Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER XXX
How are unmusical people to express themselves when they are glad? People with an ear and a voice can sing, but what is to become of those who have not? Must they whoop inarticulately? For myself, I do not know one tune from another. I am like the man who said that he knew two tunes, one was "God save the Queen," and the other was not. And yet to-day I have as good a heart for singing as ever had any of the most famous songsters. In tune, out of tune, I must lift up my voice. It is as urgent a need for me as for any mellow thrush. For my heart�oh, rare case!�is fuller of joy than it can hold. It brims over. Roger is coming back. It is February, and he has been away nearly seven months. All minor evils and anxieties�Bobby's departure for Hong-Kong, Algy's increasing besotment about Mrs. Huntley, and consequent slight estrangement from me�(to me a very bitter thing)�Frank's continued silence as regards Barbara�all these are swallowed up in gladness.
When he is back, all will come right. Is it any wonder that they have gone wrong, while I only was at the helm? My good news arrived only this morning, and yet, a hundred times in the short space that has elapsed since then, I have rehearsed the manner of our meeting, have practised calling him "Roger," with familiar ease, have fixed upon my gown and the manner of my coiffure, and have wearied Barbara with solicitous queries, as to whether she thinks that I have grown perceptibly plainer in the last seven months, whether she does not think one side of my face better looking than the other, whether she thinks�(with honest anxiety this)�that my appearance is calculated to repel a person grown disused to it. To all which questions, she with untired gentleness gives pleasant and favorable answers.
The inability under which I labored of refraining from imparting bad news is tenfold increased in the case of good. I must have some one to whom to relate my prosperity. It will certainly not be Mrs. Huntley this time. Though I have struggled against the feeling as unjust, and disloyal to my faith in Roger, I still cannot suppress a sharp pang of distrust and jealousy, as often as I think of her, and of the relation made to me by Frank, as to her former connection with my husband. Neither am I in any hurry to tell Frank. To speak truth, I am in no good-humor with him or with his unhandsome shilly-shallying, and unaccountable postponement of what became a duty months ago.
Never mind! this also will come right when Roger returns. The delightful stir and hubbub in my soul hinder me from working or reading, or any tranquil in-door occupation; and, as afternoon draws on, fair and not cold, I decide upon a long walk. The quick exercise will perhaps moderately tire me, and subdue my fidgetiness by the evening, and nobody can hinder me from thinking of Roger all the way.
Barbara has a cold�a nasty, stuffy, choky cold; so I must do without her. Apparently I must do without Vick too. She makes a feint, indeed, of accompanying me half-way to the front gate, then sits down on her little shivering haunches, smirks, and when I call her, looks the other way, affecting not to hear. On my calling more peremptorily, "Vick! Vick!" she tucks her tail well in, and canters back to the house on three legs.
So it comes to pass that I set out quite alone. I have no definite idea where to go�I walk vaguely along, following my nose, as they say, smiling foolishly, and talking to myself�now under my breath�now out loud. A strong southwest wind blows steadily in my face: it sounded noisy and fierce enough as I sat in the house; but there is no vice or malevolence in it�it is only a soft bluster.
Alternate clouds and sunshine tenant the sky. The shadows of the tree-trunks lie black and defined across the road�branches, twigs, every thing�then comes a sweep of steely cloud, and they disappear, swallowed up in one uniform gray: a colorless moment or two passes, and the sun pushes out again; and they start forth distinct and defined, each little shoot and great limb, into new life on the bright ground. I laugh out loud, out of sheer jollity, as I watch the sun playing at hide-and-seek with them.
What a good world! What a handsome, merry, sweetly-colored world! Unsatisfying? disappointing?�not a bit of it! It must be people's own fault if they find it so.
I have walked a mile or so before I at length decide upon a goal, toward which to tend�a lone and distant cottage, tenanted by a very aged, ignorant, and feudally loyal couple�a cottage sitting by the edge of a brown common�one of the few that the greedy hand of Tillage has yet spared�where geese may still stalk and hiss unreproved, and errant-tinker donkeys crop and nibble undisturbed� It is altogether a choice and goodly walk; next to nothing of the tame high-road. The path leads through a deep wooded dell; over purple plough-lands; down retired lanes.
After an hour and a quarter of smartish walking, I reach the door. There are no signs of ravaging children about. Long, long ago�years before this generation was born�the noisy children went out; some to the church-yard; some, with clamor of wedding-bells, to separate life. I knock, and after an interval hear the sound of pattens clacking across the flagged floor, and am admitted by an old woman, dried and pickled, by the action of the years, into an active cleanly old mummy, and whose fingers are wrinkled even more than time has done it, by the action of soapsuds. I am received with the joyful reverence due to my exalted station, am led in, and posted right in front of the little red fire and the singing kettle, and introduced to a very old man, who sits on the settle in the warm chimney-corner, dressed in an ancient smock-frock, and with both knotted hands clasped on the top of an old oak staff. He is evidently childish, and breaks now and then into an anile laugh at the thought, no doubt, of some dead old pot-house jest. A complication arises through his persisting in taking me for a sister of Roger's, who died thirty years ago, in early girlhood, and addressing me accordingly. I struggle a little for my identity, but, finding the effort useless, resign it.
"This poor ould person is quoite aimless," says his wife with dispassionate apology; "but what can you expect at noinety-one?"
(Her own years cannot be much fewer.)
I say tritely that it is a great age.
"He's very fatiguin' on toimes!�that he is!" she continues, eying him with contemplated candor�"he crumbles his wittles to that extent that I 'ave to make him sit upo' the News of the World."
As it seems to me that the conversation is taking a painful direction, I try to divert it by telling my news; but the bloom is again taken off it by the old man, who declines to be disabused of the idea that the Peninsular is still raging, and that it is Roger's grandfather who is returning from that field of glory. After a few more minutes, during which the old wife composedly tells me of all the children she has buried�she has to think twice before she can recollect the exact number�and in the same breath remarks, "How gallus bad their 'taters were last year," I take my departure, and leave the old man still nodding his weak old head, and chuckling to the kettle.
On first leaving the house, I feel dashed and sobered. The inertness and phlegmatic apathy of dry and ugly old age seem to weigh upon and press down the passionate life of my youth, but I have not crossed a couple of ploughed fields and seen the long slices newly ploughed, lying rich and thick in the sun; I have not heard two staves of the throstle's loud song, before I have recovered myself. I also begin to sing. I am not very harmonious, perhaps, I never am; and I wander now and then from the tune; but it is good enough for the stalking geese, my only audience, except a ragged jackass, who, moved by my example, lifts his nose and gives vent to a lengthy bray of infinite yearning.
I am half-way home now. I have reached the wood�Brindley Wood; henceforth I am not very likely to forget its name. The path dips at once and runs steeply down, till it reaches the bottom of the dell, along which a quick brook runs darkling. In summer, when the leaves are out, it is twilight here at high noonday. Hardly a peep of sky to be seen through the green arch of oak and elm; but now, through the net-work of wintry twigs one looks up, and sees the faint, far blue, for the loss of which no leafage can compensate. Winter brownness above, but a more than summer green below�the heyday riot of the mosses. Mossed tree-trunks, leaning over the bustling stream; emerald moss carpets between the bronze dead leaves; all manner of mosses; mosses with little nightcaps; mosses like doll's ferns; mosses like plump cushions; and upon them here and there blazes the glowing red of the small peziza-cups.
I am still singing; and, as no wind reaches this shadowed hollow, I have taken off my hat, and walk slowly along, swinging it in my hand. It is a so little-frequented place, that I give an involuntary start, and my song suddenly dies, when, on turning a corner, I come face to face with another occupant. In a moment I recover myself. It is only Frank, sitting on a great lichened stone, staring at the brook and the trees.
"You seem very cheerful!" he says, rising, stretching out his hand, and not (as I afterward recollect) expressing the slightest surprise at our unlikely rencontre. "I never heard you lift up your voice before."
"I seem what I am," reply I, shortly. "I am cheerful."
"You mostly are."
"That is all that you know about it," reply I, brusquely, rather resenting the accusation. "I have not been at all in good spirits all this�this autumn and winter, not, that is, compared to what I usually am."
"Have not you?"
"I am in good spirits to-day, I grant you," continue I, more affably; "it would be very odd if I were not. I should jump out of my skin if I were quite sure of getting back into it again; I have had such good news."
"Have you? I wish I had" (sighing). "What is it?"
"I will give you three guesses," say I, trying to keep grave, but breaking out everywhere, as I feel, into badly-suppressed smiles.
"Something about the boys, of course!"�(half fretfully)�"it is always the boys."
"It is nothing about the boys�quite wrong. That is one."
"The fair Z�phine is no more!�by-the-by, I suppose I should have heard of that."
"It is nothing about the fair Z�phine�wrong again! That is two!"
"Barbara has got leave to stay till Easter!"
"Nothing about Barbara!"�(with a slight momentary pang at the ease and unconcern with which he mentions her name).�"By-the-by, I wish you would give up calling her 'Barbara;' she never calls you 'Frank!' There, you have had your three guesses, and you have never come within a mile of it�I shall have to tell you�Roger is coming back!" opening my eyes and beginning to laugh joyously.
"Soon?" with a quick and breathless change of tone, that I cannot help perceiving, turning sharply upon me.
"At once!" reply I, triumphantly; "we may expect him any day!"
He receives this information in total silence. He does not attempt the faintest or slightest congratulation.
"I wish I had not told you!" cry I, indignantly; "what a fool I was to imagine that you would feel the slightest interest in any thing that did not concern yourself personally! Of course" (turning a scarlet face and blazing eyes full upon him), "I did not expect you to feel glad�I have known you too long for that�but you might have had the common civility to say you were!"
We have stopped. We stand facing each other in the narrow wood-path, while the beck noisily babbles past, and the thrushes answer each other in lovely dialogue. He is deadly pale; his lips are trembling, and his eyes�involuntarily I look away from them!
"I am not glad!" he says, with slow distinctness; "often�often you have blamed me for hinting and implying for using innuendoes and half-words, and once�once, do you recollect?�you told me to my face that I lied! Well, I will not lie now; you shall have no cause to blame me to-day. I will tell you the truth, the truth that you know as well as I do�I am not glad!"
Absolute silence. I could no more answer or interrupt him than I could soar up between the dry tree-boughs to heaven. I stand before him with parted lips, and staring eyes fixed in a stony, horrid astonishment on his face.
"Nancy," he says, coming a step nearer, and speaking in almost a whisper, "you are not glad either! For once speak the truth! Hypocrisy is always difficult to you. You are the worst actress I ever saw�speak the truth for once! Who is there to hear you but me? I, who know it already�who have known it ever since that first evening in Dresden! Do you recollect?�but of course you do�why do I ask you? Why should you have forgotten any more than I?"
Still I am silent. Though I stand in the free clear air of heaven, I could not feel more choked and gasping were I in some close and stifling dungeon, hundreds of feet underground. I think that the brook must have got into my brain, there is such a noise of bubbling and brawling in it. Barbara, Roger, Algy, a hundred confused ideas of pain and dismay jostle each other in my head.
"Why do you look at me so?" he says, hoarsely. "What have I done? For God's sake, do not think that I blame you! I never have been so sorry for any one in my life as I have been for you�as I was for you from the first moment I saw you! I can see you now, as I first caught sight of you�weariness and depression in every line of your face�"
I can bear no more. At his last words, a pain like a knife, sharp to agony, runs through me. It is the grain of truth in his wicked, lying words that gives them their sting. I was weary; I was depressed; I was bored. I fling out my arms with a sudden gesture of despair, and then, throwing myself down on the ground, bury my face in a great moss cushion, and put my fingers in my ears.
"O my God!" I cry, writhing, "what shall I do?�how can I bear it?"
After a moment or two I sit up.
"How shameful of you!" I cry, bursting into a passion of tears. "What sort of women can you have lived among? what a hateful mind you must have! And I thought that you were a nice fellow, and that we were all so comfortable together!"
He has drawn back a pace or two, and now stands leaning against one of the bent and writhen trunks of the old trees. He is still as pale as the dead, and looks all the paler for the burning darkness of his eyes.
"Is it possible," he says, in a low tone of but half-suppressed fury, "that you are going to pretend to be surprised?"
"Pretend!" cry I, vehemently; "there is no pretense about it! I never was so horribly, miserably surprised in all my life!"
And then, thinking of Barbara, I fall to weeping again, in utter bitterness and discomfiture.
"It is impossible!" he says, roughly. "Whatever else you are, you are no fool; and a woman would have had to be blinder than any mole not to see whither I�yes, and you, too�have been tending! If you meant to be surprised all along when it came to this, why did you make yourself common talk for the neighborhood with me? Why did you press me, with such unconventional eagerness to visit you? Why did you reproach me if I missed one day?"
"Why did I?" cry I, eagerly. "Because�"
Then I stop suddenly. How, even to clear myself, can I tell him my real reason?
"And now," he continues, with deepening excitement, "now that you reap your own sowing, you are surprised�miserably surprised!"
"I am!" cry I, incoherently. "You may not believe me, but it is true�as true as that God is above us, and that I never, never was tired of Roger!"
I stop, choked with sobs.
"Yes," he says, sardonically, "about as true. But, be that as it may, you must at least be good enough to excuse me from expressing joy at his return, seeing that he fills the place which I am fool enough to covet, and which, but for him, might�yes, say what you please, deny it as much as you like�would have been mine!"
"It never would!" cry I, passionately. "If you had been the last man in the world�if we had been left together on a desert island�I never should have liked you, never! I never would have seen more of you than I could help! There is no one whose society I grow so soon tired of. I have said so over and over again to the boys."
"Have you?"
"What good reason can you give me for preferring you to him?" I ask, my voice trembling and quivering with a passionate indignation; "I am here, ready to listen to you if you can! How are you such a desirable substitute for him? Are you nobler? cleverer? handsomer? unselfisher?�if you are" (laughing bitterly), "you keep it mighty well hid."
No reply: not a syllable.
"It is a lie," I cry, with growing vehemence, "a vile, base, groundless lie, to say that I am not glad he is coming back! Barbara knows�they all know how I have been wearying for him all these months. I was not in love, as you call it, when I married him�often I have told him that�and perhaps at Dresden I missed the boys a little�he knows that too�he understands! but now�now�" (clasping my hands upon my heart, and looking passionately upward with streaming eyes), "I want no one�no one but him! I wish for nothing better than to have him�him only!�and to-day, until I met you�till you made me loathe myself and you, and every living thing�it seemed to me as if all the world had suddenly grown bright and happy and good at the news of his coming."
Still he is silent.
"Even if I had not liked him," pursue I, finding words come quickly enough now, and speaking with indignant volubility, as, having risen, I again face him�"even if I had wanted to flirt with some one, why on earth should I have chosen you?" (eying him with scornful slowness, from his wide-awake to his shooting-boots), "you, who never even amused me in the least! Often when I have been talking to you, I have yawned till the tears came into my eyes! I have been afraid that you would notice it. If I had known" (speaking with great bitterness), "I should have taken less pains with my manners."
He does not answer a word. What answer can he make? He still stands under the wintry tree, white to lividness; drops of cold sweat stand on his brows; and his fine nostrils dilate and contract, dilate and contract, in an agony of anger and shame.
"What could have put such an idea into your head?" cry I, clasping my hands, while the tears rain down my cheeks, as�my thoughts again flying to Barbara�I fall from contempt and scorn to the sharpest reproach. "Who would have thought of such a thing? when there are so many better and prettier people who, for all I know, might have liked you. What wicked perversity made you fix upon me who, even if I had not belonged to any one else, could never, never have fancied you!"
"Is that true?" he says, in a harsh, rough whisper; "are you sure that you are not deceiving yourself? are you sure that under all your rude words you are not nearer loving me than you think?�that it is not that�with that barrier between us�you cannot reconcile it to your conscience�"
"Quite, quite sure!" interrupt I, with passionate emphasis, looking back unflinchingly into the angry depths of his eyes, "it has nothing to say to conscience! it has nothing to say to the wrongness of it" (crimsoning as I speak). "If it were quite right�if it were my duty�if it were the only way to save myself from hanging" (reaching after an ever higher and higher climax), "I never, NEVER could say that I was fond of you! I do not see what there is to be fond of in you! before God, I do not!"
"There!" he says, hoarsely stretching out his hand, as if to ward off a blow, "that will do!�stop!�you will never outdo that!"
A moment's pause.
Down in the loneliness of this dell, the twilight is creeping quickly on: when once it begins it tarries not. Out in the open country I dare say that it is still broad daylight; but here, the hues of the moss carpet are growing duller, and the brook is darkening. In a sudden panic, I hastily catch up my hat, which has fallen to the ground, and without a word or look of farewell, begin to run fast along the homeward path. Before I have gone ten yards he has overtaken me. His face is distorted by passion out of all its beauty.
"Nancy," he says, in a voice rendered almost unrecognizable by extreme agitation, walking quickly alongside of me, "we are not going to part like this!"
"Do not call me Nancy!" cry I, indignantly; "it makes me sick!"
"What does it matter what I call you?" he cries, impatiently; "of what consequence is such a trifle? I will call you by what name you please, but for this once you must listen to me. I know, as well as you do, that it is my last chance!"
"That it is!" put in I, viciously.
The path is beginning to rise. After mounting the slope, we shall soon be out of the wood, and in the peopled open again.
"How can I help it, if I have gone mad?" he cries violently, evidently driven to desperation by the shortness of the time before him.
"Mad!" echo I, scornfully, "not a bit of it! you are as sane as I am!"
All this time we are posting along in mad haste. Thank God! the high-road is in sight, the cheerful, populous, light high-road. The trees grow thinner, and the path broadens. Even from here, we can plainly see the carts and carters. He stops, and making me stop, too, snatches both my hands.
"Nancy!" he says, harshly, stooping over me, while his eyes flame with a haggard light. "Yes, I will call you so this once�to me now you are Nancy! I will not call you by his name! Is it possible? You may say that it is my egotism; but, at a moment like this, what is the use of shamming�of polite pretense? Never, never before in all my life have I given love without receiving it, and I cannot believe"�(with an accent of passionate entreaty)�"that I do now! Feeling for you as I do, do you feel absolutely nothing for me?"
"Feel!" cry I, driven out of all moderation by disgust and exasperation. "Would you like to know how I feel? I feel as if a slug had crawled over me!"
His face contracts, his eyes darken with a raging pain. He throws my hands�the hands a moment ago so jealously clasped�away from him.
"Thank you!" he says, after a pause, in a stiff voice of constraint. "I am satisfied!"
"And a very good thing too!" say I, sturdily, still at boiling-point, and diminishing with quick steps the small space still intervening between me and the road.
"Stay!" he says, overtaking me once again, as I reach it, and laying his hand in detention on my arm. "One word more! I should be sorry to part from you�such friends as we have been"�(with a sneer)�"without one good wish. Lady Tempest, I hope"�(smiling with malevolent irony)�"that your fidelity will be rewarded as it deserves."
"I have no doubt of it!" reply I, steadily; but even as I speak, a sharp jealous pain runs through my heart. Thank God! he cannot see it! |
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