CHAPTER XXII
A pleasant ride home in the cool of the evening, comprising some æsthetic talk on the part of Ernest with the youngest daughter, and a sensational bit of horsemanship by the Colonel, who rode his horse over a stiff three-railer that Miss Branksome had denounced as dangerous, prepared the party for a very merry dinner, after which some dressing set in, and the whole party started for the ball in a high mail phaeton.
The mining township of Turonia, while tolerably open to criticism by day as to its architecture, with the kindly aid of shadow and moonbeam looked sufficiently imposing by night, with its long line of lighted street, its clanking engines and red-gleaming shift-fires.
The particular night chosen for the entertainment which the bachelors temporarily dwelling in and around the golden city of Turonia had provided, was of the clearest moonlight procurable. Undimmed, awful, golden, pure, in the wondrous dark-blue dome, glowed the thrones of the greater and the lesser kings of the night. The trees upon the swart hillsides were visible in fullest delicate tracery of leaf and branch, as at midday. Each trail in the red dusty roadpaths showed with magic pencilling of outline. The dark-mouthed cruel shafts, which lay as if watching for a prey on either side of the narrow roadway, were plainly visible to the most careless wayfarer. So it chanced that from cottage and villa, from farmhouse and home station, and even from less pretentious habitations than any of these, wended at the usual hour a concourse of joyous or pleasure-enduring visitants, not specially distinguishable in air, manner, or raiment from metropolitan devotees of similar tenets.
Pretty Mrs. Merryfield was there, whose husband, formerly in the navy, held as many shares in the Haul and Belay Reef as would at that time have enabled him to retire upon club life and whist for the rest of his days. Managing Mrs. Campion, with her three daughters (Janie Campion was not unlikely to be voted the belle of the evening), sailed in, imposing with bouquets all the way from Sydney, the fern sprigs, camellias, and moss rosebuds of which were marvels of freshness. Little Campion and his partner, George Bowler, were driving a roaring trade as auctioneers, and a cheque for fifty for the girls’ dresses and fal-lals was, he was pleased to say, ‘neither here nor there.’ The doctors, half a dozen, were chiefly married men, and contributed their full share to the feminine contingent. So did the four lawyers. Mining cases are perhaps the most interminable, complicated, and technical known in the records of litigation. The bankers were in great force and profusion. In mining towns they are necessarily numerous and competitive, and there are few departments of social accomplishments to which they may not lay claim. Thus many were the celebrities contributed by them that night—athletic champions, musical bankers, and bankers that danced, bankers that billiarded and whisted, bankers that ‘went in for beauty’ and preserved their complexions, and bankers that combined divers of these claims to consideration. In a general way it may be assumed that the jeunesse dorée of that inevitable profession numbers as many ‘good all-round men’ as could be taken at hazard from either of the services, military or naval—the metropolitan young-lady vote notwithstanding. Our ball yet had some distinctive features. Many of the irreproachably attired persons, there and then present, had spent the day in avocations which do not in a general way precede ball going. Jack Hardston had worked his own eight hours’ ‘shift’ that day, from 8 a.m. to 4 o’clock in the afternoon, in a ‘drive’ of considerable lateral penetration, at a distance of 160 feet from ‘upper air.’ After a light repast, a smoke, a swim in the Turonia, and a somewhat protracted and hazardous toilet, he asserted himself to be wound up exactly to concert pitch. Twice as fit indeed as when he carried the money of the men for the grand military pedestrian handicap. Mild little Mrs. Wynne had treated herself to the ball on the strength of Lloyd Watkyn having come ‘on the gutter’ in his claim at Jumper’s Gully in the early part of the week. So she finished up her baking and brewing, let us say, and having handed over the three-year-old Watkyn Williams, with many injunctions, to her neighbour Mrs. David Jones (also of the Principality), proceeded with her husband, ‘dressed for once like old times,’ as she said with a little sigh, to the hall of the great enchanter—even music—who hath power over body and soul, life and limb; who with a chord can call forth the tears of the past, the joys of the present. And very nice they looked.
Horace Sherrington was there—suave, correct, rather worn-looking, but incontestably ‘good form.’ He made a handsomer income by the exercise of his talents than those somewhat varied natural gifts had ever previously afforded him. Every evening he came to the camp mess, where the Government officials kept something like open house for all pleasant fellows who were ‘of ours’ in the former or the latter time. No one sang so good a song as Sherrington, was so racy a raconteur, played a better hand at whist, had a surer cue at pool. But no one knew precisely how he spent his day, not that any one cared much. There were too many men of mark who had tried every employment on that goldfield for luck and honest bread, including the officials themselves, for them to affect any snobbish discrimination of avocations. But Horace did not volunteer the nature of his daily duties; he was not a miner, a speculator, a reefer, nor an engine-driver, a clerk, or puddler. His reticence piqued them. One day the police inspector’s horse shied at a man in a loose blue shirt and very clay-stained general rig, having also an immense sheaf of posters in his hand. ‘What the devil do you mean, my man, by flourishing these things in my horse’s face?’ growled the somewhat shaken autocrat. ‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ quoth the agent of intelligence, himself passing on. But it was too late. The lynx-eye settled upon him with unerring aim, like a backwoodsman’s rifle. Both men burst out laughing. The elegant and accomplished Horace was a bill-sticker! The festive concourse partook, in one respect at least, of classical and traditionary fitness. The sincere and fervid worshippers of Terpsichore held sacred revel in a temple—the Temple of Justice! For the large handsomely decorated hall, which resounded with the inspiriting clangour of a very passable brass band, was in good earnest the court-house of Turonia. By the simple process of removing the dock and draping the witness-box as a lamp stand, placing the musicians upon the magisterial bench, with, I hardly need to mention, a profuse exhibition of international bunting, a fairly ornamental and highly effective ballroom was secured.
It was generally believed, and indeed asserted by the Turonia Sentinel, that the Commissioner, who was known to be beau valseur, had bribed the contractor, when completing that magnificent edifice, to bestow extra finish upon the flooring, with ulterior views as to its utilisation for society purposes. Be that as it may—and much gossip was current about that high and mighty official of which he took no heed—there was some truth in a subsequent legend that a prisoner and the constable by whom he was being escorted to the dock on the following morning slipped and fell as heavily and unexpectedly upon the glassy floor as if they had been essaying the gliding graces of the rink for the first time.
When the Branksome Hall party drove up, the entertainment had commenced, and the two first dances having been got through, the gêne of all beginnings and early arrivals was evaded. The ladies having been first conducted for envelope-removing purposes into the jury-room, and the men’s overcoats and wideawakes deposited in the land office, the stewards with elaborate courtesy escorted them to the hall of dazzling delight.
The Commissioner, in blue and gold (at that period of Australian history these officials wore uniforms), looked most military and distinguished, his heavy drab moustache and decided cast of countenance suiting the costume extremely well. The second steward was a broad-shouldered, blonde, blue-eyed personage, whose singular talent for organisation caused his services to be in great request at all public demonstrations—social, military, legal, or ecclesiastical. He looked like a squatter or a naval man, but was in reality a bank manager. The third steward was a tall handsome man, very carefully attired, whose delicate features were partly concealed by an immense fair beard. His manner, his mien, his every look and gesture, told as plainly as words to any observer of his kind of foreign travel, of ‘the service’ in early life of that occasional entire dependence upon personal resources which has been roughly translated as ‘living by his wits.’ On his brow was the imprint writ large, in spite of the faultless toilet, finished courtesy, the perfect aplomb, the half-unconscious fierté of his manner, the somewhat doubtful affiche of adventurer.
Attended by these magnates, for whom way was made with ready respect, the Hall party sailed into the well-lighted, well-filled room with considerable prestige.