A letter from Paul Frankston, though kind and hearty in tone, was not reassuring. He said that the times were exceedingly bad,—so bad that even he, Paul, had had work to meet his engagements, and had at no time for many years past been so sorely pressed. He noticed that every day fresh station properties were being brought into the market, and hoped that an utter crash and collapse of stock and stations was not about to take place, as in 1842-43. The only reason for believing that a favourable change would take place in the stock-market was that the yield of gold appeared to be increasing, and that though temporary inconvenience had taken place, he, Paul, fully believed that in the course of a year or two there would be a very different state of matters. He therefore advised Ernest to be hopeful, and, while keeping down expenses to the narrowest limit, to hold on to his station with his eyelids, so to speak. Those who had done so at any former period of the country’s history were now wealthy men. He believed yet that Ernest, if he steadily adhered to his proper work and—pardon him—abstained from speculative experiments, would eventually do well. He hoped that he had got his newly-purchased store cattle safely on the run. He had the greatest confidence in Levison’s unerring judgment in such matters. He might be unduly prejudiced in his favour, but he had never known him to be wrong. If everything went to the bad, no doubt this purchase would make matters no worse. If otherwise, they were the nucleus of a future, and not a small one either. His last advice was to keep the ordinary station work in the best possible trim, and not to spend one shilling in other than absolute necessities. Antonia was very well, but did nothing but read all day. He had suggested her going in for a degree at the University, but she had not cared for the suggestion. When rain came perhaps Ernest might manage another run down the country.
Mr. Neuchamp steadily devoted himself to a full consideration of the matters placed before him in this letter—considerate and delicate in feeling, as indeed had been every word and line of advice received by him from Paul Frankston from the very beginning of their acquaintance. No one could have fancied that the whole of the obligation had been upon his, Ernest’s, side, from the day when he first exploded Hartley Selmore’s politico-economical arrangement for subsidising holders of station properties with the capital of ingenuous newly-arrived colonists. For how much generous hospitality, shrewd counsel, often implied rather than proffered, substantial assistance and unswerving friendship, was he not his debtor? And Antonia? The more he saw of girls generally,—and he did not rate those Australian young ladies, who had equal advantages of training, society, and culture, at a jot below their English contemporaries,—the more deep became his conviction of her unusual range of thought, depth of feeling, and purity of mind. As the dry, cool wind of the Australian autumn wailed and sighed over the wide gray plains, and around the useful but unromantic edifices which went to make up the homestead at Rainbar, Ernest began to feel a somewhat intensified, intolerable sensation of intellectual loneliness. For the hundredth, five hundredth, time he wished that it would rain. Why did it not rain? Was the land accursed, like Egypt in the olden Pharaoh days? Rain would do so much. Put an end to his anxieties about the stock. Improve the condition and lessen the expense of the new cattle. Perhaps, nay, certainly, send up the price of stock generally. Liberalise the ideas of Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton. Render a trip to town possible; and oh, the sight once more of the verandah at Morahmee! the savour of the fresh brine-laden air! the sight of the foam-fringed billows of the unbounded sea! the—— But the further contemplation of impossible delights, rendered such by his now comparatively lengthened inland exile, was sternly repressed by the philosophic mind of Mr. Neuchamp. And rain, in England at least, had always seemed such a little thing—to be had for nothing; to be guarded against by the timid, complained about by the superficial, anathematised by the reckless, constant in and out of season—a nuisance, a drug, a daily dread. Why then, in the name of all the mighty, merciful powers, did it not rain? It was clearly no use fretting about the absence of the gladdening, fertilising phenomenon in a dry and thirsty land, or philosophising about the relation of monsoons to icebergs, any unusual protraction or prominence in which natural facts and forces of the calm unswerving giantess, Nature, might alter climates and prices, from Lake Alexandrina to the Snowy River, from Carpentaria to the county of Cumberland. The matter on hand was the plain and prosaic adjustment of his ‘duty a dead sure thing,’ and admitting of but little variation from the point.
Therefore for the present, and as day after day arose bright and cool, with breezy morn and pure fresh bracing atmosphere, unhappily suggestive of continuous dry weather, Mr. Neuchamp, discarding theories, reveries, and projects, sternly addressed himself to work. From earliest dawn to a late hour the whole of the little community was astir. It had been with a feeling of deep satisfaction that Ernest had watched, for the first time, the great droves of ‘new cattle’ spread, unchecked, over the Rainbar plain, and take their first meal of the scanty but highly nutritive salsolaceous herbage. Bred in a ‘sour grass’ country, far inferior for fattening purposes, though having merits of its own, the docile, highly-bred herd might be expected, under ordinary conditions, to grow and develop in the most unprecedented manner. There is a peculiar pleasure, felt by all station proprietors, in the examination of the droves or flocks of store stock placed for the first time upon their new pastures. Generally purchased at a comparatively low price, and passing from inferior to superior fattening country, if the season be favourable a cheering alteration takes place. It is pleasant for the sheep-owner to perceive his ‘large-framed healthy wethers’ (as per advertisement) laying on condition day by day, passing through all the stages of comparative obesity which enables him to ‘top the market’ with them as fat sheep, having previously denuded them of a fleece which, perhaps, fully pays the cost of the original purchase.
But the gratification known to the purchaser of ‘store’ or ‘lean’ cattle, either for fattening or for increase, is of a higher and more intense, because of a more complex, nature, as becomes the more individualised character of the stock.
Day by day, if but the pasture be sufficient, the range wide, the weather favourable, the season propitious, the stockmen practised and efficient—if, I repeat, all these conditions be fulfilled—then indeed does the happy pastoralist taste all the joys of his successful and pleasant position. Day by day, as he rides forth in the fresh morn, the warm kind eve, he notes the stranger kine more habitually wander out to the springing pasture and back to the creek, marsh, river, which is their water privilege. He sees the steers grow glossy of hide, thicker, lengthier, ripen into marketable bullocks. He sees the tiny she yearlings grow into sonsy heifers; the angular cows into imposing, deep-brisketed, flat-backed matrons, ever and anon with younglets, ‘to the manor born,’ and likely in time to pay double the original cost of the parent, with a high percentage for personal profit. Lastly, the first draft of bullocks picked from these, if a mixed herd, pays for the whole lot—steers, bullocks, cows, and calves—leaving the spirited purchaser with a tolerably large and increasing herd, all profit.
Many of these pleasurable emotions would have found lodging in the breast of Mr. Neuchamp had circumstances, that is, the season, been favourable. But nothing was favourable. The skies were like brass—even as the money market—with no rent or fissure through which mercy or change could by any means be perceived. The scanty pasture provoked the instinct-guided cattle to wander far and fast. In pursuit Ernest was fain to hurry, personally or vicariously, till every horse on the establishment, Osmund included, had as much as he could do to carry his rider for a day’s slow journey. Indeed the said rider was occasionally to be descried carrying his saddle home upon his own proper back, having left his weak and weary steed out on the plain.
The original herd, every beast of which had been bred and reared at Rainbar, was not altogether badly off. Acquainted with every nook and corner of the run, they ‘went back’ almost incredible distances for grass, only returning to the bare vicinity of the water when desperate with thirst. It is wonderful what privation in that respect the half-wild herds of cattle and horses will undergo in a dry country in a dry season, without seriously imperilling their health and strength. If they can only procure a debauch upon water from time to time, they stave off famine in a manner quite impossible to the shorthorns and unadventurous beeves of more rainy climes, more succulent pastures.
As to the members of the co-operative settlement—the cockatoos, as Jack Windsor incorrectly called them—they were not, in that time of trial, an element of help or consolation. Their cattle had increased even suspiciously fast. The untoward season had brought out the narrow greed and cunning of their natures into unpleasant prominence.
Under the impression that Ernest would most probably be ruined and be compelled shortly to sell Rainbar, they arrived at the conclusion that there was nothing to be gained by concession, and so gradually threw off any semblance of deference. They rigidly enforced the exclusion of the Rainbar cattle from their very extensive pre-emptive grass rights, and they hunted with their dogs new cattle and old indifferently, not particularly caring, it would seem, whether they were or were not lost.
Ernest was first grieved, then indignant, at this gross ingratitude. Under the influence of these feelings he expostulated with them warmly, alleging his right, as having advanced a portion of the purchase-money for their holdings, to some consideration, if the general sympathy and kindness which he had accorded to them was to go for nothing.