cast down, so utterly
prostrated by the foul Sea Demon, that they positively did not care a
rush for each other. The great Jermyn lay, faintly ejaculating
‘Steward, Ste-w-a-ar-d,’ at intervals, and making neither lament nor
inquiry about his similarly suffering bride. As for Augusta, she had
scarce more strength of body or mind than permitted her to moan
out, ‘I shall die, I shall die’; and apparently, for all she cared, in that
unreal, phantasmal, pseudo-existence, which only was not death,
though more dreadful, Jermyn Croker might have fallen overboard,
or have been changed into a Seedee stoker. Then for this to happen
to Jermyn Croker, of all people! The humour of the situation was
inexhaustible!
And though the fierce south wind departed and the Nubia drove
swiftly majestic across the long seas that part Cape Otway from the
stormy Leuwin, though in due time the spice-laden gales blew ‘soft
from Ceylon’s isle,’ and the savage peaks of Aden, the lofty summit
of the Djebel Moussa rose to view in the grand succession of
historical landscapes; yet to the last day of the voyage a stray
question in reference to the precise effects of very bad cases of sea-
sickness would be directed, as to persons of proved knowledge and
experience, to Mr. and Mrs. Jermyn Croker, by their fellow-
passengers.
It is due to Mr. Croker, as a person of importance, to touch lightly
upon his after-career. His wife discovered too late that in reaching
England he had only changed the theme upon which his universal
depreciations were composed. ‘Non animam sed cœlum mutant qui
trans mare currunt.’ He abused the climate and the people of
England with a savage freedom only paralleled by his Australian
practice. Becoming tired of receiving 3 or 4 per cent for his money,
he one day, in a fit of wrath, embarked one-half of his capital in a
somewhat uncertain South American loan. His cash was absorbed, to
reappear spasmodically in the shape of interest, of which there was
little, while of principal it soon became apparent that there would be
none.
Reduced to the practice of marked though not distressing economy,
Mr. Croker enjoyed the peculiar pleasure which is yielded to men of
his disposition, of witnessing the possession of luxuries by others
and a style of living which they are debarred from emulating. He was
gladdened, too, by the occasional vision of an Australian with more
money than he could spend, who rallied him upon his grave air, and
bluntly asked why he was such a confounded fool as to sell out just
as prices were really rising. Finally, to aggravate his sufferings, long
unendurable by his own account, Mr. Parklands had the effrontery to
come home, and, in the very neighbourhood where he, Croker, was
living for economy, to buy a large estate which happened to be for
sale.
The unfailing flow of the new proprietor’s high spirits, his liberal
ways, and frank manners, combined with exceptional straight going
in the hunting-field, rendered him immensely popular, as indeed he
had always contrived to be wherever fate and speculation led his
roving steps. But it may be questioned whether his brother-colonist
ever saw his old friend spinning by behind a blood team, or heard of
his being among the select few in a ‘quick thing,’ without fulminating
one of his choicest anathemas, comprehending at once the order to
which he and Parklands had belonged, the country they had quitted,
and the one in which they now sojourned.
Mr. Banks remained in the employment of Mr. Neuchamp at Rainbar
until, having saved and acquired by guarded investment a moderate
capital, he had a tempting offer of joining, as junior partner, in the
purchase of a large station in new country. Always a good-looking,
manly fellow, he managed to secure the affections of a niece of Mr.
Middleton, whom he met on one of his rare trips to Sydney, and,
before he left for the Tadmor Downs, Lower Barcoo, they were
married.
Mr. Joe Freeman had employed some of the compulsory leisure time
rendered necessary during his fulfilment of the residence clause for
Mr. Levison, in an exhaustive study of the Crown Lands Alienation
Act. From that important statute (20 Vic. No. 7, sec. 13) he
discovered that, provided a man had children enough, there is but
little limit to the quantity of the country’s soil that he can secure and
occupy at a rate of expenditure singularly small and favourable to
the speculative ‘landist’ of the period.
Thus Joe Freeman, after considerable ciphering, made out that he
could ‘take up’ for himself and his three younger children a total of
twelve hundred and eighty acres of first-class land! He had
determined that as long as there was an alluvial flat in the colony his
choice should not consist of bad land. Added to this would be a pre-
emptive grazing right of three times the extent. This would come to
three thousand eight hundred and forty acres, which, added to the
freehold of twelve hundred and eighty acres, gave a total of five
thousand one hundred and twenty acres. The entire use of this
territory he could secure by a payment of five shillings per acre for
the freehold portion only—say, three hundred and twenty pounds.
‘Of course his three children were compelled, by law, to reside on
their selections. As two of these were under five years old, some
difficulty in the carrying out of the apparently stringent section No.
18 might be anticipated.
This difficulty was utterly obliterated by building his cottage exactly
upon the intersecting lines of the four half-sections, thus:
By this clever contrivance Mary Ellen, the baby, as well as Bob, aged
three years, were ‘residing upon their selections’ when they were in
bed at night, inasmuch as that haven of rest (for the other members
of the family) was carefully placed across the south line which
divided the estates.
Nor was this all. Bill Freeman took up a similar quantity of land in
precisely the same way, locating it about a mile from his brother’s
selection, so that as it was clearly not worth any other selector’s
while to come between them, they would probably have the use of
another section or two of land for nothing. The squatter on whose
run this little sum was worked out was a struggling, burdened man,
unable to buy out or borrow. He was ruined. But the individual, in all
ages, has suffered for the State.
Mr. Neuchamp’s Australian career had now reached a point when
life, however heroic, is generally conceded to be less adventurous.
His end, in a literary sense, is near. We feel bound in honour,
however, to add the information, that upon the assurance of Mr.
Frankston that they could not leave New South Wales temporarily at
a more prosperous time, Ernest Neuchamp resolved once more to
tempt the main, and to taste the joy of revisiting, with his Australian
bride, his ancestral home.
Having taken the precaution to call a council of the most eminent
floriculturists of flower-loving Sydney to his aid, he procured and
shipped a case of orchidaceous plants, second to none that had ever
left the land, for the delectation of his brother Courtenay. He had
long since paid the timely remittance which had so lightened his load
of anxiety in the ‘dry season’ at Rainbar, with such an addition of
‘colonial interest’ as temporarily altered the views of the highly
conservative senior as to the soundness of Australian securities.
Upon the genuine delight which Antonia experienced when the full
glory of British luxury, the garnered wealth of a thousand years,
burst upon her, it is not necessary here to dilate, nor, after a year’s
continental travel, upon the rejoicings which followed the birth of Mr.
Courtenay Frankston Neuchamp at the hall of his sires. His uncle
immediately foresaw a full and pleasing occupation provided for his
remaining years, in securing whatever lands in the vicinity of
Neuchampstead might chance to be purchasable. They would be
needed for the due territorial dignity of a gentleman, who, upon his
accession to the estate, would probably have thirty or forty thousand
a year additional to the present rental, to spend on one of the oldest
properties in the kingdom.
‘He himself,’ he said, ‘was unhappily a bachelor. He humbly trusted
so to remain, but he was proud and pleased to think that the old
House would once more be worthily represented. He had never seen
the remotest possibility of such a state of matters taking place in his
own time, and had never dreamed, therefore, of the smallest self-
assertion.
‘The case was now widely different. The cadet of the House, against,
he would frankly own, his counsel and opinion, had chosen to seek
his fortune on distant shores, as had many younger sons
unavailingly. He had not only found it, but had returned, moreover,
with the traditional Princess, proper to the King’s younger son, in all
legends and romances. In his charming sister he recognised a
princess in her own right, and an undeniable confirmation of his
firmly-held though not expressed opinion, that his brother Ernest’s
enthusiasm had always been tempered by a foundation of prudence
and unerring taste.’
Again in his native land, in his own county, Antonia had to submit to
the lionisation of her husband, who came to be looked upon as a
sort of compromise between Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh, with
a dash of Francis Drake. The very handsome income which the
flourishing property of Rainbar and Mildool, cum Back-blocks A to M,
and the unwearied rainy seasons and high markets, permitted him to
draw, was magnified tenfold. His liberal expenditure gratified the
taste of the lower class, among whom legends involving romantic
discoveries and annexations of goldfields received ready credence.
Mr. Ernest Neuchamp was courteously distinguished by the county
magnates, popular among the country gentlemen who had been his
friends and those of his family from his youth, and the idol of the
peasantry, who instinctively discerned, as do children and pet
animals, that he viewed them with a sympathetic and considerate
regard.
When Mrs. Ernest Neuchamp, of Neuchampstead, was presented to
her Gracious Sovereign by ‘the Duchess,’ that exalted lady deigned
to express high approval of her very delicately beautiful and
exquisitely apparelled subject from the far southern land, and to
inquire if all Australian ladies were so lovely and so sweet of aspect
and manner as the very lovely young creature she saw before her.
The Court Circular was unprecedentedly enthusiastic; and in very
high places was Ernest assured that he was looked upon as having
conferred lustre upon his order and benefits upon his younger
countrymen, to whom he had exhibited so good and worthy an
example.
All this panegyrical demonstration Ernest Neuchamp received not
unsuitably, but with much of his old philosophical calmness of critical
attitude. What he really had ‘gone out into the wilderness’ to see,
and to do, he reflected he had neither seen nor done. What he
found himself elevated to high places for doing, was the presumable
amassing of a large fortune, a proceeding popular and always
favourably looked upon. But this was only a secondary feature in his
programme, and one in which he had taken comparatively little
interest. He could not help smiling to himself with humorous
appreciation of the satiric pleasantry of the position, conscious also
that his depreciation of great commercial shrewdness and boldness
in speculation was held to be but the proverbial modesty of a master
mind; while the interest which he could not restrain himself from
taking in plans for the weal and progress of his old friend and client,
Demos, was considered to be the dilettante distraction with which,
as great statesmen take to wood-chopping or poultry-rearing, the
mighty hunter, the great operator of the trackless waste, like
Garibaldi at Caprera, occupied himself. It was hardly worth while
doing battle with the complimentary critics, who would insist upon
crediting him with all the sterner virtues of their ideal colonist—a
great and glorious personage who combined the autocracy of a
Russian with the savoir faire of a Parisian, the energy of an
Englishman with the instinct of a Parsee and the rapidity of an
American; after a while, no doubt, they would find out their god to
have feet of clay. He would care little for that. But, in the meanwhile,
no misgivings mingled with their enthusiastic admiration. The
younger son of an ancient house, which possessed historic claims to
the consideration of the county, had returned laden with gold, which
he scattered with free and loving hand. That august magnate ‘the
Duke’ had (vicariously, of course—he had long lost the habit of
personal action save in a few restricted modes) to look to his laurels.
There was danger, else, that his old-world star would pale before
this newly-arisen constellation, bright with the fresher lustre of the
Southern Cross.
All these admitted luxuries and triumphs notwithstanding, a day
came when both Ernest Neuchamp, and Antonia his wife, began to
approach, with increasing eagerness and decision, the question of
return. In the three years which they had spent ‘at home’ they had,
they could not conceal from themselves, exhausted the resources of
Britain—of Europe—in their present state of sensation.
Natural as was such a feeling in the heart of Antonia, with whom a
yearning for her birthland, her childhood’s home, for but once again
to hear the sigh of the summer wave from the verandah at
Morahmee, was gradually gaining intensity, one wonders that Ernest
Neuchamp should have fully shared her desire to return. Yet such
was undoubtedly the fact.
Briton as he was to the core, he had, during the third year of their
furlough, been often impatient, often aweary, of an aimless life—that
of a gazer, a spectator, a dilettante. Truth to tell, the strong free life
of the new world had unfitted him for an existence of a mere
recipiency.
A fox-hunter, a fisherman, a fair shot, and a lover of coursing, he yet
realised the curious fact that he was unable to satisfy his personal
needs by devoting the greater portion of his leisure to these
recreations, perfect in accessories and appointments, unrivalled in
social concomitants, as are these kingly sports when enjoyed in
Britain.
Passionately fond of art, a connoisseur, and erstwhile an amateur of
fair attainment, a haunter of libraries, a discriminating judge of old
editions and rare imprints, he yet commenced to become impatient
of days and weeks so spent. Such a life appeared to him now to be
a waste of time. In vain his brother Courtenay remonstrated.
‘I feel, my dear Courtenay, and it is no use disguising the truth to
you or to myself, that I can no longer rest content in this little
England of yours. It is a snug nest, but the bird has flown over the
orchard wall, his wings have swept the waste and beat the foam; he
can never again, I fear, dwell there, as of old; never again, I fear.’
‘But why, in the name of all that is exasperating and eccentric, can
you not be quiet, and let well alone?’ asked Courtenay, not without a
flavour of just resentment. ‘You have money; an obedient, utterly
devoted father-in-law, of a species unknown in Britain; a charming
wife, who might lead me like a bear, were I so fortunate as to have
been appropriated by her; troops of friends, I might almost say
admirers—for you must own you are awfully overrated in the county.
What in the wide world can urge you to tempt fortune by re-
embarkation and this superfluous buccaneering?’
‘I suppose it is vain to try and knock it out of your old head,
Courtenay, that there is no more buccaneering in New South Wales
than in old South Wales. But, talking of buccaneers, I suppose I am
like one of old Morgan’s men who had swung in a West Indian
hammock, and seen the sack of Panama; thereafter unable to
content himself in his native Devon.
‘You might as well have asked of old Raoul de Neuchamp to go back
and make cider in Normandy, after he had fought shoulder to
shoulder with Taillefer and Rollo at Hastings, and tasted the stern
delight of harrying Saxon Franklins and burning monasteries. I have
found a land where deeds are to be done, and where conquest,
though but of the forces of Nature, is still possible. Here in this
happy isle your lances are only used in the tilt-yard and tournament,
your swords hang on the wall, your armour is rusty, your knights
fight but over the wine-cup, your ladye-loves are ever in the bowers.
With us, across the main, still the warhorse carries mail, the lances
are not headless, and many a shrewd blow on shield and helmet
rings still.
‘I am in the condition of “The Imprisoned Huntsman”—

‘My hawk is tired of perch and hood,

My idle greyhound loathes his food,
My steed is weary of his stall,
And I am sick of captive thrall;
I would I were, as I have been,
Hunting the roe in forest green,
With bended bow and bloodhound free,
For that is the life that is meet for me.’
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