“Oh, how d’ye do, Angland? Come in; right to time to a minute. Easy to see your heart’s in the work you’ve undertaken. Sit down over there, that chair’s more comfortable. This other one is an old mate of mine, let me tell you. It has a history. I made it myself from the ‘sets’ that gave way in the O’Donaghue, when what we thought was the ‘hanging-wall’ caved in, and showed us the true reef again, and a nice little fortune too on the other side of a ‘horse.’
“Can I offer——no? You’re almost an abstainer. So much the better. Well, I’ve thought out your matters carefully,—and when I say that, knowing, as you do, that your uncle was the nearest approach to a brother I ever had, and that his wishes are sacred to me, I think you’ll believe me.” Pointing to the table with a paper-knife made from a piece of silver-kaolin from Broken Hill, he continued, after a pause, “I’ve just been going through his papers again, so as to be well posted up against your coming. Now, to drive right into the subject,—and perhaps you’d better not interrupt me till I ‘clean up,’—to go right ahead, I propose that you leave for the north at once. That you go to Cairns, in company with a tough old practical miner that I’ll introduce you to,—a ‘hatter’ who knows a lot about that part of the coast range. You’re not safe here, evidently. This little arch-business the other night showed that; and, almost teetotaler as you are, you may possibly be helped, nolens volens, to a drop too much—excuse the joke—that will leave you not worth ‘panning out.’ It’s no use your travelling under an assumed name now. You’ll be watched, likely, in any case; and I intend to hedge you round in a better and different way. You shall be a public character to a small extent. You shall go under the distinguished auspices of the Royal and Imperial Ethnological and Geological Society of Australasia.
“Plain Mr. Brown, or John James, Esq., may disappear; and it’s too late to look for traces of either when missed. It’s very different, let me tell you, with an accredited explorer of the Royal and Imperial—excuse the rest. He is under the eyes of the public wherever he goes; and there is much protecting virtue in the words ‘Royal and Imperial,’—and this is especially the case here, in republican Australia. Odd, ain’t it? Now you have trusted me because poor old Sam, your uncle, told you to do so; and you mustn’t object to my old miner friend going with you. If the poor old boy has kept something good up there, in the mining way, for you, you wouldn’t be able to do things properly without an old hand to teach you the ropes and dodges. If you went by yourself you’d be shadowed and tracked down, safe ‘as a Cornishman’s set.’ How about money? Ah! that’s all right; but if you do want any, draw on me to any amount.”
Claude murmured an expression of thanks.
“Not at all,” continued Mr. Winze, rising, “and now you’ll come and take lunch with me, and afterwards we’ll interview the scientists.”
After lunch, seated in a corner of the splendidly appointed smoking-room of the “only” club in Sydney, Claude’s new friend and ally discloses to him the past history of the late explorer.
“Now, all you know about your uncle, you say, is that you thought him ‘the grandest fellow you ever met;’ that you saw little of him when he visited London in 1878, with his native boy Billy, whom you are to find; that his time was much taken up with lecturing and seeing old friends; and that the late Dr. Angland, your father, and he did not quite hit it altogether. Both seemed to respect each other, but they didn’t combine well. You’ll see the same sort of thing every day,—first-class fellows, who respect each other’s good qualities, but haven’t enough in common in thoughts or prejudices to become friendly. Will fence with each other in a friendly, but stilted conversation, but won’t amalgamate any more than sickened silver will with gold on a badly managed battery-table. Well, the main reason of the—antipathy, I suppose we must term it in this particular case—I’ll explain. Have you a match? Have used all mine. Burn more matches than tobacco, I verily believe. Your uncle and your mother were the only children of a wealthy London merchant of the old school,—a man whose word was as safe as a Bank of England note; punctilious to a fault; and who, from what Sam used to tell me, would have died of horror, I verily believe, if he had lived to see the modern way of conducting business affairs. He was one of those straight-laced, horribly exact men of the last generation; one who never traded beyond his capital, and never owed a ha’penny. Old Mr. Dyesart would have turned his only son out of his house, I believe, if he had found him borrowing sixpence on an I.O.U. or promissory note. Sam was brought up on these lines, and inherited all the best points of his father’s character. He was, however, of a speculative turn. When he became a partner in his father’s business he developed a taste for big things, and at first rather startled the steady old clerks in the tumble-down offices in Fenchurch Street. I recollect his telling me how he took up the trade in maize from America which commenced after the last Irish famine, and did splendidly. Things went on well, and the old gentleman and his aged clerks felt more confidence in Sam in regard to his speculations, the vastness of which often caused his father at first to storm at his son, and afterwards to admire him more than ever. Then bad years came, and Sam’s Australian wheat connection drew him into various ‘wild cat’ ventures in Queensland sugar plantations and gold mines, and before long the credit of the old-established firm was in danger. He did not tell his father, and hoped to tide over the bad time, and anxiously searched for an opportunity to recover himself.
“With all this trouble on his shoulders, he still,—he was ever the same,—he still could think, feel, and work for others. He was indeed, as you say, ‘a grand fellow.’ As one of the ‘great unpaid,’ he was exercising his official position of Justice of the Peace for some little country town near London where he lived, when a young girl was brought before him one day charged with being an immoral character and without means of support. She told a pitiful tale. She was from Australia, she said, having left all a year before to follow the fortunes of a young libertine, who, as traveller for the soft-goods firm by whom she was employed, had come in contact with and ruined her. He had been commissioned by his firm to buy for them in the chief manufacturing towns of England, and, having been already seduced by him in Sydney, the girl had no alternative—or desire either, if you ask me—but to accompany him to Europe when he told her to do so. After a brief sojourn in London he deserted her; gave her the slip. Without money, friends, or much of a character, left helpless in the great city of a strange land, and afraid to write to her parents, she fell into the ranks of the wretched ‘necessary evils of the pavement.’ Now instead of passing over this girl’s story with an incredulous smile, as most J. P.’s would have done, he communicated through his agents with the girl’s parents,—no, it was the girl’s brother, a gold miner,—and, paying her passage, packed her off back to Sydney again. The girl never reached home, but died on the voyage, of consumption, I think Sam said, contracted by the fearful life she had led in London. You’ll see why I mention this matter by-and-by. Soon after this, Sam saw what he thought was at last a chance of winning back his losses. It proved a ‘duffer.’ This, with other mining speculations, proved to be the straw to break the business back of the old firm; and, happy only in the thought that his father had been spared the shock and disgrace of the collapse by quietly dying beforehand, Sam Dyesart left for Australia,—‘To cure my wounds with the hair of the dog that bit me,’ he used to say, for he turned gold miner, and was pretty lucky all through. His sister, your lady-mother, was engaged to be married to your father, young Dr. Angland, just about the time the final crash came. Although wooing your mother as an heiress worth £20,000 or more, his affection—with honour let it be remembered of him—his affection knew no change when he found her penniless. He must have been a very good fellow. But it appears that he had all along warned Sam of the risk he was running in dabbling in mining matters, and when the crash came rather crowed over Sam I fancy. At any rate, a tremendous row ensued. Sam forbade his sister to marry the doctor. The doctor stuck to his colours, however, and the marriage took place, Sam being absent from the wedding. Then, just after you were born, I think, having wound up his affairs, Sam started for this country, promising his sister before he went that he would return her dowry to her with interest some day. A number of years afterwards, when Sam was my mate upon the West Coast diggings in New Zealand, a stranger arrived in the camp, and came to our ware (house) one night and asked if Mr. Dyesart was at hand. You didn’t hear many surnames on the camp, I can tell you, and Sam was generally known as ‘Doctor,’ from the surgical knowledge he possessed, and the fact of his being ever ready to nurse anybody who might be sick. The visitor turned out to be the brother of the girl Sam had tried to save. It appears that, upon hearing of his sister’s disgrace and death, he set to work and saved up his wages till he could go to England. There he traced out the girl’s destroyer; and finding him, left him a helpless cripple for life. The avenger was arrested, and served a term of, I forget how many, years’ imprisonment, to which he was sentenced by a judge who pointed out, in the usual cold-blooded style, ‘that the girl had her remedy against her seducer,’ and that the law did not recognize the righteousness of a brother’s anger against the destroyer of his only sister. But the object of this long yarn, which has apparently not bored you so much as it has tired me, is that the faithful brother,—I forget his name now, ‘Solemn Jim’ the boys used to call him,—Jim met with an accident a few months after he found Sam, and on his death-bed told your uncle some cock-and-bull yarn of a regular bonanza of a gold-bearing reef, situated somewhere in the Queensland desert country. It was the belief in this imagined ‘second Mount Morgan,’—the outcome of a feverish imagination and a wish to repay your uncle for his goodness to the sister, and nothing more, I verily believe,—it was this that kept Sam flying round the country like a Cooper’s Creek ‘brumbie’ (wild horse) of late years, for he did not know the exact spot to look for his gold mine in, as Jim had turned up his toes in the middle of the directions how to find the reef.”
“Do you know what the directions were, Mr. Winze?” asks Claude.