The Crooked Stick Or Pollies's Probation Part 11

A neat brown-faced groom took the horses from the young men as they dismounted, looking critically at the rather 'tucked up' condition of the parson's steed. 'Take Mr. Courtenay's horse to a box and feed him till sundown; then put him into the creek paddock. Go round and tell the hands to roll up in the shed at half-past seven to-night. Mr. Courtenay will hold service.' The groom touched his hat with a gesture of a.s.sent, and departed with his charge.

The princ.i.p.al sitting-room at Maroobil was a fairly large apartment, which did not aspire to the dignity of a drawing-room. In the days of his father and mother Harold had always remembered them sitting there in the evenings after the evening meal had been cleared away. There was a large old-fashioned fireplace, where in winter such a fire glowed as effectually prevented those in the room from being cold. A solid mahogany table enabled any one to read or write thereon with comfort.

And Harold was one of those persons who was unable to pa.s.s his evenings in a general way without doing more or less of both. A well-chosen library, with most of the standard authors and a reasonable infusion of modern light literature, filled up one end of the room. Sofas and lounges helped to redeem the room from stiffness or discomfort.

Full-length portraits in oil of Harold's father and mother, as also of a preceding generation, with an admiral who had fought at Trafalgar, adorned the walls.

A stag's head and antlers shot in New Zealand, with a brace of stuffed pheasants and the brush of an Australian-bred fox, were fixed over doorways. Guns and rifles of every kind of size, gauge, and construction filled a couple of racks. All things were neat and scrupulously clean, but there was that total absence of ornamentation which characterises a bachelor establishment of a settled and confirmed type.

In the evening, when the master of the establishment and his clerical guest walked across the half-mile which separated the wool-shed from the house--another old-world inst.i.tution absurdly near the homestead, as the overseer, a 'Riverina man' of advanced views, declared--a fairly numerous congregation was a.s.sembled. The chairs and forms had been conveniently placed for the people. The wool table had been dressed up, so as to be made a serviceable reading-desk. Candles in tin sconces lit up the building--a matter which had been found necessary during theatrical representations in the same building during the shearing season, when travelling troupes of various orders of merit essay to levy toll on the cash earnings so freely disbursed at such times.

It was a representative gathering, in some respects a strange and pathetic a.s.semblage. It was known that Mr. Atherstone particularly wished all his employees to attend these occasional services, and to pay due respect to whatever clergyman, in the exercise of his vocation, might find his way to Maroobil. Harold was unprejudiced as to denominations, although firmly attached to his own, and exacted as far as possible a decent recognition of the trouble and personal expenditure undertaken for the spiritual welfare of the neighbourhood.

On the nearest form might be seen the unmistakable type of the English peasant from Ess.e.x. The gardener, John Thrum, and his wife, had emigrated from Bishop-Stortford thirty years ago, and finding a congenial resting-place at Maroobil, had remained there ever since, saving their money, and at the beginning of every year expressing their determination to 'go home to England.' A dozen station hands and boundary riders exhibited bronzed and sunburnt features, darkened almost to the complexion of 'Big Billy,' the black fellow, who, with a clean shirt and a countenance of edifying solemnity, sat on one of the back benches. A score of young men and lads, long of limb, rather slouching of manner, with regular features and athletic frames, showed a general resemblance in type, such as that towards which the Anglo-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Australian is gradually merging. A few women and children, a stray hawker, a policeman on the track of horse-stealers, resplendent in spotless boots and breeches--_voila tous_! There were Roman Catholics among the crowd, but much abiding in the backwoods had rubbed off prejudice. Padres were scarce, anyhow. There was no chapel within fifty miles, and they didn't think it would be any harm to come.

For the rest, the service of the Church of England, slightly condensed, was gone through; a plain, serviceable sermon, sound in doctrine and not above the heads of the hearers, was administered; the benediction was said; and the little congregation composed of such different elements dispersed--some of them certainly soothed and comforted by the familiar words, if by nought else; others, let us hope, induced to consider or amend their course of life, where such was needful.

As the young men strolled home back to the homestead the clergyman, after a pause, said, 'It often oppresses me with a feeling of sadness, the doubt which I feel whether any appreciable good results from these occasional services, the efforts of myself and other men, who labour under different t.i.tles in the Lord's vineyard. When we reflect on the lives these men, almost without exception, lead--the old gardener, perhaps, the sole exception, and the women and children--a man may well doubt whether he is not wearing out his life for nought.'

'It's hard to say,' answered Harold. 'If the soldier does not fight, the battle is not won. One does not see much improvement, certainly, from decade to decade. Perhaps there is less of the open, reckless profligacy that we used to hear of in our boyhood. But no doubt most of the men that we saw to-night gamble, drink, and in riotous living of one form or other dispose of their yearly wages; confessedly going to town at Christmas, or some other holiday, to "knock it down."'

'All of them?' said the preacher. 'Surely there must be some of them who do not?'

'Well, not the married men perhaps--those who have farms and who live in the cooler regions, near the foothills, as the Americans say, of the great mountain-chain. They save their money, and take it home to their wives; it helps for harvest and other time of need. But the older men, the regular nomadic hands, who are rarely married, and the boys, save nothing, except for a grand annual carnival, which after a month leaves them penniless for another year.'

'A practice which must have the most demoralising effect upon these poor victims of drink and debauchery?'

'I really can't say that it has,' replied Harold Atherstone. 'That is the extraordinary part of it. That grizzled, clean-shaved man with the square shoulders and highly respectable English appearance is a Devonshire man, who came here early in life. He has been employed on Maroobil, off and on, ever since I remember. He never drinks when at work. You might send him into the township with a five-pound note any day and he would return sober. He is as hard as nails. I would take his word as soon as any friend I know. He is brave, honest, hard-working, simple. As a labourer he is without a fault. He is the stuff of which England's best soldiers and sailors are made. And yet----'

'And yet what?'

'He is a hopeless and irreclaimable drunkard. He has collected his knock-about money, his shearing, and his harvest money about the end of January. By the first or second week in March he has not a shilling in the world--starting out "on the wallaby," as he calls it, sober and penniless, with barely a shirt to his back, trusting to the first job he meets for food and covering. What are you to do with a man like that?'

'Surely a word in season might influence him?'

'Not if one rose from the dead.

'Because, now consider the case carefully, as Mr. Jaggers says. Here is a man who has self-denial enough, with the raging drunkard's thirst upon him, to suddenly determine to abstain wholly, solely, and absolutely from even a teaspoonful of beer, wine, or alcohol, with gallons of it under his nose at every public-house he pa.s.ses. When you talk to him he is as sober as I am--more so indeed, for I am going to have a gla.s.s of whisky and water to-night, whereas he will touch nothing for nearly a year. He says, "Well, master, I be always main sorry at the time, and I do aim not to touch it no more. But the devil, he be too strong for I, and zumhow or zumhow, the old feeling comes over me arter Christmas time, and I knocks all the cheques down, zame as before. But I've neither chick nor child, and I reckon I harm no one but myself."

'"But you'll die in a ditch some day, Ben," I say to him.

'"Like as not, master," he replies, quite good-humouredly; "and no great matter. A man must die when his turn comes. But you'll have the hay spoiling, master, if you keeps a-talkin' to your hands 'stead of drivin' 'em at their work."'

'How it must ruin their const.i.tution!' groaned the clergyman. 'They can't have a healthy pulse or movement.'

'Even that is not borne out by fact,' said the squatter. 'Have up this old private in the industrial army, and what do you find? His eye is clear, his cheek is healthy and brown. Let either of us, fairly strong men--taller and broader too--stand alongside of him at a hard day's work, and see where we shall be! Every muscle and sinew, strained and tested since childhood, is like wire compared to cord. The country-bred Englishman is certainly the best working animal in the world, and I cannot conscientiously say that this man's bodily or mental powers have suffered for the life he has led.'

'Is there no hope, then?' said the young preacher despondingly. 'Must the best and bravest of the race be doomed to this hopeless degradation?

The preacher's warning is useless, the kindly master's advice, the teaching of experience, the voice of G.o.d. What are we to look to in the future?'

'To the spread of education and the development of intelligence. I see no other safeguard. Ben can neither read nor write. Hundreds like him can do so with difficulty--which amounts to nearly the same thing. A certain reaction sets in after continuous labour. What change or recreation have these barren intelligences so complete, so transforming as the madness of intoxication? With culture--national and universal--will come additional means of recreation a hundredfold multiplied. With the refinement inseparable from education will come the distaste for unbridled debauchery, for the coa.r.s.e and degrading enjoyments of mere sensuality, for a practice which will have become unfashionable with every grade and every cla.s.s of society.'

'Then you trust in the millennium of universal education--secular or otherwise--not fearing the communistic and atheistic principles which may be involved by mere mental culture unregulated by religious teaching.'

'So long as the race preserves the attributes which have always distinguished it, so long as the pa.s.sions disturb the reasoning powers, so long as the body preserves its present relation to the spirit, men will drink to heighten pleasure or to dull pain. But in proportion as the mental powers are developed and refined by culture, so will the vice which we call drunkenness diminish, perhaps disappear. With other results of the tillage of that rich and boundless estate, the nation's mind, so long fallow, so negligently worked, I shall not at present concern myself. I have my own opinion.'

'You will not take anything?' said Atherstone, lighting his pipe as the two men sat over the wide fireplace upon their return from the wool-shed. 'Light wine or spirits you will find on the tray; the aerated water is yonder.'

'I think it better for me to practise what I preach in the matter of intoxicating liquors,' said Mr. Courtenay, filling a large tumbler with the aerated water. 'This is very refreshing--though I do not feel called upon to denounce the moderate use of what was doubtless ordained for wise purposes.'

'I can put your horse in the paddock, and let me drive you over to Corindah,' said the host after breakfast next morning. 'He will be all the better for it, and on return you can make across to Yandah just as well from here. I'll send Jack with you across the bush, and he'll put you on to the main Wannonbah road.'

'Thank you very much, Mr. Atherstone; you are always considerate. I began to think Rover was failing a little; yet I had only ridden him forty miles when I met you.'

'Before lunch-time?' said the other, smiling. 'Well, he is a good horse, and carries you well; only, when you come back from Yandah, I'd put the other nag into commission. Leave Rover here till autumn, and he'll be fat and strong to carry you all the winter. And now, if you have any writing to do before lunch, I must leave you in possession. We'll start at half-past three sharp. There's the library, the writing-table, the house generally, to do as you like with till I come back to lunch.'

Punctually at the appointed hour after lunch the pair of fast-trotting, well-bred buggy horses whirled the two young men away on the track to Corindah, a pathway which, already well-beaten, did not appear to be in danger of becoming faint from disuse.

Arriving before sundown, they were received with unmistakable cordiality by the lady of the house, who explained that Pollie had gone out for a ride with her cousin, but would be home by tea-time. This trifling piece of intelligence did not, strange to relate, appear to add to the satisfaction of either guest. Nor even when the missing damsel came riding in, looking deliciously fresh and exhilarated by the healthful exercise, talking in an animated way to Mr. Bertram Devereux, who, attired with great neatness and mounted upon the handsomest horse that Corindah 'had to its name,' looked like an equestrian lounger from Rotten Row, was their equanimity altogether restored. Harold was reserved and imperturbable as usual--even more so. Mr. Courtenay discoursed gloomily about the low state of morality everywhere apparent in the bush. The rather carefully prepared tea entertainment, to which poor Mrs. Devereux had looked forward with a certain pleasurable antic.i.p.ation, proved flat and uninteresting.

The attendance was comparatively large in the dining-room of the bachelor's quarters, which Mrs. Devereux had caused to be rigorously cleaned out for the occasion. But it was agreed that the sermon of Mr.

Courtenay was not so good as usual; that he had 'gone off' in his preaching, and had not been so pleasant-mannered as was his wont. Mrs.

Devereux was lost in astonishment at the variation in his performance and demeanour, and concluded by remarking to Pollie privately that clergymen were uncertain in their ways, and that Mr. Courtenay in particular, must have been overworking himself lately, which accounted for his altered form.

Mrs. Devereux was anxious to confide in Harold about Mr. Charteris'

unlucky declaration before his departure, and to a.s.sure herself of his approval of her conduct. She knew that the young men were as brothers, and that Mr. Charteris would by no means object to such a proceeding.

But Harold said rather sternly that he and Mr. Courtenay must drive home that afternoon: he had work to do, etc.; and in spite of an appealing and surprised glance from Miss Pollie, he adhered to his resolution, and after saying farewell formally, was seen no more.

CHAPTER VII

Though there was nothing overt in the manner of Harold Atherstone upon which she could fasten as showing resentment or offence, yet did Miss Devereux acknowledge in her secret heart a coolness in the demeanour of her old friend which troubled her. He was always so kind, so honest, so considerate. 'Tender and true' expressed her thoughts. She could not think of his disapproval without regret, even pain. He had a way of always being in the right, too. On many occasions had they differed in opinion. She recalled how invariably it had been forced upon her cooler, juster self that his opinion had been correct from the beginning.

Suppose, she thought to herself, as she leaned out of the window and watched the stars with strange undefined yearnings, that Harold should be right this time! He had said nothing, only showed by his manner, by his countenance, every inflexion of which she knew so well, that he disliked this increasing intimacy with her cousin. Was it increasing? A mere half-friendship, founded on curiosity, admiration of the unknown, upon her own ideal, enveloping him like a costume at a masquerade.

It is possible that this highly important retrospective process might have proceeded to much greater length and depth of research, that curiously constructed organ the female heart being full of all manner of strange corridors, galleries, and shafts, of utterly unknown measure and limit. But circ.u.mstances arose--circ.u.mstances which altered the aspect of affairs--which turned temporarily the maiden's thoughts into far other channels.

The season being so exceptionally good, the stock and station being nearly 'able to manage themselves,' as Mr. Gateward expressed it, the highly original idea of a summer trip, for the benefit of her own and her daughter's health, suggested itself to the mind of Mrs. Devereux.

'Poor dear! she has been shut up here quite long enough,' said the loving mother. 'I can't say that she doesn't look well, but a voyage must benefit her. It will give a change of ideas. It may take away that restless, discontented feeling which comes to her now so often.'

Thereupon it was decided that they were to go to Sydney, and spend a fortnight among their friends. Then by steamer to Melbourne. From that city they would take one of the New Zealand boats, so as to pa.s.s a portion of the summer at the fairy lakes of Rotomahana and the hot springs of Waiwera--that modern imitation of Paradise.

For this unprecedented step Mrs. Devereux had more than one reason. She certainly thought it would tend to her darling's mental and bodily improvement. But that was not all. With womanly quickness sharpened by a mother's instinct, she had divined that the intimacy between Pollie and her cousin was slowly but surely coming closer, nearer, perhaps dearer.

Of the probable _denouement_ she had an instinctive dread. 'I don't know what it is,' she said to herself, 'but I can't altogether put faith in Bertram. It isn't that I can say anything against him. He is clever, manly, good-looking in his way. I didn't think so at first. But somehow I don't seem to be able to know him. He is as great a stranger as the first day I set eyes upon him. Oh! why can't she take Harold Atherstone, who is worth half a dozen of him--of any other man I ever saw, except poor Brian?'