Staines promises Anna half of his fortune

Emery Staines’s promise to give Anna Wetherell half of his fortune turns a private response to devastating news into a proposed act of restitution. At Crosbie Wells’s cottage in the Arahura Valley, Staines declares that he will share the wealth he has buried, and Wells begins to put the pledge into writing. The scene’s decisive complication is that Staines falls asleep before signing: the promise is made, and a document is prepared, but the record remains incomplete.

News and arrival

Benjamin Löwenthal has told Staines that Anna has been assaulted and has lost her baby. Staines sets out for the Arahura Valley at once. His distress is visible in his tears, but the narration also notes that he does not admit or explain its true cause during the journey. He arrives at Wells’s door doubled over, bringing the news into the cottage as a personal crisis rather than as a matter already resolved by any formal process.

Wells helps Staines inside and listens. He then brings out brandy and pours successive glasses for them both. The drinking gives the conversation time to unfold, but it does not produce a settled account: Staines’s promise emerges while he is distressed, and Wells has to ask how much half of the fortune would amount to. Staines estimates that his buried wealth is worth perhaps £4,000, making Anna’s proposed share approximately £2,000.

The promise and its written form

Staines says that he will give Anna half and that he will dig up the hidden fortune. Wells responds by fetching a tin box from a shelf. From it he takes a clean sheet of paper and a reservoir pen, turning the spoken commitment into a specific written instrument. The document is dated 11 October 1865 and states that £2,000 is to be given to Anna, formerly of New South Wales, by Staines, also formerly of New South Wales, with Wells identified as witness.

The writing fixes a sum and names the people involved, but its form also exposes the gap between intention and completion. Wells signs as witness and pushes the page toward Staines, telling him to sign as well. Staines is asleep by then. The scene therefore establishes neither a signed transfer nor a completed payment: it shows a promise, a drafted record, and a witness’s signature, but leaves Staines’s own signature absent. That distinction matters because the document records what Wells and Staines were trying to formalize without making the promised gift appear already fulfilled.

The fortune behind the offer

The fortune is not an abstract sum. In his later testimony, Staines explains that the ore came from the Aurora claim, where it had been excavated by his employee, Ah Quee, and retorted into squares. Rather than bank the metal against the claim as he was legally obliged to do, Staines bagged it, took it to the Arahura Valley, and buried it. His account gives the promised half a material history: the money Anna is offered derives from gold that Staines concealed instead of declaring through the required channel.

That background places the promise within the novel’s recurring disputes over gold, ownership, and secrecy. In the goldfields, concealment can be defended as ordinary practice when a prospector makes a discovery; yet the status of this particular fortune is more complicated because it came from a claim and was not banked as required. Staines’s offer to Anna does not erase those circumstances. Instead, it redirects part of a hidden and disputed wealth toward someone whose suffering has just been reported to him.

Significance and limits

The scene gives the promise emotional urgency while withholding the certainty that a completed gift would provide. Staines arrives in distress, commits himself to sharing the fortune, and allows Wells to draft a document that specifies the amount. Yet the promise’s practical future remains unsettled at the moment Staines falls asleep. The written page is evidence of intention and of Wells’s effort to witness it; it is not evidence, in this scene, that Anna receives the money.

The episode also links personal obligation to the novel’s larger concern with documentary proof. A spoken pledge can express a clear intention, but the prepared instrument remains unfinished because the person who must sign it cannot stay awake. In this small but consequential interruption, feeling and procedure do not quite meet. Staines’s offer establishes what he wants to give Anna, while the unsigned document leaves open the question of how that wish can be demonstrated, enforced, or fulfilled.