Plain Living

Mr. Stamford, in his misery, had taken scant heed of the hours. He was astonished to find that the morning had fled. He felt minded to decline, but in the kindly face of his possible entertainer he saw the marks of continuous mental exertion, mingled with the easily-recognised imprints of anxious responsibility. A feeling of sadness came over him, as he looked again – of pity for the ceaseless toil to which it seemed hard that a man in the flower of his prime should be doomed – that unending mental grind, of which he, in common with most men who have lived away from cities, had so cordial an abhorrence. “Poor fellow!” he said to himself, “he is not more than ten years older than Hubert, and yet what an eternity of thought seems engraven in his face. I should be sorry to see them change places, poor as we are, and may be.” He thought this in the moment which he passed in fixing his eyes on the countenance of Barrington Hope. What he said, was: “I shall have much pleasure; I really did not know it was so late. My time in town, however, is scarcely so valuable as yours. So we may as well devote half an hour to the repairing of the tissue.”

Mr. Stamford’s wanderings in Lower George Street and the unfamiliar surroundings of the metropolis had so far overcome the poignancy of his woe as to provide him with a reasonable appetite. The cuisine of the Excelsior, and the flavour of a bottle of extremely sound Dalwood claret, did not appeal to his senses in vain. The well-cooked, well-served repast concluded, he felt like another man; and though distrusting his present sensations as being artificially rose-coloured, he yet regarded the possibility of life more hopefully.

“It has done me good,” he said in his heart; “and it can’t have done him any harm. I feel better able to stand up to hard Fate and her shrewd blows than before.”

They chatted pleasantly till the return to the office, when Mr. Hope hung up his hat, and apparently removed a portion of his amiability of expression at the same time. He motioned his visitor to a chair, produced a box of cigars, which, with a grotesque mediæval matchbox, he pushed towards him. Lighting one for himself, he leaned back in his chair and said “Now then for business!”

The squatter offered a tabulated statement, originally prepared for the bank, setting forth the exact number of the livestock on Windāhgil, their sexes and ages, the position and area of the run, the number of acres bought, controlled or secured; the amount of debt for which the bank held mortgage, the probable value of the whole property at current rates. Of all of which particulars Mr. Hope took heed closely and carefully. Mr. Stamford became suddenly silent, and indeed broke down at one stage of the affair, in which he was describing the value of the improvements, and mentioning a comfortable cottage, standing amid a well-grown orchard on the bank of a river, with out-buildings of a superior nature grouped around.

Then Mr. Hope interposed. “You propose to me to take up your account, which you will remove from the Bank of New Guinea. You are aware that there is considerable risk.”

(“Hang it!” Mr. Stamford told himself; “I have heard that surely before. I know what you are going to say now. But why do you all, you financiers, like to keep an unlucky devil so on the tenter-hooks?”)

Mr. Hope went on quietly and rather sonorously. “Yes! there has been a large amount of forced realisation going on of late. Banks are tightening fast. The rainfall of the interior has been exceptionally bad. I think it probable that the Bank of New Guinea has none too good an opinion of your account. But I always back my own theory in finance. I have great reason to believe, Mr. Stamford, that heavy rain will fall within the next month or two. I have watched the weather signs carefully of late years. I am taking – during this season, at any rate – a strong lead in wool and stock, which I expect to rise. Everything is extremely low at present – ruinously so, the season disastrously dry. But from these very dry seasons I foretell a change which must be for the better. I have much pleasure in stating that the Austral Agency Company will take up your account, Mr. Stamford, and carry you on for two years at the same rate of interest you have been paying.”

Mr. Stamford made a commencement of thanking him, or at least of expressing his entire satisfaction with the new arrangement; but, curious to relate, he could not speak. The mental strain had been too great. The uncertain footing to which he had so long been clinging between ruin and comparative safety had rendered his brain dizzy.

He had been afraid to picture the next scene of the tragedy, when the fatal fiat of the Bank Autocrat should have gone forth, – the wrench of parting from the dear old place they had all loved so well. The unpretending, but still commodious dwelling to which he had brought his fond, true wife, while yet a young mother. The garden in which they had planted so many a tree, so many a flower together. The unchecked freedom of station life, with its general tone of abundance and liberality. All these surroundings and comforts were to be exchanged – if things were not arranged – for what? For a small house in town, for a lower – how much lower! – standard of life and society, perhaps even for poverty and privation, which it would cut him to the heart to see shared by those patient exiles from their pastoral Eden.

When Mr. Stamford had sufficiently recovered himself he thanked Mr. Hope with somewhat unaccustomed fervour, for he was an undemonstrative man, reserved as to his deeper feelings. But the manager of the Austral Agency Company would not accept thanks. “It may wear the appearance of a kindness, but it is not so in reality,” he said. “Do not mistake me. It is a hard thing to say, but if it seemed such to me, it would be my duty not to do it. It is the merest matter of calculation. I am glad, of course, if it falls in with your convenience.”

Here he looked kindly at his client – for such he had become – as if he fain would have convinced him of his stern utilitarian temperament. But, as he had remarked before, Mr. Hope’s eyes and his sentiments contradicted one another.

“You have saved my home, the valued outcome of many a year’s hard work – it may be my life also. That is all. And I’m not to thank you? Do not talk in so cold-blooded a manner; I cannot bear it.”

“My dear sir,” said Mr. Hope, with calm, half-pitying expression, “I am afraid you are not a particularly good man of business. It is as unfair to praise me now for ‘carrying you on’ for another year or two, as it will be to blame me for selling you up some fine day, if I am compelled to do so.”

“Anyhow, it is a reprieve from execution. When shall I call again?”

“To-morrow morning, before twelve, let us say. I shall want you to sign a mortgage – a necessary evil; and if you bring me an exact amount of your indebtedness to the Bank of New Guinea, I will give you a cheque for it.”

“A cheque for it!” How magnificent was the sound. Mr. Stamford had drawn some tolerably large cheques in his time, which had been duly honoured, but of late years the cheque-drawing method had fallen much into abeyance.

Nevertheless, he felt like Aladdin, suddenly gifted with the wonderful lamp. The sense of security and the guarantee of funds, for even their moderate and necessary expenses, appeared to open to him vistas of wealth and power verging on Oriental luxury.

He lost no time; indeed he just managed to gain his bank before its enormous embossed outer door was closed, when he marched into the manager’s room with so radiant a countenance that the experienced centurion of finance saw plainly what had happened.

“Don’t trouble yourself to speak,” he said. “It’s all written on your forehead. We bankers can decipher hieroglyphs invisible to other men. ‘Want my account made up – securities ready to be delivered – release – cheque for amount in full.’ Who is the reckless entrepreneur?”

“The Austral Agency Company,” he replied, feeling rather cooled down by this very accurate mind-reading; “but you seem to know so much, you ought to know that too.”

“My dear fellow, I congratulate you!” Mr. Merton said, getting up and shaking him warmly by the hand. “I beg your pardon; but really, any child could see that you had been successful; and I began to think that it must have been one of Barrington Hope’s long shots. A very fine fellow, young but talented; in finance operates boldly. I don’t say he’s wrong, mind you, but rather bold. Everything will be ready for you to-morrow morning. Look in just before ten – by the private door.”

Mr. Stamford did look in. How many times had he walked to those same bank doors with an aching heart, in which the dull throb of conscious care was rarely stilled! Many times had he quitted that building with a sense of temporary relief; many times with a more acutely heightened sense of misery, and a conviction that Fate had done her worst. But never, perhaps, before had he passed those fateful portals with so marked a sense of independence and freedom as on the present occasion.

He had cast away the burden of care, at any rate for two years – two whole years! It was an eternity in his present state of overwrought feeling. He felt like a man who in old days had been bound on the rack – had counted the dread contrivances for tearing muscles and straining sinews – who had endured the first preliminary wrench, and then, at a word, was suddenly loosed.

Such was now his joyous relief from inward agony, from the internal throbs which rend the heart and strain to bursting the wondrous tissue which connects soul and sense. The man who had decreed all this was to him a king – nay, as a god. And in his prayer that night, after he had entreated humbly for the welfare of wife and children in his absence, and for his own safe return to their love and tenderness, Barrington Hope came after those beloved names, included in a petition for mercy at the hands of the All-wise.

It was not a long business that clearing of scores with the Bank of New Guinea under these exceptional circumstances. Such and such was the debit balance, a sufficiently grave one in a season when it had not rained, “to signify,” for about three years, when stock was unsalable, when money was unprecedentedly tight, but not, perhaps amounting to more than one-third of the real value of the property. Here were the mortgages. One secured upon the freehold, the other upon stock and station, furniture and effects.

“Yes!” admitted Mr. Stamford, looking over it. “It is a comprehensive document; it includes everything on the place – the house and all that therein is, every hoof of stock, hacks and harness horses, saddles and bridles – only excepting the clothes on our backs. Good God! if we had lost all! And who knows whether we may not have to give them up yet.”

“My dear Stamford,” said the banker, “you’re almost too sentimental to be a squatter, though I grant you it requires a man of no ordinary power of imagination to look forward from your dusty pastures and dying sheep (as I am informed) to a season of waving grass and fat stock. Why only this morning, I see that on Modlah, North Queensland, they have lost eighty thousand sheep already!”

“That means they’ll have a flood in three months,” answered Stamford, forcing a laugh. “We must have rain. This awfully sultry weather is sure to bring it on sooner or later.”

“Ah! but when?” said Mr. Merton, corrugating his brow, as he mentally ran over the list of heavily-weighted station accounts to which this simple natural phenomenon would make so stupendous a difference. “If you or I could tell whether it would fall in torrents this year or next, it would be like – ”

“Like spotting the winner of the Melbourne Cup before the odds began to shorten – eh, Merton? Good Heavens! to think I feel in a mood to jest with my banker. That dread functionary! What is it Lever says – that quarrelling with your wife is like boxing with your doctor, who knows where to plant the blow that would, maybe, be the death of you? Such is your banker’s fatal strength.”

“I envy you your recovered spirits, my dear fellow,” said the over-worked man of figures, with a weary smile, glancing towards a pile of papers on his table. “Perhaps things will turn out well for you and all of us after all. You are not the only one, believe me, whose fate has been trembling in the balance. You don’t think it’s too pleasant for us either, do you? Well, I’ll send young Backwater down to Barrington Hope with these documents. You can go with him, and he will give a receipt for the cheque. For the rest, my congratulations and best wishes.” He pressed an electric knob, the door opened, a clerk looked in. “Tell Mr. Overdue I am at liberty now. Good bye, Stamford, and God bless you!”

On the previous day Mr. Stamford had betaken himself to his hotel immediately after quitting Mr. Barrington Hope’s office, and poured out his soul with fullest unreserve in a long letter to his wife, in which he had informed her of the great and glorious news, and with his usual sanguine disposition to improve on each temporary ray of sunshine, had predicted wonders in the future.

“What my present feelings are, even you, my darling Linda – sharer that you have ever been in every thought of my heart – can hardly realise. I know that you will say that only the present pressure is removed. The misfortune we have all so long, so sadly dreaded, which involves the loss of our dear old home, the poverty of our children, and woe unutterable for ourselves, may yet be slowly advancing on us. You hope I will be prudent, and take nothing for granted until it shall have been proved. I am not to relax even the smallest endeavour to right ourselves, or suffer myself to be led into any fresh expense, no matter how bright, or rather (pastoral joke of the period) how cloudy, the present outlook, till rain comes – until rains comes; even then to remember that there is lost ground to recover, much headway to make up.

“My dearest, I am as sure that you have got all these warning voices ready to put into your letter as if you phonographed them, and I recognised the low, sweet tones which have ever been for me so instinct with love and wisdom. But I feel that, on this present occasion – (I hear you interpose, ‘My dearest Harold, how often have you said so before!’) – there is no need for any extraordinary prudence. I am confident that the season will change, or that something advantageous will happen long before this new advance is likely to be called in. Mr. Hope assures me that no sudden demand will at any time be made, that all reasonable time will be given; that if the interest be but regularly paid, the Company is in a position, from their control of English capital, to give better terms than any colonial institution of the same nature. I see you shake your wise, distrustful head. My dearest, you women, who are said to be gifted with so much imagination in many ways, possess but little in matters of business. I have often told you so. This time I hope to convince you of the superior forecast of our sex.

“And now give my love to our darlings. Tell them I shall give practical expression to my fondness for them for this once, only this once; really, I must be a little extravagant. I shall probably stay down here for another week or ten days.

“Now that I am in town I may just as well enjoy myself a little, and get up a reserve fund of health and strength for future emergencies. I don’t complain, as you know, but I think I shall be all the better for another week’s sea air. I met my cousin, Bob Grandison, in the street to-day. Kind as usual, though he studiously avoided all allusion to business; wanted me to stay at Chatsworth House for a few days. I wouldn’t do that. I don’t care for Mrs. Grandison sufficiently; but I am going to a swell dinner there on Friday. And now, dearest, yours ever and always, fondly, lovingly, Harold Stamford.”

Having sent off this characteristic epistle, Mr. Stamford felt as easy in his mind as if he had provided his family with everything they could possibly want for a year. He was partially endowed with that Sheridanesque temperament which dismissed renewed acceptances as liabilities discharged, and viewed all debentures as debts of the future which a kindly Providence might be safely trusted to find means to pay.

Capable of extraordinary effort under pressure or the excitement of emergency; personally economical; temperate, and, above all, benevolent of intention towards every living creature, it must be admitted that Harold Stamford was instinctively prone frankly to enjoy the present and to take the future on trust.

Much of this joyous confidence had been “knocked out of him” – as he familiarly phrased it – by the austere course of events. He had for five years worked harder than any of his own servants. He had contented himself with but the bare necessaries of food and clothing. Nothing had been purchased that could in any way be done without by that much-enduring, conscientious household, the members of which had made high resolve to do battle with remorseless Nature and unmerited misfortune.

And well indeed had all fought, all endured, during the long, dreary, dusty summers – the cloudless, mocking, rainless winters of past years. The family garrison had stood to their guns; had not given back an inch. The men had toiled and ridden, watched and worked, from earliest dawn to the still, starlit depths of many a midnight. The tenderly-nurtured mother and her fair, proud girls had cooked the dinners, washed the clothes, faithfully performed all, even the humblest, household work, with weary hands and tired eyes, for weeks and months together. Still, through all the uncongenial drudgery, their hearts had been firm with hope and the pride of fulfilled duty. And now Harold Stamford told himself that the enemy was in retreat, that the siege was about to be raised.

CHAPTER III

Mr. Stamford, having fulfilled his home duties temporarily in this liberal and satisfactory manner, felt himself at liberty to enter upon justifiable recreations with an easy conscience. He was by no means a person of luxurious tastes. But there had been always certain dainty meats, intellectually speaking, which his soul loved. These are rarely to be met with save in large cities. It had been an abiding regret with this man that his narrow circumstances had shut him out from the inner circles of art and literature. Now, he promised himself, at any rate, a taste of these long-forbidden repasts.

On this memorable afternoon he betook himself only to the sea-marge, where he lay dreaming in the shade of an overhanging fig-tree during the closing hours of day. What an unutterable luxury was it to his desert-worn soul thus to repose with the rhythmic roll of the surges in his ear – before his half-shut eyes the wondrous, ever-changing magic mirror of the ocean!

“What an alteration,” thought he, “had a single day wrought in his destiny! What a different person was he from the care-burdened, desponding man who had seen no possible outlet from the path of sorrow and disaster, at the end of which lay the grisly form of Ruin, like some fell monster watching for prey. Now the airs of Paradise were around him. The fresh salt odours of the deep, the whispering breezes which fanned his cheek, which cooled his throbbing brow, how strangely contrasted were these surroundings with the shrivelled, arid waste, the burning sun-blast, the endless monotony of pale-hued woodland, which he had so lately quitted!”

As the low sun fell beneath the horizon verge, he watched the golden wavelet and the crimson sky mingle in one supreme colour study. He heard the night wind come moaning up from misty unknown seas of the farthest South, where the hungry billow lay hushed to rest in eternal ice-fields, where dwelt the mystery and dread of polar wastes.

Then, with the darkening eve, the pageant glided into the vestibule of night and Mr. Stamford somewhat hastily arose, bethinking himself of the dining hour at Chatsworth House. He had not overmuch time to spare, but a few minutes before the appointed hour his cab deposited him beside the Pompeian mosaic which composed the floor of the portico. A wide, cool hall, gay with encaustic tiles, received him, thence to be ushered by the accurately-costumed footman into the drawing-room, already fairly astir with the expected company.

He was not an unfamiliar guest, but his present temper inclined him to consider more closely the curious inequalities of life – the various modes in which persons, not widely differing in tastes and aspirations, are socially encircled. What a contrast was there between the abounding luxury here heaped up, pressed down and running over, and the homely surroundings of his own home, from which nevertheless the danger of departure had well-nigh driven him mad. The parquet floors, the glittering treasures of the overmantels, the lounges, the dado, the friezes, the rare china, the plaques, the antique and the modern collections, each a study, the cost of which would have gone nigh to buy halt Windāhgil.

When the hostess was informed by the imposing butler that dinner was served, and the guests filed into the dining-room, Mr. Stamford was nearly as much astonished by the magnificence of the repast and the concomitants thereof as if he had for the first time in his life beheld such splendours. In earlier days, now almost forgotten, such repasts had been to him sufficiently familiar. But these latter seasons of drought and despair had wholly, or in great part, excluded all thought of the pomps and vanities of life. So he smiled to himself, as he took the arm of Miss Crewit the passée society damsel to whom, by the fiat of Mrs. Grandison, he had been allotted, to find that his first thought was of startled surprise – his second of the habitudes which came to him as by second nature, and a conviction that he must have witnessed such presentments in a former state of existence.

All was very splendid, beyond denial. What was otherwise was æsthetically rare and almost beyond price. Antique carved furniture, mediæval royal relics, a sideboard which looked like an Egyptian sarcophagus, contrasted effectively with the massiveness of the plate, the glory of the glass, the triumph of the matchless Sèvres dinner-service. In perfect keeping was the quiet assiduity of the attendants, the quality of the iced wines, the perfection and finish of the whole entertainment.

“Rather a contrast to the tea-table at Windāhgil!” Harold Stamford said to himself; “not but what I should have been able to do things like this if I could have held on to those Kilbride blocks for another year. Only another year!” and he sighed involuntarily. “It is very fine in its way, though I should be sorry to have to go through this ordeal every evening. Grandison doesn’t look too happy making conversation with that deaf old dowager on his right. He was brighter looking in the old working-time, when he used to drop in at Din Din, where we had a glass of whisky before bedtime with a smoke and a good talk afterwards. Bob certainly read more or less then. He begins to look puffy too; he doesn’t see much of the library now, I’m afraid, except to snore in it.”

Here his fair neighbour, who had finished her soup and sipped her sherry, began to hint an assertion of social rights.

“Don’t you think dear Josie looks a little pale and thin, though she is exquisitely dressed as usual? But I always say no girls can stand the ceaseless excitement, the wild racketing of a Sydney season. Can they, now?”

“To my eye she looks very nice, pale if you like; but you don’t expect roses and lilies with the thermometer at 80° for half the year, except when it’s at 100°.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right; but it isn’t the climate altogether in her case, I should say. It’s the fearfully exciting life girls of her monde seem to lead nowadays. It’s that which brings on the wrinkles. You notice her face when she turns to the light.”

“Are women worse than they used to be, do you think; or is Josie more dissipated than the rest of her age and sex?” queried Stamford.

“I don’t know that, though they do say that she is the fastest of a very fast set; and between you and me, there have been some rather queer stories about her, not that I believe a word of them. But the girls nowadays do go such awful lengths; they say and do such things, you don’t know what to believe.”

“Ah! well, she’s young and happy, I suppose, and makes the most of her opportunities of enjoyment. My old friend, Bob Grandison, has been lucky, and his family seem to have everything they can possibly want.”