‘Have your pay put into my private account while you’re away. I’ll manage somehow. The five hundred pounds ought to frank you there, and do all the taking up and so on—with care.’
‘Yes, and careful enough we shall have to be; there’ll be no more when that’s gone. It’s the “last chance” in every sense of the word.’
‘I shall be lonely enough while you’re away, my dear; but we have had to do without each other before—and must again. You’ll write regularly—a letter will always cheer me up. I shan’t suffer for want of employment, that’s one thing.’
The Commissioner got his leave of absence on the ground of ‘urgent private affairs’—which was [26] ]only just, as he had been hard at it for several years, without change or respite, in one of the most difficult, anxious, wearing occupations in the Civil Service: that of Warden, and Police Magistrate, on a large alluvial goldfield. To rule over an excitable population, varying from ten to twenty thousand; to hear and decide the interminable mining lawsuits arising from the production of tons of gold—literally tons, won, held, and distributed under a code of mining laws, of a sufficiently complicated nature, and appearing to the unlearned a mass of confused, contradictory regulations, was no sinecure. The amounts, too, in question were often incredibly large, so that a mistake in law, or an error in judgment, magnified by the local press, assumed gigantic proportions in the eye of the public. In the police department of jurisdiction, murders and robberies, though not alarmingly frequent, were occasionally matters of by no means a quantité négligeable. Excitable public meetings were common, and, as an outlet for smouldering popular feeling, answered a good purpose.
But, on the whole, Barrawong was an appointment which a gentleman with prejudices in favour of a quiet life would have found singularly unsuitable.
As for Jack, he fell in with the proposition warmly and loyally from its first mention. Distrustful, from past experience, of his will-power in the way of resistance in the grip of terrible drink temptation, to which, in the past, he had succumbed full many a time and oft, he was not [27] ]sorry to have the custody of the joint capital placed in safe hands. And yet nothing is a more astonishing psychical phenomenon than the unbroken abstention from alcohol which the intermittent drunkard will and can practise. Having so resolved, the whilom victim will sit with roystering comrades, whose full glasses pass before his face—lodge in hotels, where he sees (and smells) the soul-destroying liquid from morning to night, and under the fire of this temptation—over the grave of so many broken vows and tearful resolutions—he will remain as unshaken as a teetotaller in a coffee-house.
What a miracle it seems! What a superhuman effort must the first days of sobriety require! How does it put to shame the better born, the better instructed, whose every-day resolutions they are often so powerless to abide by!
But it is a time-bargain with the fiend, alas! in so many—in by far the majority of instances. In ‘an hour that he knoweth not,’ the Enemy of man asserts his power, and the victim falls—to be cast into the outer darkness of despair—of hopeless surrender—to a ruined life, an unhonoured death.
A fortnight’s rest and good living set up the returned prospector to such an extent that his former comrades hardly recognised him in the neatly dressed, alert personage, who gave out that he was open to invest in a ‘show,’ but wasn’t up to any more prospecting for a while. ‘Not good enough,’ and so on. Thought he’d take a trip to Melbourne to see a friend. This resolve he carried out rather [28] ]suddenly, it having been so arranged, the partners not holding it expedient that they should leave in company, or that it should be matter for general information that they were bound upon a joint mining speculation. As to the tempting local ventures, then common among all classes on a large goldfield, Mr. Banneret had always studiously abstained from the slightest connection with them.
‘No!’ was his uniform answer to applications of a persuasive nature—‘I am here to decide upon questions of immense importance to these people over whom I am placed as a judge and a ruler. To inspire confidence in the impartiality of my decisions, I cannot be financially associated with any mining property on this goldfield. Say that my partner, or partners, do not come before me in any judicial matter. Such are the ramifications of mining association, that the partners, and friends of their partners, are certain at some time or other to be suitors in my Court. I should not then stand in the same relation to them as to perfectly unknown or detached parties to a suit. Thus I fully resolved, from my first acceptance of this office, to hold myself free from the slightest ground of suspicion.’