"THY PEOPLE SHALL BE MY PEOPLE."
Patty softened down the terms in which she made her declaration of
independence, when she found that it was received in so proper a
spirit. She asked them if they had _any objection_--which, after
telling them that it didn't matter whether they had or not, was a
graceful act, tending to make things pleasant without committing
anybody. But if they had objections (as of course they had) they
abandoned them at this crisis. It was no use to fight against Paul
Brion, so they accepted him, and made the best of him. The head of
the family suddenly and forcibly realised that he should have been
disappointed in his little sister-in law if she had acted otherwise;
and even Mrs. Duff-Scott, who would always so much rather help than
hinder a generous project, no matter how opposed to the ethics of her
class, was surprised herself by the readiness with which she turned her
back on faded old lords and dissipated young baronets, and gave herself
up to the pleasant task of making true lovers happy. Elizabeth repented
swiftly of her own disloyalty to plighted love, temporary and shadowy
as it was; and, seeing how matters really stood, acquiesced in the
situation with a sense of great thankfulness that her Patty was proved
so incorruptible by the tests she had gone through. Mrs. Yelverton's
only trouble was the fear of separation in the family, which the
ratification of the engagement seemed likely to bring about.
But Patty was dissuaded from her daring enterprise, as first proposed;
and Paul was written to by her brother and guardian, and adjured to
detach himself from his newspaper for a while and come to England
for a holiday--which, it was delicately hinted, might take the form
of a bridal tour. And in that little sitting-room, sacred to the
private interviews of the master and mistress of the house, great
schemes were conceived and elaborated for the purpose of seducing Mrs.
Brion's husband to remain in England for good and all. They settled
his future for him in what seemed to them an irresistibly attractive
way. He was to rent a certain picturesque manor-house in the Yelverton
neighbourhood, and there, keeping Patty within her sister's reach,
take up that wholesome, out-door country life which they were sure
would be so good for his health and his temper. He could do a little
high farming, and "whiles" write famous books; or, if his tastes and
habits unfitted him for such a humdrum career, he could live in the
world of London art and intellect, and be a "power" on behalf of those
social reforms for which his brother-in-law so ardently laboured.
Mr. Brion, senior, who had long ago returned to Seaview Villa, was,
of course, to be sent for back again, to shelter himself under the
broad Yelverton wing. The plan was all arranged in the most harmonious
manner, and Elizabeth's heart grew more light and confident every time
she discussed it.
Paul received his pressing invitation--which he understood to mean,
as it did, a permission to go and marry Patty from her sister's
house---just after having been informed by Mrs. Aarons, "as a positive
fact," that Miss Yelverton was shortly to be made a countess. He
did not believe this piece of news, though Mrs. Aarons, who had an
unaccountably large number of friends in the highest circles of London
society, was ready to vouch for its authenticity with her life, if
necessary; but, all the same, it made him feel moody, and surly, and
ill-used, and miserable. It was his dark hour before the dawn. In
Australia the summer was coming on. It was the middle of November. The
"Cup" carnival was over for another year. The war in Egypt was also
over, and the campaign of Murdoch's cricketers in England--two events
which it seemed somehow natural to bracket together. The Honourable
Ivo Bligh and his team had just arrived in Melbourne. The Austral had
just been sunk in Sydney Harbour. It was early summer with us here,
the brightest and gayest time of the whole year. In England the bitter
winter was at hand--that dreaded English winter which the Australian
shudders to think of, but which the Yelverton family had agreed to
spend in their ancestral house, in order to naturalise and acclimatise
the sisters, and that duty might be done in respect of those who had to
bear the full extent of its bitterness, in hunger, and cold, and want.
When Mr. Yelverton wrote to Paul to ask him to visit them, Patty wrote
also to suggest that his precious health might suffer by coming over at
such a season, and to advise him to wait until February or March. But
the moment her lover had read those letters, he put on his hat and went
forth to his office to demand leave for six months, and in a few days
was on board the returning mail steamer on his way to England. He did
not feel like waiting now--after waiting for two years--and she was not
in the least afraid that he would accept her advice.
Paul's answers arrived by post, as he was himself speeding through
Europe--not so much absorbed in his mission as to neglect note-making
by the way, and able to write brilliant articles on Gambetta's death,
and other affairs of the moment, while waiting for boat or train to
carry him to his beloved; and it was still only the first week in
January when they received a telegram at Yelverton announcing his
imminent arrival. Mr. Yelverton himself went to London to meet him,
and Elizabeth rolled herself in furs and an opossum rug in her snug
brougham and drove to the country railway station to meet them both,
leaving Patty sitting by the wood fire in the hall. Mrs. Duff-Scott
was in town, and Eleanor with her, trying to see Rossetti's pictures
through the murky darkness of the winter days, but in reality bent on
giving the long-divided lovers as much as possible of their own society
for a little while. The carriage went forth early in the afternoon,
with its lamps lighted, and it returned when the cold night had settled
down on the dreary landscape at five o'clock. Paul, ulstered and
comfortered, walked into the dimly-lighted, warm, vast space, hung
round with ghostly banners and antlers, and coats of mail, and pictures
whereof little was visible but the frames, and marched straight into
the ruddy circle of the firelight, where the small figure awaited him
by the twinkling tea-table, herself only an outline against the dusk
behind her; and the pair stood on the hearthrug and kissed each other
silently, while Elizabeth, accompanied by her husband, went to take her
bonnet off, and to see how Kingscote junior was getting on.
After that Paul and Patty parted no more. They had a few peaceful
weeks at Yelverton, during which the newspaper in Melbourne got
nothing whatever from the fertile brain of its brilliant contributor
(which, Patty thought, must certainly be a most serious matter for the
proprietors); and in which interval they made compensation for all past
shortcomings as far as their opportunities, which were profuse and
various, allowed. It delighted Paul to cast up at Patty the several
slights and snubs that she had inflicted on him in the old Myrtle
Street days, and it was her great luxury in life to make atonement for
them all--to pay him back a hundredfold for all that he had suffered on
her account. The number of "soft things" that she played upon the piano
from morning till night would alone have set him up in "Fridays" for
the two years that he had been driven to Mrs. Aarons for entertainment;
and the abject meekness of the little spitfire that he used to know
was enough to provoke him to bully her, if he had had anything of the
bully in him. The butter-like consistency to which she melted in this
freezing English winter time was such as to disqualify her for ever
from sitting in judgment upon Elizabeth's conjugal attitude. She fell
so low, indeed, that she became, in her turn, a mark for Eleanor's
scoffing criticism.
"Well, I never thought to see you grovel to any living being--let alone
a _man_--as you do to him," said that young lady on one occasion, with
an impudent smile. "The citizens of Calais on their knees to Edward the
Third were truculent swaggerers by comparison."
"You mind your own business," retorted Patty, with a flash of her
ancient spirit.
Whereat Nelly rejoined that she would mind it by keeping her _fiancé_
in his proper place when _her_ time came to have a _fiancé. She_ would
not let him put a rope round her neck and tie it to his button-hole
like a hat-string. She'd see him farther first.
February came, and Mrs. Duff-Scott returned, and preparations for the
wedding were set going. The fairy godmother was determined to make up
for the disappointment she had suffered in Elizabeth's case by making a
great festival of the second marriage of the family, and they let her
have her wish, the result being that the bride of the poor press-writer
had a _trousseau_ worthy of that coronet which she had extravagantly
thrown away, and presents the list and description of which filled a
whole column of the _Yelverton Advertiser_, and made the hearts of all
the local maidens to burn with envy. In March they were married in
Yelverton village church. They went to London for a week, and came back
for a fortnight; and in April they crossed the sea again, bound for
their Melbourne home.
For all the beautiful arrangements that had been planned for them fell
through. The Yelvertons had reckoned without their host--as is the
incurable habit of sanguine human nature--with the usual result. Paul
had no mind to abandon his chosen career and the country that, as a
true Australian, he loved and served as he could never love and serve
another, because he had married into a great English family; and Patty
would not allow him to be persuaded. Though her heart was torn in
two at the thought of parting with Elizabeth, and with that precious
baby who was Elizabeth's rival in her affections, she promptly and
uncomplainingly tore herself from both of them to follow her husband
whithersoever it seemed good to him to go.
"One cannot have everything in this world," said Patty philosophically,
"and you and I, Elizabeth, have considerably more than our fair share.
If we hadn't to pay something for our happiness, how could we expect it
to last?"