“Drury, Drury! Let me see! Yes of course. Mother and daughter brother too sometimes; rather a wild young fellow; always ‘on the go’ some where or other, you know. Yes; they used to live here; but they’ve been gone this long time; and where to, no more than I can tell you; or I think anybody else about here either.”
So spake the present tenant of “Acacia Cottage, St. Kilda.” in response to Leslie’s inquiries at the address, to obtain which he had overhauled the effecs of the dead man, finding it at the commencement of a two-year-old letter from his mother, directed to “Algoa Bay;” finding, besides, some receipts of diamonds sold at Cape Town, and a letter of credit on a Melbourne bank for five hundred pounds; probably, so Leslie thought to himself, that “measured smile” of which the poor fellow had laughingly spoken to him in the earlier days of their brief companionship.
The above was the sum-total of the information he could ever—after many persistent efforts, including a fruitless trip to Hobart—obtain of the family or their whereabouts; so, depositing the five hundred pounds at one of the principal banking institutions, and inserting an advertisement in the Age and Argus, Leslie having but little spare cash, and his own fortune lying still in deepest shadow, reluctantly, for a time at least, as he promised himself, abandoned the quest.
Kaloola was one of the prettiest pastoral homesteads in the north-western districts of Victoria; and its owner, as one evening he sat in the broad veranda, and saw on every side, far as the eye could reach, land and stock all calling him master, felt that the years that had passed since the old Decatur dropped her anchor in Port Phillip had not passed away altogether in vain; and although ominous wrinkles began to appear about the corners of John Leslie’s eyes, and gray hairs about his temples, the man’s heart was fresh and unseared as when, on a certain day twelve long years ago, he had shed bitter tears over the ocean grave of his friend. Vainly throughout these latter years had he endeavored to find some traces of the Drurys. The deposit in the Bank of Australasia had remained untouched, and had by now swollen to a very respectable sum indeed. Advertisements in nearly every metropolitan and provincial newspaper were equally without result; even “private inquiry” agents, employed at no small cost, confessed themselves at fault. Many a hard fight with fortune had John Leslie encountered before he achieved success; but through it all, good times and bad, he had never forgotten the dying bequest left to him on that dark and stormy morning in the Southern Ocean; and now, as rising and going to his desk he took out the Quandong stone, and turning it over and over, as though trying once again to finish those last dying words left unfinished so many years ago, his thoughts fled back along memory’s unforgotten vale, and a strong presentiment seemed to impel him not to leave the trinket behind, for the successful squatter was on the eve of a trip to “the Old Country,” and this was his last day at Kaloola; so, detaching the stone from its chain, he screwed it securely to his watch-guard, and in a few hours more had bidden adieu to Kaloola for some time to come.
It was evening on the Marine Parade at Brighton, and a crowd of fashionably dressed people were walking up and down, or sitting listening to the music of the band. Amongst these latter was our old friend John Leslie, who had been in England some three or four months, and who now seemed absorbed in the sweet strains of Ulrich’s Goodnight, my Love, with which the musicians were closing their evening’s selection; but in reality his thoughts were far away across the ocean, in the land of his adoption; and few dreamed that the sun-browned, long-bearded, middle-aged gentleman, clothed more in accordance with ideas of comfort than of fashion, and who sat there so quietly every evening, could, had it so pleased him, have bought up half the gay loungers who passed and repassed him with many a quizzical glance at the loose attire, in such striking contrast to the British fashion of the day.
Truth to tell, Leslie was beginning to long for the far-spreading plains of his Australian home once more; his was a quiet, thoughtful nature, unfitted for the gay scenes in which he had lately found himself a passive actor, and he was—save for one sister, married years ago, and now with her husband in Bermuda—alone in the world; and he thinks rather sadly, perhaps, as he walks slowly back through the crowd of fashionables to the Imperial, where he is staying: “And alone most likely to the end.”
He had not been in his room many minutes before there came a knock at the door; and, scarcely waiting for answer, in darted a very red-faced, very stout, and apparently very flurried old gentleman, who, setting his gold eyeglasses firmly on his nose, at once began: “Er—ah, Mr. Leslie, I believe? Got your number from the porter, you see—great rascal, by the way, that porter; always looks as if he wanted something, you know—then the visitors’ book, and so. Yes; it’s all right so far. There’s the thing now!”—glancing at the old Quandong stone which still hung at Leslie’s watch-chain. “I”—he went on—”that is, my name is Raby, Colonel Raby, and—— Dear me, yes; must apologise, ought to have done that at first, for intrusion, and all that kind of thing; but really, you see”—— And here the old gentleman paused, fairly for want of breath, his purple cheeks expanding and contracting, whilst, instead of words, he emitted a series of little puffs; and John, whilst asking him to take a seat, entertained rather strong doubts of his visitor’s sanity.