INNOCENT:
A TALE OF MODERN LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
THE OLD HOUSE.
HE Eastwoods lived in an old house in one of the southwestern suburbs of London. It was one of those houses which, dating only from the prosaic age of Queen Anne, have come to be picturesque in their way—which they were never intended to be—and are comfortable, which they were intended to be, to a degree rarely attained by all our modern efforts. What advances we have made since then in every way! And yet all Belgravia did not hold a house so thoroughly good for living in, so pleasant, so modest, so dignified, and so refined, as the big brick house, partly whitewashed, partly retaining its native red, lichened all over with brown and yellow mosses, in which, at the outset of this history, Mrs. Eastwood lived with her children. It had been built by the Eastwoods of the time, more than a century and a half ago. It had given shelter to various generations since then—their mortal inn and lodging, the everlasting dwelling-place of their memory. They had left layers, so to speak, of old furniture, from the japanned screens and cabinets of the founder, to the hideous haircloth and mahogany of George IV.; and pictures and knick-knacks, and precious old china for which collectors would have given its weight in gold. All these riches were not shown off to advantage, as they might have been. You stumbled on them in corners; you found them in out-of-the-way cupboards, in rooms that were rarely used. In short, you could not take a walk on a wet day about this delightful house without finding something out that you had not seen before. For my own part I prefer this to the modern device of making a museum or china-shop of one’s drawing-room. The drawing-room was a place to live in at The Elms. It had a hundred prettinesses about, none of which had been bought within the memory of any of the young people, except, indeed, a few foolish knick-knacks belonging to Ellinor—for what girl worth calling such was ever without knick-knacks? But its supreme use was to be lived in, and for this it was infinitely well adapted. Its only drawback that I know—and that many people thought a great advantage—was that, being close to London, you saw nothing from the windows that you might not have seen a hundred miles deep in the country. The drawing-room windows looked out upon a great green lawn, set in old trees. In winter, when the trees had lost their leaves, bits of other old houses, red and mossy, looked in through the bare branches; but in spring the farther end of the lawn was carpeted with primroses, and canopied with foliage, and the long avenue of elms at one side, and the narrower path on the other under the lime-trees, which was called the Lady’s Walk, might have graced a squire’s house anywhere. Both of these ended in a high paling; but I defy you to have found that out when elms and limes alike were in their glory of summer array.
After having said so much about the house, I may introduce you to its inhabitants. Mrs. Eastwood was a widow, and had four children, all as yet at home under the maternal roof. The eldest son was in a public office; the second, Richard, commonly called Dick, was at home “reading” for one of those examinations which occupy all our youth now-a-days. The third boy, who bore the magnificent name of Plantagenet, usually, I am grieved to say, shortened into Jenny, was still at Eton. One only remains to be accounted for, and that was Ellinor. She was but one, counted according to ordinary arithmetic; but she was as good as three additional at least, reckoning by her importance in the household. “If you count girls, there are seven of us; but some people don’t count girls. I’m one,” said one of Mr. Punch’s delightful little boys in the old days of Leech. Ellinor Eastwood might have adapted this saying with perfect propriety to her own circumstances. The boys might or might not be counted; but to enter once into the house without hearing, seeing, divining the girl in it was impossible. Not that she was a remarkable young woman in any way. I don’t know if she could justly be called clever; and she certainly was not more perfectly educated than usual—and does not everybody say that all women are badly educated? Her brothers knew twenty times as much as she did. They had all been at Eton; and Frederick, the eldest, was a University man, and had taken a very good class, though not the highest; and Dick was costing his mother a fortune in “coaches,” and was required by the conditions of his examination to be a perfect mine of knowledge; they ought by all rules to have been as superior to their sister intellectually and mentally as daylight is to darkness. But they were not. I don’t venture to explain how it was; perhaps the reader may in his or her experience have met with similar cases, though I allow that they go against a good many theories. The household was a young household altogether. Mrs. Eastwood herself was under fifty, which, for a woman who has had neither bad health nor trouble in her life, is quite a youthful age. Her eldest son was six-and-twenty. There had never appeared a very great difference between them; for Frederick had always been the most serious member of the family. His name of itself was a proof of this. While all the others were addressed by a perpetually varying host of diminutives and pet names, Frederick had always remained Frederick. I need not point out how different this is from “Fred.” He was the only member of the household who had as yet brought any trouble or anxiety to it, but he was by far the most proper and dignified person in the house. The rest were very youthful indeed, varying, as we have said, from the light-hearted though sober-visaged youthfulness of seven-and-forty to the tricksey boyhood of sixteen. It was a house, accordingly, in which there was always something going on. The family were well off, and they were popular; they were rich enough to give frequent and pleasant little entertainments, and they had never acquired that painful habit of asking, “Can we afford it?” which is so dreadful a drawback to social pleasures. I do not intend to imply by this that there was any recklessness or extravagance in this well-ordered house. On the contrary, Mrs. Eastwood’s bills were paid as by clockwork, with a regularity which was vexatious to all the tradesmen she employed; but neither she nor her children—blessed privilege!—knew what it was to be poor, and they had none of the habits of that struggling condition. That ghost which haunts the doors of the less comfortably endowed, which hovers by them in the very streets, and is always waiting round some corner—that black spectre of indebtedness or scarcity had never been seen at The Elms. There was a cheerful security of enough, about the house, which is more delightful than wealth. To be sure, there are great moral qualities involved in the material comfort of having enough, into which we need not enter. The comfort of the Eastwoods was a matter of habit. They lived as they had always lived. It never occurred to them to start on a different pied, or struggle to a higher level. What higher level could they want? They were gentlefolks, and well connected; no sort of parvenu glitter could have done anything for them, even had they thought of it; therefore it was no particular credit to them to be content and satisfied. The morality of the matter was passive in their case—it was habitual, it was natural, not a matter of resolution or thought.
And yet there had been one break in this simple and uncomplicated state of affairs. Four years before the date at which this history begins, an event had occurred to which the family still looked back with a sort of superstition,—a mingled feeling of awe, regret, and pride, such as might move the descendants of some hero who had abdicated a throne at the call of duty. The year in which Frederick took his degree, and left Oxford, Mrs. Eastwood had put down her carriage. I dare not print such words in ordinary type. She said very little about the reasons for this very serious proceeding; but it cannot be denied that there was a grandeur and pathos in the incident, which gave it a place in what may be called the mythology of the family. Nobody attempted to explain how it was, or why it was. It gave a touch of elevating tragedy and mystery to the comfortable home-life, which was so pleasant and free from care. When now and then a sympathizing friend would say, “You must miss your carriage,” Mrs. Eastwood was always prompt to disclaim any need for pity. “I have always been an excellent walker,” she said cheerily. She would not receive any condolences, and yet even she got a certain subtle pleasure, without knowing it, out of the renunciation. It was the hardest thing she had ever been called upon to do in her life, and how could she help being a little, a very little, proud of it? But, to be sure, this sentiment was quite unconscious. It was the only unexplained event in her innocent life. Ellinor, of course, half by instinct, half by reason of that ineffable communion between a mother and an only daughter, which makes the one conscious of all that passes within and without the other almost without words, knew exactly how this great family event had come about; but no one else knew, not even the most intimate friends of the house.
The cause, however, was nothing much out of the course of nature. Frederick, the eldest son and hope, he of whom everybody declared that he was his mother’s stay and support, as good as the head of the family, had suddenly burst into her room one morning before she was up, like a sudden avalanche. He came to tell her, in the first place, that he had made up his mind not to go into the Church, for which he had been educated, and in which he had the best of prospects; and in the second place, that he was deeply in debt, and was going out to Australia by the next ship to repent and make up his deficiencies. Fancy having all this poured into your ears of a cold spring morning in your peaceful bed, when you woke up with the consciousness that to-day would be as yesterday, and, perhaps, still more tranquil and pleasant. Mrs. Eastwood was stricken dumb with consternation. It was the first time that trouble in this shape had ever visited her. Grief she had known—but that curtain of gentle goodness and well-seeming which covers the surface of life had never before been rudely rent before her eyes, revealing the abyss below. And the shock was all the greater that it was Frederick who gave it; he who had been her innocent child just the other day, and who was still her serious boy, never the one to get into mischief. The surprise was so overwhelming that it almost deadened her sense of pain; and then, before she could fully realize what had happened, the real importance of the event was still further confused by the fact, that instead of judging the culprit on his real demerits, she had to pray and plead with him to give up his mad resolution, to beg him not to throw his life away after his money. So urgent did this become that she gradually forgot all about the blame attaching to him, and could think of nothing but those terrible threats about Australia, which gradually became the central fact of the catastrophe. To do him justice, Frederick was perfectly sincere, and had no thought of the admirable effect to be produced by his obstinate determination. Where is the family that does not know such scenes? The result was that the carriage was “put down,” the debts paid, Australia averted; and after a short time Mr. Frederick Eastwood gained, after a severe examination, his present appointment, and all again went merry as marriage-bells. I don’t know whether the examination was in reality severe; but at least Mrs. Eastwood thought so, which pleased her, and did nobody any harm; and as time went on she found to her entire satisfaction that every thing had been for the best, and that Providence had brought good out of evil. In the first place, it was “noble” of Frederick, when he found he could not conscientiously enter the Church, to scorn all mercenary motives, and not to be tempted by the excellent living which he knew awaited him. And then what a comfort and blessing it was to have him at home, instead of away down in Somersetshire, and only paying his family a visit two or three times in a year! Thus the fault faded out of sight altogether by the crowding of the circumstances round it; and Frederick himself, in contemplating (for he was always serious) the providential way in which his life had been arranged for him in a new groove, forgot that the first step in this arrangement had been a very reprehensible one on his own part, and came to regard the “putting down” of the carriage as the rest did—as a tremendous and mysterious family event, calling forth an intense pride and melancholy, but no individual sense of guilt or responsibility so far as he was personally concerned. “I don’t like to take you out in a fly, Nelly,” Mrs. Eastwood would sometimes say, as she gave a last touch to Ellinor’s ribbons, and breathed a soft little sigh. “As if I cared!” cried the girl: “and besides, you can say, like Lady Dobson, that you never take your horses out at night.” Now Lady Dobson was very rich, and in trade, and a standing joke in the Eastwood circle; and the party went off very merry in the fly, with never another thought of the carriage which had been “put down.”
Light-hearted folk! That sudden tempest of trouble and terror which had driven Frederick into the Sealing-Wax Office, and the ladies into Mr. Sutton’s neat flys, gave, I think, on the whole, a zest to their happiness.
The drawing-room at The Elms was a large room, with a rounded end occupied by a great bow window, which opened like a door into a pretty conservatory, always gay with flowers. Opposite the fireplace were three other long and large windows, cut to the floor, from which you looked out over the long stretch of greensward embosomed in great trees which has been already described. In summer, the flower beds which were cut in the grass close under the windows were ablaze with brilliant colour; but in the meantime, on the afternoon when this story opens, nothing was visible but an interrupted golden line of crocus, defining each bed, and depending upon the sun to make the definition successful. When the day was bright the border bristled all round in close array with spikes of gold; but on this particular day it was gloomy, and the line was straggling and broken. On a damp February afternoon the strongest attraction is generally indoors; and the room was bright enough to satisfy the most difficult critic. Mrs. Eastwood had, as every mother of a family ought to have, her particular chair, with her particular little table and footstool, a detached and commanding position, a genial domestic throne, with the supremacy of which no one ever interfered. There was room for any one who wanted counsel to draw a chair by its side, and plenty of room for a big boy to stretch out his lazy length on the rug at its feet, resting a curly head, it might be, on the mother’s footstool. Mrs. Eastwood was seated here in her black gown with violet ribbons, which was her compromise between the world and her widowhood. Sometimes she went the length of grey and red. I don’t know what innocent prejudice she had to the effect that grey and red betokened still some recondite style of mourning; but such was her prejudice. She would have felt a blue ribbon to be profane. Need I say that she was plump, and had perhaps a little more colour than when she was twenty? But there were few wrinkles upon her pleasant face, and no clouds upon her forehead. She had known grief, innocent and holy, but no trouble of that wearing kind which saps the strength and steals the courage out of life, except that one of which the reader has been told; and that, as he has also been informed, had turned out for the best.
Ellinor was the only other member of the family present, except, indeed, a certain small Skye terrier, known by the name of Winks, who was a very important member of the family. As Winks, however, for the present is asleep coiled up in an easy chair, and happily unobservant of what is going on, we may leave him for an after occasion, and pass on to the young lady of the house. What can we say about her? Dear and gentle reader, you know half-a-hundred just like Nelly. She had brown hair, bright, dancing, brown eyes, and a nose which, thanks to Mr. Tennyson, we do not require to describe as retroussé. It was “tip-tilted, like the petal of a flower.” As there was not a straight line about her anywhere, this delicate little turn was appropriate. Although, however, it is true that there was no one straight line about the girl, the combination of a hundred soft curves produced a perfect pose of figure, light, firm, and elastic, like—well, like most girls of twenty. What can one say more? Nelly had no settled place like her mother. She was not restless, nor fidgetty, but she was everywhere at once. I don’t know why it was necessary that she should be always in motion—for she never crossed the room or went from one table to another without a reason for it—but somehow there was a perpetual play of movement and variety in every room where she was. Even when she was absorbed in the tranquillity of needlework, the motion of her hand kept things going. She was like a brook: a soft atmosphere of sound and movement—always soft, always pleasant—belonged to her by nature; but, like the brook, she tranquillized the surrounding scenery; or, like a bird, making the quietness seem more complete by its flitting from one branch to another, and delicious trying over of its favourite notes. Nelly was not alarmingly good, nor perfect in any way I know of; but she fulfilled this mission of the girl, which I fear, among greater aims, is falling a little into disrepute—she filled the whole house with her youth, her brightness, her gaiety, her overflowing life. No great demands of any kind had yet been made upon her. Whether she would be capable of responding to them when they came, no one could tell; but in the meantime she fulfilled her primitive use with the most thorough completeness. She was the life of the house.