The Old Helmet Volume II Part 48

"There are plenty of servants, I believe; not very well trained, indeed, or it would not be necessary to have so many. At any rate, they can wash, whatever else they can do."

"I don't believe they would know how to wash your dresses."

"Then I can teach them," said Eleanor merrily.

"_You!_ To wash a cambrick dress!"

"That, or any other."

"Eleanor, do not talk so!"

"Certainly not, if you do not wish it. I was only putting you to rest on the score of my laundry work."

"With those hands!" said Mrs. Esthwaite expressively.

Eleanor looked down at her hands, for a moment a higher and graver expression flitted over her face, then she smiled again.

"I should be ashamed of my hands if they were good for nothing."

"Capital!" said Mr. Esthwaite. "That's what I like. That is what I call having spirit. I like to see a woman have some character of her own; something besides hands, in fact."

"But Eleanor, I do not understand. I am serious. You never washed; how can you know how?"

"That was precisely my reasoning; so I learned."

"Learned to _wash?_ _You?"_

"Yes."

"You did it with your own hands?"

"The dress you were so good as to approve," said Eleanor smiling, "it was washed and done up by myself."

"Do you expect to have to do it for yourself?" said Mrs. Esthwaite looking intensely horrified.

"No, not generally; but to teach somebody, or upon occasion, you know.

You see," she said smiling again her full rich smile, "I am bent upon having my white dresses."

Mrs. Esthwaite was too full for speech, and her husband looked at his new cousin with an eye of more absolute admiration than he had yet bestowed on her. Eleanor's thoughts were already on something else; springing forward to meet Mr. Amos and his letters.

Breakfast was over however before he arrived. Much to her chagrin, she was obliged to receive him in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Esthwaite; no private talk was possible. Mr. Esthwaite engaged him immediately in an earnest but desultory conversation, about Sydney, Eleanor, and the mission, and the prospect of their getting to their destination; which Mr. Esthwaite prophesied would not be within any moderate limits of time. Mr. Amos owned that he had heard of no opportunity, near or far.

The talk lasted a good while and it was not till he was taking leave that Eleanor contrived to follow him out and gain a word to herself.

"There are no letters for you," said Mr. Amos, speaking under his breath, and turning a cheerful but concerned face towards Eleanor. "I have made every enquiry--at the post-office, and of everybody likely to know about such things. There are none, and they know of none."

Eleanor said nothing; her face grew perceptibly white.

"There is nothing the matter with brother Rhys," said Mr. Amos hastily; "we have plenty of news from him--all right--he is quite well, and for a year past has been on another station; different from the one he was on when you last heard from him. There is nothing the matter--only there are no letters for you; and there must be some explanation of that."

He paused, but Eleanor was silent, only her colour returned a little.

"We want to get away from here as soon as possible, I suppose," Mr.

Amos went on half under breath; "but as yet I see no opening. It will come."

"Yes," said Eleanor somewhat mechanically. "You will let me know--"

"Certainly--as soon as I know anything myself; and I will continue to make enquiry for those letters. Mr. Armitage is away in the country--he might know something about them, but n.o.body else does; and he ought to have left them with somebody else if he had them. But there can be nothing wrong about it; there is only some mistake, or mischance; the letters from Vuliva where brother Rhys is, are quite recent and everything is going on most prosperously; himself included. And we are to proceed to the same station. I am very glad for ourselves and for you."

"Thank you--" Eleanor said; but she was not equal to saying much. She listened quietly, and with her usual air, and Mr. Amos never discovered the work his tidings wrought; he told his wife, sister Powle looked a little blank, he thought, at missing her expected despatches, and no wonder. It was an awkward thing.

Eleanor slowly made her way up to her room and sat down, feeling as if the foundations of the earth, to _her_ standing, had given way. She was more overwhelmed with dismay than she would have herself antic.i.p.ated in England, if she could have looked forward to such a catastrophe. Reason said there was not sufficient cause; but poor Eleanor was to feel the truth of Mrs. Caxton's prediction, that she would find out again that certain feelings might be natural that were not reasonable. Nay, reason said on this occasion that the failure of letters proved too much to justify the distress she felt; it proved a combination of things, that no carelessness nor indifference nor unwillingness to write, on the part of Mr. Rhys, could possibly have produced. Let him feel how he would, he would have written, he _must_ have written to meet her there; all his own delicacy and his knowledge of hers affirmed and reaffirmed that letters were in existence somewhere, though it might be at the bottom of the ocean. Reason fought well; to what use, when nature trembled, and s.h.i.+vered, and shrank. Poor Eleanor! she felt alone now, without a mother and without shelter; and the fair sh.o.r.es of Port Jackson looked very strange and desolate to her; a very foreign land, far from home. What if Mr. Rhys, with his fastidious notions of delicacy, did not fancy so bold a proceeding as her coming out to him?

what if he disapproved? What if, on further knowledge of the place and the work, he had judged both unfit for her; and did not, for his own sake only in a selfish point of view, choose to encourage her coming?

in that case her being _come_ would make no difference; he would not shelter himself from a judgment displeasing to him, because the escape from its decisions was rendered easy. What if _for his own sake_ his feeling had changed, and he wanted her no longer? years had gone by since he had seen her; it must have been a wayward fancy that could ever have made him think of her at first; and now, about his grave work in a distant land, and with leisure to correct blunders of fancy, perhaps he had settled into the opinion that it was just as well that his coming away had separated them; and did not feel able to welcome her appearance in Australia, and was too sincere to write what he did not feel; so wrote nothing? Not very like Mr. Rhys, reason whispered; but reason's whisper, though heard, could not quiet the sensitive delicacy which trembled at doubt. So miserable, so chilled, so forlorn, Eleanor had never felt in her life; not when the 'Diana' first carried her away from the sh.o.r.es of her native land.

What was she to do? that question throbbed at her heart; but it answered itself soon. Stay in Australia she could not; go home to England she could not; no, not upon this mere deficiency of testimony.

There was only one alternative left; she must go on whenever Mr. and Mrs. Amos should move. Nature might tremble and quiver, and all Eleanor's nerves did; but there was no other course to pursue. "I can tell," she thought,--"I shall know--the first word, the first look, will tell me the whole; I cannot be deceived. I must go on and meet that word and look, whatever it costs me--I must; and then, if it is--if it is not satisfying to me, then aunt Caxton shall have me! I can go back, as well as I have come. Shame and misery would not hinder me--they would not be so bad as my staying here then."

So the question of action was settled; but the question of feeling not so soon. Eleanor's enjoyment was gone, of all the things she had enjoyed those first twenty-four hours, and of all others which her entertainers brought forward for her pleasure. Yet Eleanor kept her own counsel, and as they did not know the cause she had for trouble, so neither did they discover any tokens of it. She did not withdraw herself from their kind efforts to please her, and they spared no pains. They took her in boat excursions round the beautiful harbour.

They shewed her the pretty environs of the Parramatta river. Nay, though it was not very easy for him to leave his business, Mr.

Esthwaite went with her and his wife to the beautiful Illawarra district; put the whole party on horses, and shewed Eleanor a land of tropical beauty under the clear, bracing, delicious warm weather of Australia. Fern trees springing up to the dimensions of trees indeed, with the very fern foliage she was accustomed to in low herbaceous growth at home; only magnified superbly. There were elegant palms, too, with other evergreens, and magnificent creepers; and floating out and in among them in great numbers were gay red-crested c.o.c.katoos and other tropical birds. The character of the scenery was exquisite. Eleanor saw one or two of the fair lake-like lagoons of that district, eat of the fish from them; for they made a kind of gypsey expedition, camping out and providing for themselves fascinatingly; and finally returned in the steamer from Wollongong to Sydney. Her friends would have taken her to see the gold diggings if it had been possible. But Eleanor saw it all, all they could shew her, with half a heart. She had learned long ago to conceal what she felt.

"I think she wants to get away," said Mrs. Esthwaite one night, half vexed, wholly sorry.

"That's what it is to be in love!" said her husband. "You won't keep her in Sydney. Do you notice she has given up smiling?"

"No!" said his wife indignantly; "I notice no such thing. She is as ready to smile as anybody I ever saw."--And I wish I had as good reason! was the mental conclusion; for Eleanor and she had had many an evening talk by that time, and many a hymn had been listened to.

"All very well," said Mr. Esthwaite; "but she don't smile as she did at first. Don't you remember?--that full smile she used to give once in a while, with a little world of mischief in the corners? I would like to see it the next time!--"

"I declare," said Mrs. Esthwaite, "I think you take quite an impertinent interest in people's concerns. She wouldn't let you see it, besides."

At which Mr. Esthwaite laughed.

So near people came to it; and Eleanor covered up her troublesome thoughts within her own heart, and gave Mr. Esthwaite the benefit of that impenetrable coolness and sweetness of manner which a good while ago had used to bewitch London circles. In the effort to hide her real thoughts and feelings she did not quite accommodate it to the different lat.i.tude of New South Wales; and Mr. Esthwaite was a good deal struck and somewhat bewildered.

"You have mistaken your calling," he said one evening, standing before Eleanor and considering her.

"Do you think so?"

"There! Yes, I do. I think you were born to govern."

"I am sadly out of my line then," said Eleanor laughing.

"Yes. You are. That is what I say. You ought to be this minute a d.u.c.h.ess--or a governor's lady--or something else in the imperial line."

"You mistake my tastes, if you think so."

"I do not mistake something else," muttered Mr. Esthwaite; and then Mr.