The Crooked Stick Or Pollies's Probation Part 8

As the hours pa.s.sed by with no abatement of violence in the falling of the rain or the fury of the storm, in which the wind had arisen, and raged with tempestuous fury in the darkened sky, a feeling of awe and alarm crept over the minds of the two women.

'There is not a soul about the place, I believe,' said Mrs. Devereux; 'Mr. Gateward is away, and every man and boy with him. During all the years I have been here I have never seen such a storm. Poor Bertram! I hope he has taken shelter somewhere. This cold rain is enough to kill him, with such thin clothing as he has on. But of course he will stay at Baradeen; it would be madness to come on.'

'He said that he would be home to-night, wet or dry. Those were his last words, and he's rather obstinate. Haven't you remarked that, mother?'

'I am afraid he is. It runs in the blood,' the elder remarked, with a sigh. 'But there will be no danger unless the Wawanoo Creek is up. It never rises unless the river does, and there's not rain enough for that.'

'There seems rain enough for anything,' said the girl, shuddering.

'Hark! how it is pouring down now. It will be dark in an hour. I do wish Bertram was home.'

The creek alluded to was a ravine of considerable size and depth, which, serving as one of the anabranches of the river, was rarely filled except in flood time, when it acted as a ca.n.a.l for the purpose of carrying off the superfluous water. Now it was almost dry, and apparently would remain so. It could be distinctly seen from the windows of the room where they were sitting.

At a sudden cry from the girl Mrs. Devereux went to the window. 'What a wonder of wonders!' she said; 'the Wawanoo is coming down. The paling fence in the flat has been carried away.'

The fence alluded to was a high and close palisade across a portion of the flat, down which ran one of the channels of the said Wawanoo Creek.

An unusual body of rain, falling apparently during one of the thunder-showers, had completely submerged the valley, which, narrowing above the said fence, and being dammed back by it, finally overbore it, and rushed down the main channel of the creek in a yeasty flood.

'The creek will be twenty feet deep where the road crosses it now,' said Pollie. 'If he comes to it he will have to swim. He will never think of its being so deep, and he might be drowned. I knew something would happen. What a lucky thing he took Guardsman!'

As she spoke her mother pointed to a spot where the track crossed the creek. The road itself was now plainly marked as a sepia-coloured, brown line winding through the gra.s.sless, herbless, grey levels of the drought-stricken waste. A horseman was riding at speed along the clearly printed track, through the misty lines of fast-falling rain.

'It is Bertram coming back,' cried Pollie. 'I know Guardsman's long stride; how he is throwing the dirt behind him! I wouldn't mind the ride myself if I had an old habit on. It must be great fun to be as wet as he must be, and to know one cannot be any worse. Do you think he will try to swim the creek?'

'He does not seem to dream of pulling up,' said Mrs. Devereux. 'Very likely he thinks it can't be deep when he crossed dry-shod this morning.'

'Oh, look!' cried the girl, with a long-drawn inspiration. 'He has ridden straight in without stopping. What a plunge! They are both over head and ears in it. But Guardsman swims well. Mr. Gateward told me he saw him in the last flood, when he was only a colt. I can see his head; how he shakes it! Gallant old fellow! And there is Bertram sitting as quietly as if he was on dry land. They will be carried down lower, but it is good shelving land on this side. Now they are out, rather staggering, but safe. Thank G.o.d for that! Oh, mother are you not glad?'

As Bertram and the brown made joint entrance to the square opposite the stable-yard, dripping like a sea-horse bestridden by a merman, he saw a feminine figure in the verandah of the barracks gesticulating wildly to him, and in a fashion demanding to be heard.

'Mother says you are to come in directly and change your clothes and take something hot, and not to stay out a moment longer than you can help.'

'I must see Guardsman made snug first,' answered the young man, with the same immovable quiet voice, in which not the slightest inflection betrayed any hint of unusual risk. 'I really couldn't answer it to my conscience to turn him out to-night. I won't be long, however.'

'When it _does_ rain here it rains hard, I must admit!' said Mr.

Devereux an hour afterwards, as, completely renovated and very carefully attired, he presented himself at dinner. 'Could not have imagined such a transformation scene of earth and sky. The plain has become a gigantic batter pudding, and the ludicrous attempt at a brook--the Wawanoo Creek--is a minor Mississippi. I thought the old horse would have been swept right down once.'

'You will find our rivers and some other Australian matters are not to be laughed at,' answered Pollie, with a heightened colour. 'But mother and I are too glad to see you back safe to scold you for anything you might say to-night.'

'Really I feel quite heroic,' he answered, with a smile which was rarely bestowed with so much kindness; 'I suppose people _are_ drowned now and then.'

'I should think so,' said Pollie. 'Do you remember that poor young Clarence, from Amhurst, two or three years ago? He was very anxious to get to the Bindera station, where they were having a party; he was told the creek was dangerous, but would try. His horse got caught in a log or something, and came over with him. He was drowned, and carried into the Bindera house next morning a corpse.'

'Very sad. But men must drop in life's battle now and then. There would be too many of us fellows else "crawling between earth and heaven," as Hamlet says.'

'What a cold-blooded way to talk!' said Pollie; 'but of course you really do not think so. Think of quitting life suddenly with all its pleasures.'

'Pleasures?' replied Mr. Devereux abruptly. 'Yes! I daresay very young persons look at it in that light. After all it's quite a lottery like other games of pitch and toss. Sometimes the backers have it all their own way. Then comes a "fielder's" year, and the first-named are obliterated.'

'Then do you really think life is only another name for a sort of Derby Day on a large scale, or a Grand National?' demanded Pollie, with a shocked expression of countenance--'at the end of which one man is borne in a shining hero, aglow with triumph, while another breaks his neck over the last leap, or loses fame and fortune irrevocably; and that neither can help the appointed lot?'

Her cousin regarded her for a moment with a fixed and searching gaze.

Then a ripple of merriment broke over his features, and a rarely seen expression of frank admiration succeeded to the ordinary composure of his visage. 'I don't go quite as far as that.

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will."

But I am afraid few of us live as if we thought so. That ever I should have found myself in Australia was at one time so unlikely, so all but impossible, that I may well believe in the interposition of a Ruler of Events.'

'I believe they've had rain,' is the usual answer to him who 'speirs' in Australia as to the pastoral welfare of a particular province, district, or locality. It is unnecessary to say more. 'Man wants but little here below' is comparatively true; but a short supply of the aqueous fluid on land parallels in its destructive effects the over abundance at sea.

When the rain is withheld for a year or two years, as the case may be, losses acc.u.mulate, and ruin stalks on apace. The severity of the acknowledged droughts, not merely accidental drynesses, is comparative, and is often matter of conversation.

'This is the worst drought known for many years,' was remarked to a young but war-worn pioneer.

'Pretty well, but not equal to that of 187-,' he made answer.

'Why do you think so?'

'When that drought commenced,' he said slowly, 'we had nine thousand head of cattle on our run on the Darwin. When it broke up we mustered sixteen hundred, and on foot too: we had not had a horse to ride for eighteen months.'

From such merciless disaster was Corindah now saved. Prosperity was a.s.sured for at least two years, as well to that s.p.a.cious property which comprehended 290,000 acres (and not a bad one among them, as Mr.

Gateward was fond of a.s.serting) as to a hundred similar pastoral leaseholds from the Macquarie to the Darr. An entirely new state of matters had suddenly arisen. In all directions telegraphic messages were speeding through s.p.a.ce, withdrawing this lot of 20,000 ewes or that of a thousand store bullocks from sale; while eager forecasting operators like Mr. Jack Charteris had swept up the supply of saleable sheep, and left their more cautious comrades lamenting their inability to purchase except at prices which 'left no margin,' the alternative being to have tens of thousands of acres of waving prairie 'going to waste' for want of stock to eat it. The face of Nature had indeed changed. Within a fortnight the arid dusty plains, so barren of aspect, were carpeted with a green mantle, wondrously vivid of hue and rapid of growth. The creek ran musically murmuring towards the river, which itself 'came down,' a tawny, turbid stream bank high, and in places overflowing into long dry lagoons and lakelets. Even the birds of the air seemed to be apprised of the wondrous atmospheric change. Great flocks of wild-fowl soared in, migrating from undreamed of central wastes. The lakelets and the river reaches were alive with the heron and the egret. The bird of the wilderness, with giant beak and sweeping wing, was there in battalions; while the roar of wings when a cloud of wild-fowl rose from water was like a discharge of artillery.

Bertram Devereux was, in his heart, truly astonished at the wondrous change wrought in the outward appearance of the region, in the manner and bearing of the dwellers therein, in the tone of the leading newspapers, in everybody's plans, position, and prospects, which had been wrought by so simple and natural an agent. He, however, carefully preserved his ordinary incurious, impa.s.sive immobility, and after casually remarking that this was evidently one of the lands known to the author of the _Arabian Nights_, and that somebody had been rubbing the magic lamp, and commanded a genie to fetch a few million tons of water from Ireland or Upper India, where it was superfluous, and deliver it here, made no other observation, but rode daily with Mr. Gateward over the sodden, springing pastures, wading through the overflowing marshes, and swimming the dangerous creeks 'where ford there was none,' as if he had always expected the West Logan to be akin to the west of Ireland as to soil and climate, and was not disappointed in his expectation.

On the morning after the flood Harold Atherstone had betaken himself to the metropolis, only to be forestalled by Jack Charteris in his rapid and comprehensive purchases of stock. Doubtless other pastoral personages had been duly informed by the magic wire of the momentous change, but even then, such had been the terror, the suffering, the dire endurance of every evil of a twofold ruin, that numbers of owners were found willing to sell their advertised sheep at a very slight advance upon the pre-pluvial prices. So might they be a.s.sured of the solvency and security which they had dreaded would never be theirs again. So might they again lay their heads on their pillow at night, thanking G.o.d for all His mercies, and for the safety of the future of those dear to them. So might they again be enabled to go forth among their fellow-men, strong in the consciousness that the aching dread, the long-deferred hope, the dark despair slowly creeping on like some dimly seen but implacable beast of prey, were things of the past, phantoms and shadows to be banished for ever from their unhaunted lives.

All these but lately altered circ.u.mstances were distinctly in favour of a quick and decisive operator, as was Harold Atherstone when he 'saw his way.' Not a plunger like Jack Charteris, he was firm and rapid of evolution when he had distinctly demonstrated his course of action. So when he returned to Maroobil after a month's absence, he had as many sheep on the road, at highly paying prices, as would keep that 'well-known fattening station' and Corindah besides in gra.s.s-eaters for many a month to come. Mrs. Devereux was full of grat.i.tude towards him for managing her delegated business so safely and promptly, and again and again declared that there was no living man like Harold Atherstone.

He was always to be relied on in the hour of need. He never made mistakes, or was taken in, or forgot things, or procrastinated, like other men. When he said he would do a thing, that thing was done, if it was in the compa.s.s of mortal man to do it.

'In short,' said Pollie, before whom and for whose benefit and edification this effusive statement was made, 'in short, he is perfection--a man without a fault. What a pity it is that paragons are never attractive!'

'Beware of false fires, my darling,' said the tender mother--'misleading lights of feeling apart from reason, which are apt to wreck the trusting, and to end in despairing darkness.'

Among the visitors to Corindah, who made at least a bi-monthly call, was the Honourable Hector MacCallum, M.L.C.

He was a prosperous bachelor, verging on middle age, with several good stations, and an enviable power of leaving them in charge of managers and overseers, while he disported himself in the pleasantest spots of the adjacent colonies, or indeed wheresoever he listed--sometimes even in Tasmania, where he was famed for his picnics, four-in-hand driving, and liberality in entertaining. In that favoured isle, where maidens fair do so greatly preponderate, Mr. MacCallum might have brought back a wife from any of his summer trips; and few would have a.s.serted that the damsel honoured by his choice was other than among the fairest and sweetest of that rose-garden of girls.

But then something always prevented him. He wanted to go to New Zealand.

It was impossible to settle down before he had seen the wonders of that wonderland--the pink-and-white terraces, the geysers, the paradisiacal gardens, the Eves that flitted through the 'rata' thickets, the fountains that dripped and flashed through the hush of midnight.

Something was always incomplete. He would come again. And more than one fair cheek grew pale, and bright eyes lost their l.u.s.tre, ere the inconstant squatter prince was heralded anew.

But now it seemed as if the goodly fish, which had so often drawn back and disappeared, was about to take the bait.

Mr. MacCallum's visits were apparently accidental. He happened to be in that part of the country, and took the opportunity of calling. He was on his way to Melbourne or Sydney, and was sure he could execute a commission for Mrs. Devereux or Miss Pollie. This, of course, involved a visit on the way back. He was a good-looking, well-preserved man, so that his forty odd years did not put him at much disadvantage, if any, when he came into compet.i.tion with younger men. Indeed, it is a.s.serted by the experienced personages of their own s.e.x that young girls are in general not given to undervalue the attentions of men older than themselves. It flatters their vanity or gratifies their self-esteem to discover that their callow charms and undeveloped intellects, so lately emanc.i.p.ated from the prosaic thraldom of the schoolroom, suffice to attract men who have seen the world--have, perhaps, borne themselves 'manful under shield' in the battlefield of life, have struck hard in grim conflicts where quarter is neither given nor received, and been a portion of the great 'pa.s.sion-play' of the universe. They look down upon their youthful admirers as comparatively raw and inexperienced, like themselves. Theirs is a career of hope and expectation all to come, like their own. They like and esteem them, perhaps take their parts in rehearsals of the old, old melodrama. But in many cases it is not till they see at their feet the war-worn soldier, the scarred veteran who has tempted fate so often in the great hazards of the campaign, who has shared the cruel privations, the deadly hazards of real life--that the imaginative heart of woman fills up all the s.p.a.ces in the long-outlined sketch of the hero and the king, the lord and master of her destiny, to whom she is henceforth proud to yield worship and loving service.

Why Mr. MacCallum did not marry all this time--he owned to thirty-seven, and his enemies said he was more like forty-five--the dwellers in the country towns on the line of march exhausted themselves in conjecturing.