Pisistratus. – Not at all!
Uncle Jack, (majestically.) – A Great Grog and Store Depôt! The miners want grog and stores, come to your depôt; you take their money; Q.E.D! Shares – eh, you dog? Cribs, as we said at school. Put in a paltry thousand or two, and you shall go halves.
Pisistratus, (vehemently.) – Not for all the mines of Potosi.
Uncle Jack, (good humouredly.) – Well, it shan't be the worse for you. I shan't alter my will, in spite of your want of confidence. Your young friend, – that Mr Vivian, I think you call him – intelligent-looking fellow, sharper than the other, I guess, – would he like a share?
Pisistratus. – In the grog depôt? You had better ask him!
Uncle Jack. – What! you pretend to be aristocratic in the Bush! Too good. Ha, ha! – they're calling to me – we must be off.
Pisistratus. – I will ride with you a few miles. What say you, Vivian? and you, Guy? —
As the whole party now joined us.
Guy prefers basking in the sun, and reading the Lives of the Poets. Vivian assents; we accompany the party till sunset. Major MacBlarney prodigalises his offers of service in every conceivable department of life, and winds up with an assurance that, if we want anything in those departments connected with engineering – such as mining, mapping, surveying, &c. – he will serve us, bedad, for nothing, or next to it. We suspect Major MacBlarney to be a civil engineer, suffering under the innocent hallucination that he has been in the army.
Mr Specks lets out to me, in a confidential whisper, that Mr Bullion is monstrous rich, and has made his fortune from small beginnings, by never letting a good thing go. I think of Uncle Jack's pickled onion, and Mr Speck's meerschaum, and perceive, with respectful admiration, that Mr Bullion acts uniformly on one grand system. Ten minutes afterwards, Mr Bullion observes, in a tone equally confidential, that Mr Speck, though so smiling and civil, is as sharp as a needle; and that if I want any shares in the new speculation, or indeed in any other, I had better come at once to Bullion, who would not deceive me for my weight in gold. "Not," added Bullion, "that I have anything to say against Speck. He is well enough to do in the world – a warm man, sir; and when a man is really warm, I am the last person to think of his little faults, and turn on him the cold shoulder."
"Adieu!" said Uncle Jack, once more pulling out his pocket-handkerchief; "my love to all at home." And, sinking his voice into a whisper, "If ever you think better of the grog and store depôt, nephew, you'll find an uncle's heart in this bosom!"
CHAPTER XCVI
It was night as Vivian and myself rode slowly home. Night in Australia! How impossible to describe its beauty! Heaven seems, in that new world, so much nearer to earth! Every star stands out so bright and particular, as if fresh from the time when the Maker willed it. And the moon like a large silvery sun; – the least object on which it shines so distinct and so still.2 Now and then a sound breaks the silence, but a sound so much in harmony with the solitude that it only deepens its charms. Hark! the low cry of a night-bird, from yonder glen amidst the small gray gleaming rocks. Hark! as night deepens, the bark of the distant watch-dog, or the low strange howl of his more savage species, from which he defends the fold. Hark! the echo catches the sound, and flings it sportively from hill to hill – farther, and farther, and farther down, till all again is hushed, and the flowers hang noiseless over your head, as you ride through a grove of the giant gum-trees. Now the air is literally charged with the odours, and the sense of fragrance grows almost painful in its pleasure. You quicken your pace, and escape again into the open plains, and the full moonlight, and through the slender tea-trees catch the gleam of the river, and, in the exquisite fineness of the atmosphere, hear the soothing sound of its murmur.
Pisistratus. – And this land has become the heritage of our people! Methinks I see, as I gaze around, the scheme of the All-beneficent Father disentangling itself clear through the troubled history of mankind. How mysteriously, while Europe rears its populations, and fulfils its civilising mission, these realms have been concealed from its eyes – divulged to us just as civilisation needs the solution to its problems; a vent for feverish energies, baffled in the crowd; offering bread to the famished, hope to the desperate; in very truth enabling the "New World to redress the balance of the Old." Here, what a Latium for the wandering spirits,
"On various seas by various tempests toss'd."
Here, the actual Æneid passes before our eyes. From the huts of the exiles scattered over this hardier Italy, who cannot see in the future,
"A race from whence new Alban sires shall come,
And the long glories of a future Rome"?
Vivian, (mournfully.) – Is it from the outcasts of the workhouse, the prison, and the transport-ship, that a second Rome is to arise?
Pisistratus. – There is something in this new soil – in the labour it calls forth, in the hope it inspires, in the sense of property, which I take to be the core of social morals – that expedites the work of redemption with marvellous rapidity. Take them altogether, whatever their origin, or whatever brought them hither, they are a fine, manly, frank-hearted race, these colonists now! – rude, not mean, especially in the Bush – and, I suspect, will ultimately become as gallant and honest a population as that now springing up in South Australia, from which convicts are excluded – and happily excluded – for the distinction will sharpen emulation. As to the rest, and in direct answer to your question, I fancy even the emancipist part of our population every whit as respectable as the mongrel robbers under Romulus.
VIVIAN. – But were they not soldiers? – I mean the first Romans?
Pisistratus. – My dear cousin, we are in advance of those grim outcasts, if we can get lands, houses, and wives, (though the last is difficult, and it is well that we have no white Sabines in the neighbourhood!) without that same soldiering which was the necessity of their existence.
Vivian, (after a pause.) – I have written to my father, and to yours more fully – stating in the one letter my wish, in the other trying to explain the feelings from which it springs.
Pisistratus. – Are the letters gone?
Vivian. – Yes.
Pisistratus. – And you would not show them to me!
Vivian. – Do not speak so reproachfully. I promised your father to pour out my whole heart to him, whenever it was troubled and at strife. I promise you now that I will go by his advice.
PISISTRATUS, (disconsolately.) – What is there in this military life for which you yearn that can yield you more food for healthful excitement and stirring adventure than your present pursuits afford?
Vivian. —Distinction! You do not see the difference between us. You have but a fortune to make, I have a name to redeem; you look calmly on the future, I have a dark blot to erase from the past.
Pisistratus, (soothingly.) – It is erased. Five years of no weak bewailings, but of manly reform, steadfast industry, conduct so blameless, that even Guy (whom I look upon as the incarnation of blunt English honesty) half doubts whether you are 'cute enough for "a station" – a character already so high, that I long for the hour when you will again take your father's spotless name, and give me the pride to own our kinship to the world; all this surely redeems the errors arising from an uneducated childhood and a wandering youth.
Vivian, (leaning over his horse, and putting his hand on my shoulder.) – "My dear friend, what do I owe you?" Then recovering his emotion, and pushing on at a quicker pace, while he continues to speak, "But can you not see that, just in proportion as my comprehension of right would become clear and strong, so my conscience would become also more sensitive and reproachful; and the better I understand my gallant father, the more I must desire to be as he would