“What I might be able to give my daughter?” said Mrs. Eastwood, in surprise; “but I have nothing to do with it. I give her nothing—she comes into it by her grandfather’s will.”
“The five thousand pounds—yes, yes, I understand all about that,” said Mr. Molyneux, with a mixture of disgust and weariness. This infinitesimal, but always recurring, morsel of money bored him. But he tried to keep his temper. He explained the duty of parents in such an emergency with great fulness. If a sacrifice had to be made, it must, he pointed out, be a mutual sacrifice. The question was not of five thousand pounds, or five thousand pence, but how to “make up an income” for the young people. Without an income there could be no marriage; it was not a matter of feeling, but of arrangement; if the one side did so much, the other side would do so much more. The great man explained the position with all his natural wealth of words, and with all the ease of wealth to which a hundred or two more of expenditure in a year mattered comparatively little. But Mrs. Eastwood, who, as the reader is aware, had enough, but not too much, listened with a dismay which she could scarcely disguise. She who had been obliged to put down her carriage in order to free her son, was not in a position to give large allowances to either son or daughter. She made the best effort she could to maintain her ground.
“I should have thought that your son, in your profession, in which you are so eminent——” she began with an attempt to propitiate her amicable adversary, who had changed the question so entirely from what appeared to her its natural aspect.
“In my profession, ma’am, a man stands on his own merits, not his father’s,” Mr. Molyneux answered, interrupting her with brusque decision. What was poor Mrs. Eastwood to do? She could not give to Nelly without being unjust to her other children, and yet how was she to have the heart to crush Nelly’s happiness by refusing? A vision of her child, hollow-eyed and pale, casting pathetic glances at her, which would be worse than reproaches, flitted before her eyes. Girls have died ere now of separation from their lovers, and Nelly (the mother thought) was the kind of girl to break her heart without a complaint. Could she risk the breaking of Nelly’s heart for a miserable question of money? This was an influence infinitely more subtle and potent than Mr. Molyneux’s eloquence. While he talked the good mother fought it out in her own bosom. She gave her consent that he should see her solicitor and talk over the matter, with a sort of despairing acquiescence and that desperate trust in Providence which springs up in an oppressed soul when driven to its last resources. Something might “come in the way.” Nothing could be resolved upon at once; neither to-day nor to-morrow could call for immediate action, and something might come in the way.
Mr. Molyneux saw Nelly before he went away, and was kind and fatherly, kissing her on the forehead, an act which Mrs. Eastwood half resented, as somehow interfering with her absolute property in her child. The lover she tolerated, but the lover’s father was odious to her. And this trial of her patience was all the more hard that she had to put the best face upon it before Nelly, and to say that Mr. Molyneux and she did not quite agree on some points, but that everything would come right by and by. Nelly had always been her mother’s confidant, knowing everything, and thrusting her ready youthful opinion and daring undoubting advice into whatever was going on, and to shut her out now from all participation in this crowning care was unspeakably hard.
And then the nature of the vexation which she had thus to conceal within herself was so doubly odious—a question of money, which made her appear even to herself as if she was a niggard where her child’s happiness was involved, she who had never grudged Nelly anything all her life! Other disagreeables, too, mingled in the matter. To be roused from the pleasant confidence that all your friends think well of you by the sudden discovery that some of them, at least, hold very lightly the privilege of your special alliance, is not in itself consolatory. Everything connected with the subject turned somehow into pain. Since the time when the carriage was put down, no such incident had occurred in the family, and Frederick’s debts, which were a kind of natural grief in their way (for has not every man debts?), were not half so overwhelming as this, nor did they bring half so many troubles in their train.
When the love of lovers comes into a house which has hitherto been kept warm and bright by the loves of parent and children, brother and sister, the first thing it does in most cases is to make a rent and division. It calls out the sense of self and personal identity, it breaks the soft silken bonds of nature, and turns the hands a little while ago so closely linked almost against each other. Nelly thought her mother was hard to her Ernest, and Ernest thought his future mother-in-law was already developing the true mother-in-law character, and was about to become his natural enemy. He could not help giving hints of this to his betrothed, which made Nelly unhappy. And then her mother would find her crying, and on asking why, would be assailed with pitiful remonstrances.
“Dear mamma, why should you turn against Ernest? You used to like him well enough. Is it because I am fond of him that you turn against him?” Thus Nelly would moan, rending her mother’s heart.
All this introduced the strangest new commotion into the peaceful household, and the reader will not wonder that poor Mrs. Eastwood, thus held on the rack, was a little impatient of other annoyances. On the very evening of the day on which she had the interview with Mr. Molyneux above recorded, when she was going through the hall on her way up-stairs, another vexing and suggestive incident disturbed her. The hall was square with one little deep window on one side of the door, the recess of which was filled with a window seat. Here some one was seated, half visible in the darkness, with a head pressed against the window, gazing out. Nothing could be more unlike the large windows of the Palazzo Scaramucci, but the attitude and act were the same. Mrs. Eastwood stopped, half alarmed, and watched the motionless figure. Then she went forward with a wondering uneasiness.
“Is it you, Innocent?” she said.