Nevertheless he must at once answer Paul’s letter, which he did to the effect that, ‘He wondered that his old friends should believe any mere fabrications, unsupported by testimony, to his prejudice. Not that there was anything discreditable about the report, if true; but this was not true. His cousin, with misplaced heroism, had visited him in his solitude; a refined and highly educated woman, as would be apparent to all, she certainly was. But as a wife he had never thought of her, nor could he, if their existence ran parallel for years.’ Having despatched the letter, Ernest felt easier in mind, more removed from that condition the most irritating and intolerable of all, the accusation of wrong without the power of justification. It was hard to resist an almost uncontrollable desire to rush down to Sydney then and there to set himself right with his friends. But, as he ran over the obstacles to such a course, it seemed, on cooler thought, to be unadvisable in every way. First, there was the extreme difficulty of performing the journey: he had not a horse at Rainbar capable of carrying him across to the mail station. When he got there it was problematical whether the contractor was running a wheel mail or not. It would be undesirable, even ridiculous, to find himself a couple of hundred miles from home, stranded on the endless, dry, hopeless plain. To make a lengthened stay in Sydney, should he get there, was not to be thought of under his present circumstances of debt and anxiety. ‘No,’ he said, as he crushed the feeling back with a self-repression more nearly allied to heroism than mere ostentatious efforts of courage, ‘no, my colours are nailed to the masthead, and there shall they hang till the cry of “victory” is once more heard, or till the fight is lost beyond mortal hope.‘
So, sadly yet steadfastly, Ernest Neuchamp turned himself to the monotonous tasks which, like those of sailors on a desert island, or of the crew of a slowly-sailing ship, were yet carried on with daily, hopeless regularity. Still the ashen-gray pastures became more withered and deathlike. Still the sad, staggering lines of cattle paced in along the well-worn dusty trails to their watering-places, and paced back like bovine processions after witnessing the funeral obsequies of individuals of their race, which experience, in truth, was daily theirs.
Then the diet, once not distasteful to the much-enduring palate of youth, became wellnigh intolerable: the flaccid unfed meat, the daily bread with never a condiment, the milkless tea, the utter absence of all fruit, vegetable, herb, or esculent. Truly, as in those ancient days when a pastoral people record their sorrowful chronicles of the dry and thirsty region where no water is, ‘the famine was sore in the land.’
At this time, so dreary, so endless, so crushing in its isolated, unchanging, helpless misery, Ernest was unutterably thankful for the hope and consolation which his studious habits afforded him. His library, the day’s work done, filled up his lonely evening as could no other employment possible under the circumstances. He ransacked his moderate references for records of similar calamities in all lands which, unlike the ‘happy isles’ of Britain, are from time to time invaded with drought, the chief agent in all the recorded wholesale destruction of animal life. He noted with painstaking and laborious accuracy the duration, the signs, the consequences, the termination of such dread seasons. From old books of Australian exploration he learned, almost by heart, the sad experiences of the pioneers of the land when they stood face to face with what to them were new and terrible foes.
‘It is hard,’ said he to himself, as he paced his room at midnight, after long hours of close application to such studies, ‘it is hard and depressing to me, and to many a wretched colonist who has worked longer and has more on the hazard than I, to see the fruit of our labours slowly, pitilessly absorbed by this remorseless season. But what, after all, is a calamity which can be measured, like this, by a money standard, compared to one which, like this latest famine in Hindostan, counts its human victims by tens of thousands, by millions? See the dry record of a food failure, which comprehends the teeming human herds which cover the soil more thickly than even our poor starving flocks!
‘Can we realise thousands of lowly homes where the mother sits enfeebled and spectral beside her perishing babes, whose eyes ask for the food which she cannot grant; where the frenzied peasant rushes, in the agony of despair, from his cabin that he may not hear the hunger cries, the death groans of his wife and babes; where the dead lie unburied; where the beast of prey alone roams satiated and lordly; where nature mourns like a maniac mother with tears of blood for her murdered offspring?
‘Such is not, may never be, the fate of this wide, rich, peaceful land, vast and wondrous in its capabilities in spite of temporary disasters. Let us take heart. Our losses, our woes, are trifling in comparison with the world’s great miseries. We are, in comparison, but as children who lose their holiday gifts of coin or cakes. Our lives, our health and strength, are all untouched. We have hope still for our unbartered heritage, the stronger for past dangers of storm and tide. The world is yet before us. There are other seas, untried and slumbering oceans, where our bark may yet ride with joyous outspread sail. Let us still labour and endure, until Fate, compelled by our steadfastness, shall be once more propitious.
‘Si fractus illabitur orbis
Impavidum ferient ruinæ.
I hardly expected to be quoting Horace at Rainbar, but the old boy probably had some experience of untoward seasons, sunshiny desolation, like this of ours. I don’t know whether “Impavidum” applies strictly to any one but Levison. I am afraid that the “fractus orbis” pertains to our cosmos of credit, which, shattered to its core, will strike us all soon and put us to the proof of our philosophy.‘