Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER XX
With feet as heavy and slowly-dragging as those of some unwieldy old person, with drooped figure, and stained and swollen face, I enter the school-room an hour later to tell my ill-news.
"Enter a young mourner!" says Algy, facetiously, in unkind allusion to the gloom of my appearance, which is perhaps heightened by the black-silk gown I wear.
"What is up?" cries Bobby, advancing toward me with an overpowering curiosity, not unmixed with admiration, legible on his burnt face; "what has summoned those glorious sunset tints into your eyes and nose?"
"Which of Turner's pictures," says Algy, putting up his hand in the shape of a spy-glass to one eye, and critically regarding me through it, "is she so like in coloring? the 'Founding of Carthage,' or 'The Fighting Temeraire?'"
"Shame! shame!" cries Bobby, in a mock hortatory tone, trying to swell himself out to the shape and bulk of our fat rector, and to speak in his wheezy tone, "that a young woman so richly dowered with the good things of this life; a young woman with a husband and a deer-park in possession, and a house-warming in prospect�"
"But I have not," interrupt I, speaking for the first time, and with a snuffliness of tone engendered by much crying.
"Have not? have not what?"
"Have not a house-warming in prospect," reply I, with distinct malignity. A moment's silence. My bomb-shell has worked quite as much havoc as I expected.
"But where has it gone to since this morning?" asks Algy, looking rather blank.
"What do you mean?" cries Tou Tou, shrilly; "it was only last night that you were asking me for the Brat's address that you might invite him."
"And tell him to bring a judiciously-selected assortment of undergraduate friends with him," supplements Bobby, loudly.
"Yes," say I, sighing, "I know I did; but last night was last night."
"That throws a great deal of light on the matter, does it not?" says Algy, ironically.
"Nancy!" cries Bobby, seizing both my hands, and looking me in the face with an air of irritated determination, "if you do not this moment stop sighing like a windmill and tell us what is up, I will go to Sir Roger, hanged if I will not, and ask him what he means by making you cry yourself to a jelly!"
At this bold metaphor applied to my own appearance, the tears begin again to start to my eyes.
"Do not!" cry I, eagerly, catching at his wrists in detention, "it was not his fault! he could not help it; but" (mopping first one eye and then the other, and finishing by a dolorous blast on my nose) "but I am so disappointed, every thing is so changed, and I know I shall miss him so much!" I end with a break in my voice, and a long whimper.
"Miss him! miss whom?"
"The ge-general!" reply I, indistinctly, from the recesses of a drenched pocket-handkerchief.
"But what is going to happen to him? where is he going to? I wish that you would be a little more intelligible," cry they all, impatiently.
"He is going to the West Indies, to Antigua," reply I, lifting my face and speaking with a slow dejection.
"To Antigua!" cries Algy; "but what in the world is going to take him there?"
"Perhaps," says Bobby, in a loud aside to Tou Tou, "perhaps he has got another wife out there�a black one�and he thinks it is her turn now!"
Barbara says, "Hush!" and Tou Tou is beginning to embark on a long argument to prove that a man cannot have more than one wife at a time, when she is summarily hustled into silence, for I speak again.
"He has some property in the West Indies�I knew he had before�" (with a passing flash of pride in my superior information)�"I dare say you did not�and he has to go out there to look after it."
"By himself?"
"By himself, worse luck!" reply I, despondently, reinterring my countenance in my pocket-handkerchief.
"And you decline to accompany him? Well, I think you are about right!" says Algy, rising, lounging over to the empty hearth, and looking at his face with a glance of serious fondness in the glass that hangs above the mantel-shelf.
"I do nothing of the kind!" cry I, indignantly, "I have not the chance! he will not take me!"
I am not looking at him, nor, indeed, in his direction at all; but I am aware that Bobby is giving Tou Tou a private and severe nudge, which means "Attend! here is confirmation of my theory for you!" and that the idea of the hypothetical black lady is again traversing his ingenuous mind.
"I hope he will bring us some Jamaica ginger," he says, presently.
"I wish you would mention it, Nancy! the suggestion would come best from you, would not it?"
"And you are to be left alone at Tempest? Is that the plan?" asks Algy, turning his eyes from his own face, and fixing them on the less interesting object of mine.
It may be my imagination, but I cannot help fancying that there is a tone of slight and repressed exultation in his voice; and also that a look of hope and bright expectation is passing from one to another of the faces round me. All but Barbara's! Barbara always understands.
"All alone?" cries Tou Tou, opening her ugly little eyes to their widest stretch. "Nobody but the servants in the house with you? Will not you be very much afraid of ghosts?"
"She need never be alone, unless she chooses," says Bobby, winking with dexterous slightness at the others; "there is the beauty of having three kind little brothers!"
"The moment you feel at all lonely," says Algy, emphasizing his remarks by benevolent but emphatic strokes with his flat hand on my shoulder, "send for us! one of us is sure to be handy! If it will be any comfort to Sir Roger, I shall be most happy to promise him that I will keep all his horses in exercise next winter!"
"I am sorrier than I was before," says Bobby, reflectively, "that the heavy rains have drowned so many of the young birds."
"O Nancy!" cries Tou Tou, ecstatically clasping her hands, "have a Christmas-tree!"
"And a dance after it!" adds Bobby, beginning to whistle a waltz-tune.
"And Sir Roger's not being at home will be a good excuse for not asking father," cries Algy, catching the prevailing excitement.
"I will not have one of you!" cry I, rising with a face pale, as I feel with anger�with flashing eyes and a trembling voice, "not one of you shall enter his doors, except Barbara!�I hate you all!�you are all g�g�glad that he is going, and I�I never was so sorry for any thing in my life before!"
I end in a passion of tears. There is a silence of consternation on the late so jubilant assembly.
"'Times is changed,' says the dog's-meat man,"
remarks Bobby, presently, veiling his discomfiture in vulgarity, and launching into uncouth and low-lived rhyme:
"'Lights is riz,' says the dog's-meat man!" |
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