COELUM,
NON ANIMUM, MUTANT, QUI TRANS MARE CURRUNT. "Non animum"? Ah! could he
but have foreseen this--foreknown it. If not before he set sail on what
was to have been but a swift adventure, then at least on that fateful
day long past when, foiled by Mary's pleadings and his own inertia, he
had let himself be bound anew.
Thus the summer dragged by; a summer to try the toughest. Mahony thought
he had never gone through its like for heat and discomfort. The drought
would not break, and on the great squatting-stations round Ballarat and
to the north, the sheep dropped like flies at an early frost. The forest
reservoirs dried up, displaying the red mud of their bottoms, and a bath
became a luxury--or a penance--the scanty water running thick and red.
Then the bush caught fire and burnt for three days, painting the sky a
rusty brown, and making the air hard to breathe. Of a morning his first
act on going into his surgery was to pick up the thermometer that stood
on the table. Sure as fate, though the clock had not long struck nine,
the mercury marked something between a hundred and a hundred and five
degrees. He let it fall with a nerveless gesture. Since his sunstroke he
not only hated, he feared the sun. But out into it he must, to drive
through dust-clouds so opaque that one could only draw rein till they
subsided, meanwhile holloaing off collisions. Under the close leather
hood he sat and stifled; or, removing his green goggles for the fiftieth
time, climbed down to enter yet another baked wooden house, where he
handled prostrate bodies rank with sweat, or prescribed for pallid or
fever-speckled children.
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