Chapter XVII: Frederick to the Rescue

“What is wrong?” said one of two young men who were coming along the road.

“Bah! what does it matter to us?” said his companion.

This companion was Frederick Eastwood. He had dined out, and he had looked in for half an hour at his club, and he was now walking leisurely home with a friend who was going the same way. Why should two gentlemen thus making their way homewards on a Sunday evening pay any attention to a group of people gathered on the muddy pavement? But the curiosity of his companion was stronger than Frederick’s indifference. There were a dozen or so of people standing round some one who was crouching down against the wall, and there was a policeman in the middle.

“Ask her her name; even if she’s furrin’ she’ll give some sort of an answer to that,” suggested one of the bystanders.

“It is some tipsy woman,” said Frederick; but the next moment he changed colour, and stepped into the midst of the crowd.

“Call me a cab,” he said to his amazed friend, and put out his hand to grasp, not very gently, at the old cloak which he recognized. “Heaven and earth! what has brought you here?” he said, in a tone of passion. The crouching figure uttered a cry, and, springing up at once, rushed upon him and clung to his arm.

“She’s found her young man at last,” said some one in the crowd; and the very policeman grinned as he cast the light of his lantern upon poor Innocent, who, pale and scared, and dazzled by the light, clung closer and closer to her cousin.

“Oh, Frederick, I lost my way. Take me home! take me home!” she cried piteously.

“Why did you ever leave home, you little fool?” he asked, and thrust her savagely into the cab which drove up. He threw a coin to the policeman, and waved a good-night to his companion. He did not give any explanation. It was better, he thought, to leave his friend to suppose that this was some adventure--some disreputable acquaintance whom he took the trouble to help, than to let him know who it really was whom he had found in such a position. But he was savage when he got into the cab, and thrust away the girl, who put out her trembling hands to cling to him once more.

“How can you be such an idiot?” he said. “Where next must I pick you out of? Do you know you are behaving like a shameless creature, and doubly like a fool? Did you come out after me? or why are you here, and where were you going? By heaven, it is enough to drive a man mad to see a girl making an idiot of herself like this!”

Poor Innocent could not stand against this torrent of reproof. She shrank back into a corner, and cried and sobbed. It seemed to her that heaven and earth had risen up against her, now that Frederick “scolded” her too. She had done no harm. But what an evening, what a round of miserable adventures she had gone through! Her limbs were aching with fatigue, and her mind with fright and terror. He had seemed to her the very messenger of heaven for her deliverance. Her cry when she saw him was one of those outcries of pure joy which sound keen and sharp as if a pang were in them. Out of the darkness, the forlornness, the utter misery, he appeared to her like an angel. But when the angel began to scold her, poor Innocent, muddy and wretched, shrank up into her corner. For the first time a consciousness of her own foolishness came across her mind. How could he, so spotless and smooth as he was, touch or look at her, with mud on her dress, with her old cloak wet with the rain, and her hair hanging limp and damp upon her shoulders? Yes, she deserved to be scolded: she perceived this for perhaps the first time in her life.

“When you have done crying,” said Frederick, still savage, “perhaps you will explain to me what ridiculous cause brought you to this plight. Have you run away entirely? Where were you going? What do you want! You little fool! They are far kinder to you at home than any one would be anywhere else. You would gain very little, I can tell you, by running away.”

“I did not mean to run away,” said Innocent, crying softly as it were, under her breath.

“You will find no other people so foolish,” said Frederick savagely. “What did you want? what were you thinking of? Good heavens! you are a girl, are you, and not a spirit of mischief? Fancy my dismay when I saw you--you, who ought to have been safe and sound at home, questioned by a policeman in the midst of a London crowd! Try and imagine how disgraceful such a thing is to yourself--how exasperating to me.”

“Oh, Frederick!” cried the girl, overwhelmed by his reproaches, and roused into understanding by the sharpness of the pain to which she was subjected, “I did not mean it. Do not be angry: it was not my fault----”

“Not your fault!” he cried in his rage. “Good heavens! if it had not been that I was afraid you might get into some still more disgraceful scrape, I should have left you to your fate. The thought did go through my mind. If this were known, nobody would ever speak to you again; nobody would believe your excuses. Not your fault! What made you come out at all, away from home?”

“Oh, don’t be angry,” she cried piteously, and put out her trembling hand to touch his coat, to propitiate and pacify him with abject self-humiliation. By this time his passion had begun to wear itself out, but he would not give her any sign of forgiveness. When the cab reached the gate of the Elms, it was thrown open to them by all the servants in a body, who were searching about among the shrubbery with lights.

“Oh, here she is, with Mr. Frederick. I know’d she’d be found with Mr. Frederick,” said one of the maids, whom Frederick overheard.

Mrs. Eastwood met them at the door, looking pale and frightened. “Oh, thank God, here she is at last!” she cried to Nelly, who was behind.

Innocent clutched tightly at Frederick’s arm as she stepped down, bewildered and dazzled by the lights that flashed everywhere around her. He had scolded her cruelly, but yet she clung to him in preference to the women who had been so kind to her. He felt the implied compliment, even in the midst of his wrath.

“Yes, I have brought the little fool home,” he cried loudly, that all might hear him. “Where do you think I found her? In the middle of the Brompton Road, with a crowd round, crying, and unable to tell where she came from. What were you thinking of, mother, to let such a child go out alone?”

“I! let her go out alone!” cried Mrs. Eastwood, astonished at the undeserved blame. “Are you mad, Frederick? I have been more unhappy about her than I can say. The gardener has gone out to look everywhere, and we have been all over the grounds with lanterns. But bring her in--bring her in. Thank God we have her safe at last!”

With the lights apparently flashing all round her, dazzling her eyes, Innocent went in, half dragged by Frederick, to whom she kept clinging. He pushed her roughly into a chair, pulling away his arm. “There! let us see if you can give any account of your escapade,” he said harshly.

The tones of his voice, his harsh words, sunk into poor Innocent’s heart like stones sinking into water. She remembered nothing else afterwards, and the pain seemed something more than she could bear. She sat and gazed at them all, holding her old faded cloak round her closely, and showing the stains of mud on it and upon her black frock. Her hair fell limp to her neck: her poor little hat was pushed back from her head. The excitement and distress threw out, as nothing before had done, the peculiar beauty of her face, but a more forlorn figure could not have been seen. Mrs. Eastwood was more anxious and more compassionate than her son.

“How was it, Innocent?” she asked: “I am sure you could not mean any harm. Tell me where were you going? where had you been?”

The girl sat silent, like one under a spell, eager yet dumb, on the point of utterance. She seemed to struggle with some force which prevented her from speaking. She turned her eyes from one to another, eager, miserable--trying, it seemed, to tell her story--incapable of beginning. At last she surmounted the spell, and burst suddenly into wild tears.

“I did not mean it. I saw the church from the window--I thought it was like the Spina. Oh--h! it was not a church at all: it was some dreadful place. They tried to kill me, and then I fled--fled! and I did not know the way----”

“What is the Spina?” said Mrs. Eastwood, wondering. “You frighten her, Frederick, making those grimaces. Innocent, no one will be hard upon you. Tell me plainly; what sort of a dreadful place was it? Why did you go?”

The girl looked round her at them all, one after another. Why did she go? She did not really understand the question, but it seemed to drive her to that necessity for an answer which sometimes brings the truth from our lips, and sometimes calls up an involuntary fiction which appears like truth to other minds, and sometimes to that of the speaker. “I was--lonely,” she said, after a long pause.

Mrs. Eastwood gave a cry of pain. She turned her back upon them all, and walked up and down the room two or three times with an agitation that no one understood. Then she came and stood by Innocent, and put one arm round her. “Oh, Nelly,” she cried, “Nelly, this is our fault!”

It would be wrong to say that Nelly was less tender-hearted than her mother, except in so far as youth is always less considerate, less tolerant than experience; but on this occasion she stood unmoved, feeling more indignant than sorry. She, too, had made her essay at sympathy, and she had not got the better of its rejection. She stood by without any particular demonstration, while by degrees some sort of account of the evening was got from her cousin. Innocent told them in broken words all that had happened to her. She shuddered as she described the groans. She was sure she had seen the gleam of the knives, and heard the steps approaching of the men who were going to kill her. This curious Italian version of a very commonplace incident puzzled the family greatly, to whose imaginations knives were quite strange and impossible things. When she had told her tale somehow, she sat, looking at them all, one after the other, with strained eyes, not knowing what they might do to her for the crime she seemed to have committed, without knowing it to be a crime. She did not catch the sense of what they said to each other, though her eyes followed every word, trying to divine it on the lips of the speaker.

“I was lonely,” she repeated, with a curious mixture of wistful misery, and the childish cunning of the perception that she had made a successful stroke with these words before.

The result, so far as Innocent was concerned, was that she was taken tenderly up-stairs, and committed to the care of Alice, who put her to bed, and questioned her over again, making her own reflections on the adventure. Innocent cried herself to sleep, sobbing while drowsiness crept over her, and waking up to sob again. The groans of the old woman in the chapel possessed her brain, and the strange black desolation of the streets, which every time she dropped asleep seemed to enfold her again, frightening her back out of the world of dreams to feel for the first time the soothing of the firelight, and the kindly warmth and comfort of her little room. These, however, were but superficial tortures. The one which gave them their hold upon her, and which had indeed produced a sort of half awakening of her spiritual nature, was the terrible disappointment of being “scolded” by Frederick. She knew no more tragical word to use, even in her own mind. He had forsaken her. She dwelt upon the fact with an acute pang, almost like the birth-pang of the soul which had not yet come to life within her. Almost, but not altogether--for the impulses of that high and potent inspiration of pain died off, when they reached the intolerable point, into vague childish moaning over an unexpected unkindness. Her only moral standing-ground in this vague uncertain world had failed her--Frederick had scolded her. The two things sound very different, yet in the feverish and confused musings of this poor undeveloped nature they were the same.

The party in the drawing-room were moved by very different feelings. The young people could not understand their mother. She had been crying, with her head bent down into her hands. To Nelly the incident was disagreeable and annoying, but not tragic; while to Frederick it had become chiefly an occasion of fault-finding. To think that it was somebody’s fault was a great relief to his mind.

“Why do you let her stray about as she likes? Why don’t you make her stay in the room with you? Why don’t you give her something to do? Surely there are people enough in the house to see that a child like that is not wandering about at her own will wherever she pleases?” he said.

This view of the subject relieved him from the indefinite uneasiness which had begun to steal into his mind as to his own sharp words to Innocent. He was quite right in using those sharp words. She must be made to see (he thought) that something more was required of her than to yield to every impulse--that she must learn, being a girl, to respect the limits which society draws around a girl’s path from her earliest beginning. She ought to have known them by instinct; but as she did not know them it was necessary she should be taught, and the sooner and more effectually the better. But, besides this, it was good to have somebody at home to blame for her foolishness. If she had been properly watched it could not have happened. Why did not some one keep her in their eye? Why not force her to remain with the others, if force was necessary? Why not--? There was no end to Frederick’s whys; everybody was wrong who had anything to do with the management of the girl; while he managed her, nothing of this sort had happened. But it was not in the nature of things that he could go on looking after a girl of sixteen--and the moment she got into the hands of the women, her natural guardians, this was the issue. It was just like women’s way--they wanted to do men’s work, and they would not take the trouble to do their own.

That Nelly should have accepted this challenge hotly and fiercely was natural enough; but Mrs. Eastwood took no notice. It was only when the discussion grew furious that she roused herself and interfered.

“Children,” she said, in her usual words, but with a more serious tone than usual, “don’t wrangle. It does not become you, Frederick, to speak against women who have brought you up, and done everything for you; and it is foolish of you, Nelly, to argue, as if it was a thing for argument. If Frederick thinks I am a fool, and you are a fool, seeing us every day as he does, and knowing all about us, what good will arguing do him?”

“I did not mean that, mother,” said Frederick, momentarily ashamed of himself.

“You said it, then, my dear, which is a very common thing among men,” said Mrs. Eastwood, “and curious when you come to think of it. But, as I say, talk will not change any one’s opinion. And here is something very much more serious to call for our attention. Something must be done about Innocent. Her mother made me very unhappy when I was young. She was not affectionate either. She was secret; nobody could ever make sure what was going on in her mind. When she ran away and married Mr. Vane, none of us had the least suspicion of what was going on. I am afraid of Innocent doing something of the same kind.”

“Running away and marrying--some one?” asked Frederick. An ineffable smile of secret complacency came over the young man’s face. He gave a short little laugh of pleased embarrassment. “I think you may feel yourself safe against any such danger. Running away--or, at least, marrying--requires two----”

Mrs. Eastwood and Nelly looked at each other with secret feminine indignation, thus relieving their minds; but the mother replied, with a composure which she was far from feeling,--

“There are more ways of going wrong than making a foolish marriage. That is very wrong, Heaven knows; when you consider how much the very character of the family and its standing in the world depends upon the wife whom a young man may marry in a sudden fancy----”

“If you are referring to me, mother,” said Frederick, catching fire, “you may make yourself perfectly easy. I look upon Innocent as a mere child. It seems to me a kind of insult to suppose for a moment that I could be capable----”

“Of running away with Innocent?” said his mother, looking him calmly in the face. “Be comforted, Frederick; I never imagined that you were likely so to compromise yourself. The danger I warned you against was of a very different kind.--But we need not return to that. Nobody can say you have been too kind to her to-night.”

“I am not sentimental,” he cried, getting up from his chair, and glad of the excuse for being angry, and withdrawing from unpleasant discussion. He went off, whistling an opera air, to show his perfect indifference, and was heard next moment pitching coals on the fire in the library, and wheeling the chairs about violently, to get himself the most comfortable place. This Sunday night was not so peaceable as a Sunday night ought to be in a respectable English household, which strove to do its duty. Dick came in immediately after Frederick’s withdrawal, with muddy boots, and rain on his rough coat, but his cheeks pink with the cold air outside, and the serenity of an easy mind in his good-natured countenance. Dick seldom wrangled, and never allowed any event to disturb him very deeply. His honest matter-of-fact character was always a comfort, whatever went wrong.

“So she has come back?” he said; “that’s a blessing. I went as far as Piccadilly without seeing anything of her. I say, weren’t they making a row in that little chapel in the road--groaning as if they’d groan their heads off. Had Innocent gone after Frederick, as the maids say? or where had she been?”

Dick was much amused when they told him the facts of the case, and saw great possibilities of laughter in the idea.

“I say, what jolly fun!” he cried--“thought they were going to kill her? Oh, oh, oh! What a stupid I was not to go in. Poor little soul though, I hope you didn’t scold her--not more than you could help, mamma! I suppose it’s right to scold--to a certain point--but she’s so scared and so bewildered.”

“And you are my own good Dick,” cried his mother, giving him a kiss, which the boy did not understand.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” he said, with a brightening of pleasure, “though hang me if I know why. Ain’t I muddy, rather! You never saw such a night. Honest fog is a joke to it. Drizzle, drizzle for ever; and the sky is so low you could touch it. I’m glad she’s in all right, and safe in bed; and I hope you didn’t whip her. If I am to be up at seven to those dear mathematics,” Dick added, making a face, “I suppose I had better go to bed too----”

“And don’t forget to get up when you are called, dear,” said Mrs. Eastwood; “and do work, there’s a good boy. I am sure you have plenty of brains, if you will only take the trouble.”

Dick shrugged his shoulders, as he went off cheerful after his long walk. I don’t know that his brains were at all superabundant; and he was not fond of work; but after the clever and refined Frederick the very sight of this honest fellow, weighted to the ground as he was by the burden of the coming Exam., was a consolation to everybody belonging to him. The mother and daughter had a final consultation before they too left the drawing-room. There had to be beer ordered for the gardener, who came in much more overwhelmed by the fatigue of his bootless walk than Dick was, depressed about things in general, and taking a dark view of Innocent’s prospects in particular.

“Gentlemen don’t like to be followed about like that,” he said oracularly, “no more nor I would myself. Women should know as their place is at ’ome, and make up their minds to it.”

This, it is true, was said down-stairs to a sympathetic housemaid; but, being an old servant, the gardener felt that he might unfold his mind a little, even to his mistress.

“I’d give the young lady a word, mum,” he said, strong in his own sense of injury, as having lost his Sunday evening’s ease and leisure through her means. “I’d let her know, whatever may be furrin’ ways, as this sort o’ thing won’t do--not in England. It ain’t the thing for a young gell. In furrin’ parts there’s many ways as ain’t like ours--so I’m told--dancing all over the place of Sundays, and that sort; but not to be hard upon her the first time, nor nothing violent, I’d jest give her a word--that it won’t do, not here.”

“You may be sure I will say all that is necessary,” said Mrs. Eastwood, half laughing, half angry. “My niece went out to go to church, and went to the little chapel in the road, and got frightened, poor child. That is the whole matter.”

“Ah, ma’am, you’re a simple ’earted one,” said the man, shaking his head with a scepticism that no asseveration could have touched.

The maids, too, were of opinion that Mrs. Eastwood was a very simple ’earted one; though not where they themselves were concerned. She had not the same faith in their excuses as she seemed to put in this patent deception attempted by “the French girl,” who was a likely one to get into trouble by going to church surely. The kitchen and all its dependencies laughed the idea to scorn, though, perhaps, respecting Innocent more for the cleverness and invention she had displayed in finding out such an excuse. But the story was laid up against her, with a fulness of detail and circumstance such as might have made an historian despair. How she followed Frederick to his dinner-party, and watched him through the window, and went after him to the club, was all known to the housemaid as particularly as if she had been there.

“And I hope he’ll reward her, when he’s free and can please hisself,” said Jane in the kitchen, who was romantic.

“Get along with you,” cried the cook. “Do you think gentlemen care for a chit like that?”

“And one as follows ’em about,” said Susan solemnly, whose younger sister Jane was.