As nothing was to be gained by immediate departure, Mr. Neuchamp availed himself of this unexpected holiday with unrestrained satisfaction and enjoyment. He feasted upon his favourite authors and upon the newer publications which he was enabled to procure in Sydney, thanks to the excellent public and private libraries. Antonia and he renewed their literary labours and criticisms; and that young lady immortalised herself and completely subjugated Jack Windsor, by making a water-colour sketch of Ben Bolt in an attitude of mingled fear, wrath, and desperation, when unexpectedly confronted with a German band. It was Mr. Windsor’s deliberate conviction, emphatically expressed, that ‘a young lady who could take off a horse like that—the dead image of him—could do anything.’ In truth, horse and man formed, at the moment, a study for an artist. The former with glaring eye, open nostril, sudden arrest of action, and capacity for the wildest outbreak; the latter sitting watchful, statuesque, centaur-like, a personification of equestrian strength and grace.
As the distance to Bilwillia was great, and its reputation unfavourable in the matter of horse-flesh, Ernest determined not to risk the safety of Osmund, whom he left in snug quarters near Sydney.
Mr. Windsor, much to his disappointment, received news of the illness of his mother, the only relative in the world, as he had often stated to Ernest, for whom he possessed a grain of affection. He was more strongly moved by the sudden announcement of her being sick unto death than Mr. Neuchamp thought possible.
‘I don’t half fancy,’ he said, ‘sloping and leaving you to go and take delivery of the place all alone by yourself, sir; and they say Mr. Parklands knows a thing or two. However, he’s an off-handed chap, and the best thing you can do is to leave the whole jimbang in his hands altogether. If you go barneying about calves, or counting horses that’s give in, he’ll best ye, as sure as you’re born. So your dart is to say you don’t know nothin’ about cattle, and drop him in for the drafting out calves under age, and all them sorts of things. Then, as he’s a gentleman, he’s bound to give you a show. I ought to be along with you, I know. But I haven’t seen my poor old mother for five years good, and I must go, if I was never to make a rise again.’
Jack departed, but he somehow found time to call at Walton’s inn on his way to Appin, where his old mother lived and where he had spent his childhood. Ben Bolt had but little breathing time once clear of Sydney streets, and that wild steed of the desert was sensible of a decidedly quickened circulation as he was pulled up in the inn yard, and turned into a stall after a hurried and headlong manner.
As Mr. Windsor passed the door of the inn, he observed an immense quadruped hung up at the posts, which, but for the saddle and bridle, might have been taken for a strayed waggon-horse. The length of the stirrup-leathers conveyed to a bushman’s intelligence the fact that the rider of this Gargantuan steed was an individual of unusual length of limb.
Passing quietly into the bar, and thence into a small parlour devoted to the family and particular friends of the host, he discovered the old couple, Miss Carry, and a stranger, whom he immediately associated with the charger aforesaid and with the district of the Hawkesbury.
‘Well, Mr. Windsor, and who’d have thought of seeing you?’ said Mrs. Walton. ‘Have you and Mr. Neuchum—and a nice gentleman he be, surely—been in Sydney all this time? And where are you leaving for now?’
‘We’ve been in Sydney all the time, and a very jolly place it is, Mrs. Walton,’ said Jack, answering the old woman with his tongue and Carry’s quick glance with his eyes. ‘Mr. Neuchamp’s just going up the country to look at a cattle run, and I’m going home to Appin for a short spell.’
‘What are you going to do there?’ said Carry; ‘I thought you went everywhere with the young gentleman?’