The drawing-room of the cottage was large and low, and had that faux air of being old-fashioned which is dear to the hearts of superior people generally. Mrs. Dennistoun and her daughter scarcely belonged to that class, yet they were, as ladies of leisure with a little taste for the arts are bound to be, touched by all the fancies of their time, which was just beginning to adore Queen Anne. There was still, however, a mixture of luxury with the square settees and spindle-legged cabinets which were “the fashion:” and partly because that was also “the fashion,” and partly because on Windyhill even a July evening was sometimes a little chill, or looked so by reason of the great darkness of the silent, little-inhabited country outside—there was a log burning on the fire-dogs (the newest thing in furnishing in those days though now so common) on the hearth. The log burned as little as possible, being, perhaps, not quite so thoroughly dry and serviceable as it would have been in its proper period, and made a faint hissing sound in the silence as it burned, and diffused its pungent odour through the house. The bow window was open behind its white curtains, and it was there that the little party gathered out of reach of the unnecessary heat and the smoke. There was a low sofa on either side of this recess, and in the centre the{vol. i_34} French window opened into the garden, where all the scents were balmy in the stillness which had fallen upon the night.

Mrs. Dennistoun was tall and slim, a woman with a presence, and sat with a sort of dignity on her side of the window, with a little table beside her covered with her little requirements, the properties, so to speak, without which she was never known to be—a book for moments when there was nothing else to interest her, a case for work should there arise any necessity for putting in a stitch in time, a bottle of salts should she or any one else become suddenly faint, a paper cutter in cases of emergency, and finally, for mere ornament, two roses, a red and a white, in one of those tall old-fashioned glasses which are so pretty for flowers. I do wrong to dismiss the roses with such vulgar qualifications as white and red—the one was a Souvenir de Malmaison, the other a General—— something or other. If you spoke to Mrs. Dennistoun about her flowers she said, “Oh, the Malmaison,” or “Oh, the General So-and-so.” Rose was only the family name, but happily, as we all know, under the other appellation they smelt just as sweet. Mrs. Dennistoun kept up all this little state because she had been used to do so; because it was part of a lady’s accoutrements, so to speak. She had also a cushion, which was necessary, if not for comfort, yet for her sense of being fully equipped, placed behind her back when she sat down. But with all this {vol. i_35}she was not a formal or prim person. She was a woman who had not produced a great deal of effect in life; one of those who are not accustomed to have their advice taken, or to find that their opinion has much weight upon others. Perhaps it was because Elinor resembled her father that this peculiarity which had affected all Mrs. Dennistoun’s married life should have continued into a sphere where she ought to have been paramount. But she was with her daughter as she had been with her husband, a person of an ineffective character, taking refuge from the sensation of being unable to influence those about her whose wills were stronger than her own, by relinquishing authority, and in her most decided moments offering an opinion only, no more. This was not because she was really undecided, for on the contrary she knew her own mind well enough; but it had become a matter of habit with her to insist upon no opinion, knowing, as she did, how little chance she had of imposing her opinion upon the stronger wills about her. She had two other children older than Elinor: one, the eldest of all, married in India, a woman with many children of her own, practically altogether severed from the maternal nest; the other an adventurous son, who was generally understood to be at the ends of the earth, but seldom or never had any more definite address. This lady had naturally gone through many pangs and anxieties on behalf of these children, who had dropped away from her side into the unknown; but it belonged to her character to have said very little about this, so that she was generally supposed to take{vol. i_36} things very easily, and other mothers were apt to admire the composure of Mrs. Dennistoun, whose son might be being murdered by savages at any moment, for anything she knew—or minded, apparently. “Now it would have driven me out of my senses!” the other ladies said. Mrs. Dennistoun perhaps did not feel the back so well fitted to the burden as appeared—but she kept her own sentiments on this subject entirely to herself.

(I may say too—but this, the young reader may skip without disadvantage—by way of explanation of a peculiarity which has lately been much remarked as characteristic of those records of human history contemptuously called fiction, i.e., the unimportance, or ill-report, or unjust disapproval of the mother in records of this description—that it is almost impossible to maintain her due rank and character in a piece of history, which has to be kept within certain limits—and where her daughter the heroine must have the first place. To lessen her pre-eminence by dwelling at length upon the mother, unless that mother is a fool, or a termagant, or something thoroughly contrasting with the beauty and virtues of the daughter—would in most cases be a mistake in art. For one thing the necessary incidents are wanting, for I strongly object, and so I think do most people, to mothers who fall in love, or think of marriage, or any such vanity in their own person, and unless she is to interfere mischievously with the young lady’s prospects, or take more or less the part of the{vol. i_37} villain, how is she to be permitted any importance at all? For there cannot be two suns in one sphere, or two centres to one world. Thus the mother has to be sacrificed to the daughter: which is a parable; or else it is the other way, which is against all the principles and prepossessions of life.)

Elinor did not sit up like her mother. She had flung herself upon the opposite sofa, with her arms flung behind her head, supporting it with her fingers half buried in the twists of her hair. She was not tall like Mrs. Dennistoun, and there was far more vivid colour than had ever been the mother’s in her brown eyes and bright complexion, which was milk-white and rose-red after an old-fashioned rule of colour, too crude perhaps for modern artistic taste. Sometimes these delightful tints go with a placid soul which never varies, but in Elinor’s case there was a demon in the hazel of the eyes, not dark enough for placidity, all fire at the best of times, and ready in a moment to burst into flame. She it was who had to be in the forefront of the interest, and not her mother, though for metaphysical, or what I suppose should now be called psychological interests, the elder lady was probably the most interesting of the two. Elinor beat her foot upon the carpet, out of sheer impatience, while John lingered alone in the dining-room. What did he stay there for? When there are several men together, and they drink wine, the thing is comprehensible; but one man alone who takes his claret with his dinner, and cares for nothing more, why{vol. i_38} should he stay behind when there was so much to say to him, and not one minute too much time till Monday morning, should the house be given up to talk not only by day but by night? But it was no use beating one’s foot, for John did not come.

“You spoke to your cousin, Elinor, before dinner?” her mother said.

“Oh, yes, I spoke to him before dinner. What did he come here for but that? I sent for him on purpose, you know, mamma, to hear what he would say.”

“And what did he say?”

This most natural question produced a small convulsion once more on Elinor’s side. She loosed the hands that had been supporting her head and flung them out in front of her. “Oh, mamma, how can you be so exasperating! What did he say? What was he likely to say? If the beggar maid that married King Cophetua had a family it would have been exactly the same thing—though in that case surely the advantage was all on the gentleman’s side.”

“We know none of the particulars in that case,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, calmly. “I have always thought it quite possible that the beggar maid was a princess of an old dynasty and King Cophetua a parvenu. But in your case, Elinor——”

“You know just as little,” said the girl, impetuously.

“That is what I say. I don’t know the man who has possessed himself of my child’s fancy and heart. I want to know more about him. I want{vol. i_39}——”

“For goodness’ sake, whatever you want, don’t be sentimental, mamma!”

“Was I sentimental? I didn’t mean it. He has got your heart, my dear, whatever words may be used.”

“Yes—and for ever!” said the girl, turning round upon herself. “I know you think I don’t know my own mind; but there will never be any change in me. Oh, what does John mean, sitting all by himself in that stuffy room? He has had time to smoke a hundred cigarettes!”

“Elinor, you must not forget it is rather hard upon John to be brought down to settle your difficulties for you. What do you want with him? Only that he should advise you to do what you have settled upon doing. If he took the other side, how much attention would you give him? You must be reasonable, my dear.”

“I would give him every attention,” said Elinor, “if he said what was reasonable. You don’t think mere blind opposition is reasonable, I hope, mamma. To say Don’t, merely, without saying why, what reason is there in that?”

“My dear, when you argue I am lost. I am not clever at making out my ground. Mine is not mere blind opposition, or indeed opposition at all. You have been always trained to use your own faculties, and I have never made any stand against you.”

“Why not? why not?” said the girl, springing to{vol. i_40} her feet. “That is just the dreadful, dreadful part of it! Why don’t you say straight out what I am to do and keep to it, and not tell me I must make use of my own faculties? When I do, you put on a face and object. Either don’t object, or tell me point-blank what I am to do.”

“Do you think for one moment if I did, you would obey me, Elinor?”

“Oh, I don’t know what I might do in that case, for it will never happen. You will never take that responsibility. For my part, if you locked me up in my room and kept me on bread and water I should think that reasonable; but not this kind of letting I dare not wait upon I would, saying I am to exercise my own faculties, and then hesitating and finding fault.”

“I daresay, my dear,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, with great tolerance, “that this may be provoking to your impatient mind: but you must put yourself in my place a little, as I try to put myself in yours. I have never seen Mr. Compton. It is probable, or at least quite possible, that if I knew him I might look upon him with your eyes——”

“Probable! Possible! What words to use! when all my happiness, all my life, everything I care for is in it: and my own mother thinks it just possible that she might be able to tolerate the man that—the man who——”

She flung herself down on her seat again, panting and excited. “Did you wear out Adelaide like{vol. i_41} that,” she cried, “before she married, papa and you——”

“Adelaide was very different, Elinor. She married selon les rÈgles a man whom we all knew. There was no trouble about it. Your father was the one who was impatient then. He thought it too well arranged, too commonplace and satisfactory. You may believe he did not object to that in words, but he laughed at them and it worried him. It has done very well on the whole,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, with a faint sigh.

“You say that—and then you sigh. There is always a little reserve. You are never wholly satisfied.”

“One seldom is in this world,” said Mrs. Dennistoun, this time with a soft laugh. “This world is not very satisfactory. One makes the best one can of it.”

“And that is just what I hate to hear,” said Elinor, “what I have always heard. Oh, yes, when you don’t say it you mean it, mamma. One can read it in the turn of your head. You put up with things. You think perhaps they might have been worse. In every way that’s your philosophy. And it’s killing, killing to all life! I would rather far you said out, ‘Adelaide’s husband is a prig and I hate him.’”

“There is only one drawback, that it would not be true. I don’t in the least hate him. I am glad I was not called upon to marry him myself, I don’t think I should have liked it. But he makes Adelaide a very good husband, and she is quite happy with him—as far as I know.{vol. i_42}”

“The same thing again—never more. I wonder, I wonder after I have been married a dozen years what you will say of me?”

“I wonder, too: if we could but know that it would solve the question,” the mother said. Elinor looked at her with a provoked and impatient air, which softened off after a moment—partly because she heard the door of the dining-room open—into a smile.

“I try you in every way,” she said, half laughing. “I do everything to beguile you into a pleasanter speech. I thought you must at least have said then that you hoped you would have nothing to say but happiness. No! you are not to be caught, however one tries, mamma.”

John came in at this moment, not without a whiff about him of the cigarette over which he had lingered so. It relieved him to see the two ladies seated opposite each other in the bow window, and to hear something like a laugh in the air. Perhaps they were discussing other things, and not this momentous marriage question, in which certainly no laughter was.

“You have your usual fire,” he said, “but the wind has quite gone down, and I am sure it is not wanted to-night.”

“It looks cheerful always, John.”

“Which is the reason, I suppose, why you carefully place yourself out of sight of it—one of the prejudices of English life.{vol. i_43}”

And then he came forward into the recess of the window, which was partly separated from the room by a table with flowers on it, and a great bush in a pot, of delicate maiden-hair fern. It was perhaps significant, though he did not mean it for any demonstration of partisanship, that he sat down on Elinor’s side. Both the ladies felt it so instinctively, although, on the contrary, had the truth been known, all John’s real agreement was with the mother; but in such a conjuncture it is not truth but personal sympathy that carries the day. “You are almost in the dark here,” he said.

“Neither of us is doing anything. One is lazy on a summer night.”

“There is a great deal more in it than that,” said Elinor, in a voice which faltered a little. “You talk about summer nights, and the weather, and all manner of indifferent things, but you know all the time there is but one real subject to talk of, and that we are all thinking of that.”

“That is my line, aunt,” said John. “Elinor is right. We might sit and make conversation, but of course this is the only subject we are thinking of. It’s very kind of you to take me into the consultation. Of course I am in a kind of way the nearest in relation, and the only man in the family—except my father—and I know a little about law, and all that. Now let me hear formally, as if I knew nothing about it (and, in fact, I know very little), what the question is. Eli{vol. i_44}nor has met someone who—who has proposed to her—not to put too fine a point upon it,” said John, with a smile that was somewhat ghastly—“and she has accepted him. Congratulations are understood, but here there arises a hitch.”

“There arises no hitch. Mamma is dissatisfied (which mamma generally is) chiefly because she does not know Mr. Compton; and some wretched old woman, who doesn’t know him either, has written to her—to her and also to me—telling us a pack of lies,” said Elinor, indignantly, “to which I do not give the least credence for a moment—not for a moment!”

“That’s all very well for you,” said John, “it’s quite simple; but for us, Elinor—that is, for your mother and me, as you are good enough to allow me to have a say in the matter—it’s not so simple. We feel, you know, that, like CÆsar’s wife, our Elinor’s—husband”—he could not help making a grimace as he said that word, but no one saw or suspected it—“should be above suspicion.”

“That is exactly what I feel, John.”

“Well, we must do something about it, don’t you see? Probably it will be as easy as possible for him to clear himself.” (The dis-Honourable Phil! Good heavens! to think it was a man branded with such a name that was to marry Elinor! For a moment he was silenced by the thought, as if some one had given him a blow.)

“To clear himself!” said Elinor. “And do you{vol. i_45} think I will permit him to be asked to clear himself? Do you think I will allow him to believe for a moment that I believed anything against him? Do you think I will take the word of a spiteful old woman?”

“Old women are not always spiteful, and they are sometimes right.” John put out his hand to prevent Mrs. Dennistoun from speaking, which, indeed, she had no intention of doing. “I don’t mean so, of course, in Mr. Compton’s case—and I don’t know what has been said.”

“Things that are very uncomfortable—very inconsistent with a happy life and a comfortable establishment,” said Mrs. Dennistoun.

“Oh, if you could only hear yourself, mamma! You are not generally a Philistine, I must say that for you; but if you only heard the tone in which you said ‘comfortable establishment!’ the most conventional match-making in existence could not have done it better; and as for what has been said, there has nothing been said but what is said about everybody—what, probably, would be said of you yourself, John, for you play whist sometimes, I hear, and often billiards, at the club.”

A half-audible “God forbid!” had come from John’s lips when she said, “What would probably be said of yourself”—audible that is to Elinor, not to the mother. She sprang up as this murmur came to her ear: “Oh, if you are going to prejudge the case, there is nothing for me to say!{vol. i_46}”

“I should be very sorry to prejudge the case, or to judge it all,” said John. “I am too closely interested to be judicial. Let somebody who knows nothing about it be your judge. Let the accusations be submitted—to your Rector, say; he’s a sensible man enough, and knows the world. He won’t be scared by a rubber at the club, or that sort of thing. Let him inquire, and then your mind will be at rest.”

“There is only one difficulty, John,” said Mrs. Dennistoun. “Mr. Hudson would be the best man in the world, only for one thing—that it is from his sister and his wife that the warning came.”

“Oh!” said John. This fact seemed to take him aback in the most ludicrous way. He sat and gazed at them, and had not another word to say. Perhaps the fact that he himself who suggested the inquiry was still better informed of the true state of the case, and of the truth of the accusation, than were those to whom he might have submitted it, gave him a sense of the hopelessness and also absurdity of the attempt more than anything else could have done.

“And that proves, if there was nothing else,” said Elinor, “how false it is: for how could Mrs. Hudson and Mary Dale know? They are not fashionable people, they are not in society. How could they or any one like them know anything of Phil”—she stopped quickly, drew herself up, and added—“of Mr. Compton, I mean?”

“They might not know, but they might state their{vol. i_47} authority,” Mrs. Dennistoun said; “and if the Rector cannot be used to help us, surely, John, you are a man of the world, you are not like a woman, unacquainted with evidence. Why should not you do it, though you are, as you kindly say, an interested party?”

“He shall not do it. I forbid him to do it. If he takes in hand anything of the kind he must say good-by to me.”

“You hear?” said John; “but I could not do it in any case, my dear Elinor. I am too near. I never could see this thing all round. Why not your lawyer, old Lynch, a decent old fellow——”

“I will tell him the same,” cried Elinor; “I will never speak to him again.”

“My dear,” said her mother, “you will give everybody the idea that you don’t want to know the truth.”

“I know the truth already,” said Elinor, rising with great dignity. “Do you think that any slander would for a moment shake my faith in you—or you? You don’t deserve it, John, for you turn against me—you that I thought were going to take my part; but do you think if all the people in London set up one story that I would believe it against you? And how should I against him?” she added, with an emphasis upon the word, as expressing something immeasurably more to be loved and trusted than either mother or cousin, by which, after having raised John up to a sort of heaven of gratified affection, she let him down again to the ground like a stone. Oh, yes! trusted in with perfect{vol. i_48} faith, nothing believed against him, whom she had known all her life—but yet not to be mentioned in the same breath with the ineffable trust she reposed in the man she loved—whom she did not know at all. The first made John’s countenance beam with emotion and pleasure, the second brought a cold shade over his face. For a moment he could scarcely speak.

“She bribes us,” he said at last, forcing a smile. “She flatters us, but only to let us drop again, Mrs. Dennistoun; it is as good as saying, ‘What are we to him?’”

“They all do so,” said the elder lady, calmly; “I am used to it.”

“But, perhaps, I am not quite—used to it,” said John, with something in his voice which made them both look at him—Elinor only for a moment, carelessly, before she swept away—Mrs. Dennistoun with a more warmly awakened sensation, as if she had made some discovery. “Ah!” she said, with a tone of pain. But Elinor did not wait for any further disclosures. She waved her hand, and went off with her head high, carrying, as she felt, the honours of war. They might plot, indeed, behind her back, and try to invent some tribunal before which her future husband might be arraigned; but John, at least, would say nothing to make things worse. John would be true to her—he would not injure Phil Compton. Elinor, perhaps, guessed a little of what John was thinking, and felt, though she could scarcely have told how, that it{vol. i_49} would be a point of honour with him not to betray her love.

He sat with Mrs. Dennistoun in partial silence for some time after this. He felt as if he had been partially discovered—partially, and yet more would be discovered than there was to discover; for if either of them believed that he was in love with Elinor, they were mistaken, he said to himself. He had been annoyed by her engagement, but he had never come to the point of asking her that question in his own person. No, nor would not, he said to himself—certainly would not—not even to save her from the clutches of this gambler and adventurer. No; they might think what they liked, but this was the case. He never should have done it—never would have exposed himself to refusal—never besought this high-tempered girl to have the control of his life. Poor Nelly all the same! poor little thing! To think she had so little judgment as to ignore what might have been a great deal better, and to pin her faith to the dis-Honourable Phil.