Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush-Life. Anthony Trollope
and as for pleasure, it had come to be altogether beyond the purpose of his life to go in quest of that. When the work of the day was over, he would lie at his length upon rugs in the veranda, with a pipe in his mouth, while his wife sat over him reading a play of Shakspeare or the last novel that had come to them from England.
He had married a fair girl, the orphan daughter of a bankrupt squatter whom he had met in Sydney, and had brought her and her sister into the Queensland bush with him. His wife idolized him. His sister-in-law, Kate Daly, loved him dearly—as she had cause to do, for he had proved himself to be a very brother to her; but she feared him also somewhat. The people about the Mary said that she was fairer and sweeter to look at even than the elder sister. Mrs. Heathcote was the taller of the two, and the larger-featured. She certainly was the higher in intellect, and the fittest to be the mistress of such an establishment as that at Gangoil.
When he had washed his hands and face, and had swallowed the very copious but weak allowance of brandy-and-water which his wife mixed for him, he took the eldest boy on his lap and fondled him. “By George!” he said, “old fellow, you sha’n’t be a squatter.”
“Why not, Harry?” asked his wife.
“Because I don’t want him to break his heart every day of his life.”
“Are you always breaking yours? I thought your heart was pretty well hardened now.”
“When a man talks of his heart, you and Kate are thinking of loves and doves, of course.”
“I wasn’t thinking of loves and doves, Harry,” said Kate. “I was thinking how very hot it must have been to-day. We could only bear it in the veranda by keeping the blinds always wet. I don’t wonder that you were troubled.”
“That comes from heaven or Providence, or from something that one knows to be unassailable, and therefore one can put up with it. Even if one gets a sun-stroke one does not complain. The sun has a right to be there, and is no interloper, like a free-selector. I can’t understand why free-selectors and mosquitoes should have been introduced into the arrangements of the world.”
“I s’pose the poor must live somewheres, and ‘squiters too,” said Mrs. Growler, the old maid-servant, as she put a boiled leg of mutton on the table. “Now, Mr. Harry, if you’re hungered, there’s something for you to eat in spite of the free-selectors.”
“Mrs. Growler,” said the master, “excuse me for saying that you jump to conclusions.”
“My jumping is pretty well-nigh done,” said the old woman.
“By no means. I find that old people can jump quite as briskly as young. You have rebuked me under the impression that I was grudging something to the poor. Let me explain to you that a free-selector may be, and very often is, a rich man. He whom I had in my mind is not a poor man, though I won’t swear but what he will be before a year is over.”
“I know who you mean, Mr. Harry; you mean the Medlicots. A very nice gentleman is Mr. Medlicot, and a very nice old lady is Mrs. Medlicot. And a deal of good they’re going to do, by all accounts.”
“Now, Mrs. Growler, that will do,” said the wife.
The dinner consisted of a boiled leg of mutton, a large piece of roast beef, potatoes, onions, and an immense pot of tea. No glasses were even put upon the table. The two ladies had dressed for dinner, and were bright and pretty as they would have been in a country house at home; but Harry Heathcote had sat down just as he had entered the room.
“I know you are tired to death,” said his wife, “when I see you eat your dinner like that.”
“It isn’t being tired, Mary; I’m not particularly tired. But I must be off again in about an hour.”
“Out again to-night?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“On horseback?”
“How else? Old Bates and Mickey are in their saddles still. I don’t want to have my fences burned as soon as they’re put up. It’s a ticklish thing to think that a spark of fire any where about the place might ruin me, and to know at the same time that every man about the run and every swagsman that passes along have matches in their pocket. There isn’t a pipe lighted on Gangoil this time of the year that mightn’t make a beggar of you and me. That’s another reason why I wouldn’t have the young un a squatter.”
“—I declare I think that squatters have more trouble than any people in the world,” said Kate Daly.
“—Free-selectors have their own troubles too, Kate,” said he.
It must be explained as we go on that Heathcote felt that he had received a great and peculiar grievance from the hands of one Medlicot, a stranger who had lately settled near him, and that this last remark referred to a somewhat favorable opinion which had been expressed about this stranger by the two ladies. It was a little unfair, as having been addressed specially to Kate, intending as it did to imply that Kate had better consider the matter well before she allowed her opinion of the stranger to become dangerously favorable; for in truth she had said no more than her sister.
“The Medlicots’ troubles will never trouble me, Harry,” she said.
“I hope not, Kate; nor mine either more than we can help.”
“But they do,” said Mary. “They trouble me, and her too, very much.”
“A man’s back should be broad enough to bear all that for himself,” said Harry. “I get ashamed of myself when I grumble, and yet one seems to be surly if one doesn’t say what one’s thinking.”
“I hope you’ll always tell me what you’re thinking, dear.”
“Well, I suppose I shall—till this fellow is old enough to be talked to, and to be made to bear the burden of his father’s care.”
“By that time, Harry, you will have got rich, and we shall all be in England, sha’n’t we?”
“I don’t know about being rich, but we shall have been free-selected off Gangoil.—Now, Mrs. Growler, we’ve done dinner, and I’ll have a pipe before I make another start. Is Jacko in the kitchen? Send him through to me on to the veranda.”
Gangoil was decidedly in the bush—according to common Australian parlance, all sheep stations are in the bush, even though there should not be a tree or shrub within sight. They who live away from the towns live a “bush life.” Small towns, as they grow up, are called bush towns, as we talk of country towns. The “bush,” indeed, is the country generally. But the Heathcotes lived absolutely and actually in the bush. There are Australian pastures which consist of plains on which not a tree is to be seen for miles; but others are forests, so far extending that their limits are almost unknown. Gangoil was surrounded by forest, in some places so close as to be impervious to men and almost to animals in which the undergrowth was thick and tortuous and almost platted, through which no path could be made without an axe, but of which the greater portions were open, without any under-wood, between which the sheep could wander at their will, and men could ride, with a sparse surface of coarse grass, which after rain would be luxuriant, but in hot weather would be scorched down to the ground. At such times—and those times were by far the more common—a stranger would wonder where the sheep would find their feed. Immediately round the house, or station, as it was called, about one hundred acres had been cleared, or nearly cleared, with a few trees left here and there for ornament or shade. Further afield, but still round the home quarters, the trees had been destroyed, the run of the sap having been stopped by “ringing” the bark; but they still stood like troops of skeletons, and would stand, very ugly to look at, till they fell, in the course of nature, by reason of their own rottenness. There was a man always at work about the place—Boscobel he was called—whose sole business was to destroy the timber after this fashion, so that the air might get through to the grasses, and that the soil might be relieved from the burden of nurturing the forest trees.
For miles around