"Phillis is my only joy."
"My brothers, Miss Fleming!"
Joseph introduced the twins with a pride impossible to dissemble. They
were so youthful-looking, so airy, so handsome, besides being so nobly
endowed with genius, that his pride may be excused. Castor and Pollux
the wrong side of forty, but slim still and well preserved--these
Greek figures do not run tall--might have looked like Cornelius and
Humphrey.
They parted company for a moment to welcome the young lady, large-eyed
as Hêrê, who rose to greet them, and then took up a position on the
hearthrug, one with his hand on the other's shoulder, like the Siamese
twins, and smiled pleasantly, as if, being accustomed to admiration
and even awe, they wished to reassure Miss Fleming and put her at
ease.
Dinner being announced, Cornelius, the elder by a few moments, gave
his arm to the young lady. Humphrey, the younger, hovered close
behind, as if he too was taking his part in the chivalrous act. Joseph
followed alone, of course, not counting in the little procession.
Phillis Fleming's arrival at No. 15 Carnarvon Square was in a manner
legal. She belonged to the office, not to the shrine of intellect,
poesy, and art created by the twin brethren. She was an orphan and a
ward. She had two guardians: one of them, Mr. Lawrence Colquhoun,
being away from England; and the other, Mr. Abraham Dyson, with whom
she had lived since her sixth birthday, having finished his earthly
career just before this history begins, that is to say, in the spring
of last year. Shaw, Fairlight, and Jagenal were solicitors to both
gentlemen. Therefore Joseph found himself obliged to act for this
young lady when, Mr. Abraham Dyson buried and done with, it became a
question what was to be done with her. There were offers from several
disinterested persons on Miss Fleming's bereaved condition being
known. Miss Skimpit, of the Highgate Collegiate Establishment for
Young Ladies, proposed by letter to receive her as a parlour-boarder,
and hinted at the advantages of a year's discipline, tempered by
Christian kindness, for a young lady educated in so extraordinary and
godless a manner. The clergyman of the new district church at Finchley
called personally upon Mr. Jagenal. He said that he did not know the
young lady except by name, but that, feeling the dreadful condition of
a girl brought up without any of the gracious influences of Anglican
Ritual and Dogma, he was impelled to offer her a home with his
Sisterhood. Here she would receive clear dogmatic teaching and learn
what the Church meant by submission, fasting, penance, and
humiliation. Mr. Jagenal thought she might also learn how to bestow
her fortune on Anglo Catholic objects when she came of age, and
dismissed his reverence with scant courtesy. Two or three widows who
had known better days offered their services, which were declined with
thanks. Joseph even refused to let Miss Fleming stay with Mrs.
Cassilis, the wife of Abraham Dyson's second cousin. He thought that
perhaps this lady would not be unwilling to enliven her house by the
attraction of an heiress and a _débutante_. And it occurred to him
that, for a short time at least, she might, without offending a
censorious world, and until her remaining guardian's wishes could be
learned, take up her abode at the house of the three bachelors.
"I am old, Miss Fleming," he said, "Forty years old; a great age
to you, and my brothers, Cornelius and Humphrey, who live with me,
are older still. Cornelius is a great poet; he is engaged on a
work--_The Upheaving of Ælfred_--which will immortalise his name.
Humphrey is an artist; he is working at a group the mere conception of
which, Cornelius says, would make even the brain of Michel Angelo
stagger. You will be proud, I think, in after years, to have made the
acquaintance of my brothers."
She came, having no choice or any other wish, accompanied by her
French maid and the usual impedimenta of travel.
Phillis Fleming--her father called her Phillis because she was his
only joy--was nineteen. She is twenty now, because the events of this
story only happened last year. Her mother died in giving her birth;
she had neither brothers nor sisters, nor many cousins, and those far
away. When she was six her father died too--not of an interesting
consumption or of a broken heart, or any ailment of that kind. He was
a jovial fox-hunting ex-captain of cavalry, with a fair income and a
carefully cultivated taste for enjoyment. He died from an accident in
the field. By his will he left all his money to his one child and
appointed as her trustees his father's old friend, Abraham Dyson of
Twickenham and the City, and with him his own friend, Lawrence
Colquhoun, a man some ten years younger than himself, with tastes and
pursuits very much like his own. Of course, the child was taken to the
elder guardian's house, and Colquhoun, going his way in the world,
never gave his trust or its responsibilities a moment's thought.
Phillis Fleming had the advantage of a training quite different from
that which is usually accorded to young ladies. She went to Mr.
Abraham Dyson at a time when that old gentlemen, always full of
crotchety ideas, was developing a plan of his own for female
education. His theory of woman's training having just then grown in
his mind to finished proportions, he welcomed the child as a subject
sent quite providentially to his hand, and proceeded to put his views
into practice upon little Phillis. That he did so showed a healthy
belief in his own judgment. Some men would have hastened into print
with a mere theory. Mr. Dyson intended to wait for twelve years or so,
and to write his work on woman's education when Phillis's example
might be the triumphant proof of his own soundness. The education
conducted on Mr. Dyson's principles and rigidly carried out was
approaching completion when it suddenly came to an abrupt termination.
Few things in this world quite turn out as we hope and expect. It was
on the cards that Abraham Dyson might die before the proof of his
theory. This, in fact, happened; and his chief regret at leaving a
world where he had been supremely comfortable, and able to enjoy his
glass of port to his eightieth and last year, was that he was leaving
the girl, the creation of his theory, in an unfinished state.
"Phillis," he said, on his deathbed, "the edifice is now
complete,--all but the Coping-stone. Alas, that I could not live to
put it on!"
And what the Coping-stone was no man could guess. Great would be the
cleverness of him, who seeing a cathedral finished save for roof and
upper courses, would undertake to put on these, with all the
ornaments, spires, lanterns, gargoyles, pinnacles, flying buttresses,
turrets, belfries, and crosses drawn in the dead designer's lost
plans.
Abraham Dyson was a wealthy man. Therefore he was greatly respected by
all his relations, in spite of certain eccentricities, notably those
which forbade him to ask any of them to his house. If the nephews,
nieces and cousins wept bitterly on learning their bereavement, deeper
and more bitter were their lamentations when they found that Mr. Dyson
had left none of them any money.
Not one penny; not a mourning ring; not a single sign or token of
affection to one of them. It was a cruel throwing of cold water on the
tenderest affections of the heart, and Mr. Dyson's relations were
deeply pained. Some of them swore; others felt that in this case it
was needless to give sorrow words, and bore their suffering in
silence.
Nor did he leave any money to Phillis.
This obstinate old theorist left it all to found a college for girls,
who were to be educated in the same manner as Phillis Fleming, and in
accordance with the scheme stated to be fully drawn up and among his
papers.
Up to the present, Joseph Jagenal had not succeeded in finding the
scheme. There were several rolls of paper, forming portions of the
great work, but none were finished, and all pointed to the last
chapter, that entitled the "Coping-stone," in which, it was stated,
would be found the whole scheme with complete fulness of detail. But
this last chapter could not be found anywhere. If it never was found,
what would become of the will? Then each one of Mr. Dyson's relations
began to calculate what might fall to himself out of the inheritance.
That was only natural, and perhaps it was not every one who, like Mr.
Gabriel Cassilis, openly lamented the number of Mr. Dyson's collateral
heirs.
Not to be found. Joseph Jagenal's clerks now engaged in searching
everywhere for it, and all the relations praying--all fervently and
some with faith--that it might never turn up.
So that poor Phillis is sitting down to dinner with her education
unfinished--where is that Coping-stone? Every young lady who has had a
finishing year at Brighton may look down upon her. Perhaps, however,
as her education has been of a kind quite unknown in polite circles,
and she has never heard of a finishing year, she may be calm even in
the presence of other young ladies.
What sort of a girl is she?
To begin with, she has fifty thousand pounds. Not the largest kind of
fortune, but still something. More than most girls have, more than the
average heiress has. Enough to make young Fortunio Hunter prick up his
ears, smooth down his moustache, and begin to inquire about guardians;
enough to purchase a roomy cottage where Love may be comfortable;
enough to enable the neediest wooer, if he be successful, to hang up
his hat on the peg behind the door and sit down for the rest of his
years. Fifty thousand pounds is a sum which means possibilities. It
was her mother's, and, very luckily for her, it was so tied up that
Captain Fleming, her father, could not touch more than the interest,
which, at three per cent., amounts, as may be calculated, to fifteen
hundred a year. Really, after explaining that a young lady has fifty
thousand, what further praise is wanted, what additional description
is necessary? By contemplation of fifty thousand pounds, ardent youth
is inflamed as by a living likeness of Helen. Be she lovely or be she
loathly, be she young or old, be she sweet or shrewish--she has fifty
thousand pounds.
With her fifty thousand pounds the gods have given Phillis Fleming a
tall figure, the lines of which are as delicately curved as those of
any yacht in the Solent or of any statue from Greek studio. She is
slight, perhaps too slight; she has hair of a common dark brown, but
it is fine hair, there is a great wealth of it, it has a gleam and
glimmer of its own as the sunlight falls upon it, as if there were a
hidden colour lying somewhere in it waiting to be discovered; her
eyes, like her hair, are brown--they are also large and lustrous; her
lips are full; her features are not straight and regular, like those
of women's beauties, for her chin is perhaps a little short, though
square and determined; she has a forehead which is broad and rather
low; she wears an expression in which good temper, intelligence, and
activity are more marked than beauty. She is quick to mark the things
that she sees, and she sees everything. Her hands are curious, because
they are so small, so delicate, and so sympathetic; while her face is
in repose you may watch a passing emotion by the quivering of her
fingers, just as you may catch, if you have the luck, the laughter or
tears of most girls first in the brightness or the clouding of their
eyes.
There are girls who, when we meet them in the street, pass us like the
passing of sunshine on an April day; who, if we spend the evening in a
room where they are, make us understand something of the warmth which
Nature intended to be universal, but has somehow only made special;
whom it is a pleasure to serve, whom it is a duty to reverence, who
can bring purity back to the brain of a rake, and make a young man's
heart blossom like a rose in June.
Of such is Phillis Fleming.