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Philiberta: A Novel

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLII.

At seven o'clock one morning we started upon the seventy miles of coach journey between Naseby and Clyde, or Dunstan, as it was originally called. A thick frost had whitened the earth, a soft pale mist lay over the plains, giving us a strange sensation of looking out upon a white calm sea. It was pretty to observe the patches of gold light breaking through and dispersing the pale waves as the sun mounted higher and higher in the clear bright sky, and to see the revelations of opal-tinted fairylands far out beyond the mist-racks and the plains.

The coach began a gradual descent from the Naseby tableland, a descent which lasted the first hour and ten miles of our journey. To our right were the Mount Ida Ranges; westward ran another chain of mountains with rough jagged edges outlined against the sky. These are called the Rough Range—a most appropriate title.

Presently we got into a bit of native (matagaura) scrub, and then came to Eden Creek, with the Garden of Eden on its banks. The garden is about forty feet square, and probably owes its name to its utter unlikeness to the accepted idea of paradise.

When about fifteen miles out of Naseby we sighted Mount St. Bathans, a grand old giant looming big and dark through page 275the mantle of clouds in which he and his tall neighbours usually enshroud themselves. Ida Valley is another stretch of undulating plain like the Maniototo, marked here and there by a lonely little cottage. Crossing this at a good pace, we came to a creek, and crossing the creek, to the Rough Bridge Post-office, a small wooden house from which emerged a pate, quiet-looking woman to receive the mail from our coachdriver for that day. Those mails were something to look and wonder at—small brown paper parcels, done up neatly, and marked O.H.M.S. in the corner above the address of the district of their destination.

'Did it come off?' inquired the driver of the postmistress, no other speech or salutation having passed between the two.

'No,' was the reply; 'the father wouldn't allow it.'

'Ah! and the parson had come?'

'Oh yes, everything was ready. She'd made a cake, and he'd got his new clothes. But the parson wouldn't do it without the old man's written consent, and we was all waitin' for that, and when it come—it was a refusal.'

'H'm; and where are they now?'

'Oh, she's gone to Naseby to try and get a place, and he's gone down to Dunedin to make the old man give in, or else knock him sky-high, as he says.'

'Ah! Well, so long, missis.'—'Good-day.'

Curiosity was rampant within me. I said to the driver, 'Who is she? Who is he? And what's the matter with them, anyhow?'

Then he told me that he was a man who had made a bit of money at Hamilton diggings, and she a girl of seventeen who had been in service at a public-house in the same place; and that the matter was that the two wanted to be married, but that, as the girl was a flighty kind of thing and under age, the minister would not perform the ceremony without the father's formal consent, and that, as we had heard from the postmistress, had been withheld.

'Just as well, too,' said the driver, in conclusion, 'for the man's gone in the head through too much shepherding years page 276ago. He ain't quite mad enough for the asylum, so he runs loose, but I wouldn't like to trust any woman with him as a constancy.'

A few miles further on we met a boy on horseback.

'Day after to-morrow,' said the driver, mysteriously.

'Ah!' said the lad.

'Disappointed?' asked the driver.

'No; thought it might be to-day, though,' replied the lad, riding off at a gentle canter.

'Expected his mother along to-day in the coach,' said the driver, meeting my inquiring gaze. 'She's been away on a visit.'

What interested me in all this was the way the driver had of plunging in medias res with these people. There was such a sublime economy of speech. No waste of words for salutation. He knew exactly the topic most interesting at the moment, and went into the middle of it without preliminaries. We passed a small farm just a little while before we reached Blackstone, the homestead standing close to the road. A quiet-looking man stood listlessly at the slip panel. (All these dwellers in lonely places look quiet and dreamy and listless; even the dogs wear the same expression.)

'It's near about time now,' said the driver.

'Near about,' replied the farmer.

'If I hear anything, I'll let you know,' said the driver, and on we went, the man gazing listlessly after us.

Said I, 'At the risk of being set down as an impudent note of interrogation, my dear sir, I must again ask you what it means?'

'A contract for horsefeed,' said he, a little impatiently I fancied; so, although my mind was not much clearer than before, I subsided, and afterwards confined myself to inquiries about the country, to all of which he replied most courteously and elaborately. He was a remarkably pleasant fellow to travel with, though he was quiet, and not given to the 'signing of papers.' I asked him if he never got tired of travelling the same route every day. He said no, he didn't mind it when page 277the weather was good. He didn't like it much in the wintertime, when the cold was so bitter, and the snow lay on the ground for weeks together sometimes, and then turned to ice over which it was next to impossible to get the horses without accident and broken knees; when the rivers were full of floating ice, and the wind nearly cut a man's nose off his face, and froze his hands so that he didn't know whether he held the reins or not. But he had always one comfort to look to; he had all his Sundays at home with his wife and children. (I saw his family afterwards, and quite understood why his Sundays at home were a 'comfort.' The Sunday I spent with them made me wish I was a coachdriver, with a wife and children like his. But you cannot pick up these treasures ready-made, like raiment and furniture; if you could, the result might not be altogether satisfactory, and I concluded that it would take me too long to attain them any other way, and so it would be better to sustain my miserable bachelorhood to the bitter end.)

St. Bathans, where we stopped to play two nights, is the quaintest little place imaginable. A narrow, irregular, steep street, low-roofed wooden and iron buildings, some stores, and the usual multiplicity of public-houses, composed the township. All the land about was under toll for gold. It had the same flood-devastated appearance that Naseby had. To a fanciful imagination it was like gnome-work. One could figure to one's self the little earth-men experimenting in surface architecture during the hours between nightfall and cockcrow.

St. Bathans proved a Land of Goshen to us. We should have quitted it a wealthy company if Our Agent had not induced us, against our better judgment, to leave the settling up until the last day. Then we discovered that there was nothing to settle, Our Agent having already settled our entire wealth at poker with the miners; and then we understood why Our Agent had declined going on in advance in accordance with his accepted duty. We felt that this last breach of principle was too much for human endurance, and Our Basso undertook to punish Our Agent; but he had better have let the job out by contract to a company, for Our Agent played round him like a flash of light-page 278ning, and with almost as fatal results. Our Agent, with his temper well up, was a terror, a sirocco, a simoom, and a cyclone all in one.

We had to stay in St. Bathans three days longer to nurse the damaged man back to comparative wholeness, and then we got up a benefit performance assisted by local amateurs, in order to raise the wherewithal to move on. Again we embarked under our old driver's protection, with Clyde as our destination this time. One of the box passengers was a friendly Hebrew with a glass eye. No one would have suspected the artificial optic. There was a squinting aspect about the owner's visage when you caught him 'full face,' or 'three quarters,' as the photographers say, but en profile one eye looked every bit as good as the other. But the wearer was a man who would scorn to impose even upon uninterested travellers.

'You wouldn't think I had a glass eye, now, would you?' said he cheerfully to Tempest, who had managed to get a place on the box seat that day.

'Why, no,' Tempest replied a little nervously.

'No,' said he, gleefully chuckling, 'nobody would. That eye of mine is the neatest fraud ever invented. You couldn't guess which eye it is, could you?'

'No, said Tempest.

'Then I'll show you,' and with startling suddenness he gouged out his left optic and held it forth in the palm of his hand.

Tempest possessed fair strength of nerve, as we ail knew, but that eye was too much for him. He turned faint and sick.

'Put the nasty thing away, will you,' said the driver sharply.

'I thought you might like to see it as a curiosity,' said the Hebrew, sticking it in again coolly.

At Cambrians we all 'signed a paper' and felt better. Some ten minutes before we reached this goldfield we espied two Chinamen running to meet the coach. They were the most miserable Celestials I ever beheld—lean, hungry-looking, withered, wrinkled, and dirty.

'Didn't get it, John,' said the driver as they neared the coach and looked eagerly up at him.

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A second before it seemed impossible for them to look more wretched, but now the expression of utter despair that came over them as they collapsed by the roadside was awful to contemplate.

'What is the matter with them?' we asked.

'Opium,' said the driver. 'They've been out of opium for a week and expecting some up every mail, but it hasn't come. Poor beggars! how they do miss it!'

We only stopped long enough at Cambrians, or Welshman's Gully, as it is more popularly called, to deliver the mail and notice how the place differed in aspect from all the other goldfields we had passed. None of us admired Cambrians as we did Naseby and St. Bathans. As we left we saw the two Chinamen, or two others exactly like them, mending their house with a bit of string. The house was built of old kerosene tins broken apart and tied together, and would have been considered by an Englishman rather limited quarters for his dog. As for 'swinging a cat!' But then the Chinamen didn't swing cats; they ate them.

Our next stopping place was at the White Horse Hotel, at a place called Blacks. There was no township, only the hotel where we changed horses and paid half a crown for a dinner of boiled mutton (the sheep had been cut up with an axe, evidently: it would have puzzled even a clairvoyant to have told what portion of the body was before us), fly sauce, unwashed half-boiled potatoes, and bread pudding, in which the flavours of onions and sour milk vied with each other.

Our Basso studied the banquet for a few moments and then said he believed he wasn't hungry just then, and went out. We all followed and scowled at the scenery until the coach was ready. If the proprietors of the White Horse have not made a fortune and retired upon it ere this, I can simply say that they must have wasted their opportunities. People of a properly economical turn could serve up a dinner like that—the same dinner; time could but improve it—every day for a week and still have it on hand. Visitors would cheerfully pay half a crown to be allowed not to eat it.

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Between Blacks and St. Ophir we passed at a distance 'Dry Bread' and 'Tinkers,' two goldfields on the Dunstan Ranges. St. Ophir itself is a very pretty little place, but existence there can scarcely be considered lively. After St. Ophir we approached the mountains—rugged quaint-shaped monuments of a remote volcanic age. The western sky, in a glory of light from the setting sun, formed a magnificent background of rose and purple, opal and gold, for the great 'Remarkables,' whose peaks stood like glittering white pillars against the brilliance beyond them. On the top of a nearer ridge of mountains crouched the colossal figure of a tiger, carved by nature in the solid rock. At a little distance from this rested a handsome lion—achieved by the same hand—the massive head and flowing mane vividly distinct against the sky. Further again was the figure of a sheep, and further again the bust of a man. All massive, huge, still, and solemn, gazing out in grand loneliness over the mountains, as they had probably gazed since ages before man had carved the Sphinx in another land.

We approached Clyde as we had approached Naseby, in the dark, with the twinkling lights of the township glimmering in the distance through the soft fog that spread before and around in a pale illusive sea.