Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER XLII
"God made a foolish woman, making me!"
"Have you any idea whom we shall meet?"
It is Barbara who asks this one morning at breakfast. The question refers to a three days' visit that it has become our fate to pay to a house in the neighborhood�a house not eight miles distant from Tempest, and over which we are grumbling in the minute and exhaustive manner which people mostly employ when there is a question of making merry with their friends.
I shake my head.
"I have not an idea, that is to say, except Mrs. Huntley, and she goes without saying!"
"Why?"
"We are known to be such inseparables, that she is always asked to meet us," reply I, with that wintry smile, which is my last accomplishment. "We pursue her round the country, do not we, Roger?"
Barbara opens her great eyes, but, with her usual tact, she says nothing. She sees that she has fallen on stony ground.
"She is the oldest friend that we have in the world!" continue I, laughing pleasantly.
Roger does not answer, he does not even look up, but by a restless movement that he makes in his chair, by a tiny contraction of the brows, I see that my shot has told. I am becoming an adept in the infliction of these pin-pricks. It is one of the few pleasures I have left.
The day of our visit has come. We have relieved our feelings by grumbling up to the hall-door. Our murmuring must per force be stilled now, though indeed, were we to shout our discontents at the top of our voices, there would be small fear of our being overheard by the master of the house, he being the boundlessly deaf old gentleman who paid his respects at Tempest on the day of Mrs. Huntley's first call, and insisted on mistaking Barbara for me. Whether he is yet set right on that head is a point still enveloped in Cimmerian gloom.
It is a bachelor establishment, as any one may perceive by a cursory glance at the disposition of the drawing-room furniture, and at the unfortunate flowers, tightly jammed, packed as thickly as they will go in one huge central bean-pot.
As we arrived rather late and were at once conducted to our rooms, we still remain in the dark as to our co-guests. Personally, I am not much interested in the question. There cannot be anybody that it will cause me much satisfaction to meet. It would give me a faint relief, indeed, to find that there were some matron of exalteder rank than mine to save me from my probable fate of bowling dark sayings at our old host, General Parker, from the season of clear soup to that of peaches and nuts. I dress quickly. The toilet is never to me a work of art. It is not that from my lofty moral stand-point I look down upon meretricious aids to faulty Nature. If I thought that it would set me on a fairer standing with Mrs. Z�phine, I would paint my cheeks an inch thick; would prune my eyebrows; daub my eyes, and make my hair yellower than any buttercups in the meadow; but I know that it would be of no avail. I should still be, compared to her, as a sign-painting to a Titian. For a long time now I have cared naught for clothes. I used greatly to respect their power, but they have done me no good; and so my reverence for them is turned into indifference and contempt.
I think that I must be late. Roger went down some minutes ago, at my request, so that there might be one representative of the family in time.
I hasten down-stairs, fastening my last bracelet as I go, and open the drawing-room door. I was wrong. There is no one down yet: even Roger has disappeared. I am the first. This is my impression for a moment: then I perceive that there is some one in the bow-window, half hidden by the drooped curtains; some one who, hearing my entry, is advancing to meet me. It is Musgrave! My first impulse, a wrong one, I need hardly say, is to turn and flee. I have even laid hold of the just abandoned handle, when he speaks.
"Are you going?" he says in a low voice, marked by great and evidently ungovernable agitation; "do not! if you wish, I will leave the room."
I look at him, and our eyes meet. He always was a pale young man�no bucolic beef-and-beer ruddiness about him�always of a healthy swart pallor; but now he is deadly white!�so, by-the-by, I fancy am I! His dark eyes burn with a shamed yet eager glow.
With the words and tones of our last parting ringing in our ears, we both feel that it would be useless affectation to attempt to meet as ordinary acquaintance.
"No," say I, faintly, almost in a whisper, "it�it does not matter! only that I did not know that you were to be here!"
"No more did I, until this morning!" he answers, eagerly; "this morning�at the last moment�young Parker asked me to come down with him�and I�I knew we must meet sooner or later�that it could not be put off forever, and so I thought we might as well get over it here as anywhere else!"
Neither of us has thought of sitting down. He is speaking with rapid, low emotion, and I stand stupidly listening.
"I suppose so," I answer lazily. I cannot for the life of me help it, friends. I am back in Brindley Wood. He has come a few steps nearer me. His voice is always low, but now it is almost a whisper in which he is so rapidly, pantingly speaking.
"I shall most likely not have another opportunity, probably we shall not be alone again, and I must hear, I must know�have you forgiven me?"
As he speaks, the recollection of all the ill he has done me, of my lost self-respect, my alienated Roger, my faded life, pass before my mind.
"That I have not!" reply I, looking full at him, and speaking with a distinct and heavy emphasis of resentment and aversion, "and, by God's help, I never will!"
"You will not!" he cries, starting back with an expression of the utmost anger and discomfiture. "You will not! you will carry vengeance for one mad minute through a whole life! It is impossible! impossible! if you are so unforgiving, how do you expect God to forgive you your sins?"
I shrug my shoulders with a sort of despairing contempt. God has seemed to me but dim of late.
"He may forgive them or leave them unforgiven as He sees best; but�I will never forgive you!"
"What!" he cries, his face growing even more ash-white than it was before, and his voice quivering with a passionate anger; "not for Barbara's sake?"
I shudder. I hate to hear him pronounce her name.
"No," say I, steadily, "not for Barbara's sake!"
"You will have to," he cries violently; "it is nonsense! think of the close connection, of the relationship that there will be between us! think of the remarks you will excite! you will defeat your own object!"
"I will excite no remark!" I reply resolutely. "I will be quite civil to you! I will say 'good-morning' and 'good-evening' to you; if you ask me a question I will answer it; but�I will never forgive you!"
We are standing, as I before observed, close together, and are so wholly occupied�voices, eyes, and ears�with each other, that we do not perceive the approach of two hitherto unseen people who are coming dawdling and chatting up the conservatory that opens out of the room; two people that I suppose have been there, unknown to us, all along. They have come quite close now, and we must needs perceive them.
In a second our eager talk drops into silence, and we look with involuntary, startled apprehension toward them. They are Roger and Mrs. Huntley. This is why he acceded with such alacrity to my request. This is why he was so afraid of being late. He has been helping her to smell the jasmine, and to look down the datura's great white trumpet-throats.
Even at this agitated moment I have time to think this with a jeering pain. The next instant all other feelings are swallowed up in breathless dread as to how they will meet. My fears are groundless. On first becoming aware, indeed, whose t�te-�-t�te it is that he has interrupted, whose low, quick voices they are that have dropped into such sudden, suspicious silence at his approach�I can see him start perceptibly, can see his gray eyes dart with lightning quickness from Musgrave to me, and from me to Musgrave; and in his voice there is to me an equally perceptible tone of ice-coldness; but to an ordinary observer it would seem the greeting, neither more nor less warm, exchanged between two moderately friendly acquaintances meeting after absence.
"How are you, Musgrave? I had no idea that you were in this part of the world!"
"No more had I!" answers Musgrave, with an exaggerated laugh. "No more I was, until�until to-day."
He has not caught the infection of Roger's stately calm. His face has not recovered a trace of even its usual slight color, and his eyes are twitching nervously. Mrs. Huntley appears unaware of any thing. Her artistic eye has been caught by the tight bean-pot, and her fingers are employed in trying to give a little air of ease and liberty to its crowded inmates. Then, thank God, the others come in, and dinner is announced, and the situation is ended.
The old host, still under the influence of his hallucination, is bearing down like a hawk (with his old bent elbow extended) on Barbara, until intercepted and redirected by a whispered roar and graphic pantomime on the part of his nephew. Then, at last, he realizes Roger's bad taste, and we go in.
As soon as we are seated, I look about me. It is a round table. For my part, I hate a round table. There is no privacy in it. Everybody seems eavesdropping on everybody else.
There are only eight of us in all�those I have enumerated, and Algy. Yes, he is here. Bellona is a goddess who can always spare her sons when there is any chance of their getting into mischief. Roger has taken Mrs. Huntley. That, poor man, he could hardly help, his only alternative being his own sister-in-law. Musgrave has taken Barbara. He is still as white as the table-cloth, and hardly speaks. It is clear that he will not get up his conversation again, until after the champagne has been round. Algy has taken no one; and, consequently, a bear is an amiable and affable beast in comparison of him. I am placed between our host and his nephew. The latter comes in for a good deal of my conversation, as most of my remarks have to be taken up and rebellowed by him with a loud emphasis, that contrasts absurdly with their triviality; and even then they mostly miscarry, and turn into something totally different.
Talking to the old man is not a dialogue, but a couple of soliloquies, carried on mostly on different subjects, which in vain try to become the same, between two interlocutors. Through soup we prospered�that is to say, we talked of the weather; and though I said several things about it that surprised me a good deal, yet we both knew that we were talking of the weather. But since then we have been diverging ever more and more hopelessly. He is at the shah's visit, and so he imagines am I. I, on the contrary, am at the Bishop of Winchester's death, and, for the last five minutes have been trying, with all the force of my lungs, and with a face rendered scarlet by the double action of heat and of the consciousness of being the object of respectful attention to the whole company, to convey to him that, in my opinion, the deceased prelate ought to have been buried in Westminster Abbey. I have at last succeeded, at least in so far as to make him understand that I wish somebody to be buried in Westminster Abbey; but, as he still persists in thinking it the shah, we are perhaps not much better off than we were before. I lean back with a sense of despairing defeat, and, behind my fan, turn to the young man on the other side. He is a jolly-looking fellow, with an aureole of fiery red hair.
"Would you mind," say I, with panting appeal, "trying to make him understand that it is not the shah?"
He complies, and, while he is trying to make it clear to his uncle that he wrongs me in crediting me with any wish to thrust the Persian monarch among the ashes of the Plantagenets, I take breath, and look round again. Algy is eating nothing, and is drinking every thing that is offered to him. His face is not much redder than Musgrave's, and he is glancing across the table at Mrs. Huntley, with the haggard anger of his eyes. Of this, however, she seems innocently unaware. She is leaning back in her chair; so is Roger. They are talking low and quickly, and looking smilingly at each other. When does his face ever light up into such alert animation when he is talking to me? There can be no doubt of it! Why blink a thing because it is unpleasant? I bore him.
I have no intention of listening, and yet I hear some of their words�enough to teach me the drift of their talk. "Residency!" "Cawnpore!" "Simlah!" "Cursed Simlah!" "Cursed Cawnpore!" My attention is recalled by the voice of my old neighbor.
"Talking of that�" he says�(talking of what, in Heaven's name?)�"I once knew a man�a doctor, at Norwich�who did not marry till he was seventy-eight, and had four as fine children as any man need wish to see."
By the extraordinary irrelevancy of this anecdote, I am so taken aback that, for a moment, I am unable to utter. Seeing, however, that some comment is expected from me, I stammer something about its being a great age. He, however, imagines that I am asking whether they were boys or girls.
"Three boys and a girl, or three girls and a boy!" he answers, with loud distinctness�"I cannot recollect which; but, after all�" (with an acrid chuckle)�"that is not the point of the story!"
I sink back in my chair, with a slight shiver.
"Give it up!" says my other neighbor, with a compassionate smile, and speaking in a voice not a whit lower than usual�"I would!�it really is no good!"
"Why does not he have a trumpet?" ask I, with a slight accent of irritation, for I have suffered much, and it is hot.
"He had one once," replies my companion, still pityingly regarding the flushed discomposure of my face; "but people would insist on bawling so loudly down it, that they nearly broke the drum of his ear, and so he broke it."
I laugh a little, but in a puny way. There is not much laugh in me. Again I look round the table. Musgrave is better; he is a better color than he was. Under the influence of Barbara's gentle talk, his features have reassumed almost serenity. Algy is no better. I see him lean back, and speak to the servant behind him. He is asking for more champagne. I wish he would not. He has had quite enough already. Roger and Mrs. Huntley are much as they were. They are still leaning back in their chairs�still looking with friendly intimacy into each other's eyes�still smiling. Again a few words of their talk reach me.
"Do you recollect?"
"Do you remember?"
"Have you forgotten?"
Clearly, they have fallen upon old times. I wish�I dearly wish�that I might bite a piece out of somebody. |
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