“Where else could she go, Nelly? We must be very kind to her. Besides, she will be a companion for you. It will be very delightful, I don’t doubt, to have her,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with a certain quaver and hesitation in her voice.
Nelly made no immediate reply. “It will be very odd,” she said, after a pause, “to have another girl in the house—a girl not so far off one’s own age. Dear, what an unpleasant sort of creature I must be! I don’t feel quite so sure that I shall like it. Perhaps she will be much nicer than I am; perhaps people will like her better. I am dreadfully afraid, mamma, I am not good enough to be quite happy about it. If she had been six instead of sixteen——”
“Nelly, don’t say anything, dear. She is our own flesh and blood. You would be good to any stranger. As for being nicer than you, my Nelly!—But poor child, poor child, without either father or mother, without a friend to stand by her—inconsolable in a strange country——”
“But, mamma,” said Nelly, scarcely able to keep from crying in sympathy, “it cannot be a strange country to her if she has lived there all her life.”
“That does not matter, dear; nothing can change the fact,” said Mrs. Eastwood. “I have been in Italy, and I know how English people live. They hold themselves aloof. Though they live there all their lives, it is always a strange country to them. And he was not the sort of man to make friends. I dare say she has been brought up by some old servant or other, and allowed to run wild.” Here Mrs. Eastwood paused and sighed. She was the kindest woman in the world, but the idea of a girl of sixteen, with no manners or education, suddenly thrown upon her hands, a new member of her family, brought up under circumstances so different, and no doubt unlike them in every way, was not without its painful side. And she was angry with herself for seeing this, and grieved to think that she had so little natural affection or Christian charity. “Our whole hearts ought to go out towards her, poor thing,” she added, with profound compunction. “She has nobody else in the world to look to; and, Nelly, whatever may be our first momentary feeling, of course there can be no real hesitation——”
“Of course,” said Nelly, springing to her feet. “There is Mrs. Everard’s knock this time, and now I know you will tell her all about it. What room must she have? the little green room, or the room in the wing, or——”
“Dear,” said Mrs. Eastwood coaxingly, “the kindest and the warmest would be the little room, off yours—close to us both—to make the poor child feel at home.”
“I knew that was what you would say,” cried Nelly, half laughing, half crying; “it is exactly like you, mamma; not only take her in, but take her into the very centre of the nest, between you and me.”
“To warm her, poor child,” said the inconsistent mother, laughing and crying too; and Nelly ran off, stumbling in her way against Mrs. Everard, her mother’s friend, whom the rest of the family were not fond of. “Do not knock me down, Ellinor,” said that lady, giving Nelly a kiss, which she received without enthusiasm. Where was Nelly going? Straight up stairs without a pause to the little room which, already in her own mind, she too had destined to her unknown cousin. She went and looked at it with her head on one side, contemplating the little bed, which was decked with faded chintz, and the paper, which was somewhat dingy, and the carpet, which was so worn as to bear little trace of its original pattern. “This will never do,” Nelly said to herself. Her imagination, which was a very lively and sprightly imagination, instantly set off on a voyage of discovery through the house to make up what was wanting. She seized, always in her thoughts, upon here a picture, and there a set of shelves, and rooted out from the lumber-room the tiniest of easy chairs, and made up her mind as to the hangings. I do not mean to say that this was all pure kindness. To tell the truth, Nelly liked the job. The arrangement of the room, and its conversion out of a dingy receptacle for a nursery maid to a bower for a young lady, was the most delightful occupation to her. Did not some one say that a lady had lately set herself up in business as a house decorator? Ellinor Eastwood would have been her apprentice, her journeywoman, with all her heart.
It will be apparent from this that though the first idea of the new arrival startled both mother and daughter, the orphan was not likely to have a cold or unkindly reception. So much the reverse indeed was this to the real case, that by the time Mrs. Eastwood had confided all to her friend she herself was in high excitement and expectation of her unknown niece. Mrs. Everard had condoled with her on the burden, the responsibility, the trouble, every one of which words added to the force of the revulsion in her kindly and simple soul. “God forgive me, Nelly,” she said, when her daughter reappeared in the twilight, “if I thought my own sister’s child a burden, or shrank from the responsibility of taking care of my own flesh and blood. It seemed to hurt me when she said such things. She must have thought that was how I felt about it; when, Heaven knows, the very reverse——”