Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER XXXIV
"Gertrude. Is my knight come? O the Lord, my band! Sister, do my cheeks look well? Give me a little box o' the ear, that I may seem to blush."�Eastward Hoe.
She is gone now. The atmosphere of the house seems less clear, less pure, now that she has left it. As she drives away, it seems to me, looking after her, that no flower ever had a modester face, a more delicate bloom. If I had time to think about it, I should fret sorely after her, I should grievously miss her; but I have none.
The carriage that takes her to the station is to wait half an hour, and then bring back Roger. There is, therefore, not more than enough time for me to make the careful and lengthy toilet, on which I have expended so much painstaking thought. I have deferred making it till now, so that I may appear in perfect dainty freshness, as if I had just emerged from the manifold silver papers of a bandbox, before him when he arrives�that not a hair of my flax head may be displaced from its silky sweep; that there may be no risk of Vick jumping up, and defiling me with muddy paws that know no respect of clothes.
I take a long time over it. I snub my maid more than I ever did in my life before. But I am complete now; to the last pin I am finished. Perhaps�though this does not strike me till the last moment�perhaps I am rather, nay, more than rather, overdressed for the occasion. But surely this, in a person who has not long been in command of fine clothes, and even in that short time has had very few opportunities of airing them, is pardonable.
You remember that it is February. Well, then, this is the warm splendor in which I am clad. Genoa velvet, of the color of a dark sapphire, trimmed with silver-fox fur; and my head crowned with a mob-cap, concerning which I am in doubt, and should be nervously glad to have the boys here to enlighten me as to whether it is very becoming or rather ridiculous. The object of the mob-cap is to approximate my age to Roger's, and to assure all such as the velvet and fur leave in doubt, that I am entitled to take my stand among the portly ranks of British matrons.
"Algy was right," say I, soliloquizing aloud, as I stand before the long cheval glass, with a back-hair glass in one hand, by whose aid I correct my errors in the profile, three-quarters or back view; "mine is not the most hopeless kind of ugliness. It is certainly modifiable by dress."
So saying, I lay down the hand-glass, and walk sedately down-stairs, holding my head stiffly erect, and looking over my shoulder, like a child, at the effect of my blue train sweeping down the steps after me.
Arrived in my boudoir, I go and stand by the window, though there are yet ten minutes before he is due. Once I open the casement to listen, but hastily close it again, afraid lest the wintry wind should ruffle the satin smoothness of my hair, or push the mob-cap awry. Then I sit carefully down, and, harshly repulsing an overture on the part of Vick to jump into my lap, fix my eyes upon the dark bare boughs of the tall and distant elms, from between which I shall see him steal into sight. The time ticks slowly on. He is due now. Five more lame, crawling minutes�ten!�no sign of him. Again I rise, unclose the casement, and push my matronly head a little way out to listen. Yes! yes! there is the distant but not doubtful sound of a horse's four hoofs smartly trotting and splashing along the muddy road. Three minutes more, and the sun catches and brightly gleams on one of the quickly-turning wheels of the dog-cart as it rolls toward me, between the wintry trees.
At first I cannot see the occupants; the boughs and twigs interpose to hide them; but presently the dog-cart emerges into the open. There is only one person in it!
At first I decline to believe my own eyes. I rub them. I stretch my head farther out. Alas! self-deception is no longer possible: the groom returns as he went�alone. Roger has not come!
The dog-cart turns toward the stables, and I run to the bell and pull it violently. I can hardly wait till it is answered. At last, after an interval, which seems to me like twenty minutes, but which that false, cold-blooded clock proclaims to be two, the footman enters.
"Sir Roger has not come," I say more affirmatively than interrogatively, for I have no doubt on the subject. "Why did not the groom wait for the next train?"
"If you please, my lady, Sir Roger has come."
"Has come!" repeat I, in astonishment, opening my eyes; "then where is he?"
"He is walking up, my lady."
"What! all the way from Bishopsthorpe?" cry I, incredulously, thinking of the five miry miles that intervene between us and that station. "Impossible!"
"No, my lady, not all the way; only from Mrs. Huntley's."
I feel the color rushing away from my cheeks, and turn quickly aside, that my change of countenance may not be perceived.
"Did he get out there?" I ask, faintly.
"Mrs. Huntley was at the gate, my lady, and Sir Roger got down to speak to her, and bid James drive on and tell your ladyship he would be here directly."
"Very well," say I, unsteadily, still averting my face, "that will do."
He is gone, and I need no longer mind what color my face is, nor what shape of woeful jealousy my late so complacent features assume.
So this is what comes of thinking life such a grand and pleasant thing, and this world such a lovely, satisfying paradise! Wait long enough�(I have not had to wait very long for my part)�and every sweet thing turns to gall-like bitterness between one's teeth! The experience of a few days ago might have taught me that, one would think, but I was dull to thick-headedness. I required two lessons�the second, oh how far harsher than even the first!
In a moment I have taken my resolution. I am racing up-stairs. I have reached my room. I do not summon my maid. One requires no assistance to enable one to unbuild, deface, destroy. In a second�in much less time than it takes me to write it�I have torn off the mob-cap, and thrown it on the floor. If I had done what I wished, if I had yielded to my first impulse, I should also have trampled upon it; but from the extremity of petulance, I am proud to be able to tell you that I refrain. With rapid fingers I unbutton my blue-velvet gown, and step out of it, leaving it in a costly heap on the floor. Then I open the high folding-doors of the wardrobe, and run my eye over its contents; but the most becoming is no longer what I seek. For a moment or two I stand undecided, then my eye is caught by a venerable garment, loathly and ill-made, which I had before I married, and have since kept, more as a relic than any thing else�a gown of that peculiar shade of sallow, bilious, Bismarck brown, which is the most trying to the paleness of my skin. Before any one could say "Jack Robinson," it is down, and I am in it. Then, without even a parting smooth to the hair, which the violent off-tearing of my cap must have roughened and disheveled, I go down-stairs and re�nter the boudoir. As I do so, I catch an accidental glimpse of myself in a glass. Good Heavens! Can three minutes (for I really have not been longer about it) have wrought such a monstrous metamorphosis? Is every woman as utterly dependent for her charms upon her husk as I am? Can this sad, sallow slip of a girl be the beaming, shapely, British matron I contemplated with so innocently pleased an eye half an hour ago? If, in all my designs, I could have the perfect success which has crowned my efforts at self-disfigurement, I should be among the most prosperous of my species.
I sit down as far from the window as the dimensions of the room will allow, call Vick, who comes at first sneakingly and doubtful of her reception, up on my lap, and take a book. It is the one nearest to my hand, and I plunge into it haphazard in the middle.
This is the sentence that first greets me: "Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that she loved him too much�more than God himself�yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened."
Not a very difficult one to construe, is it? and yet, having come to the end, and found that it conveyed no glimmering of an idea to my mind, I begin it over again.
"Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that she loved him too much�more than God himself�yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened."
Still no better! What is it all about?
I begin over again.
"Her whole heart was in her boy," etc. I go through this process ten times. I should go through it twenty, or even thirty, for I am resolved to go on reading, but at the end of the tenth, my ear�unconsciously strained�catches the sound of a step at the stair-foot. It is not the footman's. It is firmer, heavier, and yet quicker.
Eight weary months is it since I last heard that footfall. My heart pulses with mad haste, my cheeks throb, but I sit still, and hold the book before my eyes. I will not go to meet him. I will be as indifferent as he! When he opens the door, I will not even look round, I will be too much immersed in the page before me.
"Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that�"
The door-handle is turning. I cannot help it! Against my will, my head turns too. With no volition of my own�against my firmest intention�my feet carry me hastily toward him. My arms stretch themselves out. Thank God! thank God! whatever happens afterward, I shall still thank God, and call him good for allowing it. I am in Roger's embrace. No more mistakes! no more delays! he is here, and I am kissing him as I never kissed any one�as I certainly never kissed him in my life before.
Well, I suppose that in every life there are some moments that are absolutely good�that one could not mend even if one were given the power to try! I suppose that even those who, looking back over their history, say, most distinctly and certainly, "It was a failure," can yet lay the finger of memory on some such gold minutes�it may be only half a dozen, only four, only two�but still on some.
This is one of my gold moments, one of those misplaced ones that have strayed out of heaven, where, perhaps, they are all such�perhaps�one can't be sure, for what human imagination can grasp the idea of even a day, wholly made of such minutes?
I have forgotten Mrs. Huntley�Mr. Musgrave. Every ill suspicion, every stinging remembrance, is dead or fallen into a trance. All bad thoughts have melted away from the earth. Only joyful love and absolute faith remain, only the knowledge that Roger is mine, and I am his, and that we are in each other's arms. I do not know how long we remain without speaking. I do not imagine that souls in bliss ever think of looking at the clock. He is the first to break silence. For the first time for eight months I hear his voice again�the voice that for so many weeks seemed to me no better than any other voice�whose tones I now feel I could pick out from those of any other living thing, did all creation shout together.
"Let me look at my wife!" he says, taking my countenance in his tender hands, as if it were made of old china, and would break if he let it fall. "I feel as if I had never had a wife before, as if it were quite a new plaything."
I make no verbal answer. I am staring up with all my eyes into his face, thinking, with a sort of wonder, how much goodlier, younger, statelier it is than it has appeared to me in any of those dream-pictures, which yet mostly flatter.
"My wife! my wife!" he says, speaking the words most softly, as if they greatly pleased him, and replacing with carefullest fingers a stray and arrant lock that has wandered from its fellows into my left eye. "What has come to you? Had I forgotten what you were like? How pretty you are! How well you look!"
"Do I?" say I, with a pleasant simper; then, with a sudden and overwhelming recollection of the bilious gingery frock, and the tousled hair, "No, nonsense!" I say, uneasily, "impossible! You are laughing at me! Ah!"�(with a sigh of irrepressible regret and back-handed pride)�"you should have seen me half an hour ago! I did look nice then, if you like."
"Why nicer than now?"�(with a puzzled smile that both plays about his bearded lips and gayly shines in his steel-gray eyes).
"Oh, never mind! never mind!" reply I, in some confusion, "it is a long story; it is of no consequence, but I did."
He does not press for an explanation, for which I am obliged to him.
"Nancy!" he says, with a sort of hesitating joy, a diffident triumph in his voice, "do you know, I believe you have kept your promise! I believe, I really believe, that you are a little glad to see me!"
"Are you glad to see me, is more to the purpose?" return I, descending out of heaven with a pout, and returning to the small jealousies and acerbities of earth, and to the recollection of that yet unexplained alighting at Aninda's gate.
"Am I?"
He seems to think that no asseverations, no strong adjectives or intensifying adverbs, no calling upon sun and moon and stars to bear witness to his gladness, can increase the force of those two tiny words, so he adds none.
"I wonder, then," say I, in a rather sneaky and shamefaced manner, mumbling and looking down, "that you were not in a greater hurry to get to me?"
"In a greater hurry!" he repeats, in an accent of acute surprise. "Why, child, what are you talking about? Since we landed, I have neither slept nor eaten. I drove straight across London, and have been in the train ever since."
"But�between�this�and the�station?" suggest I, slowly, having taken hold of one of the buttons of his coat; the very one that in former difficulties I used always to resort to.
"You mean about my walking up?" he says readily, and without the slightest trace of guilty consciousness, indeed with a distinct and open look of pleasure; "but, my darling, how could I tell how long she would keep me? poor little woman!" (beginning to laugh and to put back the hair from his tanned forehead). "I am afraid I did not bless her when I saw her standing at her gate! I had half a mind to ask her whether another time would not do as well, but she looked so eager to hear about her husband�you know I have been seeing him at St. Thomas�such a wistful little face�and I knew that she could not keep me more than ten minutes; and, altogether when I thought of her loneliness and my own luck�"
He breaks off.
"Are you so sure she is lonely?" I say, with an innocent air of asking for information, and still working hard at the button; "are people always lonely when their husbands are away?"
He looks at me strangely for a moment; then, "Of course she is lonely, poor little thing!" he says, warmly; "how could she help it?"
A slight pause.
"Most men," say I, jealously, "would not have thought it a hardship to walk up and down between the laurustinus with Mrs. Z�phine, I can tell you!"
"Would not they?" he answers, indifferently. "I dare say not! she always was a good little thing!"
"Excellent!" reply I, with a nasty dryness, "bland, passionate, and deeply religious!"
Again he looks at me in surprise�a surprise which, after a moment's reflection, melts and brightens into an expression of pleasure.
"Did you care so much about my coming that ten minutes seemed to make a difference?" he asks, in an eager voice. "Is it possible that you were in a hurry for me?"
Why cannot I speak truth, and say yes? Why does an objectlessly lying devil make its inopportune entry into me? Through some misplaced and crooked false shame I answer, "Not at all! not at all! of course a few minutes one way or the other could not make much difference; I was only puzzled to know what had become of you?"
He looks a shade disappointed, and for a moment we are both silent. We have sat down side by side on the sofa. Vick is standing on her hinder legs, with her forepaws rested on Roger's knee. Her tail is wagging with the strong and untiring regularity of a pendulum, and a smirk of welcome and recognition is on her face. Roger's arm is round me, and we are holding each other's hands, but we are no longer in heaven. I could not tell you why, but we are not. Some stupid constraint�quite of earth�has fallen upon me. Where are all those most tender words, those profuse endearments with which I meant to have greeted him?
"And so it is actually true!" he says, with a long-drawn sigh of relief; his eyes wandering round the room, and taking in all the familiar objects; "there is no mistake about it! I am actually holding your real live hand" (turning it gently about and softly considering the long slight fingers and pink palm)�"in mine! Ah! my dear, how often, how often I have held it so in my dreams! Have you ever" (speaking with a sort of doubtfulness and uncertain hope)�"have you ever�no, I dare say not�so held mine?"
The diffident passion in his voice for once destroys that vile constraint, dissipates that idiotic sense of bashfulness.
"Scores of times!" I answer, letting my head drop on his shoulder, and not taking the trouble to raise it again.
"I never used to think myself of a very nervous turn!" he says, presently, with a smile. "Nancy, you will laugh at me, but I assure you upon my honor that all the way home I have been in the most abject and deadly fright: at every puff of wind I thought we were infallibly going to the bottom: whenever the carriage rocked in the least to-day on the way down, I made up my mind we were going to smash! Little woman, what can a bit of a thing like you have done to me to make me seem so much more valuable to myself than I have ever done these eight-and-forty years?"
I think no answer to this so suitable and seemly as a dumb friction of my left cheek against the rough cloth of the shoulder on which it has reposed itself.
"Talk to me, Nancy!" he says, in a quiet half-whisper of happiness. "Let me hear the sound of your voice! I am sick of my own; I have had a glut of that all these weary eight months; tell me about them all! How are they all? how are the boys?" (with a playful smile of recollection at what used to be my one subject, the one theme on which I was wont to wax illimitably diffuse). But now, at the magic name no pleasant garrulity overcomes me; only the remembrance of my worries; of all those troubles that I mean now to transfer from my own to Roger's broad shoulders, swoop down upon me.
I raise my head and speak with a clouded brow and a complaining tone.
"The Brat has gone back to Oxford," I say, gloomily; "Bobby has gone to Hong-Kong, and Algy has gone to the dogs�or at least is going there as hard as he can!"
"To the dogs?" (with an accent of surprise and concern); "what do you mean? what has sent him there?"
"You had better ask Mrs. Z�phine," reply I, bitterly, thinking, with a lively exasperation, of the changed and demoralized Algy I had last seen�soured, headstrong, and unhinged.
"Z�phine!" (repeating the name with an accent of thorough astonishment), "what on earth can she have to say to it?"
"Ah, what?" reply I, with oracular spite; then, overcome with remorse at the thought of the way in which I was embittering the first moments of his return, I rebury my face in his shoulder.
"I will tell you about that to-morrow," I say; "to-day is a good day, and we will talk only of good things and of good people."
He does not immediately answer. My remark seems to have buried him in thought. Presently he shakes off his distraction and speaks again.
"And Barbara? how is she? She has not" (beginning to laugh)�"she has not gone to the dogs, I suppose!"
"No," say I, slowly, not thinking of what I am saying, but with my thoughts wandering off to the greatest and sorest of my afflictions, "not yet."
"And" (smiling) "your plan. See what a good memory I have�your plan of marrying her to Musgrave, how does that work?"
"My plan!" cry I, tremulously, while a sudden torrent of scarlet pours all over my face and neck. "I do not know what you are talking about! I never had any such plan! Phew!" (lifting up the arm that is round my waist, hastily removing it, rising and going to the window), "how hot this room grows of an afternoon!" |
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