On the next morning Aurora in person must have attended to the proper arrangement of the dawn, the breakfast-hour, and other small matters which, apparently trivial, tend unquestionably to that due equilibrium of the nervous system, without which comfort is impossible and exhilaration hopeless.
Thus, Miss Folleton, having slept well, appeared renovated and just becomingly repentant. Antonia was severely happy, Mr. Neuchamp calmly superior to fate, and Mr. Frankston so hilarious that his daughter had to interpose more than once.
That ambrosial repast concluded, Antonia departed for town in the carriage, and straightway delivered up Miss Folleton to her rejoicing relatives, who had suffered anxiety in her absence. Hers was an impressionable, shallow nature, recovering easily from moral risks and disasters—even from physical ills. Her appetite reasserted itself; her love of life’s frivolities, temporarily obscured, brightened afresh; and long before the legend of the debts, the daring, the disappearance of the Count von Schätterheims had been supplanted by newer scandal, her cheek had recovered its wonted bloom, her step its lightness in the dance, and her mien its touchingly dependent grace.
In due time she had her reward; for she captured, after a short but brilliant campaign, consisting of an oratorio, a lawn party, and three dances, an immensely opulent northern squatter. She looks fair and pure as the blue sky above her, as she rolls by, dressed à merveille, in the best-appointed carriage in Sydney. But for happiness—who shall say?
In the meanwhile, unlimited pleasure-seeking and universal admiration supply a reasonable substitute.
[CHAPTER XXX]
Mr. Neuchamp, having now occasional leisure to reflect, discovered that he was provided with an extensive and valuable property which he had partly come to Australia to seek, and with an affianced bride, whom he had not at all included among his probable possessions. As for the great project of Colonial Reform, which had stood out grandly dominating the landscape in the future of his dreams, with the solitary exception of the conversion of Jack Windsor, he could not aver that he had accomplished anything.
His co-operative community had notably failed in practice. But for the aid and counsel of Mr. Levison, it might have overthrown his own fortune, without particularly benefiting the individuals of this society.
Whenever he had acted upon his own discretion, and in furtherance of advanced views, he had been conspicuously wrong. Where he had followed the ideas of others, or been forced into them by circumstances, he had been invariably right. Where he had been generous, he had been deceived; where he had been cautious, he had found himself extravagant in loss; where he had been rash, riches had rolled in upon him with flowing tide. His most elaborate estimates of character had been ludicrously erroneous. His advice had been inapplicable, his theories unsound. Practice—mostly blindfold—had alone given him a glimmering knowledge of the relatively component parts of this most contradictory, unintelligible antipodean world.