‘I suppose they will begin to improve in a few months?’
‘Improve?’ echoed Mr. Banks; ‘if this weather is followed up, every beast on Rainbar run, down to a three-months-old calf, will be mud fat in three months, and you may begin to take away the first draft of a thousand head of fat cattle that we can send to market—and a rising market, too—before next winter.’
Mr. Neuchamp did not shout aloud, nor cast any part of his clothing into the air, like Jack Windsor: his way of receiving sudden tidings of weal or woe was not demonstrative. But he grasped Charley Banks’s hand, and looked into the face of the pleased youngster with a gleam in his eye and a look of triumph such as the latter had rarely witnessed there.
‘We have had to wait—“to suffer and be strong,”—Charley, my boy,‘ he said, ‘but I think the battle is won now. You shall have your share of the spoils.’
When Mr. Neuchamp sallied forth on the second day after the rain, he could not but consider himself in a somewhat similar position to one of the Noachian family taking an excursion after the flood. True, his flood had been of a temporary and wholly beneficial nature, but not the less had it entirely altered the expression upon the face of Nature. Aqueous effects and results were prominently apparent everywhere. Mud and hardened sandy spaces, already flushed with green, had succeeded to the pale, dusty, monotoned landscape.
Thus, once more, short as had been the time of change, the eye was relieved by the delicate but distinct shade of green which commenced to drape the long-sleeping, spellbound frame of the mighty Mother. Even in the driest seasons, except on river flats, there are minute green spikelets of grass at or just below the surface. Let but one shower of rain fall, softly cherishing, and on the morrow it is marvellous to perceive what an approach to verdure has been made. Then the family of clovers, long dead and buried, but having bequeathed myriads of burr-protected, oleaginous seed vessels to the kind keeping of the baked and powdered soil, reappear in countless hosts of minute leaflets, which grow with incredible rapidity. It is not too much to say that in little more than a week after the ‘drought broke up’ at Rainbar there was grass several inches high over the entire run. The salt bushes commenced to put forth tender and succulent leaves. All nature drew one great sigh of relief, every living creature—from the small fur-covered rodents and marsupials which pattered along their minute but well-beaten paths when the sun was low to the water, from the wild mare that galloped in snorting through the midnight, with her lean, tireless offspring, to sink her head to the very eyes in the river when she reached it, to the thirsty merino flock at the well-trough, or the impoverished herd that struggled in hungered and athirst to muddy creek or treacherous river bank—every living creature did sensibly rejoice and give thanks, audibly or otherwise, for this merciful termination to the long agony of the Great Drought.
That morning of the 18th May was a fateful morn to many a struggling beginner like Ernest Neuchamp; to many a grizzled veteran of pioneer campaigns and long wars of exploration, of peril of body and anguish of mind; to many a burdened sire with boys at school to pay for, and the girls’ governess to consider, whom the next year’s losses, if the rain held off, would compel the family to dispense with.
On the night which preceded that day of deliverance Ernest Neuchamp went to bed utterly ruined and hopelessly insolvent; he arose a rich man, able within six months to pay off double the amount of every debt he owed in the world, and possessed beside of a run and stock the market value of which exceeded at least four-fold what he had paid for it.
This was a change, sudden as an earthquake, swift as a revolution, almost awe-striking in its shower of sudden benefits, dazzling in its abrupt change from the dim light of poverty, self-denial, and anxiety, to an unquestioned position of wealth, reputation, and undreamed-of success.
How differently passed the days now! What variety, what hope, what renewed pleasure in the superintendence of details ever leading upward to profit and satisfaction in a hundred different directions!