Part 29 (1/2)
”D'ye hear, Richard? Now's your chance,” repeated Ned, not to be done.
”A very different thing this, I can tell you, from running round dosing people for the collywobbles. I know men who are raising the splosh any way they can to get in.”
”I dare say. There's never been any lack of gamblers on Ballarat,” said Mahony dryly, and pa.s.sed his cup to be refilled.
Pig-headed fool! was Ned's mental retort, as he sliced a chunk of rabbit-pie. ”Well, I bet you'll feel sore some day you didn't take my advice,” he said aloud.
”We shall see, my lad, we shall see!” replied Mahony. ”In the meantime, let me inform you, I can make good use of every penny I have. So if you've come here thinking you can wheedle something out of me, you're mistaken.” He could seldom resist tearing the veil from Ned's gross hints and impostures.
”Oh no, Richard dear!” interpolated Polly, in her role of keeper-of-the-peace.
Ned answered huffily: ”'Pon my word, I never met such a fellow as you, for thinking the worst of people.”
The thrust went home. Mahony clapped his book to. ”You lay yourself open to it, sir! If I'm wrong, I beg your pardon. But for goodness'
sake, Ned, put all these trashy ideas of making a fortune out of your mind. Digging is played out, I tell you. Decent people turned their backs on it long ago.”
”That's what I think, too,” threw in Jerry.
Mahony bit his lip. ”Come, come, now, what do you know about it?”
Jerry flushed and floundered, till Polly came to his aid. ”He's been wanting to speak to you, Richard. He hates the work as much as you did.”
”Well, he has a tongue of his own.--Speak for yourself, my boy!”
Thus encouraged, Jerry made his appeal; and fearing lest Richard should throw him, half-heard, into the same category as Ned, he worded it very tersely. Mahony, who had never given much heed to Jerry--no one did--was pleased by his straightforward air. Still, he did not know what could be done for him, and said so.
Here Polly had an inspiration. ”But I think I do. I remember Mr. Oc.o.c.k saying to me the other day he must take another boy into the business, it was growing so--the fourth, this will make. I don't know if he's suited yet, but even if he is, he may have heard of something else.-- Only you know, Jerry, you mustn't mind WHAT it is. After tea I'll put on my bonnet and go down to the Flat with you. And Ned shall come, too,” she added, with a consoling glance at her elder brother: Ned had extended his huff to his second slice of pie, which lay untouched on his plate.
”Somebody has always got something up her sleeve,” said Mahony affectionately, when Polly came to him in walking costume. ”None the less, wife, I shouldn't be surprised if those brothers of yours gave us some trouble, before we're done with them.”
Chapter VI
In the weeks and months that followed, as he rode from one end of Ballarat to the other--from Yuille's Swamp in the west, as far east as the ranges and gullies of Little Bendigo--it gradually became plain to Mahony that Ned's frothy tales had some body in them after all. The character of the diggings was changing before his very eyes. Nowadays, except on an outlying muddy flat or in the hands of the retrograde Chinese, tubs, cradles, and windla.s.ses were rarely to be met with.
Engine-sheds and boiler-houses began to dot the ground; here and there a tall chimney belched smoke, beside a lofty poppet-head or an aerial trolley-line. The richest gutters were found to take their rise below the basaltic deposits; the difficulties and risks of rock-mining had now to be faced, and the capitalist, so long held at bay, at length made free of the field. Large sums of money were being subscribed; and, where these proved insufficient, the banks stepped into the breach with subsidies on mortgages. The population, in whose veins the gold-fever still burned, plunged by wholesale into the new hazard; and under the wooden verandahs of Bridge Street a motley crew of jobbers and brokers came into existence, who would demonstrate to you, a la Ned, how you might reap a fortune from a claim without putting in an hour's work on it--without even knowing where it was.
A temptation, indeed! ... but one that did not affect him. Mahony let the reins droop on his horse's neck, and the animal picked its way among the impedimenta of the bush road. It concerned only those who had money to spare. Months, too, must go by before, from even the most promising of these co-operative affairs, any return was to be expected.
As for him, there still came days when he had not a five-pound note to his name. It had been a delusion to suppose that, in accepting John's offer, he was leaving money-troubles behind him. Despite Polly's thrift, their improved style of life cost more than he had reckoned; the patients, slow to come, were slower still to discharge their debts.
Moreover, he had not guessed how heavily the quarterly payments of interest would weigh on him. With as good as no margin, with the fate of every s.h.i.+lling decided beforehand, the saving up of thirty odd pounds four times a year was a veritable achievement. He was always in a quake lest he should not be able to get it together. No one suspected what near shaves he had--not even Polly. The last time hardly bore thinking about. At the eleventh hour he had unexpectedly found himself several pounds short. He did not close an eye all night, and got up in the morning as though for his own execution. Then, fortune favoured him. A well-to-do butcher, his hearty: ”What'll yours be?” at the nearest public-house waved aside, had settled his bill off-hand. Mahony could still feel the sudden lift of the black fog-cloud that had enveloped him--the sense of bodily exhaustion that had succeeded to the intolerable mental strain.
For the coming quarter-day he was better prepared--if, that was, nothing out of the way happened. Of late he had been haunted by the fear of illness. The long hours in the saddle did not suit him. He ought to have a buggy, and a second horse. But there could be no question of it in the meantime, or of a great deal else besides. He wanted to buy Polly a piano, for instance; all her friends had pianos; and she played and sang very prettily. She needed more dresses and bonnets, too, than he was able to allow her, as well as a change to the seaside in the summer heat. The first spare money he had should go towards one or the other. He loved to give Polly pleasure; never was such a contented little soul as she. And well for him that it was so.
To have had a complaining, even an impatient wife at his side, just now, would have been unbearable. But Polly did not know what impatience meant; her sunny temper, her fixed resolve to make the best of everything was not to be shaken.
Well, comforts galore should be hers some day, he hoped. The practice was shaping satisfactorily. His attendance at Dandaloo had proved a key to many doors: folk of the Glendinnings' and Urquharts' standing could make a reputation or mar it as they chose. It had got abroad, he knew, that at whatever hour of the day or night he was sent for, he could be relied on to be sober; and that unfortunately was not always the case with some of his colleagues. In addition his fellow-pract.i.tioners showed signs of waking up to his existence. He had been called in lately to a couple of consultations; and the doyen of the profession on Ballarat, old Munce himself, had praised his handling of a difficult case of version.
The distances to be covered--that was what made the work stiff. And he could not afford to neglect a single summons, no matter where it led him. Still, he would not have grumbled, had only the money not been so hard to get in. But the fifty thousand odd souls on Ballarat formed, even yet, anything but a stable population: a patient you attended one day might be gone the next, and gone where no bill could reach him. Or he had been sold off at public auction; or his wooden shanty had gone up in a flare--hardly a night pa.s.sed without a fire somewhere. In these and like accidents the unfortunate doctor might whistle for his fee. It seldom happened nowadays that he was paid in cash. Money was growing as scarce here as anywhere else. Sometimes, it was true, he might have pocketed his fee on the spot, had he cared to ask for it. But the presenting of his palm professionally was a gesture that was denied him. And this stand-offishness drove from people's minds the thought that he might be in actual need of money. Afterwards he sat at home and racked his brains how to pay butcher and grocer. Others of the fraternity were by no means so nice. He knew of some who would not stir a yard unless their fee was planked down before them--old stagers these, who at one time had been badly bitten and were now grown cynically distrustful. Or tired. And indeed who could blame a man for hesitating of a pitch-dark night in the winter rains, or on a blazing summer day, whether or no he should set out on a twenty-mile ride for which he might never see the ghost of a remuneration?
Reflecting thus, Mahony caught at a couple of hard, spicy, grey-green leaves, to chew as he went: the gums, on which the old bark hung in ribbons, were in flower by now, and bore feathery yellow blossoms side by side with nutty capsules. His horse had been ambling forward unpressed. Now it laid its ears flat, and a minute later its master's slower senses caught the clop-clop of a second set of hoofs, the noise of wheels. Mahony had reached a place where two roads joined, and saw a covered buggy approaching. He drew rein and waited.
The occupant of the vehicle had wound the reins round the empty lamp-bracket, and left it to the sagacity of his horse to keep the familiar track, while he dozed, head on breast, in the corner. The animal halted of itself on coming up with its fellow, and Archdeacon Long opened his eyes.