Other explorations were made in the cool hours of the evening, but gradually Miss Neuchamp tired of the monotonous aspect of matters. The dusty tracts were not pleasant to her feet. The mosquitoes assailed her with savage virulence, whether she walked at sunrise, mid-day, or darkening eve. If she sat down on the river bank and watched the shallow but still pure and gleaming waters, ants of every conceivable degree of curiosity or ferocity discomposed her. There was no rest, no variety, no beauty, no ‘proper’ wood, valley, mountain, or brook. She could not imagine human beings living constantly in such a hateful wilderness. If Ernest had not all his life, and now most of all, developed a talent for useless and incomprehensible self-sacrifice, he would abandon such a spot for ever.
Mr. Neuchamp felt himself pressed to his last entrenchments to defend his position; Fate seemed to have arrived personally, masked, not for the first time in man’s strange story, in the guise of a woman. That woman, too, his persistent, inexorable cousin Augusta. ‘The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.’ The heavens,—dead to the dumb, imploring looks of the great armies of perishing brutes, to the prayers of ruined men; the earth, with withered herb and drying streamlet gasping and faint, breathless, under the burning noon and the pitiless dry moon rays,—alike conspired against him!
And now his cousin, who, with all her faults and defects, was stanchly devoted to her kindred and what she believed to be their welfare, came here to madden him with recollections of the wonderland of his birth, and to fill him with ignoble longings to purchase present relief by the ruinous sacrifice of purpose and principle.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, at the end of a closely contested argument, ‘whether all women are incapable of comprehending the adherence to a fixed purpose, to the unquestioned end and climax. But you must forgive me, my dear Augusta, for saying that you appear to me to be in the position of a passenger who urges the captain of a vessel to alter his course because the gale is wild and the waves rough. Suppose you had made a suggestion to the captain of the Rohilla, in which noble steamer you made your memorable voyage to these hapless isles. The officers of the great company are polished gentlemen as well as seamen of the first order, but I am afraid Gordon Anderson would have been more curt than explanatory on that occasion.’
‘And you are like the man in Sinbad the Sailor, as you like marine similes,’ retorted Augusta; ‘you will see your vessel gradually drawn toward the loadstone island till all the nails and rivets fly out by attraction of ruin, and you will sink in the waters of oblivion, unhonoured and unsung.’
‘But not “unloved,” I trust,‘ rejoined Ernest; ‘don’t think that matters, even in Australia, will be quite so bad as that. By the way, let me congratulate you upon your facility of quotation. Your memory must have improved amazingly of late.’
This unfair taunt closed the conversation abruptly. But like some squabbles between very near and dear friends, there was a tacit agreement not to refer to it. Subsequently all went on as usual.
Miss Neuchamp was a very fair horsewoman, having hunted without coming very signally to grief, by dint of a wonderfully broken hunter, who was first cousin to a rocking-horse—after this wise: he would on no account run away; he was easy, he was safe; you could not throw him down over any species of leap,—hedge, ditch, brook, or bulfinch. It was all alike to Negotiator. After a couple of seasons and the aid of this accomplished palfrey, Miss Neuchamp, with some reason, came to the conclusion that she could ride fairly well. So, having broached the idea at breakfast one morning, Ernest joyfully suggested Osmund as the type of ease and elegance, and of such a nerve that an organ and monkey might, were the consideration sufficient, be placed on his short back to-morrow without risk of casualty.
Miss Neuchamp thought that she should like to ride down and visit the Freeman encampment, when Tottie, who would of course attend her, might have the opportunity of seeing her mother and other kinsfolk.
The side-saddle was the next difficulty; but Tottie proffered hers at once, saying that she could ride in a man’s saddle, which she could borrow from Mr. Banks.