Nelly was, if possible, still more painfully divorced from her old gentle ease and sprightly quiet. She had begun life for herself, and the beginning was, like all beginnings, a fight and struggle. The new required her to be faithless and disloyal to the old; the old could not conceal a certain grudge and painful antagonism to the new. She was placed between, feeling herself dragged on either side—dragged asunder, the peaceful unity of her existence turned into a perpetual struggle to please both parties, to serve two masters, to be loyal at once to her lover and to her mother. Nay, the struggle was still more complicated: for Nelly had not only to serve two masters, but to content and satisfy a third party, a new being altogether—herself—another Nelly, who had risen up and sat in judgment upon her. No inquisitor was ever so hard upon a poor girl as was this other self—this new, severe, enlightened Nelly, who sat, as it were, at the very springs of her life, and watched them from their earliest outflow. Even when the poor Nelly in the flesh had made what seemed to her a very successful compromise, when she had done her very best, and had pleased both sides, and served both masters, the spiritual Nelly would come down upon her like a wolf on the fold—would convict her of falsehood, of paltering with what she knew to be right, of mean expedients, and a base policy of time-serving. Poor child! it was true she had become a time-server. She said one thing to the one, another to the other. She tried in a hundred little stealthy ways to “bring them together,” to resuscitate the ancient friendship between them. She told each of pretty speeches the other had made, and kept a dead silence as to the speeches, anything but pretty, which she had often enough to listen to. Not only was her heart torn asunder, but her mind was confused in its sense of right and wrong. Many things which seemed abstractly right had become impossible to her; and some that were wrong were so natural, so necessary! She was unhappy in her home, and, with cruel mortification, she perceived that the other home, to which she had naturally looked forward, was receding into the distance. It was to be purchased only by despoiling the present. A certain impatience, almost by moments, ripening into disgust, sometimes moved her in respect to her betrothed. Her heart sickened sometimes at his suggestions—at the tone in which he spoke. He wanted all the rest of the world to bestir themselves on his behalf; but he himself had no idea of bestirring himself. He thought it natural that sacrifices of all sorts should be made to bring about his happiness—only not by him.
“But we are young,” poor Nelly would say; “we can put up with anything. What does it matter?”
“It matters a great deal,” Ernest would answer. “We are young; it is our time for enjoyment. They have had their day. You don’t suppose our fathers and mothers feel half as keenly or enjoy half as much as we do? Then why shouldn’t they give up, and let us have the means of enjoying? I don’t understand that sort of dog-in-the-manger philosophy,” said the young man, with a loftiness of moralizing which almost impressed Nelly, in spite of her higher perceptions.
She was seated in a low basket-work chair under the lime-trees, looking up with puckers of care upon her pretty forehead which had no business there, at the self-absorbed countenance of her lover. He was cutting down the young lime-shoots which grew up in a miniature forest round the trees, with a little cane in his hand. It was autumn, and the leaves fell at every stroke. He had one hand in his pocket, careless, yet disappointed; laying down the law, and feeling himself above its action. Nelly gazed at him with a mute inquiry—a close, anxious, silent investigation, which she could not herself have explained. Yes; she was interrogating Nature and circumstances, and the present and the future; puzzled between her own instincts, her own ancient certainties of belief, and the philosophy of him who ought to be more to her than all else on earth. He was cleverer than she was, better able to express himself: was he more right than she? Or was he wrong, all wrong—wrong in feeling, in principle, in all that makes a man? What a question this was for a girl to ask herself! And she did not ask it; but only looked up at him, mutely wondering, trying to penetrate the real meaning that was in him—a meaning which must, she felt, be better and higher than anything he said.
Through the same old garden in which these two were seated another figure was visible, passing and repassing under the distant trees. This was Innocent, who had changed too, and developed in her way, during the interval which had been of so much importance to her. Her face had scarcely altered, for her mind was waking up but slowly, and it still retained the half vacant, half dreamy look habitual to it. But a change had come over her aspect generally. She had been assimilated in appearance, as much as circumstances permitted, to other girls of her age. Her hair had been put up, much against her will, though she had strenuously resisted all the modern mysteries of hair-dressing. In this point Alice had been invaluable to her; for Alice was old-fashioned, and looked with grim contempt at the devices, which even Nelly was not strong-minded enough to reject, for increasing the volume of piled-up hair with which the young ladies of the day disguise the shape and exaggerate the dimensions of their pretty heads. Alice drew Innocent’s hair into a knot behind, loosely coiled and of no great magnitude. Even thus it was seldom “tidy,” I am sorry to say, being somewhat short for such treatment, and often fell loose in a wandering, half curled lock upon her shoulders. Her dress, too, was still simply made and free from furbelows; but it was kept within a respectful distance of the fashion—enough “not to be remarked,” which was Mrs. Eastwood’s horror. Mrs. Eastwood, indeed, felt that Innocent was scarcely safe from that misery of being remarked; but consoled herself that, though the girl was nearly eighteen, she was scarcely, properly speaking, “out:” and in such cases, as everybody knows, plainness of dress is in the best taste and a mark of distinction. What was still more remarkable, however, was that Innocent held a book in her hand as she went up and down the Lady’s Walk under the arching trees, which now and then sent down a leaf flickering through the softened daylight upon her, or upon the open page, an occurrence which sent her thoughts astray continually. The girl would look up with a vague soft smile on her face when this occurred, up and round as if half hoping to see some concealed playmate among the branches or behind the bole of a tree, and then would breathe a gentle little sigh and return to the book. Innocent was struggling with the difficulties of education at this moment. She was reading, or trying to read, history, endeavouring now and then, by help of her own voice, by whispering it half aloud, and thus cheating herself into attention, to master something about Elizabeth and the Marys, her of Smithfield and her of Scotland. She had undertaken this study by her own desire, curiously enough, having come to feel herself deficient. When a girl of nearly eighteen feels herself deficient in education, what can the most well-meaning of friends advise her to do? I need not say that Mrs. Eastwood’s sense of propriety had long ere now secured a music master for Innocent, and that by this time she could play a little on the piano, not cleverly, but yet with a certain dreamy faculty, amusing herself with long-drawn chords and fragmentary combinations of her own. She could speak French and Italian, and even a little German, thanks to her foreign education, and she had no taste for drawing. What more than this could be done in the way of education for her? She had the same novels to read if she chose which came from Mudie’s periodically for the rest of the family, and she was recommended to “take a book” by everybody who saw her seated, as she was seen so often, with her hands in her lap, doing nothing. But it was only within a very recent time that Innocent had begun to take this advice. She had been laughed at for her ignorance, and the laugh had touched her for the first time; and here she was accordingly, poor child, on this sunny, hazy autumn afternoon, straying up and down, up and down the Lady’s Walk, reading half aloud to herself, about the dead controversies, the national struggles of which she knew nothing. The Queen of Scots even was to her but a printed name. She knew nothing of the story, nothing of the woman for whom partisans still fight, though she has been dead these two hundred years. She read over with her whispering lips the curt record of events which once made blood flow and hearts beat, insensible to them as though they had been mere revolutions of machinery. The leaf which dropped on her book was real, and so were the pebbles which caught her foot as she strayed on, not looking where she went; but the history was a dead thing so far as Innocent was concerned, and she herself was no more real than the history. What did she there, a stray, half-awakened soul, among the facts of that ordinary everyday scene? She was an embodied dream, scarcely realizable even by herself, and her occupation was as unreal as she was, as she strayed like a vision, appearing and re-appearing between the openings of the trees.
“Is it really true,” said Molyneux, suddenly departing from the graver subject, “that old Longueville has fallen in love with that child, Innocent? It isn’t forbidden, I believe, to marry your grandfather, but only your grandmother, eh Nelly? Are you jealous? First of all he wanted you——”
“Oh, it is very well to say so now; but it was that, you know, that brought me to the point.”
“If you did not want to be brought to the point, it is a pity that it should have happened through a mistake,” said Nelly, driven into momentary crossness by the complication and confusion of her feelings. But Molyneux did not want to quarrel. He only laughed lightly.
“Perhaps I am the best judge whether it was a mistake,” he said, “but in the meantime he is going in for Innocent. Is it true?”