CHAPTER XXVIII.

"WRITE ME AS ONE WHO LOVES HIS FELLOW MEN."

When Elizabeth went into the room, watchfully attended by the major, who was deeply interested in her proceedings, she was perhaps the happiest woman of all that gala company. She was in love, and she was going to meet her lover—which things meant to her something different from what they mean to girls brought up in conventional habits of thought. Eve in the Garden of Eden could not have been more pure and unsophisticated, more absolutely natural, more warmly human, more blindly confiding and incautious than she; therefore she had obeyed her strongest instinct without hesitation or reserve, and had given herself up to the delight of loving without thought of cost or consequences. Where her affections were concerned she was incapable of compromise or calculation; it was only the noble and simple rectitude that was the foundation of her character and education which could "save her from herself," as we call it, and that only in the last extremity. Just now she was in the full flood-tide, and she let herself go with it without an effort. Adam's "graceful consort" could not have had a more primitive notion of what was appropriate and expected of her under the circumstances. She stood in the brilliant ball-room, without a particle of self-consciousness, in an attitude of unaffected dignity, and with a radiance of gentle happiness all over her, that made her beautiful to look at, though she was not technically beautiful. The major watched her with profound interest, reading her like an open book; he knew what was happening, and what was going to happen (he mostly did), though he had a habit of keeping his own counsel about his own discoveries. He noted her pose, which, besides being so admirably graceful, so evidently implied expectancy; the way she held her flowers to her breast, her chin just touched by the fringes of maiden-hair, while she gently turned her head from side to side. And he saw her lift her eyes to the gallery, saw at the same moment a light spread over her face that had a superficial resemblance to a smile, though her sensitive mouth never changed its expression of firm repose; and, chuckling silently to himself, he walked away to find a sofa for his wife.

Presently Mrs. Duff-Scott, suitably enthroned, and with her younger girls already carried off by her husband from her side, saw Mr. Yelverton approaching her, and rejoiced at the prospect of securing his society for herself and having the tedium of the chaperon's inactivity relieved by sensible conversation. "Ah, so you are here!" she exclaimed cordially; "I thought balls were things quite out of your line."

"So they are," he said, shaking hands with her and Elizabeth impartially, without a glance at the latter. "But I consider it a duty to investigate the customs of the country. I like to look all round when I am about it."

"Quite right. This is distinctly one of our institutions, and I am very glad you are not above taking notice of it."

"I am not above taking notice of anything, I hope."

"No, of course not. You are a true philosopher. There is no dilettantism about you. That is what I like in you," she added frankly. "Come and sit down here between Miss King and me, and talk to us. I want to know how the emigration business is getting on."

He sat down between the two ladies, Elizabeth drawing back her white skirts.

"I have been doing no business, emigration or other," he said; "I have been spending my time in pleasure."

"Is it possible? Well, I am glad to hear it. I should very much like to know what stands for pleasure with you, only it would be too rude a question."

"I have been in the country," he said, smiling.

"H—m—that's not saying much. You don't mean to tell me, I see. Talking of the country—look at Elizabeth's bouquet. Did you think we could raise lilies of the valley like those?"

He bent his head slightly to smell them. "I heard that they did grow hereabouts," he said; and his eyes and Elizabeth's met for a moment over the fragrant flowers that she held between them, while Mrs. Duff-Scott detailed the negligent circumstances of their presentation, which left it a matter of doubt where they came from and for whom they were intended.

"I want to find Mr. Smith," said she; "I fancy he can give us information."

"I don't think so," said Mr. Yelverton; "he was showing me a lily of the valley in his button-hole just now as a great rarity in these parts."

Then it flashed across Mrs. Duff-Scott that Paul Brion might have been the donor, and she said no more.

For some time the trio sat upon the sofa, and the matron and the philanthropist discussed political economy in its modern developments. They talked about emigration; they talked about protection—and wherein a promising, but inexperienced, young country was doing its best to retard the wheels of progress—as if they were at a committee meeting rather than disporting themselves at a ball. The major found partners for the younger girls, but he left Elizabeth to her devices; at least he did so for a long time—until it seemed to him that she was being neglected by her companions. Then he started across the room to rescue her from her obscurity. At the moment that he came in sight, Mr. Yelverton turned to her. "What about dancing, Miss King?" he said, quickly. "May I be allowed to do my best?"

"I cannot dance," said Elizabeth. "I began too late—I can't take to it, somehow."

"My dear," said Mrs. Duff-Scott, "that is nonsense. All you want is practice. And I am not going to allow you to become a wall-flower." She turned her head to greet some newly-arrived friends, and Mr. Yelverton rose and offered his arm to Elizabeth.

"Let us go and practise," he said, and straightway they passed down the room, threading a crowd once more, and went upstairs to the gallery, which was a primeval forest in its solitude at this comparatively early hour. "There is no reason why you should dance if you don't like it," he remarked; "we can sit here and look on." Then, when she was comfortably settled in her cushions under the fern trees, he leaned forward and touched her bouquet with a gesture that was significant of the unacknowledged but well-understood intimacy between them. "I am so glad I was able to get them for you," he said; "I wanted you to know what they were really like—when you told me how much your mother had loved them."

"I can't thank you," she replied.

"Do not," he said. "It is for me to thank you for accepting them. I wish you could see them in my garden at Yelverton. There is a dark corner between two gables of the house where they make a perfect carpet in April."

She lifted those she held to her face, and sniffed luxuriously.

"There is a room in that recess," he went on, "a lady's sitting-room. Not a very healthy spot, by the way, it is too dank and dark. It was fitted up for poor Elizabeth Leigh when my two uncles, Patrick and Kingscote, expected her to come and live there, each wanting her for his wife—so my grandmother used to say. It has never been altered, though nearly all the rest of the house has been turned inside out. I think the lilies of the valley were planted there for her. I wish you could see that room. You would like sitting by the open window—it is one of those old diamond-paned casements, and has got some interesting stained glass in it—and seeing the sun shine on the grey walls outside, and smelling the lilies in that green well that the sun cannot reach down below. It is just one of those things that would suit you."

She listened silently, gazing at the great organ opposite, towering out of the groves of flowers at its base, without seeing what it was she looked at. After a pause he went on, still leaning forward, with his arms resting on his knees. "I can think of nothing now but how much I want you to see and know everything that makes my life at home," he said.

"Tell me about it," she said, with the woman's instinctive desire for delay at this juncture, not because she didn't want to hear the rest, but to prolong the sweetness of anticipation; "tell me what your life at Yelverton is like."

"I have not had much of it at present," he replied, after a brief pause. "The place was let for a long while. Then, when I took it over again, I made it into a sort of convalescent home, and training-place, and general starting-point for girls and children—protégées of my friend who does slumming in the orthodox way. Though he disapproves of me he makes use of me, and, of course, I don't disapprove of him, and am very glad to help him. The house is too big for me alone, and it seems the best use I can put it to. Of course I keep control of it; I take the poor things in on the condition that they are to be disciplined after my system and not his—his may be the best, but they don't enjoy it as they do mine—and when I am at home I run down once a week or so to see how they are getting on."

"And how is it now?"

"Now the house is just packed, I believe, from top to bottom. I got a letter a few days ago from my faithful lieutenant, who looks after things for me, to say that it couldn't hold many more, and that the funds of the institution are stretched to their utmost capacity to provide supplies."

"The funds? Oh, you must certainly use that other money now!"

"Yes, I shall use it now. I have, indeed, already appropriated a small instalment. I told Le Breton to draw on it, rather than let one child go that we could take—rather than let one opportunity be lost."

"You have other people working with you, then?"

"A good many—yes, and a very miscellaneous lot you would think them. Le Breton is the one I trust as I do myself. I could not have been here now if it had not been for him. He is my right hand."

"Who is he?" she asked, fascinated, in spite of her preoccupations, by this sketch of a life that had really found its mission in the world, and one so beneficent and so satisfying.

"He is a very interesting man," said Mr. Yelverton, who still leaned towards her, touching her flowers occasionally with a tender audacity; "a man to respect and admire—a brave man who would have been burnt at the stake had he lived a few centuries ago. He was once a clergyman, but he gave that up."

"He gave it up!" repeated Elizabeth, who had read "Thomas à Kempis" and the Christian Year daily since she was a child, as her mother had done before her.

"He couldn't stand it," said Mr. Yelverton, simply. "You see he was a man with a very literal, and straight-going, and independent mind—a mind that could nohow bend itself to the necessities of the case. I don't suppose he ever really gave himself up out of his own control, but, at any rate, when he got to know the world and the kind of time that we had come to, he couldn't pretend to shut his eyes. He couldn't make-believe that he was all the same as he had been when a mere lad of three-and-twenty, and that nothing had happened to change things while he had been learning and growing. And once he fell out with his conscience there was no patching up the breach with compromises for him. He tried it, poor fellow—he had a tough tussle before he gave in. It was a great step to take, you know—a martyrdom with all the pain and none of the glory—that nobody could sympathise with or understand."

Elizabeth was sitting very still, watching with unseeing eyes the glitter of a conspicuous diamond tiara in the moving crowd below. She, at any rate, could neither sympathise nor understand.

"He was in the thick of his troubles when I first met him," Mr. Yelverton went on. "He was working hard in one of the East End parishes, doing his level best, as the Yankees say, and tormented all the time, not only by his own scruples and self-accusations, but by a perfect hornet's nest of ecclesiastical persecutors. I said to him. 'Be an honest man, and give up being a parson—'"

"Isn't it possible to be both?" Elizabeth broke in.

"No doubt it is. But it was not possible for him. Seeing that, I advised him to let go, and leave those that could to hold on—as I am glad they do hold on, for we want the brake down at the rate we are going. He was in agonies of dread about the future, because he had a wife and children, so I offered him a salary equal to the emoluments of his living to come and work with me. 'You and I will do what good we can together,' I said, 'without pretending to be anything more than what we know we are.' And so he cast in his lot with me, and we have worked together ever since. They call him all sorts of bad names, but he doesn't care—at least not much. It is such a relief to him to be able to hold his head up as a free man—and he does work with such a zest compared to what he did!"

"And you," said Elizabeth, drawing short breaths, "what are you?—are you a Dissenter, too?"

"Very much so, I think," he said, smiling at a term that to him, an Englishman, was obsolete, while to her, an Australian born, it had still its ancient British significance (for she had been born and reared in her hermit home, the devoutest of English-churchwomen).

"And yet, in one sense, no one could be less so."

"But what are you?" she urged, suddenly revealing to him that she was frightened by this ambiguity.

"Really, I don't know," he replied, looking at her gravely. "I think if I had to label my religious faith in the usual way, with a motto, I should say I was a Humanitarian. The word has been a good deal battered about and spoiled, but it expresses my creed better than any other."

"A Humanitarian!" she ejaculated with a cold and sinking heart. "Is that all?" To her, in such a connection, it was but another word for an infidel.

CHAPTER XXIX.

PATTY CONFESSES.

A little group of their male attendants stood in the lobby, while Mrs. Duff-Scott and the girls put on their wraps in the cloak-room. When the ladies reappeared, they fell into the order in which Paul, unseen in the shadows of the street, saw them descend the steps to the pavement.

"May I come and see you to-morrow morning?" asked Mr. Yelverton of Elizabeth, whom he especially escorted.

"Not—not to-morrow," she replied. "We shall be at Myrtle Street, and we never receive any visitors there."

"At Myrtle Street!" exclaimed the major, who also walked beside her. "Surely you are not going to run off to Myrtle Street to-morrow?"

"We are going there now," said she, "if we can get in. Mrs. Duff-Scott knows."

"Let them alone," said the chaperon, looking back over her shoulder. "If they have a fancy to go home they shall go. I won't have them persuaded." She was as reluctant to leave them at Myrtle Street as the major could be, but she carefully abstained, as she always did, from interfering with their wishes when nothing of importance was involved. She was wise enough to know that she would have the stronger hold on them by seeming to leave them their liberty.

They were put into the carriage by their attentive cavaliers, the major taking his now frequent box seat in order to accompany them; and Mr. Smith and Mr. Yelverton were left standing on the pavement. Arrived at Myrtle Street, it was found that the house was still open, and the girls bade the elder couple an effusively affectionate and compunctious good-night.

"And when shall I see you again?" Mrs. Duff-Scott inquired, with a carefully composed smile and cheerful air.

"To-morrow," said Elizabeth, eagerly; "to-morrow, of course, some of us will come." All three girls had a painful feeling that they were ungrateful, while under obligations to be grateful, in spite of their friend's effort to prevent it, as they stood a moment in the warm night at their street door, and watched the carriage roll away. And yet they were so glad to be on their own "tauri" to-night—even Eleanor, who had grown more out of tune with the old frugal life than any of them.

They were let in by the ground-floor landlady, with whom they chatted for a few minutes, arranging about the materials for their breakfast; then they went upstairs to their lonely little bedrooms, where they lit their candles and began at once to prepare for bed. They were dead tired, they said, and wanted to sleep and not to talk.

But a full hour after their separation for the night, each one was as wide awake as she had been all day. Elizabeth was kneeling on the floor by her bedside, still half-dressed—she had not changed her attitude for a long time, though the undulations of her body showed how far from passive rest she was—when Patty, clothed only in her night-gown, crept in, making no noise with her bare feet.

"Elizabeth," she whispered, laying her hand on her sister's shoulder, "are you asleep?—or are you saying your prayers?"

Elizabeth, startled, lifted up her head, and disclosed to Patty's gaze in the candle-light a pale, and strained, and careworn face, "I was saying my prayers," she replied, with a dazed look. "Why are you out of bed, my darling? What is the matter?"

"That is what I want to know," said Patty, sitting down on the bed. "What is the matter with us all? What has come to us? Nelly has been crying ever since I put the light out—she thought I couldn't hear her, but she was mistaken—sobbing and sniffing under the bedclothes, and blowing her nose in that elaborately cautious way—"

"Oh, poor, dear child!" interrupted the maternal elder sister, making a start towards the door.

"No, don't go to her," said Patty, putting out her hand; "leave her alone—she is quiet now. Besides, you couldn't do her any good. Do you know what she is fretting about? Because Mr. Westmoreland has been neglecting her. Would you believe it? She is caring about it, after all—and we thought it was only fun. She doesn't care about him, she couldn't do that—"

"We can't tell," interrupted Elizabeth. "It is not for us to say. Perhaps she does, poor child!"

"Oh, she couldn't," Patty scornfully insisted. "That is quite impossible. No, she has got fond of this life that we are living now with Mrs. Duff-Scott—I have seen it, how it has laid hold of her—and she would like to marry him so that she could have it always. That is what she has come to. Oh, Elizabeth, don't you wish we had gone to Europe at the very first, and never come to Melbourne at all!" Here Patty herself broke down, and uttered a little shaking, hysterical sob. "Everything seems to be going wrong with us here! It does not look so, I know, but at the bottom of my heart I feel it. Why did we turn aside to waste and spoil ourselves like this, instead of going on to the life that we had laid out—a real life, that we should never have had to be ashamed of?"

Elizabeth was silent for a few minutes, soothing her sister's excitement with maternal caresses, and at the same time thinking with all her might. "We must try not to get confused," she said presently. "Life is life, you know, Patty, wherever you are—all the other things are incidental. And we need not try to struggle with everything at once. I think we have done our best, when we have had anything to do—any serious step to take—since we came to Melbourne; and in Europe we could have done no more. It seemed right to please Mrs. Duff-Scott, and to accept such a treasure as her friendship when it came to us in what seemed such a providential way—did it not? It seemed so to me. It would have been ungenerous to have held out against her—and we were always a little given to be too proud of standing alone. It makes her happy to have us. I don't know what work we could have done that would have been more profitable than that. Patty"—after another thoughtful pause—"I don't think it is that things are going wrong, dear. It is only that we have to manage them, and to steer our way, and to take care of ourselves, and that is so trying and perplexing. God knows I find it difficult! So, I suppose, does everyone."

"You, Elizabeth? You always seem to know what is right. And you are so good that you never ought to have troubles."

"If Nelly is susceptible to such a temptation as Mr. Westmoreland—Mr. Westmoreland, because he is rich—she would not have gone far with us, in any case," Elizabeth went on, putting aside the allusion to herself. "Europe would not have strengthened her. It would have been all the same. While, as for you, my darling—"

"I—I!" broke in Patty excitedly. "I should have been happy now, and not as I am! I should have been saved from making a fool of myself if I had gone to Europe! I should have been worth something, and able to do something, there!"

"How can you tell, dear child? And why do you suppose you have been foolish? I don't think so. On the contrary, it has often seemed to me that you have been the sensible one of us all."

"O, Elizabeth, don't laugh at me!" wailed Patty, reproachfully.

"I laugh at you, my darling! What an idea! I mean it, every word. You see everything in a distorted and exaggerated way just now, because you are tired and your nerves are over-wrought. You are not yourself to-night, Patty. You will cheer up—we shall all cheer up—when we have had a good sleep and a little quiet time to think things over."

"No, I am not myself, indeed," assented Patty, with moody passion. "I am not myself at all—to be made to feel so weak and miserable!" She put her face down in her hands and began to cry with more abandonment at the thought of how weak she had become.

"But Patty, dearest, there must be something the matter with you," her motherly elder sister cried, much distressed by this abnormal symptom. "Are you feeling ill? Don't frighten me like this."

The girl laid her head upon her sister's shoulder, and there let herself loose from all restraint. "You know what is the matter," she sobbed; "you know as well as I do what is the matter—that it is Paul Brion who worries me so and makes me so utterly wretched."

"Paul Brion! He worry you, Patty—he make you wretched?"

"You have always been delicate and considerate, Elizabeth—you have never said anything—but I know you know all about it, and how spoiled I am, and how spoiled everything is because of him. I hate to talk of it—I can't bear even you to see that I am fretting about him—but I can't help it! and I know you understand. When I have had just one good cry," she concluded, with a fresh and violent burst of tears, "perhaps I shall get on better."

Elizabeth stared at the wall over her sister's head in dumb amazement, evidently not deserving the credit for perspicacity accorded to her. "Do you mean," she said slowly, "do you really mean—"

"Yes," sobbed Patty, desperate, for the moment dead to shame.

"Oh, how blind—how wickedly blind—how stupid—how selfish I have been!" Elizabeth exclaimed, after another pause in which to collect her shocked and bewildered faculties. "I never dreamt about it, my darling—never, for a single moment. I thought—I always had the settled impression that you did not like him."

"I don't like him," said Patty, fiercely, lifting herself up. "I love him—I love him! I must say it right out once, if I never speak another word," and she bent her head back a little, and stretched out her arms with an indescribable gesture as if she saw him standing before her. "He is a man—a real, true, strong man—who works, and thinks, and lives—lives! It is all serious with him, as I wanted it to be with me—and I might have been worthy of him! A little while ago we were so near to each other—so near that we almost touched—and now no two people could be farther apart. I have done him wrong—I have been a wicked fool, but I am punished for it out of all proportion. He flirt with a married woman! What could I have been dreaming of? Oh, how disgusting I must be to have allowed such an idea to come into my head! And yet it was only a little thing, Elizabeth, when you come to think of it relatively—the only time I ever really did him injustice, and it was only for a moment. No one can always do what is right and fair without making a mistake sometimes—it was just a mistake for want of thinking. But it has taken him from me as completely as if I had committed suicide, and was dead and buried and done with. It has made him hate me. No wonder! If he cared about me, I wouldn't be too proud to beg his pardon, but he doesn't—he doesn't! And so I must face it out, or else he will think I am running after him, and he will despise me more than he does already."

"But if he was doing no harm," said Elizabeth, soothingly, "he could not suppose that you thought he was."

"No," said Patty, "he will never think I was so disgusting as to think that of him. But it is as bad as if he did. That at least was a great, outrageous, downright wrong, worth fighting about, and not the pitiful shabby thing that it appears to him. For, of course, he thinks I did it because I was too grand to notice him while I was wearing a fine dress and swelling about with great people. It never occurred to me that it would be possible for him or anybody to suspect me of that," said Patty, proudly, drawing herself up; "but afterwards I saw that he could not help doing it. And ever since then it has been getting worse and worse—everything has seemed to point to its being so. Haven't you noticed? I never see him except I am with people who are above noticing him; and Mr. Smith—oh, what I have suffered from Mr. Smith to-night, Elizabeth!—has all this time been thinking I was going to marry him, and I can see now how it must have looked to other people as if I was. Just think of it!"—with a gesture of intense disgust. "As if any girl could stoop to that, after having had such a contrast before her eyes! No wonder he hates me and despises me—no wonder he looks at me as if I were the dirt beneath his feet. I wish I were," she added, with reckless passion; "oh, my dear love, I only wish I were!"

When she was about it, Patty cleansed her stuffed bosom thoroughly. It was not her way to do things by halves. She rhapsodised about her love and her lover with a wild extravagance that was proportionate to the strained reserve and restraint that she had so long put upon her emotions. After which came the inevitable reaction. The fit being over, she braced herself up again, and was twice as strong-minded and self-sufficient as before. When the morning came, and she and Elizabeth busied themselves with housework—Eleanor being relegated to the sofa with a sick headache—the girl who had dissolved herself in tears and given way to temporary insanity, as she chose herself to call it, so recently, was bright, and brusque, and cheerful, in spite of sultry weather; and not only did she pretend, even to her confidante, that the young man on the other side of the wall had no place in her thoughts, but she hardened her heart to adamant against him, for having been the cause of her humiliating lapse from dignity. It was quite a lucky chance, indeed, that she did not straightway go and accept the hand and fortune of Mr. Smith, by way of making reparation for the outrage committed vicariously by Paul Brion on her self-respect.