The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Colonial Reformer, Vol. III (of 3), by Rolf Boldrewood

Note: The table of contents has been added by the transcriber.

[CHAPTER XXIV]
[CHAPTER XXV]
[CHAPTER XXVI]
[CHAPTER XXVII]
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
[CHAPTER XXIX]
[CHAPTER XXX]

A COLONIAL REFORMER

A
COLONIAL REFORMER

BY
ROLF BOLDREWOOD
AUTHOR OF ‘ROBBERY UNDER ARMS,’ ‘THE SQUATTER’S DREAM,’
‘THE MINER’S RIGHT,’ ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. III

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1890

All rights reserved

[CHAPTER XXIV]

In the strange exceptional condition of nervous tension up to which that marvellous instrument, the human ‘harp of a thousand strings,’ is capable of being wound, under the pressure of dread and perplexity, there is a type of visitor whose face is always hailed with pleasure. This is a fact as unquestionable as the converse proposition. For the bien-venu under such delicate and peculiar circumstances, helpfulness, sympathy, and decision are indispensable. Of no avail are weakly condolences or mild assenting pity. The power to dispense substantial aid may or may not be wanting. But the friend in need must have the moral power and clearness of mental vision which render decisiveness possible and just. His fiat, favourable or unfavourable, lets in the light, separates real danger from undefined terror, offers security for well-grounded hope, or persuades to the calmness of resignation.

A man so endowed, in a very unusual degree, was Mr. Levison. Deriving his leading characteristics from Nature’s gift—very scantily supplemented by education—he yet possessed the rare qualities of apprehensive acuteness, intrepidity, and discrimination in such measure and proportion as a hundred prize-takers at competitive examinations might have vainly hoped to emulate. Like that Australian judge, of whom the American citizen, in an inland assize town, is reported to have said, ‘Wal, Judge Shortcharge may be right, or he may be wrong, but he decides. I go for the judge myself.’

Abstinens Levison much resembled that brief but weighty legal luminary, in that, after due consideration of any case concerning which he was minded to give judgment, his verdict was clear and irrevocable.

For this reason the soul of Ernest Neuchamp was glad within him at the prospect of hearing from the lips of the grave, undemonstrative, unwavering pastoralist words of comfort or of rebuke, which would be to him as the Oracles of the Gods.

‘Jump off and come in,’ he said. ‘Delighted to see you—horse knocked up as usual? We’ll take the saddle off here, and let him pick at those reeds; they’re better than nothing. I was having a go-in at the garden here, just to take it out of myself a little, and forget my annoyances. But we must have some breakfast, though we are all going to be ruined, as you say—and it looks very like it.’

As Mr. Neuchamp in his revulsion of feeling rattled off these greetings, partly in welcome and partly in explanation, his guest removed the saddle and several folds of blanket from the very prominent vertebræ of his gaunt courser, watching him roll and then attack the scantily furnished reed-bed, with much satisfaction.

‘Where did you come from this morning?’ inquired Ernest of his guest, as, after a prolonged visit to the bathroom, they sat down to breakfast; ‘you must have made a very early start if you came from Mildool.’

‘I camped on the river,’ said Mr. Levison, attacking the corned beef in a deliberate but determined manner; ‘in the bend, just below those free-selecting friends of yours; you don’t seem to have been getting on well with ’em lately, from what they say.’

‘We are not on good terms, I must admit,’ replied Mr. Neuchamp, with a slight air of embarrassment, recollecting Levison’s prophecy of evil, which had been verified to the letter; ‘but it is entirely their own fault. I was much deceived in them.’

‘Very like,’ answered that gentleman, with as near an approach to a smile as his grave features ever permitted. ‘It takes a smart man to be up to chaps of their sort.’

‘Did you stay there?’ asked Ernest, anxious to lead the conversation into a less unsatisfactory channel; ‘they have not made themselves a very convenient dwelling.’

‘No!’ replied Mr. Levison, preferring a request for another instalment of the cold round of beef. ‘I never stay at a place if I’m going to make a deal. It makes a difference in the bargain, I always think; and I wanted to make a little deal with those chaps, from what I heard as I came up the river.’

‘A deal?’ said Ernest, with some surprise; ‘and how did you get on? I shouldn’t have thought they had much to sell.’

‘Well, they’ve got a middling lot of quiet cattle for one thing; they’re regular crawlers, but none the worse for that if grass ever grows again. Then they’ve got, what with their selections and pre-emptives, a tidy slice, and of not the worst part, of Rainbar run. And as there was a friend of mine that a small place like that would suit, and the cattle and the few sheep, at a price—at a price,’ he continued, with slow earnestness—‘why—I’ll ask for another cup of tea—I had an hour’s mighty hard dealing, and bought the whole jimbang right out.’

‘Indeed!’ said Ernest, gratified in one sense, but slightly alarmed at the idea of a second pastoral proprietor being introduced into the sacred demesne of Rainbar; ‘but they have to fulfil their residence condition, haven’t they, according to the Land Act?’

‘Of course I made that all right,’ affirmed the senior colonist. ‘They’re bound down to reside till their time is up, and they don’t get the balance of their money till they can convey, all square and legal. They didn’t know me, as luck would have it, and I dropped to their being very eager to sell out. These kind of chaps never look ahead beyond their noses, whereby I had ’em pretty well at my own price, for cash—cash, you know. A fine thing is cash, when you take care of it, and bring it out like an ace. It takes all before it.’

‘What did you give for the cattle?’ asked Ernest, with melancholy interest.

‘Well, these small holders always believe the end of the world’s come when they find themselves landed in a real crusher of a dry season. They think the weather is bound to keep set fair for a lifetime. I showed ’em how their cattle was falling off, and at last they offered the lot all round at eight and sixpence—no calves given in, except regular staggering Bobs. And so my friend has the run, and the stock, and the pre-empts all in his own hands. He’ll do well out of ’em, or I’m much mistaken.’

‘And does your friend propose to come and live here?’

‘Well, he might, and he might not. I think I’ll take another egg—fine things eggs in a dry season. I expect your fowls live on grasshoppers pretty much. You see, if he could get two or three fellows as he could depend on to take up some more of the best bits of the bends, leaving a slice here and a slice there—so as it’s not worth any one else’s while to come in, because they’d have no pre-emptive worth talking of—he’d be able to keep all that angle pretty well to himself, and I believe it will keep well on it a thousand head of cattle some day.’

‘I’m afraid it will spoil the sale of the run,’ said Ernest, with some diffidence; ‘not that it will matter to me much, as I shall have to sell out whether or no, and at present prices there will be little if anything left. You will have to take your cattle back if they’re not paid for.’

‘Well, I don’t say but what it might spoil the sale of the run, especially if my friend was to be wide awake and take up his fresh selections with judgment. And don’t you think, now,’ Mr. Levison interrogated, fixing his clear gray eyes full upon Ernest’s countenance, ‘as it was a blind trick of yours to go and bring these chaps here, like a lot of catarrhed sheep, all among your own stock, just to make it hot for yourself and crab the sale of the run, supposing you wanted to sell?’

Mr. Neuchamp had in his hours of remorse and repentance sufficiently gone over the ground of his errors and miscalculations, so as to be very fully convinced of the folly of this his most indefensible proceeding. He had been thirsting for the words of the oracle. Now that the hollow sounds came from Dodona’s oak, he liked not their purport. The spirit of his ancestors, temporarily oppressed by misfortune, awoke in his breast, and he thus made answer: ‘My dear sir, I am most willing to own that I have in this matter acted unwisely. And the more I see of this great but perplexing country, the more ready I am to admit that extreme caution is necessary in many transactions where such need does not appear on the surface. But I have acted in this, and in all other stages of my Australian career, upon the principle of attempting to do good to my fellow-creatures, and of raising the standard of human happiness and culture. Such motives I hold to be the true foundation of every instructed, christianised, and, therefore, permanent community. Want of success may have attended my efforts to carry out these ideas; but of such efforts and endeavours, whatever may be the result, I trust I shall never feel ashamed!’

As Mr. Neuchamp uttered the concluding words of this vindication of his faith with a kindling eye and slightly raised tone, he held his head erect and looked with a fixed and rather stern regard at Mr. Levison, as if defying all the Paynim hosts of selfishness and monopoly.

Mr. Levison met his gaze with a moment’s searching glance, and then, with a relapse into his ordinary expression of judicial calculation, thus answered—

‘I ain’t going to say that you are acting altogether wrong in trying to right things in a general way in life. There’s more than you has noticed a lot of wrong turns and breakdowns for want of a finger-post or two. And I like to see a man back his opinion right through, whether it’s right or wrong. But if you lose your team, and break your pole, and spoil your loading when you’re on a long overland trip, how are you to help your mates or any other chap that’s bogged when they want you to double-bank? That’s what I look at. You’ve got to stand and look on, just like a broke loafer or a coach passenger. What I say, and what I stick to, is that a man should make sure, and double sure, of his own footing, and then he can wire in and haul out any man, woman, or child as he takes a fancy to put on firm ground. But, if you go too fast, and your agent drops you, and you want to help a fellow, why, you’re bust, and he’s bust, and what can either of ye do but sit on your stern fixings and look at each other?’

Mr. Levison’s illustrations were homely, but they had a force and application which Ernest fully recognised.

‘You have the truth on your side,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I see it now—very plainly, too. I wonder why I could not see it before.’

‘There’s a deal of studying required, it seems to me,’ propounded his eccentric mentor, ‘and a deal of experience, and knocking about, and loss of time and money, too, before a man comes to see the right thing at the right time. That’s where the hardship all lies. If the thing’s right and the time’s wrong, that’s no good. And the right time and the wrong thing is worse again. What you’ve been a-doin’ of ain’t so much wrong in itself—only the time’s wrong, that’s where your mistake is,—except things take a great start soon; and I don’t say they won’t, mind you.‘

Here Mr. Levison looked at Ernest with an expression half humorous, half prophetic, so extremely unusual that the latter began to wonder whether there was any case on record of half a dozen cups of tea having produced temporary insanity. But the unaccustomed gleam departed suddenly from the dark, steadfast gray eyes, and the countenance resumed its wonted cast of calm investigation and unalterable decision.

‘Does old Frankston ever give you a dressing down in the advice line?’ inquired Mr. Levison, without continuing the development of the idea he had last started. ‘Because if he does, you’d have a bad time of it between us. But I’ve done all the preaching part of the story for this time, and I’m a-going on to the second chapter. Do you know the friend’s name as I bought these Freeman chaps out for?’

‘No,’ said Ernest. ‘I shall be happy to afford him all the assistance I can—that is, if I’m here, you know,’ he added, with sudden reflection.

‘That’s all right; but he’s a youngish chap, and easy had. Will you promise to advise him to live economically, mind his business till times improve, and not waste his money, above all things? Tell him I said so.’

‘I don’t think I am the best adviser you could pick in that way,’ said Ernest. ‘I am too sensible of my own defects; but I will deliver your message and add my feeble weight to the influence of your name.’

‘That’s all right, and handsomely said. Now, my friend’s name is Ernest Neuchamp! I’ve bought the land and the cattle for him. They’re cheap enough if he never pays me for them, but I believe he will, and that those Freeman chaps will be biting their fingers at letting theirselves go so cheap this time next year. But, mind you tell him not to waste his money. Tell him Levison said so. Ha, ha! I must start now.’

Mr. Levison laughed for the first time since Ernest had made his acquaintance. It must have been the sight of Ernest’s wonder-stricken face which caused this unprecedented though brief incongruity.

‘I can never sufficiently thank you,’ he said; ‘but where’s the money to come from? The station will never pay it.’

‘That’s more than you can know,’ answered the Changer of Destinies; ‘It’s more than I know, too. I don’t mind telling you—as I said before—you’re not likely to interfere much with any man’s profits. But cattle are going to rise, and that to no foolish price. You mark my words. Before this time twelve months fat cattle will be worth five pounds a head, as sure as my name’s Ab. Levison. And if rain comes—and I’ve seen some signs that I have great dependence on—store cattle will be two and three pounds a head, and hard to buy at that.’

These last words he uttered with great solemnity, and Mr. Neuchamp perceived that he was fully imbued with faith in his own vaticinations.

‘I hope it may be so,’ Ernest replied. ‘Good heavens! what a wonderful change it would make in everything. But why should stock rise so?’

‘Because the yield of gold is increasing every day and every hour in these colonies. Don’t you see the papers? I thought you was sure to have read everything. Why, you are not half posted up. Look here!’

Here he produced from one of his capacious pockets a much worn and closely printed Melbourne Argus, in which mention was made of ‘the astonishing discovery of gold near Bunninyong at Mr. Yuille’s station, commonly known as Ballarat, in such quantity and richness as bade fair to rival the hitherto exhaustless yields of Turonia and California. Great excitement had taken place. Melbourne was deserted. You could not get your hair cut. The barristers were gone, leaving the judges lamenting. The doctors had followed their patients. The clergymen had followed their flocks. The shepherds had deserted theirs. All society existed in a state of dislocation!’

‘Now,’ he continued, receiving the journal from Ernest, and carefully refolding and returning it to its place of safety, ‘do you see what all this gold breaking out here and there and all about means?’

‘For the present the Melbourne people seem to think it means loss, if not ruin, to them. The shepherds have nearly all run away, it seems, as also labourers of every description. The writer anticipates a great fall in the value of property. Indeed, houses and town allotments are considered to be hardly worth holding. I should have thought otherwise myself, but’ (here Ernest looked at his companion) ‘I begin to doubt the correctness of my own opinions.’

‘Well, that writer’s an ass, whoever he is; and you’re a deal nearer the mark than he is. He’s a donkey, that, because their ain’t a thistle right against his nose, thinks there ain’t no more thistles in the world—let alone corn. Now I’ve been thinkin’ and thinkin’ the whole matter over since a friend of mine in Port Phillip sent me this paper, and I cipher it out this way. They’ve sent down five thousand ounces this week from this place, Ballarat. Then they’ve struck it at Forest Creek, fifty miles off. Well, that tells me that there’s plenty of it, and more than years will see out, judging from California and Turonia, as we know of. Now what do you suppose all Europe—all the world—will do when they hear of this, that you can dig up gold like potatoes? Why, they won’t be able to find ships fast enough to bring ‘em here. When they do come they’ll want to be fed. The tea and sugar and tents and spades and shovels old Paul Frankston and the other merchants will find ’em somehow; the flour the farmers will find them, or if they can’t, old Paul and his friends will get it from Chili. But they can’t import beef and mutton. No; not if meat rose to a shilling a pound. Live stock is the worst freight in the world, and there’s nowhere within boating distance where it grows plentiful as it does here. So when my sum’s worked out it means this, that more gold means double and treble the population, and double and treble the price of everything that we have here and want to sell.’

As Mr. Levison paused,—not for breath, for he did not exceed his ordinary slow monotonal enunciation, as he propounded these original and startling ideas much as though he were reading from a book,—Mr. Neuchamp looked fixedly at his guest, as if to discover whether or no some subtle local influence peculiar to Rainbar had infected with speculative mania the shrewd, calm-judging stockholder.

But the genius loci, however seductive, would have fared ill in a mental encounter with the slow, sure inferences and iron logic of Abstinens Levison. He displayed no trace of more than ordinary interest. And from all that was apparent, the onward march of a revolution fated to flood the land with wealth and to change a handful of pioneer communities into a nation, was accepted by him with the same faint unnoted surprise as would have been the announcement of a glut in the cattle market or the ‘sticking up’ of the downriver mail coach.

‘That’s how it is in my mind,’ he slowly continued, as if pursuing his ordinary train of thoughts, ‘and before we meet again you’ll know all about it. I’m off to Melbourne as soon as I can get on to the mail line. I shall buy stock right and left, and pick up as many cottages and town allotments as I can find with good titles. They’ll be like these Freeman store cattle; cent per cent will be a trifle to what profits are to be had out of them. But all this yarning won’t buy the child a frock. Where’s that young man of yours? I want to leave my horse and saddle in his charge.’

‘Where are you going now?’ asked Ernest. ‘How can you get over to the mail station without a horse? It’s a hundred and eighty miles to Wargan, where the coach line comes in.’

‘It’s only thirty miles to Wood-duck Lagoon, where the horse mail passes,’ said his determined guest. ‘I left word for them down at Mingadee to send a led horse by the mailman for me to-morrow. Johnny Daly’s an old stockman of mine, and one of those chaps that when he says he’ll do a thing he always does it. I’m as sure of finding a horse there at ten o’clock to-morrow as if I saw him now.’

‘But suppose he loses him on the way, or don’t find your horse ready at Mingadee, what then? Hadn’t you better take a man and horse from here?’

‘Well, I don’t say Johnny would steal a horse, out and out, if he knew I expected one at a certain hour; he’s a good boy, though he does come from the Weddin Mountains. But he’d have one for me, some road or other, if there wasn’t one nearer than Bargo Brush. As for your horses, I’m obliged, and know I’m welcome, but it would knock up one going and one coming back, for they’re all as poor as crows, and that don’t pay, besides a man’s time for nothing. I’ve plenty of time, and the night’s the best travelling weather now. If you’ll call this native chap I’ll be off.’

Ernest, though extremely loath to let his friend and benefactor depart on foot—of which, as a mode of progression, he was beginning to acquire the Australian opinion, viz. that it wore a poverty-stricken appearance—could not decently oppose Mr. Levison’s fixed desire to take the road. He therefore called up Jack Windsor, to whose care Mr. Levison solemnly confided his emaciated quadruped, a much worn and sunburned saddle and bridle, together with a considerable portion of gray blanket, which, in many folds, did duty as saddle-cloth.

‘Now, young man,’ he said solemnly, walking aside with Mr. Windsor, ‘you take care of these and my old horse. Give them to nobody without he brings Mr. Cottonbush’s written order; do you hear? That’s as good a stock horse and journey hack as ever you crossed, though he’s low now.’

‘He is very low!’ averred Jack, looking at the bare-ribbed spectral but well-formed animal that was grazing within a few yards of the spot, ‘but he may get over it. I’ll take a look at him night and morning, and see that he’s lifted regular if he gets down.’

‘All right,’ said his master. ‘I had to lift him myself this morning, and very hard work I had to get him up. But if it rains within the next two months you’ll have him kicking up his heels like a colt.’

‘Are you going to walk to Wood-duck Lagoon, sir?’ inquired Jack respectfully.

‘Yes, I am, and no great matter either,’ returned the exceptionally wiry capitalist. ‘I’m right enough; don’t you trouble about me. What you and young Banks have to look out for is, to keep all these Circle Dot cattle well within bounds till the weather breaks, and then you can’t go wrong, and I look upon Mr. Neuchamp’s pile as made. I’ve taken to him, more than a bit. Besides, he’s got another good back, though he don’t know it. I’ve bought out the Freeman’s, stock, lock, and barrel, so their cattle won’t bother you any more.’

Here Mr. Windsor gave a leap off the ground, and cast his cabbage-tree hat violently from his curly brown locks in another direction.

‘Yes, I’ve bought ’em pretty right; they didn’t know me, or they’d have stuck it on—bought ’em for a friend! So they’ll have the pleasure of seeing you and Banks branding the increase next year, just as they are giving up possession; and the calves will be worth more then than I paid for the cows yesterday. But I might be mistaken, you know.’

‘It would be for the first time; so they all used to say at Boocalthra,’ answered Jack.

‘You were there, then?’ said Mr. Levison, bending his extremely discriminating gaze upon the bronzed, resolute face. ‘Now I remember your brand; you were the curly-headed boy that used to ride the colts for the horse-breaker. Glad you turned out steady. I didn’t expect it. Stick to Rainbar; now you’re in a good place, and you’ll do well. But whatever you do, if you walk your feet off, don’t let these Circle Dot cows and heifers get out of bounds till the rain comes. If you are regularly beat, go down to Mingadee; there’s a hundred and fifty stock horses there, spelling for next winter’s work, and Cottonbush will have my orders to let you have half a dozen. I know what fresh cattle are in a season like this. Well, good-bye, Jack the Devil; I remember all about you now.’ Mr. Windsor grinned, yet preserved an air of diffidence. ‘Take care of the old horse, and don’t you lend that saddle to no one!’

With these parting words tending to thrift, in curious contradistinction to the tenor of his action at Rainbar, Mr. Levison proceeded to take a hurried leave of his entertainer.

‘I’ve just been talking to that native chap of yours,’ he said, ‘about my old horse. He wants a bit of looking after now, but you’d be surprised to see what style he has when he’s in good fettle. Wonderful horse on a camp. Best cutting-out horse, this day, on the river. Pulls rather hard, that’s the worst of him.’

Mr. Neuchamp, who, having as yet not gone through the terrible trials of a prolonged drought, had never witnessed the incredible emaciation to which stock may be reduced, and their rapid and magical transformation at the wand of the enchanter ‘Rain,’ looked as if he really would be surprised at the tottering, hollow-eyed, fleshless spectre, in appearance something between an expiring poley cow and an anatomical preparation, ‘pulling hard’ again, or doing any deed of valour as a charger.

‘Ah! you’ll be all in the fashion, then,’ said Mr. Levison, with his customary affirmative expression, which apparently meant that having asserted his opinion it was waste of time to attempt to prove it. ‘When old BI (that’s what the men call him, his name’s written on him pretty big) kicks up his heels, it’ll mean that Rainbar’s worth twenty thousand pounds! That’s why I want you to be careful, and not waste your money and get sold up just before the tide turns. How’s that Arab horse-breeding notion turned out? They’d fetch about three pound a head all round just now.’

‘Very well, so far; they’re a little poor, but nothing could look more promising than the yearlings—plenty of bone, and as handsome as you could make them. I should grieve more about their forced sale than anything.’

‘Well, you’re not sold up yet, and won’t be if you’ll be careful and take my advice and Paul Frankston’s. You mark me, horses will be horses in a year or two. They’re hardly worth owning now; but their turn’s coming, with everything else that any man will have to sell in Australia for the next ten years.’

Mr. Levison placed the few necessary articles which he had abstracted from his valise, in the moiety of the gray blanket which he had apparently not required as a saddle-cloth. He requested leave to cut off and to take with him a fair-sized section of damper, sternly refusing any other description of edible. Then, turning his face to the broad plain, he held out his hand to Ernest, and finally exhorting him not to waste his money, addressed himself to the far-stretching trail after such a fashion as convinced Ernest that he was no inexperienced pedestrian.

Mr. Neuchamp returned to his cottage in a very different frame of mind from that which characterised his pre-matutinal discipline in the garden. How short a time, how trifling an incident, occasionally suffices to turn the scale from anxiety to repose, from despair to glowing hope. This last cheering mental condition was indispensably necessary to Mr. Neuchamp’s acceptation of burdens, even to his very life. He had gone forth in the clear dawnlight a miserable man, racked by presentiments of scorn unalterable to come, gazing on ‘Ruin’s red letters writ in flame,’ and associated with the hitherto untarnished fame and sufficing fortune of Ernest Neuchamp; he had heard in imagination the laugh of scorn, the half-contemptuous, pitying condolence. Now, though much remained uncertain and unsafe, the blessed flower of Hope had recommenced to bloom. Its fragrance was once more shed over the soul of the fainting pilgrim through life’s desert, and the wayfarer arose refreshed and invigorated, free once more to turn his brow erect and undaunted towards the Mecca of his dreams.

This particular morning happened to be that of the bi-weekly post-day, a day to which Mr. Neuchamp had looked forward of late with considerably more apprehension than interest. How wonderfully different, as the years roll on, are the feelings with which that humble messenger of fate, the postman, is greeted! In life’s careless spring he is the custodian of friendship’s offering, the distributor of the small sweet joys of childhood, the dawning intellectual pleasures of youth, the rose-hued, enchanting flower-tokens of love. As the days of the years of our pilgrimage roll on, ‘the air is full of farewells to the dying and mournings for the dead.’ How altered is the character of the missives which lie motionless, but charged with subtle, terrible forces!—electric agents they!—thrilling or rending the vital frame from that overcharged battery, the heart!

To this undesirable tenor and complexion had much of Mr. Neuchamp’s correspondence, drought-leavened and gloomy, arrived. Many of his smaller accounts were of necessity left unpaid. The cruel season, unchanged in the more vital characteristic of periodic moisture, seemed to be culminating in an apparently fixed and fatal determination on the part of Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton to let him have no more money on account.

But several minor matters, on this particular day, besides the visit of Mr. Levison, seemed to point to Fortune’s more indulgent mood. The pile of letters and papers was pleasantly, if not hopefully, variegated by those periodicals and peculiarly stamped envelopes which denote the delivery of the European mail. Upon these Ernest dashed with unconcealed eagerness, and tearing open a letter in his brother Courtenay’s delicate Italian handwriting, utterly devoid of linear emphasis, read as follows:

Neuchampstead, 6th March 18—.

Dear Ernest—I cannot acknowledge surprise at the contents of your last letter, having always looked for some such ending to your colonial adventure. The day of success for such enterprises has gone by—if indeed any one ever was really successful at any time in such wanderings and Quixotisms. You quote the greater examples. Yet a little temporary notoriety, chiefly ending in imprisonment or the block, was the guerdon of Columbus and one Raleigh, instances which occur to me. As I have said before, I have no doubt that our family would have substantially benefited by remaining on their paternal fiords and leaving Normandy and England to the robbers and hangers-on who followed the popular pirate of the day. Being in England, I suppose we shall have to stay, though the climate daily recommends itself less to any one whose epidermis does not resemble a suit of armour. The crops have been bad this year. The tenants are slow and deficient. No one seems to have any money except certain Liverpool or Manchester persons, born with an aptitude for swindling in ‘gray shirtings,’ cotton twist, racehorses, or other equally plausible instrument for gambling. I spend little and risk nothing. So I may hope to survive in my insignificance, unless the grand Radical earthquake, which will surely swallow England’s aristocracy of birth and culture in a coming day, be antedated. All men of family who dabble in agriculture, commerce, or colonisation, are earthen pots which must inevitably be shattered by the aggressive flotilla of brazen vessels which encumbers every tide nowadays. You will admit I had no expectation of other result than your ruin when you embarked. In announcing that fact spare me the details. You will find your old rooms ready at Neuchampstead, and refurnished. I have been extravagant in some curious antique furniture.

I enclose a draft for three thousand pounds. Such a sum is of no use to a gentleman in England. Fling it after the rest. It may console you, years hence, when you are adding Australian pollen masses to the famous collection of orchids for which alone Neuchampstead is celebrated, that your experiment had full justice. It is only the bourgeois who leaves the table before his ‘system’ is fairly tried.—Good-bye, my dear brother. Yours sincerely,

Courtenay Neuchamp.

P.S.—I forgot to add that I gave Augusta your message. How could you be so incautious? I would have suppressed it, but had, of course, no option. She starts for Sydney by the mail steamer. Are the women in Australia so obstinate? But they are much the same everywhere, I apprehend.—C. N.

The first emotion which Mr. Neuchamp experienced after reading this characteristic letter was one of unqualified delight. The sight of the draft for the three thousand pounds, so slightingly alluded to by Courtenay, was as the vision of the palm-trees at the well to the fainting desert pilgrim, of the distant sail to the gaunt, perishing seaman on the drifting raft—the symbol of blessed hope, of assured deliverance. The capital sum, or the trifling annual income derivable from it, in gold-flooded England, might be of little utility there, as Courtenay had averred with the humorous indifferentism which he professed. But here, in this rich unwatered level, metaphorically and otherwise, it was like the river-born trickling tunnels with which, since forgotten Pharaoh days, the toiling fellaheen saturate the black gaping Nile gardens, sure precursor of profound vegetation and the hundred-fold increase.

No use to a gentleman in England! A company of guardian angels must surely have wafted to him the precious, delicate document across the seas, across the desert here. What use would it not be to him, Ernest? It would pay in full for the Circle Dot store cattle, also for those purchased from Freeman Brothers, leaving a balance to the credit of his account with those treasure-guarding griffins, Oldstile and Crampton. Besides, the bills due to Levison for the store cattle were not due for several months yet. In the meantime rain or other wonders might happen. The young horses, too, children of Omar, fleet son of the desert, with delicately-formed aristocratic heads, deerlike limbs, which had been dear to him almost as their ancestors had been to some lonely subdivision of the wandering Shammar or Aneezah!—they were saved from ruin and disgrace—saved from the indignity of passing for the merest trifle into the possession of unheeding vulgar purchasers, who would probably stigmatise them as weeds, wanting in bone, or by any other cheap form of ignorant depreciation.

Saved! saved! saved! All was saved. Once more secure. Once more his own. Once more the land and the grazing herd, the humble abode, the garden, the paddock, even the long-neglected but not despaired-of canal, all the acted resolves and outcome of a sincere but perhaps over-sanguine mind, dearer than ever were they to him, their author and projector. They were his own again. How like Courtenay, too! Ever better than his word; incredulous as to improved benefits and successes; deprecating haste, risk, imprudence; doubtful of all but the garnered grain, the assayed gold, the concrete and the absolute in life,—but, in the hour of need, sparing of that counsel which is but another name for reproach, stanch in aid, generous alike in the mode and measure of his gift.

Having recovered from this natural exaltation and relief at the unexpected succour, Mr. Neuchamp turned to the consideration of the very important postscript of his brother’s letter with apprehension.

Had his cousin, Miss Augusta Neuchamp, really sailed and arrived in Sydney, as would appear? If so, where was she to go? What was he to do? She could hardly come to Rainbar to take up her abode in this small cottage, which, though possessing several rooms, was, like many dwellings in the bush proper, practically undivided as to sound; the conversation of any one, in any given room, being equally beneficial and entertaining to the occupant of any other. Then there was not a woman upon the whole establishment. The wives and daughters of the Freemans, even if the latter were eligible for ladies’ maids, were little less than hostile.

A residence in Sydney seemed the only possible plan; but he knew his cousin too well to think that there would be no drawback to that arrangement. Energetic, well-intentioned, possessing a clear available intelligence, and considerable mental force, when exercised within certain well-defined, but it must be confessed narrow limits, Augusta Neuchamp was a benevolent despot in her own way. She ardently desired to arrange the destinies of the classes or individuals who came within the sphere of her action in accordance with what she considered to be the plain intentions of Providence with regard to them. Of the tremendous issues involved in such a translation, she had no conception. Plain to bluntness in her speech, she rarely evaded the awkwardness of expressing disappointment. Unquestionably refined by habit and education, she possessed little imagination and less tact. Thus she rarely failed to provide herself, in any locality which she honoured with her presence, with a large and increasing supply of opponents, if not of enemies. A moderate private income enabled her to indulge her tastes for improving herself or others. Possessing no very near relatives, she was uncontrolled as to her movements and mode of life. She had reached the age of twenty-five, though by no means unprepossessing in appearance, without finding any suitor sufficiently valorous to adopt or oppose, in the character of a husband, her very clearly expressed views of life. Had she consented to reserve a modification in these important respects, her friends averred that she might have been ‘settled’ ere now. But such palterings with principle were alien and abhorrent to the nature of Augusta Neuchamp. And Augusta Neuchamp she had accordingly remained.

The appearance of Miss Neuchamp was generally described as commanding, although she was slightly, if at all, over the medium height of woman. But there was an expression about her high-bridged aquiline nose and compressed lips which left no one in doubt as to the fact that, in controversy or contending action, the first to yield would not be the possessor of those features. Her clear blue eyes would have been handsome had there been a shade of doubt or softness at any time visible. Such a moment of feminine weakness never came. They looked at you and through you and over you, but never fell in maiden doubt or fear beneath your gaze. Two courses were open to the individual of the conflicting sex in her presence—unconditional surrender or flight.

It was hard, Ernest thought, that just as he was relieved from one anxiety he should be provided by unkind Fate with another. He revolved the imminent question of the disposition of Miss Augusta Neuchamp in his mind until prevented by mutual apprehension from pursuing the terribly perplexing subject. Of all people in the wide world, he thought his cousin was the most impracticable, the most unyielding to argument, the most certain to expose herself to dislike and ridicule in Australia. She knew everything. She believed nothing, unless indeed it related to herself or proceeded directly from that source. Everything which differed from her stereotyped system was wrong, ruinous, degenerate, or provincial. How she would criticise the place, the people, the climate, the railways, the houses, the fences, the workmen, the men and the women, the grass, and the gum-trees!

If he could only persuade her to take lodgings in Sydney, until he could go down and argue the point with her, much might be gained. Antonia Frankston would visit her, and harder than adamant must she be if that gentle voice and natural manner did not convert her to a favourable opinion of Australian life.

No such preparatory process was possible. A letter arrived from the fair emigrant which left no doubt of her immediate intentions. It ran thus:

Dear Cousin Ernest—I have dared the perils of the deep, not the least for your sake, but me voici. I made a short stay in Sydney, but being extremely tired of the dust and mosquitoes, I decided upon the course of travelling by rail and coach to your far-away estate at once. [Here Ernest groaned, a suspicious sound which might have been in sympathy for the trials of a lonely if not distressed damsel, or an expression of despondency at the idea of his own inevitable cares and anxieties, such as must attend the entertainment of the first lady-guest ever seen at Rainbar. He continued the reading of the epistle.] If Sydney had been a more interesting place I might have lingered for a week or two so as to exchange letters with you. Had it possessed that foreign air which one finds so pleasant in many continental spots, otherwise dull enough, I could have amused myself. But being, as it is, a second-hand copy of a provincial British town—I grant you the botanical element is lovely, though neglected—I could not endure another week. I seemed to long for the desert, in all its vastness and grandeur, where your abode is placed. It was like staying in an Algerian town, a dwarfed and dirty Paris, full of cafés and shabby Frenchmen playing at dominoes. I had no lady acquaintances. There are a few, I suppose. So I grew desperate, and took my passage through the agency company; Cobb, I think, is the name. If you have no phaeton or dogcart available, you might bring a saddle-horse for me.—Your affectionate cousin,

Augusta Neuchamp.

Just after the perusal of this letter, which showed that Miss Neuchamp’s angles still stood out as sharply as those of a Theban obelisk—the voyage and change of sky notwithstanding—Mr. Neuchamp was startled by the sudden appearance of Piambook, who rushed into his presence with an air of sincere discomposure very different from that of his usual unimpressible demeanour. His rolling dark eyes gleamed—his features worked—his mouth, slightly open, could only articulate the borrowed phrase of his conquerors, ‘My word! my word!’ It was for some moments the only sound that could be extracted from him by Ernest’s inquiries.

‘What is it, Piambook?’ at length demanded Ernest, so decidedly, almost fiercely, that his sable retainer capitulated.

‘Me look out longa wheelbarrow,’ he explained at length. He had been despatched to a distant point of the run at a very early hour of the morning.

‘Well, what did you see?’ pursued his master. ‘You can yabber fast enough when you like.’

‘That one wheelbarrow plenty broket,’ explained the observing pre-Adamite. ‘Mine see um longa plain—plenty sit down—liket three fellow wheel. Billy Robinson, he go longa township.’

‘Well, what then? the coach broke down; that’s not wonderful—passengers walked, I suppose.’

‘Me seeum that one white-fellow gin,’ quoth Piambook, in a low, mysterious voice. Then, bursting into an immoderate fit of laughter, he continued, ‘That one carry liket spyglass.’ Here he placed his thumb and forefinger, circularly contracted, to his eye, and, gazing at Mr. Neuchamp, again laughed till his dusky orbs were dim.

Mr. Neuchamp at once comprehended by this pantomime the gold eyeglass which Miss Augusta, partially short-sighted, habitually wore; and becoming uneasy as to her state and condition under the circumstances of a presumed breakdown, asked eagerly of his follower what she was doing.

‘That one sit along a wheelbarrow, liket this one;’ here he took up a book from Ernest’s table and pretended to look into it with great and absorbed interest.

‘Anybody in the coach, Piambook?’

‘One fellow Chinaman,’ returned the messenger, with cool indifference.

After this information Mr. Neuchamp at once perceived that no time must be lost. Augusta could not be left a moment longer than was necessary, sitting in a disabled coach in the midst of a boundless plain, with a Chinaman for her vis-à-vis. What a situation for a young lady to whom Baden was as familiar as Brompton, Paris as Piccadilly, Rome, Florence, Venice, as the stations on the Eastern Counties Railway! He did not believe she was afraid. She was afraid of nothing. But the situation was embarrassing.

The hawk-eyed Piambook had descried the stranded coach—the wheelbarrow, as his comrades called it—on the mail track, about a mile off his path of duty. It was full twelve miles from Rainbar. In a quarter of an hour the express waggon with two cheerful but enfeebled steeds stumbled and blundered along at a very different pace from that of Mr. Parklands, when he rattled up Ernest to the Rainbar door, on the occasion of their first memorable drive.

However, the distance from home was luckily short, and in about two hours Mr. Neuchamp arrived at the spot where, in the disabled coach, sat Miss Augusta Neuchamp, possessing her soul in impatience, and gradually coming to the conclusion that Ah Ling—who sat stolidly staring at her and regretting the loss of time which might have been spent in watering his garden or smoking opium, the only two occupations he ever indulged in—was about to rob and perhaps murder her. As she always carried a small revolver, and was by no means ignorant of its use, it is possible that Ah Ling was in greater danger than he was aware of. His fair neighbour would infallibly have shot him had he made any hasty or incautious motion.

When Mr. Neuchamp rumbled up in his useful but not imposing vehicle, a slight shade of satisfaction overspread her features.

‘Oh, Ernest, I am delighted to see you; however did you find out my position? Don’t you think it was inexcusable of the coach company to send us all this way in a damaged vehicle? I thought all your coaching arrangements were so perfect.’

‘Accidents will happen, my dear Augusta,’ said Ernest, ‘in all companies and communities, you know. Cobb and Co. are the best of fellows in the main. But whatever induced you to come up into this wild place without writing to me first? Have you not suffered all kinds of hardship and disagreeables?’

‘Well, perhaps a few; but I knew all about the country from some books I read on the voyage out. I studied the directory till I found out the coach lines, and I should not have complained but for this last blunder. But what a barren wilderness this all seems. I thought Australia was a land of rich pastures.’

‘So it is—but this is a drought. “And the famine was sore in the land.” You remember that in the Bible, don’t you? We are a good deal like Palestine in our periodical lean years, except that they didn’t import their flour from beyond sea, and we do.‘

‘But this looks so very bad!’ said she, putting up her eyeglass and staring earnestly at the waste lands of the crown, which certainly presented a striking contrast to the Buckinghamshire meadows or uplands either. ‘Why, it seems all sand and these scrubby-looking bushes; are you sure you haven’t made a mistake and bought inferior land? A gentleman who came out with me said inexperienced persons often did.’

‘My dear Augusta,’ said Ernest, quelling a well-remembered feeling of violent antagonism, ‘you must surely have forgotten that I have been more than two years in Australia, and may be supposed to know the difference between good country and bad by this time.’

‘Do you?’ said his fair cousin indifferently. ‘Well, you must have improved. Courtenay says you are the most credulous person he knows; and as for Aunt Ermengarde, she says that, of all the failures the family has produced——’

‘Please to spare me the old lady’s review of my life and times,’ said Ernest, waking up his bounding steeds. ‘We never did agree, and it can serve no good purpose to further embitter my remembrance of her.’

‘Oh, but she did not wish to say anything really disparaging of you, only that you were not of sufficiently coarse material to win success in farming, or trade, or politics.’

‘Or colonisation, my dear Augusta. Perhaps she was not so far wrong, after all; but somehow one doesn’t like to be told these things, and I must ask you and Aunt Ermengarde to suspend your judgment until the last scene of the third act. Then you will be able to applaud, or otherwise, on correct grounds. I think you will find the country and its ways by no means too easy to comprehend.’

‘I expect nothing, simply, so I cannot be disappointed. It seems to me a sort of provincial England jumbled up with one’s ideas of Mexico.’

‘And the people?’

‘I haven’t noticed them much yet. I thought many of the women ridiculously overdressed in Sydney, copying our English fashions in a semi-tropical climate. I left everything behind except a few tourist suits.’

‘And most extraordinary you look,’ thought Ernest to himself, though he dared not say so, mentally contrasting the stern Augusta’s dust-coloured tusser wrap, broad-leafed hat with green lining, rather stout boots, short dress, and flattened down hair, with Antonia, cool, glistening, delicately robed, and rose-fresh amid the bright-hued shrubberies of Morahmee, or even the Misses Middleton, perfectly comme il faut, on shipboard, in George Street, or at the station, as everybody ought to be, thought Ernest—unless she is an eccentric reformer, he was just about to say, but refrained. Was any one else of his acquaintance going to do wonders in the alleviation and reformation of the Australian world? and if so, what had he accomplished? Had he not been in scores of instances self-convicted of the most egregious mistakes and miscalculations? After all his experience, was he not now indebted almost for his financial existence to certain of these very colonists whose intelligence he had formerly held so cheap?

These reflections were not suffered to proceed to an inconvenient length, being routed by the clear and not particularly musical tones of Miss Augusta’s voice.

‘I can’t say much for Australian horses, so far, Ernest. I expected to see the fleet courser of the desert, and all that kind of thing. These seem wretched underbred creatures, and miserably poor.’

‘Lives there the man, with soul so dead,’ who doesn’t mind hearing his horses run down?

‘They are not bad horses, by any means, though low in condition, owing to this dreadful season,’ answered Ernest, rather quickly. ‘This one,’ touching the off-side steed, ‘is as good and fast and high-couraged a horse as ever was saddled or harnessed, but they have had nothing to eat for six months, to speak of. So they quite surpass the experience of the cabman’s horse in Pickwick; and I can’t afford to buy corn at a pound a bushel.’

‘I forgot about the horse in Pickwick,’ said Augusta, who, a steady reader in her own line, which she denominated ‘useful,’ had little appreciation of humour, and never could be got to know the difference between Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby, Charles O’Malley and The Knight of Gwynne. ‘But surely more neatness in harness and turn-out might be managed,’ and she looked at the dusty American harness and rusty bits.

‘You must remember, my dear Augusta, that you are not only in the provinces, but in the far far Bush, now—akin to the Desert—in more ways than one. I don’t suppose the Sheik Abdallah turns out with very bright bits; but, if he does, he has the advantage of us in the labour supply. We are compelled to economise rigidly in that way.’

‘You seem compelled to economise in every way that makes life worth having,’ said his downright kinswoman. ‘Does any one ever make any money at all here to compensate for the savage life you seem to lead?’

‘Well, a few people do,’ replied Ernest, half amused, half annoyed. ‘If we had time to visit a little, not perhaps in this neighbourhood, I could show you places well kept and pretty enough, and people who would be voted fairly provided for even in England.’

‘I have seen none as yet,’ said Miss Neuchamp; ‘but I believe much of the prosperity in the large towns is unreal. I met a very pleasant, gentlemanlike man in Sydney, in fact one of the few gentlemen I did see there—a Mr. Croker, I think, was his name—who said it was all outside show, and that nobody had made any money in this colony, or ever would.’

‘Oh, Jermyn Croker,’ said Ernest, laughing; ‘you must not take him literally; he is a profound cynic, and must have been sent into the world expressly to counterbalance an equally pronounced optimist, myself for instance. That’s his line of humour, and very amusing it is—in its way.’

‘But does he not speak the truth?’ inquired the literal Augusta; ‘or is it not considered necessary in a colony?’

‘Of course he intends to do so, but like all men whose opinions are very strongly coloured by their individualism, which again is dominated by purely physical occurrences, such as bile, indigestion, and so on, he unconsciously takes a gloomy, depreciatory view of matters in general, which I, and perhaps others, think untrue and misleading.’

‘I believe in a right and a wrong about everything myself,’ said the young lady, ‘but I must say I feel inclined to agree with him so far.’

Ernest was on the point of asking her how she could possibly know, when the turrets of Rainbar appearing in sight, the conversation was diverted to that ‘hold’ and its surroundings, the danger of arriving in the midst of an altercation being thereby averted.

‘Allow me to welcome you to my poor home,’ said Mr. Neuchamp, driving up to the door of the cottage, and assisting her to alight. ‘I wish I had had notice of the honour of your visit, that we might have been suitably prepared.’

‘Stuff!’ said Miss Augusta. ‘Then you would have written to prevent me coming at all. I was determined to see how you were really getting on, and I never allow trifling discomforts to stand in the way of my resolves.’

‘I am aware of that, my dear Augusta,’ replied Mr. Neuchamp, with a slight mental shrug, in which he decided that the trifling discomforts alluded to occasionally involved others besides the heroine herself. ‘But can you do without a maid? I am afraid there is not a woman on the place.’

‘That’s a little awkward,’ confessed Miss Neuchamp. ‘I did not quite anticipate such a barrack-room state of matters. But is there none at the village, or whatever it is called, in the neighbourhood?’

‘I have a village on the run, I am sorry to say; but though we are at feud with the villagers, I did attempt to procure you a handmaid, and I will see what has been done.’

It was yet early in the day. Miss Neuchamp, being put into possession of the best bedroom, hastily arranged for her use and benefit, was told to consider herself as the sole occupant of the cottage for the present. Mr. Neuchamp in the meanwhile having ordered lunch, went over to the barracks to see if Mr. Banks had returned. He had been sent upon an embassy of great importance and diplomatic delicacy: no less, indeed, than to prevail upon Mrs. Abraham Freeman to permit her eldest daughter, Tottie, a girl of seventeen, to come to Rainbar during the period of Miss Neuchamp’s stay, to attend upon that lady as housemaid, lady’s maid, and general attendant. He was empowered to make any reasonable promises to provide the girl with everything she might want, short of a husband, but to bring her up if it could possibly be done. For, of course, Ernest was duly sensible of the extreme awkwardness that would result from the presence of Miss Neuchamp—albeit a near relative—as the sole representative of womanhood at such an essentially bachelor settlement as Rainbar.

Tottie Freeman, who had commenced to bloom in the comparatively desert air of Rainbar, was a damsel not altogether devoid of youthful charms. True, the unfriendly sun, the scorching blasts, together with the culpable disuse of veil or bonnet, had combined to embrown what ought to have been her complexion, and, worse again, to implant such a crop of freckles upon her face, neck, and arms, that she looked as if a bran-bag had been shaken over her naturally fair skin.

Now that we have said the worst of her, it must be admitted that her figure was very good, well developed, upright, and elastic. She could run as fast as any of her brothers, carrying a tolerable weight, and (when no one was looking) vault on her ambling mare, which she could ride with or without a saddle over range or river, logs, scrub, or reed-beds, just as well as they could. She could intimidate a half-wild cow with a roping pole, and milk her afterwards; drive a team on a pinch, and work all day in the hot sun. With all this there was nothing unfeminine or unpleasing to the eye in the bush maiden. Quite the contrary, indeed. She was a handsome young woman as regards features, form, and carriage. Cool and self-possessed, she was by no means as reckless of speech as many better educated persons of her sex; and though she liked a little flirtation—‘which most every girl expex’—there was not a word to be said to her detriment ‘up or down the river,’ which comprehended the whole of her social system.

Such was the damsel whom Charley Banks had been despatched to capture by force, fraud, or persuasion for the use and benefit of Miss Augusta Neuchamp. A less suitable ambassador might have been selected. Charley Banks was a very good-looking young fellow, and had always risked a little badinage when brought into contact with Miss Tottie and her family. War had been formally declared between the houses of Neuchamp and Freeman, yet Ernest, as was his custom, had always been unaffectedly polite and kindly to the women of the tribe, young and old.

Therefore Mrs. Freeman had no strong ill-feeling towards him, and Miss Tottie was extremely sorry that they never saw Mr. Neuchamp riding up to the door now, with a pleasant good-morrow, sometimes chatting for a quarter of an hour, when the old people were out of the way. When Charley Banks first asked Mrs. Freeman to let her daughter go as a great favour to Mr. Neuchamp, and afterwards inflamed Tottie’s curiosity by descriptions of the great wealth and high fashion of Miss Neuchamp (who had a dray-load of dresses, straight from London and Paris, coming up next week), he found the fort commencing to show signs of capitulation. At first Mrs. Freeman ‘couldn’t spare Tottie if it was ever so.’ Then Tottie ‘couldn’t think of going among a parcel of young fellows, and only one lady in the place.’ Then Mrs. Freeman ‘might be able to manage for a week or two, though what Abe would say when he came home and found his girl gone to Rainbar, she couldn’t say.’ Then Tottie ‘wouldn’t mind trying for a week or two.’ She supposed ‘nobody would run away with her, and it must be awfully lonely for the lady all by herself.’ Besides, ‘she hadn’t seen a soul lately, and was moped to death; perhaps a little change would do her good.’ So the ‘treaty of Rainbar,’ between the high contracting personages, resolved itself into this, that Tottie was to have ten shillings a week for a month’s service, if Miss Neuchamp stayed so long, was to obey all her lawful commands, and to make herself ‘generally useful.’

‘So if you’ll be kind enough to run in the mare, Mr. Banks—she’s down on the flat there, and not very flash, you may be sure—I’ll get my habit on, and mother will send up my things with Billy in the evening. Here’s my bridle.’

Having stated the case thus briefly, Miss Freeman retired into a remarkably small bedroom which she shared with two younger sisters and a baby-brother, to make the requisite change of raiment, while Charley Banks ran into the stockyard and caught the varmint, ambling black mare, which he knew very well by sight. As he led her up to the hut Miss Tottie came out, carrying her saddle in one hand and holding up her alpaca habit with the other. She promptly placed it upon the black mare’s back, buckled the girths, and touching the stirrup with her foot, gave a spring which seated her firmly in the saddle, and the black mare dashed off at an amble which was considerably faster than a medium trot.

‘What a brute that mare of yours is to amble, Tottie,’ said Mr. Banks, slightly out of breath; ‘can’t you make her go a more Christian pace? Come, let’s have a spin.’

‘All right,’ said the girl, going off at speed, and sitting down to her work, ‘but it must be a very short one; my mare is as weak as a cat, and I suppose your horse isn’t much better.’

‘He’s as strong as nothing to eat three times a day can make him. So pull up as soon as you like. I say, Tottie, I’m awfully glad you’ve come up this time to help us with our lady. It was firstrate of your mother to let you come. Fancy Miss Neuchamp coming up in the coach by herself from Sydney!’

‘Why shouldn’t she? I wish I had the chance of going down by myself—wouldn’t I take it—quick? But I say, Mr. Banks, what am I to do when I get there? I shall be so frightened of the lady. And I never was in service before.’

‘Oh, you must take it easy, you know,’ commenced Mr. Banks, in a very clear explanation-to-a-child sort of way. ‘Do everything she tells you, always say “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” and be a good girl all round. I’ve seen you look awfully good sometimes, Tottie, you know.‘

‘Oh, nonsense, Mr. Banks,’ said the nut-brown maid, blushing through her southern-tinted skin in a very visible manner. ‘I’m no more than others, I expect. What shall I have to do, though?’

‘Well, a good deal of nothing, I should say. You’ll sleep in the room I used to have, next to hers; for you’ll be in the cottage all by yourselves all night. You’ll have to sweep and dust, and wash for Miss Neuchamp, and wait at table. The rest of the time you’ll have to hang it out the best way you can. You mustn’t quarrel with old Johnnie, the cook, or else he’ll go away and leave us all in the bush. He’s a cross old ruffian, but he can cook.’

‘I wonder if it will be very dull—but it won’t be for long, will it, Mr. Banks?’

‘Dull? don’t think of it. Won’t there be me and Jack Windsor, and an odd traveller to talk to. Besides, Jack’s a great admirer of yours, isn’t he, Tottie?’

‘Not he,’ quoth the damsel, with decision; ‘there’s some girl down the country that he thinks no end of; besides, father and he don’t get on well,’ added Miss Tottie, with much demureness.

‘Oh, that don’t signify,’ said Mr. Banks authoritatively. ‘Jack’s a good fellow, and will be overseer here some day; you go in and cut down the other girl. He said you were the best-looking girl on the river last Sunday.’

‘Oh, you go on,’ said Tottie, playing with the bridle rein, and again making her mare run up to the top of her exceptional pace, so that further playful conversation by Mr. Banks was restricted by his lack of breath.

As they approached the Rainbar homestead Tottie slackened this aggravating pace (which resembles what Americans call ‘racking or pacing’—it is natural to many Australian horses, though of course capable of development by education), and in a somewhat awe-stricken tone inquired, ‘Is she a very grand lady, indeed, Mr. Banks?’

‘Well, she’ll be dressed plainly, of course,’ said Charley. ‘The dust’s enough to spoil anything above a gunnybag after all this dry weather. Her things are coming up, as I told you, but you never saw any one with half the breeding before. You were a little girl when you came here, Tottie; did you ever see a real lady in your life, now?’

‘I saw Mrs. Jones, of Yamboola, down the country,’ said Tottie doubtfully. ‘Father sent me up one day with some fresh butter.’

‘I wish he’d send you up with some now,’ said Charley, who hadn’t heard of butter or milk for six months. ‘Mrs. Jones is pretty well, but think of Miss Neuchamp’s pedigree. Her great-grandmother’s great-grandmother was a grand lady, and lived in a castle, and so on, for five hundred years back, and all the same for nearly a thousand. I saw it all in an old book of Mr. Neuchamp’s one day, about the history of their county.’

‘Lor!’ said Tottie, ‘how nice! Why, she must be like the imported filly we saw at Wargan Races last year. Oh, wasn’t she a real beauty? such legs! and such a sweet head on her!—I never saw the like of it!’

‘You’re a regular Currency lass, Tottie,’ laughed Mr. Banks; ‘always thinking about horses. Don’t you tell Miss Neuchamp that she’s very sweet about the head and has out-and-out legs: she mightn’t understand it. Here we are—jump down. I’ll put the mare in the paddock.’

Miss Neuchamp, having had time to finish luncheon, had walked out into the verandah with her cousin, when she was attracted by the trampling of horses, and looked forth in time to see her proposed handmaid sail up to the door at a pace which would have excited observation in Rotten Row.

Mr. Banks awaited her dismounting, knowing full well that she required no assistance. The active maiden swung herself sideways on the saddle and dropped to the ground as lightly as the ‘hounding beauty of Bessarabia,’ or any ordinary circus sawdust-treading celebrity. Lifting her habit, she advanced to the verandah with a curious mixture of shyness and self-possession. She successfully accomplished the traditional courtesy to Miss Neuchamp, and then shook hands cordially with Ernest, as she had been in the habit of doing. Miss Augusta put up her eyeglass at this, and regarded the ‘young person’ with a fixed and critical gaze.

‘I’m very much obliged to your mother for letting you come, Tottie, and I am very glad to see you at Rainbar,’ said Mr. Neuchamp. ‘If you go into the dining-room, you will find the lunch on the table; I daresay you will have an appetite after your ride. You can clear it away by and by, and Miss Neuchamp will tell you anything she wishes you to do. You will live in the cottage, and you must help old Johnny as well as you can, without quarrelling with him—you know his temper—or letting him bully you.’

Tottie was about to say, ‘I’m not afraid of the old tinker,’ but, remembering Mr. Banks’s advice, replied meekly, ‘Yes, sir; thank you, Mr. Neuchamp,’ and retired to her lunch and duties.

‘I suppose that is a sample of your peasantry,’ said Miss Neuchamp, with cold preciseness of tone. ‘Do you generally shake hands with your housemaids in the colonies? I suppose it must be looked for in a democracy.’

‘Well, Tottie Freeman isn’t exactly a peasant,’ explained Ernest mildly. ‘We haven’t any of the breed here. She is a farmer’s daughter, and her proud sire has or had an acreage that would make him a great man at fair and market in England. You will find her a good-tempered, honest girl, not afraid of work, as we say here, and as she is your only possible attendant, you must make the best of her.’

‘Is she to join us at table?’ inquired Miss Neuchamp, with the same fixed air of indifference. ‘Of course I only ask for information.’

‘She will fare as we do, but will take her refection after we have completed ours. She cannot very well be sent to the kitchen.’

‘Why not?’ demanded Miss Augusta.

‘For reasons which will be apparent to you, my dear Augusta, after your longer stay in Australia. But principally because there are only men there at present, and our old cook is not a suitable companion for a young girl.’

‘Very peculiar household arrangements,’ said Miss Neuchamp, ‘but I suppose I shall comprehend in time.’

[CHAPTER XXV]

Having communicated this sentiment in a tone which did not conduce to the lighter graces of conversation, Miss Neuchamp resumed her reading. Silence, the ominous oppressive silence of those who do not wish to speak, reigned unbroken for a while.

At length, lifting her head as if the thought had suddenly struck her, she said, ‘I cannot think why you did not buy a station nearer to town, where you might have lived in a comparatively civilised way.’

‘For the very sufficient reasons that there is never so much money to be made at comfortable, highly improved stations, and the areas of land are invariably smaller.’

‘Then you have come to regard money as everything? Is this the end of the burning philanthropy, and all that sort of thing?’

‘You are too quick in your conclusions, my dear Augusta,’ replied Mr. Neuchamp, somewhat hurt. ‘It is necessary, I find, to make some money to ensure the needful independence of position without which philanthropical or other projects can scarcely be carried out.’

‘I daresay you will end in becoming a mere colonist, and marrying a colonial girl, after all your fine ideas. I suppose there are some a shade more refined than this one.’

Mr. Neuchamp stood aghast—words failed him. Augusta went on quietly reading her book. She failed to perceive the avalanche which was gathering above her head.

‘My dear Augusta,’ he said at length, with studied calmness, ‘it is time that some of your misconceptions should be cleared away. Let me recall to you that you were only a few days in a hotel in Sydney before you started on your journey to this distant and comparatively rude district. If you had acted reasonably, and remained in Sydney to take advantage of introductions to my friends, you would have had some means of making comparisons after seeing Australian ladies. But with your present total ignorance of the premises, I wonder that a well-educated woman should be so illogical as to state a conclusion.’

‘Well, perhaps I am a little premature,’ conceded Miss Augusta, whose temper was much under command. ‘I suppose there is a wonderful young lady at the back of all this indignation. Mr. Croker said as much. I must wait and make her acquaintance. I wish you all sorts of happiness, Ernest. Now I must go and look after the other young lady.’

When Miss Neuchamp returned to the dining-room she perceived that the damsel whose social status was so difficult to define had finished her mid-day meal, and had also completed the clearing off and washing up of the various articles of the service. She had discovered for herself the small room used as a pantry, had ferreted out the requisite cloths and towels, and procured hot water from the irascible Johnny. She had extemporised a table in the passage, and was just placing the last of the articles on their allotted shelves with much deftness and celerity, when Miss Neuchamp entered. Her riding-skirt lay on a chair, and she had donned a neat print frock, which she had brought strapped to the saddle.

‘I was coming to give you instructions,’ said Miss Neuchamp, ‘but I see you have anticipated me by doing everything which I should have asked you to do, and very nicely too. What is your name?’

‘Mary Anne Freeman,’ said Tottie demurely.

‘I thought I heard Mr. Neuchamp address you by some other Christian name,’ said Miss Neuchamp, with slight severity of aspect.

‘Oh, Tottie,’ said the girl carelessly; ‘every one calls me Tottie, or Tot; suppose it’s for shortness.’

‘I shall call you Mary Anne,’ said Miss Neuchamp with quiet decision; ‘and now, Mary Anne, are you accustomed to the use of the needle? do you like sewing?’

‘Well, I don’t like it,’ she replied ingenuously, ‘but of course I can sew a little; we have to make our own frocks and the children’s things at home.’

‘Very proper and necessary,’ affirmed Augusta; ‘if we can get the material I will superintend your making a couple of dresses for yourself, which perhaps you will think an improvement in pattern on the one you wear.’

‘Oh, I should so like to have a new pattern,’ said Tottie, with feminine satisfaction. ‘There’s plenty of nice prints in the store; I’ll speak to Mr. Banks about it, mem.’

‘I will arrange that part of it,’ said Miss Neuchamp. ‘In the meanwhile I’ll point out your bedroom, which you can put in order as well as mine for the night.’

After the first day or two Miss Neuchamp, though occasionally shocked at the Australian girl’s ignorance of that portion of the Church Catechism which exhorts people to behave ‘lowly and reverently to all their betters,’ was pleased with the intelligence and artless good-humour of her attendant. She was sufficiently acute to discriminate between the genuine respect which the girl exhibited to her, ‘a real lady,’ and the mere lip service and servility too often yielded by the English poor, from direct compulsion of grinding poverty and sore need. She discovered that Tottie was quick and teachable in the matter of needlework, so that, having been stimulated by the alluring expectation of ‘patterns,’ she worked readily and creditably.

For a few days Miss Neuchamp managed to employ and interest herself not altogether unpleasantly. Ernest, of course, betook himself off to some manner of station work immediately after breakfast, returning, if possible, to lunch. This interval Miss Neuchamp filled up in great measure by means of her correspondence, which was voluminous and various of direction, ranging from her Aunt Ermengarde, a conscientious but ruthless conservative, to philosophical acquaintances whom she had met in her travels, and who, like her, had much ado to fill up those leisure hours of which their lives were chiefly composed. This portion of the day also witnessed Tottie’s most arduous labours, to which she addressed herself with great zeal and got through her work, as she termed it, so as to attire herself becomingly and wait at table.

In the afternoon Ernest went out for walking excursions to such points of interest, neither many nor picturesque, as the neighbourhood supplied. There was a certain ‘bend’ or curving reach of the river where, from a lofty bluff, the red walls of which the rushing tide had channelled for ages, a striking and uncommon view was obtained. The vast plain, here diversified by the giant eucalypti which fringed the winding watercourse, stretched limitless to the horizon. But all was apparently barren from Dan to Beersheba. The reed-beds were trampled and eaten down to the last cane. The soft rich alluvium in which they grew was cracked, yet hard as a brickfield. How different from the swaying emerald billows with feathered tasselled crests which other summers had seen there! Something of this sort had Ernest endeavoured to explain to Miss Neuchamp when she spoke disrespectfully of the trodden cloddy waste, contrasting it scornfully with the velvet meads which bordered English rivers. But Augusta, defective in imagination, never believed in anything she did not see. Therefore a reed-bed appeared to her mental vision till the day of her death always as a species of abnormal dismal swamp, lacking the traditional element of moisture.

Other explorations were made in the cool hours of the evening, but gradually Miss Neuchamp tired of the monotonous aspect of matters. The dusty tracts were not pleasant to her feet. The mosquitoes assailed her with savage virulence, whether she walked at sunrise, mid-day, or darkening eve. If she sat down on the river bank and watched the shallow but still pure and gleaming waters, ants of every conceivable degree of curiosity or ferocity discomposed her. There was no rest, no variety, no beauty, no ‘proper’ wood, valley, mountain, or brook. She could not imagine human beings living constantly in such a hateful wilderness. If Ernest had not all his life, and now most of all, developed a talent for useless and incomprehensible self-sacrifice, he would abandon such a spot for ever.

Mr. Neuchamp felt himself pressed to his last entrenchments to defend his position; Fate seemed to have arrived personally, masked, not for the first time in man’s strange story, in the guise of a woman. That woman, too, his persistent, inexorable cousin Augusta. ‘The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.’ The heavens,—dead to the dumb, imploring looks of the great armies of perishing brutes, to the prayers of ruined men; the earth, with withered herb and drying streamlet gasping and faint, breathless, under the burning noon and the pitiless dry moon rays,—alike conspired against him!

And now his cousin, who, with all her faults and defects, was stanchly devoted to her kindred and what she believed to be their welfare, came here to madden him with recollections of the wonderland of his birth, and to fill him with ignoble longings to purchase present relief by the ruinous sacrifice of purpose and principle.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, at the end of a closely contested argument, ‘whether all women are incapable of comprehending the adherence to a fixed purpose, to the unquestioned end and climax. But you must forgive me, my dear Augusta, for saying that you appear to me to be in the position of a passenger who urges the captain of a vessel to alter his course because the gale is wild and the waves rough. Suppose you had made a suggestion to the captain of the Rohilla, in which noble steamer you made your memorable voyage to these hapless isles. The officers of the great company are polished gentlemen as well as seamen of the first order, but I am afraid Gordon Anderson would have been more curt than explanatory on that occasion.’

‘And you are like the man in Sinbad the Sailor, as you like marine similes,’ retorted Augusta; ‘you will see your vessel gradually drawn toward the loadstone island till all the nails and rivets fly out by attraction of ruin, and you will sink in the waters of oblivion, unhonoured and unsung.’

‘But not “unloved,” I trust,‘ rejoined Ernest; ‘don’t think that matters, even in Australia, will be quite so bad as that. By the way, let me congratulate you upon your facility of quotation. Your memory must have improved amazingly of late.’

This unfair taunt closed the conversation abruptly. But like some squabbles between very near and dear friends, there was a tacit agreement not to refer to it. Subsequently all went on as usual.

Miss Neuchamp was a very fair horsewoman, having hunted without coming very signally to grief, by dint of a wonderfully broken hunter, who was first cousin to a rocking-horse—after this wise: he would on no account run away; he was easy, he was safe; you could not throw him down over any species of leap,—hedge, ditch, brook, or bulfinch. It was all alike to Negotiator. After a couple of seasons and the aid of this accomplished palfrey, Miss Neuchamp, with some reason, came to the conclusion that she could ride fairly well. So, having broached the idea at breakfast one morning, Ernest joyfully suggested Osmund as the type of ease and elegance, and of such a nerve that an organ and monkey might, were the consideration sufficient, be placed on his short back to-morrow without risk of casualty.

Miss Neuchamp thought that she should like to ride down and visit the Freeman encampment, when Tottie, who would of course attend her, might have the opportunity of seeing her mother and other kinsfolk.

The side-saddle was the next difficulty; but Tottie proffered hers at once, saying that she could ride in a man’s saddle, which she could borrow from Mr. Banks.

‘But you cannot ride in a man’s saddle, Mary Anne; at any rate with me,’ said Miss Neuchamp decisively, while a maidenly blush overspread her features.

‘Why not?’ inquired Tottie, with much surprise. ‘I can ride in one just as well as the other. You have only to throw the off-side stirrup over the pommel, sit square and straight, and there you are. You didn’t think I was going to ride boy-fashion, did you?’

‘I was not sure,’ conceded Miss Neuchamp. However, your explanation has satisfied me. If you like, we will ride down to your father’s place this afternoon.‘

So Osmund being brought round, and Tottie’s side-saddle upon him placed, that temperate charger walked off with Miss Neuchamp as if he had carried a ‘pretty horsebreaker’ up Rotten Row before the eyes of an envious aristocracy, while Tottie disposed herself upon a station saddle and ambled off so erect and free of seat that few could have known that she was crutchless and self-balanced. Mr. Windsor followed at a respectful distance, in case of any contretemps requiring a groom’s assistance.

Miss Neuchamp was perhaps never more favourably impressed with the South Land, in which she was sojourning, than when she felt herself borne along by Osmund, a hackney of rare excellence—free, elastic, safe, fast, easy! How many horses of whom so much can be said does one come across in a lifetime?

‘This seems to be an exceedingly nice horse of my cousin’s,’ said she to Tottie. ‘I had no idea that such riding horses could be found in the interior. He must have been very carefully trained.’

‘He’s a plum, that’s what he is!’ affirmed Tottie with decision. ‘He’s the best horse in these parts, by long chalks. Mr. Neuchamp let me have a spirt on him one day. My word! didn’t I put him along?’

‘I am surprised that he should have let you ride him,’ replied Miss Neuchamp with dignity; ‘but my cousin is very eccentric, and does not, in my opinion, always keep his proper position.’

‘I don’t know about his proper position,’ said Tottie with great spirit, ‘but before our people had the row with him—and that was Uncle Joe’s fault—there was no one within fifty mile of Rainbar that wouldn’t have gone on their knees to serve Mr. Neuchamp. As a gentleman he can’t be beat; and many a one besides me thinks that.’

‘Oh well, if you have that sort of respectful feeling towards my cousin, Mary Anne, I have nothing to say,’ said Miss Augusta. ‘No one can possibly have better intentions, and I am glad to see them so well appreciated, even in the bush. Suppose we canter.’

She drew the curb rein as she spoke, and Osmund sailed off at a long, bounding, deerlike canter over the smooth dusty track, which convinced Miss Neuchamp that she had not left all the good horses in England. The scant provender had impaired his personal appearance, but had not deprived him of that courage which he would retain as long as he possessed strength to stand on his legs.

‘I have not enjoyed a ride like this for many a day,’ she said with unusual heartiness. ‘This is a very comfortable saddle of yours, though I miss the third pommel. How do you manage, Mary Anne, to ride so squarely and easily upon that uncomfortable saddle?’

‘I’ve ridden many a mile without a saddle at all—that is, with nothing but an old gunny-bag to sit on,’ said Tottie, ‘and jumped over logs too. Of course I was a kid then.’

‘A what?’ said Miss Neuchamp anxiously.

‘Oh, a little child,’ explained Tottie. ‘I often used to go out at daylight to fetch in the cows and the working bullocks when we lived down the country. Bitter cold it was, too, in the winter; such hard frosts.’

‘Frosts?’ asked Miss Augusta. ‘Do you ever have frosts? Why, I supposed they were unknown here.’

‘You don’t suppose the whole country is like this, miss?’ said Tottie. ‘Why, near the mountains there’s snow and ice, and it rains every winter, and the floods are enough to drownd you.’

‘Are there floods too? It does not look as if they could ever come.’

‘Do you see that hut, miss? That’s our place. I heard Piambook, the black boy, tell father it would be swep’ away some day. Father laughed at him.‘

Here they arrived at the abode of Freeman père, at which Miss Neuchamp gazed with much curiosity.

In the language of architecture, the construction had been but little decorated. A plain and roughly-built abode, composed of round saplings nailed vertically to the wall-plate, and plastered insufficiently with mud. The roof was thatched with reeds, put on in a very ineffectual and chance-medley manner. The hut or cottage contained two large and three small rooms. There was no garden whatever, or any attempt at the cultivation of the baked and hopelessly-looking clay soil. Close to the side of the house was a stockyard, comprising the ‘gallows’ of the colonists, a rough, rude contrivance, consisting of two uprights and a crosspiece, for elevating slaughtered cattle. Upon this structure was at present hanging the carcass of a fine six-months-old calf. No other enclosure was visible, the only attempt at the preservation of neatness being the sweeping of the earth immediately around the front and back doors.

Tottie immediately clattered up to the hut door, the black mare putting her head so far in that she obstructed the egress of a middle-aged woman, who made haste to come forth and receive the guests.

‘Mother,’ said the girl, ‘here’s Miss Neuchamp come to see you; bring a chair for her to get off by.’

This article of furniture having been supplied, Augusta was fain to descend upon it with as much dignity as she could manage, not being confident of her ability to drop down, like the agile Tottie, from a tallish horse, as was Osmund. Tottie, having given the horses in charge of a small brown-faced brother, who spent his whole time in considering Osmund, and apparently learning him by heart, welcomed Miss Neuchamp into her home. That young lady found herself for the first time under the roof of an Australian free-selector, and felt that she had acquired a new experience.

‘Come in, miss; I’m very glad to see you, I’m sure; please to sit down,’ was the salutation Augusta received, in tones that spoke a hearty welcome, in very pure unaccented English.

Miss Neuchamp selected the most ‘reliable’ looking of the wooden-seated American chairs, and depositing herself thereon, looked around. The dwelling was, she thought, more prepossessing than the outside had led her to imagine. Though everything was plain to ugliness, there was yet nothing squalid or repulsive. All things were very clean. The room in which they sat was evidently only used as a parlour or ‘living room.’ It was fairly large and commodious. The earthen floor was hard, even, and well swept. A large table occupied the centre. The fireplace was wide and capacious, the mantelpiece so high that it was not easy to reach. There was a wooden sofa covered with faded chintz, and an American clock. Half a dozen cheap chairs, a shelf well filled with indifferently bound books, a few unframed woodcuts hung upon the walls, made up the furniture and ornamentation. Opening from this apartment laterally was evidently a bedroom. At the back a skilling, a lower roofed portion of the building, contained several smaller rooms. A detached two-roomed building, in what would have been the back-yard had any enclosure been made, was probably the kitchen and laundry.

Mrs. Freeman insisted upon putting down the kettle to boil, in order that she might make a cup of tea for her distinguished visitor, evidently under the opinion that every one naturally desired to drink tea whenever they could get it.

‘And how have you been behaving yourself, Tottie?’ said she, addressing her daughter, as a convenient mode of opening the conversation. ‘I hope and trust you’ve been a help to Miss Neuchamp. Has she, miss?’

‘Oh, certainly,’ answered Augusta; ‘Mary Anne has been a very good girl indeed. I don’t know how I should get on without her. And I have borrowed her side-saddle too. How long will it be before Mr. Freeman comes home?’

‘Oh, he won’t be home much before dark. He’s always out on the run all day long. He hates coming in before the day is done.’

‘Why is that, Mrs. Freeman?’

‘“Because,” he says, “what can a man do after his day’s work but sit down and twirl his thumbs.” He haven’t got any garden here to fiddle about in, and he can’t sit still and smoke, like some people.‘

‘But why don’t you have a garden?’ promptly inquired Augusta. ‘I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have one?’

‘You see, miss,’ said Mrs. Freeman, casting about for a mode of explaining to her young lady visitor that she didn’t know what she was talking about, ‘the ground ain’t very good just here; and though it’s so dry and baked just now, they say the floods come all over it; and perhaps we mightn’t be here altogether that long. And Freeman, he’s had a deal of trouble with the stock lately. I don’t say but what a garden would look pretty enough; but who’s to work in it? It ain’t like our place down the country. There we had a garden—lots of peaches and grapes, and more plums, apples, and quinces than we could use and give away, besides early potatoes and all kinds of vegetables.’

‘I suppose you regretted leaving such a home,’ said Miss Neuchamp, rather impressed by the hothouse profusion of the fruits mentioned.

‘Well, I’d rather live there on a pound a week,’ said Mrs. Freeman, ‘than here on riches. Freeman thought the stock would make up for all, but I didn’t, and I’m always sorry for the day we ever left the old farm.’

As the good woman spoke the tears stood in her eyes, and Miss Neuchamp much marvelled that any spot in the desolate region of Australia should have power to attract the affection even of hard-worked, unrelieved Mrs. Freeman.

‘Mother’s always fretting about that old place at Bowning,’ said Tottie. ‘I don’t believe it was any great things either. It was a deal colder than this, and we had lots of milk and butter always; but bread and butter’s not worth caring about.’

‘You don’t recollect it, Tottie,’ said her mother, ‘or you would not talk in that way. Don’t you remember going into the garden to pick the peaches? How cool and shady it was in the mornings, to be sure, without scores of mosquitoes to sting and eat us up! Then there was always grass enough for the cows, and we had plenty of milk and butter and cheese, except, perhaps, in the dead of winter. It was better for all of us in other ways too, and that’s more.’

‘I don’t see that, mother,’ said Tottie.

‘But I do,’ said Mrs. Freeman, ‘and more than me knows it. There’s your father isn’t the same man, without his regular work at the farm, and the carrying and the other jobs, that used to fill up his time from daylight to dark. Now he’s nothing but the cattle to look after; and such weather as this there’s nothing to do from month’s end to month’s end, unless to pull them out of the waterholes. And I know he had a “burst” at that wretched Stockman’s Arms the last time he was down the river. He that was that sober before you could not tell him from a Son of Temperance.‘

‘I feel sorry that you should have so much reason to complain of your lot,’ said Miss Neuchamp. ‘The poor, I am aware, are never contented, at least none that I ever saw in England. Yet it seems a pity, indeed, that want of patience and trust in Providence should have led to your moving to this unsuitable and, I am afraid, ill-fated locality.’

‘We’re not altogether so poor, miss,’ said the worthy matron, recovering herself. ‘Abe will have over five hundred pounds in the bank when he’s delivered up the land and the stock to this Mr. Levison, that’s bought us all out. But what’s a little money, one way or the other, if your life’s miserable, and your husband takes to idle ways and worse, and your children grow up duffers and planters, and perhaps end in sticking up people?’

‘Oh, mother, shut up!’ ejaculated Tottie, with more kindliness in her tone than the words would have indicated. ‘Things won’t be as had as that. Don’t I teach Poll and Sally and Ned and Billy? Besides, what does Miss Neuchamp know about duffing and sticking up? We’ll be all right when we clear out next year, and you can go back to Bowning and buy Book’s farm, and set father splitting stringy-bark rails for the rest of his life, if that’s what keeps him good. I expect the tea is ready. Won’t you give Miss Neuchamp a cup?’

Mrs. Freeman made haste to fill up a cup of tea, and a small jug of milk being produced, Miss Augusta found herself in possession of the best cup of tea she had tasted at Rainbar. She felt a sincere compassion for her hostess as a woman of properly submissive turn of mind, who had sense enough to regret her improper and irreligious departure from the lowly state in which Providence had placed her.

Promising to call again, and comforting the low-spirited matron as far as in her lay, she remounted Osmund with some difficulty by means of the chair, and rode homewards, followed by Mr. Windsor, who had solaced his leisure by extracting from the younger girls, whom he had descried fishing, the latest news of the cattle operations of the family generally.

‘Your mother seems to be very much of my opinion, Mary Anne,’ said Miss Augusta as soon as they were fairly on the sandy home-station track, ‘that this is a most undesirable place to live in.’

‘Mother’s as good a woman as ever was,’ said Tottie, ‘but she don’t “savey.” She’s always fretting about our old farm; and it certainly was cooler—that’s about all the pull there was in it. Father’s made more money here in two or three years than he’d have got together in twenty there. I should have been hoeing corn all day with a pair of thick boots on, and grown up as wild as a scrub filly. I don’t want to go back.‘

‘Your mother seems a person of excellent sense, Mary Anne, and I must say that I fully agree with her,’ said Miss Neuchamp, with her most unbending expression, designed to modify her attendant’s lightness of tone. ‘Depend upon it, unhappiness and misfortune invariably follow the attempt to quit an allotted station in life.’

‘Oh, that be hanged for a yarn! Oh, I beg your pardon, miss,’ said Tottie confusedly, for she was on the point of relapsing into the Rainbar vernacular. ‘But surely every one ain’t bound to stop where they’re planted, good soil or bad, water or no water, like a corn-seed in a cow track or a pumpkin in a tree stump! Men and women have it in ’em to forage about a bit, else how do some people get on so wonderfully. I’ve read about self-help, and all that, and heaps of people beginning with half-a-crown and making fortunes. Ought they to have thrown the half-crown away or the fortune after they had made it?’

‘No doubt some people are apparently favoured,’ said Miss Augusta, regarding Tottie’s argument as another result of the over-education of ‘these sort of persons.’ ‘In the end it is often the worst thing that can befall them. Now let us canter.‘

When Augusta Neuchamp had remained for a fortnight at Rainbar she began to perceive that the monotonous existence likely to be unreasonably prolonged would serve no object either of pleasure or profit. No amount of residence would teach her an iota more of the nature of such an establishment as Rainbar than she knew already. What was there to learn? The plains within sight of the cottage needed but to be indefinitely multiplied; and what then? An area of country equally arid, barren, unspeakably desolate. Other droves and herds of cattle equally emaciated. Nothing possibly could be in her eyes more hopeless and horrible than these endless death-stricken, famine-haunted wastes. Why did Ernest stay here? She had tried her utmost to induce him to abandon the whole miserable delusion, quoting the arguments of Mr. Jermyn Croker until he spoke angrily about that gentleman and closed the debate.

The obvious thing to do was to return to Sydney, but even this comparatively simple step was difficult to carry out. Miss Neuchamp did not desire again to tempt the perils of the road unattended. She had taken it for granted that Ernest, the most complying and good-natured of men ordinarily, would return to Sydney with her; and she had trusted to the influence of civilisation and her steady persuasion to prevail upon him to return to England to his friends, and to what she deemed to be his fixed and unalterable position in life.

On this occasion she met with unexpected opposition. Ernest positively declined to quit his station at present.

‘My dear Augusta,’ said he, ‘you do not know what you are asking. I have a number of very important duties to perform here. My financial state is an extremely critical one. I cannot with any decency appear in Sydney when everything points to the ruin of myself and my whole order. I am sincerely sorry that you should feel life here to be so extremely ennuyant, but I should never, if consulted, have advised you to come; and now I am afraid you must wait until a proper escort turns up or until I can accompany you.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘When the rain comes, certainly not before.’

Miss Augusta said that this last contingency was as probable as the near advent of the millennium. She would wait a given time, and, that expired, would go down to Sydney as she had come up by herself.

A fortnight, even three weeks, passed away. Augusta had mentioned a month as the outside limit of her forbearance. She read over and over ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’ and ‘Mariana in the South’ with quite a new appreciation of their peculiar accuracy as well as poetic sentiment.

Daily she worked and read, and walked and rode, and alternately was hopeful or otherwise about the ultimate conversion of Tottie to the true faith of proper English village lowliness and reverence. Daily Ernest went forth ‘out on the run’ immediately after breakfast, reappearing only at or after sunset. Insensibly Miss Neuchamp became alarmed to find creeping over her a kind of provincial interest in the affairs of the ‘burghers of this desert city.’ She listened almost with excitement to the account of a lot of the new cattle having been followed twenty miles over the boundary and recovered by Charley Banks. She heard of a bushranger being captured about fifty miles off—this was Jack Windsor’s story; of the mail coming in twelve hours late in consequence of the horses being exhausted. Ernest gathered this from the overseer of the last lot of travelling sheep that passed through, having been locked up in Wargan Gaol for disobeying a summons. ‘Such a handsome young fellow, miss.’ This was Tottie’s contribution.

What with the reading, the sewing, the teaching of Tottie, the daily cousinly walks and talks, the hitherto uncompromising Augusta became partially converted to station life, and finally admitted in conversation with Ernest that, other things being equal, she could imagine a woman enduring such privation for a few years, always assuming that she had the companionship of the one man to whom alone she could freely devote every waking thought, every pulsation of the heart.

‘Do you think there’s any man born, miss,’ inquired Tottie, who was laying the cloth for dinner, but who stopped deliberately and listened with qualified approval to the sentence with which Miss Neuchamp concluded her statement—‘any man born—except in a book—like that? I don’t. They most of ’em seem to me to take it very easy, smoking and riding about, and drinking at odd times. It’s the women that all the real pull comes on.’

‘I was not addressing myself to you, Mary Anne,’ replied Miss Augusta with dignity; ‘I was speaking to Mr. Neuchamp only. I should hardly think your experience entitled you to offer an opinion.’

‘H—m,’ said Tottie, proceeding with the plates. ‘I’m young, and I suppose I don’t know much. But I hear what’s going on. Don’t you think I’d better go down to Sydney, to take care of you on the road, miss, in case there’s a Chinaman to knock over? I think I could do that, if I was drove to it.’

On the next day an unusual occurrence took place in that land where events and novelties seemed to have perished like the grass, under the slow calcining of the deadly season—a dray arrived from town.

Miss Neuchamp, in her sore need of change and occupation, could have cheerfully witnessed the unpacking of ordinary station stores, in which, as usual, a little drapery would be comprised. But here again disappointment. It was merely a load of flour.

Depressed and discouraged, Miss Neuchamp had condescended to watch the unloading of the unromantic freight, deriving a faint interest in noting with what apparent ease Jack Windsor and Charley Banks placed the heavy bags upon their shoulders and deposited them in the store.

Rarely was Miss Augusta so lowered in spirit as not to be able to talk. On this occasion she had informed Tottie, with some relish, that English country girls were much ruddier and more healthy looking, as well as, she doubted not, stronger and more capable of endurance, than those born in Australia could possibly be.

‘Why so?’ inquired Tottie with animation.

‘Why?’ said Miss Neuchamp with asperity; ‘because of the cool, beautiful climate they live in, the regular, wholesome labour they are born to, the superiority of the whole land and people to this dull, deceitful country, all sand and sun-glare.’

‘Well, I can’t say, miss,’ replied Tottie, plotting a surprise, with characteristic coolness, ‘about English girls’ looks, because I’ve hardly ever seen any; but as for health, I’ve a middling appetite, I never was a day ill since I was born, and as to being strong—look here.‘

Before the horrified Augusta could forbid her rapid motion, she bounded over to the dray, from which Mr. Windsor had just borne his two hundred pounds of farina. She placed her back beneath the lessening load, and stretching her arms upward in the way proper to grasp the tied corner of the bag, said imperiously, ‘Here, Mr. Carrier, just you lower that bag steady; I want to show the English lady what a Currency girl can walk away with.’

The tall sunburned driver entered into the joke, and winking at Charley Banks, who stood by laughing, he placed the heavy bag fairly and square upon Tottie’s plump shoulders. Miss Neuchamp’s gaze was riveted upon the erratic ‘help’ as if she had been about to commit suicide.

‘Oh! don’t—don’t,’ she gasped; ‘are you mad, Mary Anne? You will break your back, or cripple yourself for life. Mr. Banks, pray interfere! I am sure my cousin will be angry—pray stop her!’

Charley Banks was not afraid that anything dreadful would happen. He had seen the bush girls perform feats of strength and activity ere now which proved to him that very little cause for apprehension existed in the present case.

And there was not much time. For one moment the girl stood, with her arms raised above her head, her figure, in its natural and classic grace, proving the unspeakable advantage of the free, open-air life, with fullest liberty for varied exercise, which she had had from her birth. The next she had moved forward with firm, elastic tread, under a load which a city man out of training would have found no joke, and, walking into the store, permitted it to fall accurately beside the others which had been shot from the backs of Jack Windsor and Mr. Banks into their appointed corner.

There was a slight cheer, and an exclamation of, ‘Well done, Tottie,’ as she returned with a heightened colour and half-triumphant, half-confused air to Miss Neuchamp, who, relieved at her safe return from the dangerous feat, did not administer so severe a rebuke as might have been expected.

‘You may be thankful, Mary Anne, if you do not hereafter discover that this day’s folly has laid the foundation of lifelong ill-health. But come into the house, child. You have some colour for once. Let me see no more pranks of this sort again, while I am here.’

‘Lor, miss,’ said Tottie, ‘that’s not the first bag of flour I’ve carried. And father says there was a girl he knew at the Hawkesbury that took one—and him a-top of it—around her father’s barn. He was only a boy then.’

‘I think you may lay the tea, Mary Anne,’ said Miss Neuchamp, not requiring any more Hawkesbury anecdotes. ‘I feel unusually fatigued to-day.’