‘Look at these poor devils of cattle,’ said Jack, pointing to a number of hide-bearing anatomies moving their jaws mechanically over the imperceptible pasture. ‘They have water, but what the deuce they find to eat I can’t see. There’s that white steer, that red cow, and one or two more, with their jaws swelled up. There’s plenty of ’em like that.’
‘From what cause?’ asked Mr. Neuchamp. ‘Cancer is not becoming epidemic, I hope.’
‘It comes from the shortness of the feed, I think,’ returned Jack; ‘you see the poor creatures keep licking and picking every time they see a blade of grass, if it’s only a quarter of an inch long; half their time they miss their aim and rattle their jaws together with nothing between them. That’s what hurts ’em, I expect, and after a bit it makes their heads swell.’
‘I wonder what they would think in England of such an injury, occurring in what we always believed to be a rich pastoral country.’
‘So it is, sir, when the season’s right. I expect in England you have your bad seasons in another way, and get smothered and flooded out with rain; and the crops are half rotten; and the poor man (I suppose he is really a poor man there, no coasting up one side of a river and down the other for six months, with free rations all the time) gets tucked up a bit.’
‘As you say, Jack, there are bad seasons, which mean bad harvests, in England,’ answered Ernest, always inclined to the diversion of philosophical inquiry; ‘and the poor man there, as you say, properly so called, inasmuch as he requires more absolute shelter, more sufficient clothes in the terrible winter of the north, than our friends who pursue the ever-lengthening but not arduous track of the wallaby in Australia. They may in England, and do occasionally, I grieve to say, if unemployed and therefore unfed, actually starve to death. But what are those cattle just drawing in?’
‘Those belong to a lot that keeps pretty well back,’ answered Jack, ‘and they’re different in their way from these cripples we’ve been looking at, as they’ve had something to eat, but they’re pretty well choked for a drink. I don’t know when they’ve had one. That’s how it is, you see, sir; half the cattle’s afraid to go away for the water, and the rest won’t leave what little feed there is till they’re nearly mad with drouth. It’s cruel work either way. I’m blest if that wasn’t a drop of rain!’
This sudden and rare phenomenon caused Ernest to take a cursory examination of the sky, which he had long forborne to regard with hope or fear. It was clouded over. But such had been the appearance of the firmament scores of times during the last six months. The air was still, sultry, and full of the boding calm which precedes a storm. Such signs had been successfully counterfeited, as Ernest bitterly termed it, once a month since the last half-forgotten showery spring. He had observed a halo round the moon on the previous night. There had been dozens of dim circular rings round that planet all the long summer through. The rain was certainly falling now. So had it commenced, on precisely such a day, with the same low banks of clouds, many a time and oft, and stopped abruptly in about twenty minutes, the clouds disappearing, and the old presentment reverting to a staring blue sky, a mocking, unveiled sun therein, with the suddenness of a transformation scene in a pantomime.
‘I think that spotted cow looks as near meat as anything we’re likely to get, sir,’ said Jack Windsor, interrupting the train of distrustful reverie. ‘It begins to look as if it meant it. Lord send we may get well soaked before we get home!’
Mr. Windsor’s pious aspiration was appropriate this time. They reaped the benefit of a genuine and complete saturation before they reached the yard with the small lot of cattle they were compelled to take in for companionship to their ‘fat beast.’ There was no appearance of haste about the rain, no tropical violence, no waterspout business. It trickled down in slow, monotonous, still, and settled drizzle, much as it might have done in North Britain. It only did not stop; that was all. It was hopefully continuous all the evening. And when Mr. Neuchamp opened his casement at midnight he thankfully listened to the soaking, ceaseless downpour, which seemed no nearer a sudden conclusion than during the first hour.