The next afternoon Stella and her brother reached Peeloo Station, where they were to stay the night. Langdale came near sundown, after paying some professional visits for Dr. Morrison by the way. There was but a meagre garden at this station, though it was a wealthy one, like most in the district. The house, too, had a curiously makeshift appearance. The fact was that the family from year to year proposed residing in the vicinity of Melbourne. Near sunset the host proposed an evening ride to all who cared to go over the great Peeloo Plain, which stretched for over sixty miles westward. There was an artesian well ten miles off, on the plain of weeping myalls, he wished to show Courtland.
'Whom the gods love ride across a great Australian plain in the evening,' said Stella; and Langdale, of course, was instantly converted to the same opinion. So the four set off westward, when the sun was low on the horizon. There were heat clouds piled up in an unmoving bank, through which the sun burned, as it sank, like a smouldering fire that the wind has fanned till the coals kindle into red heat and the flames break out, eating their way through the fuel. For a moment before setting the sun stood all undimmed on the level horizon like a great fiery ball, and then dropped suddenly out of sight, leaving a deep soft glow which reached high up in the heavens, and so remained for hours. This beautiful, unusual appearance was more vivid that evening than it had ever been before.
The riders followed no road, but took their way across the plain, still clothed with the luxuriant winter grass, which here and there was beginning to be touched with the heat languor that a few weeks later would turn the verdure into sapless flax. But as yet the herbage was so close and rich that the hoof-beats of the horses scarcely awoke an echo. The few sounds that were borne with startling distinctness through the sonorous air died away. The shrill scream of a black cockatoo in the depths of a weeping myall, the twitter of a little emu wren bounding through the grass, the loud calls of the white-fronted honey-birds in a flowering acacia, the hysterical chorus of laughing jackasses in the wooded bend of a watercourse densely lined with ti-tree, the sudden caw of a solitary crow in a box-gum, all became silent, one by one. Now and then a red kangaroo, with his beautiful ruddy tints and faint flush of dawn-rose on the under-neck, or a doe, clad in delicate steely blue, bounded near them as they passed.
They flew over the great smooth plain, while the spring wind, vivifying as a sea-breeze, blew in their faces. At times they came to a stretch of kangaroo grass, tall and rustling, swayed by the wind that came now and then running up in little fitful gusts, till the faint billows formed an exact image of the half-formed waves seen in mid-ocean in placid summer weather. The earth and sky equally had an unfamiliar boundlessness that at first lay like a weight on the spirit, and yet gradually soothed it as the imagination gathered impulse and repose from the sad magnificent horizons, unbroken by wood or hill, or the gleam of water. At rare intervals the marvellous uniformity was heightened rather than interrupted by the course of a creek whose abrupt banks were marked by a wavering line of box-wood or weeping myall, and sometimes dense undergrowth. The light of day and the brilliant blue of the sky were replaced by the dreamy paleness which falls on the world when the heavens are cloudless, yet hold the stars for some time out of sight, and the earth lies stretched below without limit and without shadow.
There was no cold look in the sky, no bleakness on the earth. It was noble in its vast breadth, its virgin promise of fertility—fit to be the dwelling-place of a race strong, free and generous; careful not only for the things that advance man's material prosperity, but caring infinitely as well for all that touches the human spirit with quick recognition of its immortal kinships.
'It is like no other scene I have ever looked at,' said Langdale, at length breaking the silence.
'Don't you feel you will remember it all to your dying day?' asked Stella softly.
'Yes; perhaps when we die we shall remember it better than ever. It is like a picture of the old classic underworld, with its pale light and its wide, homeless pastures.'
'Oh, if it would only last for ever—the world flooded in mysterious light, the horses never tired, the horizon never visible! Why are you smiling?'
'I would not wish it to go on for ever. I have an earth-creeping imagination that would soon pine for a local habitation—and Blättchen waiting for me inside. But how often we shall recall this ride till we meet again!'