‘This is the kingdom of unlimited loo as applied to real estate—the region of golden opportunity, you see, Rockley,’ said St. Maur. ‘We are all hard at it buying and selling from morning to night. Must go the pace or be left behind. Half-acre allotments in Collins Street have brought as much as seventy pounds this very morning. Try that claret.’
‘Quite right too. A very fair wine,’ quoth Mr. Rockley, slowly savouring the ruby fluid. ‘My dear St. Maur, you are right to buy everything that you can, as long as your credit lasts. I can see—and I stake my business reputation on the fact—a tremendous future in store for this town. It is not much in itself. The river’s a mere ditch; the harbour a great ugly bay; the site of the town too flat; but the country!—the country around is grand and extensive. Nothing can take that away. It is not so rich as the spot my friend and I have just left; but it’s fine—very fine. I’m not so young as I was, but I shall pitch my tent here and never go back to Sydney.’
‘I hope to see Sydney again,’ said St. Maur; ‘but in the meantime I shall stay and watch the markets. I quite agree with you that there is money to be made.’
‘Of course there is,’ said Rockley; ‘but how long will it last? People can’t live upon buying and selling to each other for ever. Some fine day there will be an awful smash, in which some of you brisk young people will be caught. But the settlement is so first-class in soil and situation that it must pull through. I shall buy a few allotments, just to give me an interest, as the racing men say.’
‘We can accommodate you,’ said Mr. Raymond. ‘But why don’t you stay and set up in business here? You’d make a fortune a month, with your name and connections. Never mind Mrs. R. for the present; we’re all bachelors here.’
‘I see that—and a very jolly set you are. I wouldn’t mind a month or two here at all. But my friend Effingham and I are tied to time to get home, and as we’re going overland we haven’t much time to spare.’
‘Well, look us up whenever you come back. The door of the Lamb Inn is always open—night or day, for that matter. St. Maur and I are thinking of buying it, aren’t we, Bertram, and turning it into a Club? We offered Jones a thousand for it, but he wouldn’t take less than twelve hundred.’
‘That would have been only a hundred apiece for a dozen of us,’ said the man with the large whiskers, whose name was Macleod. ‘Almost concluded it, but Morton died of D.T., Southey got married, and Ingoldsby went home. Nice idea, you know, being our own landlords.’
‘Not bad at all,’ said Rockley, who approved of everything when he was in a good-humour. ‘A very original, business-like idea. Well, I must say good-bye to you all, gentlemen. I really wish I could stay longer.’
‘Stay till next week,’ pleaded Raymond. ‘We are going to give a ball. No end of an entertainment. Two real carriages just landed, and the families pledged to bring them.’