Nevermore - Rolf Boldrewood

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told of safety and success, even of the approaching return.

      Estelle Chaloner treasured this missive from a far country, read it and re-read it day after day: she watched the features change and the colour fade from her uncle's face as he listened to the exulting cry with which she announced a letter from Lance, watched the stern face soften and heard the first words of regret which had passed his lips since the day of wrath and despair.

      'I was hard upon the boy, perhaps—it's this accursed family temper, I suppose,' he said. 'Where is the lad that isn't a fool in some way or other! We are a stubborn breed, and once heated slow to cool. Tell him when you write that he will be welcome again at Wychwood. Not to stay away too long, though, whatever his good fortune may be, for I am not the man I was, Estelle, and I should like to see my boy's face again, before—before I die.'

      Here the hard voice changed, the stern man turned his head. Could this be Sir Mervyn? thought Estelle. In all her previous knowledge of him she had never known him to express regret for any act, speech, or opinion whatever, however placed in the wrong by after-consequences. That he should be really regretful and repentant struck her in the light of a species of miracle. More than that, it imbued her with a vague fear, as if there was some impending ill when such an abnormal change took place in the social atmosphere.

      'Do not grieve, my dearest uncle,' said she, winding her arms around him, with a look of beseeching tenderness. 'I know, from the way Lance has written to me, that he has long since ceased to harbour resentment. He knows that he was in the wrong, though he, and I too, must I confess it, at the time, thought that you were too hard upon him. Depend upon it we shall see him in a year, if not less, and all will be forgotten in the joy of his return, in the triumph of his success.'

      'God grant it,' said the old man, 'but I have evil dreams. I believe the devil enters into a Trevanion at times. Perhaps Lance may break the spell. If he has an angel for his wife like my darling Estelle, it will be all the more likely.'

      Trevanion and party, of Number Six, Growlers' Gully, were 'fair on it'—'had struck it rich, and no mistake,' in miners' parlance. Fame and fortune were both theirs, assured, unchallenged; the fame, as in too many cases in this world, considerably in advance of the fortune. His partner, Polwarth, a shrewd, long-headed 'Cousin Jack' (as the Cornish miners are called), stuck steadily to his work, stayed at home with his wife and child, and beyond building a comfortable weatherboard-fronted bark cottage for them, made no difference in his equilibrium.

      But it was otherwise with Lance Trevanion. His striking appearance, his manner and bearing, his reputation for wealth, coupled with romantic tales of his family circumstances, commenced to make him a personage of consideration, as well as to cause his society to be sought after in the higher social strata in and around Ballarat. Even at the Gully, now that it had developed a true and defined 'lead'—the auriferous course of a dead and buried river of the past—a couple of branch banks had been established, shops and hotels had sprung up.

      All created organisms, during certain periods of their existence, are capable of development. The conditions being varied, plants and animals, including that strangely-constituted vertebrate, man, suddenly or by graduation, but not less surely, expand and change, or decrease and degenerate, as the case may be. Physical expansion does not invariably presume moral advancement, and, indeed, the removal of restrictive pecuniary conditions occasionally conduces to the reverse result. Alas! that the delightful freedom from restraints which our civilisation renders galling, which is often described by the phrase 'money being no object,' should, in itself, be ofttimes that broad road leading to irrevocable ruin, to destruction of body and soul.

      When a man arises from sound and untroubled slumber at or about five 'A.M. in the morning,' vide Mr. Chuckster, and within an hour is commencing a long day's work, which process is continued week in, week out, with the exception of Sundays, there is not much room or opportunity for the Enemy of man, who proverbially finds work for 'the unemployed.'

      These, and chiefly for such reasons, were the dangers of 'Growlers' Gully' during the early period of their existence—an eminently peaceful and virtuous community. Hard at work from morn till dewy eve, that is from daylight to dark, a matter of fourteen hours, there was scant space or opportunity for riotous living. A quiet talk over their pipes before the so-early bedtime, a glass of beer or grog at the unpretending shanty, which, before the era of hotel licenses, was compulsorily modest and unobtrusive, was the outside dissipation indulged in by the 'Growlers.' There was sufficient prosperity to produce hope and contentment, but not enough, except in rarely exceptional cases, to bring forth the evil craving for luxury and excitement. There was no theatre, no gaming saloon (under the rose, of course), no inrush of fiends, male and female, as upon a diggings of published richness; and therein lay safety, had they known it, such as should have made every man thankful, and every woman deeply grateful to the Higher Power that had so ordered their destiny and surroundings.

      So might, perchance, have continued their Arcadian freedom from evil had not the exceptional richness of Number Six been known and bruited abroad. But, somehow, principally through Lance's carelessness, it had leaked out, been spread far and wide, been wildly exaggerated, and now, every day new arrivals from the most unlikely places in other colonies testified to the brilliant reputation which 'Growlers' had acquired. Greatness, indeed, had been thrust upon them. There was no escaping the celebrity, wholly undesired by the more thoughtful and fore-casting miners. But the majority of the adventurers of the day were young and inexperienced. Intoxicated with their suddenly-acquired wealth, they were splendidly reckless as to the morrow. They ever welcomed the irruption of the heterogeneous army of strangers which invaded their hitherto rather close borough. They treated their rash migration, made upon the flimsiest reports, as a humorous incident wholly appropriate to goldfield life. As for the risks to which such an admixture might fairly be held to expose the safety and solvency of the community, they were contemptuously indifferent.

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      Among the new arrivals who came in numbers to swell the gathering crowd, whose huts and tents were now scattered for miles around the original gully, which, owing to the chronic discontent of the prospectors, had given its name to the locality, were some people from a distant part of the neighbouring colony of New South Wales. They constituted a large family party, comprising brothers, cousins, the mother of the young men, their sister, and a friend or two. Their tents were pitched in an open flat at no great distance from claim Number Six, and without any special overture on either side, a casual acquaintance commenced which bade fair to ripen into friendship. The migrating party were all native-born Australians. Gold-lured, they had travelled in one encampment from their homesteads on the upper waters of the Eumeralla, a tributary of the Snowy River. In that mountainous region, thinly settled with scattered families, tending their herds of wild cattle and wilder horses, had these stalwart men and fearless girls been born and reared. The men were fine athletic fellows, free and cordial in their manners, apparently liberal and obliging in such small matters as came into notice. Apart from his natural curiosity, too, as to the characteristics of this company of 'Sydney natives,' as they were generally called—people of pure British race and descent, who had never seen Britain—Lance was attracted by their riding feats as well as by the high quality of the unusually large number of horses which belonged to the party. That they were consummate horsemen, he, a fair judge and performer in the hunting field, at once perceived. Their ways of managing the animals, catching, handling and saddling them, were all new to him. He came to walk over to their tent in the evening, to talk over the gold news of the 'day', to hear their stories of adventure by flood and field, to him novel and interesting, and by no means unattractively rendered. Besides all this, there was another appendage to the Lawless family—one which, since the ancientest days, has sufficed to attract the ardent susceptible male of whatever age and character with steady resistless force. There was a woman in the case, and a fairly prepossessing damsel she was. The sister of the young men, Kate Lawless, was indeed a very handsome girl. Bush-bred and reared as she was, uneducated and wholly unacquainted with many of the habitudes of civilisation, she comprised much of the perilous fascination of her sex. Tall and

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