The intense gravity and slow solemnity with which this sudden assault was performed upon Mr. Barker, impugning the character of his run, and by implication his probable solvency, appeared so overpoweringly ludicrous to the company, that a diversion was effected in favour of Mr. Barker's pasturage, who therefore permitted the personal questions to lapse.
Letter from Bertram Devereux to Captain Goodwood, 6th Dragoon Guards:—
Corindah, New South Wales, Australia, June 1877.
My dear Charlie—Partly on account of a weak promise to let you and one or two more of the old set into the secrets of my other-world life when I said good-bye after that fatal Derby that proved such a smasher, partly because one has such enormous quantities of spare time in the desert here, I am going to produce a respectable despatch—may even go the length of becoming a regular correspondent—while quartered here.
My jottings down, apart from any personal interest which may yet survive the writer's departure, ought to possess a certain value as tidings from a far country—descriptions of a mode of life and state of society of which no one I ever met in England had the faintest idea. It is odd, too, for how many youngsters from good families that we know have emigrated within the last ten years! And with one or two exceptions there was no gleaning any information from their friends. Either the fellows didn't write or had done indifferently, and so the less said the better, or else the friends hardly could tell whether they lived in Victoria, Western Australia, New South Wales, or Tasmania, which is much as if the whereabouts of a continental traveller should be described as indifferently as in Belgium, Berlin, Switzerland, or Sicily. There is a want of exactitude about our countrymen, I must say, in all matters that do not concern their own immediate interests, most painful to persons gifted with a love of method—like you and me, for instance. No wonder we English are always caught unprepared when we go to war, and get laughed at all over Europe—till we begin to fight, that is. The reaction sets in then.
However, revenons à nos moutons—a strictly appropriate tag, inasmuch as this lodge in the wilderness is surrounded by enormous estates, leasehold, not freehold, by the way, all devoted to the production of the merino variety of the ovine family. Millions of them are bred in these great solitudes. In favourable years I gather that one is enabled to export about one-half to a fourth of their value, in the shape of wool. This brings a good price, is as negotiable as gold, and the fortunes of the returned colonists that we used to see in London society are thus compiled. Of course there are details, the which I am setting my mind to master. But they would hardly interest you. One trifling fact I may mention, lest you may imagine the progress of fortune-constructing too ridiculously easy. It is, that there has been next to no rain for more than a year, strange, almost incredible, as it may seem to you of the rainy isles. In consequence, the country looks like a desert, and tens of thousands of sheep are dying here, and for hundreds of miles in every direction. Occurrences of this kind, you will understand, delay indefinitely and perhaps wholly frustrate one's too obvious purpose of gathering a competency and hurrying out of the strange country as fast as may be.
'All this is very well,' I hear you say; 'but what about the social system? Why doesn't he tell me about her?—for of course there is a woman somewhere within the orbit of his existence. Wonder what they're like out there. Must be some, I suppose.'
With your usual acuteness, which I have rarely known at fault, unless confronted by a plain unvarnished robbery like the doing to death of the favourite (and very nearly the backers) in our fatal year, you have hit the gold.
Well, somehow or other, there is a she. How strange it seems that one's life, whether
'Pone me pigris ubi nulla campis
Arbor æstiva recreatur aura,' etc.,or in the midst of cities, or even in the comparatively assured and fortified privacy of a messroom, should never be wholly free from the invasion of womankind. A book, a photograph, a souvenir of the slightest kind, is sufficient to arouse the tempestuous motives of those who are doomed to be 'the prey of the gods' in this peculiar fashion. How much more so the perfect human form, 'ripe and real,' when it comes before your eyes in all the unconscious temptation of virgin youth and beauty scarce unfolded morning, noon, and night. Add to this that I'm at present habitans in sicco, and you will conclude, with the swift logical subtlety so proverbially yours, that as a latter-day hermit I may compare favourably with St. Anthony.
Heaven knows I did not rush into danger. Languid and prostrated as I was after the overthrow of all my worldly hopes; worn and despairing when the one devouring, passionate love of my life had disappeared, and it was like the last scene of a tragedy, when nothing is left for the spectators but to wrap their cloaks around them and go home—I deemed that I was coming to a land where there were no women, except black ones or those required for culinary purposes.
How little we know of these new lands and their inhabitants, all English as they are, as if in the Midland Counties, yet of manner strangely fresh! All is high development and new material. How I am shut up with a magnificent young creature, with a face like Egeria, and a figure like the huntress maid, burning with enthusiasm, talented, cultured, full of all noble feminine attributes; dangerous with the fascinations of fresh, innocent womanhood, yet ignorant of the ways of the world, and childlike in her unsuspicious confidence!
How I wish I was young again! I do really, Charlie. Could I but blot out the years that have intervened—not so many—but what Dead-Sea fruits have I not tasted during their stormy course? What a burnt-out volcano is this heart of mine! Could I but recall the past and be like one of our schoolboy heroes!
'The happy page who was the lord
Of one soft heart and his own sword.'What empires and kingdoms would I give—supposing them to be mine—to revert to that position, and so prove myself worthy of the fresh heart, the petals of which are about to open before my graduated advance, like a rose in June! That I shall be the favoured suitor, despite of the opposition of a good-looking, stalwart, provincial rival, my experience assures me. With women l'inconnu is always the interesting, the romantic, the irresistible. In despite of myself, I can see clearly my future position of jeune premier in this opera of the wilderness. It might be worse, you will say. That I grant. But you know that Helen of Troy would never control this restless, wayward heart of mine in perpetuity.
For the rest, the life is bearable enough, free, untrammelled, novel, with a tinge of adventure. My days are spent in the saddle. There's just a hint of shooting, no hunting, no fishing. We dress for dinner, and live much as at a shooting-lodge in the Highlands, with stock-riders for gillies. So we are not altogether barbarous, as you others imagine. This letter is far too long, and imprudently confiding, so I hasten to subscribe myself yours, as of old,
Bertram Devereux.
So much for the impression Pollie was capable of producing on a worn, world-weary heart.
It was a strange fate which had thus imprisoned this beautiful creature, so richly endowed with all the attributes which combine to form the restless, tameless, unsatisfied man, amid surroundings so uninteresting and changeless. Eager for adventure, even for danger, she was curious with a child's hungering, insatiable appetite for the knowledge of wondrous lands, cities, peoples; hating the daily monotone to which the woman's household duties are necessarily attuned. Capable of the strongest, the most passionate attachments, yet all-ignorant as yet of the subtle, sweet, o'ermastering tone of the world-conquering harmony of love. In the position to which she appeared immovably attached by circumstance, she seemed like a strayed bright-plumaged bird, a foreign captive, taken in infancy and reared in an alien land.
A chamois in a sheepfold, a leopardess in a drawing-room, a red deer in a trim and close-paled enclosure, could not have been more hopelessly at war with surroundings, more incongruously provided with food and shelter. Day after day a growing discontent, a hopeless despair of life, seemed to weigh her down, to take the savour from existence, to restrain the instinctive sportiveness of youth, to hush the spirit-song of praise with which, like the awakening bird, she should have welcomed each dawning morn.
'Why must it be thus?' she often asked herself when, restless at midnight as at noon-day, she gazed from her window across the wide star-lit plain, in which groups of melancholy, swaying, pale-hued trees seemed to be whispering secrets of past famine years or sighing weirdly over sorrows to come.
'Will it always be thus?' thought she, 'and is my life to trickle slowly along like the course of our enfeebled stream, until after long assimilation to this desert dreariness I become like one of the house-mothers I see around me? Ignorant, incurious, narrow, with an intelligence gradually shrivelling up to the dimensions of a childhood with which they have nothing else in common! What a hateful prospect! What a death in life to look forward to! Were it not for my darling mother and the few friends I may call my own, I feel as if I could put an end to an existence which has so little to recommend it, so pitiably small an outlook.'
In all this outburst of capricious discontent the experienced reader of the world's page will perceive nothing more than the instinctive, unwarranted impatience of youth, which in man or woman is so utterly devoid of reason or gratitude.
What! does not the vast, calm universe wait and watch, weak railer at destiny, for the completion of 'Nature's wondrous plan,' counting not the years, the æons, as the sands of the sea, that intervene between promise and fulfilment? Hast thou not enjoyed ease, love unwearying, anxious tendance, from the dawn of thy helpless, as yet useless being; and while all creation suffers and travails, canst thou not endure the unfolding of thy fated lot?