“He never seemed to pause or hesitate.”
“Nan!” I heard him say, as she cried “Nick!” and if I had ever had any hope of change in her or him, it died in that moment, when I saw the wonderful and immortal love in their eyes.
Love! love, real love! In spite of the cynics, there’s nothing else in this universe that endures. I turned away feeling lonely and sick at heart. I’d had my dream, and it was over; but I knew that I should never love any woman as I loved Nan, and when I saw the two, drawn as it were into each other’s arms, both uttering that strange yearning cry, of a longing that was at last to be fulfilled, I swore to myself that I’d be Nan’s loyal brother and Nick’s friend, as long as Fate kept us three together.
Eungella Diggings was a wild sort of place to bring a woman to—a straggling town, set in a hollow of the hills, with claims all about, and heaps of mullock, as they call the refuse after the crushing of the quartz, and queer, unsightly erections of machinery, of which the whirr ceased not day nor night.
Then there were mushroom tenements of canvas, and shanties of bark, and weather-board lean-to’s, and zinc-roofed buildings, mostly of a public character—the Courthouse, and Bank, and The Star Office, and the many public-houses, into which all the scum of the earth seemed to gather itself. And some of its aristocracy, too.
There was a baronet doing a store business two doors from The Star, and “Honourables” were as thick as peas—or Chinamen, which is saying much the same thing at the Diggings.
There were all sorts, mostly scamps; and fine, daredevil scamps they were that went out to Australia in those days. Many are the stories I could tell, if I hadn’t to tell that of Nick and Nan, about the Diggings crew.
There were lags, too, of course—old hands, as bad as you make ’em, and rough miners as honest as you make ’em, and Oxford and Cambridge men, and army swells, that you’d expect to see in London drawing-rooms.
There were women, too, of all sorts—the worst and the best; and drink flowing, and divine bank-notes flying, and knives gleaming, and tomahawks and pistols at men’s belts.