Innocent’s enjoyment was a little damped by this long speech; but as she was still walking with Frederick, and had, as, yet, no drawback to the pleasant sensation of being with him, the shadow flitted rapidly from her face. He took her all over the village, showing her everything that was to be seen, before he turned his step towards the Villa, where Amanda, fretful and peevish, awaited him, longing for news, for change, for something to amuse her. Frederick cared very little for the fact that his once-worshipped beauty was now waiting for him. His little cousin, with her dreamy delight in his society, her refined and gradually developing beauty, and the strange attraction of her visionary abstractedness from the common world, was very amusing and pleasant to him. The mere fact of not seeing her every day, as he had been in the habit of doing, had made him perceive Innocent’s beauty, and a mingled feeling, half wholly good, half dubious in character, inclined him towards the girl who clung to him. She was very pretty and “very fond of him,” which pleased his vanity highly, and made him feel vaguely self-complacent and on good terms with himself in her company; and by the side of this doubtful and not very improving sensation, the man, who was not wholly bad, had actually a little wholesome, brotherly, protecting affection for the child who had clung to him from the first moment of seeing him. Thus they wandered through the village, round and round the Minster, looking at everything and at nothing till the October afternoon began to cloud over. “Now you must come and see Amanda,” said Frederick with a sigh. Innocent sighed too. It seemed to her very hard that there was this inevitable “Frederick’s wife” to be always the shadow to the picture, to take him away from his family, to separate him from herself, to worry and vex him whatever he was doing. Innocent hesitated at the corner of the street.
“Are you sure I should go?” she said. “She will scold me. She will not be kind like Cousin Lætitia or you. She does not like me, and I do not like her. Shall I go back now? I have had all I wanted, Frederick; I have seen you.”
“That would never do,” said Frederick. “If it were known that you had met me in the Minster and walked about so long with me, and then returned without seeing my wife, people would talk—unpleasant things would be said.”
“What could be said?” asked Innocent.
“Upon my life, one doesn’t know whether to laugh at you or be angry,” cried Frederick, impatient. “Will you never understand? But, come along, it is no use wasting words. Don’t you see you must come now?”
“I do not want to come. She will scold me,” said Innocent, standing firmly, with a cloud upon her face. It was the first time she had openly resisted him or any one. Poor child, was it some angel who stayed her feet? She felt ready to cry, which was an unusual thing with her, and with a frightened instinctive recoil, stood still, refusing to go on.
Poor Innocent! Safety and shelter, and the life of order and peace which suited her half-developed faculties, lay calm and sunshiny on one side. On the other was conflict, confused darkness and misery, pain and shame, gathering in heavy clouds to swallow her up. For one moment it hung on the balance which her fate was to be; terrible moment, which we, none of us, divine, during which we have to exercise that great and awful choice which is the privilege of humanity, in blindness and unconsciousness, ignorant of the issues, stupid to the importance of the decision. This was decided, however, not by Innocent. Impatient Frederick seized her hand and drew it through his arm.
“This is folly,” he cried. “What you, Innocent! you be such a little traitor and resist me and get me into trouble? No, no, come along. This is out of the question now.”
Next moment he had knocked at his father-in-law’s door.
The Villa looked very much as it had done the day that Frederick first made his appearance there. The sun was still shining by intervals, but glimmers of firelight came from the window, and the garden behind was spare of flowers. Mr. Batty met them as they came in, and stared hard at the girl whom Frederick led by the hand into the narrow light passage which traversed the house from the street to the garden door. “This is my cousin, sir, Miss Innocent Vane,” said Frederick. “I have brought her to see Amanda. She is on a visit at the High Lodge, as you may have heard.”