The Three Miss Kings

"Dear me, how nice! —how comfortable!" exclaimed Mrs. Duff-Scott, sailing up to the hearth and seating herself in a deep leather chair. "Come in, Mr. Westmoreland. Come along to the fire, dears." And she called her brood around her. Eleanor, who had caressing ways, knelt down at her chaperon's feet on the soft oriental carpet, and she pulled out the frills of lace round the girl's white neck and elbows with a motherly gesture.

"Dear child!" she ejaculated fondly, "doesn't she" – appealing to her husband – "remind you exactly of a bit of fifteenth century Nankin?"

"I should like to see the bit of porcelain, Nankin or otherwise, that would remind me exactly of Miss Nelly," replied the gallant major, bowing to the kneeling girl. "I would buy that bit, whatever price it was."

"That's supposing you could get it," interrupted Mr. Westmoreland, with a laugh.

"It is the very shade of blue, with that grey tinge in it," murmured Mrs. Duff-Scott. But at the same time she was thinking of a new topic. "I have asked Mr. Yelverton to dine with us to-morrow, my dear," she remarked, suddenly, to her spouse. "We wanted another man to make up our number."

"Oh, have you? All right. I shall be very glad to see him. He's a gentlemanly fellow, is Yelverton. Very rich, too, they tell me. But we don't see much of him."

"No," said Mr. Westmoreland, withdrawing his eyes from the contemplation of Eleanor and her æsthetic gown, "he's not a society man. He don't go much into clubs, Yelverton. He's one of the richest commoners in Great Britain – give you my word, sir, he's got a princely fortune, all to his own cheek – and he lets his places and lives in chambers in Piccadilly, and spends nearly all his time when he's at home in the slums and gutters of Whitechapel. He's got a mania for philanthropy, unfortunately. It's an awful pity, for he really would be a good fellow."

At the word "philanthropy," the major made a clandestine grimace to Elizabeth, but composed his face immediately, seeing that she was not regarding him, but gazing with serious eyes at the narrator of Mr. Yelverton's peculiarities.

"He's been poking into every hole and corner," continued Mr. Westmoreland, "since he came here, overhauling the factory places, and finding out the prices of things, and the land regulations, and I don't know what. He's just been to Sandhurst, to look at the mines – doing a little amateur emigration business, I expect. Seems a strange thing," concluded the young man, thoughtfully, "for a rich swell of his class to be bothering himself about things of that sort."

Mrs. Duff-Scott had been listening attentively, and at this she roused herself and sat up in her chair. "It is the rich who should do it," said she, with energy. "And I admire him – I admire him, that he has given up his own selfish ease to help those whose lives are hard and miserable. I believe the squalid wretchedness of places like Whitechapel – though I have never been there – is something dreadful – dreadful! I admire him," she repeated defiantly. "I think it's a pity a few more of us are not like him. I shall talk to him about it. I – I shall see if I can't help him."

This time Elizabeth did look at the major, who was making a feint of putting his handkerchief to his eyes. She smiled at him sweetly, and then she walked over to Mrs. Duff-Scott, put her strong arms round the matron's shoulders, and kissed her fervently.

CHAPTER XXIV.

AN OLD STORY

Mrs. Duff-Scott's drawing-room, at nine or ten o'clock on Friday evening, was a pleasant sight. Very spacious, very voluptuous, in a subdued, majestic, high-toned way; very dim – with splashes of richness – as to walls and ceilings; very glowing and splendid – with folds of velvety darkness – as to window curtains and portières. The colouring of it was such as required a strong light to show how beautiful it was, but with a proud reserve, and to mark its unostentatious superiority over the glittering salons of the uneducated nouveaux riches, it was always more or less in a warm and mellow twilight, veiling its sombre magnificence from the vulgar eye. Just now its main compartment was lit by wax candles in archaic candlesticks amongst the flowers and bric-à-brac of an étagère over the mantelpiece, and by seven shaded and coloured lamps, of various artistic devices, judiciously distributed over the abundant table-space so as to suffuse with a soft illumination the occupants of most of the wonderfully stuffed and rotund chairs and lounges grouped about the floor; and yet the side of the room was decidedly bad for reading in. "It does not light up well," was the consolation of women of Mrs. Duff-Scott's acquaintance, who still clung to pale walls and primary colours and cut-glass chandeliers, either from necessity or choice. "Pooh!" Mrs. Duff-Scott used to retort, hearing of this just criticism; "as if I wanted it to light up!" But she had compromised with her principles in the arrangement of the smaller division of the room, where, between and beyond a pair of vaguely tinted portières, stood the piano, and all other material appliances for heightening the spiritual enjoyment of musical people. Here she had grudgingly retained the gas-burner of utilitarian Philistinism. It hung down from the ceiling straight over the piano, a circlet of gaudy yellow flames, that made the face of every plaque upon the wall to glitter. But the brilliant corona was borne in no gas-fitter's vehicle; its shrine was of dull brass, mediæval and precious, said to have been manufactured, in the first instance, for either papal or imperial purposes – it didn't matter which.

In this bright music-room was gathered to-night a little company of the elect – Herr Wüllner and his violin, together with three other stringed instruments and their human complement. Patty at the piano, Eleanor, Mrs. Duff-Scott, and half-a-dozen more enthusiasts – with a mixed audience around them. In the dim, big room beyond, the major entertained the inartistic, outlawed few who did not care, nor pretend to care, for aught but the sensual comfort of downy chairs and after dinner chit-chat. And, at the farthest end, in a recess of curtained window that had no lamps about it, sat Elizabeth and Mr. Yelverton, side by side, on a low settee – not indifferent to the pathetic wail of the far-distant violins, but finding more entertainment in their own talk than the finest music could have afforded them.

"I had a friend who gave up everything to go and work amongst the London poor – in the usual clerical way, you know, with schools and guilds and all the right and proper things. He used to ask me for money, and insist on my helping him with a lecture or a reading now and then, and I got drawn in. I had always had an idea of doing something – taking a line of some sort – and somehow this got hold of me. I couldn't see all that misery – you've no idea of it, Miss King – "

"I have read of it," she said.

"You would have to see it to realise it in the least. After I saw it I couldn't turn my back and go home and enjoy myself as if nothing had happened. And I had no family to consider. I got drawn in."

"And that is your work?" said Elizabeth. "I knew it."

"No. My friend talks of 'his work' – a lot of them have 'their work' – it's splendid, too – but they don't allow me to use that word, and I don't want it. What I do is all wrong, they say – not only useless, but mischievous."

"I don't believe it," said Elizabeth.

"Nor I, of course – though they may be right. We can only judge according to our lights. To me, it seems that when things are as bad as possible, a well meaning person can't make them worse and may make them better. They say 'no,' and argue it all out as plainly as possible. Yet I stick to my view – I go on in my own line. It doesn't interfere with theirs, though they say it does."

"And what is it?" she asked, with her sympathetic eyes.

"Well, you'll hardly understand, for you don't know the class – the lowest deep of all – those who can't be dealt with by the Societies – the poor wretches whom nothing will raise, and who are abandoned as hopeless, outside the pale of everything. They are my line."

"Can there be any abandoned as hopeless?"

"Yes. They really are so, you know. Neither religion nor political economy can do anything for them, though efforts are made for the children. Poor, sodden, senseless, vicious lumps of misery, with the last spark of soul bred out of them – a sort of animated garbage that cumbers the ground and makes the air stink – given up as a bad job, and only wanted out of the way – from the first they were on my mind more than all the others. And when I saw them left to rot like that, I felt I might have a free hand."

"And can you succeed where so many have failed?"

"Oh, what I do doesn't involve success or failure. It's outside all that, just as they are. They're only brutes in human shape – hardly human shape either; but I have a feeling for brutes. I love horses and dogs – I can't bear to see things suffer. So that's all I do – just comfort them where I can, in their own way; not the parson's way – that's no use. I wouldn't mock them by speaking of religion – I suppose religion, as we know it, has had a large hand in making them what they are; and to go and tell them that God ordained their miserable pariah-dog lot would be rank blasphemy. I leave all that. I don't bother about their souls, because I know they haven't got any; I see their wretched bodies, and that's enough for me. It's something not to let them go out of the world without ever knowing what it is to be physically comfortable. It eases my conscience, as a man who has never been hungry, except for the pleasure of it."

"And do they blame you for that?"

"They say I pauperise them and demoralise them," he answered, with a sudden laugh; "that I disorganise the schemes of the legitimate workers – that I outrage every principle of political economy. Well, I do that, certainly. But that I make things worse – that I retard the legitimate workers – I won't believe. If I do," he concluded, "I can't help it."

"No," breathed Elizabeth, softly.

"There's only one thing in which I and the legitimate workers are alike – everybody is alike in that, I suppose – the want of money. Only in the matter of beer and tobacco, what interest I could get on a few hundred pounds! What I could do in the way of filling empty stomachs and easing aches and pains if I had control of large means! What a good word 'means' is, isn't it? We want 'means' for all the ends we seek – no matter what they are."

"I thought," said Elizabeth, "that you were rich. Mr. Westmoreland told us so."

"Well, in a way, I am," he rejoined. "I hold large estates in my own name, and can draw fifty or sixty thousand a year interest from them if I like. But there have been events – there are peculiar circumstances in connection with the inheritance of the property, which make me feel myself not quite entitled to use it freely – not yet. I will use it, after this year, if nothing happens. I think I ought to; but I have put it off hitherto so as to make as sure as possible that I was lawfully in possession. I will tell you how it is," he proceeded, leaning forward and clasping his knee with his big brown hands. "I am used to speaking of the main facts freely, because I am always in hopes of discovering something as I go about the world. A good many years ago my father's second brother disappeared, and was never heard of afterwards. He and the eldest brother, at that time the head of the family, and in possession of the property, quarrelled about – well, about a woman whom both were in love with; and the elder one was found dead – shot dead – in a plantation not far from the house on the evening of the day of the quarrel, an hour after the total disappearance of the other. My uncle Kingscote – I was named after him, and he was my godfather – was last seen going out towards the plantation with his gun; he was traced to London within the next few days; and it was almost – but just not quite certainly – proved that he had there gone on board a ship that sailed for South America and was lost. He was advertised for in every respectable newspaper in the world, at intervals, for twenty years afterwards – during which time the estate was in Chancery, before they would grant it to my father, from whom it descended to me – and I should think the agony columns of all countries never had one message cast into such various shapes. But he never gave a sign. All sorts of apparent clues were followed up, but they led to nothing. If alive he must have known that it was all right, and would have come home to take his property. He must have gone down in that ship."

"But – oh, surely he would never have come back to take the property of a murdered brother!" exclaimed Elizabeth, in a shocked voice.

"His brother was not murdered," Mr. Yelverton replied. "Many people thought so, of course – people have a way of thinking the worst in these cases, not from malice, but because it is more interesting – and a tradition to that effect survives still, I am afraid. But my uncle's family never suspected him of such a crime. The thing was not legally proved, one way or the other. There were strong indications in the position of the gun which lay by his side, and in the general appearance of the spot where he was found, that my uncle, Patrick Yelverton, accidentally shot himself; that was the opinion of the coroner's jury, and the conviction of the family. But poor Kingscote evidently assumed that he would be accused of murder. Perhaps – it is very possible – some rough-tempered action of his might have caused the catastrophe, and his remorse have had the same effect as fear in prompting him to efface himself. Anyway, no one who knew him well believed him capable of doing his brother a mischief wilfully. His innocence was, indeed, proved by the fact that he married the lady who had been at the bottom of the trouble – by no fault of hers, poor soul! – after he escaped to London; and, wherever he went to, he took her with him. She disappeared a few days after he did, and was lost as completely, from that time. The record and circumstances of their marriage were discovered; and that was all. He would not have married her – she would not have married him – had he been a murderer."

"Do you think not?" said Elizabeth. "That is always assumed as a matter of course, in books – that murder and – and other disgraces are irrevocable barriers between those who love each other, when they discover them. But I do not understand why. With such an awful misery to bear, they would want all that their love could give them so much more– not less."

"You see," said Mr. Yelverton, regarding her with great interest, "it is a sort of point of honour with the one in misfortune not to drag the other down. When we are married, as when we are dead, 'it is for a long time.'"

Elizabeth made no answer, but there was a quiet smile about her lips that plainly testified to her want of sympathy with this view. After a silence of a few seconds, her companion leaned forward and looked directly into her face. "Would you stick to the man you loved if he had forfeited his good name or were in risk of the gallows? – I mean if he were really a criminal, and not only a suspected one?" he asked with impressive slowness.

"If I had found him worthy to be loved before that," she replied, speaking collectedly, but dismayed to find herself growing crimson, "and if he cared for me – and leant on me – oh, yes! It might be wrong, but I should do it. Surely any woman would. I don't see how she could help herself."

He changed his position, and looked away from her face into the room with a light in his deep-set eyes. "You ought to have been Elizabeth Leigh's daughter," he said. "I did not think there were any more women like her in the world."

"I am like other women," said Elizabeth, humbly, "only more ignorant."

He made no comment – they both found it rather difficult to speak at this point – and, after an expressive pause, she went on, rather hurriedly, "Was Elizabeth Leigh the lady who married your uncle?"

"Yes," he replied, bringing himself back to his story with an effort, "she was. She was a lovely woman, bright and clever, fond of dress and fun and admiration, like other women; but with a solid foundation to her character that you will forgive my saying is rare to your sex – as far, at least, as I am able to judge. I saw her when I was a little schoolboy, but I can picture her now, as if it were but yesterday. What vigour she had! What a wholesome zest for life! And yet she gave up everything to go into exile and obscurity with the man she loved. Ah, what a woman! She ought not to have died. She should have lived and reigned at Yelverton, and had a houseful of children. It is still possible – barely, barely possible – that she did live, and that I shall some day stumble over a handsome young cousin who will tell me that he is the head of the family."

"O no," said Elizabeth, "not after all these years. Give up thinking of such a thing. Take your own money now, as soon as you go home, and" – looking up with a smile – "buy all the beer and tobacco that you want."

CHAPTER XXV.

OUT IN THE COLD

Paul Brion, meanwhile, plodded on in his old groove, which no longer fitted him as it used to do, and vexed the soul of his benevolent landlady with the unprecedented shortness of his temper. She didn't know how to take him, she said, he was that cantankerous and "contrairy: " but she triumphantly recognised the result that she had all along expected would follow a long course of turning night into day, and therefore was not surprised at the change in him. "Your brain is over-wrought," she said, soothingly, when one day a compunctious spirit moved him to apologise for his moroseness; "your nervous system is unstrung. You've been going on too long, and you want a spell. You just take a holiday straight off, and go right away, and don't look at an ink-bottle for a month. It will save you a brain fever, mark my words." But Paul was consistent in his perversity, and refused to take good advice. He did think, for a moment, that he might as well have a little run and see how his father was getting on; and for several days he entertained the more serious project of "cutting" the colony altogether and going to seek his fortune in London. All the same, he stayed on with Mrs. M'Intyre, producing his weekly tale of political articles and promiscuous essays, and sitting up all night, and sleeping all the morning, with his habitual irregular regularity. But the flavour had gone out of work and recreation alike, and not all Mrs. Aarons's blandishments, which were now exercised upon him for an hour or two every Friday evening, were of any avail to coax it back again. Those three Miss Kings, whom his father had sent to him, and whom Mrs. Duff-Scott had taken away from him, had spoiled the taste of life. That was the fact, though he would not own it. "What care I? They are nothing to me," he used to say to himself when fighting an occasional spasm of rage or jealousy. He really persuaded himself very often that they were nothing to him, and that his bitter feeling was caused solely by the spectacle of their deterioration. To see them exchanging all their great plans and high aspirations for these vulgar social triumphs – giving up their studies at the Library to attend dancing classes, and to dawdle about the Block, and gossip in the Exhibition – laying aside their high-bred independence to accept the patronage of a fine lady who might drop them as suddenly as she took them up – was it not enough to make a man's heart bleed?

As for Patty, he made up his mind that he could never forgive her. Now and then he would steal out upon his balcony to listen to a Schubert serenade or a Beethoven sonata in the tender stillness of a summer night, and then he would have that sensation of bleeding at the heart which melted, and unnerved, and unmanned him; but, for the most part, every sight and sound and reminiscence of her were so many fiery styptics applied to his wound, scorching up all tender emotions in one great angry pain. Outwardly he shunned her, cut her – withered her up, indeed – with his ostentatiously expressed indifference; but secretly he spent hours of the day and night dogging her from place to place, when he ought to have been at work or in his bed, merely that he might get a glimpse of her in a crowd, and some notion of what she was doing. He haunted the Exhibition with the same disregard for the legitimate attractions of that social head-centre as prevailed with the majority of its visitors, to whom it was a daily trysting-place; and there he had the doubtful satisfaction of seeing her every now and then. Once she was in the Indian Court, so fragrant with sandalwood, and she was looking with ardent eyes at gossamer muslins and embroidered cashmeres, while young Westmoreland leaned on the glass case beside her in an attitude of insufferable familiarity. It was an indication, to the jealous lover, that the woman who had elevated her sex from the rather low place that it had held in his estimation before he knew her, and made it sacred to him for her sake, was, after all, "no better than the rest of them." He had dreamed of her as a man's true helpmate and companion, able to walk hand in hand with him on the high roads of human progress, and finding her vocation and her happiness in that spiritual and intellectual fellowship; and here she was lost in the greedy contemplation of a bit of fine embroidery that had cost some poor creature his eyesight already, and was presently to cost again what would perhaps provision a starving family for a twelvemonth – just like any other ignorant and frivolous female who had sold her soul to the demon of fashion. He marched home to Myrtle Street with the zeal of the reformer (which draws its inspiration from such unsuspected sources) red-hot in his busy brain. He lit his pipe, spread out his paper, dipped his pen in the ink-bottle, and began to deal with the question of "Woman's Clothes in Relation to her Moral and Intellectual Development" in what he conceived to be a thoroughly impersonal and benevolent temper. His words should be brief, he said to himself, but they should be pregnant with suggestive truth. He would lay a light touch upon this great sore that had eaten so deeply into one member of the body politic, causing all the members to suffer with it; but he would diagnose it faithfully, without fear or favour, and show wherein it had hindered the natural advancement of the race, and to what fatal issues its unchecked development tended. It was a serious matter, that had too long been left unnoticed by the leaders of the thought of the day. "It is a problem," he wrote, with a splutter of his pen, charging his grievance full tilt with his most effective term; "it is, we conscientiously believe, one of the great problems of this problem-haunted and problem-fighting age – one of the wrongs that it is the mission of the reforming Modern Spirit to set right – though the subject is so inextricably entangled and wrapped up in its amusing associations that at present its naked gravity is only recognised by the philosophic few. It is all very well to make fun of it; and, indeed, it is a very good thing to make fun of it – for every reform must have a beginning, and there is no better weapon than just and judicious ridicule wherewith Reason can open her attack upon the solid and solemn front of time-honoured Prejudice. The heavy artillery of argument has no effect until the enemy has contracted an internal weakness by being made to imbibe the idea that he is absurd. A little wit, in the early stage of the campaign, is worth a deal of logic. But still there it stands – this great, relentless, crushing, cruel CUSTOM (which requires capital letters to emphasise it suitably) – and there are moments when we can't be witty about it – when our hearts burn within us at the spectacle of our human counterpart still, with a few bright exceptions, in the stage of intellectual childhood, while we fight the battle of the world's progress alone – "

Here the typical strong-minded female, against whom he had fulminated in frequent wrath, suddenly appeared before him, side by side with a vision of Patty in her shell-pink Cup dress; and his sword arm failed him. He paused, and laid down his pen, and leaned his head on his hand; and he was thereupon seized with a raging desire to be rich, in order that he might buy Indian embroideries for his beloved, and clothe her like a king's daughter in glorious apparel. Somehow that remarkable paper which was to inaugurate so vast a revolution in the social system never got written. At least, it did not for two or three years, and then it came forth in so mild a form that its original design was unrecognisable. (N.B. – In this latest contribution to the Dress Reform Question, women, to the peril of their immortal intellects, were invited to make themselves as pretty as they could, no hard condition being laid upon them, save that they should try to dress to please the eyes of men instead of to rival and outshine each other – that they should cultivate such sense of art and reason as might happily have survived in them – and, above all, from the high principles of religion and philanthropy, that they should abstain from bringing in new fashions violently – or, indeed, at all – leaving the spirit of beauty and the spirit of usefulness to produce their healthy offspring by the natural processes. In the composition of this paper he had the great advantage of being able to study both his own and the woman's point of view.)