He released me; he was still laughing.
“I can’t help it,” he said.
“All those years, all that toil and sweat, all that hope. And Nora goes out, thinks she would like a drink of water, and it falls into her hands!”
“It may be nothing much.”
“Nothing much! With the dust coming down in the water so that all you have to do is catch it. And the nugget lying there on the bank! And you say that may be nothing! You don’t know gold country.” He was sober suddenly.
“Not a word to anybody … nobody at all. We’re going out there at once. We’ll take Stirling. And no one is to know where we’re going. Nobody must guess what’s there until I’ve made it mine.”
I caught his excitement. Gold! And I had found it. I knew how men felt when they had their lucky strike. I was triumphant, exultant, excited as I had never been before—because I had found gold. Then I realized that this sensation did not come from merely finding gold; it was because I had found gold for Lynx.
The weeks slid by in a feverish tension which was all the more intense because the news must be kept secret. No one knew about the find but myself, Stirling and Lynx. No one must know. We lived in terror that anyone should find what I had found.
Lynx and Stirling had examined the terrain and were absolutely certain that it would give the richest yield ever found in Australia. On the top of the plateau, which was difficult to scale—and it must be for this reason that the gold field had never been discovered—was a fortune. It had been there, so close, for all these years. That was what amazed them. They regarded me as though I were some genius to have discovered it.
I myself was elated. had brought them this luck. I had made all this possible. I was to be the maker of their fortunes. I felt proud of myself and refused to listen to the inwards warning which demanded to know what good had ever come from gold.
I was caught up in the excitement. I had forgotten all the unhappy events of the past. It was only the urgent need to keep our secret which made me able to hide my exhilaration.
There were conferences in the library in the evenings when I was supposed to be playing chess with Lynx. Stirling would come in to join us. Lynx was buying the land and it was not just the ground which held the plateau that he was negotiating for. That would have been to arouse suspicion. He wanted to extend his property, he said; he was thinking of getting more sheep. It was some time before he acquired the land but he and Stirling had already scaled the plateau and found what lay at its summit. There was no doubt that it was gold. They had already discovered rich alluvial deposits as they had expected from the gold dust which was carried down by the stream; but Lynx was certain that the real wealth lay beneath the surface.
“There’ll be lodes of gold at various levels,” he explained.
“We’ll take the shafts down as deep as need be.”
Stirling was impatient to get to work. So were we all. But for the time, until the golden plateau was Lynx’s own, there must be. secrecy.
There came the day when he called Stirling and me to the library. He solemnly opened a bottle of champagne and filled three glasses.
He said: “The land is mine. We have our fortune. We are going to be rich as few people have ever been.”
He handed a glass, first to me then to Stirling before he took the other.
“First,” he said, ‘to Nora, the founder of our fortunes. “
“It was sheer luck,” I insisted.
“I shouldn’t have known what to do about it without you.”
“You did the right thing. You came straight to me.” His eyes were shining with love and approval; and I thought I had never been so happy in my life.
“Now,” he said, ‘to us. The triumphant Triumvirate. “
Then we drank.
I said: “Are you sure? After all, as yet you have not sunk your shafts.”
Lynx laughed.
“Nora, even now we have found a nugget which weighs two thousand ounces. I’ll guarantee it is worth ten thousand pounds. And we have not yet begun. There’s gold up there, gold to make any miner’s dream come true. Don’t fret. We’re rich.
After all these years you’ve led us to what we’ve been looking for.”
We put down our glasses. I held out my hands. Lynx took one, Stirling the other.
“This is what I wanted more than anything,” I said. Lynx laughed at me.
“So you felt the gold fever, too, Nora.”
“No, not gold fever. I just want to give you both what you most want.”
Then Lynx held me in his arms again and said softly in a strangely tender voice: “Nora, my girl Nora.” Then he let me go and handed me as it were to Stirling. Stirling’s arms were round me and I clung to him.
“I believe I’m crying,” I said.
“People who don’t cry when they’re hurt will cry for happiness.”
Now the activity had started. Everyone was talking about the find.
Lynx had struck gold—real gold. They had always known he would one day. It was just his luck. The ground yielded its alluvial gold—a fortune in itself. But Lynx was not stopping there. He was sinking deep shafts and he was going to get the gold which he knew lay in the quartz reefs below the ground. He closed the old worthless mine, all workers were transferred to the new one and more were engaged. The scene of my father’s murder had changed completely. The birds had deserted the place; the sound of gunpowder explosions had frightened them away; steps had been cut in the earth to enable men to mount the plateau; drays were constantly passing along the road taking the gold to the bank in Melbourne. The place had been renamed. It was: Nora’s Hill.
I saw less of Lynx and Stirling. They were always at the mine. A place had been built there so that they could sleep in some sort of comfort when they did not come home. The fortune was being accumulated. I was constantly hearing of nuggets that had been found. I remember the excitement when one over two feet long was discovered. It was mentioned in the Melbourne papers and reckoned to be worth twenty thousand pounds.
There was a kind of breathlessness everywhere, but for me the excitement had worn off. I was not as happy as I had been in the first flush of discovery.
A stranger came to the house and was closeted a long time with Lynx.
Adelaide told me that he was her father’s lawyer and that he was going to England on Lynx’s business.
It was said that Lynx was now a millionaire. This was probably true, but he wasn’t satisfied. I wondered if he ever would be.
Once I said to him: “You are very rich now.”
He admitted it.
“You too, my dear. Don’t forget you have your share in our good fortune. Didn’t I say it was a triumvirate?”
“How rich?”
“Do you want figures?”
“No. They would mean little to me. But I believe it is rich enough.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“That now you might give up this feverish activity and leave others to work for you.”
“Other people never work for you as you work for yourself.”
“Does it matter? You have enough.”
“I’m going to get all the gold out of that mine, Nora.”
“You are insatiable … for gold.”
His eyes gleamed.
“No,” he said.
“I shall know when I have enough. I need to be very rich.”
“And then?”
“And then I shall do what I have always planned to do. I have waited a long time, but now I see the fulfilment in sight.”
He said no more then, but he alarmed me a little because there was a hardening of his lips and I knew that the thought of revenge was in his mind.
Revenge on the man who had had him sent away over thirty-five years ago! Did people harbour feelings of revenge for so long? A man like Lynx did, I knew. It worried me because I knew that there was no happiness to be found in revenge.