be traversed before Mr. Evans triumphantly drove his team through the gate of the dilapidated garden fence surrounding the front of a large old-fashioned stone mansion, with wide verandah and lofty balcony, supported upon freestone pillars. A stout, elderly woman of decided aspect opened the creaking hall door, and casting a searching glance at Mr. R. Evans, made the strangers welcome.
‘I’m sure I’m very glad to see you, my lady,’ said she, bobbing an antiquated curtsey, ‘and you, sir, and the young ladies and gentlemen. I’ve done all I could to clean up the old barrack of a house; it was that lonesome, and made me frighted with ghosts, as I thought I’d never live to see you all; and Dick here, I knew there was no certainty of, as might have gone to Timor, or the Indies, and never let on a word about it. Please you to come in, my lady.’
‘My old woman’s temper is none of the best, Captain,’ said Dick, stating the fact with philosophical calmness, ‘but I’ll warrant she’s cleaned up as much as any two, and very bad it wanted it when Parson Sternworth brought us over.’
Now that a nearer view was afforded of the demesne and dwelling, it was evident that the place had been long abandoned to natural decay and sordid neglect. The fences were rotten, gapped, or fallen; the orchard, though the aged trees were high out of the reach of browsing cattle, had been used as a convenient species of stock paddock; the climbers, including a magnificent bignonia and a wistaria, the great laterals of which had erstwhile clothed the verandah pillars with beauty and bloom, were broken and twisted. In the rear of the building all the broken bottles and bones of the land appeared to be collected; while, with windows broken, shutters hanging on a single hinge, doors closing with difficulty, or impossible to open, all things told of the recklessness of ruined owners.
Still, in despite of all deficiencies, the essentials of value could not be overlooked. The house, though naked and desolate of aspect, was large and commodious, promising in its shingled roof and massive stone walls protection against the heat of summer, the cold of winter. The deep black mould needed but ordinary culture to respond generously. The offices might be mouldering and valueless, but the land was there, thinly timbered, richly grassed, well adapted for stock of all kinds. And though the gaunt limbs of the girdled trees looked sadly unpicturesque between the front of the house and the lake shore, some had been left untouched, and the grass was all the more richly swarded. The lake itself was a grand indisputable fact. It was deep and fresh, abounding in water-fowl, a priceless boon to dwellers in a climate wherein a lack of rivers and permanent reservoirs is unhappily a distinguishing characteristic.
Let it not be supposed that Wilfred and his mother, the girls and Jeanie were outside the house all this time. Very promptly had Dick unloaded the household stores, pressing all able-bodied persons, including his wife, into the service, until the commissariat was safely bestowed under shelter. His waggon was taken to the rear, his horses unharnessed, and he himself in a marvellously short space of time enjoying a well-earned pipe, and advising Andrew to bestow Daisy’s calf in a dilapidated but still convertible calf-pen, so that his mother might graze at ease, and yet be available for the family breakfast table in the morning.
‘The grass here is fust-rate,’ he said, in a tone of explanation to Andrew. ‘There’s been a lot of rain in spring. It’s a pity but we had a few good cows to milk. It would be just play for you and me and the young master in the mornings. Teach him to catch hold like and learn him the use of his hands.’
‘Him milk!’ exclaimed Andrew, in a tone of horrified contempt. ‘And yet – I dinna say but if it’s the Lord’s will the family should ha’ been brocht to this strange land, it may be no that wrang that he should labour, like the apostles, “working with his hauns.” There’s guid warrant for’t.’
Meanwhile, inside the house important arrangements were proceeding. The sitting-room, a great, bare apartment, had an ample fireplace, which threw out a genial warmth from glowing logs. There was a large, solid cedar table, which Mrs. Evans had rubbed and polished till the dark red grain of the noble wood was clearly visible. Also a dozen real chairs, as Annabel delightedly observed, stood around, upon which it was possible to enjoy the long-disused comfort of sitting down. Of this privilege she promptly availed herself.
The night-draperies were disposed in the chief bedchamber, though until the arrival of the furniture it was apparent that the primitive sleeping accommodation of the road would need to be continued. Mr. Effingham and his sons were luxuriously billeted in another apartment, where, after their axle-tree experiences, they did not pity themselves.
Andrew and his family were disposed of in the divisions of the kitchen, which, in colonial fashion, was a detached building in the rear. Mr. and Mrs. Evans had, on their previous entry on the premises, located themselves in an outlying cottage (or hut, as they called it), formerly the abode of the dairyman, where their possessions had no need of rearrangement. Even the dogs had quarters allotted to them, in the long range of stabling formerly tenanted by many a gallant steed in the old extravagant days of the colony, when unstinted hospitality and claret had been the proverbial rule at Warbrok.
‘Oh dear!’ exclaimed Annabel from her chair, ‘what a luxurious feeling it is to be once more in a home of one’s own! Though it’s a funny old place and must have been a tempting refuge for ghosts wandering in search of quarters. And then to think that to-morrow morning we shall not have to move on, for ever and ever. I was beginning to get the least bit tired of it; were not you, mamma? Though I would have died sooner than confess it.’
‘Words cannot describe how thankful I am, my dear child,’ said her mother, ‘that we have had the good fortune to end this land journey so well. It is the first one of the kind I ever undertook, and I trust it will be the last. But let us remember in our prayers to-night whose hand has shielded us from the perils of the deep, and whatever dangers we may have escaped upon the land.’
‘I feel as if we had all been acting a charade or an extended tableau vivant,’ said Rosamond. ‘Like you, Annabel, dear, I am not sorry that the theatricals are over, though the play has been a success so far. It has no more nights to run, fortunately for the performers. Our everyday life will commence to-morrow. We must enter upon it in a cheerful, determined spirit.’
‘I cannot help fancying,’ said Beatrice, ‘that colonial travellers enjoy an unnecessary amount of prestige, or some experiences must differ from ours. We might have had a Dick who would have lost his horses or overturned the waggon, and bushrangers (there are bushrangers, for I saw in a paper that Donohoe and his gang had “stuck-up,” whatever that means, Mr. Icely’s drays and robbed them) might have taken us captive. We have missed the romance of Australian life evidently.’
Howard Effingham felt strangely moved as he walked slowly forth at dawn. He watched the majestic orb irradiate the mist-shrouded turrets of the great mountain range which lay to the eastward. Endless wealth of colour was evoked by the day-god’s kiss, softly, stealingly, suffusing the neutral-tinted dome, then with magical completeness flashing into supernal splendour. The dew glistened upon the vernal greensward. The pied warbler rolled his richest notes in flute-like carol. The wild-fowl, on the glistening mirror of the lake, swam, dived, or flew in playful pursuit. The bracing air was unspeakably grateful to Howard Effingham’s rurally attuned senses. Amid this bounty of nature in her less sophisticated aspects, his heart swelled with the thought that much of the wide champaign, the woodland, and the water, over which his eye roamed wonderingly, called him master. He saw, with the quick projection of a sanguine spirit, his family domiciled once more with comfort and security. And not without befitting dignity, so long despaired of. He prized the ability to indulge again the disused pursuits of a country life. Though in a far land, among strange people, separated by a whole ocean from the scenes of his youth and manhood, he now felt for the first time since the great disaster that contentment, even happiness, was possible. Once more he felt himself a country gentleman, or at the least an Australian squire. With the thought he recalled the village chimes in their lost home, and his wife’s reference of every circumstance of life to the special dispensation of a benign, overruling Providence occurred to him. With unconscious soliloquy he exclaimed, ‘I have not deserved this; God be merciful to me a sinner!’
Dick Evans, with his horses, now appeared upon the scene, bells, hobbles, and all. He bore every appearance of