The Three Miss Kings 2

The Three Miss Kings 2

The parents of these three girls had been a mysterious couple, about

whose circumstances and antecedents people knew just as much as they

liked to conjecture, and no more. Mr. King had been on the diggings

in the old days--that much was a fact, to which he had himself been

known to testify; but where and what he had been before, and why he

had lived like a pelican in the wilderness ever since, nobody knew,

though everybody was at liberty to guess. Years and years ago, he

came to this lone coast--a region of hopeless sand and scrub, which

no squatter or free selector with a grain of sense would look at--and

here on a bleak headland he built his rude house, piece by piece, in

great part with his own hands, and fenced his little paddock, and made

his little garden; and here he had lived till the other day, a morose

recluse, who shunned his neighbours as they shunned him, and never was

known to have either business or pleasure, or commerce of any kind

with his fellow-men. It was supposed that he had made some money at

the diggings, for he took up no land (there was none fit to take up,

indeed, within a dozen miles of him), and he kept no stock--except a

few cows and pigs for the larder; and at the same time there was never

any sign of actual poverty in his little establishment, simple and

humble as it was. And it was also supposed--nay, it was confidently

believed--that he was not, so to speak, "all there." No man who was not

"touched" would conduct himself with such preposterous eccentricity as

that which had marked his long career in their midst--so the neighbours

argued, not without a show of reason. But the greatest mystery in

connection with Mr. King was Mrs. King. He was obviously a gentleman,

in the conventional sense of the word, but she was, in every sense,

the most beautiful and accomplished lady that ever was seen, according

to the judgment of those who knew her--the women who had nursed her in

her confinements, and washed and scrubbed for her, and the tradesmen

of the town to whom she had gone in her little buggy for occasional

stores, and the doctor and the parson, and the children whom she had

brought up in such a wonderful manner to be copies (though, it was

thought, poor ones) of herself. And yet she had borne to live all

the best years of her life, at once a captive and an exile, on that

desolate sea-shore--and had loved that harsh and melancholy man with

the most faithful and entire devotion--and had suffered her solitude

and privations, the lack of everything to which she _must_ have been

once accustomed, and the fret and trouble of her husband's bitter

moods--without a murmur that anybody had ever heard.

 

Both of them were gone now from the cottage on the cliff where they had

lived so long together. The idolised mother had been dead for several

years, and the harsh, and therefore not much loved nor much mourned,

father had lain but a few weeks in his grave beside her; and they had

left their children, as Elizabeth described it, more utterly without

belongings than ever girls were before. It was a curious position

altogether. As far as they knew, they had no relations, and they had

never had a friend. Not one of them had left their home for a night

since Eleanor was born, and not one invited guest had slept there

during the whole of that period. They had never been to school, or had

any governess but their mother, or any experience of life and the ways

of the world save what they gained in their association with her, and

from the books that she and their father selected for them. According

to all precedent, they ought to have been dull and rustic and stupid

(it was supposed that they were, because they dressed themselves so

badly), but they were only simple and truthful in an extraordinary

degree. They had no idea what was the "correct thing" in costume or

manners, and they knew little or nothing of the value of money; but

they were well and widely read, and highly accomplished in all the

household arts, from playing the piano to making bread and butter, and

as full of spiritual and intellectual aspirations as the most advanced

amongst us.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II.

 

 

A LONELY EYRIE.

 

 

"Then we will say Melbourne to begin with. Not for a permanence, but

until we have gained a little more experience," said Patty, with

something of regret and reluctance in her voice. By this time the sun

had set and drawn off all the glow and colour from sea and shore. The

island rock was an enchanted castle no longer, and the sails of the

fishing-boats had ceased to shine. The girls had been discussing their

schemes for a couple of hours, and had come to several conclusions.

 

"I think so, Patty. It would be unwise to hurry ourselves in making

our choice of a home. We will go to Melbourne and look about us. Paul

Brion is there. He will see after lodgings for us and put us in the

way of things generally. That will be a great advantage. And then the

Exhibition will be coming--it would be a pity to miss that. And we

shall feel more as if we belonged to the people here than elsewhere,

don't you think? They are more likely to be kind to our ignorance and

help us."

 

"Oh, we don't want anyone to help us."

 

"Someone must teach us what we don't know, directly or indirectly--and

we are not above being taught."

 

"But," insisted Patty, "there is no reason why we should be beholden

to anybody. Paul Brion may look for some lodgings for us, if he

likes--just a place to sleep in for a night or two--and tell us where

we can find a house--that's all we shall want to ask of him or of

anybody. We will have a house of our own, won't we?--so as not to be

overlooked or interfered with."

 

"Oh, of course!" said Eleanor promptly. "A landlady on the premises is

not to be thought of for a moment. Whatever we do, we don't want to be

interfered with, Elizabeth."

 

"No, my dear--you can't desire to be free from interference--unpleasant

interference--more than I do. Only I don't think we shall be able to be

so independent as Patty thinks. I fancy, too, that we shall not care to

be, when we begin to live in the world with other people. It will be so

charming to have friends!"

 

"Oh--friends!" Patty exclaimed, with a little toss of the head. "It is

too soon to think about friends--when we have so much else to think

about! We must have some lessons in Melbourne, Elizabeth. We will go

to that library every day and read. We will make our stay there a

preparation for England and Germany and Italy. Oh, Nell, Nell! think of

seeing the great Alps and the Doge's Palace before we die!"

 

"Ah!" responded Eleanor, drawing a long breath.

 

They all rose from the grass and stood still an instant, side by side,

for a last look at the calm ocean which had been the background of

their simple lives. Each was sensible that it was a solemn moment, in

view of the changes to come, but not a word was spoken to imply regret.

Like all the rest of us, they were ungrateful for the good things of

the present and the past, and were not likely to understand how much

they loved the sea, that, like the nurse of Rorie Mhor, had lulled them

to sleep every night since they were born, while the sound of its many

waters was still in their ears.

 

"Sam Dunn is out late," said Eleanor, pointing to a dark dot far away,

that was a glittering sail a little while ago.

 

"It is a good night for fishing," said Patty.

 

And then they turned their faces landward, and set forth on their road

home. Climbing to the top of the cliff on the slope of which they had

been sitting, they stood upon a wide and desolate heath covered in all

directions with a short, stiff scrub, full of wonderful wild-flowers

(even at this barren season of the year), but without a tree of any

sort; a picturesque desert, but still a desert, though with fertile

country lying all around it--as utterly waste as the irreclaimable

Sahara. Through this the girls wended their way by devious tracks

amongst the bushes, ankle deep in the loose sand; and then again

striking the cliff, reached a high point from which they had a distant

view of human habitations--a little township, fringing a little bay;

a lighthouse beyond it, with its little star shining steadily through

the twilight; a little pier, running like a black thread through the

silvery surf; and even a little steamer from Melbourne lying at the

pier-head, veiling the rock-island, that now frowned like a fortress

behind it, in a thin film of grey smoke from its invisible little

funnels. But they did not go anywhere near these haunts of their

fellow-men. Hugging the cliff, which was here of a great height,

and honeycombed with caves in which the green sea-water rumbled and

thundered like a great drum in the calm weather, and like a furious

bombardment in a storm, they followed a slender track worn in the scant

grass by their own light feet, until they came to a little depression

in the line of the coast--a hollow scooped out of the great headland

as if some Titanic monster of a prehistoric period had risen up out of

the waves and bitten it--where, sheltered and hidden on three sides by

grassy banks, sloping gently upward until they overtopped the chimneys,

and with all the great plain of the sea outspread beneath the front

verandah, stood the house which had been, but was to be no more, their

home.

 

It was well worth the money that the storekeeper had offered for it. It

was a really charming house, though people had not been accustomed to

look at it in that light--though it was built of roughest weatherboard

that had never known a paint-brush, and heavily roofed with great

sheets of bark that were an offence to the provincial eye, accustomed

to the chaste elegance of corrugated zinc. A strong, and sturdy,

and genuine little house--as, indeed, it had to be to hold its own

against the stormy blasts that buffeted it; mellowed and tanned with

time and weather, and with all its honest, rugged features softened

under a tender drapery of hardy English ivy and climbing plants that

patient skill and care had induced to grow, and even to thrive in

that unfriendly air. The verandah, supported on squat posts, was a

continuation of the roof; and that roof, with green leaves curling

upward over it, was so conspicuously solid, and so widely overspread

and over-shadowed the low walls, that it was about all that could be

seen of the house from the ridges of the high land around it. But

lower down, the windows--nearly all set in rude but substantial door

frames--opened like shy eyes in the shadow of the deep eaves of the

verandah, like eyes that had __EXPRESSION__ in them; and the retiring

walls bore on numerous nails and shelves a miscellaneous but orderly

collection of bird-cages, flower boxes, boating and fishing apparatus,

and odds and ends of various kinds, that gave a charming homely

picturesqueness to the quaint aspect of the place. The comparatively

spacious verandah, running along the front of the house (which had been

made all front, as far as possible), was the drawing-room and general

living room of the family during the greater part of the year. Its

floor, of unplaned hardwood, dark with age and wear, but as exquisitely

clean as sweeping and scrubbing could make it, was one of the loveliest

terraces in the country for the view that it afforded--so our girls

will maintain, at any rate, to their dying day. Now that they see it no

more, they have passionate memories of their beloved bay, seen through

a frame of rustling leaves from that lofty platform--how it looked in

the dawn and sunrise, in the intensely blue noon, in the moonlight

nights, and when gales and tempests were abroad, and how it sounded

in the hushed darkness when they woke out of their sleep to listen

to it--the rhythmic fall of breaking waves on the rocks below, the

tremulous boom that filled the air and seemed to shake the foundations

of the solid earth. They have no wish to get back to their early home

and their hermit life there now--they have tasted a new wine that is

better than the old; but, all the same, they think and say that from

the lonely eyrie where they were nursed and reared they looked out

upon such a scene as the wide world would never show them any more.