On his arrival at Pollington, all the Shands welcomed him as though he had been the successful son or successful brother who had gone out from among them; and spoke of ‘Poor Dick’ as being the unsuccessful son or unsuccessful brother,— as indeed he was. There did not seem to be the slightest anger against him, in that he had thriven and had left Dick behind him in such wretched poverty. There was no just ground for anger, indeed. He was well aware of that. He had done his duty by Dick to the best of his ability. But fathers and mothers are sometimes apt to think that more should be done for their own children than a friend’s best ability can afford. These people, however, were reasonable. ‘Poor Dick!’ ‘Isn’t it sad?’ ‘I suppose when he’s quite far away in the bush like that he can’t get it,’— by which last miserable shred of security the poor mother allowed herself to be in some degree comforted.
‘Now I want you to tell me,’ said the father, when they were alone together on the first evening, ‘what is really his condition?’
‘He was a shepherd when I last heard about him.’
‘He wrote to his mother by the last mail, asking whether something cannot be done for him. He was a shepherd then. What is a shepherd?’
‘A man who goes about with the sheep all day, and brings them up to a camp at night. He may probably be a week without seeing a human being, That is the worst of it.’
‘How is he fed?’
‘Food is brought out to his hut,— perhaps once a week, perhaps once a fortnight,— so much meat, so much flour, so much tea, and so much sugar. And he has thirty or thirty-five pounds a-year besides.’
‘Paid weekly?’
‘No;— perhaps quarterly, perhaps half-yearly. He can do nothing with his money as long as he is there. If he wants a pair of boots or a new shirt, they send it out to him from the store, and his employer charges him with the price. It is a poor life, sir.’
‘Very poor. Now tell me, what can we do for him?’
‘It is an affair of money.’
‘But is it an affair of money, Mr. Caldigate? Is it not rather an affair of drink? He has had his money,— more than his share; more than he ought to have had. But even though I were able to send him more, what good would it do him?’
This was a question very difficult to answer. Caldigate had been forced to answer it to himself in reference to his own conduct. He had sent money to his former friend, and could without much damage to himself have sent more. Latterly he had been in that condition as to money in which a man thinks nothing of fifty pounds,— that condition which induces one man to shoe his horse with gold, and another to chuck his bank-notes about like half-crowns. The condition is altogether opposed to the regulated prudence of confirmed wealth. Caldigate had stayed his hand in regard to Dick Shand simply because the affair had been one not of money but of drink. ‘I suppose a man may be cured by the absence of liquor?’
‘By the enforced absence?’
‘No doubt they often break out again. I hardly know what to say, sir. If you think that money will do good,— money, that is, in moderation,— I will advance it. He and I started together, and I am sometimes aghast with myself when I think of the small matter which, like the point on a railway, sent me running rapidly on to prosperity,— while the same point, turned wrong, hurried him to ruin. I have taken my glass of grog, too, my two glasses,— or perhaps more. But that which would elate him into some fury of action would not move me. It was something nature did for me rather than virtue. I am a rich man, and he is a shepherd, because something was put into my stomach capable of digesting bad brandy, which was not put into his.’
‘A man has more than one chance. When he found how it was with him, he should have abstained. A man must pay the fine of his own weakness.’
‘Oh, yes. It is all understood somewhere, I suppose, though we don’t understand it. I tell you what it is, Dr. Shand. If you think that five hundred pounds left with you can be of any assistance, you can have it.’
But the doctor seemed to doubt whether the money would do any good, and refused to take it, at any rate for the present. What could he do with it, if he did take it? ‘I fear that he must lie upon his bed as he has made it,’ said the doctor sorrowfully. ‘It is a complaint which money cannot cure, but can always exaggerate If, without costing myself or my family a shilling, I could put a thousand pounds into his hands to-morrow, I do not know whether I ought to do it.’
‘You will remember my offer.’
The doctor thanked him, and said that he would remember. So the conversation was ended, and the doctor went about the ordinary occupation of his life, apparently without any settled grief at his heart. He had done his duty by his son, and that sufficed,— or almost sufficed, for him.
Then came the mother’s turn. Could anything be sent to the poor lost one,— to poor Dick? Clothes ran chiefly in her mind. If among them they could make up a dozen of shirts, would there be any assured means of getting them conveyed safely to Dick’s shepherd-hut out in the Queensland bush? In answer to this Caldigate would fain have explained, had it been possible, that Dick would not care much for a dozen new shirts,— that they would be to him, even if received, almost as little a source of comfort as would be a ton of Newcastle coals. He had sunk below shirts by the dozen; almost below single shirts, such as Mrs. Shand and her daughters would be able to fabricate. Some upper flannel garment, and something in the nature of trousers, with a belt round his middle, and an old straw-hat would be all the wardrobe required by him. Men by dint of misery rise above the need of superfluities. The poor wretch whom you see rolling himself, as it were, at the corner of the street within his old tattered filthy coat, trying to extract something more of life and warmth out of the last glass of gin which he has swallowed, is by no means discomposed because he has no clean linen for the morrow. All this Caldigate understood thoroughly;— but there was a difficulty in explaining it to Dick Shand’s mother. ‘I think there would be some trouble about the address,’ he said.
‘But you must know so many people out there.’
‘I have never been in Queensland myself, and have no acquaintance with squatters. But that is not all, Mrs. Shand.’
‘What else? You can tell me. Of course I know what it is that he has come to. I don’t blind myself to it, Mr. Caldigate, even though I am his mother. But I am his mother; and if I could comfort him, just a little ——’
‘Clothes are not what he wants;— of clothes he can get what is necessary, poor as he is.’
‘What is it he wants most?’
‘Somebody to speak to;— some one to be kind to him.’
‘My poor boy!’
‘As he has fallen to what he is now, so can he rise again if he can find courage to give his mind to it. I think that if you write to him and tell him so, that will be better than sending him shirts. The doctor has been talking to me about money for him.’
‘But, Mr. Caldigate, he couldn’t drink the shirts out there in the bush. Here, where there is a pawn-broker at all the corners, they drink everything.’
He had promised to stay two days at Pollington and was of course aware of the dangers among which he walked. Maria had been by no means the first to welcome him. All the other girls had presented themselves before her. And when at last she did come forward she was very shy. The eldest daughter had married her clergyman though he was still only a curate; and the second had been equally successful with Lieutenant Postlethwaite though the lieutenant had been obliged in consequence to leave the army and to earn his bread by becoming agent to a soap-making company. Maria Shand was still Maria Shand, and was it not too probable that she had remained so for the sake of that companion who had gone away with her darling brother Dick? ‘Maria has been thinking so much about your coming,’ said the youngest,— not the girl who had been impertinent and ill-behaved before, for she had since become a grown-up Miss Shand, and had a young attorney of her own on hand, and was supposed to be the one of the family most likely to carry her pigs to a good market,— but the youngest of them all who had been no more than a child when he had been at Pollington before. ‘I hope she is at home,’ said Caldigate ‘At home! Of course she’s at home. She wouldn’t be away when you’re coming!’
The Shands were demonstrative, always;— and never hypocritical. Here it was; told at once,— the whole story. He was to atone for having left Dick in the lurch by marrying Maria. There did seem to him to be a certain amount of justice in the idea; but then, unfortunately, it could not be carried out. If there were no............