‘Heard of him before,’ men would say in the smoking room. ‘Been at the front all his life. Squatter in old days—took up outside country—rows with blacks—bushrangers, that sort of man. Dropped his money when stock went down. Took to the Civil Service later on. Wife and children—so on. Makes up his mind to be Goldfields Warden—tired of that—believed in another cast of the dice—goes to W.A.—and before he’s been there a month, hits on the discovery of the age—the biggest of the century—regular Mount Morgan, y’know.’
‘Mayn’t be quite as big a quarry as that,’ interposes another man—a pastoralist, whose grizzled beard and bronzed countenance has ‘Waste Lands of the Crown’ writ large thereon—‘but told by men, been there and seen, half a dozen fortunes in it,’ and so on, and so on. Thus the hero-worship progressed.
Rich—beyond any of _his_ dreams of avarice—so far, he saw himself so high on the ladder of prosperity that he began to consider how he might benefit those friends and relations (perhaps) whom he had so often pitied, lamenting at the same time his inability to aid them. It was one of the anomalies of life, he had reflected, that people in possession of superfluous means seldom showed much disposition to use them in this way; while those who, like himself, would have taken pleasure in dispensing timely aid seldom had the wherewithal to gratify benevolent intentions. However, if the future yields of the ‘Last Chance’ kept up its present rate, there would be enough, and to spare, for years to come. He could enact the Uncle from India—they are always rich (or used to be)—for the benefit of deserving relations who would be touchingly grateful to the end of their lives. How he could assist all benevolent institutions—repay those who had been kind to him in the early struggles of his life! He had a good memory for such positions and people. Then, after a few years, which he could spend comfortably, not to say luxuriously, in Sydney—he would take the family to England. The boys would be of an age to benefit by public-school training, preparatory to being entered at Oxford or Cambridge. He would buy an estate—not too large, but sufficiently so, to give them the pleasures of English country life, without the drawbacks of having to attend to the responsibilities and details of a large estate. He might even go into parliament—that was to be managed more easily in the old country than in the new one, where the low suffrage, combined with the intense jealousy which wealth and a cultured intellect aroused in the lower-class voters, made it difficult, if not impossible, for their possessor to enter parliament. However, these hopes and enterprises were for the future to justify and develop in action. For the present here was he, Arnold Banneret, back again in Sydney—safe and sound, fully recovered from the fever scourge of outside habitations—wife and children well—heartily enjoying his recovered freedom from anxiety, the society of his friends, and in a moderate way the prestige which had accrued to him as a favourite of fortune, and a successful, energetic, worthy recipient of her gifts.