Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER VI
A fortnight has passed. Two Sundays, two Mondays, two Tuesdays, etc. Fourteen times have I sleepily laid head on pillow. Fourteen times have I yawningly raised it from my pillow. Fourteen times have I hungrily eaten my dinner, since the night when I stood in the hall with Sir Roger's hand in mine, raging against my parent. And Sir Roger is here still. After all, there is nothing like the tenacity of boyish friendship, is there?
I suppose that, to Sir Roger, father is still the manly, debonair youth that he remembers thirty years ago. In happy ignorance he slurs over the thirty intervening years of moroseness, and goes back to that blest epoch in which I have so much difficulty in believing, and about which he, walking beside me now and again through the tender, springing grass of the meadows, has told me many a tale. For our promised walk has come off, and so has many others like it.
He must be dotingly fond of father. It is the 15th of April. I dare say, O reader, that it seems to you much like any other date, but to me, through every back-coming year, it seems to gain fresh significance�the date that marks the most important day�take it for all in all�of my life, though, whether for good or ill, who shall say, until I am dead, and my life's sum reckoned up. I awake on that morning with no forecast of what is coming? I tear myself from my morning dreams with as sleepy unwillingness as usual. I eat my bread-and-butter with as stolidly healthy an appetite. I run with as scampering feet, as evenly-beating a heart as is my wont, with little Vick along the garden-walks, in the royal morning sun. For one of God's own days has come�one that must have lost his way, and strayed from paradise.
It has the steady heat of June, though we are only in mid-April, and the freshness of the prune. The leaves on the trees are but tender and tiny, and through them the sun sends his might. The tulips are all a-blaze and a-stare, making one blink with the dazzle of their odorless beauty: the frolicsome young wind is shaking out their balm from the hyacinth-bells, and the sweet Nancies�my flowers�blowing all together, are swaying and cong�eing to the morning airs.
O wise men, who know all things, do you know this? Can you tell it me? Where does the flower hide her scent? From what full cup of hidden sweets does one suck it?
It is one of those days when one feels most convinced of being immortal�when the spirits of men stretch out longing arms toward the All-Good, the Altogether Beautiful�when souls thirst for God, yearn most deeply for the well of his unfathomed truth�when, to those who have lost, their dead come back in most pleasant, gentle guise. As for me, I have lost nothing and no one as yet. All my treasures are still about me; I can stretch out live hands, and touch them alive; none of my dear names are yet to be spoken sparingly with bated breath, as too holy for common talk. And yet I, too, as I walk and bask, and bend to smell the hyacinth-blooms, feel that same vague and most unnamed yearning�a delicate pain that he who has it would barter for no boisterous joy. The clocks tick out the scented hours, and with loud singing of happy birds, with pomp of flowers and bees, and freaked butterflies, God's day treads royally past.
It is afternoon, and the morning wind, heaving with too much fragrance, has lain down to sleep. A great warm stillness is on the garden and house. The sweet Nancies no longer bow. They stand straight up, all a-row, making the whole place honeyed. The school-room is one great nosegay. Every vase and jug, and cup, and pot and pan and pipkin that we can command, is crammed with heavy-headed daffodils, with pale-cheeked primroses, with wine-colored gilly-flowers, every thing that spring has thrust most plentifully into our eager hands.
The boys have been out fishing.
Algy and Bobby have been humorously trying to drown the Brat.
He looks small and cold in consequence, and his little pert nose is tinged with a chilly pink. Half an hour ago, mother called me away to a private conference, exciting thereby a mighty curiosity not unmixed with envy in my brethren.
Our colloquy is ended now, and I am re�ntering the school-room.
"Well, what was it? out with it," cries Algy, almost before I am inside the door again. Algy is sitting more than half�more than three-quarters out of the window, balancing himself with great nicety on the sill. He is in the elegant n�glig� of a decrepit shooting-jacket, no waistcoat, and no collar.
"What have you been doing to your face?" says Bobby, drawing nigh, and peering with artless interest into the details of my appearance; "it is the color of this" (pointing to a branch of red rhibes, which is hanging its drooped flowers, and joining its potent spice to the other flower-scents).
"Is it?" I answer, putting both hands to my cheeks, to feel their temperature. "I dare say! so would yours be, perhaps, if you had, like me, been having a�" I stop suddenly.
"Having a what?"
"I will not say what I was going to say," I cry, emphatically, "it was nonsensical!"
"But what has she told you, Nancy?" asks Barbara, who, enervated by the first hot day, is languishing in the rocking-chair, slowly see-sawing. "What could it have been that she might not as well have said before us all?"
"You had better try and guess," I reply, darkly.
"I will not, for one," says Bobby, doggedly, "I never made out a conundrum in my life, except, 'What is most like a hen stealing?'"
"It is not much like that," say I, demurely, "and, in fact, when one comes to think of it, it can hardly be called a conundrum at all!"
"I do not believe it is any thing worth hearing," remarks the Brat, skeptically, "or you would have come out with it long ago! you never could have kept in to yourself!"
"Not worth hearing!" cry I, triumphantly raising my voice, "is not it? That is all you know about it!"
"Do not wrangle, children," says Algy from the window; "but, Nancy, if you have not told us before the clock gets to the quarter" (looking impressively at the slowly-traveling hands), "I shall think it right to�"
What awful threats would have followed will never now be certainly known, for I interrupt.
"I will tell you! I mean to tell you!" I cry, excitedly, covering my face with my hands, and turning my back to them all; "only do not look at me! look the other way, or I cannot tell you."
A little pause.
"You have only three minutes, Nancy."
"Will you promise," cry I, with indistinct emphasis from under my hands, "none of you to laugh�none, even Bobby!"
"Yes!"�"Yes!"�"Yes!"
"Will you swear?"
"What is the use of swearing?�you have only half a minute now. Well, I dare say it is nothing very funny. Yes, we will swear!"
"Well, then, Sir Roger�I hear Bobby laughing!"
"He is not!"�"He is not!"�"I am not!�I am only beginning to sneeze!"
"Well, then, Sir Roger�"
I come to a dead stop.
"Sir Roger? What about him? There is not a smile on one of our faces: if you do not believe, look for yourself!�What about our future benefactor?"
"He is not our future benefactor," cry I, energetically, whisking swiftly round to face them again, and dropping my hands, "he never will be!�he does not want to be! He wants to�to�to marry me! there!"
The murder is out. The match is set to the gunpowder train. Now for the explosion!
The clock-hand reaches the quarter�passes it; but in all the assembly there is no sound. The westering sun shines in on four open mouths (the youthful Tou Tou is absent), on four pairs of stupidly-staring eyes. The rocking-chair has ceased rocking. Bobby's sneeze has stopped half-way. There is a petrified silence.
At length, "Marry you!" says the Brat, in a deeply-accented tone of low and awed disbelief. "Why, he was at school with father!"
"I wish to heavens that he had never been at school anywhere!" cry I, in a fury. "I am sick to death of hearing that he was at school with father. Will no one ever forget it?"
"He is for-ty-sev-en!" says Algy, at last closing his mouth, and speaking with slow impressiveness. "Nineteen from forty-seven! how many years older than you?"
"Do not count!" cry I, pettishly; "what is the use? not all the counting in the world will make him any younger."
"It is not true!" cries Bobby, with boisterous skepticism, jumping up from his seat, and making a plunge at me; "it is a hoax! she has been taking us all in! Really, Nancy, for a beginner, you did not do it badly!"
"It is not a hoax!" cry I, scornfully, standing scarlet and deeply ashamed, facing them all; "it is real, plain, downright, simple truth."
Another pause. No sound but the monotonous, unemotional clock, and the woodpecker's fluty laugh from the orchard.
"And so you really have a lover at last, Nancy?" says Algy, the corners of his mouth beginning to twitch in a way which looks badly for the keeping of his oath.
"Yes!" say I, beginning to laugh violently, but quite uncomfortably; "are you surprised? you know I always told you that if you half shut your eyes, and looked at me from a great way off, I really was not so bad-looking."
"You have distanced the Begums!" cries the young fellow, joining in my mirth, but with a good deal more enjoyment than I can boast.
"So I have!" I answer; and my sense of the ludicrous overcoming all other considerations, I begin to giggle with a good-will.
"Let us look at you, Nancy!" says the Brat, taking hold of me by both arms, and bringing the minute impertinence of his face into close neighborhood to mine. "I begin to think that there must be more in you than we have yet discovered! we never looked upon you as one of our most favorable specimens, did we?"
"Do not you remember old Aunt Williams?" reply I, merrily; "how she used to say 'I was not pretty, my dears, but I was a pleasant little devil!' perhaps I am a pleasant little devil!"
"Poor�dear�old fellow!" says Barbara, in an accent of the profoundest, delicatest, womanliest pity, "how sorry I am for him! Nancy, how will you break it to him most kindly? I am afraid he will be sadly hurt! will you speak to him, or do it by letter?"
Barbara has risen. We are all standing up, more or less; it is impossible to sit through such news; Barbara's garden-hat is in her hand. The warm and mellow sun that is making Africa's dreary expanse in the map on the wall, one broad fine sheet, is enkindling, too, the silk of her hair, the flower-petals of her cheeks, the blue compassion of her eyes. My pretty, tall Barbara! Let them say what they like, I am sure that somewhere�somewhere�you are pretty now!
"If you write," says Algy, still laughing, but with more moderation, "I should advise you to depute me to make a fair copy of the letter; else, from the extreme ambiguity of your handwriting, he will most likely mistake your drift, and imagine that you are saying yes."
"How do you know that I am not going to say yes?" I ask, abruptly.
Rivers of additional scarlet are racing to my cheeks, over my forehead�in among the roots of my hair�all around and about my throat, but I stand, looking the assembled multitude full in the face, fairly, well, and boldly.
"Listen!" I continue, holding up my right hand in deprecation, "let me speak!�do not interrupt me!�Bobby, I know that he was at school with father�Algy, I know that he is forty-seven�all of you, I know that his hair is gray, and that there are crows'-feet about his eyes�but still�but still�"
"Do you mean to say that you are in love with him?" breaks in Bobby, impressively.
Instances of enamored humanity have been rare in Bobby's experience. With the exception of Toothless Jack, he has never had a near and familiar view of an authentic specimen. I therefore see him now regarding me with a reverent interest, not unmixed with awe.
"I mean nothing so silly!" I answer, with lofty petulance. "I am a great deal too old for any such nonsense!"
"There I go with you," says Algy, not without grandeur. "I believe that it is the greatest humbug out, and that it rarely occurs between the ages of sixteen and sixty."
"Father's and mother's was a love-match," says Bobby, gravely. "Did not Aunt Williams tell us that they used always to sit hand-in-hand before they were married?"
A shout of laughter at our parents' expense greets this piece of information.
"All married people grow to hate one another after a bit," say I, comprehensively; "it is only a question of time."
"But if you do not love him now, and if you are sure that you will hate him by-and-by," says Barbara, looking rather puzzled, "what makes you think of taking him?"
"It would be such a fine thing for all the family: I could give all the boys such a shove," say I, with homely shrewdness.
"They killed seven hundred head of game on his big day last year; I heard him tell father so," says Bobby, with his mouth watering.
"He has a moor in Scotland," throws in the Brat.
"He must ride a stone heavier than I do," says Algy, thoughtfully, "his horses would certainly carry me: I wonder would he give me a mount now and then?"
"I would have you all staying with me always," I cry, warming with my theme, and beginning to dance, "all except father: he should come once a year for a week, if he was good, and not at all, if he was not."
"What will you call him, Nancy?" asks the Brat, inquisitively. "What shall we call him?"
"He will be Tou Tou's brother," cries Bobby, with a yell of delight.
"Hush!" says Barbara, apprehensively, "he will hear you."
"No he will not," I answer, composedly. "A person would have to bawl even louder than Bobby does, to make him hear: he has gone away for a week; he said he did not wish me to decide in a hurry: he has given me till this day week; I wish it were this day ten years�"
"This day week, then," says Algy, walking about with his hands in his pockets, and smiling to himself, "we may hope to see him return in triumph in a blue frock-coat, with the ring and the parson: at that age one has no time to lose."
"Haste to the wedding!" cries the Brat at the top of his voice, seizing me by both hands, and forcing me to execute an uncouth war-dance, in unwilling celebration of my approaching nuptials.
"I hope that there will be lots of almonds in the cake!" says Bobby, gluttonously. |
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