AFTER A YEAR.
It is impossible for any story, unless comprised within a very short
space, to be written in full detail, and therefore I must beg the gentle
reader to pardon me if I pass over a little more than a year, jumping
over the marriage of Frederick Eastwood and all its attendant
circumstances, which, indeed, was not pleasant to dwell upon. To make
this event possible Mrs. Eastwood had to sacrifice a portion of her
income, which she did with a pained and miserable sense of
unwillingness. It would be impossible for anything to have been more
repulsive or disagreeable to her than the marriage itself, and yet she
had to subtract largely from her own living to render it possible. I
cannot rightly tell why she did not resist this claim. It was partly, I
think, out of horror at herself for being reluctant to sacrifice
anything or everything to secure “the happiness” of one of her
children--a fictitious motive, but one which had great force with her.
The consequence was that old Brownlow, who had seen all the children
grow up, and to whose services and lectures they had been used all their
lives, had to be “put down” like the carriage. Mrs. Eastwood could no
longer afford a costly and solemn butler; she laughed tremulously at the
idea that this was a grievance, and declared aloud that she had always
preferred having maids to wait at table. But it was a grievance, for
Brownlow was an old and faithful servant, upon whom Mrs. Eastwood had
relied much, and he married the cook, also a most important functionary
in the house, and disordered the establishment from top to bottom.
Nobody but the Molyneuxes thought the less of Mrs. Eastwood because the
door at The Elms was now opened by a nice-looking maid; but _they_ did
note her descent in the social scale, and this was very irksome to her.
Brownlow became the greengrocer of the district, and was always at hand
round the corner among the beetroots and cabbages, ready to respond to
any call, and to wait at all the dinner-parties; but still it was not
the same thing as having a man in the house. No carriage and no butler!
These things she had given up for Frederick, and what was she to give up
for Nelly when the time came? The fact was, however, that Nelly would
not allow the time to come. Things remained almost exactly in the same
position as they had done at the beginning of this story, so far as
Nelly was concerned. Ernest Molyneux still went and came, occasionally
taking upon himself the aspect of son of the house, but quite as often
making himself generally disagreeable, making speeches which were
sharply sarcastic or ill-tempered, under the guise of civility, to Mrs.
Eastwood, and torturing Nelly with heats and chills of feeling. He had
taken no step to make the marriage possible in his own person. He was as
idle as ever, lounging about his clubs and The Elms, interfering with
all their arrangements, a man with nothing to do. Now and then he wrote
an article in the _Piccadilly_ or in the _Daily Treasury_, and thus kept
up the character of being a literary man, and making a great deal of
money by his writings. But his profession was just as much and as little
to him as on the day when he had told Mrs. Eastwood that he would not
press for an immediate marriage. He did not press for it now. He felt
with all the clear-sightedness of personal extravagance how many
disadvantages there would be in having to set up an establishment of his
own, and felt that the changes involved would bring more discomfort than
additional happiness. A little more of Nelly would be purchased somewhat
dearly by the change in position, in money to spend, and in
responsibility of every kind; and at present he could have a very
sufficient amount of Nelly’s society without these attendant troubles.
His father, for his part, held himself good-humouredly ready to “do as
much as the other side,” whenever, as he said, Ernest and his young lady
made up their minds, but in the meantime regarded the whole matter with
a certain cynical amusement, watching the process by which, as he
thought, “the old mother” staved off the moment when, along with her
daughter, she would have to part with some of her money. “Knows the
value of money, that future mother-in-law of yours,” he would say to
Ernest, chuckling; “you don’t get it out of her so easily as you do out
of me.” And this was Ernest’s own opinion. To get as much as he could
out of her was clearly the principle on which he must go if he married.
She was “the other side.”
This is, I suppose, a very common state of affairs, and one which is
found existing everywhere; but it is difficult to describe the effect it
produced in the house where a little while ago each believed himself and
herself ready to give up anything or everything for the other, and in
which there was but one heart and one aim. Mrs. Eastwood was driven from
her old standing-ground altogether. She had no longer any faith in
herself or her motives. She felt all the gentle security of well-doing,
which had been in her life, to glide away from her. She was not willing,
as she thought she had been, to denude herself for her children. Their
desire to get as much as they could out of her, revolted her mind and
chilled her heart. Frederick had left her in no doubt that this was his
sentiment. And Nelly? Could Nelly be of the same mind? Oh, no, not
Nelly! but, at least, Ernest, who was to be Nelly’s husband, who would
take her from her mother, and no doubt persuade her to think with
him--at least, when she was his wife. Mrs. Eastwood felt that the virtue
upon which she had made her stand, the great principle of her life, no
longer animated her, and she no longer believed in herself. She felt
that her children were no longer wholly hers, but had become separate,
and even antagonist powers thinking chiefly of themselves; and she
ceased to believe in them. Thus her entire moral atmosphere was changed,
the foundations of the very earth unsettled, the time put out of joint.
She groped vainly for something to guide her out of the maze, and found
nothing. Her comely face became full of anxious lines, and care crept
over her like a cold shadow. This was how the changes, present and to
come, in the family existence, affected its head.
Nelly was, if possible, still more painfully divorced from her old
gentle ease and sprightly quiet. She had begun life for herself, and the
beginning was, like all beginnings, a fight and struggle. The new
required her to be faithless and disloyal to the old; the old could not
conceal a certain grudge and painful antagonism to the new. She was
placed between, feeling herself dragged on either side--dragged asunder,
the peaceful unity of her existence turned into a perpetual struggle to
please both parties, to serve two masters, to be loyal at once to her
lover and to her mother. Nay, the struggle was still more complicated:
for Nelly had not only to serve two masters, but to content and satisfy
a third party, a new being altogether--herself--another Nelly, who had
risen up and sat in judgment upon her. No inquisitor was ever so hard
upon a poor girl as was this other self--this new, severe, enlightened
Nelly, who sat, as it were, at the very springs of her life, and watched
them from their earliest outflow. Even when the poor Nelly in the flesh
had made what seemed to her a very successful compromise, when she had
done her very best, and had pleased both sides, and served both masters,
the spiritual Nelly would come down upon her like a wolf on the
fold--would convict her of falsehood, of paltering with what she knew to
be right, of mean expedients, and a base policy of time-serving. Poor
child! it was true she had become a time-server. She said one thing to
the one, another to the other. She tried in a hundred little stealthy
ways to “bring them together,” to resuscitate the ancient friendship
between them. She told each of pretty speeches the other had made, and
kept a dead silence as to the speeches, anything but pretty, which she
had often enough to listen to. Not only was her heart torn asunder, but
her mind was confused in its sense of right and wrong. Many things which
seemed abstractly right had become impossible to her; and some that were
wrong were so natural, so necessary! She was unhappy in her home, and,
with cruel mortification, she perceived that the other home, to which
she had naturally looked forward, was receding into the distance. It was
to be purchased only by despoiling the present. A certain impatience,
almost by moments, ripening into disgust, sometimes moved her in respect
to her betrothed. Her heart sickened sometimes at his suggestions--at
the tone in which he spoke. He wanted all the rest of the world to
bestir themselves on his behalf; but he himself had no idea of
bestirring himself. He thought it natural that sacrifices of all sorts
should be made to bring about his happiness--only not by him.
“But we are young,” poor Nelly would say; “we can put up with anything.
What does it matter?”
“It matters a great deal,” Ernest would answer. “We are young; it is our
time for enjoyment. They have had their day. You don’t suppose our
fathers and mothers feel half as keenly or enjoy half as much as we do?
Then why shouldn’t they give up, and let us have the means of enjoying?
I don’t understand that sort of dog-in-the-manger philosophy,” said the
young man, with a loftiness of moralizing which almost impressed Nelly,
in spite of her higher perceptions.
She was seated in a low basket-work chair under the lime-trees, looking
up with puckers of care upon her pretty forehead which had no business
there, at the self-absorbed countenance of her lover. He was cutting
down the young lime-shoots which grew up in a miniature forest round the
trees, with a little cane in his hand. It was autumn, and the leaves
fell at every stroke. He had one hand in his pocket, careless, yet
disappointed; laying down the law, and feeling himself above its action.
Nelly gazed at him with a mute inquiry--a close, anxious, silent
investigation, which she could not herself have explained. Yes; she was
interrogating Nature and circumstances, and the present and the future;
puzzled between her own instincts, her own ancient certainties of
belief, and the philosophy of him who ought to be more to her than all
else on earth. He was cleverer than she was, better able to express
himself: was he more right than she? Or was he wrong, all wrong--wrong
in feeling, in principle, in all that makes a man? What a question this
was for a girl to ask herself! And she did not ask it; but only looked
up at him, mutely wondering, trying to penetrate the real meaning that
was in him--a meaning which must, she felt, be better and higher than
anything he said.
Through the same old garden in which these two were seated another
figure was visible, passing and repassing under the distant trees. This
was Innocent, who had changed too, and developed in her way, during the
interval which had been of so much importance to her. Her face had
scarcely altered, for her mind was waking up but slowly, and it still
retained the half vacant, half dreamy look habitual to it. But a change
had come over her aspect generally. She had been assimilated in
appearance, as much as circumstances permitted, to other girls of her
age. Her hair had been put up, much against her will, though she had
strenuously resisted all the modern mysteries of hair-dressing. In this
point Alice had been invaluable to her; for Alice was old-fashioned, and
looked with grim contempt at the devices, which even Nelly was not
strong-minded enough to reject, for increasing the volume of piled-up
hair with which the young ladies of the day disguise the shape and
exaggerate the dimensions of their pretty heads. Alice drew Innocent’s
hair into a knot behind, loosely coiled and of no great magnitude. Even
thus it was seldom “tidy,” I am sorry to say, being somewhat short for
such treatment, and often fell loose in a wandering, half curled lock
upon her shoulders. Her dress, too, was still simply made and free from
furbelows; but it was kept within a respectful distance of the
fashion--enough “not to be remarked,” which was Mrs. Eastwood’s horror.
Mrs. Eastwood, indeed, felt that Innocent was scarcely safe from that
misery of being remarked; but consoled herself that, though the girl was
nearly eighteen, she was scarcely, properly speaking, “out:” and in such
cases, as everybody knows, plainness of dress is in the best taste and a
mark of distinction. What was still more remarkable, however, was that
Innocent held a book in her hand as she went up and down the Lady’s Walk
under the arching trees, which now and then sent down a leaf flickering
through the softened daylight upon her, or upon the open page, an
occurrence which sent her thoughts astray continually. The girl would
look up with a vague soft smile on her face when this occurred, up and
round as if half hoping to see some concealed playmate among the
branches or behind the bole of a tree, and then would breathe a gentle
little sigh and return to the book. Innocent was struggling with the
difficulties of education at this moment. She was reading, or trying to
read, history, endeavouring now and then, by help of her own voice, by
whispering it half aloud, and thus cheating herself into attention, to
master something about Elizabeth and the Marys, her of Smithfield and
her of Scotland. She had undertaken this study by her own desire,
curiously enough, having come to feel herself deficient. When a girl of
nearly eighteen feels herself deficient in education, what can the most
well-meaning of friends advise her to do? I need not say that Mrs.
Eastwood’s sense of propriety had long ere now secured a music master
for Innocent, and that by this time she could play a little on the
piano, not cleverly, but yet with a certain dreamy faculty, amusing
herself with long-drawn chords and fragmentary combinations of her own.
She could speak French and Italian, and even a little German, thanks to
her foreign education, and she had no taste for drawing. What more than
this could be done in the way of education for her? She had the same
novels to read if she chose which came from Mudie’s periodically for the
rest of the family, and she was recommended to “take a book” by
everybody who saw her seated, as she was seen so often, with her hands
in her lap, doing nothing. But it was only within a very recent time
that Innocent had begun to take this advice. She had been laughed at for
her ignorance, and the laugh had touched her for the first time; and
here she was accordingly, poor child, on this sunny, hazy autumn
afternoon, straying up and down, up and down the Lady’s Walk, reading
half aloud to herself, about the dead controversies, the national
struggles of which she knew nothing. The Queen of Scots even was to her
but a printed name. She knew nothing of the story, nothing of the woman
for whom partisans still fight, though she has been dead these two
hundred years. She read over with her whispering lips the curt record of
events which once made blood flow and hearts beat, insensible to them as
though they had been mere revolutions of machinery. The leaf which
dropped on her book was real, and so were the pebbles which caught her
foot as she strayed on, not looking where she went; but the history was
a dead thing so far as Innocent was concerned, and she herself was no
more real than the history. What did she there, a stray, half-awakened
soul, among the facts of that ordinary everyday scene? She was an
embodied dream, scarcely realizable even by herself, and her occupation
was as unreal as she was, as she strayed like a vision, appearing and
re-appearing between the openings of the trees.
“Is it really true,” said Molyneux, suddenly departing from the graver
subject, “that old Longueville has fallen in love with that child,
Innocent? It isn’t forbidden, I believe, to marry your grandfather, but
only your grandmother, eh Nelly? Are you jealous? First of all he wanted
you----”
“He never wanted me.”
“Oh, it is very well to say so now; but it was that, you know, that
brought me to the point.”
“If you did not want to be brought to the point, it is a pity that it
should have happened through a mistake,” said Nelly, driven into
momentary crossness by the complication and confusion of her feelings.
But Molyneux did not want to quarrel. He only laughed lightly.
“Perhaps I am the best judge whether it was a mistake,” he said, “but in
the meantime he is going in for Innocent. Is it true?”
“He has said something to mamma; but not enough to build any story upon,
or to be talked about----”
“By George!” cried Molyneux, “it is about to come to a crisis before our
eyes. There is your mother calling for Innocent, and I know
Longueville’s there----. Now this is what I call exciting. Innocent!
Innocent! don’t you hear your aunt calling you? She’s got a new doll for
you,” he said, laughing, as the girl came slowly past them. “A good
strong india-rubber affair, warranted not to break, that can walk and
talk, and say----. She doesn’t take any notice,” he added with some
disappointment. “What is she always dreaming about? She has got over all
that nonsense about Frederick----”
“Please don’t talk so lightly,” said Nelly, still cross in spite of
herself. “There never was any nonsense about Frederick. She liked him
best, for she knew him first. She has never taken to us very much. I
don’t know whether it is our fault or her fault; but there was nothing
like what you say.”
Molyneux laughed again. “It does not matter,” he said, “though you are
very contradictory, Nelly. Of course you are jealous, that’s what it is.
Lady Longueville, with a handsome house in town, and half-a-dozen in the
country, with diamonds and an opera-box, and everything that’s heavenly.
Confess now you do feel it. All this going to your little cousin!”
Nelly’s eyes flashed. Few people see the joke of which they are
themselves the subject, and Nelly was not superior to the rest of the
world; but she had learned the wisdom of restraining her first outburst
of feeling. She rose from her seat under the tree, and, going a little
apart from him, watched Innocent making her way slowly through the
gleams of sunshine and bars of shadow to the drawing-room windows, which
were open. When the girl went slowly in through the open window, Nelly
breathed forth a little sigh. “Poor child!” she said. She was thinking
more of her own strange position than of anything that could come to her
cousin. How little she had foreseen the perplexities, the chill doubts,
the weakening of faith, the diminution of feeling, the irritation and
weariness which often filled her now! Innocent could have no such
experience; she was not capable of it; but the one girl threw herself
into the position of the other, with a liveliness of feeling which the
circumstances scarcely called for. She forgot that Sir Alexis was as
unlikely to inspire love as Innocent was to feel it. “I wonder what she
will say?” Nelly murmured, with her eyes fixed on the window by which
Innocent had disappeared.
“Say? nothing! there is one advantage of taciturnity. She will let it
all be settled for her. A lucky girl, indeed; your mother must have
played her cards very well,” said Molyneux, with real approbation,
“after you and I foiled her, Nelly, by our precipitation, to catch the
great prize for her niece. You look angry. I think it was extremely
clever of her, for my part.”
“Ernest,” said Nelly quickly, “I wish you would go. If you don’t, I feel
sure we shall quarrel, and I would rather not quarrel,” cried the girl,
with tears in her eyes. “Please go away.”
“Why, Nelly? you are out of temper----”
“I am out of everything,” she cried, “out of heart, out of hope, out
of----”
“Not out of love?” he said, drawing her hand through his arm. He, at
least, was not out of love. And Nelly cried, but let him soothe her. Was
not she his, bound to him for ever and ever? Was it not hers to forgive,
to tolerate, to endure all things? If he seemed to think amiss would not
that mend? All this went through Nelly’s heart as her brief hot passion
of tears relieved the irritation in her soul; but still the irritation
was there.