‘You’ve spent a lot of money on this place, by the look of things as I came along,’ said this mild but uncompromising critic, filling himself another cup of tea with much deliberation. ‘You’ve been and put up a big paddock and a horse-yard and a grand house; and, last night, I’m blessed if I didn’t ride slap into that drain arrangement, miles of it I see there was. Now, I don’t say it’s altogether a waste of money, but when a young man like you buys a place, he has no call to spend a shilling that he can help till he gets it out of the run.’
‘I can understand the prudence of that policy now,’ answered Ernest, half amused, half inclined to resent this extremely plain speech from a comparative stranger, yet comprehending with instinctively clear perception the unaffected friendliness of intuition and truthful habit of his reviewer, ‘but the fat cattle sold so well that I expected to continue paying my way and still improving the property.’
‘That’s where you made the mistake,’ pursued the senior colonist; ‘you went on thinking that the good seasons were a-going to last for ever. If you’d kept on selling and never spending, you’d have had your money in your pocket now, and might have been in the market for some of these lots of first-rate store cattle that’s going a-begging—splendid fine-bred cattle, too, as you ever saw!’ Here Mr. Levison emptied the teapot with a benign expression, and, crossing his legs reflectively, looked with mild reproach at his entertainer.
Ernest felt each item of guilty extravagance arise and arraign him separately, as Mr. Levison, with judicial enumeration, went on ticking off his pecuniary sins. In one of these lightning flashes of self-accusation with which conscience favours erring man, he realised the difference of his position from what it would have been if he had doggedly adhered to the scale of non-expenditure which he had found at Rainbar, and had retained the proceeds of his drafts of cattle with which to pay off his purchase-money, or re-invest in stores at the tempting tariff of the day. The faint counter-consolation that occurred to him, under the circumstances, was that if he had acted in such a way he would not have been Ernest Neuchamp at all, but must have changed his very nature and identity. So there was no more to be said.
On the next morning Osmund was saddled for Mr. Levison, who, after saying that he would be back at sundown on the fifth day, departed for Mingadee. He was good enough to express his unqualified admiration of the gray horse’s make and shape as he mounted him. ‘I saw a lot of mares and foals knocking about at the big bend,’ he said. ‘Brood mares are useless wretches generally, and you can buy horses a deal cheaper than you raise ’em. But if you could turn out a few colts like this gray horse here, why, I should begin to think there was something in horse-breeding after all.’
On the fifth day punctually, about sundown, Mr. Levison reappeared at Rainbar. Having crossed the hundred miles of plain which separated the stations in two days, he remained one day, transacting the purchase of the store stock to which he had referred; then Osmund carried him back in two days, ‘quite flippant,’ as Jack Windsor observed. As he partook of the evening meal in company with Ernest, he essayed to cheer him up after the following fashion—
‘I’d a sort of notion that I’d checked off all your money-burying before I left. But it seems I wasn’t quite up to the number of holes a man can dig and fill up with sovereigns. I came across the Settlement!—regular town it is; and that native chap—active fellow he is, and no mistake—told me you’d paid the deposit money and given ’em employment, and advanced ’em money in other ways. I’ve seen new hands do many a blind trick, but I never knew a man before, of his own free will, bring down a lot of free selectors on his own run.’
‘It does not appear to be a fashionable thing to do,’ admitted Ernest, ‘judging from the remarks of my neighbours, as well as yourself; but I am somewhat like you in one respect—I do things upon my own responsibility, and, I am afraid, do not care sufficiently about other people’s opinions. Sometimes I am wrong—very wrong—I admit. But at other times I am so satisfied of being right that the whole world would not turn me.’
Mr. Levison looked Ernest ‘straight in the eye’ with his own singularly clear, penetrating gaze. ‘I hold with you in that,’ he said at length; ‘nothing like a man who acts on his own reason, and sticks to it. He may be right, or he may be wrong, but he’ll come out better in the long run than any fellow that follows the wind wherever it blows. And so you believe in these cockatoo chaps? Now, what’s the good of ’em?’
‘Just so far,’ said Ernest, ‘that I hope, in time, to see a thriving and prosperous population here, making proper use of the soil, and advantageous to the proprietor, as they in turn would be benefited by him.’