As for Antonia Frankston, like most women, she was gratified by these tokens of the distinction which had been so profusely accorded to her hero. He was a hero who, in her eyes, though worthy of triumphs and processions, evaded his claims to such distinctions. He was too prone, she thought, to be over Scriptural in his social habitudes, and unless roused and incited, to take the lower rather than the higher seat at the board. Now that the people, wavering and impulsive, but still a mighty and tangible power, had endorsed and adopted him, Antonia’s expansive mind recognised the brevet rank bestowed upon him. After all, had he not done much and dared greatly? Was it not well for the world to know it? If he was to be decorated, few deserved it more. So Antonia accepted serenely and in good faith the plaudits and universal flattery which now commenced to be showered upon the hero of her choice, the idol of her heart, the image of all written manhood.
The days which Mr. Neuchamp spent in Sydney after his return from Mildool and Rainbar were certainly more tedious than any which he had ever known in the pleasant city; but at length they passed away and were no more—strange thought! those atoms from the mighty mass of Time—drops from his flowing river—draughts, alas! quaffed or spilled from life’s golden chalice. They were past, faded, dead, irrevocably gone, as the days of the years before Pharaoh, before the shepherd kings, before the dawn of human life, Eden, or the first gleam of light which flashed upon a darkened, formless world!
Sad, pathetic even, is the death of a day! Its circling hours have known peace, joy, loving regard, social glee, charity, justice, mercy, repose. The allotted task has been done. The parent’s smile, the wife’s love, the babe’s prattle, have all glorified earth during its short season. And now the day is done! its tiny term is over, lost in the shoreless sea of past immensities! The brightly inconstant orb shines tenderly on the new-born stranger, full of joyous hope or dread expectancy. Who can tell what this, the new and garish day, may bring forth? Let us weep for the loved, fast-fading Child of Time, in whose golden tresses, at least, twined no cypress wreath.
Then, heralded by calm and cloudless hours, did the wondrous unit, the Day of Days, dawn for Ernest Neuchamp. Rarely—even in that matchless clime, where the too ardent sun alone may be blamed by the husbandman, rarely by the citizen or the tourist—did a more perfect, unrivalled, wondrous day steal rosy through the ocean mists, the folded vapours, to change into fretted gold and Tyrian dyes the tender tints of flushed dawn. All nature visibly, audibly rejoiced. The tiny wavelets murmured on the milk-white sands of the Morahmee beach, that their darling—she who loved them and talked with them in many a hushed eve, in many a solemn starry midnight—was this day to be wed. The strange foreign pines and flower trees of the Morahmee plantation, brought from many a distant land to please the lady of the mansion, echoed the sound as they waved to and fro with oriental languor and tropical mystery. The flowerets she daily tended turned imperceptibly their delicately various sheen of petals to each other and sighed the tender secret. With how many secrets are not the flowers entrusted? Have they not been sworn to silence since those days of the great dead empires, when the vows and pleadings, songs and laughter, beneath the rose-chaplets were sacred evermore?
Her gems, of which Antonia had great store—for there was more difficulty in preventing Paul from overlading her caskets than of replenishing them—even they knew it. They flashed and glittered, and reddened, and sent out green and purple light, for they are envious, hard, and remorseless of nature, as they noted the arrival of a bediamonded necklace, and a brooch outshining in splendour any of their rich and rare and very exclusive ‘set.’
The pensioners, her dependants, of the house, among the humble, and the very poor, knew it and raised for her welfare the brief unstudied prayer which comes from a thankful heart. The poor, in ordinary acceptation, are, and have always been, in Australia, difficult to discover and to distinguish. But to the earnest quest of the unaffectedly charitable, anxious to do good to soul or body, to succour the tempted, to help the needy, to save him that is ready to perish, worthy occasions of ministration have never been absent from the outskirts of every large city.
The forlorn spinster, friendless and forsaken, the overworked matron,—the shabby genteel sufferers too secure to starve, too poor to enjoy, too proud to complain, and, occasionally, what seemed to be an example of unmerciful disaster,—among these were the rich maiden’s unobtrusive but unremittingly performed good works, of which none heard, none knew, but the recipients, and perhaps the discreetest of co-workers.
And thus, with the day just dawned, had the maiden life of Antonia Frankston come to an end. From this day forth her being was to merge in that of one who, falling with the suddenness of a shipwrecked mariner into their society, had been, as would have been such a waif, treated with every friendly office, with the ample up-springing kindness of a princely heart, by her fond father. That father, no mean judge of his fellow-man, had seen in his early career but the noble errors of a lofty nature and an elevated ideal. Such disproportions between judgment and experience but prove the natural dignity of the mind as fully as the precocious wisdom of the gutter-bred urchin waif, his base descent and companionship.
Paul Frankston had long foreseen that, when the lessons of life should have cleared the encrustation from the character of his protégé, it would shine forth bright and burnished as Toledo steel—all-sufficient for defence, nay, equal to spirited attack, should such need arise. He saw that the future possessor and guardian of his soul’s treasure was a ‘man’ as well as a ‘gentleman.’ On both of these essentials he laid great weight. For the rest, his principles were high and unfaltering, his habits unimpeachable. Whatever trifling defects there might be in his character were merely such as were incident to mortality. They must be left to the influence of time, experience, and of Antonia.