Chapter VI.

Mrs. Peck’s Progress

All things continued favourable to Mrs. Peck’s plans—­she met with no disaster by sea in her voyage from Adelaide to Melbourne; the ‘Havilah’ brought her to her destination in three days, and she landed on the familiar shores with a light and hopeful heart.  She was not long in discovering where Mrs. Phillips lived, which was in East Melbourne; and as no time was to be lost, she repaired to the house on the very day on which she landed, dressed decently and respectably, like the wife of an artisan, or perhaps with more of the appearance of a monthly nurse.

The girl who opened the door asked her name when she requested to see Mrs. Phillips, and she announced herself, not as Mrs. Peck, but as Mrs. Mahoney, under which name she had taken out her passage, and begged to see the missis by herself for a few minutes.  Mrs. Phillips was then sitting in an easy-chair in the drawing-room, the nurse was engaged with the baby, and Elsie busy in Mrs. Phillips’s room; so the stranger was introduced to have a quiet interview with her daughter.

“Well, Betsy, do you not recollect me?” said Mrs. Peck, in a subdued but intensely earnest voice, whenever the girl was out of hearing.  “Have you forgotten your own mother?”

Mrs. Phillips grew deadly pale, and was about to scream.

“Hush!  Betsy, be quiet,” said her mother.  “I’ve only come to pay you a friendly visit.  I’ve longed so to see you again all these years, and now I heard you was by yourself, I thought I must run all risks to get a look at you.  Why, how handsome you’ve grown, and everything handsome about you, too;” and Mrs. Peck gazed with wondering admiration at the beautiful, well-dressed, queen-like woman whom she had parted with when a mere girl, and had never seen since her marriage.  “Rings on your fingers, and a gold chain round your neck, and everything you can wish for.  Oh, Betsy, I made your fortune, and you never take a thought for me.  I might be dead and buried, and you’d never care a straw.  I have had a hard life, a very hard life—­tossed about from place to place, and often in want of many things that at my time of life I need to get—­and you in such luxury.  My pretty girl, my beautiful daughter!”

Whatever might have been the resemblance between mother and daughter, there were but slight traces of it now.  Mrs. Peck might have been beautiful at sixteen, but her life had not been so conservative of her charms as Mrs. Phillips’s was; besides, Mrs. Phillips resembled her father much more than her mother, and he had been of a much more lymphatic temperament, and was at the same time a remarkably handsome man.  Mrs. Peck was not yet sixty, but she looked old for her years, and more like the grandmother than the mother of Mrs. Phillips, whose easy circumstances, indulgent husband, and indolent, self-regarding life, with no emotion and little excitement, had kept her face free from a single line of care or anxiety.  Her mother’s face was ploughed up with innumerable lines, and her features seemed to work with every varying passion, while her expression was hungry, eager, and wolf-like, without showing anything more intellectual than cunning, even in its calmest moments.