Mrs. Daventry was delighted at first with her new home. A pretty flower-garden sloped down to the lagoon, and the verandah of the snug one-storey house of brick and weather-board was smothered in passion-flower. The Captain had furnished the house as comfortably as he could for his wife, and altogether it seemed a much smarter, livelier place than the dark old house in the dull, grass-grown side-street of the little Norfolk town where she had been economizing whilst her husband was first doing military duty, and afterwards building this snug nest in New South Wales. There was no need, apparently, to economize now. Beef and mutton were the commonest of things at Daventry Hall. Cream, butter, eggs, honey, pigs, poultry, fish and game were all to be got, to almost any extent, upon the premises. Besides English vegetables, there were pumpkins and sweet potatoes in the kitchen garden. There was a nice vineyard, which Walter mistook at first for a field of currant-bushes; and in the orchard there were raspberries and strawberries and mulberries, pears and pomegranates, figs and plums and loquats, oranges and lemons, peaches, apricots and nectarines, and gigantic rock and water melons. Walter thought of the scanty pennyworths of sour apples that he used to get in Norfolk, and for a week or two devastated the orchard and the vineyard like a ’possum or a flying-fox. As soon as it was known that Mrs. Daventry had arrived, the Captain’s friends and their wives rode over to Daventry Hall, and then there was a round of dinners at the friends’ houses, and then the Captain gave dinners in return, and both Mrs. Daventry and Phœbe were delighted with the gaiety. But when things settled into everyday course, and, as often happened, Captain Daventry was away from home for hours together, they both began to fall back into their old dread of Australia. Mrs. Daventry had been proud at first of having so many servants inside and outside the house, but it was not pleasant to remember that all except Phœbe were convicts. Captain Daventry was a strict, but then not a severe master, and so he got on pretty well with his assigned servants, but in all their faces—except Long Steve’s and his wife’s—there was a shallow, time-serving look, however cringingly civil they might be, that was not assuring.
Walter did not trouble himself about such things. He made friends after a fashion with the men, and rode about with his father to look after the horses, and cattle, and sheep; the maize-paddock and the potato fields; the clearers, the fencers, and the sawyers. His father soon let him go about by himself, and then he was a proud and happy boy. He could scarcely believe that only a year ago he was stumbling through the irregular and defective verbs in that gloomy old Norfolk school-room. Walter could leap logs now far better than he could conjugate Fio or Inquam then. Of course, his father or his mother gave him lessons every now and then, but that was not like regular school, you know. Long Steve had taught him to crack a stock-whip, and Long Steve’s wife had plaited him a cabbage-tree hat (in those days the lagoon was studded with cabbage-tree palms), and Walter used to gallop through the bush like a Wild Huntsman on his own three-parts blood chestnut Dragon-fly. Sometimes he went out on foot with his little gun, and after a bit he managed to shoot wallabies and kangaroo-rats, and quail and snipe, and bronze-wings, and parrots and cockatoos to make pies of. Sometimes, too, he took his gun out with him in the boat, and shot wild duck, and now and then a black swan, on the lagoon. In the lagoon and the little river, moreover, he caught eels and schnappers, and guard-fish, and so-called bream, and mullet and trout, and delicious oysters. The Captain was very proud of the way in which his little boy took to the colony, but Mrs. Daventry was very anxious because he was out so much alone.
One day, when the Captain and Walter rode home, they found Mrs. Daventry and Phœbe almost dead with alarm. A party of blacks had taken possession of the front verandah, on which they were jabbering and gesticulating—rubbing their sides and poking their fingers down their throats. Poor Mrs. Daventry and her servant thought that these were signs that the blacks wanted to eat them, and therefore were ready to faint from fear. The Captain soon bundled the black fellows off the verandah, but he made it a point of policy to be kind to them, and so he ordered the cook to supply them with tea and damper and mutton chops. They ate and drank until even they could eat and drink no more, and then remarking, with great self-satisfaction, that they had “budgeree big belly,” they drowsily tramped into the bush, and lay down in the sun to sleep off their surfeit.
The black fellows were not grateful to the Captain for his kindness. Unfortunately, they had tasted his potatoes, and thought them so nice that they twice saved him the trouble of digging up his crop, and once even scooped out and baked his seed-potatoes. The Captain did not want to make enemies of the darkies, but he was obliged after that to give up supplying them with chops and damper, except when they had fairly earned them by working for them.
Far worse thieves than the black fellows, however, persistently preyed on Daventry Hall.
All the assigned servants, except Long Steve and his wife, were habitual thieves. They did not get any wages for their work, and so they thought themselves free to help themselves to their master’s property. So many pounds of salt or fresh meat and flour, so much coarse brown sugar and inferior tea, and a little tobacco, were the rations served out to each man every week; but there was good living in the men’s huts for all that. China pigs, ducks, turkeys, &c., mysteriously disappeared. The men made out that they had wandered into the bush, and been devoured by bush beasts and birds, or else starved to death; but if Captain Daventry had gone to the huts a little more frequently, instead of trusting, as he did, to his overseer, the savoury scent that often issued from them would have told him what had become of his poultry, &c. Walter noticed the savoury steam one evening, but the overseer said that he had shot some wild ducks, and given them to the men. The overseer was a convict—a smooth-faced, smooth-tongued rascal. He was trusted to weigh out the rations, and the men used to carry a good deal besides their rations out of the store. The house servants, too, whenever they had a good opportunity, would appropriate unguarded valuables. They had no difficulty in disposing of them, since all the assigned servants, except Long Steve and his wife, were in league with the ticket-of-leave farmers round about. Most of these ticket-of-leavers were a thieving, drunken lot. Some of them would reconvey their Government grants for a keg of rum. As for conveyance of another kind—Pistol’s—they did not rob one another, but gentlemen-settlers they considered fair game. Captain Daventry’s bullocks found their way into the ticket-of-leavers’ beef-casks. They stole his best horses; they clapped their brands on his best colts, fillies, and calves; they pastured their own horses and cattle on his grant; through the villany of his overseer and convict shepherds, they robbed him of his sheep wholesale. They had even the impudence to steal Dragon-fly!
“Why, Daventry,” said one of the Captain’s friends one day, “what made you sell that capital chestnut your little fellow used to ride? He fetched a good price, though, I believe.”
“I didn’t sell him,” answered the Captain, moodily; “he was stolen. A nice lot of neighbours we’ve got; however, I think I’ve scared ’em for one while.”
When Dragon-fly was first missing, the overseer had comforted Walter by telling him that his horse could only have strayed a little way into the bush, and was sure to turn up soon. Mounted on another nag, Walter rode about for days in search of his favourite, but never saw him more. Walter found out something, however. He was riding home very dispiritedly one evening, when he noticed Black Poley—as one of his father’s shepherds who lived at an out-station was nicknamed, from the resemblance his head bore to a hornless bullock’s—mounting the rise on the right of the gully in which Walter was riding. Walter could not understand what Poley was doing there at that time of night, and having been made suspicious by the loss of his horse, he pressed after Poley as quietly as he could. By the time he topped the ridge it was nearly dark, but he could make out Poley going down the other side of the ridge, and another man coming up to meet him. Walter was a brave little fellow. He tied his horse to a tree, and, slipping down the ridge, got within earshot of the two men, who were sitting, smoking and talking, on a fallen tree-trunk.
“Well, Poley, how many can you let me have this time?”