Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER XI
We have been in Dresden three whole days, and as yet my aspirations have not met their fulfillment. We have met no one we know. We have borrowed the Visitors' Book from the porter, and diligently searched it. We have expectantly examined the guests at the tables d'h�te every day, but with no result. It is too early in the year. The hotel is not half full. Of its inmates one half are American, a quarter German, and the other quarter English, such as not the most rabidly social mind can wish to forgather with. At the discovery of our ill-success, Sir Roger looks so honestly crestfallen that my heart smites me.
"How eager you are!" I say, laying my hand on his, with a smile. "You are far more anxious about it than I am! I begin to think that you are growing tired of me already! As for me," continue I, nonchalantly, seeing his face brighten at my words, "I think I have changed my mind. Perhaps it would be rather a bore to meet any acquaintance, and�and�we do very well as we are, do not we?"
"Is that true, Nancy?" he says, eagerly. "I have been bothering my head rather with the notion that I was but poor company for a little young thing like you; that you must be wearying for some of your own friends."
"I never had a friend," reply I, "never�that is�except you! The boys"�(with a little stealing smile)�"always used to call you my friend�always from the first, from the days I used to take you out walking, and keep wishing that you were my father, and be rather hurt because I never could get you to echo the wish."
"And you are not much disappointed really?" he says, with a wistful persistence, as if he but half believed the words my lips made. "If you are, mind you tell me, child�tell me every thing that vexes you�always!"
"I will tell you every thing that happens to me, bad and good," reply I, quite gayly, "and all the unlucky things I say�there, that is a large promise, I can tell you!"
I am no longer dusty and grimy; quite spick and span, on the contrary; so freshly and prettily dressed, indeed, that the thought will occur to me that it is a pity there are not more people to see me. However, no doubt some one will turn up by-and-by. The weather is serenely, evenly fine. It seems as if no rain could come from such a high blue sky. It is late afternoon or early evening. Since dinner is over�dinner at the godless hour of half-past four�I suppose we must call it evening. Sir Roger and I are driving out in an open carriage beyond the town, across the Elbe, up the shady road to Weisserhoisch. The calm of coming night is falling with silky softness upon every thing. The acacias stand on each side of the highway, with the delicate abundance of their airy flowers, faintly yet most definitely sweet on the evening air.
I look up and see the crowded blooms drooping in pensive beauty above my head. The guelder-rose's summer snow-balls, and the mock-orange with its penetrating odor, whiten the still gardens as we pass. The billowy meadow-grass, the tall red sorrel, the untidy, ragged robin, all the yearly-recurring May miracles! What can I say, O my friends, to set them fairly before you?
Under the trees the townsfolk are walking, chatting low and friendly. A soldier has his arm round a fat-faced M�dchen's waist, an attention which she takes with the stolidity engendered by long habit. Dear, willing, panting dogs, are laboriously dragging the washer-women's little carts up-hill.
"Vick," say I, gravely, "how would you like to drag a little cart to the wash?"
Vick does not answer verbally, but she stretches her small neck over the carriage-side, and gives a disdainful yet inquisitive smell at her low brethren. No words could express a fuller contempt for a dog that earns his own living.
The driver is taking his horses along very easily, but we do not care to hurry him. I have not felt so happy, so at ease, so gay, since I was wed.
"This is nice," say I, making a frantic snatch at a long acacia-droop; "how I wish they were all here!"
Sir Roger laughs a little, and raises his eyebrows slightly.
"Do you mean with us�now�in the carriage? Should not we be rather a tight fit?"
"Rather," say I, laughing too. "We should be puzzled how to pack them all, should not we? We would be like the animals in a Noah's ark."
A little pause.
"General," say I, impulsively, "it has just occurred to me, are not you sometimes deadly, deadly tired of hearing about the boys? I am sure I should be, if I were you. Confess! I will try not to be any angrier with you than I can help; but do not you sometimes wish that Algy and Bobby, and the Brat�not to speak of Tou Tou�were drowned in the Red Sea, or in the horse-pond, at home?"
"At least you gave me fair warning," he says, with a smile. "Do you remember telling me that whoever married you would have to marry all six?"
"I wish you would not remind me of that," say I, reddening.
It was quite the broadest hint any one ever gave. The evening is deepening. We have reached Weisserhoisch. Now our faces are turned homeward again. As we pass the entrance to the Gardens of the Linnisches Bad, we see the lamps springing into light, and the people gayly yet quietly trooping in, while on the soft evening air comes the swell of merry music.
"Stop! stop!" cry I, springing up, excitedly. "Let us go in. I love a band! It is almost as good as a circus. May we, general? Do you mind? Would it bore you?"
Five minutes more, and we are sitting at a little round table, each with a tall green glass of Mai-Trank before us, and a brisk Uhlanenritt in our ears. I look round with a pleasant sense of dissipation. The still, green trees; the cluster of oval lamps, like great bright ostrich-eggs; the countless little tables like our own; the happy social groups; the waiters running madly about with bif-tecks; the great-lidded goblets of amber-colored Bohemian beer; the young Bavarian officers, in light-blue uniforms, at the next table to us�stalwart, fair-haired boys�I should not altogether mind knowing a few of them; and, over all, the arch of suave, dark, evening sky.
"What shall we have for supper?" cry I, vivaciously. "I never can see anybody eating without longing to eat too. Blutwurst! That means black-pudding, I suppose�certainly not that�how they do call a spade a spade in German! By-the-by, what are the soldiers having? Can you see? I think I saw a vision of prawns! I saw things sticking out like their legs. I must find out!"
I rise, on pretense of getting a little wooden stool from under an unoccupied table close to the object of my curiosity, and, as I stoop to pick it up, I fraudulently glance over the nearest warrior's shoulder. My sin finds me out. He turns and catches me in the act, and at the same time a young man�not a warrior, at least not in uniform, but in loose gray British clothes�turns, too, and fixes me with a stony, British stare. I am returning in some confusion, having moreover incidentally discovered that they were not prawns, when to my extreme surprise, I hear my husband addressing the young gentleman in gray.
"Why, Frank, my dear boy, is that you? Who would have thought of seeing you here?"
"As to that," replies the young man, stretching out a ready right hand, "who would have thought of seeing you? What on earth has brought you here?"
Sir Roger laughs, but with a sort of shyness.
"Like the man in the parable, I have married a wife," he says; then, putting his hand kindly on the young fellow's shoulder�"Nancy, you have been wishing that we might meet some one we knew, have not you? Well, here is some one. I suppose that I must introduce you formally to each other. Lady Tempest�Mr. Musgrave."
Despite the searching, and, I should have thought, exhaustive examination of my appearance, that my new friend has already indulged in, he thinks good to look at me again, as he bows, and this time with a sort of undisguisable surprise in his great dark eyes.
"I must apologize," he says, taking off his hat. "I had heard that you were going to be married, but I am so behind the time, have been so out of the way of hearing news, that I did not know that it had come off yet."
He says this with a little of that doubtful stiffness, which sometimes owes its birth to shyness, and sometimes to self-consciousness; but he seems in no hurry to return to his friends, the big, blond soldiers. On the contrary, he draws a chair up to our table.
"Do they ever get prawns here?" say I, with apparent irrelevancy, not being able to disengage my mind from the thought of shell-fish, "or is it too far inland? I am so fond of them, and I fancied that these gentlemen�" (slightly indicating the broad, blue warrior-backs)�"were eating some."
His mouth curves into a sudden smile.
"Was that why you came to look?"
I laugh.
"I did not mean to be seen: that person must have had eyes in the back of his head."
I relapse into silence, and fish for the sprigs of woodruff floating in my Mai-Trank, while the talk passes to Sir Roger. Presently I become aware that the stranger is addressing me by that new title which makes me disposed to laugh.
"Lady Tempest, have you seen those lamps that they have here, in the shape of flowers? Cockney sort of things, but they are rather pretty."
"No," say I, eagerly, dropping my spoon and looking up; "in the shape of flowers? Where?"
"You cannot see them from here," he answers; "they are over there, nearer the river."
"I should like to see them," say I, decisively; "shall we, general?"
"Will you spare Lady Tempest for five minutes?" says the young man, addressing my husband; "it is not a hundred yards off."
At my words Sir Roger had made a slight movement toward rising; but, at the stranger's, he resettles himself in his chair.
"Will you not come, too? Do!" say I, pleadingly; and, as I speak, I half stretch out my hand to lay it on his arm; then hastily draw it back, afraid and ashamed of vexing him by public demonstrations.
He looks up at me with a smile, but shakes his head.
"I think I am lazy," he says; "I will wait for you here."
We set off; I with a strongish, but unexplained feeling of resentment against my companion.
"Where are they?" I ask, pettishly; "not far off, I hope! I do not fancy I shall care about them!"
"I did not suppose that you would," he replies, in an extremely happy tone; "would you like us to go back?"
"No," reply I, carelessly, "it would not be worth while now we have started."
We march on in solemn silence, not particularly pleased with each other. I am staring about me, with as greedily wondering eyes as if I were a young nun let loose for the first time. We pass a score�twoscore, threescore, perhaps�of happy parties, soldiers again, a bourgeois family of three generations, the old grandmother with a mushroom-hat tied over her cap�soldiers and Fr�uleins coketteering. The air comes to our faces, dry, warm, and elastic, yet freshened by the river, far down in whose quiet heart all the lamps are burning again.
"Have you been here long?" says Mr. Musgrave, presently, in a formal voice, from which I see that resentment is not yet absent.
"Yes," say I, having on the other hand fully recovered my good-humor, "a good while�that is, not very long�three, four, three whole days."
"Do you call that a good while?"
"It seems more," reply I, looking frankly back at him in the lamplight, and thinking that he cannot be much older than Algy, and that, in consequence, it is rather a comfort not to be obliged to feel the slightest respect for him.
"And how long have you been abroad altogether?"
We have reached the flower-lamps. We are standing by the bed in which they are supposed to grow. There are half a dozen of them: a fuchsia, a convolvulus, lilies.
"I do not think much of them," say I, disparagingly, kneeling down to examine them. "What a villainous rose! It is like an artichoke!"
"I told you you would not like them," he says, not looking at the flowers, but switching a little stick nonchalantly about; then, after a moment: "How long did you say you had been abroad?"
"You asked me that before," reply I, sharply, rising from my knees, and discovering that the evening grass has left a disfiguring green trace on my smart trousseau gown.
"Yes, and you did not give me any answer," he replies, with equal sharpness.
"Because I cannot for the life of me recollect," reply I, looking up for inspiration to the stars, which the great bright lamps make look small and pale. "I must do a sum: what day of the month is this?�the 31st? Oh, thanks, so it is; and we were married on the 20th. It is ten days, then. Oh, it must be more�it seems like ten months."
I am looking him full in the face as I say this, and I see a curious, and to me puzzling, expression of inquiry and laughter in the shady darkness of his eyes.
"Has the time seemed so long to you, then?"
"No," reply I, reddening with vexation at my own b�tise; "that is�yes�because we have been to so many places, and seen so many things�any one would understand that."
"And when do you go home?"
"In less than three weeks now," I reply, in an alert, or rather joyful tone; "at least I hope so�I mean" (again correcting myself)�"I think so."
Somehow I feel dissatisfied with my own explanations, and recommence:
"The boys�that is, my brothers�will soon be scattered to the ends of the earth; Algy has got his commission, and Bobby will soon be sent to a foreign station�he is in the navy, you will understand; and so we all want to be together once again before they go."
"You are not going home really, then?" inquires my companion, with a slight shade of disappointment in his tone; "not to Tempest�that is?"
"What a number of questions you do ask!" say I, impatiently. "Of what possible interest can it be to you where we are going?"
"Only that I shall be your nearest neighbor," replies he, stiffly; "and, as Sir Roger has hardly ever been down hitherto, I am rather tired of living next an empty house."
"Our nearest neighbor!" cry I, with animation, opening my eyes. "Not really? Well, I am rather glad! Only yesterday I was asking Sir Roger whether there were many young people about. And how near are you? Very near?"
"About as near as I well can be," answers he, dryly. "My lodge exactly faces yours."
"Too close," say I, shaking my head. "We shall quarrel."
"And do you mean to say," in a tone of attempted lightness that but badly disguises a good deal of hurt conceit, "that you never heard my name before?"
Again I shake my head.
"Never! and, what is more, I do not think I know what it is now: I suppose I did not listen very attentively, but I do not think I caught it."
"And your tone says" (with a very considerable accession of huffiness) "that you are supremely indifferent as to whether you ever catch it."
I laugh.
"Catch it! you talk as if it were a disease. Well" (speaking demurely), "perhaps on the whole it would be more convenient if I were to know it."
Silence.
"Well! what is it?"
No answer.
"I shall have to ask at your lodge!"
"Who can pronounce his own name in cold blood?" he says, reddening a little. "I, for one, cannot�there�if you do not mind looking at this card�"
He takes one out of his pocket, and I stop�we are slowly strolling back�under a lamp, to read it:
Mr. MR. FRANCIS MUSGRAVE,
MUSGRAVE ABBEY.
"Oh, thanks�Musgrave�yes."
"And Sir Roger has never mentioned me to you really?" he says, recurring with persistent hurt vanity to the topic. "How very odd of him!"
"Not in the least odd!" reply I, brusquely. "Why should he? He knew that I was not aware of your existence, and that therefore you would not be a very interesting subject to me; no doubt"�(smiling a little)�"I shall hear all about you from him now."
He is silent.
"And do you live here at this abbey"�(pointing to the card I still hold in my hand)�"all by yourself?"
"Do you mean without a wife?" he asks, with a half-sneering smile. "Yes�I have that misfortune."
"I was not thinking of a wife," say I, rather angrily. "It never occurred to me that you could have one! you are too young�a great deal too young!"
"Too young, am I? At what age, then, may one be supposed to deserve that blessing? forty? fifty? sixty?"
I feel rather offended, but cannot exactly grasp in my own mind the ground of offense.
"I meant, of course, had you any father? any mother?"
"Neither. I am that most affecting spectacle�an orphan-boy."
"You have no brothers and sisters, I am sure," say I, confidently.
"I have not, but why you should be sure of it, I am at a loss to imagine."
"You seem to take offense rather easily," I say, ingenuously. "You looked quite cross when I said I did not think much of the flowers�and again when I said I had forgotten your name�and again when I told you, you were too young to have a wife: now, you know, in a large family, one has all that sort of nonsense knocked out of one."
"Has one?" (rather shortly).
"Nobody would mind whether one were huffy or not," continue I; "they would only laugh at one."
"What a pleasant, civil-spoken thing a large family must be!" he says, dryly.
We have reached Sir Roger. I had set off on my little expedition feeling rather out of conceit with my young friend, and I return with those dispositions somewhat aggravated. We find my husband sitting where we left him, placidly smoking and listening to the band.
"Four-and-twenty fiddlers all in a row!"
They have long finished the Uhlanenritt, and are now clashing out a brisk Hussarenritt, in which one plainly hears the hussars' thundering gallop, while the conductor madly waves his arms, as he has been doing unintermittingly for the last two hours.
"You were quite wise," say I, laying my hand on the back of his chair; "you had much the best of it! they were a great imposture!"
"Were they?" he says, taking his cigar out of his mouth, and lifting his handsome and severe iron-gray eyes to mine. "They were farther off than you thought, were not they? I began to think you had not been able to find them."
"Have we been so long?" I say, surprised. "It did not seem long! I suppose we dawdled. We began to talk�bah! it is growing chill! let us go home!"
Mr. Musgrave accompanies us to the entrance to the gardens.
"Good-night, Frank!" cries Sir Roger, as he follows me into the carriage.
As soon as I am in, I recollect that I have ungratefully forgotten to shake hands with my late escort.
"Good-night!" cry I, too, stretching out a compunctious hand, over Sir Roger and the carriage-side. "I am so sorry! I forgot all about you!"
"What hotel are you at?" asks Sir Roger, closing the carriage-door after him. "The Victoria? Oh, yes. We are at the Saxe. You must come and look us up when you have nothing better to do. Our rooms are number�what is it, Nancy? I never can recollect."
"No. 5," reply I. "But, indeed, it is not much use any one coming to call upon us, is it? For we are always out�morning, noon, and night."
With this parting encouragement on my part, we drive off, and leave our young friend trying, with only moderate success, to combine a gracious smile to Sir Roger, with a resentful scowl at me, under a lamp-post. We roll along quickly and easily, through the soft, cool, lamplit night.
"Well, how did you get on with him, Nancy?" asks Sir Roger. "Good-looking fellow, is not he?"
"Is he?" say I, carelessly. "Yes, I suppose he is, only that I never can admire dark men: I am so glad that all the boys are fair�I should have hated a black brother."
"How do you know that my hair was not coal-black before it turned gray?" he asks, with a smile. "It may have been the hue of the carrion-crow for all you know."
"I am sure it was not," reply I, stoutly; then, after a little pause, "I do not think that I did get on well with him�not what I call getting on�he seems rather a touchy young gentleman."
"You must not quarrel with him, Nancy," says Sir Roger, laughing. "He lives not a stone's-throw from us."
"So he told me!"
"Poor fellow!" with an accent of compassion. "He has never had much of a chance; he has been his own master almost ever since he was born�a bad thing for any boy�he has no parents, you know."
"So he told me."
"Neither has he any brothers or sisters."
"So he told me!"
"He seems to have told you a great many things."
"Yes," reply I, "but then I asked him a great many questions: our conversation was rather like the catechism: the moment I stopped asking him questions, he began asking me!" |
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