The evening was not dreary. Mark and his wife exerted themselves to dispel the gloom that threatened to enshroud the little party. Maud was again outwardly calm and self-possessed, as women often are, in the supreme hours of life. Jack exhibited the recklessness of despair, and appeared to have dismissed from his mind the misery of his position. Stangrove recounted the many shifts and contrivances rendered necessary by the exigencies of the season.
“Did you ever taste milk, old fellow,” he said, “distilled chiefly from water-lilies? I assure you our two melancholy milkers have consumed no other food for weeks. There is not, of course, a particle of grass, or so much as an unstripped salt-bush or cotton-bush for miles. Well, the big lagoon (quite a lake it looks in winter) has not dried up yet. You may see the cows standing up to their backs in it all day long. Even the lilies are not on the surface. An occasional flower is all that they get there, but from time to time you may notice one of the amphibious creatures put her head deeply under water like a diving duck, and raise it after a longish interval, filled with a great trailing bunch of roots and esculent filaments. Great idea, isn’t it? I wonder how long they would take to Darwinize into webbed feet and a beaverly breadth of tail.”
“They manage to live, and give us milk besides, on this blanc-mange, or whatever it is,” said Mrs. Stangrove. “I don’t know what the poor children would have done but for these submarine plantations.”
“My dear old Mameluke has copied their idea, then,” joined in Maud, with a brave attempt at light converse, which ended in a flickering, piteous smile; “for I saw him in the cows’ water party yesterday, with very little but his head visible. He has lost all the hair from his knees down, either from the leeches or the water.”
“We are living in strange times,” remarked Jack; “it is a pity we can’t get a few hints from the blacks, who must have seen all the dry seasons since Captain Cook. What have you done with all your sheep, Mark?”
“We are eating the few that are left,” said Mark.
“And very bad they are,” interposed Mrs. Stangrove. “We are all so tired of mutton, that I shall never like it again as long as I live.”
“The beef would be worse, if we had any,” resumed Mark. “The sheep are just eatable, though I agree as to the indifferent quality. All the flocks are in the mountains in charge of my working overseer, old Hardbake, as well as the cattle. Here is the last letter: ‘The sheep is all well, and the wool will be right if so be as you get rain by the time the snow falls here. We must cut and run then for fear of haccidence. The cattle is pore but lively. Send some more baccy. Yours, to command, Gregory Hardbake.’ Curious scrawl, isn’t it?”
The ladies having retired, Mark Stangrove and his guest adjourned to the veranda for the customary tabaks parlement, and for some time smoked silently under the influence of the glorious southern night. All was still save the faint but clearly-heard ripple of the stream, and the low, sighing, rhythmical murmur of the river oaks. Cloudless was the sky; the broad silver moon hung in mid firmament, with splendour undimmed, save by a wide translucent halo—in happier times suggestive of rain. In this hopeless season, the denizens of the Warroo had learned by sad experience to distrust this and all other ordinary phenomena.
“Glorious night,” said Mark at length, breaking the long silence, “but how infinitely we should prefer the wildest weather that ever frightened a man to his prayers! Strange, how comparative is even one’s pleasure in the beauty of nature, and how dependent upon its squaring with our humble daily needs. When I read such a passage as—‘the storm beat mercilessly in the faces of the wayfarers, with heavy driving showers,’ &c.—when the author has exhausted himself in this endeavour to elicit your sympathy for the unlucky hero and heroine—I feel madly envious, which I take it is not the feeling intended to be produced. So you are going to clear out, old fellow, for good and all? You know, I am sure, how sorry we all are. Will you pardon me if I ask what your plans are for the future?”