Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER XLVII
This is how the ball ends for me. As soon as I am out of sight, I quicken my walk into a run, and, flying up the stairs, take refuge in my bedroom. Nor do I emerge thence again. The ball itself goes on for hours. The drawing-room is directly beneath me. It seems to me as if the sound of the fiddling, of the pounding, scampering feet would never, never end.
I believe, at least I hear afterward, that Mr. Parker, whose spirits go on rising with the steady speed of quicksilver in fine weather, declines to allow his guests to depart, countermands their carriages, bribes their servants, and, in short, reaches the pitch of joyfully confident faith to which all things seem not only possible, but extremely desirable, and in whose eyes the mango-tree feat would appear but a childish trifle.
The room is made up for the night; windows closed, shutters bolted, curtains draped. With hasty impatience I undo them all. I throw high the sash, and lean out. It is not a warm night; there is a little frosty crispness in the air, but I am burning. I am talking quickly and articulately to myself all the time, under my breath; it seems to me to relieve a little the inarticulate thoughts. I will not wink at it any longer, indeed I will not; nobody could expect it of me. I will not be taken in by that transparent fallacy of old friends! Nobody but me is. They all see it; Algy, Musgrave, all of them. At the thought of the victory written in Musgrave's eyes just now�at the recollection of the devilish irony of his wish, as we parted in Brindley Wood�
"I hope that your fidelity may be rewarded as it deserves�"
I start up, with a sort of cry, as if I had been smartly stung, and begin to walk quickly up and down the room. I will not storm at Roger�no, I will not even raise my voice, if I can remember, and, after all, there is a great deal to be said on his side; he has been very forbearing to me always, and I�I have been trying to him; most petulant and shrewish; treating him to perpetual, tiresome tears, and peevish, veiled reproaches. I will only ask him quite meekly and humbly to let me go home again; to send me back to the changed and emptied school-room; to Algy's bills and morosities; to the wearing pricks of father's little pin-point tyrannies.
I have lit the candles, and am looking at myself in the cheval-glass. What has become of my beauty, pray? The powder is shaken from my hair; it no longer rises in a white and comely pile; the motion of dancing has loosened and tossed it; it has a look of dull, gray dishevelment. The rouge has almost disappeared; melted away, or sunk in; there never was a great deal of it, never the generous abundance that adorned Mr. Parker's face. I cannot help laughing, even now, as I think of the round red smouch that so artlessly ornamented each of his cheeks.
I neither ring for my maid, nor attempt to undress myself. I either keep walking restlessly to and fro, or I sit by the casement, while the cold little wind lifts my dusty hair, or blows against my hot, stiff eyes; or I stand stupidly before the glass; bitterly regarding the ruins of my one night's fairness. I do not know for how long; it must be hours, but I could not say how many.
The fiddles' shrill voices grow silent at last; the bounding and stamping ceases; the departing carriage-wheels grind and crunch on the gravel drive. I shall not have much longer to wait; he will be coming soon now. But there is yet another interval. In ungovernable impatience, I open my door and listen. It seems to me that there reaches me from the hall, the sound of voices in loud and angry altercation; it is too far off for me to distinguish to whom they belong. Then there is silence again, and then at last�at last Roger comes. I hear his foot along the passage, and run to the door to intercept him, on his way to his dressing-room. He utters an exclamation of surprise on seeing me.
"Not in bed yet? Not undressed? They told me that you were tired and had gone to bed hours ago!"
"Did they?"
I can say only these two little words. I am panting so, as if I had run hard. We are both in the room now, and the door is shut. I suppose I look odd; wild and gray and haggard through the poor remains of my rouge.
"You are late," I say presently, in a voice of low constraint, "are not you? everybody went some time ago."
"I know," he answers, with a slight accent of irritation; "it is Algy's fault! I do not know what has come to that boy; he hardly seems in his right mind to-night; he has been trying to pick a quarrel with Parker, because he lit Mrs. Huntley's candle for her."
"Yes," say I, breathing short and hard. Has not he himself introduced her name?
"And you know Parker is always ready for a row�loves it�and as he is as screwed to-night as he well can be, it has been as much as we could do to make them keep their hands off each other!" After a moment he adds: "Silly boy! he has been doing his best to fall out with me, but I would not let him compass that."
"Has he?"
Roger has begun to walk up and down, as I did a while ago; on his face a look of unquiet discontent.
"It was a mistake his coming here this time," he says, with a sort of anger, and yet compassion, in his tone. "If he had had a grain of sense, he would have staid away!"
"It is a thousand pities that you cannot send us all home again!" I say, with a tight, pale smile�"send us packing back again, Algy and Barbara and me�replace me on the wall among the broken bottles, where you found me."
My voice shakes as I make this dreary joke.
"Why do you say that?" he cries, passionately. "Why do you torment me? You know as well as I do, that it is impossible�out of the question! You know that I am no more able to free you than�"
"You would, then, if you could?" cry I, breathing short and hard. "You own it!"
For a moment he hesitates; then�
"Yes," he says firmly, "I would! I did not think at one time that I should ever have lived to say it, but I would."
"You are at least candid," I answer, with a sort of smothered sob, turning away.
"Nancy!" he cries, following me, and taking hold of my cold and clammy hands, while what looks�what, at least, I should have once said looked�like a great yearning fills his kind and handsome eyes; "we are not very happy, are we? perhaps, child, we never shall be now�often I think so. Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose. We are not the first, and we shall not be the last! (with a deep and bitter sigh). But indeed, I think, dear, that we are unhappier than we need be."
I shrug my shoulders with a sort of careless despair.
"Do you think so? I fancy not. Some people have their happiness thinly spread over their whole lives, like bread-and-scrape!" I say, with a homely bitterness. "Some people have it in a lump! that is all the difference! I had mine in a lump�all crowded into nineteen years that is, nineteen very good years!" I end, sobbing.
He still has hold of my hands. His face is full of distress; indeed, distress is too weak a word�of acute and utter pain.
"What makes you talk like this now, to-night?" he asks, earnestly. "I have been deceiving myself with the hope that you were having one happy evening, as I watched you dancing�did you see me? I dare say not�of course you were not thinking of me. You looked like the old light-hearted Nancy that lately I have been thinking was gone forever!"
"Did I?" say I, dejectedly, slowly drawing my hands from his, and wiping my wet eyes with my pocket-handkerchief.
"Any one would have said that you were enjoying yourself," he pursues, eagerly�"were not you?"
"Yes," say I, ruefully, "I was very much." Then, with a sudden change of tone to that sneering key which so utterly�so unnaturally misbecomes me�"And you?"
"I!" He laughs slightly. "I am a little past the age when one derives any very vivid satisfaction from a ball; and yet," with a softening of eye and voice, "I liked looking at you too!"
"And it was pleasant in the billiard-room, was not it?" say I, with a stiff and coldly ironical smile�"so quiet and shady."
"In the billiard room?"
"Do you mean to say," cry I, my factitious smile vanishing, and flashing out into honest, open passion, "that you mean to deny that you were there?"
"Deny it!" he echoes, in a tone of the deepest and most displeased astonishment; "of course not! Why should I? What would be the object? And if there were one�have I ever told you a lie?" with a reproachful accent on the pronouns. "I was there half an hour, I should think."
"And why were you?" cry I, losing all command over myself. "What business had you? Were not there plenty of other rooms�rooms where there were lights and people?"
"Plenty!" he replies, coldly, still with that look of heavy displeasure; "and for my part I had far rather have staid there. I went into the billiard-room because Mrs. Huntley asked me to take her. She said she was afraid of the draughts anywhere else."
"Was it the draughts that were making her cry so bitterly, pray?" say I, my eyes�dry now, achingly dry�flashing a wretched hostility back into his. "I have heard of their making people's eyes run indeed, but I never heard of their causing them to sob and moan."
He has begun again to tramp up and down, and utters an exclamation of weary impatience.
"How could I help her crying?" he asks, with a tired irritation in his tone. "Do you think I enjoyed it? I hate to see a woman weep! it makes me miserable! it always did; but I have not the slightest objection�why, in Heaven's name, should I?�to tell you the cause of her tears. She was talking to me about her child."
"Her child!" repeat I, in an accent of the sharpest, cuttingest scorn. "And you were taken in! I knew that she made capital out of that child, but I thought that it was only neophytes like Algy, for whose benefit it was trotted out! I thought that you were too much of a man of the world, that she knew you too well�" I laugh, derisively.
"Would you like to know the true history of the little Huntley?" I go on, after a moment. "Would you like to know that its grandmother, arriving unexpectedly, found it running wild about the lanes, a little neglected heathen, out at elbows, and with its frock up to its knees, and that she took it out of pure pity, Mrs. Z�phine not making the slightest objection, but, on the contrary, being heartily glad to be rid of it�do you like to know that?"
"How do you know it?" (speaking quickly)�"how did you hear it?"
"I was told."
"But who told you?"
"That is not of the slightest consequence."
"I wish to know."
"Mr. Musgrave told me."
I can manage his name better than I used, but even now I redden. For once in his life, Roger, too, sneers as bitterly as I myself have been doing.
"Mr. Musgrave seems to have told you a good many things."
This is carrying the war into the enemy's quarters, and so I feel it. For the moment it shuts my mouth.
"Who is it that has put such notions into your head?" he asks, with gathering excitement, speaking with rapid passion. "Some one has! I am as sure as that I stand here that they did not come there of themselves. There was no room for such suspicions in the pure soul of the girl I married."
I make no answer.
"If it were not for the misery of it," he goes on, that dark flush that colored his bronzed face the other night again spreading over it, "I could laugh at the gross absurdity of the idea! To begin such fooleries at my age! Nancy, Nancy!" his tone changing to one of reproachful, heart-rending appeal�"has it never struck you that it is a little hard, considering all things, that you should suspect me?"
Still I am silent.
"Tell me what you wish me to do!" he cries, with passionate emphasis. "Tell me what you wish me to leave undone! I will do it! I will leave it undone! You are a little hard upon me, dear: indeed you are�some day I think that you will see it�but it was not your own thought! I know that as well as if you had told me! It was suggested to you�by whom you best know, and whether his words or mine are most worthy of credit!"
He is looking at me with a fixed, pathetic mournfulness. There is in his eyes a sort of hopelessness and yet patience.
"We are miserable, are not we?" he goes on, in a low voice�"most miserable! and it seems to me that every day we grow more so, that every day there is a greater dissonance between us! For my part, I have given up the hope that we can ever be happier! I have wondered that I should have entertained it. But, at least, we might have peace!"
There is such a depth of depression, such a burden of fatigue in his voice, that the tears rise in my throat and choke the coming speech.
"At least you are undeceived about me, are not you?" he says, looking at me with an eager and yet almost confident expectation. "At least, you believe me!"
But I answer nothing. It is the tears that keep me dumb, but I think that he thinks me still unconvinced, for he turns away with a groan. |
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