And Nelly looked at him. She did not say anything, but her lips moved as if she would have echoed her mother’s words. Nelly’s face had grown somehow longer, with a wistful expression which, by moments, was almost like Innocent’s. Especially when she looked at John Vane was this the case; a perpetual comparison seemed to be going on in her mind, almost a complaint against him that he was different from the other who was so much more important to her. Why should Vane always be of use and service when that other neglected his duties? Why should he be, as Ernest said, always on the spot when the other was away? Nelly was half angry with the man who was so ready to stand by her; and then there came over her heart the softest compunction and self-reproach, mingled—in that inextricable complication which belongs to all human feeling—with bitterness and mortification. Was it possible that she grudged the kindness of the one because it threw into further relief the indifference of the other? This, as the reader will easily see, was a very unsafe, as well as a very uncomfortable, state of mind for an engaged young woman. Perhaps on the whole, the kindest thing John Vane could have done would have been to take himself out of the way, and leave Ernest to show himself in the best light possible, a thing which his constant presence put out of the question.
To return, however, to the conversation with which this chapter begins. It took place on the morning after Mrs. Frederick’s outburst, and was the end of the adjourned discussion which Vane had begun on the previous evening. He had found some trouble in soothing Mrs. Eastwood, and persuading her that his proposal had nothing to do with what Amanda had said, but had been in his mind for some time previously. When he succeeded in this, everything was easy enough. It was certainly well that Innocent should be made acquainted with her family, her father’s relations. “If anything were to happen to me,” Mrs. Eastwood allowed with some pathos, “it would be an excellent thing that she should have other friends to fall back upon. Frederick could not, I fear, give her a home, as I might have hoped, and as for Nelly, I don’t know how Nelly may be situated,” the mother said, looking at her daughter. She did not know what was in Nelly’s mind; but that Ernest should be ready to give succour and shelter to a penniless dependent was a thing which, at this stage of affairs, with her present knowledge of Ernest, Mrs. Eastwood could not hope.
“It was with no such lugubrious idea that I made my proposal,” said John Vane, laughing. “But Innocent is nearly eighteen, and there could not be an easier plunge into life for her than a few weeks at the High Lodge. My sister has made half a convent, half a school, of the old house. I wish you would come too, and see what she is doing. But if not, I will take my little cousin down and leave her with Lætitia. It will teach Innocent the use of some new faculties. You have taught her only how to be carried about and cared for and tended——”
“I have not spoiled her, I hope,” said Mrs. Eastwood, who was not, however, displeased with the compliment. When a woman comes to that stage of life in which all that she does and says is no longer admirable, because she says and does it—when she begins to feel the force of hot and hostile criticism and to be shaken even in the natural confidence with which she has been accustomed to regard her own motives, then praise becomes very sweet to her; it restores her to the moral standing-ground which she seemed to have lost. Mrs. Eastwood had just accepted with a natural pleasure John Vane’s testimony to her goodness, when Frederick came in suddenly, with a harassed look upon his face. Frederick had been in the country shooting, as he said—for some time—without his wife; and had come back looking pale, as he used to look after his absences in the old days.
“Something is wrong?” said his mother, divining what his looks meant as Vane discreetly withdrew.
“Oh, nothing particular—nothing out of the ordinary,” he said; “I wonder though, that, knowing all the circumstances as you do, you should not make an effort, mother, to prevent Amanda from exciting herself. Of course, she is ill to-day. I told you before I married what was the state of affairs; she may deserve it if you please, but I don’t deserve it, and the worst always falls on me. I do think you and Nelly between you might, at least manage to keep the peace.”
“Frederick! you seem quite unaware of how it all happened,” cried his mother, suddenly roused to a movement of self-defence.
“I know how it all turned out,” said Frederick, “and I do think my mother, if she had any regard for me, would try to avoid such scenes. She has been ill all night; and now she’s taken it into her head to go down to Sterborne, to the old place—the last thing in the world I could wish for. If you only knew,” said Frederick in a tone of the deepest injury, “how I hate her father; how I have struggled to keep them apart! And now here is my wife—your daughter-in-law—going down to our own county among all the Eastwoods, to Batty’s house! By Jove, it will break my heart.”
Words of unkind meaning were on Nelly’s very lips. “You should not have married Batty’s daughter, if you hate him,” was what she was disposed to say. “Frederick would not have spared me had I done anything of the kind,” she added to herself. She was guilty in intention of this unkind utterance; but in act she was innocent; she bit her lips, and kept it in. Mrs. Eastwood was a great deal more sympathetic.
“But if you were to speak to her, Frederick—if you were to say you did not like it?” she suggested anxiously.