"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?"