Now, thought Mr. Neuchamp, the hour, long delayed, long doubted, has surely come. Who could have dreamed but a few short months since, when our very souls were adust and athirst with perennial famine, that our eyes should behold the sight which I see now? How should it teach us to hoard the garnered gold of truth, the ‘eternal verity’ in our heart of hearts! ‘My lord delayeth his coming.’ Was that held to be a reason, an excuse for the unfaithful, self-indulgent? Truly this would seem to some as great a miracle as the leaping water which followed the stroke of the prophet’s staff in that other desert of which we read of old.
And now his eyes did actually behold the first trickling, wondrous motion of the brimming reservoir to advance, gravitation-led, along the narrow path to its far-distant sister lake. Slowly the full waters rose to the very lip of the vast natural cup or vase, and then, first saturating the entrance, poured down the narrow outlet which the forecasting mind of man had prepared for it. It trickled, it flowed, it ran, it coursed, foaming and rushing, along the cutting, of which the fall at first exceeded that of the general passage. It was done! It was over! A proud success!
Charley Banks threw up his hat. Together they rode recklessly onward to the Outer Lake, and there Ernest Neuchamp enjoyed silently the deep satisfaction—then known but to the projector and inventor—of witnessing the waters of the Inner Lake, for the first time since the sea had ceased to murmur over these boundless levels, flow fast and flashing forward, driven by the pressure of the immense body behind, into the vast, deep, grass-clothed basin of the Outer Lake.
This was a triumph truly. For this alone it was worth while to have journeyed across the long long ocean tide, to have toiled and suffered, waited and watched, to have eaten his heart with fear and sickening dread of the gaunt destroyer ‘Ruin,’ ever stalking nearer and nearer. This was true life—real adventure—the hazard and the triumph which alone constitute true manhood.
In the ecstasy of the moment Ernest Neuchamp forgot the fortune he had gained, the bride whom he had won, the home of his youth, the grand and glorious future, the not uneventful past. All things seemed as dreams and visions by the side of this grand and living Reality.
As he sat on his horse and gazed, still flowed the glorious wave into the century-dry basin by the channel which he, Ernest Neuchamp, had, in defiance of Nature, opinion, and society, conceived, formed, and successfully completed. Seasons might come and go; another dry time might come; the water might periodically evaporate and disappear,—but nothing could evade the great fact henceforth in the history of the land, that he had established the connection between the river and this distant, long-dry, unthought-of reservoir. There would be no more hint or menace of Neuchamp’s Folly—more likely, Neuchamp’s River.
Lake Neuchamp! Pshaw! it was an inland sea. Why not name it now? Why not render immortal, not his own perhaps ancient patronymic, but the lovely and beloved name of his soul’s divinity? Now was the hour, the minute, when the virgin waters were falling for the first time in creation into the flower-besprinkled lap of the green earth before their eyes!
‘Charley, my boy,’ he said to Mr. Banks, ‘take off your hat. Piambook, do liket me,’ he said, removing his own. ‘I name this water, now about to be filled for the first time within the memory of man, “Lake Antonia.” So mote it be. Hip, hip, hurrah!‘ and the echoes of the waste rang to the unfamiliar sounds of the great British shout of welcome, of salutation, of battle-joy, of death-defiance, which England’s friends and England’s foes have had ere now just cause to know.
‘Hurrah!’ joined in Charley Banks with genuine feeling. ‘By George! I never thought to see this sight—last year particularly; but, of course, we might have known it wasn’t going to be dry always, as Levison said. We don’t see far beyond our noses, most of us. But it was hard to conjure up any notion of a regular out-and-out waterfall like this with a twelvemonth’s dust, and last year’s burnt feed keeping as black as the day it took fire. I believe there will be thirty feet of water in this when it’s full up, and it soon will be at this rate.’
‘Budgeree tumble down water that one,’ said Piambook. ‘Old man blackfellow yabber, debil-debil, make a light here when he yan long that one scrub.’