Again established in their most comfortable house, on one of the heights which overlooked the harbour on the winding highway to the South Head—a dream of beauty by day or starlit night, by sweet moonrise or palest dawn—unequalled, unapproachable beneath the Southern Cross—how pure, how peaceful, how unspeakable was their happiness! What avenues of enjoyment opening out daily, stretching in the future to illimitable distance, filled the perspective!
The New Holland Club, of which Mr. Banneret had for many years been a member, again opened its arms to receive the absent member, whom they thought never again to behold. Reports had reached them that he was dead—not expected to survive, what not? It is not a wholly unpleasant sensation to personally contradict the report of one’s decease,—that report, ‘upon the best authority,’ quoted from the morning papers, that one has been cut off in the flower of one’s youth, or the zenith of one’s fame, as the case may be. Even there the candid friend is not wholly at a disadvantage. ‘No idea that I was such a fine fellow,’ says Horatio, returning, let us say, from Philippi, where he was reported slain. ‘Really,’ drawls the inevitable ‘friend,’ ‘but, you know, dear boy, people exaggerate so fearfully on such occasions!’
It is good to be rich, for some, for many reasons. It is good even to be thought rich, if one is not thereby tempted to spend extravagantly. As mankind are constituted, whether the money is inherited, gained by accident, by the hardly reputable means of gambling, so long as it is known to be there, a certain kind of respect and deference goes along with its possession. Perhaps in Arnold Banneret’s case, whose exploration of an inhospitable desert where men’s lives were but as counters in the game, and had been expended as recklessly, it disposed the critics of the clubs and swagger hotels to regard him as having achieved true distinction. Younger sons and others, who had gone out with hazy ideas of digging a fortune out of the dreary wastes, of which they had heard, and had returned to the city without one, comprehended the preliminary hardships which he must have undergone. They enlarged upon these, in all good faith, until the readers of newspapers and the public generally were disposed to look upon him as a general of Division and a scientific millionaire combined.