By this time, in addition to being unmistakably and importunately hungry, Mr. Neuchamp was furiously thirsty. His satisfaction was great, therefore, when he discovered, just outside the door of the empty hut, two hogsheads filled with clean water.
He was about to plunge his head into the nearer one, like an eager horse, when a sudden thought passed through his brain, and he stopped short, with desire and dread written in every line of his face.
What was the potent thought, the word of power, that sufficed to arrest the step as if a precipice had opened suddenly below his feet to hold back the longing lips so parched and moistureless? One word, lightning-like, flashed along the wondrous telegraph of the brain. That word was ‘arsenic’! Ernest looked again at the casks. The water was suspiciously clear. He could not trust it. He knew that somewhere in that direction Mr. Doubletides had been dressing the feet of lame sheep with a solution of arsenic. He had seen in the local paper an account of a thirsty shepherd and his horse similarly placed. The horse drank out of one cask, the man from the other. The horse died. Ernest was not sufficiently tired of his life to take a philosophical view of the chances. Sudden death, undignified convulsions, a visit from the coroner—an unsympathetic individual, who declined minute shades of discrimination in favour of ’three star’—‘Verdict, found dead, as much arsenic internally placed as would have killed a horse.’ All this was uninviting, non-heroic. Bordering on the heroic, however, was the stern resolve to pass the night without tasting one drop of the doubtfully limpid element.
CHAPTER XII
It occasionally occurs to our unresting, unreasonable minds, prone, as we all are, to straining the mental vision and wearying our hearts with efforts to descry the form, to catch the Sibylline words, of the veiled future, that we are not so very wretched in the society of the present. After some slight intervals of sighing for the (social) fleshpots of Egypt, Mr. Neuchamp began to enjoy his life very thoroughly, and to question whether he should be so much happier after he had become a proprietor and carried out his plans of regeneration. The spring had set in, and nothing could be more lovely than the fresh warm air, the gloriously fresh mornings, the cool calm nights.
‘How happily the days of Thalaba went by!’ His health, spirits, and appetite were faultless. It was a time of hope and expectation for the great event of the year. The shearing was coming on, and insensibly the increase of station hands. The putting into order of the disused shearers’ huts, wash-pens, machinery, and woolshed, spoke of impending transactions of importance, and told that ‘the year had turned.’ He had made up his mind, too, that ‘after shearing he would revisit the metropolis.’ There the moon-lighted, sea-washed verandah of Morahmee, with a slight and graceful form pacing thereon, musing ‘in maiden meditation fancy free,’ showed softly yet bright, as an occasional romance gleam through the somewhat prosaic mist of his ordinary day-dreams. It might have been the influence of the pure dry air, of the oxygenated atmosphere, which caused Ernest to become so very light of heart after this heroic resolution. If it were so, nothing that has ever been said by enthusiastic tourists in praise of the beauty and salubrity of the Australian climate can be held to be in the slightest degree exaggerated.
Another effect was noticeable about this time. Ernest commenced to be remarked, among his observing mess-mates, for a suspicious eagerness to learn and acquire all the mysteries of stock farming, some of which he might have previously overlooked. He delighted Mr. Doubletides by his alacrity, and that grim veteran remarked that in a year or two more he might be able to look after a small station himself, always provided that he had a careful overseer.
‘The deuce a bit you’ll see of him thin, me ould shepherd-driver, in a year or two, or next year either,’ said Barrington. ‘I know the signs of it. He’s going to cut Garrandilla after shearing, and he’s trying to suck ye, like a marrow-bone, of all the fruits of all yer long hard life and experience, me ould warrior. And why wouldn’t he? Sure I’d be off myself and invest, if my uncle would only send out the ten thousand that he promised me.’
‘Neuchamp manage a station!’ said Malcolm Grahame. ‘He just knows naething whatever about foot-rot, and he disna know first-combing from pieces; it’s my deleeberate opinion he’ll just be insolvent within the year.’