SUSPENSE.
Mr. Brion stood at his gate when the little buggy drove up, beaming
with contentment and hospitality. He respectfully begged that Mr.
Yelverton would grant them the favour of his company a little
longer--would take pot-luck and smoke an evening pipe before he
returned to his hotel in the town, whither he, Mr. Brion, would be
only too happy to drive him. Mr. Yelverton declared, and with perfect
truth, that nothing would give him greater pleasure. Whereupon the
hotel servant was dismissed in charge of the larger vehicle, and the
horses of the other were put into the stable. The girls went in to wash
and dress, and the housekeeper put forth her best efforts to raise the
character of the dinner from the respectable to the genteel in honour
of a guest who was presumably accustomed to genteel dining.
The meal was served in the one sitting-room of the house, by the
light of a single lamp on the round table and a flood of moonlight
that poured in from the sea through the wide-open doors. After the
feasts and fatigues of the day, no one had any appetite to speak of
for the company dishes that Mrs. Harris hastily compounded, course by
course, in the kitchen; but everyone felt that the meal was a pleasant
one, notwithstanding. Mr. Yelverton, his host, and Patty, who was
unusually sprightly, had the conversation to themselves. Patty talked
incessantly. Nelly was amiable and charming, but decidedly sleepy;
and Elizabeth, at her lover's side, was not, perhaps, unhappy, but
visibly pale and noticeably silent. After dinner they went out upon
the verandah, and sat there in a group on the comfortable old chairs
and about the floor, and drank coffee, and chatted in subdued tones,
and looked at the lovely water shining in the moonlight, and listened
to it booming and splashing on the beach below. The two men, by virtue
of their respective and yet common qualities, "took to" each other,
and, by the time the girls had persuaded them to light the soothing
cigarette, Mr. Brion was talking freely of his clever lad in Melbourne,
and Mr. Yelverton of the mysterious disappearance of his uncle, as if
it were quite a usual thing with them to confide their family affairs
to strangers. Eleanor meanwhile swayed herself softly to and fro in
a ragged rocking chair, half awake and half asleep; Elizabeth, still
irresistibly attracted to the neighbourhood of her beloved, sat in the
shadow of his large form, listening and pondering, with her eyes fixed
on the veiled horizon, and all her senses on the alert; Patty squatted
on the edge of the verandah, leaning against a post and looking up into
the sky. She was the leading spirit of the group to-night. It was a
long time since she had been so lively and entertaining.
"I wonder," she conjectured, in a pause of the conversation, "whether
the inhabitants of any of those other worlds are sitting out on their
verandahs to-night, and looking at _us_. I suppose we are not so
absolutely insignificant but that _some_ of them, our own brother
and sister planets, at any rate, can see us if they use their best
telescopes--are we, Mr. Yelverton?"
"We will hope not," said Mr. Yelverton.
"To think that the moon--miserable impostor that she is!--should
be able to put them out," continued Patty, still gazing at the
palely-shining stars. "The other Sunday we heard a clergyman liken her
to something or other which on its appearance quenched the ineffectual
fires of the _lesser_ luminaries--"
"He said the sun," corrected Elizabeth.
"Well, it's all the same. What's the sun? The stars he hides are
better suns than he is--not to speak of their being no end to them. It
shows how easily we allow ourselves to be taken in by mere superficial
appearances."
"The sun and moon quench the stars for _us_, Patty."
"Pooh! That's a very petty parish-vestry sort of way to look at things.
Just what you might expect in a little bit of a world like this. In
Jupiter now"--she paused, and turned her bright eyes upon a deep-set
pair that were watching her amusedly. "Mr. Yelverton, I hope you are
not going to insist upon it that Jupiter is too hot to do anything but
blaze and shine and keep life going on his little satellites--are you?"
"O dear no!" he replied. "I wouldn't dream of such a thing."
"Very well. We will assume, then, that Jupiter is a habitable world, as
there is no reason why he shouldn't be that _I_ can see---just for the
sake of enlarging Elizabeth's mind. And, having assumed that, the least
we can suppose--seeing that a few billions of years are of no account
in the chronology of the heavenly bodies--is that a world on such a
superior scale was fully up to _our_ little standard before we began.
I mean our present standard. Don't you think we may reasonably suppose
that, Mr. Yelverton?"
"In the absence of information to the contrary, I think we may," he
said. "Though I would ask to be allowed to reserve my own opinion."
"Certainly. I don't ask for anybody's opinion. I am merely throwing
out suggestions. I want to extend Elizabeth's vision in these matters
beyond the range of the sun and moon. So I say that Jupiter--and if not
Jupiter, one of the countless millions of cooler planets, perhaps ever
so much bigger than he is, which lie out in the other sun-systems--was
well on with his railways and telegraphs when we began to get a crust,
and to condense vapours. You will allow me to say as much as that, for
the sake of argument?"
"I think you argue beautifully," said Mr. Yelverton.
"Very well then. Millions of years ago, if you had lived in Jupiter,
you could have travelled in luxury as long as your life lasted, and
seen countries whose numbers and resources never came to an end. Think
of the railway system, and the shipping interest, of a world of that
size!"
"_Don't_, Patty," interposed Elizabeth. "Think what a little, little
life it would have been, by comparison! If we can't make it do us now,
what would its insufficiency be under such conditions?"
Patty waved her hand to indicate the irrelevancy of the suggestion.
"In a planet where, we are told, there are no vicissitudes of climate,
people can't catch colds, Elizabeth; and colds, all the doctors say,
are the primary cause of illness, and it is because they get ill that
people die. That is a detail. Don't interrupt me. So you see, Mr.
Yelverton, assuming that they knew all that we know, and did all that
we do, before the fire and the water made our rocks and seas, and the
chalk beds grew, and the slimy things crawled, and primitive man began
to chip stones into wedges to kill the saurians with--just imagine for
a moment the state of civilisation that must exist in Jupiter, _now_.
Not necessarily our own Jupiter--any of the older and more improved
Jupiters that must be spinning about in space."
"I can't," said Mr. Yelverton. "My imagination is not equal to such a
task."
"I want Elizabeth to think of it," said Patty. "She is a little
inclined to be provincial, as you see, and I want to elevate her ideas."
"Thank you, dear," said Elizabeth.
"It is a pity," Patty went on, "that we can't have a Federal
Convention. That's what we want. If only the inhabited planets
could send representatives to meet and confer together somewhere
occasionally, then we should all have broad views--then we might find
out at once how to set everything right, without any more trouble."
"Space would have to be annihilated indeed, Miss Patty."
"Yes, I know--I know. Of course I know it can't be done--at any
rate, not _yet_--not in the present embryonic stage of things. If a
meteor takes a million years to travel from star to star, going at
the rate of thousands of miles per second--and keeps on paying visits
indefinitely--Ah, what was that?"
She sprang from her low seat suddenly, all her celestial fancies
scattered to the mundane winds, at the sound of a wakeful magpie
beginning to pipe plaintively on the house roof. She thought she
recognised one of the dear voices of the past. "_Can_ it be Peter?" she
cried, breathlessly. "Oh, Elizabeth, I do believe it is Peter! Do come
out and let us call him down!"
They hurried, hand in hand, down to the shelving terrace that divided
the verandah from the edge of the cliff, and there called and cooed and
coaxed in their most seductive tones. The magpie looked at them for a
moment, with his head cocked on one side, and then flew away.
"No," said Patty, with a groan, "it is _not_ Peter! They are all gone,
every one of them. I have no doubt the Hawkins boys shot them--little
bloodthirsty wretches! Come down to the beach, Elizabeth."
They descended the steep and perilous footpath zig-zagging down the
face of the cliff, with the confidence of young goats, and reaching the
little bathing-house, sat down on the threshold. The tide was high, and
the surf seething within a few inches of the bottom step of the short
ladder up and down which they had glided bare-footed daily for so many
years. The fine spray damped their faces; the salt sea-breezes fanned
them deliciously. Patty put her arms impulsively round her sister's
neck.
"Oh, Elizabeth," she said, "I am so glad for you--I _am_ so glad! It
has crossed my mind several times, but I was never sure of it till
to-day, and I wouldn't say anything until I was sure, or until you told
me yourself."
"My darling," said Elizabeth, responding to the caress, "don't be sure
yet. _I_ am not sure."
"_You_ are not!" exclaimed Patty, with derisive energy. "Don't try to
make me believe you are a born idiot, now, because I know you too well.
Why, a baby in arms could see it!"
"I see it, dear, of course; both of us see it. We understand each
other. But--but I don't know yet whether I shall accept him, Patty."
"Don't you?" responded Patty. She had taken her arms from her sister's
neck, and was clasping her knees with them in a most unsympathetic
attitude. "Do you happen to know whether you love him, Elizabeth?"
"Yes," whispered Elizabeth, blushing in the darkness; "I know that."
"And whether he loves you?"
"Yes."
"Of course you do. You can't help knowing it. Nobody could. And if,"
proceeded Patty sternly, fixing the fatuous countenance of the man in
the moon with a baleful eye, "if, under those circumstances, you don't
accept him, you deserve to be a miserable, lonely woman for all the
rest of your wretched life. That's my opinion if you ask me for it."
Elizabeth looked at the sea in tranquil contemplation for a few
seconds. Then she told Patty the story of her perplexity from the
beginning to the end.
"Now _what_ would you do?" she finally asked of her sister, who had
listened with the utmost interest and intelligent sympathy. "If it were
your own case, my darling, and you wanted to do what was right, _how_
would you decide?"
"Well, Elizabeth," said Patty; "I'll tell you the truth. I should not
stop to think whether it was right or wrong."
"Patty!"
"No. A year ago I would not have said so--a year ago I might have been
able to give you the very best advice. But now--but now"--the girl
stretched out her hands with the pathetic gesture that Elizabeth had
seen and been struck with once before--"now, if it were my own case, I
should take the man I loved, no matter _what_ he was, if he would take
me."
Elizabeth heaved a long sigh from the bottom of her troubled heart. She
felt that Patty, to whom she had looked for help, had made her burden
of responsibility heavier instead of lighter. "Let us go up to the
house again," she said wearily. "There is no need to decide to-night."
When they reached the house, they found Eleanor gone to bed, and the
gentlemen sitting on the verandah together, still talking of Mr.
Yelverton's family history, in which the lawyer was professionally
interested. The horses were in the little buggy, which stood at the
gate.
"Ah, here they are!" said Mr. Brion. "Mr. Yelverton is waiting to say
good-night, my dears. He has to settle at the hotel, and go on board
to-night."
Patty bade her potential brother-in-law an affectionate farewell, and
then vanished into her bedroom. The old man bustled off at her heels,
under pretence of speaking to the lad-of-all-work who held the horses;
and Elizabeth and her lover were left for a brief interval alone.
"You will not keep me in suspense longer than you can help, will you?"
Mr. Yelverton said, holding her hands. "Won't a week be long enough?"
"Yes," she said; "I will decide it in a week."
"And may I come back to you here, to learn my fate? Or will you come to
Melbourne to me?"
"Had I not better write?"
"No. Certainly not."
"Then I will come to you," she said.
He drew her to him and kissed her forehead gravely. "Good-night, my
love," he said. "You will be my love, whatever happens."
And so he departed to the township, accompanied by his hospitable host,
and she went miserable to bed. And at the first pale streak of dawn
the little steamer sounded her whistle and puffed away from the little
jetty, carrying him back to the world, and she stood on the cliff, a
mile away from Seaview Villa, to watch the last whiff of smoke from its
funnels fade like a breath upon the horizon.