As for Nelly, setting her foot into the studio did her good. The smell of the pigments, and the sight of the rubbish about,—all the sketches, and unused bits of canvas, and bursting portfolios, were balm to the impetuous but not ungenerous girl. ‘I don’t want to see Alice,’ she said; ‘it was sly of her not to tell me. No, I don’t want to see her; but she is very happy, I suppose;’ and it was not possible that this could be said without a certain bitterness, considering all that had come and gone.
‘Nelly dear, don’t speak of it,’ said the padrona, who was ignorant of all the complications; and she went and gave the little messenger of consolation a kiss, and suffered herself to shed a tear or two out of her full heart. ‘I thought it would have killed me at first,’ she said, going back to her work with trembling hands. And the hand that shook so made a dreadful business of Cinderella’s white dress, and then the mother put away her tools, and sat down and cried. Nelly had been poor Severn’s pupil in the old, old days, and the sight of her brought nothing but softening thoughts to the padrona’s mind; and the fountain was opened that she kept so bravely shut. As for Nelly herself, every moment in that room was good for her. She cried too, and washed all her bitterness away in those tears, and turned Frank Renton and all his misdoings courageously out of her imagination. I doubt whether he had ever got so far as her heart.
‘I only want you to tell me one thing,’ she said, somewhat fiercely, to Alice, who came in, all unconscious, after the tears were dried, glad and wondering. ‘Was it going on when you were at Richmont?’
‘It?—what?’ said simple Alice, and then the child’s ready blush covered her face. ‘Oh, no, no! It never came on at all; it came into our minds in a moment, when we knew he was going away.’
And Nelly Rich was so magnanimous as to kiss Alice too.
‘Tell him I did it,—and that I bear no malice,’ she said, with a laugh; and then went away with Miss Hadley, who saw her safely to the railway station, and made the story still more plain to her. The governess thought it strange of Mrs. Rich to permit her daughter to run about alone in this way, but reflected that it might be one of the strange customs of ‘those sort of people,’ and did her duty by the young lady, putting her under the care of the guard, and keeping an eye on the carriage till the train started. The journey might be slightly indecorous, but it did more good than any tonic in the world.
And so it came about that in September Frank Renton sailed from Southampton to join his regiment, with his young wife,—the only one of the brothers who made anything like a practical conclusion to the little romance of their beginning. Though he had hesitated for some time as to whether he should follow interest or inclination, Frank was not the sort of man, when his choice was made, to care very much what he might tread upon in his way. He would have given no one pain willingly, but to have his way was the most important matter, and he had it accordingly. They were a couple of babies to set forth thus together, to face the world,—one-and-twenty and sixteen! but their very youth kept them from any consciousness of the gravity of the undertaking. They went forth with the daring ignorance of two children, hand in hand. There were several hearts that ached over the parting, and one had almost broke in the effort. And the bride shed a few soft tears, and the bridegroom kissed his hand to the people who stayed behind; and thus the last of the three Rentons carried out his father’s will, and launched himself upon the world.
CHAPTER V.
THE FALLING OF THE WATERS.
The readers of this history must be prepared to pass over an interval of something less than seven years from the end of the last chapter. I allow that it is a most undesirable break, but yet it has been involved from the beginning as a necessity of the narrative.
Nearly seven years had elapsed since Mr. Renton’s death at the moment when we again approach Renton Manor. He died in September, and it was the beginning of August when Mrs. Renton received a note from Mr. Ponsonby, the lawyer, announcing his intention of arriving at the Manor the next day. Mrs. Renton had not improved much in health, but she had laid aside her mourning, and wore grey and violet, and pretty caps, once more. Her existence had known very little change during all these years. Now and then the tonics had been changed, and she had substituted for a whole year the Revalenta Arabica for the arrowroot; but the difference was scarcely perceptible except to the maid and the cook, and I believe, on the whole, the arrowroot was found to agree with her best. She had taken her drive almost every day with a feeling that she was doing her duty. ‘My dear husband always made such a point of my drive,’ she said, plaintively, though for her own part she would have preferred her sofa; and so had lived on, very punctual in taking her medicine, a woman humbly conscious of fulfilling all the duties of her life. Mary Westbury had been generally her companion in these drives; and as she was younger and not so settled in mind, had sometimes, it must be allowed, felt as if life was no better than a leisurely promenade between two rows of hedgerows, sometimes green and sometimes brown. The carriage was very comfortable and the horses were very fat, and there were a great many charming points of view within a radius of fifteen miles round Renton; but still there were moments in which Mary was such an infidel as to wish herself jogging to market in the passing cart, or carrying a basket along the road, or anywhere rather than in that luxurious corner. If anything had happened to make Mrs. Renton ‘put down,’ as people say, her carriage, she would have regarded it as a calamity altogether immeasurable; but I think that both she and her niece would have felt a burden taken off their minds. She would have been left at peace on her sofa, and Mary could have taken needful exercise in her own way. But such a blessing in disguise was beyond praying for. Mr. Renton, though he had been so hard upon his sons, had provided very tenderly for his wife’s comfort.