Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER XXXIII
So this is the way in which Barbara's hope dies! Our hopes have as many ways of dying as our bodies. Sometimes they pine and fall into a slow consumption, we nursing, cockering, and physicking them to the last. Sometimes they fall down dead suddenly, as one that in full health, with his bones full of marrow, and his eyes full of light, drops wordless into the next world unaware. This last has been Barbara's case. When she thought it healthiest, and most vigorous in its stalwart life, then the death-mark was on it. To most of us, O friends, troubles are as great stones cast unexpectedly on a smooth road; over which, in a dark night, we trip, and grumblingly stumble, cursing, and angrily bruising our limbs. To a few of us, they are ladders, by which we climb to God; hills, that lift us nearer heaven�that heaven, which, however certainly�with whatever mathematical precision�it has been demonstrated to us that it exists not here, nor there, nor yet anywhere, we still dimly, with yearning tears and high longings, grasp at. Barbara has always looked heavenward. In all her mirth, God has mixed. Now, therefore, in this grief that He has sent her�this ignoble grief, that yet cuts the none less deeply for being ignoble, and excluding the solace of human sympathy, she but thrusts her hand with a fuller confidence in his, and fixes her sweet eyes with a more reverent surety on the one prime consoler of humankind, who, from his Cross, has looked royally down the toiling centuries�the king, whom this generation, above all generations, is laboring�and, as not a few think, successfully�to discrown. To her, his kingship is as unquestioned as when heretics and paynims burnt to prove it.
Often, since then, in those vain longings that come to each of us, I suppose, I tried in after-days�sometimes I try now, to stretch my arms out wide-backward toward the past�to speak the words that would have been as easily spoken then as any other�that no earthly power can ever make spoken words now, of sympathy and appreciation to Barbara.
I did say loving things, but they seem to me now to have been but scant and shabby. Why did not I say a great many more? Oh, all of you who live with those that are dearer to you than they seem, tell them every day how much you love them! at the risk of wearying them, tell them, I pray you: it will save you, perhaps, many after-pangs.
I think that, at this time, there are in me two Nancys�Barbara's Nancy, and Roger's Nancy; the one so vexed, thwarted, and humiliated in spirit, that she feels as if she never could laugh quite heartily again; the other, so utterly and triumphantly glad, that any future tears or trials seem to her in the highest degree improbable. And Barbara herself is on the side of this latter. From her hopeful speech and her smiles, you would think that some good news had come to her�that she was on the eve of some long-looked-for, yet hardly-hoped prosperity. Not that she is unnaturally or hysterically lively�an error into which many, making such an effort and struggle for self-conquest, would fall. Barbara's mirth was never noisy, as mine and the boys' so often was. Perhaps�nay, I have often thought since, certainly�she weeps as she prays, in secret; but God is the only One who knows of her tears, as of her prayers. She has always been one to go halves in her pleasures, but of her sorrows she will give never a morsel to any one.
Her very quietness under her trouble�her silence under it�her equanimity�mislead me. It is the impulse of any hurt thing to cry out. I, myself, have always done it. Half unconsciously, I am led by this reasoning to think that Barbara's wound cannot be very deep, else would she shrink and writhe beneath it. So I talk to her all day, with merciless length, about Roger. I go through all the old queries. I again critically examine my face, and arrive�not only at the former conclusion, that one side is worse-looking than the other, but also that it looks ten years older.
I have my flax hair built in many strange and differing fashions, and again unbuilt: piled high, to give me height; twisted low, in a vain endeavor to liken me to the Greeks; curled, plaited, frizzed, and again unfrizzed. I institute a searching and critical examination of my wardrobe, rejecting this and that; holding one color against my cheek, to see whether my pallor will be able to bear it; turning away from another with a grimace of self-disgust.
And this is the same "I," who thought it so little worth while to win the good opinion of father's blear-eyed old friend, that I went to my first meeting with him with a scorched face, loose hair, tottering, all through prayers, on the verge of a descent about my neck, and a large round hole, smelling horribly of singeing, burnt in the very front of my old woolen frock.
His coming is near now. This very day I shall see him come in that door. He will sit in that chair. His head will dent that cushion. I shall sit on a footstool at his feet. The better to imagine the position, I push a footstool into the desired neighborhood to Roger's arm-chair, and already see myself, with the eye of faith, in solid reality occupying it. I rehearse all the topics that will engage my tongue. The better to realize their effect upon him, I give utterance out loud to the many greetings, to the numberless fond and pretty things with which I mean to load him.
He always looked so very joyful when I said any little civil thing to him, and I so seldom, seldom did. Ah! we will change all that! He shall be nauseated with sweets. And then, still sitting by him, holding his hand, and with my head (dressed in what I finally decide upon as the becomingest fashion) daintily rested on his arm, I will tell him all my troubles. I will tell him of Algy's estrangement, his cold looks and harsh words. Without any outspoken or bitter abuse of her, I will yet manage cunningly to set him on his guard against Mrs. Huntley. I will lament over Bobby to him. Yes, I will tell him all my troubles�all, that is, with one reservation.
Barbara is no longer here. She has gone home.
"You will be better by yourselves," she says, gently, when she announces her intention of going. "He will like it better. I should if I were he. It will be like a new honey-moon."
"That it will not," reply I, stoutly, recollecting how much I yawned, and how largely Mr. Musgrave figured in the first. "I have no opinion of honey-moons; no more would you if you had had one."
"Should not I?" speaking a little absently, while her eyes stray through the window to the serene coldness of the sky, and the pallid droop of the snow-drops in the garden-border.
"You are sure," say I, earnestly, taking her light hand in mine, "that you are not going because you think that you are not wanted now�that now, that I have my�my own property again" (smiling irrepressibly), "I can do very well without you."
"Quite sure, Nancy!" looking back into my eager eyes with confident affection.
"And you will come back very soon? very?"
"When you quarrel," she answers, her face dimpling into a laugh, "I will come and make it up between you."
"You must come before then," say I, with a proud smile, "or your visit is likely to be indefinitely postponed."
Roger and I quarrel! We both find the idea so amusing that we laugh in concert. |
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