YELVERTON.
Patty went "home," and stayed there for two years; but it was never
home to her, though all her friends and connections, save one, were
with her--because that one was absent. She saw "the great Alps and the
Doge's palace," and all the beauty and glory of that great world that
she had so ardently dreamed of and longed for; travelling in comfort
and luxury, and enjoying herself thoroughly all the while. She was
presented at Court--"Miss Yelverton, by her sister, Mrs. Kingscote
Yelverton"--and held a distinguished place in the _Court Journal_ and
in the gossip of London society for the better part of two seasons. She
was taught to know that she was a beauty, if she had never known it
before; she was made to understand the value of a high social position
and the inestimable advantage of large means (and she did understand it
perfectly, being a young person abundantly gifted with common sense);
and she was offered these good things for the rest of her life, and a
coronet into the bargain. Nevertheless, she chose to abide by her first
choice, and to remain faithful to her penniless press writer under all
temptations. She passed through the fire of every trying ordeal that
the ingenuity of Mrs. Duff-Scott could devise; her unpledged constancy
underwent the severest tests that, in the case of a girl of her tastes
and character, it could possibly be subjected to; and at the end of a
year and a half, when the owner of the coronet above-mentioned raised
the question of her matrimonial prospects, she announced to him, and
subsequently to her family, that they had been irrevocably settled
long ago; that she was entirely unchanged in her sentiments and
relations towards Paul Brion; and that she intended, moreover, if they
had no objection, to return to Australia to marry him.
It was in September when she thus declared herself--after keeping
a hopeful silence, for the most part, concerning her love affairs,
since she disgraced herself before a crowd of people by weeping in
her sweetheart's arms on the deck of the mail steamer at the moment
when she was bidden by a cruel fate to part from him. The Yelverton
family had spent the previous winter in the South of Europe, "doing"
the palaces, and churches, and picture galleries that were such an
old story to most people of their class, but to the unsophisticated
sisters so fresh and wonderful an experience--an experience that
fulfilled all expectations, moreover, which such realisations of young
dreams so seldom do. Generally, when at last one has one's wish of
this sort, the spirit that conceived the charms and pleasures of it
is quenched by bodily wearinesses and vexations and the thousand and
one petty accidents that circumvent one's schemes. One is burdened
and fretted with uncongenial companions, perhaps, or one is worried
and hampered for want of money; or one is nervous or bilious, or one
is too old and careworn to enjoy as one might once have done; in some
way or other one's heart's desire comes to one as if only to show the
"leanness withal" in the soul that seemed (until thus proved) to have
such power to assimilate happiness and enrich itself thereby. But with
the Yelverton sisters there was no disillusionment of this sort. They
had their little drawbacks, of course. Elizabeth was not always in
good health; Patty pined for her Paul; Eleanor sprained her ankle and
had to lie on Roman sofas while the others were exploring Roman ruins
out of doors; and there were features about the winter, even in those
famous climes, which gave them sensible discomfort and occasionally
set them on the verge of discontent. But, looking back upon their
travels, they have no recollection of these things. Young, and strong,
and rich, with no troubles to speak of and the keenest appetites to
see and learn, they had as good a time as pleasure-seeking mortals
can hope for in this world; the memories of it, tenderly stored up to
the smallest detail, will be a joy for ever to all of them. On their
return to England they took up their abode in the London house, and for
some weeks they revelled delightedly in balls, drums, garden parties,
concerts, and so on, under the supervision and generalship of Mrs.
Duff-Scott; and they also made acquaintance with the widely-ramifying
Whitechapel institutions. Early in the summer Elizabeth and her husband
went to Yelverton, which in their absence had been prepared for "the
family" to live in again. A neighbouring country house and several
cottages had been rented and fitted up for the waifs and strays, where
they had been made as comfortable as before, and were still under the
eye of their protector; and the ancestral furniture that had been
removed for their convenience and its own safety was put back in its
place, and bright (no, not bright--Mrs. Duff-Scott undertook the task
of fitting them up--but eminently artistic and charming) rooms were
newly decorated and made ready for Elizabeth's occupation.
She went there early in June--she and her husband alone, leaving Mrs.
Duff-Scott and the girls in London. Mr. Yelverton had always a little
jealousy about keeping his wife to himself on these specially sacred
occasions, and he invited no one to join them during their first days
at home, and instructed Mr. Le Breton to repress any tendency that
might be apparent in tenants or _protégés_ to make a public festival of
their arrival there. The _rôle_ of squire was in no way to his taste,
nor that of Lady Bountiful to hers. And yet he had planned for their
home-coming with the utmost care and forethought, that nothing should
be wanting to make it satisfying and complete--as he had planned for
their wedding journey on the eve of their hurried marriage.
It is too late in my story to say much about Yelverton. It merits a
description, but a description would be out of place, and serve no
purpose now. Those who are familiar with old Elizabethan country seats,
and the general environment of a hereditary dweller therein, will
have a sufficient idea of Elizabeth's home; and those who have never
seen such things--who have not grown up in personal association with
the traditions of an "old family"--will not care to be told about it.
In the near future (for, though his brother magnates of the county,
hearing of the restoration of the house, congratulated themselves that
Yelverton's marriage had cured him of his crack-brained fads, he only
delivered her property intact to his wife in order that they might be
crack-brained together, at her instance and with her legal permission
in new and worse directions afterwards) Yelverton will lose many of
its time-honoured aristocratic distinctions; oxen and sheep will take
the place of its antlered herds, and the vulgar plough and ploughman
will break up the broad park lawns, where now the pheasant walks in
the evening, and the fox, stealing out from his cover, haunts for his
dainty meal. But when Elizabeth saw it that tender June night, just
when the sun was setting, as in England it only sets in June, all its
old-world charm of feudal state and beauty, jealously walled off from
the common herd outside as one man's heritage by divine right and for
his exclusive enjoyment, lay about it, as it had lain for generations
past. Will she ever forget that drive in the summer evening from the
little country railway station to her ancestral home?--the silent road,
with the great trees almost meeting overhead; the snug farm-houses, old
and picturesque, and standing behind their white gates amongst their
hollyhocks and bee-hives; the thatched cottages by the roadside, with
groups of wide-eyed children standing at the doors to see the carriage
pass; the smell of the hay and the red clover in the fields, and the
honeysuckle and the sweet-briar in the hedges; the sound of the wood
pigeons cooing in the plantations; the first sight of her own lodge
gates, with their great ramping griffins stonily pawing the air, and of
those miles and miles of shadow-dappled sward within, those mysterious
dark coverts, whence now and then a stag looked out at her and went
crashing back to his ferny lair, and those odorous avenues of beech
and lime, still haunted by belated bees and buzzing cockchafers, under
which she passed to the inner enclosure of lawns and gardens where the
old house stood, with open doors of welcome, awaiting her. What an old
house! She had seen such in pictures--in the little prints that adorned
old-fashioned pocket-books of her mother's time---but the reality, as
in the case of the Continental palaces, transcended all her dreams.
White smoke curled up to the sky from the fluted chimney-stacks; the
diamond-paned casements--little sections of the enormous mullioned
windows--were set wide to the evening breezes and sunshine; on the
steps before the porch a group of servants, respectful but not
obsequious, stood ready to receive their new mistress, and to efface
themselves as soon as they had made her welcome.
"It is more than my share," she said, almost oppressed by all these
evidences of her prosperity, and thinking of her mother's different
lot. "It doesn't seem fair, Kingscote."
"It is not fair," he replied. "But that is not your fault, nor mine.
We are not going to keep it all to ourselves, you and I--because a
king happened to fall in love with one of our grandmothers, who was
no better than she should be--which is our title to be great folks, I
believe. We are going to let other people have a share. But just for
a little while we'll be selfish, Elizabeth; it's a luxury we don't
indulge in often."
So he led her into the beautiful house, after giving her a solemn kiss
upon the threshold; and passing through the great hall, she was taken
to a vast but charming bedroom that had been newly fitted up for her
on the ground floor, and thence to an adjoining sitting-room, looking
out upon a shady lawn--a homely, cosy little room that he had himself
arranged for her private use, and which no one was to be allowed to
have the run of, he told her, except him.
"I want to feel that there is one place where we can be together,"
he said, "whenever we want to be together, sure of being always
undisturbed. It won't matter how full the house is, nor how much bustle
and business goes on, if we can keep this nest for ourselves, to come
to when we are tired and when we want to talk. It is not your boudoir,
you know--that is in another place--and it is not your morning room; it
is a little sanctuary apart, where nobody is to be allowed to set foot,
save our own two selves and the housemaid."
"It shall be," said his wife, with kindling eyes. "I will take care of
that."
"Very well. That is a bargain. We will take possession to-night. We
will inaugurate our occupation by having our tea here. You shall not be
fatigued by sitting up to dinner--you shall have a Myrtle Street tea,
and I will wait on you."
She was placed in a deep arm-chair, beside a hearth whereon burned the
first wood fire that she had seen since she left Australia--billets
of elm-wood split from the butts of dead and felled giants that had
lived their life out on the Yelverton acres--with her feet on a rug
of Tasmanian opossum skins, and a bouquet of golden wattle blossoms
(procured with as much difficulty in England as the lilies of the
valley had been in Australia) on a table beside her, scenting the room
with its sweet and familiar fragrance. And here tea was brought in--a
dainty little nondescript meal, with very little about it to remind her
of Myrtle Street, save its comfortable informality; and the servant was
dismissed, and the husband waited upon his wife--helping her from the
little savoury dishes that she did not know, nor care to ask, the name
of--pouring the cream into the cup that for so many years had held her
strongest beverage, dusting the sugar over her strawberries--all the
time keeping her at rest in her soft chair, with the sense of being
at home and in peace and safety under his protection working like a
delicious opiate on her tired nerves and brain.
This was how they came to Yelverton. And for some days thereafter they
indulged in the luxury of selfishness--they took their happiness in
both hands, and made all they could of it, conscious they were well
within their just rights and privileges--gaining experiences that all
the rest of their lives would be the better for, and putting off from
day to day, and from week to week, that summons to join them, which the
matron and girls in London were ready to obey at a moment's notice.
Husband and wife sat in their gable room, reading, resting, talking,
love-making. They explored all the nooks and corners of their old
house, investigated its multifarious antiquities, studied its bygone
history, exhumed the pathetic memorials of the Kingscote and Elizabeth
whose inheritance had come to them in so strange a way. They rambled
in the beautiful summer woods, she with her needlework, he with his
book--sometimes with a luncheon basket, when they would stay out all
day; and they took quiet drives, all by themselves in a light buggy,
as if they were in Australia still--apparently with no consciousness
of that toiling and moiling world outside their park-gates which had
once been of so much importance to them. And then one day Elizabeth
complained of feeling unusually tired. The walks and drives came to an
end, and the sitting-room was left empty. There was a breathless hush
all over the great house for a little while; whispers and rustlings to
and fro; and then a little cry--which, weak and small as it was, and
shut in with double doors and curtains, somehow managed to make itself
heard from the attic to the basement--announced that a new generation
of Yelvertons of Yelverton had come into the world.
Mrs. Duff-Scott returned home from a series of Belgravian
entertainments, with that coronet of Patty's capture on her mind,
in the small hours of the morning following this eventful day; and
she found a telegram on her hall table, and learned, to her intense
indignation, that Elizabeth had dared to have a baby without her (Mrs.
Duff-Scott) being there to assist at the all-important ceremony.
"It's just like him," she exclaimed to the much-excited sisters, who
were ready to melt into tears over the good news. "It is just what I
expected he would do when he took her off by herself in that way. It
is the marriage over again. He wants to manage everything in his own
fashion, and to have no interference from anybody. But this is really
carrying independence too far. Supposing anything had gone wrong
with Elizabeth? And how am I to know that her nurse is an efficient
person?--and that the poor dear infant will be properly looked after?"
"You may depend," said Patty, who did not grudge her sister her new
happiness, but envied it from the bottom of her honest woman's heart,
"You may depend he has taken every care of that. He is not a man to
leave things to chance--at any rate, not where _she_ is concerned."
"Rubbish!" retorted the disappointed matron, who, though she had had
no children of her own--perhaps because she had had none--had looked
forward to a vicarious participation in Elizabeth's experiences at
this time with the strongest interest and eagerness; "as if a man has
any business to take upon himself to meddle at all in such matters! It
is not fair to Elizabeth. She has a right to have us with her. I gave
way about the wedding, but here I must draw the line. She is in her
own house, and I shall go to her at once. Tell your maid to pack up,
dears--we will start to-morrow."
But they did not. They stayed in London, with what patience they could,
subsisting on daily letters and telegrams, until the season there was
over, and the baby at Yelverton was three weeks old. Then, though no
explanations were made, they became aware that they would be no longer
considered _de trop_ by the baby's father, and rushed from the town to
the country house with all possible haste.
"You are a tyrant," said Mrs. Duff-Scott, when the master came forth to
meet her. "I always said so, and now I know it."
"I was afraid she would get talking and exerting herself too much if
she had you all about her," he replied, with his imperturbable smile.
"And you didn't think that _we_ might possibly have a grain of sense,
as well as you?"
"I didn't think of anything," he said coolly, "except to make sure of
her safety as far as possible."
"O yes, I know"--laughing and brushing past him--"all you think of is
to get your own way. Well, let us see the poor dear girl now we are
here. I know how she must have been pining to show her baby to her
sisters all this while, when you wouldn't let her."
The next time he found himself alone with his wife, Mr. Yelverton asked
her, with some conscientious misgiving, whether she _had_ been pining
for this forbidden pleasure, and whether he really was a tyrant.
Of course, Elizabeth scouted any suggestion of such an idea as most
horrible and preposterous, but the fact was--
Never mind. We all have our little failings, and the intelligent reader
will not expect to find the perfect man any more than the perfect
woman in this present world. And if he--or, I should say, she--_could_
find him, no doubt she would be dreadfully disappointed, and not like
him half so well as the imperfect ones. Elizabeth, who, as Patty had
predicted, was "butter" in his hands, would not have had her husband
less fond of his own way on any account.
For some time everybody was taken up with the baby, who was felt to be
the realisation of that ideal which Dan and the magpies had faintly
typified in the past. Dan himself lay humbly on the hem of the mother's
skirts, or under her chair, resting his disjointed nose on his paws,
and blinking meditatively at the rival who had for ever superseded
him. Like a philosophical dog as he was, he accepted superannuation
without a protest as the inevitable and universal lot, and, when no one
took any notice of him, coiled himself on the softest thing he could
find and went to sleep, or if he couldn't go to sleep, amused himself
snapping at the English flies. The girls forgot, or temporarily laid
aside, their own affairs, in the excitement of a constant struggle
for possession of the person of the little heir, whom they regarded
with passionate solicitude or devouring envy and jealousy according
as they were successful or otherwise. The nurse's post was a sinecure
at this time. The aunts hushed the infant to sleep, and kept watch by
his cradle, and carried him up and down the garden terraces with a
parasol over his head. The mother insisted upon performing his toilet,
and generally taking a much larger share of him than was proper for
a mother in her rank of life; and even Mrs. Duff-Scott, for whom
china had lost its remaining charms, assumed privileges as a deputy
grandmother which it was found expedient to respect. In this absorbing
domesticity the summer passed away. The harvest of field and orchard
was by-and-by gathered in; the dark-green woods and avenues turned
red, and brown, and orange under the mellow autumn sun; the wild
fruits in the hedgerows ripened; the swallows took wing. To Yelverton
came a party of guests--country neighbours and distinguished public
men, of a class that had not been there a-visiting for years past;
who shot the well-stocked covers, and otherwise disported themselves
after the manner of their kind. And amongst the nobilities was that
coronet, that incarnation of dignity and magnificence, which had been
singled out as an appropriate mate for Patty. It, or he, was offered
in form, and with circumstances of state and ceremony befitting the
great occasion; and Patty was summoned to a consultation with her
family--every member of which, not even excepting Elizabeth herself,
was anxious to see the coronet on Patty's brow (which shows how
hereditary superstitions and social prejudices linger in the blood,
even after they seem to be eradicated from the brain)--for the purpose
of receiving their advice, and stating her own intentions.
"My intention," said Patty, firmly, with her little nose uplifted,
and a high colour in her face, "is to put an end to this useless and
culpable waste of time. The man I love and am _engaged to_ is working,
and slaving, and waiting for me; and I, like the rest of you, am
neglecting him, and sacrificing him, as if he were of no consequence
whatever. _This_ shows me how I have been treating him. I will not
do it any more. I did not become Miss Yelverton to repudiate all I
undertook when I was only Patty King. I am Yelverton by name, but I am
King by nature, still. I don't want to be a great swell. I have seen
the world, and I am satisfied. Now I want to go home to Paul--as I
ought to have done before. I will ask you, if you please, Kingscote, to
take my passage for me at once. I shall go back next month, and I shall
marry Paul Brion as soon as the steamer gets to Melbourne."
Her brother-in-law put out his hand, and drew her to him, and kissed
her. "Well done," he said, speaking boldly from his honest heart. "So
you shall."