Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER LI
"The last touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day
and by night.
Their last step on the stairs, at the door, still throbs through
me, if ever so light.
Their last gift which they left to my childhood, far off in the
long-ago years,
Is now turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystals
of tears.
'Dig the snow,' she said,
'For my church-yard bed;
Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,
If one only of these, my beloveds, shall love with heart-warm tears,
As I have loved these.'"
It seems to me in these days as if, but for the servants, I were quite alone in the house. Father is ill. We always thought that he never would care about any thing, or any of us, but we are wrong. Barbara's death has shaken him very much. Mother is with him always, nursing him, and being at his beck and call, and I see nothing of her.
Tou Tou has gone to school, and so it comes to pass that, in the late populous school-room, I sit alone. Where formerly one could hardly make one's voice heard for the merry clamor, there is now no noise, but the faint buzzing of the house-flies on the pane, and now and again, as it grows toward sunset, the loud wintry winds keening and calling.
The Brat indeed runs over for a couple of days, but I am so glad when they are over, and he is gone. I used to like the Brat the best of all the boys, and perhaps by-and-by I shall again; but, for the moment, do you know, I almost hate him.
Once or twice I quite hate him, when I hear him laughing in his old thorough, light-hearted way�when I hear him jumping up-stairs three steps at a time, whistling the same tune he used to whistle before he went.
Poor boy! He would be always sorrowful if he could, and is very much ashamed of himself for not being, but he cannot.
Life is still pleasant to him, though Barbara is dead, and so I unjustly hate him, and am glad when he is gone. Have not I come home because here she was loved, here, at least, through all the village�the village about which she trod like one of God's kind angels�I shall be certain of meeting a keen and assured sympathy in my sorrow.And yet, now that I am here, the village seems much as it was. Still the same groups of fat, frolicking children about the doors; still the same busy women at the wash-tub; about the house still the same coarse laughs.
It would be most unnatural, impossible that it should not be so, and yet I feel angry�sorely angry with them.
One day when this sense of rawness is at its worst and sharpest, I resolve that I will pay a visit to the almshouse. There, at least, I shall find that she is remembered; there, out of mere selfishness, they must grieve for her. When will they, in their unlovely eld, ever find such a friend again?
So I go there. I find the old women, some crooning over the fire, half asleep, some squabbling. I suppose they are glad to see me, though not so glad when they discover that I have brought no gift in my hand, for indeed I have forgotten�no quarter-pounds of tea�no little three-cornered parcels of sugar.
They begin to talk about Barbara at once. Among the poor there is never any sacredness about the names of the dead, and though I have hungered for sorrowful talk about her, for assurance that by some one besides myself the awful emptiness of her place is felt, yet I wince and shrink from hearing her lightly named in common speech.
They are sorry about her, certainly�quite sorry�but it is more what they have lost by her, than her that they deplore. And they are more taken up with their own little miserable squabbles�with detracting tales of one another�than with either.
"Eh? she's a bad 'un, she is! I says to her, says I, 'Sally,' says I, 'if you'll give yourself hully and whully to the Lord for one week, I'll give you a hounce of baccy,' and she's that wicked, she actilly would not."
Is this the sort of thing I have come to hear? I rise up hastily, and take my leave.
As I walk home again through the wintry roads, and my eyes fix themselves with a tired languor on the green ivy-flowers�on the little gray-green lichen-cups on the almshouse-wall, I think, "Does no one remember her? Is she already altogether forgotten?"
It is still early in the afternoon when I reach home. The dark is coming indeed, for it comes soon nowadays, but it has not yet come.
I go into the garden, and begin to pace up and down the gravel walks, under the naked lime-trees that have forgotten their July perfume, and are tossing their bare, cold arms in the evening wind.
Only one of my old playfellows is left me. Jacky still stands on the gravel as if the whole place belonged to him; still stands with his head on one side, roguishly eying the sunset.
Thank Heaven, Jacky is still here, sly and nefarious, as when I bent down to give him my tearful good-by kiss on my wedding-morning. I kneel down, half laughing, half crying, on the damp walk, to stroke his round gray head, and hear his dear cross croak. Whether he resents the blackness of my appearance as being a mean imitation of his own, I do not know, but he will not come near me; he hops stiffly away, and stands eying me from the grass, with an unworthy affectation of not knowing who I am. I am still wasting useless blandishments on him, when my attention is distracted by the sound of footsteps on the walk.
I look up. Who is this man that is coming, stepping toward me in the gloaming?
I am not long left in doubt. With a slight and sudden emotion of surprised distaste, I see that it is Musgrave. I rise quickly to my feet.
"It is you, is it?" I say, with a cold ungraciousness, for I have not half forgiven him yet�still I bear a grudge against him�still I feel an angry envy that Barbara died with her hand in his.
"Yes, it is I!"
He is dressed in deep mourning. His cheeks are hollow and pale; he looks dejected, and yet fierce. We walk alongside of each other in silence for a few yards.
"Why do not you ask what has brought me here?" he asks suddenly, with a harsh abruptness. "I know that that is what you are thinking of."
"Yes," I reply, gravely, without looking at him, "it is!�what has?"
"I have come to bid you all good-by," he answers, in a low, quick voice, with his eyes bent on the ground; "you know"�raising them, and beginning to laugh hoarsely�"if�if�things had gone right�you would have been my nearest relation by now."
I shudder.
"Yes," say I, "I know."
"I am going away," he goes on, raising his voice to a louder tone of reckless unrest, "where?�God knows!�I do not, and do not care either!�going away for good!�I am going to let the abbey."
"To let it!"
"You are glad!" he cries in a tone of passionate and sombre resentment, while his great eyes, lifted, flash a miserable resentment into mine; "I knew you would be! I have not given you much pleasure very often, have I?"�(still with that same harsh mirth).�"Well, it is something to have done it once!"
I clasp my down-hanging hands loosely together. I lift my eyes to the low, dark sky.
"Am I glad?" I say, hazily. "I do not know!�I do not think I am!�I do not think I care one way or another!"
"Nancy!" he says, presently, in a tone no longer of counterfeit mirth, but of deep and serious earnestness, "I do not know why I told you just now that I had come to bid them all good-by�it was not true�you know it was not. What are they to me, or I to them, now? I came�"
"For what did you come, then?" cry I, interrupting him, pantingly, while my eyes, wide and aghast, grow to his face. What is it that he is going to say? He�from whose clasp Barbara's dead hand was freed!
"Do not look at me like that!" he cries, wildly, putting up his hands before his eyes. "It reminds me�great God! it reminds me�"
He breaks off; then goes on a little more calmly:
"You need not be afraid! Brute and blackguard as I am, I am not quite brute and blackguard enough for that!�that would be past even me! I have come to ask you once again to forgive me for that�that old offense" (with a shamed red flush on the pallor of his cheeks); "I asked you once before, you may remember, and you answered"�(recalling my words with a resentful accuracy)�"that you 'would not, and, by God's help, you never would'!"
"Did I?" say I, with that same hazy feeling. Those old emotions seem grown so distant and dim. "I dare say!�I did not recollect!"
"And so I have come to ask you once again," he goes on, with a heavy emphasis�"it will do me no great harm if you say 'No' again!�it will do me small good if you say 'Yes.' And yet, before I go away forever�yes"�(with a bitter smile)�"cheer up!�forever!�I must have one more try!"
I am silent.
"You may as well forgive me!" he says, taking my cold and passive hand, and speaking with an intense though composed mournfulness. "After all, I have not done you much harm, have I?�that is no credit to me, I know. I would have done, if I could, but I could not! You may as well forgive me, may not you? God forgives!�at least"�(with a sigh of heavy and apathetic despair)�"so they say!�would you be less clement than He?"
I am looking back at him, with a quiet fixedness. I no longer feel the slightest embarrassment in his presence; it no longer disquiets me, that he should hold my hand.
"Yes," say I, speaking slowly, and still with my sunk and tear-dimmed eyes calmly resting on the dull despair of his, "yes�if you wish�it is all so long ago�and she liked you!�yes!�I forgive you!" |
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