“Is Nelly settled?” asked Innocent.
“God knows!” cried Mrs. Eastwood, in sudden trouble; and then she turned to the girl whom she had adopted with an instinctive appeal for sympathy. “If I was to die who would think of you who would care for you—Nelly and you? There would be no one but Frederick—and Frederick’s wife.”
Innocent did not make any reply—a faint colour flickered over her cheek. She turned away from her aunt, twisting her fingers together with a helpless gesture. Then she said, very low, “Frederick—would always take care—of me.”
“Oh, my dear,” cried Mrs. Eastwood, “you must not think of Frederick. I am afraid when he is kind to you he is thinking more of himself than you. That is one reason why I should have been glad, very glad. Frederick belongs to his wife.”
“May I go now, and read my history?” said Innocent, after a pause. She went back to the path overshadowed with trees, and opened her book; and whispered to herself again, half aloud, how Mary plotted and wove her spells, how Elizabeth lay in wait for her like a spider. She resumed at the same sentence as if nothing had happened. How much of it went into her mind? How much of the other had gone into her mind? Sir Alexis, Frederick, all the surrounding figures, were they ghostly and dim to her as Mary of Scotland and the great Elizabeth? But no one could answer this question. Amid the strange light-gleams and weird darkness of her own little world she dwelt alone.
CHAPTER XXVII.
MRS. FREDERICK.
The evening of the day on which the above incidents occurred was that of a periodical banquet, feared and staved off as long as possible by all the Eastwoods. Since the time of Frederick’s marriage it had been considered necessary that he and his wife should be invited to dinner formally from time to time, in order that it might be visible to the world and “Mrs. Frederick’s family” that full honour was done to her. Nelly and Mrs. Eastwood had made a great effort to adopt Amanda, if not into their hearts, at least into their society, after the terrible event was actually accomplished which made her their daughter and sister. But I need not say that this was a very hopeless attempt, and that as familiar companionship gradually failed between people who resembled each other so little, the periodical dinner gradually gained importance as the only practicable way of keeping up “a proper intercourse.” Mrs. Frederick had come to London with very great ideas. She had hoped for nothing less than an entry into the fashionable world, and all the glory of associating with lords and ladies. The visits she received from the ladies of Mrs. Eastwood’s circle disgusted and disappointed her. What! Marry and come to London for no better purpose than to be visited by ladies from the suburbs, who lived there always—ladies with no better title than Mrs.; some of them, like Mrs. Eastwood herself, paying their visits in flys, or in the plainest of little broughams, no better than a fly. Visions of splendid vehicles, with embroidered hammercloths and celestial flunkeys, had entranced Amanda’s imagination. The Eastwoods were county people at Sterborne—they were a baronet’s family—magnates in the neighbourhood; and the beauty had no means of realizing that a country baronet is no great personage in London, much less a country baronet’s cousin. The disappointment was bitter, and she was not the woman to conceal it. Gradually, however, she fell into a kind of society, or to use her own words, formed a circle, which pleased her well enough. This consisted chiefly of the men who had been her father’s visitors in former days, several of whom had handles to their names. They were not as a general rule much credit to know, but they suited Amanda better than the Mrs. Everards, and other humdrum persons, who had welcomed her first to her new position. When she had yawned through one or two dinner parties, painfully got up for Mrs. Eastwood’s sake, to make the best of a bad business, by the society which frequented The Elms, Amanda had declared her determination to have nothing more to do with “Frederick’s old-fashioned set.” They were not much in sympathy with her, to tell the truth; and dinners at Richmond, with Lord Hunterston and his kind in attendance, were a great deal more to her liking. Amanda held, in fact, the opinion which poor little Innocent had expressed innocently as a reflection of the sentiments of her father. She disliked women. They were all jealous of her beauty, she believed; they were her critics or her rivals—never her friends; spite was their chief characteristic; envy their main sentiment. The men of Amanda’s set were of her opinion—so are a great many clever persons, it must be allowed—at least, in books. Therefore it is not to be supposed that Amanda looked forward with more distinct gratification than that felt by the ladies at The Elms to her periodical dinner. She put on her handsomest dresses and her finest talk to dazzle them, and she made it a subject for her peculiar wit for some time before and after.
“I am going to dine with my old mother-in-law,” she would say to the young men, few in number at this season of the year, who filled her little drawing-room in the afternoon. “Such a set of old guys she has about her, to be sure. Why she should insist upon having me, I can’t imagine, for she hates me, of course. But duty before everything. I shall have to go.”
“Why should you have to go?” said one. “And by Jove, I’ll come to-morrow to hear all about it!” said another. The lively sympathy of this chorus did Mrs. Frederick good.
“Oh, you shall hear the whole account,” she said. “It’s like Noah’s Ark. There is the regular clergyman, and some old fogies of lawyers, and a horrible man called John Vane——”