She stood before him more eloquent in her tears than he, with all his cleverness, could ever have been, with one soft appealing hand on his arm, and the other raised in passionate entreaty. Her eyes were fixed upon him with a prayer as passionate—all Nelly’s heart, all her soul, was in this appeal. It was for Innocent—to save her; it was for Ernest—to save him; it was for herself, poor Nelly, to change her despairing into life and hope. Never was face more full of emotion than the glowing, moving, tearful face, every line quivering, every feature inspired, which she turned upon him. Her very look was a prayer intense and passionate. But opposite to this entreating face was one which lowered like the skies when everything is black with storm. Ernest shut himself as heaven itself seems to close sometimes upon the prayers of the despairing. He stood obdurate, unmoving, unmoved, looking at her with blank brows, answering with a hard abstinence from all emotion the imploring look, the impassioned words. Nelly saw how it was before she had ceased speaking; but she repulsed the chill of certainty from her heart, and prayed on with eyes and gestures, even when she felt herself to be praying against hope.
At last he threw off, not roughly, but crossly, her hand from his arm, and, as he himself would have said, “put a stop to it.”
“Nelly,” he said, “are you mad? What do you mean? Longueville, you may be sure, has secured counsel already; I suppose he has not been taken by surprise as I have been? And supposing I could do it, would you have me begin my career under such unfavourable circumstances, on the spur of the moment, for the sake of mere family connexion? I have often heard that women carried their feeling for their own family a very long way; but to prefer this girl and her folly to the interests of your future husband—to ask me to commit myself—— Are you mad, Nelly? Why, my interests are yours—my character is yours. You should beg me rather to keep out of it—you should keep out of it yourself, for my sake. What is Innocent to us?—a silly, creature, half idiot, an ungrateful little minx, fond of nobody but Frederick, and, I daresay, capable of striking a bold stroke for him, as she seems to say she has done. Don’t look at me as if you would eat me. I don’t say she has done it. I know nothing but what you have told me.”
Nelly shrank away from him to her mother’s chair. A burning blush covered her face; her tears dried up as if by scorching heat. Her eyes flashed and shone; her whole aspect, her very figure seemed to change.
“I may ask at least one thing of you,” she said; “and that is to forget what I told you. I was very foolish to say so much. Women are prone to that, I suppose, as you say; but I may trust to your honour to forget it? not to repeat it to any one? I shall be very thankful if you will promise that.”
“Why, Nelly!” he cried, “I repeat what you have said to me! You don’t take me for a scoundrel, I hope, because I don’t act upon everything you say——”
She smiled faintly, and bowed her head, accepting the assurance; and then between these two, who had loved each other, who were betrothed and bound to each other, there ensued a pause. She said nothing, she did not even look at him; and he looking at her, feeling somehow that greater things had happened even than those which appeared, cast about in his mind how to speak, and did not know what to say.
“Nelly,” he said, at last, clearing his throat, “I see you are angry with me; and, though I think you are rather unreasonable, I am very sorry to vex you. I would do as much as most men for the girl I love; but I should be compromising your prospects, as well as my own, were I to plunge into this business without reflection, as you tell me. I am sure, when you are cool and able to think, you will see the justice of what I say.”
Still Nelly made no answer. She could not trust herself to speak; her heart beat too loudly, her breath came too fast. But to him it seemed obduracy, determined and conscious resistance, like his own.
“If this is how you take it, of course I can’t help myself,” he said; “but you are very unjust—and unreasonable. A woman may stretch her demands too far. There is much that I would be glad to do for your sake; but, even for your sake, it is best that I should employ my own judgment; and I cannot do what that judgment condemns——”