IN TWO YEARS’ TIME.

BY

ADA CAMBRIDGE.

IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.

LONDON:

RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,

NEW BURLINGTON STREET.

1879.

(All rights reserved.)

PRINTED AT THE CANTON PRESS, BECCLES.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAPTER

PAGE

[Pg 1]

IN TWO YEARS’ TIME.

CHAPTER I.

NARRAPORWIDGEE.

“Seven o’clock!” exclaimed father, throwing his hat (with a very dirty puggaree on it) upon the drawing-room sofa. “Isn’t that confounded boy back yet?” Mother looked up from a low chair with her gentle face of reproof. She had a great objection to strong language, and, to do him justice, father seldom used it; but he was hot and tired, poor man, after drafting sheep all day in a north wind, and, moreover, the boy in question had gone to post for the[Pg 2] English letters, and was half an hour beyond his usual time for returning.

“He started late,” said mother. “Pat Malony wanted him to help to put out a fire in the lake paddock. Go and change your dress, my dear, and we’ll have dinner. I think the wind is turning; it is not quite so hot as it was.”

Father obediently took himself off, puffing and blowing and wiping his forehead vigorously, his dirty puggaree flapping against his dirty grass-cloth coat (I don’t think he would have presented himself to us in that costume if it had not been mail day). Mother folded up her work and laid it neatly in her basket. I rushed out upon the verandah to consult the stable weathercock, and, finding that it indicated a blessed south sea-breeze coming round, flourished up all the blinds and flung open all the[Pg 3] windows, which had been tight shut since early morning from the oven heat outside.

“Gently, my dear!” called mother after me, as the tail of my thin dress whisked round a rough bole of grape vine clasping a verandah post, and the bottom flounce parted with half a yard of lace. “I wish you would move more quietly, Kitty.”

“I wish I could, mother, but this lovely air is intoxicating,” I responded, tucking up my tail and dancing down upon the lawn and back again, with my hands stretched out. “I believe it will be cold by bed-time, really.”

The dinner bell rang, and I went indoors through the dining-room window, and took my seat at table. Father, spruce and fresh after a bath and change of clothes, stood up over a pair of boiled fowls, and shut his[Pg 4] eyes, and muttered briskly, “For what we are going to receive—wing or breast, my dear?”—as if it were all one sentence (another little habit he had which mother would have liked to break him of, if she had not known her place too well). And mother, looking with her calm eyes upon the sun-browned, arid landscape beyond the garden gate, remarked, as she helped herself to a slice of pork, “I see Sandy now, crossing the ford. Let us get dinner over before we open the bag.”

We generally did what she told us, and we did now; but dinner was a brief ceremony in consequence. The fowls gave place to the puddings, and the puddings to the cheese, with a celerity that Ah Foo, the Chinaman cook, was not used to these hot days, and we left a lovely dish of raspberries and cream untouched for the[Pg 5] first time that year. (N.B.—It was nearly the end of January, and they were just going out of season at Narraporwidgee.) Mother rose with her accustomed dignity, and went into the hall to sort the servants’ letters into the hands of Bridget the parlour-maid. She selected her own correspondence from the remainder, gave several letters and a bundle of newspapers to father, and then deliberately hung up the bag on its proper peg. Finally, we went out and seated ourselves on the verandah, now cool and breezy, with one of those sudden evening changes peculiar to the Australian climate; and father commenced operations by reading his newspaper telegrams aloud, as usual, and then tearing open the one English letter he had received.

“Well!” he exclaimed presently, and[Pg 6] continued gazing at his letter, with a complacent smile on his honest face. Of course mother and I looked up at him expectantly.

“The market not gone down yet?” she inquired.

“No,” he replied; “I believe the tide is on the turn, but it hasn’t turned yet. Prices may even rise a little more, Norton thinks.”

“Dear me, I am very glad,” said mother; and so she looked, though she never visibly excited herself. She knew quite well that the price of wool, even at its then rate, if it lasted long enough (until father’s shipment arrived in London) meant an increase of a great deal to our income for the year; and she knew, too, that that increase meant so much more promise for her of the fulfilment of a great hope and scheme that she[Pg 7] had cherished for many years. It was pathetic to see the wistful eyes that she lifted to his, as he continued to look in her face steadily.

“Yes, I know what you’re thinking of,” said he; “and I have been thinking of it too. I believe it might be managed now. I said to myself only this morning, while I was drafting those ewes, ‘If wool makes as much this year as it did last, I can afford to turn the whole concern over to somebody else, and Mary shall have her wish.’ So you shall,” he added, letting his broad palm fall upon her shapely shoulder. “We’ll wait till we hear the bales are in the market, and we’ll start home by the very next mail, if you like.”

I looked at mother, and her face was a study. A delight that would have overbalanced the self-possession of anybody[Pg 8] else struggled to break through her cloak of dignified reserve, and she would not let it. Her eyes grew moist, and her mouth twitched at the corners; but she just took father’s hand from her shoulder, and laid it to her lips, and replied, gently, “Thank you, my dear; I shall be very glad. It will be such a good thing for Kitty.”

When father was a young man (what he calls a young man, about thirty-eight or forty years of age), he and mother came out to Australia to seek their fortunes, bringing me, a baby, with them. My grandfather had died several years before, leaving a home-made will, and my uncle, his eldest son, his sole executor; and uncle James, of whose integrity and uprightness no one had ever had the faintest suspicion, was tempted by some[Pg 9] flaws in that irregular testament to take a mean advantage of his brother and sisters. My father, who was the last to see evil in any one, let things drift a little while, not suspecting mischief; but when the truth was suddenly forced upon him he arose to do battle for himself and his sisters with all his might and main. Aunt Alice and aunt Kate were both married, and of course their husbands joined the fray, with their respective family solicitors; and very soon the affair got into Chancery, and into the hands of about fifty lawyers (speaking roughly), and, after two or three years of suspense and misery, my father and

my aunts—who had only right on their side, while uncle James had the law on his—found themselves no better off than if grandpapa had left them nothing, and,[Pg 10] indeed, rather worse. Aunt Alice’s husband was a wealthy London merchant, and scorned to consider the loss of such a trifle as £5000; and aunt Kate’s husband, who was a dignified country rector of old family and ample means, paid his fees gracefully, and comforted aunt Kate by an extra allowance of pin-money thenceforth. But my poor daddy, hot and sore with indignation and defeat, reckless and disgusted with everybody and everything, gathered together what few hundreds he could call his own, told mother to pack up her clothes, and her plate and linen, and anything else she cared to keep, advertised his house and furniture, took our passages in the Great Britain, and shook the dust of his native land from off his feet for ever. “For ever” was what he said, and mother made no protest[Pg 11] at the time against a sentence of perpetual banishment which almost broke her heart. Everything comes to those who wait, it

is said: mother was wise and waited, and the things she wished for certainly did seem to come to her, sooner or later.

They had had hard times in their early years of exile. Father had not felt his privations on his own account: he was a vigorous, enterprising, hopeful man, to whom difficulties came with a certain pleasant zest. He was a born gentleman, too (though I say it that shouldn’t), and so was never troubled with those scruples of gentility which cause such poignant distress to many people in what they call “reduced circumstances.” He delighted in his skill as groom and gardener, builder and bricklayer, wood-cutter and butcher, and Jack-of-all-trades, and understood that[Pg 12] the doing of all that rough work well conferred a new dignity of manhood upon him. As far as himself was concerned, I believe those struggling years were the happiest of his life, judging from the tone of his reminiscences, which is always tender, and heartfelt, and vaguely regretful. It was mother who suffered—poor mother!—without a word of complaint, of course. She had to be left alone whole days together, while father was working on his run, and the blacks used to prowl about the house and terrify her.

There were swagmen turning up at all hours for rations—very shady characters, some of them; and there were the bushrangers (who, to be sure, never came, but might have come, which was almost as bad). The snakes used to glide between the shrunk boards of the floors; the wild[Pg 13] dogs used to make her blood run cold with that dreadful howl of theirs at nightfall, when they came sniffing round after the sheep; the native cats were her torment in the poultry-yard, and the opossums as bad in the orchard. Worse than any of these, there were the wretched trolloping women—that was father’s description of them—that she had to do with for servants, when lucky enough to get servants at all, who wore her life out with coarse words and ways. Little brothers and sisters were born in the wilderness, and poor mother had to fall back upon an awkward man and a little child (me) to wait on her properly, and make her a decent cup of gruel when she wanted it. And the babies died in the wilderness, too, with little or no doctor’s skill to help them, and had

to be laid in their little graves under a[Pg 14] wattle tree, with only their parents’ love and tears to consecrate the ground.

But these were very old times. Father made money rapidly, as no steady and persevering man could well help doing, under the circumstances; and money, of course, brought us comfort in all sorts of ways. As fences meandered all over the run, and stock increased, and the value of wool with it, the weatherboard house grew bigger and bigger, and its new rooms were furnished more and more luxuriously. Then a better class of domestics, and many more of them, appeared in the colony, railways were opened, townships were founded and grew and flourished, lawyers and doctors, and police magistrates and bankers, began to organize some system of society in those little centres of population. We were able to drive to church over a macadamized[Pg 15] road, instead of being restricted to a family service in the dining-room at home, as for ten years had been the case; and I was fortunate enough to possess in my governess an accomplished and well-bred lady. By-and-by, from a well-to-do squatter, father became an extensive landowner and a rich man. He bought his land easily by

instalments before free selectors had discovered its value; and then land in Victoria suddenly rose to a great price, and his erewhile moderate estate became worth £60,000 at the lowest market rate. He had preferred sheep to cattle always; and at this time the owners of sheep stations had such a run of luck, in good seasons and high prices, for a few years, as they probably never had before, and seem never likely to have again.

Just at this flood-time in his fortunes,[Pg 16] and before the evil days of drought and bad government fell upon the colony in general, and the class in particular to which he belonged, that memorable mail arrived from England which decided him to sell his property and go home. Just at first (when mother and he talked over their plans on the verandah that night) he seemed disinclined to sell, and proposed to leave a manager in charge of everything. But mother, without in the least assuming to give advice, suggested the difficulty of finding a man at once capable and trustworthy enough for so responsible a post, and the probability that such years of prosperity as we had had latterly would not, in the nature of things, last much longer. It had always been a land of vicissitudes, in which men made and lost fortunes with equal celerity; and suppose[Pg 17] now (she hinted in the most modest manner) that droughts came and the stock died from starvation, or suppose the scab broke out again and swept them off, or suppose these high prices fell, as they

were bound to do some time or another, or an ignorant Government succeeded in turning everything upside down.

“Then, perhaps, it would be wisest to sell,” said father, in a tone of deliberation that meant he had made up his mind to do so; but he sighed as he thought of all his improvements, and what a nice place he had made of it.

The fact was, father had an idea of coming back again, and I am sure mother never meant he should, if she could help it.

[Pg 18]

CHAPTER II.

AN UNEXPECTED PLEASURE.

I had my share in the conversation—and the lion’s share it always was—until Bridget brought tea out to the verandah. I was wild with excitement at this mighty change in my fortunes and the novel experiences in store for me, and I wanted immediately to know all about everything, from cabin furniture to the Zoological Gardens and Madame Tussaud’s, wild beasts and waxwork being objects which (grown up though I was, or thought I was) appealed far more strongly to my[Pg 19] imagination than the museums and operas and picture-galleries that mother tried to tempt me with. By-and-by, however, I began to see that I bothered them a little, and that they had higher matters to talk over. So, when I had taken my cup of tea, I left them to enjoy theirs in peace, and, wrapping myself in a light scarf that hung in the hall, went down into the garden for a stroll.

It was a lovely, soft, cool night, raging hot and nasty though all the day had been. The north wind blew no longer, as if from the mouths of a million red-hot ovens: it had gone almost round to the south, and came rustling, fresh and sweet, through the trees and shrubs, with a dewy smell of flowers (from the few the drought had left) mingling with the faint hay scent of the burnt-up paddocks. There was a[Pg 20] little crescent moon shining above the many roofs of the low house and outbuildings, showing the delicate transparency of the atmosphere, even on a cloudy night, as never moon could show me in England afterwards. Some great oleander trees (it would have been an insult to call them bushes) blushed rosily out from the half-darkness, nodding their pink bunches over the verandah roofs, as if proud to remind me that they were nearly all I had to depend upon in this scorching weather for the innumerable flower-vases that I loved to scatter all over the house.

It was such a sweet night, that it made me (even me) feel, all at once, a little melancholy. I began to think of some things I had forgotten in my first burst of excitement at the prospect of going[Pg 21] home. It occurred to me, for the first time, to wonder whether I should really like England as well as my own dear Narraporwidgee? And could I part with Spring, my canine familiar, who was as much my shadow as any witch’s black cat? He was sniffing round my petticoats now, poking his wet black nose under my arm and into my face, as I leaned on the garden gate, in an attitude of contemplation that he was not used to, and could not understand.

The dear old dog! He seldom took a night’s rest anywhere but on the verandah outside my door—the glass door that was also the window of my bedroom; and if I did let him lie under my bed in the daytime when it was blinding hot outside, he was my dog, and it was nobody’s business but my own. Who would understand[Pg 22] his ways and wants as I did? Who would take him down to the dam and the river for his swims, and see that he got the bits of mutton he liked best? And how could he bear his life without me?

At this stage of my meditations, when my eyes were filling with tears, and I was wildly resolving to pay his passage and smuggle him along with me somehow, if I had to sell my new watch and chain to do it, Spring jumped out of my embraces with a sudden energy that nearly knocked me over, and darted in pursuit of a wretched little opossum that was just scuttling up the trunk of my favourite plum tree. He scratched my arm with his iron claws, and I did not cry over him any more.

I began to think of the plums, which would be ripe enough for jam in another[Pg 23] week or two. Oh, who would make the jam? And who would eat it? I had visions of strange people rudely criticizing our pretty house, rummaging about mother’s dainty store-rooms, and tramping over our sacred Persian carpet with muddy boots; and they made me very sad.

Then, by the vague moonlight, I saw the horses in the home paddock quietly sauntering about and enjoying the night air, and amongst them I easily recognized my own lovely Bronzewing—the most perfect lady’s horse, many people said, in the whole of the Western district. The pretty creature! I should know him from a thousand in any scrap of moonlight—the graceful droop and lift of his strong, supple neck, and the way he raised his feet as he trod the earth, that hardly seemed good enough for him to walk on. He whisked his silky[Pg 24] tail from side to side, and nibbled, and glided from shadow to shadow, little thinking, poor dear Bronzewing, what was in store for him and me!

I wondered would daddy let me take my horse to England? Perhaps he would, if I made a great point of it; he never liked to refuse me anything if he could help it. Bronzewing was not like poor Spring; he really was valuable, in whatever part of the world he might be. His father and mother both came from England, to begin with. If daddy did not mind paying all that for the parents, he surely wouldn’t mind paying a little for the son, who had, as he always said, all the good points of both of them. It was hardly a month ago that the Indian buyer offered a hundred pounds for him, and father would not entertain the offer for a[Pg 25] moment. So, feeling pretty comfortable about Bronzewing, I began to think of somebody else—Tom.

Tom was the only son of our next-door neighbour, and lived only five miles off, and he was my great friend. That is to say, he had been my great friend for years when we were children, until his father sent him home to Oxford, and then I did not see him for nearly four years. He had only been back about six months, and we had renewed our acquaintance on rather a different footing, for now we were both grown up. He was nearly twenty-three, and I was just over eighteen. But I could not say that we were not great friends still. He brought me some presents from Oxford when he came back—a pretty box for my handkerchiefs, and a book of photographs of the colleges, with[Pg 26] a cardinal’s hat on the cover (he was a Christ Church man), and a set of Egyptian jewellery that he said was the fashion in England—and these were the greatest treasures I had in the world.