Nancy by Rhoda Broughton - CHAPTER XXXVII
"Yea, by God's rood, I trusted you too well!"
In the hall we part without a word, and I, spiritlessly, mount the staircase alone. How I flew down it this morning, three steps at a time, and had some ado to hinder myself from sliding down the banisters, as we have all often, with dangerous joy, done at home! Now I crawl up, like some sickly old person. When I reach my bedroom, I throw myself into the first chair, and lie in it�
"... quiet as any water-sodden log
Stayed in the wandering warble of a brook."
I do not attempt to take off my hat and jacket. Of what use is it to take them off more than to leave them on, or to leave them on more than to take them off? Of what use is any thing, pray? What a weary round life is! what a silly circle of unfortunate repetitions! eating only to be hungry again; waking only to sleep; sleeping only to wake!
At first I am too inert even to think, even to lift my hand to protect my cheek from Vick's muddy paws, who, annoyed at my evident inattention to her presence, is sitting on my lap, making little impatient clawings at my defenseless countenance. But gradually on the river of recollection all the incidents of the morning flow through my mind. In more startling relief than ever, the astounding change in Roger, wrought by those ill-starred two hours, stands out. Is it possible that I may have been attributing it to a wrong cause? Doubtless, the first interview with the woman he had loved, and who had thrown him over (by-the-by, how forgiving men are!)�yes, the first, probably, since they had stood in the relation of betrothed people to each other�must have been full of pain. Doubtless, the contrast between the crude gawkiness of the raw girl he has drifted into marrying�for I suppose it was more accident than any thing else�with the mature and subtile grace, the fine and low-voiced sweetness of the woman whom his whole heart and soul and taste chose and approved, must have struck him with keen force. I expected that: it would not have taken me by surprise. If he had emerged from among the laurestines, depressed, and vainly struggling for a factitious cheerfulness, I think I could have understood it. I think I could have borne with it, could have tried meekly to steal back into his heart again, to win him back, in despite of ignorance, gawkiness, and all other my drawbacks, by force of sheer love.
But the change was surely too abrupt to be accounted for on this hypothesis. Would Roger, my pattern of courtesy�Roger, who shrinks from hurting the meanest beggar's feelings�would he, in such plain terms, have deplored and wished undone our marriage, if it were only suffering to himself that it had entailed? Has his unselfish chivalry gone the way of Algy's brotherly love? Impossible! the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems�the more certain it appears to me that I must look elsewhere for the cause of the alteration that has so heavily darkened my day.
I have risen, and am walking quickly up and down. I have shaken off my stolid apathy, or, rather, it has fallen off of itself. Can she have told him any ill tales of me? any thing to my disadvantage? Instantly the thought of Musgrave�the black and heavy thought that is never far from the portals of my mind�darts across me, and, at the same instant, like a flash of lightning, the recollection of my meeting her on the fatal evening, just as (with tear-stained, swollen face) I had parted from Frank�of the alert and lively interest in her eyes, as she bowed and smiled to me, flames with sudden illumination into my soul. Still I can hardly credit it. It would, no doubt, be pleasant to her to sow dissension between us, but would even she dare to carry ill tales of a wife to a husband? And even supposing that she had, would he attach so much importance to my being seen with wet cheeks? I, who cry so easily�I, who wept myself nearly blind when Jacky caught his leg in the snare? If he thinks so much of that part of the tale, what would he think of the rest?
As I make this reflection I shudder, and again congratulate myself on my silence. For beyond our parting, and my tears, it is impossible that she can have told him aught.
Men are not prone to publish their own discomfitures; even I know that much. I exonerate Mr. Musgrave from all share in making it known�and have the mossed tree-trunks lips? or the loud brook an articulate tongue? Thank God! thank God! no! Nature never blabs. With infinite composure, with a most calm smile she listens, but she never tells again.
A little reassured by this thought, I resolve to remain in doubt no longer than I can help, but to ascertain, if necessary, by direct inquiry, whether my suspicions are correct. This determination is no sooner come to than it puts fresh life and energy into my limbs. I take off my hat and jacket, smooth my hair, and prepare with some alacrity for luncheon.
It is evening, however, before I have an opportunity of putting my resolve in practice. At luncheon, there are the servants; all afternoon, Roger is closeted with his agent: before we set off this morning, he never mentioned the agent: he never figured at all in our day's plan�(I imagined that he was to be kept till to-morrow); and at dinner there are the servants again. Thank God, they are gone now! We are alone, Roger and I. We are sitting in my boudoir, as in my day-dreams, before his return, I had pictured us; but, alas! where is caressing proximity which figured in all my visions? where is the stool on which I was to sit at his feet, with head confidently leaned on his arm? As it happens, Vick is sitting on the stool, and we occupy two arm-chairs, at civil distance from each other, much as if we had been married sixty years, and had hated each other for fifty-nine of them. I am idly fiddle-faddling with a piece of work, and Roger�is it possible?�is stretching out his hand toward a book.
"You do not mean to say that you are going to read?" I say, in a tone of sharp vexation.
He lays it down again.
"If you had rather talk, I will not."
"I am afraid," say I, with a sour laugh, "that you have not kept much conversation for home use! I suppose you exhausted it all, this morning, at Laurel Cottage!"
He passes his hand slowly across his forehead.
"Perhaps!�I do not think I am in a very talking vein."
"By-the-by," say I, my heart beating thick, and with a hurry and tremor in my voice, as I approach the desired yet dreaded theme, "you have never told me what it was, besides Mr. Huntley's debts, that you talked of this morning!�you owned that you did not talk of business quite all the time!"
"Did I?"
He has forgotten his book now; across the flame of the candles, he is looking full and steadily at me.
"When I asked you, you said it was not about old times?�of course�" (laughing acridly)�"I can imagine your becoming illimitably diffuse about them, but you told me, that, 'No,' you did not mention them."
"I told truth."
"You also said," continue I, with my voice still trembling, and my pulses throbbing, "that it was not Algy that you were discussing!�if I had been in your place, I could, perhaps, have found a good deal to say about him; but you told me that you never mentioned him."
"We did not."
"Then what did you talk about?" I ask, in strong excitement; "it must have been a very odd theme that you find such difficulty in repeating."
Still he is looking, with searching gravity, full in my face.
"Do you really wish to know?"
I cannot meet his eyes: something in me makes me quail before them. I turn mine away, but answer, stoutly:
"Yes, I do wish. Why should I have asked, if I did not?"
Still he says nothing: still I feel, though I am not looking at him, that his eyes are upon me.
"Was it�" say I, unable any longer to bear that dumb gaze, and preferring to take the bull by the horns, and rush on my fate�"was it any thing about me? has she been telling you any tales of�of�me?"
No answer! No sound but the clock, and Vick's heavy breathing, as she peacefully snores on the footstool. I cannot bear the suspense. Again I lift my eyes, and look at him. Yes, I am right! the intense anxiety�the overpowering emotion on his face tell me that I have touched the right string.
"Are there�are there�are you aware that there are any tales that she could tell of you?"
Again I laugh harshly.
"Ha! ha! if we came to mutual anecdotes, I am not quite sure that I might not have the best of it!"
"That is not the question," he replies, in a voice so exceedingly stern, so absolutely different from any thing I have ever hitherto contemplated as possible in my gentle, genial Roger, that again, to the depths of my soul, I quail; how could I ever, in wildest dreams, have thought I should dare to tell him?�"it is nothing to me what tales you can tell of her!�she is not my wife!�what I wish to know�what I will know, is, whether there is any thing that she could say of you!"
For a moment, I do not answer. I cannot. A coward fear is grasping my heart with its clammy hands. Then�
"Could!" say I, shrugging my shoulders, and feebly trying to laugh derisively; "of course she could! it would be difficult to set a limit to the powers of a lady of her imagination!"
"What do you mean?" he cries, quickly, and with what sounds like a sort of hope in his voice; "have you any reason�any grounds for thinking her inventive?"
I do not answer directly.
"It is true, then," I cry, with flashing eyes, and in a voice of great and indignant anguish. "I have not been mistaken! I was right! Is it possible that you, who, only this morning, warned me with such severity against backbiting, have been calmly listening to scandalous tales about me from a stranger?"
He does not interrupt me: he is listening eagerly, and that sort of hope is still in his face.
"I knew it would come, sooner or later," I continue, speaking excitedly, and with intense bitterness, "sooner or later, I knew that it would be a case of Algy over again! but I did not�did not think that it would have been quite so soon! Great Heaven!" (smiting my hands sharply together, and looking upward), "I have fallen low! to think that I should come to be discussed by you with her!"
"I have not discussed you with her," he answers, very solemnly, and still looking at me with that profound and greedy eagerness in his eyes; "with no living soul would I discuss my wife�I should have hardly thought I need tell you that! What I heard, I heard by accident. She�as I believe, in all innocence of heart�referred to�the�the�circumstance, taking it for granted that I knew it�that you had told me of it, and I�I�" (raising his clinched right hand to emphasize his speech)�"I take God to witness, I had no more idea to what she was alluding�as soon as I understood�she must have thought me very dull�" (laughing hoarsely)�"for it was a long time before I took it in�but as soon as I understood to what manner of anecdote it was that she was referring�then, at once, I bade her be silent!�not even with her, would I talk over my wife!"
He stops. He has risen from his chair, and is now standing before me. His breath comes quick and panting; and his face is not far from being as white as mine.
"But what I have learned," he continues presently, in a low voice, that, by a great effort, he succeeds in making calm and steady, "I cannot again unlearn! I would not if I could!�I have no desire to live in a fool's paradise! I tried hard this morning�God knows what constraint I had to put upon myself�to induce you to tell me of your own accord�to volunteer it�but you would not�you were resolutely silent. Why were you? Why were you?" (breaking off with an uncontrollable emotion). "I should not have been hard upon you�I should have made allowances. God knows we all need it!"
I sit listening in a stony silence: every bit of me seems turned into cold rock.
"But now," he says, regathering his composure, and speaking with a resolute, stern quiet; "I have no other resource�you have left me none�but to come to you, and ask point-blank, is this true, or is it false?"
For a moment, my throat seems absolutely stopped up, choked; there seems no passage for my voice, through its dry, parched gates. Then at length I speak faintly: "Is what true? is what false? I suppose you will not expect me to deny it, before I know what it is?"
He does not at once answer. He takes a turn once or twice up and down the silent room, in strong endeavor to overcome and keep down his agitation, then he returns and speaks; with a face paler, indeed, than I could have imagined any thing so bronzed could be; graver, more austere than I ever thought I should see it, but still without bluster or hectoring violence.
"Is it true, then?" he says, speaking in a very low key. "Great God! that I should have to put such a question to my wife; that one evening, about a week ago, on the very day, indeed, that the news of my intended return arrived, you were seen parting with�with�Musgrave" (he seems to have an intense difficulty in pronouncing the name) "at or after nightfall, on the edge of Brindley Wood, he in a state of the most evident and extreme agitation, and you in floods of tears!�is it true, or is it false?�for God's sake, speak quickly!"
But I cannot comply with his request. I am gasping. His eyes are upon me, and, at every second's delay, they gather additional sternness. Oh, how awful they are in their just wrath! When was father, in his worst and most thunderous storms, half so dreadful? half so awe-inspiring?
"What sort of an interview could it have been to which there was such a close?" he says, as if making the reflection more to himself than to me; "speak! is it true?"
I can no longer defer my answer. One thing or another I must say: both eyes and lips imperatively demand it. Twice, nay thrice I struggle�struggle mightily to speak, and speak well and truly, and twice, nay, three times, that base fear strangles my words. Then, at length�O friends! do not be any harder upon me than you can help, for indeed, indeed I have paid sorely for it, and it is the first lie that ever I told; then, at length, with a face as wan as the ashes of a dead fire�with trembling lips, and a faint, scarcely audible voice, I say, "No, it is not true!"
"Not true?" he echoes, catching up my words quickly; but in his voice is none of the relief, the restored amenity that I had looked for, and for the hope of which I have perjured myself; equally in voice and face, there is only a deep and astonished anger.
"Not true!�you mean to say that it is false!"
"Yes, false!" I repeat in a sickly whisper. Oh, why, if I must lie, do not I do it with a bold and voluble assurance? whom would my starved pinched falsehood deceive?
"You mean to say," speaking with irrepressible excitement, while the wrathful light gathers and grows intenser in the gray depths of his eyes, "that this�this interview never took place? that it is all a delusion; a mistake?"
"Yes."
I repeat it mechanically now. Having gone thus far, I must go on, but I feel giddy and sick, and my hands grasp the arms of my chair. I feel as if I should fall out of it if they did not.
"You are sure?" speaking with a heavy emphasis, and looking persistently at me, while the anger of his eyes is dashed and crossed by a miserable entreaty. Ah! if they had had that look at first, I could have told him. "Are you sure?" he repeats, and I, driven by the fates to my destruction, while God hides his face from me, and the devil pushes me on, answer hazily, "Yes, quite sure!"
Then he asks me no more questions; he turns and slowly leaves the room, and I know that I have lied in vain! |
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