Mr. Stamford was riding slowly, wearily homeward in the late autumnal twilight along the dusty track which led to the Windāhgil station. The life of a pastoral tenant of the Crown in Australia is, for the most part, free, pleasant, and devoid of the cares which assail so mordantly the heart of modern man in cities.
But striking exceptions to this rule are furnished periodically. “A dry season,” in the bush vernacular, supervenes. In the drear months which follow, “the flower fadeth, the grass withereth” as in the olden Pharaoh days. The waters are “forgotten of the footstep”; the flocks and herds which, in the years of plenty, afford so liberal an income, so untrammelled an existence to their proprietor, are apt to perish if not removed. Prudence and energy may serve to modify such a calamity. No human foresight can avert it.
In such years, a revengeful person could desire his worst enemy to be an Australian squatter. For he would then behold him hardly tried, sorely tormented, a man doomed to watch his most cherished possessions daily fading before his eyes; nightly to lay his head on his pillow with the conviction that he was so much poorer since sunrise. He would mark him day by day, compelled to await the slow-advancing march of ruin – hopeless, irrevocable – which he was alike powerless to hasten or evade.
If he were a husband and a father, his anxieties would be ingeniously heightened and complicated. The privations of poverty, the social indignities which his loved ones might be fated to undergo, would be forever in his thoughts, before his eyes, darkening his melancholy days, disturbing his too scanty rest.
Such was the present position, such were the prospects, of Harold Stamford of Windāhgil. As he rode slowly along on a favourite hackney – blood-like, but palpably low in condition – with bent head and corrugated brow, it needed but little penetration to note that the “iron had entered into his soul.”
Truth to tell, he had that morning received an important letter from his banker in Sydney. Not wholly unexpected; still it had destroyed the remnant of his last hope. Before its arrival he had been manfully struggling against fate. He had hoped against hope. The season might change. How magical an alteration would forty-eight hours of steady rain produce! He might be able to tide over till next shearing. The station was being worked with the strictest economy. How he grudged, indeed, the payment of their wages to the men who performed the unthankful task of cutting down the Casuarina and Acacia pendula, upon which the starving flocks were now in a great measure kept alive!
But for that abnormal expenditure, he and his boy Hubert, gallant, high-hearted fellow that he was, might make shift to do the station work themselves until next shearing. How they had worked, too, all of them! Had not the girls turned themselves into cooks and laundresses for weeks at a time! Had not his wife (delicate, refined Linda Carisforth – who would have thought to see a broom in those hands?) worn herself well-nigh to death, supplementing the details of household work, when servants were inefficient, or, indeed, not to be procured! And was this to be the end of all? Of the years of patient labour, of ungrudging self-denial, of so much care and forethought, the fruit of which he had seen in the distance, a modest competence, an assured position? A well-improved freehold estate comprising the old homestead, and a portion of the fertile lands of Windāhgil, once the crack station of the district, which Hubert should inherit after him.
It was hard-very hard! As he came near the comfortable, roomy cottage, and marked the orchard trees, the tiny vineyard green with trailing streamers in despite of the weary, sickening, cruel drought, his heart swelled nigh to bursting as he thought how soon this ark of their fortunes might be reft from them.
Surely there must be some means of escape! Providence would never be so hard! God’s mercy was above all. In it he would trust until the actual moment of doom. And yet, as he marked the desolate, dusty waste across which the melancholy flocks feebly paced; as he saw on every side the carcases of animals that had succumbed to long remorseless famine; as he watched the red sun sinking below the hard, unclouded sky, a sense of despair fell like lead upon his heart, and he groaned aloud.
“Hallo, governor!” cried out a cheery voice from a clump of timber which he had approached without observing, “you and old Sindbad look pretty well told out! I thought you were going to ride over me and the team, in your very brown study. But joking apart, dear old dad, you look awfully down on it. Times are bad, and it’s never going to rain again, is it? But we can’t afford to have you throwing up the sponge. Fortuna favet fortibus, that’s our heraldic motto. Why, there are lots of chances, and any amount of fortunes, going begging yet.”
“Would you point out one or two of them, Master Hubert?” said his father, relaxing his features as he looked with an air of pride on the well-built youngster, who stood with bare throat and sun-bronzed, sinewy arms beside a dray upon which was a high-piled load of firewood.
