With his customary disregard for the feelings of others, he had insisted upon being married, without the usual time-honoured ceremonies and concomitants, on the morning upon which the mail steamer started for Europe. By going on board directly afterwards, the Sydney people would be precluded from hearing of the event until after their departure; while their fellow-passengers, most of them strangers, would be ignorant as to whether the newly-married couple were of a week’s date or of six months.
This arrangement, in which he had no great difficulty in persuading Miss Augusta to acquiesce, would have excellently answered Mr. Croker’s unselfish expectations but for one circumstance, which he doubtless noted to the debit of colonial wrongs and shortcomings—he had neglected to procure the co-operation of the elements.
No sooner had the ceremony, unwitnessed save by Paul Frankston and Mr. and Mrs. Neuchamp, taken place, and the happy pair been transferred to the Nubia, their luggage having been safely deposited in that magnificent ocean steamer days before,—no sooner had the great steamer neared the limit of the harbour, when a southerly gale, an absolute hurricane, broke upon the coast with such almost unprecedented fury that till it abated no sane commander of the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s service would have dreamed of quitting safe anchorage.
For three days the ‘tempest howled and wailed,’ and most uncomfortably the Nubia lay at anchor, safe but most uneasy, and, as she was rather crank, rolling and pitching nearly as wildly as she could have done in the open sea.
It so chanced that one of Mr. Croker’s few weak points was an extraordinarily extreme susceptibility to mal de mer. On all occasions upon which he had cleared the Heads, for years past, he had suffered terribly. But never since his first outward-bound experience in early life had he suffered torments, prostration, akin to this. He lay in his cabin death-like, despairing, well-nigh in collapse.
Miss Neuchamp, in spite of her much travelling, was always a martyr during the first week of a voyage, if the weather chanced to be bad. Now it certainly was bad, very bad; and in consequence Miss Augusta lay, under the charge of a stewardess, in a stern cabin, well-nigh sick unto death, heedless of life and its chequered presentments, and as oblivious, not to say indifferent, to the fate of Jermyn Croker as if she had yesterday sworn to love and obey the chief officer of the Nubia.
This was temporary anguish, mordant and keen, doubtless. But Time, the healer, would certainly in a few days have set it straight. The fact of an unknown lady and gentleman being indisposed at the commencement of the voyage afflicts nobody. But here was apparently the finger of the fiend. A ruffianly pilot, coming off in his hardy yawl, brought on board a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald of the day following their attempted departure, in which it was duly set forth how, at St. James’s Church, by Canon Druid, Jermyn, second son of Crusty Croker, Esq., of Crankleye Hall, Cornwall, was then and there married to Augusta, only daughter of the Rev. Cyril Neuchamp, incumbent of Neuchamp-Barton, Buckinghamshire, England. Now the joke was out. Even under such unpromising circumstances it told. Here were two mortals, passionately devoted of course, and in that state of matrimonial experience when all things tend to the wildest overrating, so cast down, so utterly prostrated by the foul Sea Demon, that they positively did not care a rush for each other. The great Jermyn lay, faintly ejaculating ‘Steward, Ste-w-a-ar-d,’ at intervals, and making neither lament nor inquiry about his similarly suffering bride. As for Augusta, she had scarce more strength of body or mind than permitted her to moan out, ‘I shall die, I shall die’; and apparently, for all she cared, in that unreal, phantasmal, pseudo-existence, which only was not death, though more dreadful, Jermyn Croker might have fallen overboard, or have been changed into a Seedee stoker. Then for this to happen to Jermyn Croker, of all people! The humour of the situation was inexhaustible!
And though the fierce south wind departed and the Nubia drove swiftly majestic across the long seas that part Cape Otway from the stormy Leuwin, though in due time the spice-laden gales blew ‘soft from Ceylon’s isle,’ and the savage peaks of Aden, the lofty summit of the Djebel Moussa rose to view in the grand succession of historical landscapes; yet to the last day of the voyage a stray question in reference to the precise effects of very bad cases of sea-sickness would be directed, as to persons of proved knowledge and experience, to Mr. and Mrs. Jermyn Croker, by their fellow-passengers.
It is due to Mr. Croker, as a person of importance, to touch lightly upon his after-career. His wife discovered too late that in reaching England he had only changed the theme upon which his universal depreciations were composed. ‘Non animam sed cœlum mutant qui trans mare currunt.’ He abused the climate and the people of England with a savage freedom only paralleled by his Australian practice. Becoming tired of receiving 3 or 4 per cent for his money, he one day, in a fit of wrath, embarked one-half of his capital in a somewhat uncertain South American loan. His cash was absorbed, to reappear spasmodically in the shape of interest, of which there was little, while of principal it soon became apparent that there would be none.
Reduced to the practice of marked though not distressing economy, Mr. Croker enjoyed the peculiar pleasure which is yielded to men of his disposition, of witnessing the possession of luxuries by others and a style of living which they are debarred from emulating. He was gladdened, too, by the occasional vision of an Australian with more money than he could spend, who rallied him upon his grave air, and bluntly asked why he was such a confounded fool as to sell out just as prices were really rising. Finally, to aggravate his sufferings, long unendurable by his own account, Mr. Parklands had the effrontery to come home, and, in the very neighbourhood where he, Croker, was living for economy, to buy a large estate which happened to be for sale.