The Three Miss Kings

Very cheerfully did Mr. Yelverton come forward to greet his beloved, albeit a little moved with the sentiment of the occasion. He had parted from her in a ball-room, with a half-spoken confession of – something that she knew all about quite as well as he did – on his lips; and he had followed her now to say the rest, and to hear what she had to reply to it. This was perfectly understood by both of them, as they shook hands, with a little conventional air of unexpectedness, and he told her that he had come at Mrs. Duff-Scott's orders.

"She could not rest," he said, gravely, "until she was sure that you had found pleasant quarters, and were comfortable. She worried about you – and so she sent me up."

"It was troubling you too much," Elizabeth murmured, evading his direct eyes, but quite unable to hide her agitation from him.

"You say that from politeness, I suppose? No, it was not troubling me at all – quite the contrary. I am delighted with my trip. And I am glad," he concluded, dropping his voice, "to see the place where you were brought up. This was your home, was it not?" He looked all round him.

"It was not like this when we were here," she replied. "The house was old then – now it is new. They have done it up."

"I see. Have you a sketch of it as it used to be? You draw, I know. Mrs. Duff-Scott has been showing me your drawings."

"Yes, I have one. It hangs in the Melbourne sitting-room."

Mr. Brion broke in upon this dialogue. "Now, my dears, I think we are all ready," he said. "Elizabeth, you and I will go in the little buggy and lead the way. Perhaps Mr. Yelverton will be good enough to take charge of the two young ladies. Will you prefer to drive yourself, Mr. Yelverton?"

Mr. Yelverton said he preferred to be driven, as he was not acquainted with the road; and Elizabeth, throned in the seat of honour in the little buggy, looked back with envious eyes to watch his arrangements for her sisters' comfort. He put Patty beside the groom on the front seat, and carefully tucked her up from the dust; and then he placed Eleanor at the back, climbed to her side, and opened a large umbrella which he held so that it protected both of them. In this order the two vehicles set forth, and for the greater part of the way, owing to the superior lightness of the smaller one, they were not within sight of each other; during which time Elizabeth was a silent listener to her host's amiable prattle, and reproaching herself for not feeling interested in it. She kept looking through the pane of glass behind her, and round the side of the hood, and wondering where the others were, and whether they were keeping the road.

"Oh, they can't miss it," was Mr. Brion's invariable comment. "They will follow our tracks. If not, the man knows our destination."

For the old lawyer was making those short cuts which are so dear to all Jehus of the bush; preferring a straight mile of heavy sand to a devious mile and a quarter of metal, and ploughing through the stiff scrub that covered the waste moors of the district rather by the sun's than by the surveyor's direction. It made the drive more interesting, of course. The bushes that rustled through the wheels and scratched the horses' legs were wonderful with wild flowers of every hue, and the orchids that were trampled into the sand, and gathered by handfuls to die in the buggy, were remarkable for their fantastic variety. And then there were lizards and butterflies, and other common objects of the country, not so easily discerned on a beaten track. But Elizabeth could not bring herself to care much for these things to-day.

They reached high land after a while, whence, looking back, they saw the other buggy crawling towards them a mile or two away, and, looking forward, saw, beyond a green and wild foreground, the brilliant sea again, with a rocky cape jutting out into it, sprinkled with a few white houses on its landward shoulder – a scene that was too beautiful, on such a morning, to be disregarded. Here the girl sat at ease, while the horses took breath, thoroughly appreciating her opportunities; wondering, not what Mr. Yelverton was doing or was going to do, but how it was that she had never been this way before. Then Mr. Brion turned and drove down the other side of the hill, and exclaimed "Here we are!" in triumph.

It was a shallow basin of a dell, in the midst of romantic glens, sandy, and full of bushes and wild flowers, and bracken and tussocky grass, and shady with tall-stemmed gum trees. As the buggy bumped and bounced into the hollow, shaving the dead logs that lay about in a manner which reflected great credit upon the lawyer's navigation, Elizabeth, feeling the cool shadows close over her head, and aware that they had reached their destination, looked all round her for the yawning cavern that she had specially come to see.

"Where are the caves?" she inquired – to Mr. Brion's intense gratification.

"Ah, where are they?" he retorted, enjoying his little joke. "Well, we have just been driving over them."

"But the mouth, I mean?"

"Oh, the mouth – the mouth is here. We were very nearly driving over that too. But we'll have lunch first, my dear, before we investigate the caves – if it's agreeable to you. I will take the horses out, and we'll find a nice place to camp before they come."

Presently the other buggy climbed over the ridge and down into the hollow; and Mr. Yelverton beheld Elizabeth kneeling amongst the bracken fronds, with the dappled sun and shade on her bare head and her blue cotton gown, busily trying to spread a table-cloth on the least uneven piece of ground that she could find, where it lay like a miniature snow-clad landscape, all hills except where the dishes weighed it to the earth. He hastened to help her as soon as he had lifted Patty and Eleanor from their seats.

"You are making yourself hot," he said, with his quiet air of authority and proprietorship. "You sit down, and let me do it. I am quite used to commissariat business, and can set a table beautifully." He took some tumblers from her hand, and, looking into her agitated face, said suddenly, "I could not help coming, Elizabeth – I could not leave it broken off like that – I wanted to know why you ran away from me – and Mrs. Duff-Scott gave me leave. You will let me talk to you presently?"

"Oh, not now – not now!" she replied, in a hurried, low tone, turning her head from side to side. "I must have time to think – "

"Time to think!" he repeated, with just a touch of reproach in his grave surprise. And he put down the tumblers carefully, got up, and walked away. Upon which, Elizabeth, reacting violently from the mood in which she had received him, had an agonising fear that he would impute her indecision to want of love for him, or insensibility to his love for her – though, till now, that had seemed an impossibility. In a few minutes he returned with her sisters and Mr. Brion, all bearing dishes and bottles, and buggy cushions and rugs; and, when the luncheon was ready, and the groom had retired to feed and water his horses, she lifted her eyes to her tall lover's face with a look that he understood far better than she did. He quietly came round from the log on which he had been about to seat himself, and laid his long limbs on the sand and bracken at her side.

"What will you have?" he asked carelessly; "roast beef and salad, or chicken pie? I can recommend the salad, which has travelled remarkably well." And all the time he was looking at her with happy contentment, a little smile under his red moustache; and her heart was beating so that she could not answer him.

The luncheon was discussed at leisure, and, as far as Mr. Brion could judge, was a highly successful entertainment. The younger girls, whatever might be going to happen to-morrow, could not help enjoying themselves to-day – could not help getting a little intoxicated with the sweetness of the summer air and the influences of the scene generally, and breaking out in fun and laughter; even Elizabeth, with her desperate anxieties, was not proof against the contagion of their good spirits now and then. The travelled stranger, who talked a great deal, was the most entertaining of guests, and the host congratulated himself continually on having added him to the party. "We only want Paul now to make it all complete," said the happy old man, as he gave Patty, who had a dreadful appetite after her long drive, a second helping of chicken pie.

When the sylvan meal was ended, and the unsightly remnants cleared away, the two men smoked a soothing cigarette under the trees, while the girls tucked up their clean gowns a little and tied handkerchiefs over their heads, and then Mr. Brion, armed with matches and a pound of candles, marched them off to see the caves. He took them but a little way from where they had camped, and disclosed in the hillside what looked like a good-sized wombat or rabbit hole. "Now, you stay here while I go and light up a bit," he said, impressively, and he straightway slid down and disappeared into the hole. They stooped and peered after him, and saw a rather muddy narrow shaft slanting down into the earth, through which the human adult could only pass "end on." The girls were rather dismayed at the prospect.

"It is a case of faith," said Mr. Yelverton. "We must trust ourselves to Mr. Brion entirely or give it up."

"We will trust Mr. Brion," said Elizabeth.

A few minutes later the old man's voice was heard from below. "Now, come along! Just creep down for a step or two, and I will reach your hand. Who is coming first?"

They looked at each other for a moment, and Patty's quick eye caught something from Mr. Yelverton's. "I will go first," she said; "and you can follow me, Nelly." And down she went, half sliding, half sitting, and when nearly out of sight stretched up her arm to steady her sister. "It's all right," she cried; "there's plenty of room. Come along!"

When they had both disappeared, Mr. Yelverton took Elizabeth's unlighted candle from her hand and put it into his pocket. "There is no need for you to be bothered with that," he said: "one will do for us." And he let himself a little way down the shaft, and put up his hand to draw her after him.

In a few seconds they stood upright, and were able, by the light of the three candles just dispersing into the interior, to see what kind of place they had come to. They were limestone caves, ramifying underground for a quarter of a mile or so in direct length, and spreading wide on either side in a labyrinth of chambers and passages. The roof was hung with a few stalactites, but mostly crusted with soft bosses, like enormous cauliflowers, that yielded to the touch; lofty in places, so that the candle-light scarcely reached it, and in places so low that one could not pass under it. The floor, if floor it could be called, was a confusion of hills and vales and black abysses, stony here, and dusty there, and wet and slippery elsewhere – altogether an uncanny place, full of weird suggestions. The enterprising and fearless Patty was far ahead, exploring on her own account, and Mr. Brion, escorting Eleanor, dwindling away visibly into a mere pin's point, before Mr. Yelverton and Elizabeth had got their candle lighted and begun their investigations. A voice came floating back to them through the immense darkness, duplicated in ever so many echoes: "Are you all right, Elizabeth?"

"Yes," shouted Mr. Yelverton instantly, like a soldier answering to the roll-call. Then he took her hand, and, holding the candle high, led her carefully in the direction of the voice. She was terribly nervous and excited by the situation, which had come upon her unawares, and she had an impulse to move on hastily, as if to join her sisters. Bat her lover held her back with a turn of his strong wrist.

"Don't hurry," he said, in a tone that revealed to her how he appreciated his opportunity, and how he would certainly turn it to account; "it is not safe in such a place as this. And you can trust me to take care of you as well as Mr. Brion, can't you?"

She did not answer, and he did not press the question. They crept up, and slid down, and leapt over, the dark obstructions in their devious course for a little while in silence – two lonely atoms in the vast and lifeless gloom. Fainter and fainter grew the voices in the distance – fainter and fainter the three tiny specks of light, which seemed as far away as the stars in heaven. There was something dreadful in their isolation in the black bowels of the earth, but an unspeakably poignant bliss in being thus cast away together. There was no room for thought of anything outside that.

Groping along hand in hand, they came to a chasm that yawned, bridgeless, across their path. It was about three feet wide, and perhaps it was not much deeper, but it looked like the bottomless pit, and was very terrifying. Bidding Elizabeth to wait where she was, Mr. Yelverton leaped over by himself, and, dropping some tallow on a boulder near him, fixed his candle to the rock. Then he held out his arms and called her to come to him.

For a moment she hesitated, knowing what awaited her, and then she leaped blindly, fell a little short, and knocked the candle from its insecure socket into the gulf beneath her. She uttered a sharp cry as she felt herself falling, and the next instant found herself dragged up in her lover's strong arms, and folded with a savage tenderness to his breast. This time he held her as if he did not mean to let her go.

"Hush! – you are quite safe," he whispered to her in the pitch darkness.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE DRIVE HOME

The girls were boiling a kettle and making afternoon tea, while the men were getting their horses and buggy furniture together, at about four o'clock. Elizabeth was on her knees, feeding the gipsy fire with dry sticks, when Mr. Yelverton came to her with an alert step.

"I am going to drive the little buggy back," he said, "and you are coming with me. The others will start first, and we will follow."

She looked up with a startled expression that puzzled and disappointed him.

"What!" he exclaimed, "do you mean to say that you would rather not?"

"Oh, no, I did not mean that," she faltered hurriedly; and into her averted face, which had been deadly pale since she came out of the cave, the hot blood flushed, remembering how long he and she had stood there together in a profound and breathless solitude, and the very blackest night that ever Egypt knew, after he took her into his arms, and before they remembered that they had a second candle and matches to light it with. In that interval, when she laid her head upon his shoulder, and he his red moustache upon her responsive lips, she had virtually accepted him, though she had not meant to do so. "No," she repeated, as he silently watched her, "you know it is not that."

"What then? Do you think it is improper?"

"Of course not."

"You would really like it, Elizabeth?"

"Yes – yes. I will come with you. We can talk as we go home."

"We can. That was precisely my object in making the arrangement."

Eleanor, presiding over her crockery at a little distance, called to them to ask whether the water boiled – and they perceived that it did. Mr. Yelverton carried the kettle to the teapot, and presently busied himself in handing the cups – so refreshing at the close of a summer picnic, when exercise and sun and lunch together have resulted in inevitable lassitude and incipient headaches – and doling out slices of thin bread and butter as Patty deftly shaved them from the loaf. They squatted round amongst the fern fronds and tussocks, and poured their tea vulgarly into their saucers – being warned by Mr. Brion that they had no time to waste – and then packed up, and washed their hands, and tied on their hats, and shook out their skirts, and set forth home again, declaring they had had the most beautiful time. The large buggy started first, the host driving; and Mr. Yelverton was informed that another track would be taken for the return journey, and that he was to be very careful not to lose himself.

"If we do lose ourselves," said Mr. Yelverton, as his escort disappeared over the crest of the hill, and he still stood in the valley – apparently in no haste to follow – tucking a light rug over his companion's knees, "it won't matter very much, will it?"

"Oh, yes, it will," she replied anxiously. "I don't know the way at all."

"Very well; then we will keep them in sight. But only just in sight – no more. Will you have the hood up or down?"

"Down," she said. "The day is too lovely to be shut out."

"It is, it is. I think it is just about the most lovely day I ever knew – not even excepting the first of October."

"The first of October was not a lovely day at all. It was cold and dismal."

"That was its superficial appearance." He let down the hood and climbed to his seat beside her, taking the reins from her hand. He had completely laid aside his sedate demeanour, and, though self-contained still, had a light in his eyes that made her tremble. "On your conscience," he said, looking at her, "can you say that the first of October was a dismal day? We may as well begin as we mean to go on," he added, as she did not answer; "and we will make a bargain, in the first place, never to say a word that we don't mean, nor to keep back one that we do mean from each other. You will agree to that, won't you, Elizabeth?" – his disengaged arm was round her shoulder and he had drawn her face up to his. "Elizabeth, Elizabeth," – repeating the syllables fondly – "what a sweet and honest name it is! Kiss me, Elizabeth."

Instead of kissing him she began to sob. "Oh, don't, don't!" she cried, making a movement to free herself – at which he instantly released her. "Let us go on – they will be wondering where we are. I am very foolish – I can't help it – I will tell you presently!"

She took out her handkerchief, and tried to calm herself as she sat back in the buggy; and he, without speaking, touched his horses with his whip and drove slowly out of the shady dell into the clear sunshine. For a mile or more of up-and-down tracking, where the wheels of the leading vehicle had left devious ruts in sand and grass to guide them, they sat side by side in silence – she fighting with and gradually overcoming her excitement, and he gravely waiting, with a not less strong emotion, until she had recovered herself. And then he turned to her, and laid his powerful hand on hers that had dropped dejectedly into her lap, and said gently, though with decision – "Now tell me, dear. What is the matter? I must know. It is not – it is not" – contracting his fingers sharply – "that you don't mean what you have been telling me, after all? For though not in words, you have been telling me, have you not?"

"No," she sighed; "it is not that."

"I knew it. I was sure it could not be. Then what else can matter? – what else should trouble you? Is it about your sisters? You know they will be all right. They will not lose you – they will gain me. I flatter myself they will be all the better for gaining me, Elizabeth. I hoped you would think so?"

"I do think so."

"What then? Tell me."

"Mr. Yelverton, it is so hard to tell you – I don't know how to do it. But I am afraid – I am afraid – "

"Of what? Of me?"

"Oh, no! But I want to do what is right. And it seems to me that to let myself be happy like this would be wrong – "

"Wrong to let yourself be happy? Good heavens! Who has been teaching you such blasphemy as that?"

"No one has taught me anything, except my mother. But she was so good, and she had so many troubles, and she said that she would never have been able to bear them – to have borne life – had she not been stayed up by her religious faith. She told us, when it seemed to her that we might some day be cast upon the world to shift for ourselves, never to let go of that – to suffer and renounce everything rather than be tempted to give up that."

"Who has asked you to give it up?" he responded, with grave and gentle earnestness. "Not I. I would be the last man to dream of such a thing."

"But you —you have given up religion!" she broke forth, despairingly.

"Have I? I don't think so. Tell me what you mean by religion?"

"I mean what we have been brought up to believe."

"By the churches?"

"By the Church – the English Church – which I have always held to be the true Church."

"My dear child, every Church holds itself to be the true Church, and all the others to be false ones. Why should yours be right any more than other people's?"

"My mother taught us so," said Elizabeth.

"Yes. Your mother made it true, as she would have made any other true, by the religious spirit that she brought into it. They are all true – not only those we know of, but Buddhism and Mohammedanism, and even the queer faiths and superstitions of barbarian races, for they all have the same origin and object; and at the same time they are all so adulterated with human errors and vices, according to the sort of people who have had the charge of them, that you can't say any one of them is pure. No more pure than we are, and no less. For you to say that the rest are mistaken is just the pot calling the kettle black, Elizabeth. You may be a few degrees nearer the truth than those are who are less educated and civilised, but even that at present does not look so certain that you are justified in boasting about it – I mean your Church, you know, not you."

"But we go by our Bible – we trust, not in ourselves, but in that."

"So do the 'Dissenters,' as you call them."

"Yes, I am speaking of all of us – all who are Christian people. What guide should we have if we let our Bible go?"

"Why should you let it go? I have not let it go. If you read it intelligently it is truly a Holy Scripture – far more so than when you make a sort of charm and fetish of it. You should study its origin and history, and try to get at its meaning as you would at that of any other book. It has a very wonderful history, which in its turn is derived from other wonderful histories, which people will perversely shut their eyes to; and because of this undiscriminating ignorance, which is the blindness of those who won't see or who are afraid to see, it remains to this day the least understood of all ancient records. Some parts of it, you know, are a collection of myths and legends, which you will find in the same shape in older writings – the first dim forms of human thought about God and man and the mysteries of creation; and a great many good people read these as gospel truth, in spite of the evidence of all their senses to the contrary, and take them as being of the same value and importance as the beautiful books of the later time. And there are other Bibles in the world besides ours, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not."

Elizabeth listened with terror. "And do you say it is not the light of the world after all?" she cried in a shaken voice.

"There should be no preaching to the heathen, and spreading the good tidings over all lands?"

"Yes, there should," he replied; "oh, yes, certainly there should. But it should be done as it was by Christ, to whom all were with Him who were not against Him, and with a feeling that we should share all we know, and help each other to find out the best way. Not by rudely wrenching from the heathen, as we call him, all his immemorial moral standards, which, if you study them closely, are often found, rough as they are, to be thoroughly effective and serviceable, and giving him nothing in their places except outworn myths, and senseless hymns, and a patter of Scripture phrases that he can't possibly make head or tail of. That, I often think, is beginning the work of salvation by turning him from a religious man into an irreligious one. Your Church creed," he went on, "is just the garment of religion, and you wear finely-woven stuffs while the blacks wear blankets and 'possum-skins; they are all little systems that have their day and cease to be – that change and change as the fashion of the world changes. But the spirit of man – the indestructible intelligence that makes him apprehend the mystery of his existence and of the great Power that surrounds it – which in the early stages makes him cringe and fear, and later on to love and trust – that is the body. That is religion, as I take it. It is in the nature of man, and not to be given or taken away. Only the more freely we let that inner voice speak and guide us, the better we are, and the better we make the world and help things on. That's my creed, Elizabeth. You confuse things," he went on, after a pause, during which she kept an attentive silence, "when you confound religion and churchism together, as if they were identical. I have given up churchism, in your sense, because, though I have hunted the churches through and through, one after another, I have found in them no adequate equipment for the work of my life. The world has gone on, and they have not gone on. The world has discovered breechloaders, so to speak, and they go to the field with the old blunderbusses of centuries ago. Centuries! – of the prehistoric ages, it seems, now. My dear, I have lived over forty years – did you know I was so old as that? – seeking and striving to get hold of what I could in the way of a light and a guide to help me to make the best of my life and to do what little I might to better the world and brighten the hard lot of the poor and miserable. Is that giving up religion? I am not a churchman – I would be if I could, it is not my fault – but if I can't accept those tests, which revolt the reason and consciousness of a thinking man, am I therefore irreligious? Am I, Elizabeth?"