The Squatter's Dream

Now there seemed a danger of the citadel being undermined, of the great fabric of investment and adventure – built up by a free expenditure of capital and energy during the last five years – melting away like an iceberg before the south wind. With such a thaw – resolving into primitive elements the gilded temple – down would go the fame and fortune of John Redgrave, and, for aught he cared, down might go his life, and stilled for ever might be those restless heart-beats. Thus, when by a sudden intuitive forecast the shadow of misfortune fell athwart the sunlight of his soul, did he for an instant feel the dull agony of despair – thus spoke he to his saddened spirit.

With the first mail that was due after M‘Nab’s departure, allowing him time to reach the sheep, came a letter, as thus – “Sheep-market is bad – decidedly bad, with no hope of getting better. I can keep the sheep about Echuca till I get your answer. Shall I send them on, or return? My advice is to sell at all hazards.”

Jack returned answer that he was to do whatever he thought best, and to use his own discretion unreservedly.

The sheep were sold accordingly. They brought eight shillings and tenpence all round, which just returned, clear of all expenses, eight shillings net. A magnificent price truly, and a terrible come-down from the fourteen or fifteen shillings which had been the regular price, for years past, of large, aged, prime sheep, as were the Gondaree lot.

M‘Nab was back in remarkably quick time after this untoward outcome of so much care and forethought, and planning and contriving.

“The sheep were beautifully driven; I never saw a lot better looked after; they showed first-rate in the yards at Newmarket. All the drovers, butchers, and agents said there hadn’t been a lot in like them this season. They topped the market, but what sort of a market was it? – rushed and glutted with all kinds of half-fat stock, going for nothing. And cattle down too – regular store prices; a most miserable sight.”

“And what’s said about wool and stations?” inquired Jack.

“That there’s going to be the devil to pay; there’s a tremendous commercial panic in England. Discount up to war figures. The great dissenting bankers – Underend, Burney & Co. – gone for any sum you like to mention. Run on the Bank of England. Panic on the Stock Exchange. The end of the world, as far as accommodation is concerned!”

“By Jove!” said Jack, “could anything have been more unlucky? I wish to heavens that I had sold out three months since, though that might only have landed some other unlucky beggar in the same fix. There’s no chance of selling now at any price?”

“Sell!” answered M‘Nab, and here he looked kindly and almost pitifully at Jack, on whose face there was a dark and troubled look, such as he had never seen there in bygone mishaps. “There won’t be a station sold for the next three years, except at prices which will leave the owners the clothes they wear, and not a half-crown to put in the breeches-pocket either.”

“What in the world shall I do?” groaned Jack. “I would have given much to have cleared out after shearing.”

“Well, sir,” said M‘Nab, sitting down and putting on a calm, argumentative look, “let us look at the matter both ways. No doubt the outlook is gloomy; but here we have the place and the stock. There’s not a station in the colonies that can be worked at a less annual expense. Surely we can carry on and pay interest on the mortgage till times come round.”

“Perhaps,” said Jack, disconsolately. “But suppose times don’t come round; and suppose the Bank presses for their money?”

“The times will change and improve,” said M‘Nab, impressively, “as surely as the sun will shine after the next stormy day, whenever that may be. And as for the Bank, they seldom push any customer in whom they have confidence, and who has a real good property at his back.”

“I trust so. But how in the world shall I ever grub on for three or four years more in this infernal wilderness, waiting for better seasons, and a rise in the market, which, for all we know, may never come?”

“My dear sir,” said M‘Nab, “nothing but patience and doggedness ever did any good in stock matters yet. It’s the men that stick to their runs and their cattle and sheep, in spite of losses and danger, and discouragement and misery, that have always come out in the end with the tremendous profits that from time to time have always been realized in Australia, and will again. Look at old Ruggie M‘Alister, coming back to his place one day, after counting out his two flocks to a person sent up to take charge by his agents, finding the place burnt down, the hut robbed, the cook speared, and a big black fellow swimming the Murray with his best double-barrelled gun in his mouth. There was cause for despair for ye, if ye like!”

“And what did your friend do?”

“Shot the black fellow with his carbine; dived for the double-barrel. Lived under a dray with the bailiff till after shearing; got the run out of debt, and is worth ten thousand a year, and has a villa near Melbourne this minute.”

“I could have done that once,” answered Jack; “but whether I am growing old, or have only one supply of energy, which is exhausted, I know not; I can’t face the idea of all the work, and daily drudgery, and endless monotony – over again – over again!”

“There’s nothing else to be done, sir. You’ll think better of it to-morrow. And you needn’t bother about my salary. We’ll work together, and I’ll never ask you for a penny of it till better times come.”

Next day, as was his custom, Jack did not find the storm-signals so unmistakable or portentous. As M‘Nab had very properly pointed out, there were still the first-class, fully-improved run, the sixty thousand sheep. The clip would be large and well got up, in spite of the fall in the value of the carcase.

Underend, Burneys, might totter and fall, crushing under the ruins of a long-decayed house, tunnelled and worm-eaten with usury, the trusting friend, the confiding public; but unless mankind and womenkind abandoned those garments, delicate, indispensable, and universally suitable from India to the Pole, the demand for wool, like that for gold, might slacken, but could not cease. This confounded American war would come to an end. Why the deuce could they not put off this insane, suicidal contest for a year or two? The season would improve – even that was against a man. It looked drier, and yet more dry, every day he got up. Whereas, at Marshmead – ah! why, why did he ever leave that lovely (though flattish – but never mind), cool, green, regularly raining Eden? “Sad was the hour and luckless was the day” – as Hassan the camel-driver said. But if he had never left it he would never have seen Maud. “So, after all, it is Kismet. The will of Allah must be done!”

With this rather unorthodox consolation Jack ended his soliloquy, and prepared to march sternly along the path of duty, though the flowerets lay withered by the wayside, the surges of the shoreless sea of Ruin sounded sullenly in his ears, and though the illuminating image of Maud Stangrove, smiling welcome with eyes and brow, was hidden by mists and storm-rack.

All things went on much as usual; but it was like the routine of a household in which there has been a death. Jack’s favourite of all the Lares and Penates had always been Hope. Her image was not shattered; but the light and colour had faded from the serenely glowing lineaments. The calm eyes that had looked forth over every marvel of earth and sea and sky – resting on the far mountains, illumined by golden gleams from the Eternal Throne – were now rayless.

Hope-inspired, John Redgrave was and had proved himself capable of bodily and mental labour of no mean order – of self-denial severe and enduring. But severed from the probability of attainment of success, of eventual triumph, he was prone to a state of feeling as of the cheetah that has missed the prey, and after a succession of lightning-like bounds retires sullenly to hood and keeper.

As soon as he could assure himself that he was in a proper and befitting state of mind, he rode down to Juandah, making the journey in a very different tone and temper from the last. He did not find that his altered prospects had made his friends less cordial; on the contrary, it seemed to him that never before was he so manifestly the bien-venu as on this occasion. Maud sang and played, and talked cheerily, and with a slight preference for the minor key, which harmonized with the sore and bruised spirit of the guest. Mrs. Stangrove, too, exerted herself to the extent of sprightliness wonderful to behold. When a man is suffering in mind, body, or estate, the sympathy of sincere, unworldly women – and all women are unworldly with those they love – is soothing, tender, and inexpressively healing. As the dark-souled physician in the Fair Maid of Perth was enabled by the perfection of his art to apply to the severed hand of the knight the unguent which stilled his raging torment at a touch, so the sweet eyes and the soft tones of Maud Stangrove cooled and composed his fevered soul. Mark Stangrove, also, was unusually genial, even hilarious.

“This insatiable Warroo is going to have another dig at us,” he said. “We have just not escaped a flood, and now we are in for a drought. That means a few years more of the mill for us. Well, we’re all in the same boat; we must stick to the oars, keep a good look out, and weather it out together.”

“A good look out!” echoed Jack. “I see nothing but rocks and breakers.”

“Come, come, old fellow; a capful of wind, or even a heavy gale, doesn’t mean total wreck always. We shall, of course, have to take in sail, throw cargo over, and all that. Seriously, things are going to be bad in more ways than one. I’m not altogether taken by surprise; I’ve seen it before; but I don’t wish to crow over you for all that. I think in some ways you are better off than I am.”

“How do you make that out?”

“Why, though I am a good deal under-stocked, this drought will put me ever so much about. I shall lose a lot of my lambs and calves, have to travel all the sheep, and, generally, be compelled to spend money and lose stock right and left till rain comes again.”

“You can afford it,” said Jack, “and I can’t; it will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. A long drought means unsaleable stock – which means increase of debt, interest, and principal – which means ruin.”

“You go too fast, my dear fellow. I used to tell you that you were going to be rich rather more quickly than I fancied probable; and now you are determined to be ruined with equal rapidity. I must tell Maud to read you a sermon upon patience and perseverance.”

“I deserve no quarter from her or from you either,” professed Jack, who was now en pénitence all round, “for dragging her into this uncertain, anxious life of mine.”

“Well, accidents will happen, you know. I blame those rascally bushrangers and your gun-shot wound for it all; no woman can nurse any fellow, under a hundred, without appropriating him. But I’ll take care that you are not married till you are something more than a bank overseer, which is a different thing from a bank manager, you know.”

“Hang all banks and bank officials, from the board of directors to the junior messenger,” fulminated Jack, “though, as they only sell money to fools like me, who choose to buy, they are scarcely to blame either. And now, old fellow, as I’ve relieved my mind, we’ll go in and be civil to the ladies. Even if times are bad, one must not quite forget to be a gentleman. Thank you, once and for all, old fellow, for your true kindness.”

After this Jack put away his Skeleton gently, though firmly, into his closet, and, turning the key, compelled him there to abide, only permitting him to come out and sit by the fire with him occasionally when no one was present, or to walk cheerfully round the room when he was dressing in the morning – or to wake him before earliest dawn and whisper in his ear till he rose desperately at the first faint streak of day. But these being the regularly allotted periods and interviews, lawfully to be claimed and recognized by all well-bred skeletons and their proprietors, Jack could not with any conscience grumble.

He explained the whole state of affairs to Maud, who, to his surprise, took it coolly, and, like Mark, said “that things might not turn out so badly. That every one agreed that his station was very well managed, and that probably he might overrate the probability of loss. That, whether or no, she knew he would fight it out manfully – and that she would wait – oh, yes! years upon years – as long as he would promise to think of her, and for her, now and then.”

So they parted, Jack thinking how difficult it was to understand women. He would have sworn that the fiery girl, whose petulances had so often amused him, would have been as deeply disappointed, as intolerant of the delay, as himself. And now here she was calmly looking forward to years of stocking-mending and child-nursing on the Warroo before they could be married, as if she had never dreamed of a higher life, to be realized in a few short months.

John Redgrave had never experienced, and therefore had not realized, the most deeply-rooted attribute of woman’s manifold nature – the capacity for self-sacrifice. Rarely can he who is blessed with her first pure love overtax its wondrous endurance – its angelic tenderness.

With right down hard work, as with the conscientious performance of military duty, in the trenches or otherwise, before the enemy, much of the darker portion of the spirit’s gloom disappears. Man is a working animal – civilization notwithstanding; and an undecided mental condition, combined with bodily inaction, has ever produced the direst forms of misery to which our kind is subjected here below.

So day after day saw Jack and his faithful subject fully occupied from dawn to sunset in the ordinary routine of station work. The personal labour devolving upon each was tolerably severe, but the exact number of hands allotted to the place by the inexorable M‘Nab was rigidly adhered to, and not an extra boy even would he hear of until the inevitable month before shearing, when all ordinary labour laws must perforce be suspended.

The four boundary-riders, all active, steady men, young or in the prime of life, well-paid and well-housed, did their duty regularly and efficiently. It was part of M‘Nab’s creed that, if you kept a man at all you should pay him well, and otherwise minister to his well-being. In cheap labour there was no economy; and for anything like indifferently-performed work he had a dislike almost amounting to abhorrence. He and Jack transacted all the business that of right appertained to the home station. They by turns convoyed the increasingly numerous and hungry flocks of travelling sheep; took out the rations; laid the poisoned meat, which, spread over the run in cartloads, was daily returning an equivalent in dead eagles, dogs, and dingoes; counted the sheep regularly; and all this time there was not a sheep-skin unaccounted for – not a nail or a rail out of order in the whole establishment.

So fared all things until the time for shearing drew nigh. Jack felt quite delighted at the first engagement of washers, the first appearance of three or four shearers, with their big swags and low-conditioned horses, having journeyed from far land where winter was not wholly obsolete as a potentate, and did not stand for a mere section of the year between autumn and spring. The changed appearance of the long-silent huts was pleasant to his eye; the daily increase of strange voices and unembarrassed, careless talk; the giving out of rations; the arrangement of the steam-engine; the arrival of teamsters – all these things heralded the cheerful, toilsome, jostling shearing-time, half festive, half burdensome, yet still combining the pains and pleasures of harvest.

CHAPTER XVI

“And did she love him? What and if she did?Love cannot cool the burning Austral sands,Nor show the secret waters that lie hidIn arid valleys of that desert land.” —Jean Ingelow.

The season had not been a good one for grass. It was a very good one for wool. Save a little dust, no exception could be taken to anything. The clip was well grown; the washing simply perfection. The lambing had been a fortunate one. Counting these aspirants for the trials and triumphs to which the merino proper is foredoomed, the count stood well over sixty thousand sheep, of all ages. But a few months since, what a comfortable sum of money did they represent; whereas now – but it would not bear thinking of! The shearers even seemed to be unnaturally good and easy to manage now that no particular benefit could accrue from their conduct. Everything was right but the one important fact, which lay at the root – the price of stock. Even if that had improved, the season was going to turn and evilly entreat them; the “stars in their courses fought against Sisera;” and Jack began to consider himself as his modern exemplar – the prey of the gods!

He sent off his wool, but this year he determined not to go to town himself; with the present prices and a fast-coming drought staring him in the face, what could a man do in the Club or in Collins Street but advertise himself as an incipient insolvent? Better stick to his work, save a little money, now that it was too late, and spend the summer pleasantly in staving off bush fires, following in the dusty wake of endless hordes of starving travelling sheep, and watching the desolation of the grass famine, already sore in the land, deepen from scarcity into starvation. A pleasant programme truly, and considerably altered from that one dreamily sketched out for himself and Maud so short a year agone – ah, me!

He wrote to his agents, desiring them to sell or ship the clip at their discretion, and to pour the proceeds into the lap of the Bank of New Holland, so to speak, by the hands of Mr. Mildmay Shrood. From that gentleman he, by and by, received a missive, very soothing and satisfactory, as times went – “The wool had been sold very well, and had maintained the high reputation of Gondaree both for quality and condition. Mr. Redgrave was empowered to continue to draw upon the bank for expenses, though (he might, perhaps, be pardoned for suggesting, in the present severe financial pressure) the bank trusted that their constituents would use every effort to keep down expenses to the lowest limit consistent with efficient working. It was thought by gentlemen of experience that the present untoward season would soon break up. In the meanwhile, however, the utmost care and caution were necessary to prevent loss and depreciation of valuable securities.”

“All this is very reassuring,” said Jack, grimly, to himself, as he marked the allusion to the securities – doubtless now regarded as the property of the bank, or something nearly akin. “However, we are not quite sold up yet, and if the season would change and a little rally come to pass in the market we might snap our fingers at the men of mortgage yet. There is a chance still, I believe. The wool fetched the best price on the river; everything will depend upon the season, and how we get through the summer.”

When poor Tom Hood once wrote that the “summer had set in with its usual severity,” little thought the great humorist that he was describing the sad simple earnest of the far land, to him a terra incognita.

All places have their “hard season” – that portion of the year when the ordinary operation of the weather has power to inflict the greatest amount of damage upon dwellers or producers. In one country it is winter, which is the foe of man with unkind frosts, cruel snow-storms, hurtling blasts, or dark and dreary days. In another land it is the hurricane season, when every vessel goes down at anchor, or is lifted high and dry over bar and beach, when the town totters above the shrinking inhabitants, and when, perchance, the more awful earthquake gapes for the wretches whom the great tempest has spared. But in Australia, more especially in that great interior system of sea-like plains, where for hundreds of miles the level is unbroken, and where, doubtless, at no very distant period the surges of ocean resounded, the hard season there is the summer, more particularly the periodically recurring oppression of a dry summer following a dry winter. In that land, where the brief spring is a joy and a luxury only too transient, where the winter is a time of rejoicing – mild, fair, verdant – where autumn is the crown and utter perfection of sublunary weather, the sole terror is of the slow, unnatural, gradual desiccation which – as in the olden Pharaoh days – eats up every green herb, and, if protracted, metamorphoses plain and forest and watercourse into similitudes of the “valley of dry bones.”

Such has happened aforetime in the history of Australia. Such may, at the expiration of any aqueous cycle, happen again.

A term of dread was apparently settling down upon the land when John Redgrave resolved to stay at home the summer-time through. Such were the prospects which confronted him as he rode from paddock to paddock, among the tens of thousands of sheep, and watched from day to day the pasturage shrivel up and disappear; the water retire into the bosom of the sun-baked earth.

The days were long, even dreary, and as the summer wore on they seemed longer and more dreary still. Hot, glaring, breezeless – there was no change, no relief – apparently no hope. There was no sign of distress among the Gondaree flocks. In that well-watered, well-pastured, well-fenced, and subdivided station the stock scarcely felt the pressure of the death-like season which was decimating the flocks in less-favoured localities. But everything that was heard, said, or thought of in that melancholy time tended to depression and despair. “This man had lost ten thousand sheep, having made too late a start for the back country, and been unable to reach water from the intervening desert. They – fine, strong, half-fat wethers – had gone mad with thirst – obstinately refused to stir – as is the manner of sheep in their extremity, and had perished to the last one. Then some one had sold three thousand weaners for ninepence a head, a well-grown lot too.”

As the panic and the season acted and reacted upon one another, by the time the summer had passed, and the autumn and the cold nights, but still dry, stern, merciless as the summer, had come, the value of stock and stations had come to be nominal.

People of imaginative temperaments began to ask themselves whether they could have been sane when they in cool blood set down 20,000 sheep and a station as value for £20,000 or £25,000. Had such prices been actually paid?

Yes, actually paid! Not in golden sovereigns, perhaps, but in good cheques upon perfectly solvent bank accounts, and in bills of exchange, which were legally strong enough to extract the last penny of their value from him whose name was written under the talismanic word “accepted.” The money had been there, doubtless; and now it seemed as if it had turned into withered leaves, like the fairy gold in the old legends.

So mused Jack on his daily rounds, as wearily he rode day after day, often on a weak and tired horse, for grass was none, and hay and corn were considerably dearer than loaf sugar; or when he lighted his pipe at night, and sat staring at the stars, while M‘Nab wrote up his accounts, and generally bore himself as if droughts were merely passing obstacles to the prosperity which must eventually attend the proprietor of well-classed sheep and a fenced-in run.

The famine year dragged on. Long will that season be remembered throughout the length and breadth of the great island-continent. Its history was written in the hearts of ruined men – in the dangerously-tasked minds of many a proprietor whom “luck and pluck” carried through the ordeal. Still the drought grasped with unrelenting gripe the enfeebled flocks – the thirst-maddened and desperate herds. The great merchants of the land were beginning to grow accustomed to the sound of the terrible word “bankruptcy.” All bank shares had fallen, and were falling, to prices which showed the usual cowardly distrust of the public in the time of trial. Rumour began to be busy with the names of more than one bank, including the Bank of New Holland, which had, it was asserted, made stupendous advances to the squatters. “Hadn’t they lent old Captain Blockstrop a quarter of a million, and even that wouldn’t do? Every day the directors met, old Billy used to talk to the manager in much the same tone of voice that he had been accustomed to use to his first mate, and demand ten, twenty, or thirty thousand pounds, as the case might be. ‘I must have it, Mr. Shrood,’ the old man would roar out, ‘if I’m to carry on, or else, sir, the house of William Blockstrop and Co. will have the shutters up to-morrow morning.’ And he got the money of course.”