‘No doubt some people are apparently favoured,’ said Miss Augusta, regarding Tottie’s argument as another result of the over-education of ‘these sort of persons.’ ‘In the end it is often the worst thing that can befall them. Now let us canter.‘
When Augusta Neuchamp had remained for a fortnight at Rainbar she began to perceive that the monotonous existence likely to be unreasonably prolonged would serve no object either of pleasure or profit. No amount of residence would teach her an iota more of the nature of such an establishment as Rainbar than she knew already. What was there to learn? The plains within sight of the cottage needed but to be indefinitely multiplied; and what then? An area of country equally arid, barren, unspeakably desolate. Other droves and herds of cattle equally emaciated. Nothing possibly could be in her eyes more hopeless and horrible than these endless death-stricken, famine-haunted wastes. Why did Ernest stay here? She had tried her utmost to induce him to abandon the whole miserable delusion, quoting the arguments of Mr. Jermyn Croker until he spoke angrily about that gentleman and closed the debate.
The obvious thing to do was to return to Sydney, but even this comparatively simple step was difficult to carry out. Miss Neuchamp did not desire again to tempt the perils of the road unattended. She had taken it for granted that Ernest, the most complying and good-natured of men ordinarily, would return to Sydney with her; and she had trusted to the influence of civilisation and her steady persuasion to prevail upon him to return to England to his friends, and to what she deemed to be his fixed and unalterable position in life.
On this occasion she met with unexpected opposition. Ernest positively declined to quit his station at present.
‘My dear Augusta,’ said he, ‘you do not know what you are asking. I have a number of very important duties to perform here. My financial state is an extremely critical one. I cannot with any decency appear in Sydney when everything points to the ruin of myself and my whole order. I am sincerely sorry that you should feel life here to be so extremely ennuyant, but I should never, if consulted, have advised you to come; and now I am afraid you must wait until a proper escort turns up or until I can accompany you.’
‘And when will that be?’
‘When the rain comes, certainly not before.’
Miss Augusta said that this last contingency was as probable as the near advent of the millennium. She would wait a given time, and, that expired, would go down to Sydney as she had come up by herself.
A fortnight, even three weeks, passed away. Augusta had mentioned a month as the outside limit of her forbearance. She read over and over ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’ and ‘Mariana in the South’ with quite a new appreciation of their peculiar accuracy as well as poetic sentiment.
Daily she worked and read, and walked and rode, and alternately was hopeful or otherwise about the ultimate conversion of Tottie to the true faith of proper English village lowliness and reverence. Daily Ernest went forth ‘out on the run’ immediately after breakfast, reappearing only at or after sunset. Insensibly Miss Neuchamp became alarmed to find creeping over her a kind of provincial interest in the affairs of the ‘burghers of this desert city.’ She listened almost with excitement to the account of a lot of the new cattle having been followed twenty miles over the boundary and recovered by Charley Banks. She heard of a bushranger being captured about fifty miles off—this was Jack Windsor’s story; of the mail coming in twelve hours late in consequence of the horses being exhausted. Ernest gathered this from the overseer of the last lot of travelling sheep that passed through, having been locked up in Wargan Gaol for disobeying a summons. ‘Such a handsome young fellow, miss.’ This was Tottie’s contribution.