“Bairn, bairn, hold your tongue!” cried Alice. “Are you no aware that it’s a sin, a great sin, to wish anybody dead? Never let me hear you say such a thing again.”
“But I do think it,” said Innocent; “she makes herself ill; she suffers; she makes everybody else unhappy. She scolds, it does not matter whom. Why should people go on living when they do so much harm?”
“But you would not do her harm?” said Alice, curiously gazing at her; “and why should Mr. Frederick be free? He has taken his own way, and he must put up with it. He has made his bed, and he must lie on it. What is he, that he should be delivered from what he has brought on himself?”
“I am fond of Frederick,” said Innocent dreamily. “If he is good or not I do not know, but I am fond of him. Alice, do you know I have found out something? When papa said women were hateful, he meant women like Frederick’s wife.”
“My bonnie lamb,” said Alice, “think as little as you can either of Mr. Frederick or Mr. Frederick’s wife. Such kind of thoughts are little good. Say your prayers, and mind that you must wish harm to no person. It’s against a’ Scripture; though, eh! human nature’s weak, and if it was me I doubt if I could keep my hands off her,” she added to herself.
When Mrs. Eastwood left the room with Innocent, Mr. Vane asked permission to stay. “May I wait till you come back?” he asked, “I have something to say.” Perhaps it was injudicious on all sides, for, indeed, Nelly, who was thus left alone with him in a state of high and indignant resentment, was, perhaps, too much disposed to confide in the sympathetic companion who was always ready to feel with her, always willing to be interested. They were standing together over the little fire, which on this mild October evening smouldered unnecessarily in the grate. But when there is any trouble in a house the fire becomes at once the centre; everybody goes to it mechanically. Nelly stood there, clasping her hands together by way of restraining herself; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes abashed. She was not only wounded and angry, but ashamed to the bottom of her heart. She had been doing all she could to conceal and cover over the “scene” which, like all Englishwomen, she dreaded to have known. But she had not been successful, and now her mind was so full of it, so running over with indignation and excitement, that she knew she ought not to have trusted herself with any companion; and yet absolute self-denial was so hard. She could not be so wise as to go away and bury the tumult of feeling which was eager to be expressed.
“Oh, Mr. Vane, what must you think of us?” she burst forth at last.
“What must I think of you? I am afraid some things I dare not tell you,” he said. “But what can any one think—that you have had to submit to a very ordinary form of domestic misfortune, and that, by dint of doing your very best to bear it, you have to suffer much that is disagreeable? That is all that the most curious could think. Every one who is worthy to be called your friend, Miss Eastwood, should be only too glad to stand by you in such a trial.”
I don’t know what John Vane meant, or if he fully realized what he was saying; but as for Nelly she turned crimson, and gave him a quick, furtive look of inquiry. Had he looked as if he meant anything she would have been offended; but he was sufficiently innocent or clever to dismiss all meaning from his face.
“Oh, as for that,” said Nelly, “it would be foolish to speak as if we wanted any one to stand by us. Mamma and I are able to support each other—mamma, and I, and Innocent. We are quite a strong body; we want no one else,” said Nelly. She looked up at him, smiling, to prove her assertion, but somehow just at that moment a chance tear, which had gathered on her eyelashes without her knowledge, seized the opportunity to fall. “Why what is this? I wonder,” she said, with a little laugh, wiping it from her hand with her handkerchief; “it seems I must have been crying without knowing it. How silly! It is horrid that because one happens to be a woman one should always make a fool of one’s self and cry.”