A half-audible "G.o.d 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!"
"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 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 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 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.
CHAPTER IV.
In the morning John accompanied Elinor to church. Mrs. Dennistoun had found an excuse for not going, which I am sorry to say was a way she had. She expressed (and felt) much sorrow for it herself, saying, which was quite true, that not to go was a great distress to her, and put the household out, and was a custom she did not approve of. But somehow it had grown upon her. She regretted this, but did it, saying that everybody was illogical, and that when Elinor had some one to go with she thought herself justified at her age in this little indulgence.
Neither Elinor nor John objected to the arrangement. There are things that can be said in a walk while both parties are in motion, and when it is not necessary to face each other and to be subjected each to the other"s examination of feature and expression. It is easier in this way to say many things, to ask questions which might be embarra.s.sing, to receive the fire of an examination which it might be otherwise difficult to meet. Thus the two had not walked above half the way to church, which was on the other edge of the combe, and stood, a lovely old place--but not the trim and restored and well-decorated edifice it is nowadays--tinkling its little bells into the sweet moorland air, amid such a hum of innumerable bees as seemed to make the very sunshine a vehicle for sound--before John began to perceive that he was being ingeniously driven to revelations which he had never intended, by a process for which he was not at all prepared. She who had been so indignant last night and determined not to allow a word to be said against the immaculate honour of the man she loved, was now--was it possible?--straining all her faculties to obtain from him, whom she would not permit to be Phil Compton"s judge, such unguarded admissions as would enlighten her as to what Phil Compton was accused of. It was some time before John perceived her aim; he did not even grasp the idea at first that this girl whose whole heart was set upon marrying Phil Compton, and defying for his sake every prophecy of evil and all the teachings of prudence, did not indeed at all know what it was which Phil had been supposed to have done. Had she been a girl in society she could scarcely have avoided some glimmerings of knowledge. She would have heard an unguarded word here and there, a broken phrase, an expression of scorn or dislike, she might even have heard that most unforgettable of nicknames, the dis-Honourable Phil. But Elinor, who was not in society, heard none of these things. She had been warned in the first fervour of her betrothal that he was not a man she ought to marry, but why? n.o.body had told her; how was she to know?
"You don"t like Lady Mariamne, John?"
"It matters very little whether I like her or not: we don"t meet once in a year."
"It will matter if you are to be in a kind of way connected. What has she ever done that you shouldn"t like her? She is very nice at home; she has three nice little children. It"s quite pretty to see her with them."
"Ah, I daresay; it"s pretty to see a tiger with her cubs, I don"t doubt."
"What do you mean, John? What has she ever done?"
"I cannot tell you, Elinor; nothing perhaps. She does not take my fancy: that"s all."
"That"s not all; you could never be so unjust and so absurd. How dreadful you good people are! Pretending to mean kindness," she cried, "you put the mark of your dislike upon people, and then you won"t say why. What have _they_ done?"
It was this "they" that put John upon his guard. Hitherto she had only been asking about the sister, who did not matter so very much. If a man was to be judged by his sister! but "they" gave him a new light.
"Can"t you understand, Elinor," he said, "that without doing anything that can be built upon, a woman may set herself in a position of enmity to the world, her hand against every one, and every one"s hand against her?"
"I know that well enough--generally because she does not comply with every conventional rule, but does and thinks what commends itself to her; I do that myself--so far as I can with mamma behind me."
"You! the question has nothing to do with you."
"Why not with me as much as with another of my family?" said Elinor, throwing back her head.
He turned round upon her with something like a snort of indignation: she to be compared--but Elinor met his eyes with scornful composure and defiance, and John was obliged to calm himself. "There"s no a.n.a.logy,"
he said; "Lady Mariamne is an old campaigner. She"s up to everything.
Besides, a sister-in-law--if it comes to that--is not a very near relation. No one will judge you by her." He would not be led into any discussion of the other, whose name, alas! Elinor intended to bear.
"If it comes to that. Perhaps you think," said Elinor, with a smile of fine scorn, "that you will prevent it ever coming to that?"
"Oh, no," he said, "I"m very humble; I don"t think much of my own powers in that way: nothing that I can do will affect it, if Providence doesn"t take it in hand."
"You really think it"s a big enough thing to invoke Providence about?"
"If Providence looks after the sparrows as we are told," said John, "it certainly may be expected to step in to save a nice girl like you, Nelly, from--from connections you"ll soon get to hate--and--and a shady man!"
She turned upon him with sparkling eyes in a sudden blaze of indignation.
"How dare you! how dare you!"
"I dare a great deal more than that to save you. You must hear me, Nelly: they"re all badly spoken of, not one, but all. They are a shady lot--excuse a man"s way of talking. I don"t know what other words to use--partly from misfortune, but more from---- Nelly, Nelly, how could you, a high-minded, well-brought-up girl like you, tolerate that?"
She turned upon him again, breathing hard with restrained rage and desperation; evidently she was at a loss for words to convey her indignant wrath: and at last in sheer inability to express the vehemence of her feelings she fastened on one word and repeated "well-brought-up!"
in accents of scorn.
"Yes," said John, "my aunt and you may not always understand each other, but she"s proved her case to every fair mind by yourself, Elinor. A girl could not be better brought up than you"ve been: and you could not put up with it, not unless you changed your nature as well as your name."
"With what?" she said, "with what?" They had gone up and down the sloping sides of the combe, through the rustling copse, sometimes where there was a path, sometimes where there was none, treading over the big bushes of ling and the bell-heather, all bursting into bloom, past groups of primeval firs and seedling beeches, self-sown, over little hillocks and hollows formed of rocks or big old roots of trees covered with the close glittering green foliage and dark blue cl.u.s.ters of the dewberry, with the hum of bees filling the air, the twittering of the birds, the sound of the church bells--nothing more like the heart of summer, more peaceful, genial, happy than that brooding calm of nature amid all the harmonious sounds, could be.
But as Elinor put this impatient question, her countenance all ablaze with anger and vehemence and resolution, yet with a gleam of anxiety in the puckers of her forehead and the eyes which shone from beneath them, they stepped out upon the road by which other groups were pa.s.sing, all bound towards the centre of the church and its tinkling bells. Elinor stopped, and drew a longer panting breath, and gave him a look of fierce reproach, as if this too were his fault: and then she smoothed her ruffled plumes, after the manner of women, and replied to the Sunday-morning salutations, with the smiles and nods of use and wont.
She knew everybody, both the rich and the poor, or rather I should say the well-off and the less-well-off, for there were neither rich nor poor, formally speaking, on Windyhill. John did not find it so easy to put his emotions in his pocket. He cast an admiring glance upon her as with heightened colour and a little panting of the breath, but no other sign of disturbance, she made her inquiries after this one"s mother and that one"s child. It was wonderful to him to see how the storm was got under in a moment. An occasional glance aside at himself from the corner of her eye, a sort of dart of defiance as if to bid him remember that she was not done with him, was shot at John from time to time over the heads of the innocent country people in whom she pretended to be so much interested. Pretended!--was it pretence, or was the one as real as the other? He heard her promising to come to-morrow to see an invalid, to send certain articles as soon as she got home, to look up certain books.
Would she do so? or was all this a mere veil to cover the other which engaged all her soul?
And then there came the service--that soothing routine of familiar prayers, which the lips of men and women absorbed in the violence and urgency of life murmur over almost without knowing, with now and then an awakening to something that touches their own aspirations, to something that offers or that asks for help. "Because there is none other that fighteth for us but only Thou, O G.o.d." That seems to the careless soul such a _non sequitur_, as if peace was asked for, only because there was none other to fight; but to the man heavily laden, what a cry out of the depths! Because there is none other--all resources gone, all possibilities: but one that fighteth for us, standing fast, always the champion of the perplexed, the overborne, the weak. John was a little careless in this respect, as so many young men are. He thought most of the music when he joined the fashionable throng in the Temple Church.
But there was no music to speak of at Windyhill. There was more sound of the bees outside, and the birds and the sighing ba.s.s of the fir-trees than of anything more carefully concerted. The organ was played with a curious drone in it, almost like that of the primitive bagpipe. But there was that one phrase, a strong strain of human appeal, enough to lift the world, nay, to let itself go straight to the blue heavens: "Because there is none other that fighteth for us but only Thou, O G.o.d."
Mr. Hudson preached his little sermon like a discord in the midst. What should he have preached it for, that little sermon, which was only composed because he could not help himself, which was about nothing in heaven or earth? John gave it a sort of partial attention because he could not help it, partly in wonder to think how a sensible man like Mr.
Hudson could account to himself for such strange little interruption of the natural sequence of high human emotion. What theory had he in his mind? This was a question John was fond of putting to himself, with perhaps an idea peculiar to a lawyer, that every man must be thinking what he is about, and be able to produce a clear reason, and, as it were, some theory of the meaning of his own actions--which everybody must know is nonsense. For the Rector of course preached just because it was in his day"s work, and the people would have been much surprised, though possibly much relieved, had he not done so--feeling that to listen was in the day"s work too, and to be gone through doggedly as a duty. John thought how much better it would be to have some man who could preach now and then when he had something to say, instead of troubling the Rector, who, good man, had nothing. But it is not to be supposed that he was thinking this consecutively while the morning went on. It flitted through his mind from time to time among his many thinkings about the Compton family and Elinor; poor Nelly, standing upon the edge of that precipice and the helplessness of every one to save her, and the great refrain like the peal of an organ going through everything, "None other that fighteth for us but only Thou, O G.o.d."