In the Year of Jubilee Part 31

Impatient to be gone, she lingered minute after minute, and broke hurriedly from his restraining arms at last. The second outer door, which Tarrant had closed on her entrance, surprised her by its prison-like ma.s.siveness. In the wooden staircase she stopped timidly, but at the exit her eyes turned to an inscription above, which she had just glanced at when arriving: _Surrexit e flammis_, and a date. Nancy had no Latin, but guessed an interpretation from the last word.

Through the little court, with its leafy plane-trees and white-worn cobble-stones, she walked with bent head, hearing the roar of Holborn through the front archway, and breathing more freely when she gained the quiet garden at the back of the Inn.

Tarrant's step sounded behind her. Looking up she asked the meaning of the inscription she had seen.

'You don't know Latin? Well, why should you? _Surrexit e flammis_, "It rose again from the flames."

'I thought it might be something like that. You will be patient with my ignorance?'

A strange word upon Nancy's lips. No mortal ere this had heard her confess to ignorance.

'But you know the modern languages?' said Tarrant, smiling.

'Yes. That is, a little French and German--a very little German.'

Tarrant mused, seemingly with no dissatisfaction.

CHAPTER 4

In her brother's looks and speech Nancy detected something mysterious.

Undoubtedly he was keeping a secret from her, and there could be just as little doubt that he would not keep it long. Whenever she questioned him about the holiday at Scarborough, he put on a smile unlike any she had ever seen on his face, so profoundly thoughtful was it, so loftily reserved. On the subject of Mrs. Damerel he did not choose to be very communicative; Nancy gathered little more than she had learnt from his letter. But very plainly the young man held himself in higher esteem than hitherto; very plainly he had learnt to think of 'the office' as a burden or degradation, from which he would soon escape. Prompted by her own tormenting conscience, his sister wondered whether f.a.n.n.y French had anything to do with the mystery; but this seemed improbable. She mentioned f.a.n.n.y's name one evening.

'Do you see much of her?'

'Not much,' was the dreamy reply. 'When are you going to call?'

'Oh, not at present,' said Nancy.

'You've altered again, then?'

She vouchsafed no answer.

'There's something I think I ought to tell you,' said Horace, speaking as though he were the elder and felt a responsibility. 'People have been talking about you and Mr. Crewe.'

'What!' She flashed into excessive anger. 'Who has been talking?'

'The people over there. Of course I know it's all nonsense. At least'--he raised his eyebrows--'I suppose it is.'

'_I_ should suppose so,' said Nancy, with vehement scorn.

Their father's illness imposed a restraint upon trifling conversation.

Mary Woodruff, now attending upon Mr. Lord under the doctor's directions, had held grave talk with Nancy. The Barmbys, father and son, called frequently, and went away with gloomy faces. Nancy and her brother were summoned, separately, to the invalid's room at uncertain times, but neither was allowed to perform any service for him; their sympathy, more often than not, excited irritation; the sufferer always seemed desirous of saying more than the few and insignificant words which actually pa.s.sed his lips, and generally, after a long silence, he gave the young people an abrupt dismissal. With his daughter he spoke at length, in language which awed her by its solemnity; Nancy could only understand him as meaning that his end drew near. He had been reviewing, he said, the course of her life, and trying to forecast her future.

'I give you no more advice; it would only be repeating what I have said hundreds of times. All I can _do_ for your good, I have done. You will understand me better if you live a few more years, and I think, in the end, you will be grateful to me.'

Nancy, sitting by the bedside, laid a hand upon her father's and sobbed.

She entreated him to believe that even now she understood how wisely he had guided her.

'Tried to, Nancy; tried to, my dear. Guidance isn't for young people now-a-days. Don't let us shirk the truth. I have never been satisfied with you, but I have loved you--'

'And I you, dear father--I have! I have!--I know better now how good your advice was. I wish--far, far more sincerely than you think--that I had kept more control upon myself--thought less of myself in every way--'

Whilst she spoke through her tears, the yellow, wrinkled face upon the pillow, with its sunken eyes and wasted lips, kept sternly motionless.

'If you won't mock at me,' Stephen pursued, 'I will show you an example you would do well to imitate. It is our old servant, now my kindest, truest friend. If I could hope that you will let her be _your_ friend, it would help to put my mind at rest. Don't look down upon her,--that's such a poor way of thinking. Of all the women I have known, she is the best. Don't be too proud to learn from her, Nancy. In all these twenty years that she has been in my house, whatever she undertook to do, she did well;--nothing too hard or too humble for her, if she thought it her duty. I know what that means; I myself have been a poor, weak creature, compared with her. Don't be offended because I ask you to take pattern by her. I know her value now better than I ever knew it before. I owe her a debt I can't pay.'

Nancy left the room burdened with strange and distressful thoughts. When she saw Mary she looked at her with new feelings, and spoke to her less familiarly than of wont. Mary was very silent in these days; her face had the dignity of a profound unspoken grief.

To his son, Mr. Lord talked only of practical things, urging sound advice, and refraining, now, from any mention of their differences.

Horace, absorbed in preoccupations, had never dreamt that this illness might prove fatal; on finding Nancy in tears, he was astonished.

'Do you think it's dangerous?' he asked.

'I'm afraid he will never get well.'

It was Sunday morning. The young man went apart and pondered. After the mid-day meal, having heard from Mary that his father was no worse, he left home without remark to any one, and from Camberwell Green took a cab to Trafalgar Square. At the Hotel Metropole he inquired for Mrs.

Damerel; her rooms were high up, and he ascended by the lift. Sunk in a deep chair, her feet extended upon a ha.s.sock, Mrs. Damerel was amusing herself with a comic paper; she rose briskly, though with the effort of a person who is no longer slim.

'Here I am, you see!--up in the clouds. Now, _did_ you get my letter?'

'No letter, but a telegram.'

'There, I thought so. Isn't that just like me? As soon as I had sent out the letter to post, I said to myself that I had written the wrong address. What address it _was_, I couldn't tell you, to save my life, but I shall see when it comes back from the post-office. I rather suspect it's gone to Gunnersbury; just then I was thinking about somebody at Gunnersbury--or somebody at Hampstead, I can't be sure which. What a good thing I wired!--Oh, now, Horace, I _don't_ like that, I don't really!'

The young man looked at her in bewilderment.

'What don't you like?'

'Why, that tie. It won't do at all. Your taste is generally very good, but that tie! I'll choose one for you to-morrow, and let you have it the next time you come. Do you know, I've been thinking that it might be well if you parted your hair in the middle. I don't care for it as a rule; but in your case, with your soft, beautiful hair, I think it would look well. Shall we try? Wait a minute; I'll run for a comb.'

'But suppose some one came--'

'n.o.body will come, my dear boy. Hardly any one knows I'm here. I like to get away from people now and then; that's why I've taken refuge in this c.o.c.k-loft.'

She disappeared, and came back with a comb of tortoise-sh.e.l.l.

'Sit down there. Oh, what hair it is, to be sure! Almost as fine as my own. I think you'll have a delicious moustache.'

Her personal appearance was quite in keeping with this vivacity. Rather short, and inclining--but as yet only inclining--to rotundity of figure, with a peculiarly soft and clear complexion, Mrs. Damerel made a gallant battle against the hostile years. Her bright eye, her moist lips, the admirable smoothness of brow and cheek and throat, bore witness to sound health; as did the rows of teeth, incontestably her own, which she exhibited in her frequent mirth. A handsome woman still, though not of the type that commands a reverent admiration. Her frivolity did not exclude a suggestion of shrewdness, nor yet of capacity for emotion, but it was difficult to imagine wise or elevated thought behind that narrow brow. She was elaborately dressed, with only the most fashionable symbols of widowhood; rings adorned her podgy little hand, and a bracelet her white wrist. Refinement she possessed only in the society-journal sense, but her intonation was that of the idle cla.s.s, and her grammar did not limp.

'There--let me look. Oh, I think that's an improvement--more _distingue_. And now tell me the news. How is your father?'

'Very bad, I'm afraid,' said Horace, when he had regarded himself in a mirror with something of doubtfulness. 'Nancy says that she's afraid he won't get well.'

'Oh, you don't say that! Oh, how very sad! But let us hope. I can't think it's so bad as that.'