Mr. Neuchamp, having reached the very visible landmark of an engagement in his pilgrimage of love, was much minded to press for an immediate union, believing, now that the rain had come, there existed no rational impediments in the way of this last supreme success. Well-informed persons will know that no such outrage upon les convenances could for a moment be tolerated. Baffled but not despondent, he returned to the charge with such determination that the event was fixed to take place in about two months, as being the earliest hour anything so dreadful could be thought of.
So much being gained, Ernest became speedily aware that being at all hours and seasons subject to the raids of milliners‘attendants and others was a state of existence out of harmony with a poet’s soul. Thus, after divers unsatisfactory and interrupted interviews with Antonia, he took his passage by the mail, and heroically started for Rainbar.
This brilliant combination of business with necessity would, he thought, serve to while away the weary hours between the scorned present and the beautiful future. Rainbar and Mildool had to be visited at some time or other. Although the luxurious life of the metropolis had gained upon him, Ernest Neuchamp always arose, Antæus-like, fresh to the call of duty.
When he quitted the railway terminus and entered the mail-coach which was to convey him to his destination, the full magnitude of the mighty change of season burst upon him. During his stay in Sydney the short, bright southern spring-time had been born and was ripening into summer, with what effect upon plant life it was now a marvel of marvels to see.
Mr. Neuchamp’s novitiate had been served during the latter years of a ‘dry cycle.’ He had seen fair growth of pasture towards Christmas time, but of the amazing crop of grass and herbage uncared for, wasted, or burned, in what Mr. Windsor called ‘an out-and-out wet season,’ he had no previous experience.
From the moment that the coach cleared the forest parks which skirted the plains, Ernest found himself embarked upon a ‘measureless prairie,’ where the tall green grass waved far as eye could see in the summer breeze. A millennium of peace and plenty had apparently arrived for all manner of graminivorous creatures. How different was the aspect of these ‘happy hunting grounds,’ velvet-green of hue, flower-bespangled, brook-traversed, with the forgotten sound of falling waters ever and anon breaking on the ear, with hum of bee and carol blithe of bird, as the sleek-coated, high-conditioned coach-horses rattled the light drag merrily over the long long road! What a wondrous transformation! Would Augusta, la belle cousine, have believed that all this glorious natural beauty had been born, grown, and developed ‘since the rain came’?
When at length the journey was over, and the proprietor of Rainbar and Mildool was deposited, with his portmanteau, at the garden gate of the former station, Mr. Neuchamp was constrained to confess that he hardly knew his own place. There had been much growth and greenery when he left with the fat cattle; but the riotous extravagance of nature in that direction could not have been credited by him without actual eye-witness.
Around the buildings, the garden fence, the stockyard, the cowshed, was a growth of giant herbage, composed of wild oats, wild barley, marsh-mallows, clover, and fodder plants unnamed, that almost smothered these humble buildings and enclosures. A few milch cows fed lazily, looking as if they had been employed in testing the comparative merits of oilcake and Thorley’s cattle-food, for an agricultural experiment. The river-flats below the house were knee-deep in clover and meadow grasses, causing Mr. Neuchamp to wonder whether or no it would be worth while to go in for a mowing-machine and a few horse-rakes, for the easy conversion of a fraction of it into a few hundred tons of meadow hay, to be stored against the next, ‘dry year.’ The mixed grasses, as he had tested in a small way, made excellent hay. But how far off looked such a calamity! Thus ever with ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm’ do we lightly measure the future, recking neither of stormy sky nor of the ravening deep.
After Mr. Neuchamp had sufficiently admired the grassy wilderness, thoughts arose respecting dinner, and also a feeling of wonder where everybody was. The station appeared to be minding itself. The cook was absent, though recent indications of his presence were visible in the kitchen. Charley Banks was away and Jack Windsor, probably at Mildool; also Piambook, whose open countenance and dazzling teeth would have been better than nothing. Where was Mrs. Windsor, née Walton? He had rather looked forward to having a talk with her under new conditions of life. She could not be at Mildool, as there was no shelter for a decent woman there. What in the name of wonder had become of them all? There were no Indians in this country, or he might have turned his thoughts in the direction of Blackfeet or Comanches, the ‘wolf Apaché and the cannibal Navajo.’ Not even a Mormon settlement handy enough to organise a ‘mountain-meadows massacre’! He never thought Rainbar so lonely before. He went into the cottage, and in a leisurely way unpacked his portmanteau in the snug bedroom which he had so long inhabited—where he had so often, before the rain came, lain down in sorrow and arisen in despair. What a tiny wooden box it seemed! Yet he had thought it comfortable, even luxurious. Like those of many other distinguished travellers and heroes long absent from the scene of early conflict or youthful habitation, the eyes of Mr. Neuchamp had altered their focus.
After three months’ familiarity with the lodging of clubs and villas, the neat but necessarily contracted apartments of his bush cottage appeared like cupboards, or even akin to a watch-box which he had once dwelt in at Garrandilla.