‘Highly probable,’ assented Ernest, with fierce sarcasm; ‘and Levison’s steady prophecy that the season was going to break just before it did was an accidental guess! His purchasing stock, stations, and town property for the rise, which no one else believed in, was a chance hit! His uniformly good sales when every one else was holding! His large purchases when all the world was selling! His unostentatious gifts, at the rate of two to a thousand pounds, to church buildings were unredeemed parsimony! His advice to me to buy and his actual purchases of stock for my benefit, every pound invested in which has furnished a profit of ten, were selfish mistakes! You must excuse me, Croker, for saying that I think you have reared a larger crop of prejudices in Australia than any man I have seen here.’
‘It’s a fine climate!’ quoth Paul; ‘everything grows and develops; even experience, like Madeira in the voyage round the Cape, ripens twice as fast here as anywhere else. A whitewasher, Croker? I really believe this is a bottle of the Manzanares you prefer, and we’ll join the ladies, which means adjourn to the verandah.’
If happiness, at any period or season, did dwell upon the earth, she must have sojourned, about the month of September 185—, so near to the New Holland Club, so near to the person of Ernest Neuchamp, as to have been occasionally visible to the naked eye. Had a company of savans been told off to view the goddess, as in the far less important matter of the transit of Venus, success had been certain. But society never recognises its real wonders—its absolute and imperious miracles. Therefore for a little space that earthly maid glorified the dwelling and precincts of the untrammelled, rejoicing, successful proprietor. She sat by Mr. Neuchamp at the daintily prepared refections of the club, and gave an added flavour to his moderate but intense enjoyment of viand and vintage, so wondrous in variety, so miraculous of aroma, after his long endurance of the unpalatable monotony of the Rainbar cuisine. She whispered in the mystic tones of the many-voiced sea-breezes, as they murmured around his steps when, with Antonia at his side, he roamed through the mimic woods of Morahmee, or gazed with never-ending contemplative joy on the pale moon’s silver tracery o’er wave and strand. She rose with him in the joyous morn, telling him the ever-welcome tale that all cause for anxiety had fled, that a new ukase had gone forth, bringing unmixed joy to every man of his order, always excepting the sheepholders and Jermyn Croker. She sat behind him, on Osmund, displacing ‘the sad companion ghastly pale’ even ‘atra Cura,’ who had been the occupant of a croup seat on that gallant steed for many a day. Once more the rattle of flying hoofs was heard upon the sandy downs and red hill-roads which, near Bondi’s ceaseless surge, overlook the city’s mingled mass, the ocean’s fresh eternal glory. In this season of joy and pride—the natural and becoming pride of him who has suffered and struggled, waited and warred for no mean reward, which at length he has been permitted to grasp—the bright goddess smiled on every act, thought, and hope of Ernest Neuchamp. In that fair brief bygone day of unalloyed triumph, of unclouded hope, it is a truth most absolute and indisputable that she stood by his side in serene and awful beauty; but, like her austere sister of old who cried aloud in the streets to a heedless generation, ‘no man regarded her.’
Through all this halcyon time no definite pledge or vow had passed between him and the woman whom he had slowly, but with all the force of an inflexibly tenacious nature, come to consider as the embodied essence of that mysterious complement to man’s nature, at once the vital necessity, the crowning glory, of this mortal state, the vision of female perfection! Proud, fastidious, a searcher after ideals, prone to postpone the irrevocable decision by which man’s fate here below is for ever sealed, he was now face to face with Destiny. Even now he felt so utterly fascinated, so supremely content, with the graduated intimacies of which the daily process which draws two human hearts together into indescribable union is composed, so charmed with the undreamed-of treasures of mind and heart which each fresh casket unlocked displayed to his gaze, that he felt no desire to change the mode of bliss. Why hurry to an end this sojourn in the land of Faerye, while the bridle-reins of the Queen of Elf-land and her troop were ringing still through the haunted woods, while feast and tournament still went merrily on, while stream and emerald turf and bosky glade were still touched with the glory of successful love, while the glamour still held sea and sky and far-enpurpled mounts, upon which, let but once the knell of disenchantment sound, no mortal may again gaze while life endures?
During all this time of joy and consolation Mr. Neuchamp had regular advices from his lieutenant, Charley Banks. That young gentleman complained piteously of his lonely state and solitary lodging in the wilderness, for which nothing compensated, it would appear, but the increasing beauty of the season (pastorally considered) and an occasional gossip with Tottie Freeman.
Now that the rain had found out the way to saltbush land, there seemed to be but little variety of weather. It rained every other day, sometimes for nearly a week, incredible to relate, without stopping. The creeks were full, the flats were soaked, spongy, and knee-deep in clover. The river was high, had come down ‘a banker,’ and any further rainfall at the head waters, or even the melting of the snow, might bring down a flood such as the dwellers in those parts had not seen for many a day. The Freemans were uncomfortable enough. They had found that their huts and fencing had been placed on land too low for comfort in a wet season, and even for safety if the threatened floods rose higher than usual.
In November, the third spring month of the Australians, another despatch of greater weight and importance reached Mr. Neuchamp, who apparently was not hasting to quit the land of French cooks and Italian singers, of pleasant day saunterings, of cheerful lunch parties, and moonlight rambles by the murmuring sea. Mr. Banks had the distinguished honour of entertaining Mr. Levison, but lately returned from Melbourne, and engaged in starting two or three thousand head of fat cattle for that market. He had come round by Rainbar, he said, on purpose to take delivery of the Freemans‘land, but he, Charley Banks, thought it more likely that he wanted to see old ‘BI’ (who looked splendid, with a crest like a lion), and whom he rode away in triumph. He handed over the deeds of all the Freemans‘conditional purchases to him to give to Mr. Neuchamp, saying that he hoped he wouldn’t do that sort of thing again, as he might not come out of it right another time.
Mr. Banks further related that he had volunteered as his deliberate opinion, from what he had noticed about the Victorian gold mines, that the yield of gold would last many years, during which time stock would continue to be high in price, although there might be temporary depressions. As a consequence of which state of things, the sooner every one bought all the store stock they could lay hands on the better. ‘“My word,” he said, “it was a lucky drop-in—not for them though—that I picked you up those Freeman cattle, not to speak of the ‘circle dots.’ There will be no more eight-and-sixpenny store cattle, or fifteen-bob ones either—two pounds for cows, and fifty shillings and three pounds for good steers and bullocks will be more like it, and they will pay at that price too. But what I want you to tell Mr. Neuchamp is this. I’d write to him, but I’m in a hurry off, and you can do it quite as well, if you’re careful and attend to what I tell you.
‘“I’ve just had information that the Sydney people who have got the agency of the Mildool run, that joins you, are going to sell. They’ve got it into their wise heads that cattle have seen their top, because they’re worth five pounds all round, that is, with stations; and because they’re old-fashioned Sydney-siders that never heard of such a price since the days when they used to bring buffaloes from India.