Page:Such Is Life.djvu/77

Rh han’s turn the year roun’, beyant givin’ ordhers; an’ he would hev lavin’s iv iverything, an’ a brave shoot o’ clo’es till his back, an’ mebbe a gool’ watch, furbye money in his pocket. Bates all! Bates all!”

But the anomalous and baffling nature of Australian conditions made Rory all the more reluctant to tear himself away from his present asylum—though its shelter seemed to resemble the shadow of a great deficit in an insolvent land.

So another fortnight passed, whilst each of us learned something from the other. I constantly endeavoured, by reminiscence and inference, to post him up in the usages of his adopted country; and he regaled me with the folk-lore of the hill-side where his ancestors had passively resisted extinction since the time of Japhet. Purposeless fairy tales and profitless ghost stories for the most part, with another class of legend, equally fatuous; but ah! how legitimately born of that auroral fancy which ceases not to play above the grave of homely ambition, penury-crushed and dead! Legends wherein the unvarying motif was a dazzling cash advance made by Satan in pre-payment for the soul of some rustic dead-beat; delivery being due in seven years from date. And a clever repudiation of covenant, with consequent non-forfeiture of ensuing clip, always came as a climax; so that the defaulter lived happy ever after, while the outwitted speculator retired to his own penal establishment in shame and confusion of tail.

At last a queer thing happened. I received a letter, containing a bank draft for £2, from a friend to whom I had lent the money three years before, on the diggings. In case there might have been some mistake about the remittance, that draft was cashed before the postmaster had missed me from the window, and I was on the way home before the bank manager thought I was clear of his porch. On the same evening, I placed one of the notes in Rory’s hand, adjuring him not to let the storekeeper know anything about it, but to depart from me while he was safe.

He shrank from the note as from a lizard, while his lip quivered, and he tried to swallow his emotion down. Then ensued mutual expostulation, which he terminated by producing a knitted purse, which might have belonged to his grandfather—or to Brian Boru’s grandfather, for that matter—and disclosing a hidden treasure of seven shillings, two sixpences, and ten coppers. I nearly hit him in the mere fury of pity. Ultimately, however, my superior force of character told its tale, and we added the note to his reserve fund.

I got him started next morning. I gave him my Shakespear as a keepsake, with a billy and pannikin, and a few days’ rations. I made up his swag scientifically while he lay heart-broken on his bunk; then I walked with him to the Echuca road. So he sorrowed his way northward, in renewed search of his brother Larry; and, as I watched his diminishing figure, I prayed that he might be enticed into the most shocking company in Echuca, and be made fightably drunk, and fall in for a remembersome hammering, and get robbed of everything, and be given in charge for making a disturbance, and wind up the adventure with a month in Her Majesty’s jail. It seemed to me that no milder dispensation of Providence would satisfy his moral requirements. Drastic, but such is life.