‘We want a little rousing up,’ thought poor Paul; ‘we have had no little dinners lately, no one in the evenings. I have been thinking over this confounded season and these bothering bills till I have forgotten my own darling, but for whose sake the whole country might be swallowed up in Mauna Loa, for all old Paul cares. I shouldn’t say that either; but it seems hard that anything should ail the poor darling that care might have prevented. If her mother had lived—ah!’ and here Paul fell a-thinking, until the wheels of the dogcart grated against the pavement near the office door.
Thus it so chanced that, towards the end of the week, occurred one of the little dinners for which Morahmee was famous, with a ‘whip’ of certain musical celebrities of the neighbourhood, and as many ordinary guests as made a successful compromise between all ‘music,’ which sometimes hath not ‘charms’ for the masculine breast, and a regulation evening party, which would have been an anachronism.
Among the guests for whom Paul, in his anxiety for a healthful distraction for Antonia, had swept the clubs and the hotels, were Mr. Hardy Baldacre and Jermyn Croker. Squatters were scarce in Sydney beyond previous experience. They were all at home on their stations attending to their stock, except those who were in town attending to their bills. These last were chiefly indisposed to society. They dined at their clubs or hotels after half a day’s waiting in the manager’s ante-chamber, and felt more inclined for the repose of the smoking-room than for the excitement of the society.
Mr. Hardy Baldacre had managed to come to town, however, without such anxieties of a pecuniary nature as interfered with his amusements. Of these he partook of as full measure of every kind and description as he could procure cheaply. He had early developed a taste for pleasure, controlled only by considerations of caution and economy. Those who knew him well disliked him thoroughly, and with cause. Those who met him occasionally, as did Mr. Neuchamp and Paul Frankston, saw in him a well-dressed, good-looking man, with an affectation of good-humour and liberality by no means without attraction. Paul had heard assertions made to his disadvantage, but not having bestowed much thought upon the matter, had not gone the length of excluding him from his invitation list; on this occasion he had been rather glad to fill up his table.
Mr. Jermyn Croker, as usual, had constituted himself an exception to ordinary humanity by remaining at his club during the terrible season which sent the most ardent lovers of the metropolis to their distant duties. In explanation he stated that either the whole country would be ruined or it would not. He frankly admitted that he inclined to the first belief. If the former state of matters prevailed, what was the use of living in the desert till the last camel died and the last well was choked? No human effort could avert the final simoom, which was evidently on its way to engulf pastoral Australia. Now, here at the club (though the wines were beastly, as usual, and the committee ought to be sacked) there would be a little claret and ice available to the last. He should remain and perish, where, at least, a club waiter could see to your interment.
Such was Mr. Jermyn Croker’s faith, openly professed in club and counting-house. But those who knew him averred that he took good care to have one of the best overseers in the country at his head station, whose management he kept up to the mark by weekly letters of so consistently depreciatory a nature that nobody expected he would survive the season, whatever the issue to others. ‘Died of a bad season and Jermyn Croker’ had, indeed, been an epitaph written in advance and forwarded to him by a provincial humorist.
Hartley Selmore had also been found available. He, indeed, could not very well remain away from financial headquarters. So many of his unpaid orders and acceptances, with the ominous superscription ‘Refer to drawer,’ found their way to bank and office by every mail from the interior, that a residence in the metropolis was vitally necessary. In good sooth, his unflagging energy and great powers of resource, under the presence of constant emergency, were equal to the demand made upon them. With the aid of every device of discount and hypothecation known to the children of finance, he managed to keep afloat. His day’s work, neither light nor easy of grasp, once over, the philosophical Hartley enjoyed his dinner, his cigar, his whist or billiards, as genuinely as if he had not a debt in the world, and was always ready for a petit dîner if he distrusted not the wine.
This dinner was, as usual, perfect in its way. The cooking at Morahmee was proverbial; the wines were too good for even Jermyn Croker to grumble at—had he done so he would have imperilled his reputation as connoisseur, of which he was careful; the conversation of the guests, at first guarded and unsympathetic, rose into liveliness with the conclusion of the first course, and, simultaneously with the circulation of Paul’s unrivalled well-iced vintage, became more adventurous and brilliant.
‘Where is our young friend Neuchamp?’ inquired Hartley Selmore. ‘I haven’t seen him for an age.’
‘Gone to the bad long ago, hasn’t he?’ replied Croker, with an air of pleasing certainty.