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.