"You have been hard to me always – from first to last – but this is the very cruellest thing you have ever done. To come here and drive me wild like this, and then go and leave me us if I were Mrs. M'Intyre or the landlord you were paying off next door. I wonder what you think I am made of? I have stood everything – I have stood all your snubs, and slights, and hard usage of me – I have been humble and patient as I never was to anybody who treated me so in my life before – but that doesn't mean that I am made of wood or stone. There are limits to one's powers of endurance, and though I have borne so much, I can't bear this. I tell you fairly it is trying me too far." He stood at the table fluttering his papers with a hand as unsteady as that of a drunkard, and glaring at her, not straight into her eyes – which, indeed, were cast abjectly on the floor – but all over her pretty, forlorn figure, shrinking and cowering before him. "You are kind enough to everybody else," he went on; "you might at least show some common humanity to me. I am not a coxcomb, I hope, but I know you can't have helped knowing what I have felt for you – no woman can help knowing when a man cares for her, though he never says a word about it. A dog who loves you will get some consideration for it, but you are having no consideration for me. I hope I am not rude – I'm afraid I am forgetting my manners, Miss Patty – but a man can't think of manners when he is driven out of his senses. Forgive me, I am speaking to you too roughly. It was kind of you to come and tell me what you have told me – I am not ungrateful for that – but it was a cruel kindness. Why didn't you send me a note – a little, cold, formal note? or why did you not send Mrs. Yelverton to explain things? That would have done just as well. You have paid me a great honour, I know; but I can't look at it like that. After all, I was making up my mind to lose you, and I think I could have borne it, and got on somehow, and got something out of life in spite of it. But now how can I bear it? – how can I bear it now?"
Patty bowed like a reed to this unexpected storm, which, nevertheless, thrilled her with wild elation and rapture, through and through. She had no sense of either pride or shame; she never for a moment regretted that she had not written a note, or sent Mrs. Yelverton in her place. But what she said and what she did I will leave the reader to conjecture. There has been too much love-making in these pages of late. Tableau. We will ring the curtain down.
Meanwhile Elizabeth sat alone when her work was done, wondering what was happening at Mrs. M'Intyre's, until her husband came to tell her that it was past six o'clock, and time to go home to dress for dinner. "The child can't possibly be with him," said Mr. Yelverton, rather severely. "She must be gossiping with the landlady."
"I think I will go and fetch her," said Elizabeth. But as she was patting on her bonnet, Patty came upstairs, smiling and preening her feathers, so to speak – bringing Paul with her.
CHAPTER XLVII.
A FAIR FIELD AND NO FAVOUR
When Mrs. Duff-Scott came to hear of all this, she was terribly vexed with Patty. Indeed, no one dared to tell her the whole truth, and to this day she does not know that the engagement was made in the young bachelor's sitting-room, whither Patty had sought him because he would not seek her. She thinks the pair met at No. 6, under the lax and injudicious chaperonage of Elizabeth; and, in the first blush of her disappointment and indignation, she was firmly convinced, though too well bred to express her conviction, that the son had taken advantage of the father's privileged position to entrap the young heiress for the sake of her thirty thousand pounds. Things did not go smoothly with Patty, as they had done with her sister. Elizabeth herself was a rock of shelter and a storehouse of consolation from the moment that the pair came up to the dismantled room where she and her husband were having a lovers' tête-à-tête of their own, and she saw that the long misunderstanding was at an end; but no one else except Mrs. M'Intyre (who, poor woman, was held of no account), took kindly to the alliance so unexpectedly proposed. Quite the contrary, in fact. Mr. Yelverton, notwithstanding his late experiences, had no sympathy whatever for the young fellow who had flattered him by following his example. The philanthropist, with all his full-blown modern radicalism, was also a man of long descent and great connections, and some subtle instinct of race and habit rose up in opposition to the claims of an obscure press writer to enter his distinguished family. It was one thing for a Yelverton man to marry a humbly-circumstanced woman, as he had himself been prepared to do, but quite another thing for a humbly-circumstanced man to aspire to the hand of a Yelverton woman, and that woman rich and beautiful, his own ward and sister. He was not aware of this strong sentiment, but believed his objections arose from a proper solicitude for Patty's welfare. Paul had been rude and impertinent, wanting in respect for her and hers; he had an ill-conditioned, sulky temper; he lived an irregular life, from hand to mouth; he had no money; he had no reputable friends. Therefore, when Paul (with some defiance of mien, as one who knew that it was a merely formal courtesy) requested the consent of the head of the house to his union with the lady of his choice, the head of the house, though elaborately polite, was very high and mighty, and – Patty and Elizabeth being out of the way, shut up together to kiss in comfort in one of the little bedrooms at the back – made some very plain statements of his views to the ineligible suitor, which fanned the vital spark in that young man's ardent spirit to a white heat of wrath. By-and-by Mr. Yelverton modified those views, like the just and large-hearted student of humanity that he was, and was brought to see that a man can do no more for a woman than love her, be he who he may, and that a woman, whether queen or peasant, millionaire or pauper, can never give more than value for that "value received." And by-and-by Paul learned to respect his brother-in-law for a man whose manhood was his own, and to trust his motives absolutely, even when he did not understand his actions. But just at first things were unpleasant. Mr. Yelverton touched the young man's sensitive pride, already morbidly exercised by his consciousness of the disparity between Patty's social position and fortunes and his own, by some indirect allusion to that painful circumstance, and brought upon himself a revengeful reminder that his (Mr. Yelverton's) marriage with Elizabeth might not be considered by superficial persons to be entirely above suspicion. Things were, indeed, very unpleasant. Paul, irritated in the first rapture of happiness, used more bad language (in thought if not in speech) than he had done since Cup Day, when he went back to his unfinished article on Political Patronage; Patty drove home with a burning sense of being of age and her own mistress; and Elizabeth sat in the carriage beside her, silent and thoughtful, feeling that the first little cloud (that first one which, however faint and small, is so incredible and so terrible) had made its appearance on the hitherto stainless horizon of her married life.
Mrs. Duff-Scott, when they got home, received the blow with a stern fortitude that was almost worse than Mr. Yelverton's prompt resistance, and much worse than the mild but equally decided opposition of that punctilious old gentleman at Seaview Villa, who, by-and-by, used all his influence to keep the pair apart whom he would have given his heart's blood to see united, out of a fastidious sense of what he conceived to be his social and professional duty. Between them all, they nearly drove the two high-spirited victims into further following the example of the head of the house – the imminent danger of which became apparent to Patty's confidante Elizabeth, who gave timely warning of it to her husband. This latter pair, who had themselves carried matters with such a very high hand, were far from desiring that Paul and Patty should make assignations at the Exhibition with a view to circumventing their adversaries by a clandestine or otherwise untimely marriage (such divergence of opinion with respect to one's own affairs and other people's being very common in this world, the gentle reader may observe, even in the case of the most high-minded people).
"Kingscote," said Elizabeth, when one night she sat brushing her hair before the looking-glass, and he, still in his evening dress, lounged in an arm-chair by the dressing-table, talking to her, "Kingscote, I am afraid you are too hard on Patty – you and the Duff-Scotts – keeping her from Paul still, though she has but three days left, and I don't believe she will stand it."
"My dear, we are not hard upon her, are we? It is for her sake. If we can tide over these few days and get her away all right, a year or two of absence, and all the new interests that she will find in Europe and in her changed position, will probably cure her of her fancy for a fellow who is not good enough for her."
"That shows how little you know her," said Elizabeth, with a melancholy smile. "She is not a girl to take 'fancies' in that direction, and having given her heart – and she has not given it so easily as you imagine – she will be as faithful to him – as faithful" – casting about for an adequate illustration – "as I should have been to you, Kingscote."
"Perhaps so, dear. I myself think it very likely. And in such a case no harm is done. They will test each other, and if they both stand the test it will be better and happier for them to have borne it, and we shall feel then that we are justified in letting them marry. But at present they know so little of each other – she has had no fair choice of a husband – and she is too good to be thrown away. I feel responsible for her, don't you see? And I only want her to have all her chances. I will be the last to hinder the course of true love when once it proves itself to be true love."
"We did not think it necessary to prove our love – and I don't think we should have allowed anybody else to prove it – by a long probation, Kingscote."
"My darling, we were different," he said, promptly.
She did not ask him to explain wherein they were different, he and she, who had met for the first time less than four months ago; she shared the usual unconscious prejudice that we all have in favour of our own sincerity and trustworthiness, and wisdom and foresight, and assumed as a matter of course that their case was an exceptional one. Still she had faith in others as well as in herself and her second self.
"I know Patty," she said, laying her hair brush on her knee and looking with solemn earnestness into her husband's rough-hewn but impressive face – a face that seemed to her to contain every element of noble manhood, and that would have been weakened and spoiled by mere superficial beauty – "I know Patty, Kingscote, better than anyone knows her except herself. She is like a little briar rose – sweet and tender if you are gentle and sympathetic with her, but certain to prick if you handle her roughly. And so strong in the stem – so tough and strong – that you cannot root her out or twist her any way that she doesn't feel naturally inclined to grow – not if you use all your power to make her."
"Poor little Patty!" he said, smiling. "That is a very pathetic image of her. But I don't like to figure in your parable as the blind genius of brute force – a horny-handed hedger and ditcher with a smock frock and a bill-hook. I am quite capable of feeling the beauty, and understanding the moral qualities of a wild rose – at least, I thought I was. Perhaps I am mistaken. Tell me what you would do, if you were in my place?"
Elizabeth slipped from her chair and down upon her knees beside him, with her long hair and her long dressing-gown flowing about her, and laid her head where it was glad of any excuse to be laid – a locality at this moment indicated by the polished and unyielding surface of his starched shirt front. "You know I never likened you to a hedger and ditcher," she said, fondly. "No one is so wise and thoughtful and far-sighted as you. It is only that you don't know Patty quite yet – you will do soon – and what might be the perfect management of such a crisis in another girl's affairs is likely not to succeed with her – just simply and only for the reason that she is a little peculiar, and you have not yet had time to learn that."
"It is time that I should learn," he said, lifting her into a restful position and settling himself for a comfortable talk. "Tell me what you think and know yourself, and what, in your judgment, it would be best to do."
"In my judgment, then, it would be best," said Elizabeth, brief interval given up to the enjoyment of a wordless tête-à-tête, "to let Patty and Paul be together a little before they part. For this reason – that they will be together, whether they are let or not. Isn't it preferable to make concessions before they are ignominiously extorted from you? And if Patty has much longer to bear seeing her lover, as she thinks, humiliated and insulted, by being ignored as her lover in this house, she will go to the other extreme – she will go away from us to him – by way of making up to him for it. It is like what you say of the smouldering, poverty-bred anarchy in your European national life – that if you don't find a vent for the accumulating electricity generating in the human sewer – how do you put it? – it is no use to try to draw it off after the storm has burst."
"Elizabeth," said her husband, reproachfully, "that is worse than being called a hedger and ditcher."
"Well, you know what I mean."
"Tell me what you mean in the vulgar tongue, my dear. Do you want me to go and call on Mr. Paul Brion and tell him that we have thought better of it?"
"Not exactly that. But if you would persuade Mrs. Duff-Scott to be nice about it – no one can be more enchantingly nice than she, when she likes, but when she doesn't like she is enough to drive a man – a proud man like Paul Brion – simply frantic. And Patty will never stand it – she will not hold out – she will not go away leaving things as they are now. We could not expect it of her."
"Well? And how should Mrs. Duff-Scott show herself nice to Mr. Brion?"
"She might treat him as – as she did you, Kingscote, when you were wanting me."
"But she approved of me, you see. She doesn't approve of him."
"You are both gentlemen, anyhow – though he is poor. I would have been the more tender and considerate to him, because he is poor. He is not too poor for Patty – nor would he have been if she had no fortune herself. As it is, there is abundance. And, Kingscote, though I don't mean for a moment to disparage you – "
"I should hope not, Elizabeth."
"Still I can't help thinking that to have brains as he has is to be essentially a rich and distinguished man. And to be a writer for a high-class newspaper, which you say yourself is the greatest and best educator in the world – to spend himself in making other men see what is right and useful – in spreading light and knowledge that no money could pay for, and all the time effacing himself, and taking no reward of honour or credit for it – surely that must be the noblest profession, and one that should make a man anybody's equal – even yours, my love!"
She lifted herself up to make this eloquent appeal, and dropped back on his shoulder again, and wound her arm about his neck and his bent head with tender deprecation. He was deeply touched and stirred, and did not speak for a moment. Then he said gruffly, "I shall go and see him in the morning, Elizabeth. Tell me what I shall say to him, my dear."
"Say," said Elizabeth, "that you would rather not have a fixed engagement at first, in order that Patty may be unhampered during the time she is away – in order that she may be free to make other matrimonial arrangements when she gets into the great world, if she likes– but that you will leave that to him. Tell him that if love is not to be kept faithful without vows and promises, it is not love nor worth keeping – but I daresay he knows that. Tell him that, except for being obliged to go to England just now on the family affairs, Patty is free to do exactly as she likes – which she is by law, you know, for she is over three-and-twenty – and that we will be happy to see her happy, whatever way she chooses. And then let him come here and see her. Ask Mrs. Duff-Scott to be nice and kind, and to give him an invitation – she will do anything for you – and then treat them both as if they were engaged for just this little time until we leave. It will comfort them so much, poor things! It will put them on their honour. It will draw off the electricity, you know, and prevent catastrophes. And it will make not the slightest difference in the final issue. But, oh," she added impulsively, "you don't want me to tell you what to do, you are so much wiser than I am."
"I told you we should give and take," he responded; "I told you we should teach and lead each other – sometimes I and sometimes you. That is what we are doing already – it is as it should be. I shall go and see Paul Brion in the morning. Confound him!" he added, as he got up out of his chair to go to his dressing-room.
And so it came to pass that the young press writer, newly risen from his bed, and meditating desperate things over his coffee and cutlet, received a friendly embassy from the great powers that had taken up arms against him. Mr. Yelverton was the bearer of despatches from his sovereign, Mrs. Duff-Scott, in the shape of a gracious note of invitation to dinner, which – after a long discussion of the situation with her envoy – Mr. Paul Brion permitted himself to accept politely. The interview between the two men was productive of a strong sense of relief and satisfaction on both sides, and it brought about the cessation of all open hostilities.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
PROBATION
Mr. Yelverton did not return home from his mission until Mrs. Duff-Scott's farewell kettle-drum was in full blast. He found the two drawing-rooms filled with a fashionable crowd; and the hum of sprightly conversation, the tinkle of teaspoons, the rustle of crisp draperies, the all-pervading clamour of soft feminine voices, raised in staccato exclamations and laughter, were such that he did not see his way to getting a word in edgeways. Round each of the Yelverton sisters the press of bland and attentive visitors was noticeably great. They were swallowed up in the compact groups around them. This I am tempted to impute to the fact of their recent elevation to rank and wealth, and to a certain extent it may be admitted that that fact was influential. And why not? But in justice I must state that the three pretty Miss Kings had become favourites in Melbourne society while the utmost ignorance prevailed as to their birth and antecedents, in conjunction with the most exact knowledge as to the narrowness of their incomes. Melbourne society, if a little too loosely constituted to please the tastes of a British prig, born and bred to class exclusiveness, is, I honestly believe, as free as may be from the elaborate snobbishness with which that typical individual (though rather as his misfortune than his fault) must be credited.
In Mrs. Duff-Scott's drawing-room were numerous representatives of this society – its most select circle, in fact – numbering amongst them women of all sorts; women like Mrs. Duff-Scott herself, who busied themselves with hospitals and benevolent schemes, conscious of natural aspirations and abilities for better things than dressing and gossiping and intriguing for social triumphs; women like Mrs. Aarons, who had had to struggle desperately to rise with the "cream" to the top of the cup, and whose every nerve was strained to retain the advantages so hardly won; women to whom scandal was the breath of their nostrils, and the dissemination thereof the occupation of their lives; women whose highest ambition was to make a large waist into a small one; women with the still higher ambition to have a house that was more pleasant and popular than anybody else's. All sorts and conditions of women, indeed; including a good proportion of those whose womanhood was unspoiled and unspoilable even by the deteriorating influences of luxury and idleness, and whose intellect and mental culture and charming qualities generally were such as one would need to hunt well to find anything better in the same line elsewhere. These people had all accepted the Miss Kings cordially when Mrs. Duff-Scott brought them into their circle and enabled the girls to do their duty therein by dressing well, and looking pretty, and contributing a graceful element to fashionable gatherings by their very attractive manners. That was all that was demanded of them, and, as Miss Kings only, they would doubtless have had a brilliant career and never been made to feel the want of either pedigree or fortune. Now, as representatives of a great family and possessors of independent wealth, they were overwhelmed with attentions; but this, I maintain, was due to the interesting nature of the situation rather than to that worship of worldly prosperity which (because he has plenty of it) is supposed to characterise the successful colonist.
Mr. Yelverton looked round, and dropped into a chair near the door, to talk to a group of ladies with whom he had friendly relations until he could find an opportunity to rejoin his family. The hostess was dispensing tea, with Nelly's assistance – Nelly being herself attended by Mr. Westmoreland, who dogged her footsteps with patient and abject assiduity – other men straying about amongst the crowd with the precious little fragile cups and saucers in their hands. Elizabeth was surrounded by young matrons fervently interested in her new condition, and pouring out upon her their several experiences of European life, in the form of information and advice for her own guidance. The best shops, the best dressmakers, the best hotels, the best travelling routes, and generally the best things to do and see, were emphatically and at great length impressed upon her, and she made notes of them on the back of an envelope with polite gratitude, invariably convinced that her husband knew all about such things far better than anybody else could do. Patty was in the music-room, not playing, but sitting at the piano, and when Kingscote turned his head in her direction he met a full and glowing look of inquiry from her bright eyes that told him she knew or guessed the nature of his recent errand. There was such an invitation in her face that he found himself drawn from his chair as by a strong magnet. He and she had already had those "fights" which she had prophetically anticipated. Lately their relations had been such that he had permitted himself to call her a "spitfire" in speaking of her to her own sister. But they were friends, tacitly trusting each other at heart even when most openly at war, and the force that drew them apart was always returned in the rebound that united them when their quarrels were over. They seemed to be all over for the present. As he approached her she resumed her talk with the ladies beside her, and dropped her eyes as if taking no notice of him; but she had the greatest difficulty to keep herself down on the music-stool and resist an inclination to kiss him that for the first time beset her. She did, indeed, suddenly put out her hand to him – her left hand – with a vigour of intention that called faint smiles to the faces of the fair spectators; who concluded that Mr. Yelverton had been out of town and was receiving a welcome home after a too long absence. Then Patty was seized with an ungovernable restlessness. She quivered all over; she fidgetted in her seat; she did not know who spoke to her or what she was talking about; her fingers went fluttering up and down the keyboard.
"Play us something, dear Miss Yelverton," said a lady sitting by. "Let us hear your lovely touch once more."
"I don't think I can," said Patty, falteringly – the first time she had ever made such a reply to such a demand. She got up and began to turn over some loose music that lay about on the piano. Her brother-in-law essayed to help her; he saw what an agony of suspense and expectation she was in.
"You know where I have been?" he inquired in a careless tone, speaking low, so that only she could hear.
"Yes" – breathlessly – "I think so."
"I went to take an invitation from Mrs. Duff-Scott."
"Yes?"
"I had a pleasant talk. I am very glad I went. He is coming to dine here to-night."
"Is he?"
"Mrs. Duff-Scott thought you would all like to see him before you went away. Let us have the 'Moonlight Sonata,' shall we? Beauty fades and mere goodness is apt to pall, as Mrs. Ponsonby de Tompkins would say, but one never gets tired of the 'Moonlight Sonata,' when it is played as you play it. Don't you agree with me, Mrs. Aarons?"
"I do, indeed," responded that lady, fervently. She agreed with everybody in his rank of life. And she implored Patty to give them the "Moonlight Sonata."
Patty did – disdaining "notes," and sitting at the piano like a young queen upon her throne. She laid her fingers on the keyboard with a touch as light as thistle-down, but only so light because it was so strong, and played with a hushed passion and subdued power that testified to the effect on her of her brother-in-law's communication – her face set and calm, but radiant in its sudden peacefulness. Her way, too, as well as Elizabeth's, was opening before her now. She lost sight of the gorgeous ladies around her for a little while, and saw only the comfortable path which she and Paul would tread together thenceforth. She played the "Moonlight Sonata" to him, sitting in his own chamber corner, with his pipe, resting himself after his work. "I will never," she said to herself, with a little remote smile that nobody saw, "I will never have a room in my house that he shall not smoke in, if he likes. When he is with me, he shall enjoy himself." In those sweet few minutes she sketched the entire programme of her married life.
The crowd thinned by degrees, and filtered away; the drawing-rooms were deserted, save for the soft-footed servants who came in to set them in order, and light the wax candles and rosy lamps, and the great gas-burner over the piano, which was as the sun amongst his planet family. Night came, and the ladies returned in their pretty dinner costumes; and the major stole downstairs after them, and smiled and chuckled silently over the new affair as he had done over the old – looking on like a benevolent, superannuated Jove upon these simple little romances from the high Olympus of his own brilliant past; and then (preceded by no carriage wheels) there was a step on the gravel and a ring at the door bell, and the guest of the evening was announced.
When Paul came in, correctly appointed, and looking so fierce and commanding that Patty's heart swelled with pride as she gazed at him, seeing how well – how almost too well, indeed – he upheld his dignity and hers, which had been subjected to so many trials, he found himself received with a cordiality that left him nothing to find fault with. Mrs. Duff-Scott was an impulsive, and generous, and well-bred woman, not given to do things by halves. She still hoped that Patty would not marry this young man, and did not mean to let her if she could help it; but, having gone the length of inviting him to her house, she treated him accordingly. She greeted him as if he were an old friend, and she chatted to him pleasantly while they waited for dinner, questioning him with subtle flattery about his professional affairs, and implying that reverence for the majesty of the press which is so gratifying to all enlightened people. Then she took his arm into dinner, and continued to talk to him throughout the meal as only one hostess in a hundred, really nice and clever, with a hospitable soul, and a warm heart, and abundant tact and good taste, can talk, and was surprised herself to find how much she appreciated it. She intended to make the poor young fellow enjoy his brief taste of Paradise, since she had given herself leave to do so, and Paul responded by shining for her entertainment with a mental effulgence that astonished and charmed her. He put forth his very best wares for her inspection, and at the same time, in a difficult position, conducted himself with irreproachable propriety. By the time she left the table she was ready to own herself heartily sorry that fickle fortune had not endowed him according to his deserts.
"I do so like really interesting and intellectual young men, who don't give themselves any airs about it," she said to nobody in particular, when she strolled back to the drawing-room with her three girls; "and one does so very seldom meet with them!" She threw herself into a low chair, snatched up a fan, and began to fan herself vigorously. The discovery that a press writer of Paul Brion's standing meant a cultured man of the world impressed her strongly; the thought of him as a new son for herself, clever, enterprising, active-minded as she was – a man to be governed, perhaps, in a motherly way, and to be proud of whether he let himself be governed or not – danced tantalisingly through her brain. She felt it necessary to put a very strong check upon herself to keep her from being foolish.
She escaped that danger, however. A high sense of duty to Patty held her back from foolishness. Still she could not help being kind to the young couple while she had the opportunity; turning her head when they strolled into the conservatory after the men came in from the dining-room, and otherwise shutting her eyes to their joint proceedings. And they had a peaceful and sad and happy time, by her gracious favour, for two days and a half – until the mail ship carried one of them to England, and left the other behind.