A Colonial Reformer, Vol. 2 (of 3)

It is questionable whether Byron had the operation of the Lands Occupation Act for the colony of New South Wales in view when he penned these lines, but they apply as closely to the general consequences of that great statute as if his lordship had intended to settle the affairs of Australia, after leading to victory the anti-Turkish party of the day.

The brothers Freeman, by a peculiar mental process, had managed to ignore the very substantial aid in cash and employment, the former still unrepaid, furnished by Mr. Neuchamp. By fixing all their attention upon his latter line of conduct, they became convinced that in denying their cattle access to every portion of the Rainbar run he had inflicted upon them a great wrong. This they determined to avenge if not to redress; and one fine morning an ill-written note, brought by a brown-faced urchin of ten years old about breakfast time, informed Mr. Neuchamp that William and Joseph Freeman had discovered three hundred and forty-seven of his cattle trespassing upon their land, which cattle were now in their custody, and which they proposed driving to Drewarrina pound (about seventy miles off) if not forthwith released with damages and expenses paid.

‘What in the name of all that’s rascally can we do?’ inquired Ernest of Charley Banks, as he tossed the note over to him across the breakfast table. ‘I feel inclined to go down and take the cattle by force. The dishonest, scheming vagabonds!’

‘That’s what I should like to do,’ said Banks, ‘and I think Jack and I could hammer that Bill Freeman and his brother, but I’m afraid it won’t do. If we rescue the cattle we can be summoned and fined; besides taking us all the way to that rascally hole of a township.’

‘Then let them keep them, and drive them over to the pound. The damage can’t be much.’

‘And let them hunt them over, and yard them half the time?’ demanded Mr. Banks. ‘No, that wouldn’t do either. The cattle wouldn’t recover it for the whole season. You’ll have to buy him off. So much a head. It’s the shortest way through it.’

Mr. Neuchamp groaned. This way was degrading. A pecuniary loss, for which he did not care so much as he ought to have done, for Ernest was one of those people who rarely regard a cheque or order as the bag of golden sovereigns that anything over a ten-pound note really is. Also, a loss of dignity, which he felt keenly, that he should be placed in the dilemma of having to pay to release his own cattle from his own tenants, so to speak, or to see them injured and lowered in value by those base burghers of the corporation he had himself led into the land of promise!

‘There is nothing else to be done,’ said Charley. ‘They have the best of us now; we must pay.’

‘I don’t believe the cattle were on their land at all,’ pleaded the founder of the society.

‘That’s nothing,’ opposed Mr. Banks, ‘they’ll swear they found ’em there, and bring three or four witnesses to prove it; you’d better give me a cheque for thirty pounds, and let me square it with them. I think we shall get out for that.’

Mr. Neuchamp much regretted sacrificing any portion of his latest and probably concluding advance from Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton in such an unsatisfactory manner, but was compelled to employ that only universal solvent, a cash payment. Mr. Banks departed with the magic missive. I have no authentic record of what actually passed between him and Bill Freeman, but he returned with the cattle. It was also noticed that no peculiar exacerbation occurred between the litigants after this interview.

Another month wore away in the performance of the ordinary work, and the endurance of rather more than the ordinary crosses and losses consequent upon the still protracted drought.

No rain. And again, no rain. Nothing grew. All nature became daily more wan, pale, leafless. The crop of expenses, inevitable and regular, in contradistinction to the produce of the season, grew and matured, until once more the limit of advance agreed to by Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton was definitely reached. Of this ultimate fact Mr. Neuchamp was unpleasantly reminded by the return, unpaid, of his last half-dozen orders, arriving by the mail preceding that which furnished an exceedingly formal letter, advising the unpleasant step which his agents, to their extreme regret, had been compelled to take.

Ernest felt this hitherto unknown annoyance to be the precursor of a financial earthquake, in which possibly his present possessions and future hopes might be engulfed.

He tried to consider his position with the calmness proper to so grave a conjuncture. But he had much difficulty in preserving the requisite freedom from disturbance. Ever and anon would come, as with a lightning flash, the vision of all his cherished projects disappearing down the dark chasm of insolvency and ruin.

His stud of Australian Arabs, now so promising, would be sold for the price of bush mustangs. His store cattle, nearly broken to the run, would be as valueless as if, in spite of their high breeding, they had been composed in great part of the ‘scrub-danglers,’ one of whom had so unwarrantably assaulted him on his arrival at Rainbar. His pet engineering scheme, unfinished and derided, would be henceforth ticketed among the denizens of the locality as Neuchamp’s Folly. Ernest had not more than the ordinary share of self-love, through which nature makes provision for the preservation of the individual, but he commenced to feel by anticipation the pangs which are inseparable from pronounced failure in any soever enterprise or profession. He heard Mr. Jermyn Croker’s unqualified verdict that ‘he had always been a philanthropic lunatic, from whom nothing else could have been expected; the only wonder being that any one had been found fool enough to trust him, and thereby enable him to make so respectable a smash of it.’ Others doubtless would follow in the same suit. Even the good-natured Parklands and the charitable Aymer Brandon, who gave, as they required indeed, much frank social absolution, could scarcely refrain from unreserved condemnation of his ‘improvement’ theory. As to the ‘grateful tenantry’ idea, represented by Freeman Brothers, with their grass-rights, their hostility, and their herds and their flocks—for they had lately purchased a thousand debilitated travelling sheep at about sixpence per head—it would not bear thinking of. He was now in full endurance of the reactionary stage of despondency occasionally bestowed as a counterpoise to the ordinarily high average of tone with which the sanguine man is blessed or cursed, as the case may be. As Mr. Neuchamp reviewed his generous and lofty aims, his far-reaching plans and projects dependent upon so kindly a future for success, he inclined to the latter reading. They appeared to him in this his dark hour as the fantasies of an opium-eater or the dream-palaces of a slumbering child.

Mr. Neuchamp, after a day spent in sad consideration, unfortunately permitted himself to pursue the unending evil of regret during the night. His heightened imagination multiplied disaster and enlarged evil to such a degree that he was more than once tempted to spring from his thorny couch and take to the broad starlit plain for the relief of exercise.

says the remorseful Marmion; and but that in the present state of the fodder market no horses had been stabled at Rainbar for many a day, our latter-day Crusader might have followed out the idea literally. As it was he but arose at earliest dawn and mechanically took the garden path, trusting to find some excuse for an hour or two of hard manual labour which might guide or exorcise the evil spirits that were rending his very soul.

He had been putting out all his strength for an hour or more, and was in much the same bodily state and condition as if he had taken a ten-mile spin with a greatcoat on, after the prescription of Mr. Geoffry Delamayn, when he observed a solitary horseman wending his way along the ‘up-river’ road, which was distinguishable more by dust than by colouring from the grassless waste through which it wound.

The stranger, who was habited in a collarless Crimean shirt and rather dilapidated habiliments generally, rode his emaciated steed steadily on at the slow, hopeless, leg-weary jog to which most of the horses of the territory had long been reduced, until he reached the garden gate. Ernest,—taking him for granted as the usual ‘reporter’ of travelling sheep, about to clear off the last fragments of what once had been pasture; an invalid shepherd, making for the Drewarrina Hospital; a mounted tramp or ‘traveller’ looking for work, with no great hope of, or indeed concern about, finding it; or lastly, a supernumerary for some travelling stock caravan, who had been ‘hunted’ for drunkenness or inefficiency,—raised not his head. For any or all of these toilers of the waste there would be the unvarying hospitality of the men’s hut. But the stranger sat calmly upon his despondent horse at the gate surveying Ernest’s exceedingly efficient spade performance with apparent approval, until at length he broke silence. ‘My word, Mr. Noochamp, you’re nigh as good as a Chinaman. You’d make wages at post-hole digging, if the rain forgets to come and we’re all smothered. How’s those AD store cattle getting on?’

Ernest looked up hastily and indignantly at the first tones of the stranger’s accost, but immediately relaxed his visage and flung down his spade as he recognised in the horseman’s countenance the grave, reflective lineaments of Abstinens Levison.

END OF VOL. II

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.