Nancy Part 26

As he reaches the door, following father, he turns and nods to me with a half-humorous smile.

"Cheer up," he says, "it shall not be a sailing-vessel."

He is gone, and I return to my former position, and my former occupation, only that now--the check of Sir Roger's presence being removed--I indulge in two or three good hearty groans. To think how the look of all things is changed since this morning!

As we came home through the fields singing, if any one had given me three wishes, I should have been puzzled what to ask--and _now_! All the good things I am going to lose march in gloomy procession before my mind. _No house-warming!_ It will have to be put off till we come back, and, by the time that we come back, Bobby will almost certainly have been sent to some foreign station for three or four years. And who knows what may happen before he returns? Perhaps--for I am in the mood when all adversities seem antecedently probable--he will _never_ come back.

Perhaps never again shall I be the willing victim of his buffets, never again shall I buffet him in return.

And the _sea_! It is all very fine for Sir Roger to take it so easily, to laugh and make unfeeling jokes at my expense! _He_ does not lie on the flat of his back, surrounded by the horrid paraphernalia of sea-sickness. _He_ walks up and down, with his hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar, and talking to the captain. _He_ cares nothing for the heaving planks. The taste of the salt air gives _him_ an appet.i.te. An _appet.i.te_! Oh, prodigious! I must say I think he might have been a _little_ more feeling, might have expressed himself a _little_ more sympathetically.

By dint of thinking over Sir Roger's iniquities on this head, I gradually work myself up into such a state of righteous indignation and injury against him, that when, after a longish interval, the door again opens to readmit him, I affect neither to see nor hear him, nor be in any way conscious of his presence. Through the c.h.i.n.ks of my fingers, dolorously spread over my face, I see that he has sat down on the other side of the table, just opposite me, and that he is smiling in the same unmirthful, gently sarcastic way, as he was when he left me.

"Nancy," he says, "I have been thinking what a pity it is that I have not a _yacht_! We might have taken our own time then, and done it enjoyably--made quite a pleasure-trip of it."

I drop my hands into my lap.

"People's ideas of pleasure differ," I say, with trite snappishness.

"Yes," he answers, a little sadly, "no two people look at any thing in _quite_ the same way, do they?--not even husband and wife."

"I suppose not," say I, still thinking of the steward.

"Do you know," he says, leaning his arms and his crossed hands on the table between us, and steadfastly regarding me, "that I never saw you look miserable before, never? I did not even know that you _could_!"

"I am not _miserable_," I answer, rather ashamed of myself, "that is far too strong a word! Of course I am a little disappointed." Then I mumble off into an indistinctness, whence the nouns "House--warming," "Bobby,"

"Gold Coast," crop out audibly.

"After all," he says, still regarding me, and speaking kindly, yet a little coldly too, "you need not look so woebegone. They say second thoughts are best, do not they? Well, I have been thinking second thoughts, and--I have altered my mind."

"You are going to stay at home?" cry I, at the top of my voice, jumping up in an ecstasy, and beginning to clap my hands.

"No," he says, gently, "not quite _that_, as I explained to you before, that is impossible: but--do not be downcast--something nearly as good. I am going to leave _you_ at home!"

To leave me at home! My first feeling is one of irrepressible relief. No sea! no steward! no courtesying ship! no swaying waves after all! Then comes a quick and strong revulsion, shame, mortification, and pain.

"To--leave--me--at home!" I repeat slowly, hardly yet grasping the idea, "to--go--_without_--me!--by yourself?"

"By myself," he answers, gently. "You see, it is no _new_ thing to me. I have been by myself for forty-seven years."

A quick, remorseful pain runs through my heart.

"But you are not by yourself any longer," I cry, eagerly. "Why do you talk as if you were? Do you count _me_ for nothing?"

"For nothing?" he answers, smiling quietly. "I am glad of an excuse to be rid of you for a bit--that is it!"

"But _is_ that it?" cry I, excitedly, rising and running round to him.

"If you are sure of that--if you will _swear_ it to me--I will not say another word. I will hold my tongue, and try to bear as well as I can, your having grown tired of me so soon--but--" speaking more slowly, and hesitating, "if--if--it is that you fancied--you thought--you imagined--that I did not _want_ to come with you--"

"My dear," he says, laughing not at all bitterly, but with a genuine amus.e.m.e.nt, "I should have been even less bright than I am, if I had not gathered that much."

I sink down on a chair, and cover my face with my hands. My _att.i.tude_ is the same as it was ten minutes ago, but oh, how different are my feelings! What bitter repentance, what acute self-contempt, invade my soul! As I so sit, I feel an arm round my waist.

"Nancy," says Sir Roger, "it was ill-naturedly said; do not fret about it; you were not in the least to blame. I should not like you half so much--should not think nearly so well of you, if you had been willing to give up all your own people, to throw them lightly over, all of a sudden, for a comparative stranger, treble your age, too"--(with a sigh)--"like me."

He generously ignores the selfish fear of sea-sickness, of _personal_ suffering, which had occupied the fore-front of my mind.

"It will be much, _much_ better, and a far more sensible plan for both of us," he continues, cheerfully. "Where would be the use of exposing you to the discomfort and misery of what you hate most on earth for no possible profit? I shall not be long away, shall be back almost before you realize that I am gone, and meanwhile I should be far happier thinking of you merry, and enjoying yourself with your brothers and sisters at Tempest, than I should be seeing you bored and suffering, with no one but me to amuse you--you know, dear--" (smiling pensively); "do not be angry with me, it was no fault of yours; but you _did_ grow rather tired of me at Dresden."

"I did not! I did not!" cry I, bursting into a pa.s.sion of tears, and a.s.severating all the more violently because I feel, with a sting of remorse, that there is a tiny grain of truth--not so large a one as he thinks, but still a _grain_ in his accusations. "It seemed rather _quiet_ at first--I had always been used to such a noisy house, and I missed the boys' chatter a little, perhaps; but _indeed_, INDEED, that was all!"

"Was it? I dare say! I dare say!" he says, soothingly.

"You shall _not_ leave me behind," say I, still weeping with stormy bitterness. "I _will not_ be left behind! What business have you to go without me? Am I to be only a fair-weather wife to you? to go shares in all your pleasant things, and then--when any thing hard or disagreeable comes--to be left out. I tell you" (looking up at him with streaming eyes) "that I _will not_! I WILL NOT!"

"My darling!" he says, looking most thoroughly concerned, I do not fancy that crying women have formed a large part of his life-experience--"you misunderstand me! I will own to you, that five minutes ago I did you an injustice; but _now_ I know, I am thoroughly convinced, that you would follow me without a murmur or a sulky look to the world's end--and"

(laughing) "be frightfully sea-sick all the way; but" (kindly patting my heaving shoulder) "do you think that I want to be hampered with a little invalid? and, supposing that I took you with me, whom should I have to look after things at Tempest, and keep them straight for me against I come home?"

"I know what it is," I cry, pa.s.sionately clinging round his neck, "you think I do not like you! I _see_ it! twenty times a day, in a hundred things that you do and leave undone! but indeed, _indeed_, you never were more mistaken in all your life! I will own to you that I did not care _very_ much about you at first. I thought you good, and kind, and excellent, but I was not _fond_ of you; but _now_, every day, every hour that I live, I like you better! Ask Barbara, ask the boys if I do not! I like you ten thousand times better than I did the day I married you!"

"_Like_ me!" he repeats a little dreamily, looking with a strong and bitter yearning into my eyes; then, seeing that I am going to a.s.severate, "for G.o.d's sake, child," he says, hastily, "do not tell me that you _love_ me, for I know it is not true! you can no more help it than I can help caring for you in the idiotic, mad way, that I do!

Perhaps, on some blessed, far-off day, you may be able to say so, and I to believe it, but not now!--_not now_!"

CHAPTER XX.

With feet as heavy and slowly-dragging as those of some unwieldy old person, with drooped figure, and stained and swollen face, I enter the school-room an hour later to tell my ill-news.

"Enter a young mourner!" says Algy, facetiously, in unkind allusion to the gloom of my appearance, which is perhaps heightened by the black-silk gown I wear.

"What _is_ up?" cries Bobby, advancing toward me with an overpowering curiosity, not unmixed with admiration, legible on his burnt face; "what _has_ summoned those glorious sunset tints into your eyes and nose?"

"Which of Turner's pictures," says Algy, putting up his hand in the shape of a spy-gla.s.s to one eye, and critically regarding me through it, "is she so like in coloring? the 'Founding of Carthage,' or 'The Fighting Temeraire?'"

"Shame! shame!" cries Bobby, in a mock hortatory tone, trying to swell himself out to the shape and bulk of our fat rector, and to speak in his wheezy tone, "that a young woman so richly dowered with the good things of this life; a young woman with a husband and a deer-park in possession, and a house-warming in prospect--"

"But I have not," interrupt I, speaking for the first time, and with a snuffliness of tone engendered by much crying.

"Have not? have not _what_?"

"Have not a house-warming in prospect," reply I, with distinct malignity. A moment's silence. My bomb-sh.e.l.l has worked quite as much havoc as I expected.

"But where has it gone to since this morning?" asks Algy, looking rather blank.

"What do you mean?" cries Tou Tou, shrilly; "it was only last night that you were asking me for the Brat's address that you might invite him."