Chapter V Dunks’ Selection
‘Well, it is earth with me; Silence resumes her reign,
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.’
‘I shouldn’t think it can be very much farther, dad,’ said Bart.
‘I believe we have passed it,’ Hermie sighed; ‘I am sure we have come much more than nine miles,’ and she mopped her hot cheeks that the sun, burn as he would, had never freckled.
Cameron, the reins slack in his hand, looked doubtfully from side to side.
‘It ought to be somewhere here,’ he said; ‘isn’t that a fence at the top of the hill? Yes, I’m sure it is.’ He touched the horse lightly with the switch that Floss held, and on they went again. They were in a borrowed broken-springed buggy, the five of them and Miss Browne, come out to see the home their father was buying—none of them, not even the father, had seen it yet.
For a couple of months after his dismissal Cameron had lingered on in the house in Wilgandra, too bewildered and helpless to know what to do.
It was not the first time a similar crisis had happened, but before his wife had always taken matters in hand, looked up situations for him in the papers, interviewed influential people, brushed his clothes and sent him out with little to do but present himself to his employer.
But now he was completely at sea.
He wrote a few letters to Sydney friends, vaguely asking if they knew of ‘a billet.’ But seven years’ silence makes strangers of ones best friends; some were scattered, and dead letters were the only reply; others wrote to say Sydney had never been in such a state of hopeless depression, and strongly advised him not to come to add to the frightful army of the unemployed.
‘Why not go on the land?’ said one or two of them. ‘A man like you with a growing family should do well there, and you would at least be your own master and free from “a month’s notice.”’
Cameron first asked the children what they thought of ‘going on the land.’
When they heard this meant moving to a new place, and having sheep and growing all their own things, and each one helping, they were enchanted.
Cameron was too shy and reserved to have made many friends in the township, but he put on a clean cool coat and filled his pipe and wandered forth, with the vague idea of asking some one’s advice on the matter. But there was a race-meeting in a neighbouring township, and the streets were almost deserted, the tradespeople and the land-and-estate agent being the only men at their posts. The latter, however, struck Cameron as the very man to ask. And Cameron struck the agent as the very man for whom he had been waiting. There was a selection, he said, a few miles away—eighty acres of fine land that its drunken owner, Dunks, had hardly stirred since he had taken it up. There was a five-roomed cottage on it, there were fifty head of sheep, poultry, a couple of horses, a cart, and all tools. Dunks, anxious to get to Sydney, was willing to let all go for two hundred and fifty pounds.
But Cameron went home hopeless, he could as easily raise two thousand pounds as two hundred and fifty.
Hermie met him with a registered letter from which a cheque for a hundred fluttered. Challis’s professors, it seemed, had allowed her to give a few concerts in the midst of her course of lessons, and five hundred pounds had been the result.
‘The child insists that I shall send a hundred,’ ran the letter, ‘for you all to buy presents with, and though I don’t know what you can buy—but sheep—in Wilgandra, I send it. More I do not enclose, my dear one, for well do I know how shockingly you would lose and give it away. But all have some fun with this hundred, and now every penny that comes I shall jealously bank for the future and for the child’s own use, as is but fair and right.’
Cameron and Bartie and Hermie went eagerly off to the agent’s again. Cameron held up his cheque, and asked if it would do if they paid that amount down and the rest on terms. And the agent, after a little demur, was agreeable—had he not that morning been visited by Dunks, who said he would take as low as a hundred and fifty to be rid of the place?
Cameron almost handed the cheque over there and then, but then some of the prudence learned from his wife came to him, and he pocketed it instead, and said they would go and look at the place.
Thereupon, the following Saturday, the agent lent his buggy, gave directions for finding, and this was the journeying.
‘Yes,’ Cameron said, ‘this must be it, but there doesn’t seem to be a gate. I suppose we had better go through these sliprails. Get down and lift them out, Bart.’
The early summer, in her eagerness and passion for growth and beauty, had been tender even to Dunks’ selection. The appearance of the place appalled none of the buggy-load.
Wattle in bloom made a glory of the uncleared spaces, the young gums were very green, the older ones wore masses of soft white upon their soberness.
Farther away there browsed brown sheep, but this was the season for lambs, and a dozen little soft snowballs of things had come close to the cottage and gambolled with the children. There was a bleating calf with a child’s pink sash tied round its neck, fluff balls of chickens ran under the feet, downy ducklings were picking everywhere.
And all this young life was so beautiful a sight that the children were wild with rapture, and Cameron’s dreamy beauty-loving soul told him here was the home for him.
The cottage shocked him somewhat, it was so very tumbledown, the roof was so low, the windows so broken.
He began to consider whether he had not better take up a selection for himself near at hand and run up his own cottage, these walls were hardly worth the pulling down.
But Mrs. Dunks began to talk to him, and her apron was at her eyes nearly all the time. He learned that Dunks was the best of men, and only weak. If once they could get from this neighbourhood and his bad companions to Forbes, where her own people were, he would surely reform. He learned that Mrs. Dunks had nine children, all under fourteen; that she was in a consumption, and only the air of Forbes could cure her. It seemed to him that he could not turn round to this fragile, heavily burdened creature, look into her fever-bright, anxious eyes, and tell her he would not give her this chance to end her days among her own people.
So he looked at all the young life again, and the sheer sun, bursting out of the wattles, and was glad to be persuaded that a little paint and a bit of timber would make the house quite new again.
‘Do you think,’ he said, and turned round to the woman, ‘that you could give me possession of the place in a month?’
And the woman burst into thankful tears, and told him they would be gone to-morrow.
‘I’ve packed up for going eighteen times this year,’ she said through her tears. ‘I’ve got my hand well in.’
Dunks was away in the township, the youngest baby was lying in her arms looking up at her with pure eyes, and the pale wraith death, whom she ever felt beside her, had kept her conscience tender.
‘Did—did you say the agent told you two hundred and fifty?’ she faltered.
Cameron thought of his children and braced himself up.
‘He did,’ he said firmly, ‘and I cannot possibly give you a penny-piece more. I consider it is a very fair price.’
‘But—but——’ the woman began again.
‘It is no use, I can go no further,’ Cameron said, ‘so please do not waste your breath’—and he unhobbled his horse and prepared for the journey home, his face set away from her, lest he should be softened.
How could he dream she wanted to tell him that a hundred and fifty was all they had asked, and more than the place was worth, so ill in repair was everything? Then the thought of this man’s famous child came to her—Challis, with fingers of gold. What were a hundred pounds to the father of such a child?
She looked away from the eyes of her babe, she forgot that she and death were met, and replied:
‘Very well, we will take two hundred and fifty, Mr. Cameron.’
Going homewards in the jolting buggy the talk was of the happiest.
‘Miss Browne and I will look after the fowls, daddie,’ Hermie said.
‘An’ me,’ said Floss.
‘You and I must get the crops in,’ Bart and his father told each other.
But how this would be done, and what the crops should be, they had but the remotest notion; still, it was a phrase heard often in Wilgandra, and sounded well.
‘Will it take you long to learn to shear the sheep?’ asked Miss Browne timidly.
Cameron looked a trifle disturbed. Sheep seemed very right and proper things to own when one was ‘going on the land,’ but it had not yet occurred to him to think to what use he was going to put them.
Bart’s observation of his neighbours had been a little keener than this, however.
‘We sha’n’t get any wool to mention from that handful,’ he said. ‘I suppose they are for killing. Mrs. Dunks says they use a sheep a week. Her husband kills one every Saturday.’
‘Who—who—oh, surely you will not have to kill them, Mr. Cameron!’ said Miss Browne, shuddering with horror. ‘Surely you will not be expected to kill them for yourself.’
The thought of it turned Cameron sick; it seemed to him he had never quite got over chopping off a fowl’s head once for his wife, though it was nine years ago.
Roly gloated over the thought.
‘I’ll shoot them with my bow and arrow,’ he said.
Cameron wiped his brow.
‘I suppose one could use a gun to them, eh, Bart?’ he said.
But Bart looked doubtful.
Nearing home Cameron gave the reins to Bartie, and leaped out and walked the last mile or two, wrestling with the problem how he might turn himself from a dreamer of dreams into a practicable, hard-working man of business. It had to be done, some way, somehow, or what to do with these children, and how to face his wife?
Then suddenly he found his thoughts had wandered to the sunset fire that blazed before him in the sky; he was putting it in a picture, massing up the purple banks, touching the edges with a streak of scarlet.
When he convicted himself of the wandering he groaned aloud.
‘There is only one way,’ he said, and walked into his house with lifted head.
The children were stretching their limbs after their cramping drive, Roly and Bart panting on the floor, a cup of water beside them so warm and flat and tasteless that even thirst would not bring them to it. Bart was talking of Nansen, picturing stupendous icebergs, revelling in the exquisite frigidity of the water in which Nansen had washed luxuriously every day. The exercise actually cooled the little party down one degree. Then in to them came their father.
‘I want a bonfire made in the yard,’ he said; ‘a very big one, I have something to burn.’
The boys were upright in a moment and on their way; even Floss tossed down the newspaper with which she was fanning herself (the Wilgandra Times, with which was incorporated the Moondi Mercury), and rushed to partake of the fun, and Hermie and Miss Browne found themselves impelled to go and see what was happening.
Such a blaze! Bart raked up a lot of garden rubbish and added tree branches. Roly, feeling quite authorised since the bonfire had been commanded by his father and was no illicit one of his own, made journeys to and from the wood-heap and piled on the better part of a quarter of a ton of wood just paid for.
Then down came the father, his blue eyes a little wild, his mouth not quite under his own control. He had his mustard-box under his arm.
‘Oh, daddie!’ Hermie cried and sprang at him. ‘Oh no, no, no!’
But he pushed her aside.
‘Don’t speak to me—none of you speak one word,’ he said, and he stooped and dropped the box where the flames leapt.
‘No, no, no!’ Hermie screamed, and rushed at it, and put a hand right through the flame and touched the box, then drew back, helpless, crying.
‘Get away!’ Bart said, and pushed her back from danger and took the work himself, a rake for aid.
He dragged the charred box out, Miss Browne fluttered round him and caught at the lid and burnt her hands, and fell over the rake and singed her hair and eyebrows. Roly and Floss, carried off their feet by the excitement, rushed to help, and the box lay safely on the grass again, two minutes from the time it had been in the flames.
‘Let it alone, no one dare to touch it!’ commanded the father, and the voice was one the children had never heard before.
He picked the box up, hot and blackened as it was, and flung it on the fire again; the lid fell off, there came a rain of tubes and paint-brushes, a splutter or two from the turpentine, the smell of burnt paint, then the fire burnt steadily again, and there was silence that only Hermie’s bitter crying broke.
The father had gone back to the house; he came down to them once again and this time The Ship was in his arms.
Surely an ill-starred ship! There had been no money to send it to Sydney for the artists there to appraise; Cameron, absolutely frightened when he found how the debts were growing, exhibited it in Wilgandra and a neighbouring town or two, and marked it ten pounds.
But who in the back-blocks was going to give that sum for a picture without a frame? The coloured supplements, with elaborate plush surrounds, satisfied the artistic yearnings of most of the community, and The Ship came back to sad anchorage in the Cameron dining-room.
But to burn it!
Hermie gave a fresh despairing cry. Floss, Bart, and Roly stood absolutely still, the instinct of obedience strong at such a crisis.
Cameron’s arm was again raised, but Miss Browne flung herself right upon him and clung to the canvas, her weak hands suddenly filled with strength and tenacity.
‘Not this, not this!’ she cried. ‘Anything but this! Give it to me—I will keep it from your sight—I will hide it away—it shall never meet your eyes. My ship, my ship, you shall not burn it.’
She held it in her arms, actually torn from his grasp.
Cameron glanced around—the leaping flames, the startled children, Hermie’s hysterical sobbing, Miss Browne’s wild attitude of daring and defiance—he told himself he had taken a theatrical vengeance on himself.
‘Oh, do as you like,’ he said irritably, and turned back to the house. ‘Bart, put a bucket of water on that fire.’
One month from the night of the sacrifice the Camerons were in possession of the selection, and Mrs. Dunks was lying in peace among those of her own people who rested from the sun’s heat in the Forbes graveyard.