‘But I do,’ said Mrs. Freeman, ‘and more than me knows it. There’s your father isn’t the same man, without his regular work at the farm, and the carrying and the other jobs, that used to fill up his time from daylight to dark. Now he’s nothing but the cattle to look after; and such weather as this there’s nothing to do from month’s end to month’s end, unless to pull them out of the waterholes. And I know he had a “burst” at that wretched Stockman’s Arms the last time he was down the river. He that was that sober before you could not tell him from a Son of Temperance.‘
‘I feel sorry that you should have so much reason to complain of your lot,’ said Miss Neuchamp. ‘The poor, I am aware, are never contented, at least none that I ever saw in England. Yet it seems a pity, indeed, that want of patience and trust in Providence should have led to your moving to this unsuitable and, I am afraid, ill-fated locality.’
‘We’re not altogether so poor, miss,’ said the worthy matron, recovering herself. ‘Abe will have over five hundred pounds in the bank when he’s delivered up the land and the stock to this Mr. Levison, that’s bought us all out. But what’s a little money, one way or the other, if your life’s miserable, and your husband takes to idle ways and worse, and your children grow up duffers and planters, and perhaps end in sticking up people?’
‘Oh, mother, shut up!’ ejaculated Tottie, with more kindliness in her tone than the words would have indicated. ‘Things won’t be as had as that. Don’t I teach Poll and Sally and Ned and Billy? Besides, what does Miss Neuchamp know about duffing and sticking up? We’ll be all right when we clear out next year, and you can go back to Bowning and buy Book’s farm, and set father splitting stringy-bark rails for the rest of his life, if that’s what keeps him good. I expect the tea is ready. Won’t you give Miss Neuchamp a cup?’
Mrs. Freeman made haste to fill up a cup of tea, and a small jug of milk being produced, Miss Augusta found herself in possession of the best cup of tea she had tasted at Rainbar. She felt a sincere compassion for her hostess as a woman of properly submissive turn of mind, who had sense enough to regret her improper and irreligious departure from the lowly state in which Providence had placed her.
Promising to call again, and comforting the low-spirited matron as far as in her lay, she remounted Osmund with some difficulty by means of the chair, and rode homewards, followed by Mr. Windsor, who had solaced his leisure by extracting from the younger girls, whom he had descried fishing, the latest news of the cattle operations of the family generally.
‘Your mother seems to be very much of my opinion, Mary Anne,’ said Miss Augusta as soon as they were fairly on the sandy home-station track, ‘that this is a most undesirable place to live in.’
‘Mother’s as good a woman as ever was,’ said Tottie, ‘but she don’t “savey.” She’s always fretting about our old farm; and it certainly was cooler—that’s about all the pull there was in it. Father’s made more money here in two or three years than he’d have got together in twenty there. I should have been hoeing corn all day with a pair of thick boots on, and grown up as wild as a scrub filly. I don’t want to go back.‘
‘Your mother seems a person of excellent sense, Mary Anne, and I must say that I fully agree with her,’ said Miss Neuchamp, with her most unbending expression, designed to modify her attendant’s lightness of tone. ‘Depend upon it, unhappiness and misfortune invariably follow the attempt to quit an allotted station in life.’
‘Oh, that be hanged for a yarn! Oh, I beg your pardon, miss,’ said Tottie confusedly, for she was on the point of relapsing into the Rainbar vernacular. ‘But surely every one ain’t bound to stop where they’re planted, good soil or bad, water or no water, like a corn-seed in a cow track or a pumpkin in a tree stump! Men and women have it in ’em to forage about a bit, else how do some people get on so wonderfully. I’ve read about self-help, and all that, and heaps of people beginning with half-a-crown and making fortunes. Ought they to have thrown the half-crown away or the fortune after they had made it?’