CHAPTER XXIII
“Well, Lizzie, how does the Ocho Rios country strike you?” and Gerrard pulled up his horse under the grateful shade of a great Leichhardt tree standing on the bank of a clear, sandy-bottomed creek.
“I think it is beautiful, Tom, almost tropical, especially anywhere near the sea,” and Mrs Westonley jumped lightly from her horse. “Are we going to spell here for awhile?”
“Yes. Here come Jim and Mary with the pack-horse, and as it is past twelve, we'll have our dinner, rest an hour, and then take the beach way home.”
Eight months had passed since Mrs Westonley and Mary had come to Ocho Rios, and they had been eight months of work and happiness to them all, for the fortunes of Gerrard had changed greatly, and he was now in a fair way of becoming a prosperous man again. The numerous gold discoveries had brought a great inrush of diggers, and cattle for killing were now worth four times the price they had been a year before. He had built his new house, which was ready and actually furnished when his sister and Mary arrived at Somerset, where he had met them. Together they had ridden across the peninsula, through the dry, parched-up bush so lately devastated by fire, and when Ocho Rios was reached, the country was certainly looking at its worst, as he had mentioned in his letter. But since then glorious rains had fallen, and no one not acquainted with the marvellous changes produced by copious rains in a tropical land, would believe that the shady Leichhardt tree under which Gerrard and his sister were camped had four months previously been withered and scorched by the great fire which had swept across the peninsula.
The name of “Ocho Rios” had been given to the station by the man who had first taken up the block of country for a cattle-run. He was an ex-Jamaican sugar planter, whose estate had been situated in the Ocho Rios (Eight Rivers) district of that beautiful island; and who had been ruined by the emancipation of the negroes in 1838. And, as his new possession was in the vicinity of eight small creeks flowing westward into the Gulf of Carpentaria, he had given it the same name.
“How far are we from the sea now, Uncle Tom?” asked Mary, as she and Jim rode up leading the pack-horse.
“About seven miles or so. Ever seen mango trees, Mary?”
“No, Uncle Tom, but Aunt Lizzie has, and says that mangoes are lovely. She ate some at Point de Galle, when she was a little girl going to England. Didn't you, Aunt?”
Mrs Westonley smiled, and looked at Gerrard inquiringly, wondering what had made him ask the question. He had a way of “springing” pleasant surprises upon people. When she came to the new bark-roofed house at Ocho Rios, she had never expected to find anything but the common chairs and tables, usually to be seen on cattle stations in the Far North. Certainly Tom had told her in his letter that he had bought “some decent furniture” at Port Denison, and she had smiled to herself, thinking of what the difference would be between her ideas and his of what was “decent furniture.” And her heart had gone out to him when she—then knowing what she had not dreamt of before, that he was a ruined man—saw what he had bought for her out of his slender purse.