Chapter XXIX: Innocent’s Outset in the World

In consequence of this interview between Mrs. Eastwood and John Vane it was arranged that Innocent should pay Miss Vane a visit at the High Lodge, near Sterborne, where that lady lived in an eccentric way of her own in an old house which her brother had abandoned to her, and which she had turned to a great many uses quite uncontemplated by her predecessors. “We are an eccentric race,” her brother had said, laughing; “but as it is my way to be good for nothing, so it is Lætitia’s way to be good for a great deal. The one of us neutralizes the other. I tell her she is trying to lay up a stock of superfluous merit on my account, one good result of having a brother a ne’er-do-well----”

“Why should you call yourself a ne’er-do-well!” said Mrs. Eastwood. Nelly had already asked the same question furtively with a glance, and there was a warmth in the little outburst of partisanship by which these two women defended him against himself which warmed the man’s heart.

“Because, alas! it is true,” he said; “you got this character of me before you knew me? Ah, I was sure you had! and you see it is realized; but Lætitia is good for us both. Some part of her goodness is after a droll fashion, I confess. She is prodigiously High Church; she keeps a poor little parson in petticoats and a cloak, whom she calls father, and treats, I fear, as she treats her housemaids; but mind, she is very good both to the housemaids and the parson. I think Father Featherstone is a mistake; but if there ever was a good woman bent on doing good and succeeding in the attempt, it is my sister Lætitia. She will be very good to Innocent. You need not fear to trust her in my sister’s hands.”

“I like men who believe in their sisters,” said Mrs. Eastwood with a smile.

And Nelly looked at him. She did not say anything, but her lips moved as if she would have echoed her mother’s words. Nelly’s face had grown somehow longer, with a wistful expression which, by moments, was almost like Innocent’s. Especially when she looked at John Vane was this the case; a perpetual comparison seemed to be going on in her mind, almost a complaint against him that he was different from the other who was so much more important to her. Why should Vane always be of use and service when that other neglected his duties? Why should he be, as Ernest said, always on the spot when the other was away? Nelly was half angry with the man who was so ready to stand by her; and then there came over her heart the softest compunction and self-reproach, mingled--in that inextricable complication which belongs to all human feeling--with bitterness and mortification. Was it possible that she grudged the kindness of the one because it threw into further relief the indifference of the other? This, as the reader will easily see, was a very unsafe, as well as a very uncomfortable, state of mind for an engaged young woman. Perhaps on the whole, the kindest thing John Vane could have done would have been to take himself out of the way, and leave Ernest to show himself in the best light possible, a thing which his constant presence put out of the question.

To return, however, to the conversation with which this chapter begins. It took place on the morning after Mrs. Frederick’s outburst, and was the end of the adjourned discussion which Vane had begun on the previous evening. He had found some trouble in soothing Mrs. Eastwood, and persuading her that his proposal had nothing to do with what Amanda had said, but had been in his mind for some time previously. When he succeeded in this, everything was easy enough. It was certainly well that Innocent should be made acquainted with her family, her father’s relations. “If anything were to happen to me,” Mrs. Eastwood allowed with some pathos, “it would be an excellent thing that she should have other friends to fall back upon. Frederick could not, I fear, give her a home, as I might have hoped, and as for Nelly, I don’t know how Nelly may be situated,” the mother said, looking at her daughter. She did not know what was in Nelly’s mind; but that Ernest should be ready to give succour and shelter to a penniless dependent was a thing which, at this stage of affairs, with her present knowledge of Ernest, Mrs. Eastwood could not hope.

“It was with no such lugubrious idea that I made my proposal,” said John Vane, laughing. “But Innocent is nearly eighteen, and there could not be an easier plunge into life for her than a few weeks at the High Lodge. My sister has made half a convent, half a school, of the old house. I wish you would come too, and see what she is doing. But if not, I will take my little cousin down and leave her with Lætitia. It will teach Innocent the use of some new faculties. You have taught her only how to be carried about and cared for and tended----”

“I have not spoiled her, I hope,” said Mrs. Eastwood, who was not, however, displeased with the compliment. When a woman comes to that stage of life in which all that she does and says is no longer admirable, because she says and does it--when she begins to feel the force of hot and hostile criticism and to be shaken even in the natural confidence with which she has been accustomed to regard her own motives, then praise becomes very sweet to her; it restores her to the moral standing-ground which she seemed to have lost. Mrs. Eastwood had just accepted with a natural pleasure John Vane’s testimony to her goodness, when Frederick came in suddenly, with a harassed look upon his face. Frederick had been in the country shooting, as he said--for some time--without his wife; and had come back looking pale, as he used to look after his absences in the old days.

“Something is wrong?” said his mother, divining what his looks meant as Vane discreetly withdrew.

“Oh, nothing particular--nothing out of the ordinary,” he said; “I wonder though, that, knowing all the circumstances as you do, you should not make an effort, mother, to prevent Amanda from exciting herself. Of course, she is ill to-day. I told you before I married what was the state of affairs; _she_ may deserve it if you please, but I don’t deserve it, and the worst always falls on me. I do think you and Nelly between you might, at least manage to keep the peace.”

“Frederick! you seem quite unaware of how it all happened,” cried his mother, suddenly roused to a movement of self-defence.

“I know how it all turned out,” said Frederick, “and I do think my mother, if she had any regard for me, would try to avoid such scenes. She has been ill all night; and now she’s taken it into her head to go down to Sterborne, to the old place--the last thing in the world I could wish for. If you only knew,” said Frederick in a tone of the deepest injury, “how I hate her father; how I have struggled to keep them apart! And now here is my wife--your daughter-in-law--going down to our own county among all the Eastwoods, to Batty’s house! By Jove, it will break my heart.”

Words of unkind meaning were on Nelly’s very lips. “You should not have married Batty’s daughter, if you hate him,” was what she was disposed to say. “Frederick would not have spared me had I done anything of the kind,” she added to herself. She was guilty in intention of this unkind utterance; but in act she was innocent; she bit her lips, and kept it in. Mrs. Eastwood was a great deal more sympathetic.

“But if you were to speak to her, Frederick--if you were to say you did not like it?” she suggested anxiously.

“Speak! say! much she would care,” cried Frederick. “It just shows how little you know Amanda. That confounded heart disease of hers--if she has a heart disease--makes her believe that she is free to insult everybody. She must not be crossed herself; but there is nothing she likes so much as to cross others. No, I shall have to give in. I shall have to take her there, though I hate the whole concern. I do not think there ever was a more miserable wretch than I am on the face of the earth,” cried Frederick, flinging himself wearily into a chair.

“My poor boy!” said his mother, going to him, and passing her soft kind hand over his forehead, raising the waves of his hair, which were not in their usual good order. Frederick was not generally very tolerant of his mother’s caresses, but of late he had been soothed by them. Amanda cared very little for his amour _propre_, and made no particular effort to magnify his importance, and a man likes to feel himself important, if only to his mother. On the other hand, his mother was half-pleased even in the midst of her pity for him that he should, as it were, throw aside his wife, and recognize himself as a victim. It is not a fine quality, this, in women; but I am afraid a great many good women are conscious of possessing it. When a man has connected himself with his inferior, with some one we disapprove of, we like him to find out his mistake. We feel that it is better for him to know that he has done badly, very badly, for himself; and though in higher minds a certain contempt for the being who thus gives up the cause of his once-beloved, mingles with the softer feeling, yet we are all more or less mollified towards the son or brother who has made a foolish marriage, when he delivers over his wife, metaphorically, to our tender mercies, and abandons her standard. I don’t know whether the same sentiment exists on the other side, but I avow its existence on my own side. Mrs. Eastwood was pleased that her boy gave his Amanda up. She was far more tenderly sorry for him than had he been still in love. In words, she tried “to make the best of her,” and recognized fully that now the deed was done it was to be desired that Frederick should be “happy” with the woman who was his wife; but she thought more highly of him because he was not happy. She was more pleased, more tender, much more softened towards her son than if his household had been a pleasant one. Nelly did not share these sentiments. She was impatient with Frederick, and disposed to despise him for giving up Amanda’s cause. She put herself in Amanda’s place, small as was her sympathy for that young woman, and involuntarily conjured up before her a picture of the Molyneuxes, who would feel towards Ernest’s wife much as the Eastwoods felt to Frederick’s. Would Ernest abandon her, Nelly, to their strictures? would he allow them to suppose that he too had made a mistake? This thought made Nelly’s cheeks burn, and her eyes glow, and disposed her on the spot to assault Frederick, and lift up Amanda’s falling standard.

“It is curious,” said Mrs. Eastwood, after a pause, “that we should be so much entangled with Sterborne, where all the Eastwoods live, without having anything to do with the Eastwoods. Perhaps Innocent might travel with you, Frederick, if you are obliged to go. She has been invited to the High Lodge, to make acquaintance with her father’s family.”

“Who lives at the High Lodge?”

“Mr. Vane’s sister, the only one of the Vanes who has taken much notice of Innocent.”

“What does John Vane want with Innocent?” said Frederick, his tone changing. He got up from his chair, and slightly pushed away his mother, who was still leaning over him. “Does he want to marry _her_ too?”

“Does Mr. Vane want to marry some one else--too?” said Nelly instinctively, with an impulse for which next moment she was sorry.

“You should know best,” said Frederick; and then he turned to his mother with that air of superior knowledge and virtue which he knew so well how to assume. “I told you when that man first came to the house that his character was very doubtful. He has always been a queer fellow. Had I thought that you would receive him almost into the family, and make so much of him, I should never have allowed him to come here at all.”

“But, Frederick!--I have never seen anything in him that was not nice,” said Mrs. Eastwood, alarmed.

“Oh, I daresay, mother. A man does not come into a lady’s drawing-room to show off his shady qualities; but I warned you to start with. There are many queer stories about him current among men. Ask Molyneux--I don’t think there is any love lost between him and John Vane.”

“Is that the case, Nelly?” asked Mrs. Eastwood.

Nelly felt to her dismay that a hot and angry blush--a blush not altogether of embarrassment, of something that felt like passion--covered her face. “I should be sorry to quote Ernest on any such subject,” she said, faltering yet eager. “He told me that there were stories current among men about Sir Alexis, that he was not a man to be brought into your house, into my company----”

(“What impertinence! one of my oldest friends!”) said Mrs. Eastwood, in a parenthesis.

“And then,” continued Nelly, “he turned round upon me, and laughed at my knowing such things, when I told you, mamma. He made me out to be a gossip, to be fond of disagreeable reports; he made me feel as if I had made it up; that is how men show their friendship for each other. Probably both Frederick and he would do the same about Mr. Vane.”

“Molyneux would be flattered by your opinion of him,” said Frederick, laughing; and had it not been for the lucky arrival of Dick and Jenny, I do not know how far the quarrel might have gone. Mrs. Eastwood, however, would not have “the boys” made parties to any discussion of this kind, and Frederick departed after a time to his office, where he was so very hard worked, poor fellow, and where he appeared between twelve and one o’clock, having settled his domestic affairs first, as became a Briton of the most “domesticated” race in the world.

During the interval which has passed without record in these pages, Dick, the much suffering and much labouring, had encountered a great event, and had got through it, I do not say triumphantly, but at least successfully. The examination--the great exam., which had exercised his mind and temper for years--had come and passed; and Dick had pulled through. There he was, still walking about with books in his pocket, still in the trammels of “a coach,” and still subject to other terrible and ghastly episodes of exam., which had (I think) to be repeated for two or three years before the full-blown competition wallah was sent to India. I do not remember to have encountered in society many young men of this tremendously educated class, and therefore I cannot tell if Dick may be considered as a fair specimen; but this I can say, that considering the amount of information which must have been crammed into his head, it was astonishing how lightly he wore it. He was profoundly careful not to shock and humiliate the uninstructed mass of his fellow-creatures by letting it appear when there was no occasion for such vanities; and, in short, Dick examined and passed, was as much like Dick unexamined and dubious as could be supposed. Jenny had undergone a greater change. He had left Eton and had matriculated at Balliol, and felt himself a greater man than it is given to mortal in any other stage of existence to feel himself. He had done even more than this; he had gained a scholarship, and was thus actually paying part of his own expenses, a fact which his mother could not sufficiently admire and wonder at, and which still had all the freshness of a family joke in the house. It was astonishing how the brows of the two women cleared, how the atmosphere lightened when these two boys (oh, boys, I beg your pardon--men) came in. No complication had yet arisen in their young lives. Jenny had hung his mother’s photograph over the mantelpiece in his college sitting-room, and boasted that she had as much sense as all the dons put together, though she knew no Greek. I wonder whether in the progress of the human intellect this kind of boy will long survive; but the very sight of Jenny’s face (though he was not handsome), and Dick’s big figure, with a book in its coat pocket, was good for sore hearts as well as eyes.

“We were talking about Mr. Vane,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with a little furtive artfulness such as women use. She would not enter into any discussion of him with her boys, nor direct their attention to the stories “current among men.” She reverenced their youth more perhaps than, had she been anything but an ignorant woman, she would have thought it necessary to reverence it. Probably they both knew a great deal more than she did in that kind--or so at least all men inform women for their comfort; but still I think it was good for Dick and Jenny that their mother ignored all these “stories current,” &c. “We were talking,” she said, “about Mr. Vane. Frederick does not seem quite to like him----”

“I should think not. He isn’t the sort of fellow for Frederick to like,” said Dick. “He is not your superior sort of prig. He is jolly to everybody. _I_ like him--gives himself no airs, and is never above saying he’s wrong when he’s wrong. Why just the other day--I told you, Jen--about the build of that yacht----”

“I like him,” said Jenny, “but I’m not a fair judge. He came down to Eton last fourth of June, and didn’t he just give me a tip! so I can’t speak; I’m bribed; but if I knew anything _he_ wanted----”

“So that is your opinion,” said the mother, well pleased. “They say though,” she added mournfully, “that those men in the clubs----”

“I don’t belong to any club,” said Dick. “It’s very hard. What does it matter, if I _am_ going to India? I shall come back from India, I hope. I suppose you all wish to see me again? Well, then, why shouldn’t I be proposed for Trevor’s club? It doesn’t bind a fellow to anything, and it’s a handy place to have people call upon you, and to send your letters. Trevor offered to put me up a year ago. His father is on the committee, and I know two or three other fellows there.”

“My dear boy, Frederick thought it a waste of money--as you are going away,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with an incipient tear in her eye. This glimmer of moisture was always produced by any reference to the fact that Dick was going away.

“Then thanks to him,” said Dick, in high dudgeon, “I can’t tell any one what is said in the clubs.”

“What is the question?” said Jenny, always practical; “is John Vane on his trial for something?” And here the boy, without knowing it, glanced at Nelly; and Nelly turned abruptly away, and went out through the conservatory into the garden, with a very great tumult and many painful thoughts in her breast.

“Innocent is going to pay his sister a visit,” said Mrs. Eastwood, “at a house near Sterborne. He thinks it is time she knew her father’s relations, and I have consented, for I thought so too. But Frederick says----”

“Is she going now, or at Christmas?” said Jenny. “If now, I give my consent, for I’m going off to-morrow. I like Innocent to be at home when I am at home. You may laugh, if you please, but I like it; why shouldn’t I?” said the boy hotly. “And I like Nelly to be at home. What is the good of girls if they don’t make the old place look nice? But she may go now, if you please, what has that to do with John Vane?”

Upon this Dick laughed long and low, “John ain’t in love with Innocent,” he said chuckling. “I say, mother, what a set of jolly spoons!--if you know what that means. I’ll take her down to the country, if you like, and see John Vane’s sister. Perhaps she might take a fancy to me.”

“Silly boy, she is as old as I am,” said his mother, with a smile. And thus the discussions of the morning fell into cheerful home banter, and the jests of the boys. This consoled the mother, the light of whose firmament was at present supplied by these two boys; but it did not comfort Nelly, who was wading up to her neck in personal dismay and trouble; and it would have called forth nothing but angry contempt from Frederick, who felt his own griefs big enough to eclipse both earth and heaven.