to see shared by those patient exiles from their pastoral Eden.
When Mr. Stamford had sufficiently recovered himself he thanked Mr. Hope with somewhat unaccustomed fervour, for he was an undemonstrative man, reserved as to his deeper feelings. But the manager of the Austral Agency Company would not accept thanks. “It may wear the appearance of a kindness, but it is not so in reality,” he said. “Do not mistake me. It is a hard thing to say, but if it seemed such to me, it would be my duty not to do it. It is the merest matter of calculation. I am glad, of course, if it falls in with your convenience.”
Here he looked kindly at his client—for such he had become—as if he fain would have convinced him of his stern utilitarian temperament. But, as he had remarked before, Mr. Hope’s eyes and his sentiments contradicted one another.
“You have saved my home, the valued outcome of many a year’s hard work—it may be my life also. That is all. And I’m not to thank you? Do not talk in so cold-blooded a manner; I cannot bear it.”
“My dear sir,” said Mr. Hope, with calm, half-pitying expression, “I am afraid you are not a particularly good man of business. It is as unfair to praise me now for ‘carrying you on’ for another year or two, as it will be to blame me for selling you up some fine day, if I am compelled to do so.”
“Anyhow, it is a reprieve from execution. When shall I call again?”
“To-morrow morning, before twelve, let us say. I shall want you to sign a mortgage—a necessary evil; and if you bring me an exact amount of your indebtedness to the Bank of New Guinea, I will give you a cheque for it.”
“A cheque for it!” How magnificent was the sound. Mr. Stamford had drawn some tolerably large cheques in his time, which had been duly honoured, but of late years the cheque-drawing method had fallen much into abeyance.
Nevertheless, he felt like Aladdin, suddenly gifted with the wonderful lamp. The sense of security and the guarantee of funds, for even their moderate and necessary expenses, appeared to open to him vistas of wealth and power verging on Oriental luxury.
He lost no time; indeed he just managed to gain his bank before its enormous embossed outer door was closed, when he marched into the manager’s room with so radiant a countenance that the experienced centurion of finance saw plainly what had happened.
“Don’t trouble yourself to speak,” he said. “It’s all written on your forehead. We bankers can decipher hieroglyphs invisible to other men. ‘Want my account made up—securities ready to be delivered—release—cheque for amount in full.’ Who is the reckless entrepreneur?”
“The Austral Agency Company,” he replied, feeling rather cooled down by this very accurate mind-reading; “but you seem to know so much, you ought to know that too.”
“My dear fellow, I congratulate you!” Mr. Merton said, getting up and shaking him warmly by the hand. “I beg your pardon; but really, any child could see that you had been successful; and I began to think that it must have been one of Barrington Hope’s long shots. A very fine fellow, young but talented; in finance operates boldly. I don’t say he’s wrong, mind you, but rather bold. Everything will be ready for you to-morrow morning. Look in just before ten—by the private door.”
Mr. Stamford did look in. How many times had he walked to those same bank doors with an aching heart, in which the dull throb of conscious care was rarely stilled! Many times had he quitted that building with a sense of temporary relief; many times with a more acutely heightened sense of misery, and a conviction that Fate had done her worst. But never, perhaps, before had he passed those fateful portals with so marked a sense of independence and freedom as on the present occasion.
He had cast away the burden of care, at any rate for two years—two whole years! It was an eternity in his present state of overwrought feeling. He felt like a man who in old days had been bound on the rack—had counted the dread contrivances for tearing muscles and straining sinews—who had endured the first preliminary wrench, and then, at a word, was suddenly loosed.
Such was now his joyous relief from inward agony, from the internal throbs which rend the heart and strain to bursting the wondrous tissue which connects soul and sense. The man who had decreed all this was to him a king—nay, as a god. And in his prayer that night, after he had entreated humbly for the welfare of wife and children in his absence, and for his own safe return to their love and tenderness, Barrington Hope came after those beloved names, included in a petition for mercy at the hands of the All-wise.
It was not a long business that clearing of scores with the Bank of New Guinea under these exceptional circumstances. Such and such was the debit balance, a sufficiently grave one in a season when it had not rained, “to signify,” for about three years, when stock was unsalable, when money was unprecedentedly tight, but not, perhaps amounting to more than one-third of the real value of the property. Here were the mortgages. One secured upon the freehold, the other upon stock and station, furniture and effects.
“Yes!” admitted Mr. Stamford, looking over it. “It is a comprehensive document; it includes everything on the place—the house and all that therein is, every hoof of stock, hacks and harness horses, saddles and bridles—only excepting the clothes on our backs. Good God! if we had lost all! And who knows whether we may not have to give them up yet.”
“My dear Stamford,” said the banker, “you’re almost too sentimental to be a squatter, though I grant you it requires a man of no ordinary power of imagination to look forward from your dusty pastures and dying sheep (as I am informed) to a season of waving grass and fat stock. Why only this morning, I see that on Modlah, North Queensland, they have lost eighty thousand sheep already!”
“That means they’ll have a flood in three months,” answered Stamford, forcing a laugh. “We must have rain. This awfully sultry weather is sure to bring it on sooner or later.”
“Ah! but when?” said Mr. Merton, corrugating his brow, as he mentally ran over the list of heavily-weighted station accounts to which this simple natural phenomenon would make so stupendous a difference. “If you or I could tell whether it would fall in torrents this year or next, it would be like—--”
“Like spotting the winner of the Melbourne Cup before the odds began to shorten—eh, Merton? Good Heavens! to think I feel in a mood to jest with my banker. That dread functionary! What is it Lever says—that quarrelling with your wife is like boxing with your doctor, who knows where to plant the blow that would, maybe, be the death of you? Such is your banker’s fatal strength.”
“I envy you your recovered spirits, my dear fellow,” said the over-worked man of figures, with a weary smile, glancing towards a pile of papers on his table. “Perhaps things will turn out well for you and all of us after all. You are not the only one, believe me, whose fate has been trembling in the balance. You don’t think it’s too pleasant for us either, do you? Well, I’ll send young Backwater down to Barrington Hope with these documents. You can go with him, and he will give a receipt for the cheque. For the rest, my congratulations and best wishes.” He pressed an electric knob, the door opened, a clerk looked in. “Tell Mr. Overdue I am at liberty now. Good bye, Stamford, and God bless you!”
On the previous day Mr. Stamford had betaken himself to his hotel immediately after quitting Mr. Barrington Hope’s office, and poured out his soul with fullest unreserve in a long letter to his wife, in which he had informed her of the great and glorious news, and with his usual sanguine disposition to improve on each temporary ray of sunshine, had predicted wonders in the future.
“What my present feelings are, even you, my darling Linda—sharer that you
