But as three-syllabled words in her own language made her pucker up her poor little brows, and as English grammar still had power to draw weary, dispirited tears, Meg advised a short postponement.
[161]
]CHAPTER XIV.
MUSHROOMS.
“In what will all this ostentation end?”
A new house had been built lately not very far from Misrule, a grand, showy-looking place, of red brick, in the Elizabethan style, which the suburbs of Sydney are just beginning to affect largely.
The grounds were laid out by a landscape gardener, and there were velvet lawns, carpet beds, and terraces reaching down to the river, where at Misrule there was only a wilderness of a garden with broken palings, and a couple of sloping paddocks where long rank grass and poppies flourished. Then the carriage drive,—such a grand, smooth, red sweep, serpentining up to the great porch. The Misrule drive was hardly red at all; the gravel had mostly vanished, the dead leaves were generally of Vallambrosian thickness, and weeds raised cheerful heads at intervals. The name of the people who had built the new house was Browne,—Fitzroy-Browne, with a hyphen and an e.
[162]
]Mr. Fitzroy-Browne was a railway contractor, and had builded himself an ample fortune out of a Government that not yet had need to cheese-pare.
There were three or four Misses Fitzroy-Browne, that fashionable boarding-schools, dressmakers, and several seasons had done their best for. There was a Mr. Fitzroy-Browne junior, who waxed his moustache, wore clothes of chessboard device, and kept racehorses. And there was Mamma Fitzroy-Browne, who was fat and good-natured, and said “Bless yer ’art” with a cheeriness refreshing in these days of ceremony, and then pulled herself up short and looked unhappy.
Poor Mamma Browne! who sometimes thought wistfully of the long-dead days when Papa had been only an honest navvy, and her little girls and boy too small to snub and suppress her, and order her about.
Mamma Browne, who had liked her little old “best” room, with its big round table, holding the Bible, three gilt-edged books, and some wax grapes under a glass shade, far better than her grand new drawing-room, that was like a furniture show-place, all mirrors and cabinets, and green and gold.
How many Mamma Brownes there are in Australia! It is quite pitiful. Good dear creatures, [163] ]with their bones too set to adapt themselves to the change the golden days have brought; poor simple-minded things, who, having consistently left “h” out of their language for forty or fifty years, cannot remember it now till an embarrassed cough or a blush and sneer from a Miss Hyphen Browne makes their old hearts ache for shame of themselves.