‘I’ve just been talking to that native chap of yours,’ he said, ‘about my old horse. He wants a bit of looking after now, but you’d be surprised to see what style he has when he’s in good fettle. Wonderful horse on a camp. Best cutting-out horse, this day, on the river. Pulls rather hard, that’s the worst of him.’
Mr. Neuchamp, who, having as yet not gone through the terrible trials of a prolonged drought, had never witnessed the incredible emaciation to which stock may be reduced, and their rapid and magical transformation at the wand of the enchanter ‘Rain,’ looked as if he really would be surprised at the tottering, hollow-eyed, fleshless spectre, in appearance something between an expiring poley cow and an anatomical preparation, ‘pulling hard’ again, or doing any deed of valour as a charger.
‘Ah! you’ll be all in the fashion, then,’ said Mr. Levison, with his customary affirmative expression, which apparently meant that having asserted his opinion it was waste of time to attempt to prove it. ‘When old BI (that’s what the men call him, his name’s written on him pretty big) kicks up his heels, it’ll mean that Rainbar’s worth twenty thousand pounds! That’s why I want you to be careful, and not waste your money and get sold up just before the tide turns. How’s that Arab horse-breeding notion turned out? They’d fetch about three pound a head all round just now.’
‘Very well, so far; they’re a little poor, but nothing could look more promising than the yearlings—plenty of bone, and as handsome as you could make them. I should grieve more about their forced sale than anything.’
‘Well, you’re not sold up yet, and won’t be if you’ll be careful and take my advice and Paul Frankston’s. You mark me, horses will be horses in a year or two. They’re hardly worth owning now; but their turn’s coming, with everything else that any man will have to sell in Australia for the next ten years.’
Mr. Levison placed the few necessary articles which he had abstracted from his valise, in the moiety of the gray blanket which he had apparently not required as a saddle-cloth. He requested leave to cut off and to take with him a fair-sized section of damper, sternly refusing any other description of edible. Then, turning his face to the broad plain, he held out his hand to Ernest, and finally exhorting him not to waste his money, addressed himself to the far-stretching trail after such a fashion as convinced Ernest that he was no inexperienced pedestrian.
Mr. Neuchamp returned to his cottage in a very different frame of mind from that which characterised his pre-matutinal discipline in the garden. How short a time, how trifling an incident, occasionally suffices to turn the scale from anxiety to repose, from despair to glowing hope. This last cheering mental condition was indispensably necessary to Mr. Neuchamp’s acceptation of burdens, even to his very life. He had gone forth in the clear dawnlight a miserable man, racked by presentiments of scorn unalterable to come, gazing on ‘Ruin’s red letters writ in flame,’ and associated with the hitherto untarnished fame and sufficing fortune of Ernest Neuchamp; he had heard in imagination the laugh of scorn, the half-contemptuous, pitying condolence. Now, though much remained uncertain and unsafe, the blessed flower of Hope had recommenced to bloom. Its fragrance was once more shed over the soul of the fainting pilgrim through life’s desert, and the wayfarer arose refreshed and invigorated, free once more to turn his brow erect and undaunted towards the Mecca of his dreams.
This particular morning happened to be that of the bi-weekly post-day, a day to which Mr. Neuchamp had looked forward of late with considerably more apprehension than interest. How wonderfully different, as the years roll on, are the feelings with which that humble messenger of fate, the postman, is greeted! In life’s careless spring he is the custodian of friendship’s offering, the distributor of the small sweet joys of childhood, the dawning intellectual pleasures of youth, the rose-hued, enchanting flower-tokens of love. As the days of the years of our pilgrimage roll on, ‘the air is full of farewells to the dying and mournings for the dead.’ How altered is the character of the missives which lie motionless, but charged with subtle, terrible forces!—electric agents they!—thrilling or rending the vital frame from that overcharged battery, the heart!
To this undesirable tenor and complexion had much of Mr. Neuchamp’s correspondence, drought-leavened and gloomy, arrived. Many of his smaller accounts were of necessity left unpaid. The cruel season, unchanged in the more vital characteristic of periodic moisture, seemed to be culminating in an apparently fixed and fatal determination on the part of Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton to let him have no more money on account.
But several minor matters, on this particular day, besides the visit of Mr. Levison, seemed to point to Fortune’s more indulgent mood. The pile of letters and papers was pleasantly, if not hopefully, variegated by those periodicals and peculiarly stamped envelopes which denote the delivery of the European mail. Upon these Ernest dashed with unconcealed eagerness, and tearing open a letter in his brother Courtenay’s delicate Italian handwriting, utterly devoid of linear emphasis, read as follows: