‘I think I may promise that,’ said Mr. Neuchamp. ‘When Frank is old enough to set up for himself at Morahmee, with an occasional trip to Rainbar and Mildool, to keep himself from forgetting how to ride, then I think we may possibly make our last voyage to the old home, in preparation for that journey on which I trust we three may set forth at periods not very distantly divided.’
The brothers shook hands silently. Antonia bestowed a sister’s kiss upon the calm brow of the elder brother, and quitted the room. No more was said. But all needful preparations were made, and ere the autumn leaves had commenced to fall from the aged woods which girdled Neuchampstead, the Massilia was steaming through the Straits of Bonifacio with Ernest Neuchamp watching the snowy mountain-tops of Corsica, while Antonia alternately enlivened the baby Frank or dipped into The Crescent and the Cross, which she had long intended to read over again in a leisurely and considerate manner.
But little remains to tell of the after-life of Ernest Neuchamp. Settled once more in ‘the sunny land,’ he found his time fully and not unworthily occupied in the superintendence of his extensive properties and investments. There was much necessary journeying between Rainbar and Morahmee, at which latter place Paul Frankston had insisted upon their taking up their permanent abode. ‘I am going down hill,’ he said; ‘the old house will be yours when I am gone; why should I sit here lonely in my age while my darling and her children are so near me? Don’t be afraid of the nursery-racket bothering me. Every note of their young voices is music in my ears, being what they are.’ So in Ernest’s absence in the bush, or during the sitting of the House of Assembly—having from a stern sense of duty permitted himself to be elected as the representative of the electoral district of Lower Oxley—Antonia had a guardian and a companion. She resolved upon making the journey to Rainbar, indeed, in order that she might fully comprehend the nature of the life which her husband had formerly led. During her stay she formed a tolerably fair estimate of the value of the property, being a lady of an observing turn of mind, and possessing by inheritance a hitherto latent tendency towards the management of affairs not generally granted to the sex. She visited Lake Antonia, and warmly congratulated Mr. Neuchamp upon that grand achievement. She patted Osmund and Ben Bolt, now bordering on the dignity of pensioners. She drove over to Mrs. Windsor’s cottage at Mildool, where she found Carry established as rather a grande dame, with the general approbation of the district and of all the tourists and travellers who shared the proverbial hospitality of Mildool. She caused the stud to be driven in for inspection, when she had sufficient presence of mind to choose a pair of phaeton horses for herself out of them. But she told her husband that she could not perceive any advantage to be derived from living at Rainbar as long as their income maintained its present average, and that he could manage the interesting but exceedingly warm and isolated territory equally well by proxy.
Jack Windsor, upon Mr. Banks’s promotion and marriage, became manager of the whole consolidated establishment, with a proportionate advance in salary. He developed his leading qualities of shrewdness and energy to their fullest capacity under the influence of prosperity. Being perfectly satisfied with his position and duties, having a good home, a contented wife, the means of educating his large family, the respect of the whole country-side, and the habit of saving a large portion of his liberal salary, besides an abundance of the exact species of occupation and exercise which suited him, it is not probable that he will make any attempt to ‘better himself.’ It is not certain that Mrs. Windsor would not favour the investment of their savings in property ‘down the country’ for the sake of the children, etc.; but Jack will not hear of it. ‘I should feel first-rate,’ he says scornfully, ‘shouldn’t I, in a place of my own, with a man and a boy, and forty or fifty head of crawling cattle to stare at while they were getting fit for market? That’s not my style. It wouldn’t suit any of us—not you either, old woman, to be poking about, helping at the wash-tub or something, or peelin’ potatoes for dinner. We couldn’t stand it after the life we’ve had here. I couldn’t do without half-a-dozen stabled hacks and a lot of smart men to keep up to the mark. Give me something big to work at, done well, and paying for good keep and good spending all round. Five hundred and forty head of fat cattle cut out in two days like the last Mildool lot, and all the country-side at the muster—that’s John Windsor’s style—none of your Hawkesbury corn-shelling, butter-and-eggs racket. You ought to have married old Homminey, Carry, if that’s what you wanted. Besides, after thinking and saving and driving up to high pressure for the master so long, it would feel unnatural-like to be only working for myself.‘ So the argument was settled. Mr. Windsor had, it seems, tasted too fully of the luxury of power and command to relinquish it for humble independence.
The undisputed sway over a large staff of working hands, the unquestioned control of money and credit, within certain limits, had become with him more and more an indispensable habitude. Accustomed to the tone of the leader and the centurion, he could not endure the thought of changing his wide eventful life into the decorous dulness of the small landed proprietor. Mrs. Windsor, too, who dressed exceedingly well, and was admitted on equal terms to the society of the district, a position which, from her tact, good sense, and extremely agreeable appearance, she suitably filled and fully deserved, would probably, as her husband forcibly explained, have felt the change almost as much as himself. So Mr. Neuchamp was spared the annoyance of looking out for a new manager.
Hardy Baldacre accumulated a very large fortune, but was prevented, in middle life, from proving the exact amount of coin and property which may be amassed by the consistent practice of grinding parsimony, combined with an elimination of all the literary, artistic, social, and sympathetic tendencies. He habitually condemned the entire section, under the fatal affiche of ‘don’t pay.’ To the surprise—we cannot with accuracy affirm, to the regret—of the general public, this very extensive proprietor fell a victim to a fit of delirium tremens, supervening upon the practice of irregular and excessive alcoholism. Into this vice of barren minds, the pitiless economist, guilty of so few other recreations, was gradually but irresistibly drawn.
The White Falcon fled far and fast with the fugitive noble, whose debts added the keenest edge among his late friends and creditors to the memory of his treasons. He escaped, with his usual good fortune, the civil and criminal tentacula in which the dread octopus of the law would speedily have enveloped him. He laughed at British and Australian warrants. But passing into one of the Dutch Indian settlements, he was sufficiently imprudent to pursue there also the same career of reckless expenditure. By an accident his character was disclosed, and his arrest effected at the moment of premeditated flight. A severe logic, learned in the strict commercial schools of Holland, where debt meets with no favour, guards the commerce of her intertropical colonies. The White Falcon was promptly seized and sold to satisfy a small portion of the princely liabilities of the owner, while for long years, in a dreary dungeon, like another and a better sea-rover, Albert von Schätterheims was doomed to eat his heart in the darksome solitude of an ignoble and hopeless captivity.
The Freeman family prospered in a general sense. Abraham Freeman settled down upon a comfortable but not over-fertile farm in the neighbourhood of Bowning. The thickness of the timber, and the conversion of much of it into fencing-rails, served to provide him with occupation, and therefore with good principles, as Tottie saucily observed, to his life’s end. That high-spirited damsel grieved much at first over the slowness and general fuss about trifles, which, after her extended experience, seemed to her to characterise the whole district, but was eventually persuaded by a thriving young miller that there were worse places to reside in. He was resolute, however, in forbidding the carrying of bags of flour, and as she was provided with a smart buggy and unlimited bonnets, her taste for adventurous excitement became modified in time, and the black ambling mare was handed over to the boys.
William and Joe Freeman made much money by nomadic agrarianism. After years passed in arduously constructing sham improvements and ‘carrying out the residence clause,’ with no intention of residing, they found themselves able to purchase a station.