now,' said Stella, when the sisters were alone.
'About insisting on your visit? Oh, she means to show you the kingdoms
of the world and the glory thereof. And I expect it's not so much
Laurette as Ted. It's a change of venue so as to get a different
verdict. You have got into the habit of saying "no" at Fairacre, but in
that "smaller house" at Toorak, surrounded by magnates who have private
theatres and French cooks--after all, Laurette is very amusing.'
'Oh yes; for a day or two. But get a little below the surface, and she
always has the hard, crude touch of the social amateur. And Allie--how
could you be such a little jackdaw as to say that to her--about Prince
Charming?'
'Well, it was partly my instincts as an artist. I could not bear to
hear you give the light, graphic touches of the setting and leave out
the very core. Besides, even Laurette cannot unravel that little
mystery. Do you know, Stella, it's the nearest thing to a romance that
has happened for--twice one year. A great brilliant ball--a wonderful
Austrian band--electric lights, flowers--an introduction without
surnames--one dance--intellectual kinship--mysterious sympathy between
two souls--a long talk behind ferns and chaperons in an alcove--duty
thrown to the winds--till the fugitives are discovered by an irate
ci-devant lover who is down for two waltzes--separation without even a
lingering farewell--disappearance of the Prince before midnight--no
name--no trace. Even the people who got him the invitation depart next
day by the P. and O. steamer. Ah me! he was on his way to the Princess
of China--or to awaken the sleeping beauty with a kiss. Would I were
the sleeping beauty! He really had a distinguished air.'
'I wish Felix would overhear you,' said Stella, who listened to this
little rhapsody with a half-tender smile.
'Ah, my dear, when people are so desperately fond of each other as Felix
and I, the shadow of romance never eclipses their gaiety. But the more
I have thought over the episode, the more does it appear to me in the
light of an allegory. You were from childhood the victim of the ideal.
You always forsook your dolls when you perceived they were stuffed with
sawdust. When you found the kitten of commerce mewed by means of a
spring, you would have no more of it. And so in the central fact of a
woman's life, as someone has called marriage. You ask for better bread
than is made from wheat. Well, just for one evening you saw one cast in
that higher mould, and then you were for ever secured from disillusion.'
'Allie, you have got into one of your random fits. Remember, it is you
who have been spending yourself on theories and imaginings concerning
the unknown.'
'Ah, my dear, it is what you do not say that I try to interpret. But
take it, I say, as an allegory--not a real event; and then turn your
mind to the sober realities of life. Now confess, if at the end of
October you had not gone to a certain assembly, in November you would
have fulfilled your engagement and gone to Laurette--seen the Melbourne
Cup and made certain promises--renewed them, rather. Remember our
conversation two days before the ball, when our dresses came home.'
'I like your way of measuring life, Allie.'
'By the dressmaker's thread? Well, it's much more cheerful than that of
the Parae. But you do remember that conversation?
'Yes, I think we came to the conclusion that some people married because
they were in love; others because they thought they were; but the
majority because they couldn't be.'
'And that you belonged to the last named; but would very likely find the
unholy estate of matrimony as brilliant an affair as most others.'
'Well, for goodness' sake don't let us go on quoting ourselves as if we
were classics in Russia backs. I still hold to that. I begin to see
that Ted is my fate. I shall have to succumb. On the whole, it will be
less tiresome. And then I want to go to Rome and places.'
'You might have gone with Claude and Helen.'
'Well, it was heroic of them to offer to take me; but I think it would
have been still more heroic of me to have gone. Oh, every reason--Can
there be anything in life more unendurable than the confident air of
prosperity which envelops your newly-married couple? The melting stolen
glances, the becoming humility, the timid anxiety to please that in
pre-nuptial days marked their demeanour, disappear as if some witch had
exorcised them with black magic.'
'Oh, let it be white magic, Stella, if only for my sake!'
'Till at last we have that placid semi-unconsciousness of each other's
presence which decks your full-blown married pair as a cankerworm adorns
the rose.'
'Oh, Stella, Stella! I believe you really were born with a mistrust of
marriage,' laughed the elder sister.
'Yes; ever since I have been able to think or observe I have been
convinced that marriage is the most foolish, faulty old institution
going.'
Alice at this laughed louder than before; and then, still smiling, with
the joyous, confident smile of a woman triumphantly in love, she said:
'I wish, dear, you would throw out a few hints for the improvement of
this heaven-forsaken arrangement.'
'Well, you see, really to improve it would be to destroy it. To begin
with, people see too much of each other, which seems to be destructive
alike to passion and good manners. Oh yes; you are ready to _mourir a
rire_ at all this. Nevertheless, fate and the comedians are lying in
wait for you.'
'As for the comedians, I care nothing for them. Most of them were men
who married dreadful creatures--as even Moliere did. And fate--well,
the most terrible sting it can have is that after living all our lives
together, Felix and I may not die together.'
'Like the babes in the wood, or Philemon and Baucis.'
'Yes; or those dear old people one so often sees in common life, who
survive each other only a few quiet uncomplaining weeks or months. But
as for you, Stella--well, I suppose you would have your husband come
with his hat in his hand, asking in an agitated voice when he might pay
you a morning call?'
'Yes; and then I would look at my ivory memory--the pretty one you gave
me a year ago, with a tablet for each day in the week--and I would say,
"To-morrow is Goethe's birthday, and I see only people who write sonnets
in honour of that occasion. Ah, but yours, my friend, do not scan! No;
nothing in prose, however felicitous, will pass muster."'
'Well, the next day--wouldn't you let him come on the next day?' pleaded
Alice, a wicked light gleaming in her eyes.
'No; the next day, "I have an appointment with a white fairy rose-bush.
It has four hundred and fifty buds, and some of them have promised to
open on that day. Well, yes; perhaps Wednesday. But, mind, you must be
very amusing, and whatever you do, don't tell me old stories."'
And so, grave and gay by turns, they talked of love and marriage, as
girls are wont to do in the sheltered sanctuary of the parental home,
while life is a sort of isthmus between early youth and the deeper
responsibilities of womanhood. Behind them lies childhood, full of
sunshine and laughter, of bird calls and opening roses and passionate
little griefs that passed into oblivion in the sleep that came with the
glimmering twilight. Yes; looking backward there lie the fairest
meadows, sunny nooks made cosier with the blue haze of smoke rising from
familiar hearths; and always in the air the refrain of cradle songs, the
sound of bells calling to prayer, the faces and voices that they first
loved, that they must love to the end. They are still merely onlookers,
seeing but selected replicas of the play of life, jealously guarded from
the vulgar collisions of the crowd. But what is there on the farther
side of the isthmus? It is far off, and the land is veiled in mist.
But there are arenas there in which terrible things happen. There is
reckless trampling as of wild beasts, and there are dark stains of
bloodshed quickly sanded over. Often there come rumours of those
overtaken with worse than the throes of dissolution. The shadow of the
valley of life is much more intolerable oftentimes than that of death.
There are whirlpools that suck in more than life.
And those who have been so delicately guarded: will their path trend
towards sinister pitfalls? will they be overtaken by those catastrophes
that mutilate human lives, smitten with those fiery darts that with a
touch work moral paralysis? How will it be with them in the unborn
years, far from the old sacred shelter of their early home? Will they
moan for help in the darkness, with no ear to listen to their cry?
Ah, dear God! how strange and pitiful it all is--this incredible saga of
human life, whose beginning we have lost, whose end we cannot tell; in
which we lose one by one those who are our companions, and in the end
lose ourselves; in which we are first robbed of all we love, and then of
all we know.
The sisters had wandered from lighter topics, and were talking in hushed
tones of their father's death, when Mr. Edward Ritchie was announced,
and the young man entered with that air so characteristic of him, of
being in and belonging wholly to a world without visions or anxious
forecasts. His mere presence threw discredit on the sophistry of
speculation. He was, to use an old figure of speech, for ever planting
cabbages, and when one foot was on the ground the other was not far off.
Nothing in books, or the destiny of the race, or the life of the soul,
had ever moved him. But, then, he was never without a horse or two that
had achieved something wonderful, or were just going to do so, or might
do it if they chose. Without being exactly excited over this, he was so
deeply interested, and so sure people wanted to know all about it, that
he often, even in the breasts of those who cared little for equine
performances, created a glow of enthusiasm, which banished every subject
of a less abstract nature than an animal of good lineage, with four legs
and a mane.
There was Spindrift, now, who could do anything he liked at home, and
yet, put him on a race-course, you would swear he was dickey on every
leg he had got, and had sprung a hock into the bargain. It was enough
to make a fellow eat his hat, and the horse, too. And such a beautiful
creature--almost perfect in all his points--perhaps the shoulders were
not quite oblique enough. But the only thing by which you could guess
there was a bad 'nick' in him was his eye. Never trust a horse unless
his eye is bold and full, etc., etc.
Ted's ostensible mission, on this occasion, was to invite the Courtlands
to a dinner-party at his father's house before Cuthbert left for
Melbourne.
'My mother and I put our heads together, and planned it after Larry came
to see you to-day,' he explained. 'When Larry comes on a visit to the
old house now, she wants to drive everyone tandem, full swing. But we
just gave her the slip, and settled how many and all, and I wouldn't
even wait till to-morrow morning--I shall be here at ten sharp to take
you out riding, you know, Stella. I thought perhaps Cuth might have
some parsonic concern on, if he didn't get early notice.'
'But a dinner-party on the 26th December!' said Stella, in a voice of
consternation. 'Everyone will be so frightfully used up with the
tradespeople's Christmas cards, and the heat, and the Athanasian Creed
the day before!'
But Ted overruled every objection. He had to return to Strathhaye soon
after Christmas, and the 26th was the only day, and come they must.
Then the three went out into the garden to see the sun set across the
sea, which was one of the traditions at Fairacre. All over the west the
heavens seemed on fire, and underneath lay the sea, wide and silvery,
and calm as a great inland lake. A white-sailed craft going southward
stood out with startling distinctness.
'Where lies the land to which yon ship must go?' said Stella, watching
its course with a far look in her eyes.
'To Normanton, I expect, for potatoes,' said Ted promptly.
And then when his companions laughed involuntarily at this explanation,
he asked very placidly where the joke came in.
'Well, Ted, you must know that a man called Wordsworth wrote sonnets,
and that is a line out of one of them,' said Alice.
'I'm blessed if ever I could make out why these old buffers of poets
want to jaw so much about things. If he didn't know where the boat was
going, why didn't he ask at a shipping office, instead of writing a
sonnet?'
This reflection, delivered in a wondering, half-aggrieved tone, made
Stella laugh more than before. Though Ted could not always very well
divine the cause of her clear rippling laughter, no sound was pleasanter
to his ears. The elder sister watched the two with an amused interest
that was always renewed. It was apparent that the blunt, shrewd way in
which the young man so forcibly used his limited outlook on life, formed
a kind of attraction to the girl, who had that wide sympathetic range of
view which a many-sided culture imparts; who was infected, too, by that
dreamy, sceptical attitude of mind born of a nature innately
introspective, and early inured to flights in mental dialectics.
'I suppose I ought to go now,' said Ted lingeringly.
'No; stay to dinner and spend the evening with us,' said Alice. 'Oh, it
doesn't matter about your clothes. Tom and Cuth seldom dress when we
dine _en famille_ in the summer-time.'
'Will you play two-handed _euchre_ with me for sixpenny points if I
stay, Stella?'
'Oh, I must play for love.'
Ted coloured with pleasure to the roots of his hair, and Stella hastened
to explain.
'You see, it is near the end of the quarter, and I have nothing in my
purse but a doubtful threepenny-bit and a damaged stamp.'
*CHAPTER IV.*
Godolphin House, the town residence of Sir Edward Ritchie, was a large
pile of buildings near the foot of the hills, a few miles to the
south-west of Adelaide. Everything was on a large scale--the house, the
grounds, the conservatories, the trees, and even the views. The place
had been well planned and built, from the neat little semi-Swiss lodge
at the chief entrance, to the handsome gable-ended stables, with their
luxurious appointments, at some distance to the rear of the house; and
the house itself lacked no comfort or convenience of modern days, and,
to a certain extent, had been even pleasant to the eye, till, in an evil
hour, the emissary of a great 'decorative' firm had prevailed on Sir
Edward to have the 'mansion' 'done up' from top to toe. This took the
form of a carnival of unlimited expenditure, and that unhappy outburst
of British Philistinism known as the aesthetic craze. There was one
apartment, known as the peacock-room, which upset an old Bush comrade of
Sir Edward's in a surprising way. The man was one to whom money had no
value apart from the excitement of earning and losing it. His life was
impartially spent in tents in the wilderness and costly hotels. He and
Sir Edward had worked together as wood sawyers in a great gum-forest for
over seven years. This long period of hard lucrative work had laid the
foundation of the worthy knight's large fortune, while for the other man
it started the habit of alternately drinking bad champagne, etc., at a
guinea a bottle, out of a quart jug, and humping his swag to the last
new rush. For it was always gold that attracted him, and that, with
astonishing frequency, retrieved his fallen fortunes. But through all
the reverses of the one, and the climbing grandeurs of the other, the
friendship between the two men was unbroken.
It was when Godolphin House was at its most appalling stage of
unmodified aestheticism--from sage-green portieres to nymphs with
exaggerated chins holding bronze lamps aloft--that the Bushman paid one
of his periodical visits. Sir Edward took him all over the house, and
finally the two sat down in the peacock-room. Here they dug their
saw-pits and felled mighty giants of the forest over again. But the
more adventurous spirit had recently 'knocked down' a large nugget, and
his nerves were not what they ought to be.
'Ned, my boy, I can't stand these blazing eyes any longer. They get
upon my liver somehow. I'll take a turn in the fresh air.' With that
he stepped on the terrace, but the next moment he rushed back white and
breathless.
'Look here, old man, I must hook it out of this. Why, you've hung the
very birds with these damned staring eyes!' He had come upon a row of
peacocks sunning their gorgeous tails on the terrace on which he had
taken refuge.
Even Ted used to grumble that it was all very well to lick the place
into a cocked hat with screens, and fans, and dados, and soup-plates,
but it was a jolly shame not to leave a den or two in which a fellow
could live. Laurette adored all the transformations as long as they
were 'quite the thing'; but when the tide turned she wrought various
changes from time to time during her visits to her parents, and in
several rooms had quite wiped away the disgrace of conventional
aestheticism. But the air of 'no expenses spared,' and of being _en
rapport_ with a rampant art-decorator, who has forsworn the old honest
British hideousness for a sickly unreality, was apt to weigh heavy on
the spirits. It was a house in which above all others to taste the
wormwood of ennui to its last dregs; in which to be overcome by that
lassitude of body, and bitter languor of mind, in which these symptoms
may be successively noted.
You have a growing conviction that you can draw your breath but an hour
longer without a change of environment.
You find yourself yawning irretrievably when you essay to add your mite
to feeble anecdotes of the weather.
You find your face turning to stone when you strive with all the anguish
of despair to call up a smile in response to a faded joke.
You reply with withering platitudes to every observation, and you find
the kindliest attempt at pleasantry an unpardonable offence.
You sit on and on with the uncommunicating muteness of a fish, till you
are overpowered by the thought that if you do not creep into the
solitude of your own room you will be driven to commit some desperate
deed, so that you may be imprisoned or sent to an asylum for the insane,
or some equally genial retreat that will mercifully shield you from the
joys of social intercourse.
But the culmination of all was the library. It was a marvel in its way.
Horace Walpole somewhere speaks of one that contained only a broken
chair, a chart, and a lame telescope. But this was an enchanting bower
for the muses compared to a room full of lame and impotent compilations
in 'books' clothing.' Thinglets fit only to wrap candles in, or make
winding-sheets in Lent for pilchards, or keep butter in the market-place
from melting. There were rows upon rows of such stuff as the Rev.
Ebenezer Slipslop on Corinthians; awful Encyclopedias and Treasuries of
Knowledge, and biographies of self-made men who, to the prime sin of
having existed at all, added the no less unpardonable one of swelling
the dreariest form of fiction. So many and so many and such woe. In
proportion to the keen pleasure we associate with real books is the
gloom which the bare sight of such biblia-a-biblia can induce. The
tradition ran that Sir Edward had ordered 'a ton of books' from a
third-rate bookseller in distress, and that this enterprising tradesman
had bought up and bound for the Godolphin House library an astounding
collection of the young men's mutual improvement type of rubbish. There
was probably not a fact in the known world of the callow sort one hears
only to forget which did not repose on these shelves.
Even in venturing out in the grounds at Godolphin House, everything
still breathed of money recklessly lavished by hirelings. One was
constantly taken to gaze at some double or triple monstrosity,
perpetrated by gardeners who were so highly paid that it would
compromise them to let Nature have much of her own way.
When Ted returned to his father's house that night, he found Mrs.
Tareling--Larry as he usually called her--in a bitterly discontented
frame of mind.
'Who do you think has come to stay for two weeks, Ted?' she cried, the
moment she caught sight of him.
'Tareling?' questioned Ted carelessly, taking possession of one armchair
and resting his feet on another.
'Oh, you know very well he wouldn't come to stay so long, especially at
Christmas-time. It is Uncle John!'
'Well, I'm glad the old chap came while I'm here. It's ages since I saw
him. Did he bring aunt along with him?'
'Upon my word, Ted, you are horribly provoking sometimes. You take it as
coolly as if he were the most agreeable company in the world.'
'Well, one's relations aren't often that; but still, there they are, you
know, and there they were, before we showed our noses in the world. Has
the old man gone to bed?'
'Yes, long ago. That's his way. He'll go to bed when the hens do, that
he may rise at daybreak, to go creaking all over the house and burst
into guffaws of laughter at the decorations and things, and tell
abominable stories before the servants.'
'Now draw it mild, Larry. The old fellow can tell a shady yarn as well
as most men of his age, especially if he's a bit sprung, but he doesn't
before the servants, and I'm sure he wouldn't before you.'
'Oh, I don't mean what you call "shady yarns." It's much worse when he
tells how he left London as a stowaway, with two and threepence in his
pockets, and not a second shirt to his back.'
'Yes he had. Don't you remember the little bundle done up in a red
cotton handkerchief--a pair of go-ashore breeches and a Crimea shirt?'
'Goodness knows, I ought to remember it all; I've heard it often
enough.'
'Well, it's natural when a man comes to be sixty-eight he should like to
tell how he kicked up his heels at seventeen. If a horse has got much
gumption, he doesn't care to race after he's two years old. But a man
goes it as long as he can, and afterwards he likes to speak of the old
days. And, by Jove! it's only what you might expect,' added Ted
reflectively. 'I'd sooner be a stowaway, without even a bundle,
to-morrow, than be close on seventy with a million of money.'
'Ah, yes; but if you became a stowaway to-morrow, it would be a very
different tale. You've been brought up with the command of money and
servants, and never took your hat off to anyone save on equal terms.
But when Uncle John tells his stories, you know, he used to stand in his
smock frock, staring at the "gentry" as they drove by. And the way he
eats his soup, and chuckles when the servants say "your ladyship" to
mother!'
'You see, Larry, he didn't have four daughters to sit upon his manners,
and train him up the way he should go, like the governor,' said Ted,
smiling broadly, as certain reminiscences rose in his mind.
'The worst of it is that Colonel and Mrs. Aldersley are coming here from
Friday till Monday. Yes, they came over here from Melbourne three weeks
ago. They've been at Government House for two weeks. Look here, Ted,
couldn't you take the old man away somewhere during that time?'
'Well I'm blowed! You have got a cheek, Larry,' said Ted, sitting
straight up at this proposition. 'Smuggle the old bird away as if he
were a convict, and all for what? An elderly frump of a woman, who says
"Yes, to be sure," eighty times a day, and a man who would rook a young
cub that had hardly shed his milk teeth. Oh, I happen to know a good
deal about Aldersley. I tell you what, in the matter of
straightforward, fair play, the man isn't fit to brush Uncle John's
shoes!'
'He never wears shoes--it's always great creaking Wellington boots. And
can't you see, Ted, that to have embezzled money years and years ago
would be pardonable compared to taking an orange in your fist, and
sucking it at dessert, as Uncle John does? But nothing is so bad as his
stories; and it's no use interrupting him: he only gets red in the face
and talks louder.'
'Yes; as he did when he was telling once how he and father borrowed an
old donkey to go and see the young squire's first meet; and there were
you and Henrietta, pitching away about the Queen's drawing-room, at
which our Lotty was presented. By Jove, it was as good as a play,' and
Ted laughed.