Chapter XXX (2)

Did not Mr. Selmore propose the health of the bride and bridegroom with such pathetic eloquence that the uninstructed were doubtful as to whether he was Antonia’s uncle or Mr. Neuchamp’s father? He referred to the mingled energy, foresight, acuteness, and originality displayed by his valued, and, he might add, distinguished friend Ernest Neuchamp. By utilising qualities of the highest order, joined with information always yielded, he was proud to say, by himself and other pioneers, he had achieved an unequalled, but, he must add, a most deserved success, which placed him in the front rank of the pastoral proprietors of New South Wales.

Any one would have imagined from Mr. Hartley Selmore’s benevolent flow of eulogy that he had carefully nursed the infancy of Mr. Neuchamp’s fortunes instead of ruthlessly endeavouring to strangle the tender nursling. He himself, by means of luck and much discount, had managed to hang on, ostensible proprietor of his numerous stations, until the tide turned. Now he was a wealthy man, and needed not to call the governor of the Bank of England his cousin.

With prosperity his character and estimation had much improved. There were those yet who said he was an unprincipled remorseless old humbug, and would none of him. But in a general way he was acceptable; popular, in private and in public. His natural talents were great; his acquirements above the average; his manner irresistible; it was no one’s particular interest or business to bring him to book,—so he dined and played billiards at the clubs, buttonholed officials, and greeted illustrious strangers, as if the greater portion of the pastoral interior of Australia belonged to him, or as though he were one of the Conscript Fathers, distinguished for an excess of Roman virtues, of this rising nation.

Mr. Parklands indeed desired to throw some missile at him for his ‘cheek,’ as he confided to a young lady with sensational blue eyes, but desisted from that practical criticism upon being implored by his fair neighbour not to think of it, for her sake, and that of the ladies generally. The speaker was pretty enough to speak with authority, and so Hartley, like other fortunate conspirators and oppressors, departed in triumph, with the plaudits and congratulations of the unthinking public. For the rest, the affair went off much as such society fireworks do. Augusta Neuchamp, in a Paris dress, looked so extremely well that Jermyn Croker congratulated himself warmly, and mingled such vitriolic scintillations with his pleasantries, that every one was awed into admiration. The mail steamer was to sail in a few days, and he flattered himself that he had contrived a surprise for all his friends, which should contain an element of ignoring contempt so complete in conception and execution, that his departure from the colony should faithfully reflect the opinions and convictions formed during his residence in it.

Having, after considerable hesitation, finally determined to enter upon the frightfully uncertain adventure of matrimony, he had offered himself and heart, such as it was, in marriage to Miss Augusta, with many apologies for the apparent necessity of the ceremony being performed in a colony. That young lady had endeared herself to Mr. Croker by her unsparing criticisms, by her ceaseless discontent with all things Australian, by her unmistakable air of _ton_ and distinction. He did not entirely overlook her possession of a moderate but assured income.

With his customary disregard for the feelings of others, he had insisted upon being married, without the usual time-honoured ceremonies and concomitants, on the morning upon which the mail steamer started for Europe. By going on board directly afterwards, the Sydney people would be precluded from hearing of the event until after their departure; while their fellow-passengers, most of them strangers, would be ignorant as to whether the newly-married couple were of a week’s date or of six months.

This arrangement, in which he had no great difficulty in persuading Miss Augusta to acquiesce, would have excellently answered Mr. Croker’s unselfish expectations but for one circumstance, which he doubtless noted to the debit of colonial wrongs and shortcomings—he had neglected to procure the co-operation of the elements.

No sooner had the ceremony, unwitnessed save by Paul Frankston and Mr. and Mrs. Neuchamp, taken place, and the happy pair been transferred to the _Nubia_, their luggage having been safely deposited in that magnificent ocean steamer days before,—no sooner had the great steamer neared the limit of the harbour, when a southerly gale, an absolute hurricane, broke upon the coast with such almost unprecedented fury that till it abated no sane commander of the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s service would have dreamed of quitting safe anchorage.

For three days the ‘tempest howled and wailed,’ and most uncomfortably the _Nubia_ lay at anchor, safe but most uneasy, and, as she was rather crank, rolling and pitching nearly as wildly as she could have done in the open sea.

It so chanced that one of Mr. Croker’s few weak points was an extraordinarily extreme susceptibility to _mal de mer_. On all occasions upon which he had cleared the Heads, for years past, he had suffered terribly. But never since his first outward-bound experience in early life had he suffered torments, prostration, akin to this. He lay in his cabin death-like, despairing, well-nigh in collapse.

Miss Neuchamp, in spite of her much travelling, was always a martyr during the first week of a voyage, if the weather chanced to be bad. Now it certainly was bad, very bad; and in consequence Miss Augusta lay, under the charge of a stewardess, in a stern cabin, well-nigh sick unto death, heedless of life and its chequered presentments, and as oblivious, not to say indifferent, to the fate of Jermyn Croker as if she had yesterday sworn to love and obey the chief officer of the _Nubia_.

This was temporary anguish, mordant and keen, doubtless. But Time, the healer, would certainly in a few days have set it straight. The fact of an unknown lady and gentleman being indisposed at the commencement of the voyage afflicts nobody. But here was apparently the finger of the fiend. A ruffianly pilot, coming off in his hardy yawl, brought on board a copy of the _Sydney Morning Herald_ of the day following their attempted departure, in which it was duly set forth how, at St. James’s Church, by Canon Druid, Jermyn, second son of Crusty Croker, Esq., of Crankleye Hall, Cornwall, was then and there married to Augusta, only daughter of the Rev. Cyril Neuchamp, incumbent of Neuchamp-Barton, Buckinghamshire, England. Now the joke was out. Even under such unpromising circumstances it told. Here were two mortals, passionately devoted of course, and in that state of matrimonial experience when all things tend to the wildest overrating, so cast down, so utterly prostrated by the foul Sea Demon, that they positively did not care a rush for each other. The great Jermyn lay, faintly ejaculating ‘Steward, Ste-w-a-ar-d,’ at intervals, and making neither lament nor inquiry about his similarly suffering bride. As for Augusta, she had scarce more strength of body or mind than permitted her to moan out, ‘I shall die, I shall die’; and apparently, for all she cared, in that unreal, phantasmal, pseudo-existence, which only was not death, though more dreadful, Jermyn Croker might have fallen overboard, or have been changed into a Seedee stoker. Then for this to happen to Jermyn Croker, of all people! The humour of the situation was inexhaustible!

And though the fierce south wind departed and the _Nubia_ drove swiftly majestic across the long seas that part Cape Otway from the stormy Leuwin, though in due time the spice-laden gales blew ‘soft from Ceylon’s isle,’ and the savage peaks of Aden, the lofty summit of the Djebel Moussa rose to view in the grand succession of historical landscapes; yet to the last day of the voyage a stray question in reference to the precise effects of very bad cases of sea-sickness would be directed, as to persons of proved knowledge and experience, to Mr. and Mrs. Jermyn Croker, by their fellow-passengers.

It is due to Mr. Croker, as a person of importance, to touch lightly upon his after-career. His wife discovered too late that in reaching England he had only changed the theme upon which his universal depreciations were composed. ‘Non animam sed cœlum mutant qui trans mare currunt.’ He abused the climate and the people of England with a savage freedom only paralleled by his Australian practice. Becoming tired of receiving 3 or 4 per cent for his money, he one day, in a fit of wrath, embarked one-half of his capital in a somewhat uncertain South American loan. His cash was absorbed, to reappear spasmodically in the shape of interest, of which there was little, while of principal it soon became apparent that there would be none.

Reduced to the practice of marked though not distressing economy, Mr. Croker enjoyed the peculiar pleasure which is yielded to men of his disposition, of witnessing the possession of luxuries by others and a style of living which they are debarred from emulating. He was gladdened, too, by the occasional vision of an Australian with more money than he could spend, who rallied him upon his grave air, and bluntly asked why he was such a confounded fool as to sell out just as prices were really rising. Finally, to aggravate his sufferings, long unendurable by his own account, Mr. Parklands had the effrontery to come home, and, in the very neighbourhood where he, Croker, was living for economy, to buy a large estate which happened to be for sale.

The unfailing flow of the new proprietor’s high spirits, his liberal ways, and frank manners, combined with exceptional straight going in the hunting-field, rendered him immensely popular, as indeed he had always contrived to be wherever fate and speculation led his roving steps. But it may be questioned whether his brother-colonist ever saw his old friend spinning by behind a blood team, or heard of his being among the select few in a ‘quick thing,’ without fulminating one of his choicest anathemas, comprehending at once the order to which he and Parklands had belonged, the country they had quitted, and the one in which they now sojourned.

Mr. Banks remained in the employment of Mr. Neuchamp at Rainbar until, having saved and acquired by guarded investment a moderate capital, he had a tempting offer of joining, as junior partner, in the purchase of a large station in new country. Always a good-looking, manly fellow, he managed to secure the affections of a niece of Mr. Middleton, whom he met on one of his rare trips to Sydney, and, before he left for the Tadmor Downs, Lower Barcoo, they were married.

Mr. Joe Freeman had employed some of the compulsory leisure time rendered necessary during his fulfilment of the residence clause for Mr. Levison, in an exhaustive study of the Crown Lands Alienation Act. From that important statute (20 Vic. No. 7, sec. 13) he discovered that, provided a man had children enough, there is but little limit to the quantity of the country’s soil that he can secure and occupy at a rate of expenditure singularly small and favourable to the speculative ‘landist’ of the period.

Thus Joe Freeman, after considerable ciphering, made out that he could ‘take up’ for himself and his three younger children a total of twelve hundred and eighty acres of first-class land! He had determined that as long as there was an alluvial flat in the colony his choice should not consist of _bad_ land. Added to this would be a pre-emptive grazing right of three times the extent. This would come to three thousand eight hundred and forty acres, which, added to the freehold of twelve hundred and eighty acres, gave a total of five thousand one hundred and twenty acres. The entire use of this territory he could secure by a payment of five shillings per acre for the _freehold portion_ only—say, three hundred and twenty pounds.

‘Of course his three children were compelled, by law, to reside on their selections. As two of these were under five years old, some difficulty in the carrying out of the apparently stringent section No. 18 might be anticipated.

This difficulty was utterly obliterated by building his cottage _exactly_ upon the intersecting lines of the four half-sections, thus:

By this clever contrivance Mary Ellen, the baby, as well as Bob, aged three years, were ‘residing upon their selections’ when they were in bed at night, inasmuch as that haven of rest (for the other members of the family) was carefully placed across the south line which divided the estates.

Nor was this all. Bill Freeman took up a similar quantity of land in precisely the same way, locating it about a mile from his brother’s selection, so that as it was clearly not worth any other selector’s while to come between them, they would probably have the use of another section or two of land for nothing. The squatter on whose run this little sum was worked out was a struggling, burdened man, unable to buy out or borrow. He was ruined. But the individual, in all ages, has suffered for the State.

Mr. Neuchamp’s Australian career had now reached a point when life, however heroic, is generally conceded to be less adventurous. His end, in a literary sense, is near. We feel bound in honour, however, to add the information, that upon the assurance of Mr. Frankston that they could not leave New South Wales temporarily at a more prosperous time, Ernest Neuchamp resolved once more to tempt the main, and to taste the joy of revisiting, with his Australian bride, his ancestral home.

Having taken the precaution to call a council of the most eminent floriculturists of flower-loving Sydney to his aid, he procured and shipped a case of orchidaceous plants, second to none that had ever left the land, for the delectation of his brother Courtenay. He had long since paid the timely remittance which had so lightened his load of anxiety in the ‘dry season’ at Rainbar, with such an addition of ‘colonial interest’ as temporarily altered the views of the highly conservative senior as to the soundness of Australian securities.

Upon the genuine delight which Antonia experienced when the full glory of British luxury, the garnered wealth of a thousand years, burst upon her, it is not necessary here to dilate, nor, after a year’s continental travel, upon the rejoicings which followed the birth of Mr. Courtenay Frankston Neuchamp at the hall of his sires. His uncle immediately foresaw a full and pleasing occupation provided for his remaining years, in securing whatever lands in the vicinity of Neuchampstead might chance to be purchasable. They would be needed for the due territorial dignity of a gentleman, who, upon his accession to the estate, would probably have thirty or forty thousand a year additional to the present rental, to spend on one of the oldest properties in the kingdom.

‘He himself,’ he said, ‘was unhappily a bachelor. He humbly trusted so to remain, but he was proud and pleased to think that the old House would once more be worthily represented. He had never seen the remotest possibility of such a state of matters taking place in his own time, and had never dreamed, therefore, of the smallest self-assertion.

‘The case was now widely different. The cadet of the House, against, he would frankly own, his counsel and opinion, had chosen to seek his fortune on distant shores, as had many younger sons unavailingly. He had not only found it, but had returned, moreover, with the traditional Princess, proper to the King’s younger son, in all legends and romances. In his charming sister he recognised a princess in her own right, and an undeniable confirmation of his firmly-held though not expressed opinion, that his brother Ernest’s enthusiasm had always been tempered by a foundation of prudence and unerring taste.’

Again in his native land, in his own county, Antonia had to submit to the lionisation of her husband, who came to be looked upon as a sort of compromise between Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh, with a dash of Francis Drake. The very handsome income which the flourishing property of Rainbar and Mildool, _cum_ Back-blocks A to M, and the unwearied rainy seasons and high markets, permitted him to draw, was magnified tenfold. His liberal expenditure gratified the taste of the lower class, among whom legends involving romantic discoveries and annexations of goldfields received ready credence.

Mr. Ernest Neuchamp was courteously distinguished by the county magnates, popular among the country gentlemen who had been his friends and those of his family from his youth, and the idol of the peasantry, who instinctively discerned, as do children and pet animals, that he viewed them with a sympathetic and considerate regard.

When Mrs. Ernest Neuchamp, of Neuchampstead, was presented to her Gracious Sovereign by ‘the Duchess,’ that exalted lady deigned to express high approval of her very delicately beautiful and exquisitely apparelled subject from the far southern land, and to inquire if all Australian ladies were so lovely and so sweet of aspect and manner as the very lovely young creature she saw before her. The Court Circular was unprecedentedly enthusiastic; and in very high places was Ernest assured that he was looked upon as having conferred lustre upon his order and benefits upon his younger countrymen, to whom he had exhibited so good and worthy an example.

All this panegyrical demonstration Ernest Neuchamp received not unsuitably, but with much of his old philosophical calmness of critical attitude. What he really had ‘gone out into the wilderness’ to see, and to do, he reflected he had neither seen nor done. What he found himself elevated to high places for doing, was the presumable amassing of a large fortune, a proceeding popular and always favourably looked upon. But this was only a secondary feature in his programme, and one in which he had taken comparatively little interest. He could not help smiling to himself with humorous appreciation of the satiric pleasantry of the position, conscious also that his depreciation of great commercial shrewdness and boldness in speculation was held to be but the proverbial modesty of a master mind; while the interest which he could not restrain himself from taking in plans for the weal and progress of his old friend and client, Demos, was considered to be the dilettante distraction with which, as great statesmen take to wood-chopping or poultry-rearing, the mighty hunter, the great operator of the trackless waste, like Garibaldi at Caprera, occupied himself. It was hardly worth while doing battle with the complimentary critics, who would insist upon crediting him with all the sterner virtues of their ideal colonist—a great and glorious personage who combined the autocracy of a Russian with the _savoir faire_ of a Parisian, the energy of an Englishman with the instinct of a Parsee and the rapidity of an American; after a while, no doubt, they would find out their god to have feet of clay. He would care little for that. But, in the meanwhile, no misgivings mingled with their enthusiastic admiration. The younger son of an ancient house, which possessed historic claims to the consideration of the county, had returned laden with gold, which he scattered with free and loving hand. That august magnate ‘the Duke’ had (vicariously, of course—he had long lost the habit of personal action save in a few restricted modes) to look to his laurels. There was danger, else, that his old-world star would pale before this newly-arisen constellation, bright with the fresher lustre of the Southern Cross.

All these admitted luxuries and triumphs notwithstanding, a day came when both Ernest Neuchamp, and Antonia his wife, began to approach, with increasing eagerness and decision, the question of return. In the three years which they had spent ‘at home’ they had, they could not conceal from themselves, exhausted the resources of Britain—of Europe—in their present state of sensation.

Natural as was such a feeling in the heart of Antonia, with whom a yearning for her birthland, her childhood’s home, for but once again to hear the sigh of the summer wave from the verandah at Morahmee, was gradually gaining intensity, one wonders that Ernest Neuchamp should have fully shared her desire to return. Yet such was undoubtedly the fact.

Briton as he was to the core, he had, during the third year of their furlough, been often impatient, often aweary, of an aimless life—that of a gazer, a spectator, a dilettante. Truth to tell, the strong free life of the new world had unfitted him for an existence of a mere recipiency.

A fox-hunter, a fisherman, a fair shot, and a lover of coursing, he yet realised the curious fact that he was unable to satisfy his personal needs by devoting the greater portion of his leisure to these recreations, perfect in accessories and appointments, unrivalled in social concomitants, as are these kingly sports when enjoyed in Britain.

Passionately fond of art, a connoisseur, and erstwhile an amateur of fair attainment, a haunter of libraries, a discriminating judge of old editions and rare imprints, he yet commenced to become impatient of days and weeks so spent. Such a life appeared to him now to be a waste of time. In vain his brother Courtenay remonstrated.

‘I feel, my dear Courtenay, and it is no use disguising the truth to you or to myself, that I can no longer rest content in this little England of yours. It is a snug nest, but the bird has flown over the orchard wall, his wings have swept the waste and beat the foam; he can never again, I fear, dwell there, as of old; never again, I fear.’

‘But why, in the name of all that is exasperating and eccentric, can you not be quiet, and let well alone?’ asked Courtenay, not without a flavour of just resentment. ‘You have money; an obedient, utterly devoted father-in-law, of a species unknown in Britain; a charming wife, who might lead me like a bear, were I so fortunate as to have been appropriated by her; troops of friends, I might almost say admirers—for you must own you are awfully overrated in the county. What in the wide world can urge you to tempt fortune by re-embarkation and this superfluous buccaneering?’

‘I suppose it is vain to try and knock it out of your old head, Courtenay, that there is no more buccaneering in New South Wales than in old South Wales. But, talking of buccaneers, I suppose I _am_ like one of old Morgan’s men who had swung in a West Indian hammock, and seen the sack of Panama; thereafter unable to content himself in his native Devon.

‘You might as well have asked of old Raoul de Neuchamp to go back and make cider in Normandy, after he had fought shoulder to shoulder with Taillefer and Rollo at Hastings, and tasted the stern delight of harrying Saxon Franklins and burning monasteries. I have found a land where deeds are to be done, and where conquest, though but of the forces of Nature, is still possible. Here in this happy isle your lances are only used in the tilt-yard and tournament, your swords hang on the wall, your armour is rusty, your knights fight but over the wine-cup, your ladye-loves are ever in the bowers. With us, across the main, still the warhorse carries mail, the lances are not headless, and many a shrewd blow on shield and helmet rings still.

‘I am in the condition of “The Imprisoned Huntsman”—

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

‘I know from experience that it is as probable that a star should come down from the sky and do duty in the kitchen grate,’ said Courtenay Neuchamp sardonically, ‘as that you should listen to any one’s opinion but your own, or I would suggest that the falcon, and greyhound, and steed business is better if not exclusively performed in this hemisphere. I never doubted you would go your own road. But what does Antonia say to leaving the land of court circulars and Queen’s drawing-rooms and Paris bonnets fresh once a week?’

‘She says’—and here Mrs. Neuchamp crept up to her husband’s side and placed her hand in his—‘that she is tired of Paradise—tired of perfect houses, unsurpassable servants and dinners, drives and drawing-rooms, lawn parties and archery meetings, the Academy and the Park, Belgravia and South Kensington—in fact, of everything and everybody except Neuchampstead and dear old Courtenay. She wants, like some one else, to go out into the world again, a real world, and not a sham one like the one in which rich people live in England. She is _living_, not life. Perhaps I am “_un peu_ Zingara”—who knows? It’s a mercy I’m not very dark, like some other Australians I have seen. But it is now the time to say, my dear Courtenay, that Ernest and I have grown tired of play, and want to go back to that end of the world where work grows.‘

‘Please don’t smother me with wisdom and virtue,’ pleaded Courtenay, with a look of pathetic entreaty. ‘I know we are very ignorant and selfish, and so on, in this old-fashioned England of ours. I really think I might have become a convert and a colonist myself, if taken up early by a sufficiently zealous and prepossessing missionaress. I feel now that it is too late. Club-worship is with me too strongly ingrained in my nature. Clubs and idols are closely connected, you know. But are we never to meet again?’ and here the rarely changed countenance of Courtenay Neuchamp softened visibly.

‘We will have another look at you in late years,’ said Antonia softly; ‘perhaps we may come altogether when—when—we are old.’

‘I think I may promise that,’ said Mr. Neuchamp. ‘When Frank is old enough to set up for himself at Morahmee, with an occasional trip to Rainbar and Mildool, to keep himself from forgetting how to ride, then I think we may possibly make our last voyage to the old home, in preparation for that journey on which I trust we three may set forth at periods not very distantly divided.’

The brothers shook hands silently. Antonia bestowed a sister’s kiss upon the calm brow of the elder brother, and quitted the room. No more was said. But all needful preparations were made, and ere the autumn leaves had commenced to fall from the aged woods which girdled Neuchampstead, the _Massilia_ was steaming through the Straits of Bonifacio with Ernest Neuchamp watching the snowy mountain-tops of Corsica, while Antonia alternately enlivened the baby Frank or dipped into _The Crescent and the Cross,_ which she had long intended to read over again in a leisurely and considerate manner.

* * * * *

But little remains to tell of the after-life of Ernest Neuchamp. Settled once more in ‘the sunny land,’ he found his time fully and not unworthily occupied in the superintendence of his extensive properties and investments. There was much necessary journeying between Rainbar and Morahmee, at which latter place Paul Frankston had insisted upon their taking up their permanent abode. ‘I am going down hill,’ he said; ‘the old house will be yours when I am gone; why should I sit here lonely in my age while my darling and her children are so near me? Don’t be afraid of the nursery-racket bothering me. Every note of their young voices is music in my ears, being what they are.’ So in Ernest’s absence in the bush, or during the sitting of the House of Assembly—having from a stern sense of duty permitted himself to be elected as the representative of the electoral district of Lower Oxley—Antonia had a guardian and a companion. She resolved upon making the journey to Rainbar, indeed, in order that she might fully comprehend the nature of the life which her husband had formerly led. During her stay she formed a tolerably fair estimate of the value of the property, being a lady of an observing turn of mind, and possessing by inheritance a hitherto latent tendency towards the management of affairs not generally granted to the sex. She visited Lake Antonia, and warmly congratulated Mr. Neuchamp upon that grand achievement. She patted Osmund and Ben Bolt, now bordering on the dignity of pensioners. She drove over to Mrs. Windsor’s cottage at Mildool, where she found Carry established as rather a _grande dame_, with the general approbation of the district and of all the tourists and travellers who shared the proverbial hospitality of Mildool. She caused the stud to be driven in for inspection, when she had sufficient presence of mind to choose a pair of phaeton horses for herself out of them. But she told her husband that she could not perceive any advantage to be derived from living at Rainbar as long as their income maintained its present average, and that he could manage the interesting but exceedingly warm and isolated territory equally well by proxy.

Jack Windsor, upon Mr. Banks’s promotion and marriage, became manager of the whole consolidated establishment, with a proportionate advance in salary. He developed his leading qualities of shrewdness and energy to their fullest capacity under the influence of prosperity. Being perfectly satisfied with his position and duties, having a good home, a contented wife, the means of educating his large family, the respect of the whole country-side, and the habit of saving a large portion of his liberal salary, besides an abundance of the exact species of occupation and exercise which suited him, it is not probable that he will make any attempt to ‘better himself.’ It is not certain that Mrs. Windsor would not favour the investment of their savings in property ‘down the country’ for the sake of the children, etc.; but Jack will not hear of it. ‘I should feel first-rate,’ he says scornfully, ‘shouldn’t I, in a place of my own, with a man and a boy, and forty or fifty head of crawling cattle to stare at while they were getting fit for market? That’s not my style. It wouldn’t suit any of us—not you either, old woman, to be poking about, helping at the wash-tub or something, or peelin’ potatoes for dinner. We couldn’t stand it after the life we’ve had here. I couldn’t do without half-a-dozen stabled hacks and a lot of smart men to keep up to the mark. Give me something _big_ to work at, done well, and paying for good keep and good spending all round. Five hundred and forty head of fat cattle cut out in two days like the last Mildool lot, and all the country-side at the muster—that’s John Windsor’s style—none of your Hawkesbury corn-shelling, butter-and-eggs racket. You ought to have married old Homminey, Carry, if that’s what you wanted. Besides, after thinking and saving and driving up to high pressure for the master so long, it would feel unnatural-like to be only working for myself.‘ So the argument was settled. Mr. Windsor had, it seems, tasted too fully of the luxury of power and command to relinquish it for humble independence.

The undisputed sway over a large staff of working hands, the unquestioned control of money and credit, within certain limits, had become with him more and more an indispensable habitude. Accustomed to the tone of the leader and the centurion, he could not endure the thought of changing his wide eventful life into the decorous dulness of the small landed proprietor. Mrs. Windsor, too, who dressed exceedingly well, and was admitted on equal terms to the society of the district, a position which, from her tact, good sense, and extremely agreeable appearance, she suitably filled and fully deserved, would probably, as her husband forcibly explained, have felt the change almost as much as himself. So Mr. Neuchamp was spared the annoyance of looking out for a new manager.

Hardy Baldacre accumulated a very large fortune, but was prevented, in middle life, from proving the exact amount of coin and property which may be amassed by the consistent practice of grinding parsimony, combined with an elimination of all the literary, artistic, social, and sympathetic tendencies. He habitually condemned the entire section, under the fatal _affiche_ of ‘don’t pay.’ To the surprise—we cannot with accuracy affirm, to the regret—of the general public, this very extensive proprietor fell a victim to a fit of _delirium tremens_, supervening upon the practice of irregular and excessive alcoholism. Into this vice of barren minds, the pitiless economist, guilty of so few other recreations, was gradually but irresistibly drawn.

The _White Falcon_ fled far and fast with the fugitive noble, whose debts added the keenest edge among his late friends and creditors to the memory of his treasons. He escaped, with his usual good fortune, the civil and criminal tentacula in which the dread octopus of the law would speedily have enveloped him. He laughed at British and Australian warrants. But passing into one of the Dutch Indian settlements, he was sufficiently imprudent to pursue there also the same career of reckless expenditure. By an accident his character was disclosed, and his arrest effected at the moment of premeditated flight. A severe logic, learned in the strict commercial schools of Holland, where debt meets with no favour, guards the commerce of her intertropical colonies. The _White Falcon_ was promptly seized and sold to satisfy a small portion of the princely liabilities of the owner, while for long years, in a dreary dungeon, like another and a better sea-rover, Albert von Schätterheims was doomed to eat his heart in the darksome solitude of an ignoble and hopeless captivity.

The Freeman family prospered in a general sense. Abraham Freeman settled down upon a comfortable but not over-fertile farm in the neighbourhood of Bowning. The thickness of the timber, and the conversion of much of it into fencing-rails, served to provide him with occupation, and therefore with good principles, as Tottie saucily observed, to his life’s end. That high-spirited damsel grieved much at first over the slowness and general fuss about trifles, which, after her extended experience, seemed to her to characterise the whole district, but was eventually persuaded by a thriving young miller that there were worse places to reside in. He was resolute, however, in forbidding the carrying of bags of flour, and as she was provided with a smart buggy and unlimited bonnets, her taste for adventurous excitement became modified in time, and the black ambling mare was handed over to the boys.

William and Joe Freeman made much money by nomadic agrarianism. After years passed in arduously constructing sham improvements and ‘carrying out the residence clause,’ with no intention of residing, they found themselves able to purchase a station.

Having paid down a large sum in cash, they entered into possession of their property with feelings of much self-gratulation, as being now truly squatters, just as much so, indeed, as Mr. Neuchamp, who had thought himself so well able to patronise them. But, unluckily for them, and in direct contravention of the saying, ‘Hawks winna pike oot hawks’ een,‘ the ex-owner of the station, formerly indeed an old acquaintance who had risen in life, displayed the most nefarious keenness in plotting an unscrupled treachery. He settled down, under the conditional purchase clause, section 13, upon the very best part of the run, the goodwill of which he had the day before been paid for. Having a large family, and the land laws having been recently altered so that a double area could be selected by each ‘person,’ he, with the Messrs. Freemans‘own cash, actually annexed, irrevocably, an area which reduced the value of the grazing property by about one-third. Shrewd and unscrupulous as themselves, he calmly informed the frantic Freemans ‘that he had only complied with the law.’ He laughed at their accusations of bad faith. ‘Every man for himself,’ he retorted, adding that ‘if all stories were true, they hadn’t been very particular themselves, but had sat down on the cove’s run that first helped ’em when they was bull-punchers without credit for a bag of flour.’

Rendered furious by this very original application of their own practice to the detriment of their own property, they wasted much of their—well—we must say, legally acquired gains in endless suits and actions for trespass against this most unprincipled free selector, and others who shortly followed his example. The lawyers came to know Freeman _versus_ Downey as a _cause célèbre_. It is just possible that these brothers may come to comprehend, by individual suffering, the harassed feeling which their action had, many a time and oft, tended to produce in others.

The later years of Mr. Neuchamp’s life have been stated by himself to be only too well filled with prosperity and happiness as compared with his deserts. Those who know him are aware that he could not become an idler—either aimless or bored. He lives principally in Sydney. But if ever he finds a course of unmitigated town-life commencing to assail his nervous system, he runs off to a grazing station within easy rail, where he has long superintended the production of the prize shorthorns, Herefords, and Devons necessary for the keeping up the supply of pure blood for his immense and distant herds. Here he revels in fresh air—the priceless sense of pure country life—and that absolute leisure and absolute freedom from interruption which the happiest paterfamilias rarely experiences in the home proper. Here Ernest Neuchamp builds up fresh stores of health, new reserves of animal spirits. Here Ernest probably thinks out those theories of perfected representative government in which, however, he fails at present to persuade an impatient, perhaps illogical, democracy to concur. His children are numerous, and all give promise, as, after a protracted and impartial consideration of their character, he is led to believe, of worthily carrying forward the temporarily modified but rarely relinquished hereditary tenets of his ancient House.

Time rolls on. The great city expanding beautifies the terraced slopes and gardened promontories of the glorious haven. Old Paul Frankston lies buried in no crowded cemetery, but in a rock-hewn family vault under giant araucarias, within sound of the wave he loved so well. Yet is Morahmee still celebrated for that unselfish, unrestricted hospitality to the stranger-guest which made Paul Frankston’s name a synonym for general sympathy and readiest aid.

Assuredly Ernest Neuchamp, now one of the largest proprietors in Australia, both of pastoral and urban property, has not suffered the reputation to decline. He remembers too well the hearty open visage, the kindly voice, the ready cheer of him who was so true at need, so delicate in feeling, so stanch in deed. Succoured himself at the crisis of fortune and happiness, he has vowed to help all whose inexperience arouses a sympathetic memory. The opinion of a social leader and eminent pastoralist may be considered to have exceptional weight and value. However that may be, much of his time is taken up in honouring the numberless letters of introduction showered upon him from Britain. Young gentlemen arrive in scores who have been obligingly provided with these valuable documents by sanguine ex-colonists. By the bearers they were regarded as passports to an assured independence. Some of these youthful squires, with spurs unwon, need restraining from imprudence, others a gentle course of urging towards effort and self-denial. But it has been noticed that the only occasions on which their respective guide, philosopher, and friend speaks with decision bordering on asperity, is when he exposes the fallacy of the reasoning upon which any ardent neophyte aspires to the position of A Colonial Reformer.

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.

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Transcriber's note:

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and all other spelling and punctuation remain unchanged.

Italics are represented thus _italic_.

In “the [Ǝ]NE brand” on page 106 [Ǝ] represent the character depressed by half a line and in “the M[D] brand” on page 154 [D] represents a reversed D depressed by half a line.