Jack’s face turned nearly as white as when he fell fainting at the Juandah gate. He set his teeth hard as he crushed the fateful missive in his hand; and leaning back, growled out a savage oath, such as seldom passed his lips. “This was to be the end, then, of all his hopes, and plans, and work, exile, and anxiety. To be sold up now, in the very vortex of the unabated panic, in the worst month of the year, in the most depressing period of the worst drought that had been known for thirty years! No warning, no hint of such an impending stroke. The sword of Damocles had been suspended financially above his head, in his daily musings, in his nightly dreams, for many a month. But strong in sanguine anticipation of a change in the season, in a rise of the market, he had become accustomed to its presence. It had come to be as harmless as a punkah; and now—it had fallen, keen, deadly, inevitable, full upon his defenceless head.”
For he knew his position to be utterly hopeless. “Reduce his overdraft!” What a world of irony lay in the request! Even could he sell without the consent of the bank—to which abstraction every sheep, lamb, and fleece was mortgaged—how was he to realize, when best fat sheep were selling under five shillings, and ewes, as well-bred and classed as his own, were offering in any number at half a-crown a head, and unsaleable at that? God in heaven! he was a ruined man—not in the sense of those whom he had known in mercantile life, who seemed in some wonderful fashion to fail, and come forth again with personal belongings hardly curtailed to ordinary observation, but really, utterly, tangibly ruined—left without home, or household goods, or opportunity to commence afresh. A beggar and a byword for rashness, extravagance, utter want of discretion, purpose, energy, what not. Who has not heard the chorus of cant which swells and surges round a fallen man? M‘Nab was away; he would tell him the news next day. Meanwhile, he must go to town and see what could be done. Matters might be arranged somehow, though of what the “somehow” was to be composed he had not the faintest conception, even after a night cap wherein the proportion of “battle-axe” was not very closely calculated—“To bed, to bed, to bed!” Banquo, his ghost, did not more effectually murder sleep than in Jack’s case did the delicate, deadly caligraphy of Mildmay Shrood.
On the morrow he told M‘Nab what had happened, and betook himself on horseback to the stage which the mail could reach on the following day, choosing the distraction of a long ride rather than the slow torture of a whole day’s waiting.
M‘Nab was moved, though not altogether surprised, at the intelligence. He knew that the interest must have been running up upon the bank account, when all was necessarily going out and nothing, since the clip of wool, coming in. He held as firmly as ever to his opinion that stock and stations must rise again after a time. The ship would right herself, though water-logged and dipping bows under with every sea. The thing was to know how long the storm would rage. He cautioned Jack to be cool and cautious in his dealing with the bank, and at whatever cost to procure further accommodation—time being the all-important matter in such a season. Three days’ rain would send up the value of all stock fifty per cent. at least, to rise another cent. per cent. within the year.
John Redgrave reached Melbourne after a journey over five hundred miles of a country which, in all but the essential features of camels and Arabs, would seem to have been translated bodily from the great desert of Sahara. Nor leaf, nor grass, reed nor rush relieved the bare, dusty, red-brown wastes. The stations, deserted by their travelling stock, looked as if built by a past generation of lunatics upon a “waste land, where no one comes or hath come since the making of the world.”
From time to time columns of dust, moving cloud-pillars, met or passed them on their way, the abodes of evil Genii, as the Bedouins told. Evil spirits were abroad, doubtless Jack thought, in sufficient numbers. The land looked as if not only there never had been any herbage whatever, but, from the total absence of the roots, as if there could by no possibility be any in the future. The mail horses were worn and feeble, threatening to leave them stranded in the midst of some endless plain. At the mail-station, no fresh animals being forthcoming, it seemed as if their journey must then and there end, or be performed on foot. But the driver, a man of resources, lounged over to the pound, and seeing therein two comparatively plump nags, one of which had certainly worn harness, set up a claim, and promptly released them upon payment of sustenance fees. With these equivocal steeds the journey was prosecuted to the railway terminus, and once more, after nearly two years’ absence, Mr. Redgrave found himself in the great city which has grown up in little more than a generation.
Pleasant would have been the change from the lone waste, in process of change into a charnel-house, but for the great overshadowing dread which dwelt with John Redgrave day by day. The fresh breezes of ocean fanned his bronzed cheek, but awoke not, as of old, the joyous pulsations of a heart free to respond to every tone of the grand harmony of Nature. The slave who feels at every step the galling of his heavy chain thanks not God for the blue sky, or the song of the soaring bird; and he who is the thrice fettered bond-slave of Debt bears a spirit steeled against all softening and ennobling influences.
Some transient gleams of the joy of new sensation and old friendship were permitted even to his hopeless condition. But even amid the welcome and the talk of old associates there ran depressing announcements.
“Times were incredibly bad. As for stock, no one would take them at a gift. Wool was down, lower than for years, and (of course) never would rise again. Hugh Brass was gone. Estate in liquidation. The Marsalays, Moreland, ditto; Heaven only knew for what amount—not that it mattered much, in these days, whether a man stopped for one hundred thousand or three. Fellow went one day to bank-manager, and actually wanted advances on a good run and twenty thousand sheep. Manager, new appointment, inquired if he had any other liabilities? Shut him up, rather. Times’ changed, eh, old boy?”