The Three Miss Kings

"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."

CHAPTER L.

"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?"

CHAPTER LI.

PATIENCE REWARDED

Eleanor, like Patty, withstood the seductions of English life and miscellaneous English admirers, and lived to be Miss Yelverton in her turn, unappropriated and independent. And, like both her sisters, though more by accident than of deliberate intention, she remained true to her first love, and, after seeing the world and supping full of pleasure and luxury, returned to Melbourne and married Mr. Westmoreland. That is to say, Mr. Westmoreland followed her to England, and followed her all over Europe – dogging her from place to place with a steadfast persistence that certainly deserved reward – until the major and Mrs. Duff-Scott, returning home almost immediately after Patty's marriage and departure, brought their one ewe lamb, which the Yelvertons had not the conscience to immediately deprive them of, back to Australia with them; when her persevering suitor promptly took his passage in the same ship. All this time Mr. Westmoreland had been as much in love as his capacity for the tender passion – much larger than was generally supposed – permitted. Whether it was that she was the only woman who dared to bully him and trample on him, and thereby won his admiration and respect – or whether his passion required that the object of it should be difficult of attainment – or whether her grace and beauty were literally irresistible to him – or whether he was merely the sport of that unaccountable fate which seems to govern or misgovern these affairs, it is not necessary to conjecture. No one asks for reasons when a man or woman falls a victim to this sort of infatuation. Some said it was because she had become rich and grand, but that was not the case – except in so far as the change in her social circumstances had made her tyrannical and impudent, in which sense wealth and consequence had certainly enhanced her attractions in his eyes. Thirty thousand pounds, though a very respectable marriage portion in England, is not sufficient to make a fortune-hunter of an Australian suitor in his position; and let me do the Australian suitor of all ranks justice and here state that fortune hunting, through the medium of matrimony, is a weakness that his worst enemy cannot accuse him of – whatever his other faults may be. Mr. Westmoreland, being fond of money, as a constitutional and hereditary peculiarity – if you can call that a peculiarity – was tempted to marry it once, when that stout and swarthy person in the satin gown and diamonds exercised her fascinations on him at the club ball, and he could have married it at any time of his bachelor life, the above possessor of it being, like Barkis, "willin'", and even more than "willin'". Her fortune was such that Eleanor's thirty thousand was but a drop in the bucket compared with it, and yet even he did not value it in comparison with the favour of that capricious young lady. So he followed her about from day to day and from place to place, as if he had no other aim in life than to keep her within sight, making himself an insufferable nuisance to her friends very often, but apparently not offending her by his open and inveterate pursuit. She was not kind, but she was not cruel, and yet she was both in turn to a distracting degree. She made his life an ecstasy of miserable longing for her, keeping him by her side like a big dog on a chain, and feeding him with stones (in the prettiest manner) when he asked for bread. But she grew very partial to her big dog in the process of tormenting him and witnessing his touching patience under it. She was "used to him," she said; and when, from some untoward circumstance over which he had no control, he was for a little while absent from her, she felt the gap he left. She sensibly missed him. Moreover, though she trampled on him herself, it hurt her to see others do it; and when Mrs. Duff-Scott and Kingscote Yelverton respectively aired their opinions of his character and conduct, she instantly went over to his side, and protested in her heart, if not in words, against the injustice and opprobrium that he incurred for her sake. So, when Elizabeth became the much-occupied mother of a family, and when Patty was married and gone off into the world with her Paul, Eleanor, left alone in her independence, began to reckon up what it was worth. The spectacle of her sisters' wedded lives gave her pleasant notions of matrimony, and the state of single blessedness, as such, never had any particular charms for her. Was it worth while, she asked herself, to be cruel any more? – and might she not just as well have a house and home of her own as Elizabeth and Patty? Her lover was only a big dog upon a chain, but then why shouldn't he be? Husbands were not required to be all of the same pattern. She didn't want to be domineered over. And she didn't see anybody she liked better. She might go farther and fare worse. And – she was getting older every day.