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.
[CHAPTER XLIX.]
YELVERTON.
Patty went "home," and stayed there for two years; but it was never home to her, though all her friends and connections, save one, were with her—because that one was absent. She saw "the great Alps and the Doge's palace," and all the beauty and glory of that great world that she had so ardently dreamed of and longed for; travelling in comfort and luxury, and enjoying herself thoroughly all the while. She was presented at Court—"Miss Yelverton, by her sister, Mrs. Kingscote Yelverton"—and held a distinguished place in the Court Journal and in the gossip of London society for the better part of two seasons. She was taught to know that she was a beauty, if she had never known it before; she was made to understand the value of a high social position and the inestimable advantage of large means (and she did understand it perfectly, being a young person abundantly gifted with common sense); and she was offered these good things for the rest of her life, and a coronet into the bargain. Nevertheless, she chose to abide by her first choice, and to remain faithful to her penniless press writer under all temptations. She passed through the fire of every trying ordeal that the ingenuity of Mrs. Duff-Scott could devise; her unpledged constancy underwent the severest tests that, in the case of a girl of her tastes and character, it could possibly be subjected to; and at the end of a year and a half, when the owner of the coronet above-mentioned raised the question of her matrimonial prospects, she announced to him, and subsequently to her family, that they had been irrevocably settled long ago; that she was entirely unchanged in her sentiments and relations towards Paul Brion; and that she intended, moreover, if they had no objection, to return to Australia to marry him.
It was in September when she thus declared herself—after keeping a hopeful silence, for the most part, concerning her love affairs, since she disgraced herself before a crowd of people by weeping in her sweetheart's arms on the deck of the mail steamer at the moment when she was bidden by a cruel fate to part from him. The Yelverton family had spent the previous winter in the South of Europe, "doing" the palaces, and churches, and picture galleries that were such an old story to most people of their class, but to the unsophisticated sisters so fresh and wonderful an experience—an experience that fulfilled all expectations, moreover, which such realisations of young dreams so seldom do. Generally, when at last one has one's wish of this sort, the spirit that conceived the charms and pleasures of it is quenched by bodily wearinesses and vexations and the thousand and one petty accidents that circumvent one's schemes. One is burdened and fretted with uncongenial companions, perhaps, or one is worried and hampered for want of money; or one is nervous or bilious, or one is too old and careworn to enjoy as one might once have done; in some way or other one's heart's desire comes to one as if only to show the "leanness withal" in the soul that seemed (until thus proved) to have such power to assimilate happiness and enrich itself thereby. But with the Yelverton sisters there was no disillusionment of this sort. They had their little drawbacks, of course. Elizabeth was not always in good health; Patty pined for her Paul; Eleanor sprained her ankle and had to lie on Roman sofas while the others were exploring Roman ruins out of doors; and there were features about the winter, even in those famous climes, which gave them sensible discomfort and occasionally set them on the verge of discontent. But, looking back upon their travels, they have no recollection of these things. Young, and strong, and rich, with no troubles to speak of and the keenest appetites to see and learn, they had as good a time as pleasure-seeking mortals can hope for in this world; the memories of it, tenderly stored up to the smallest detail, will be a joy for ever to all of them. On their return to England they took up their abode in the London house, and for some weeks they revelled delightedly in balls, drums, garden parties, concerts, and so on, under the supervision and generalship of Mrs. Duff-Scott; and they also made acquaintance with the widely-ramifying Whitechapel institutions. Early in the summer Elizabeth and her husband went to Yelverton, which in their absence had been prepared for "the family" to live in again. A neighbouring country house and several cottages had been rented and fitted up for the waifs and strays, where they had been made as comfortable as before, and were still under the eye of their protector; and the ancestral furniture that had been removed for their convenience and its own safety was put back in its place, and bright (no, not bright—Mrs. Duff-Scott undertook the task of fitting them up—but eminently artistic and charming) rooms were newly decorated and made ready for Elizabeth's occupation.
She went there early in June—she and her husband alone, leaving Mrs. Duff-Scott and the girls in London. Mr. Yelverton had always a little jealousy about keeping his wife to himself on these specially sacred occasions, and he invited no one to join them during their first days at home, and instructed Mr. Le Breton to repress any tendency that might be apparent in tenants or protégés to make a public festival of their arrival there. The rôle of squire was in no way to his taste, nor that of Lady Bountiful to hers. And yet he had planned for their home-coming with the utmost care and forethought, that nothing should be wanting to make it satisfying and complete—as he had planned for their wedding journey on the eve of their hurried marriage.
It is too late in my story to say much about Yelverton. It merits a description, but a description would be out of place, and serve no purpose now. Those who are familiar with old Elizabethan country seats, and the general environment of a hereditary dweller therein, will have a sufficient idea of Elizabeth's home; and those who have never seen such things—who have not grown up in personal association with the traditions of an "old family"—will not care to be told about it. In the near future (for, though his brother magnates of the county, hearing of the restoration of the house, congratulated themselves that Yelverton's marriage had cured him of his crack-brained fads, he only delivered her property intact to his wife in order that they might be crack-brained together, at her instance and with her legal permission in new and worse directions afterwards) Yelverton will lose many of its time-honoured aristocratic distinctions; oxen and sheep will take the place of its antlered herds, and the vulgar plough and ploughman will break up the broad park lawns, where now the pheasant walks in the evening, and the fox, stealing out from his cover, haunts for his dainty meal. But when Elizabeth saw it that tender June night, just when the sun was setting, as in England it only sets in June, all its old-world charm of feudal state and beauty, jealously walled off from the common herd outside as one man's heritage by divine right and for his exclusive enjoyment, lay about it, as it had lain for generations past. Will she ever forget that drive in the summer evening from the little country railway station to her ancestral home?—the silent road, with the great trees almost meeting overhead; the snug farm-houses, old and picturesque, and standing behind their white gates amongst their hollyhocks and bee-hives; the thatched cottages by the roadside, with groups of wide-eyed children standing at the doors to see the carriage pass; the smell of the hay and the red clover in the fields, and the honeysuckle and the sweet-briar in the hedges; the sound of the wood pigeons cooing in the plantations; the first sight of her own lodge gates, with their great ramping griffins stonily pawing the air, and of those miles and miles of shadow-dappled sward within, those mysterious dark coverts, whence now and then a stag looked out at her and went crashing back to his ferny lair, and those odorous avenues of beech and lime, still haunted by belated bees and buzzing cockchafers, under which she passed to the inner enclosure of lawns and gardens where the old house stood, with open doors of welcome, awaiting her. What an old house! She had seen such in pictures—in the little prints that adorned old-fashioned pocket-books of her mother's time—-but the reality, as in the case of the Continental palaces, transcended all her dreams. White smoke curled up to the sky from the fluted chimney-stacks; the diamond-paned casements—little sections of the enormous mullioned windows—were set wide to the evening breezes and sunshine; on the steps before the porch a group of servants, respectful but not obsequious, stood ready to receive their new mistress, and to efface themselves as soon as they had made her welcome.