Nancy Part 30

"As you will!" he answers, with an air of affected carelessness. "It is only that, if they _do not_ come to-morrow--"

"_Fourth time!_" interject I, counting on my fingers and smiling.

"If you _wish_--if you _like_--if it would be any comfort to you--I shall be happy--I mean I shall be very glad to come up again about the same time to-morrow evening."

"_Will_ you?" (eagerly, with a great accession of exhilaration in my voice). "Are you serious? I shall be so much obliged if you will, but--"

"It is _impossible_ that any one can say any thing," he interrupts, hastily. "There _could_ be no harm in it!"

"_Harm!_" repeat I, laughing. "Well, _hardly_! I cannot fancy a more innocent amus.e.m.e.nt."

Though my speech is in agreement with his own, the coincidence does not seem to gratify him.

"What did you mean, then?" he says, sharply. "You said 'but'--"

"Did I?" answer I, again throwing back my head, and looking upward, as if trying to trace my last preposition among the clouds; "but--_but_--where could I have put a '_but_'?--oh, I know! _but_ you will most likely forget! Do not!" I continue, bringing down my eyes again, and speaking in a coaxing tone. "If you do, it will be play to you, but _death_ to me; the thought of it will keep me up all the day!"

"Will it?" in a tone of elated eagerness. "You are not _gibing_, I suppose? it does not sound like your gibing voice!"

"Not it!" reply I, gloomily. "My gibing voice is packed away at the bottom of my imperial. I do not think it has been out since we left Dresden. Well, good-night! What do you want to shake hands _again_ for?

We have done that _twice_ already. You are like the man who, the moment he had finished reading prayers to his family, began them all over again. _Mind_ you do not forget! and" (laughing) "if you cannot come yourself, _send some one else! any one_ will do--I am not particular, but I _must_ have _some one_ to speak to!"

Almost before my speech is finished, Frank is out of sight. With such rapid suddenness has he disappeared round the house-corner. I stand for a moment, marveling a little at his hurry. Five minutes ago he seemed willing enough to dawdle on till midnight. Then I go in, and forget his existence.

CHAPTER XXII.

Suppose that in all this world, during all its ages, there never was a case of a person being _always_ in an ill-humor. I believe that even Xantippe had her lucid intervals of amiability, during which she fondled her Socrates. At all events, father has. On the day after my disappointment, one such interval occurs. He relents, allows Algy and Barbara to have the carriage, and sends them off to Tempest.

Either Mr. Musgrave becomes aware of this fact, or, as I had antic.i.p.ated, he forgets his promise, for he never appears, and I do not see him again till Sunday. By Sunday my cheeks are no longer _raw_; the furniture has stopped cracking--seeing that no one paid any attention to it, it wisely left off--and the ghosts await a fitter opportunity to pounce.

I have heard from Sir Roger--a cheerful note, dated Southampton. If _he_ is cheerful, I may surely allow myself to be so too. I therefore no longer compunctiously strangle any stray smiles that visit my countenance. I have taken several drives with Barbara in my new pony-carriage--it is a curious sensation being able to order it without being subject to fathers veto--and we have skirted our own park, and have peeped through his close wooden palings at Mr. Musgrave's, have strained our eyes and stretched our necks to catch a glimpse of his old gray house, nestling low down among its elms. (Was there ever an abbey that did not live in a hollow?) With bated breath, lest the groom behind should overhear me, I have slightly sketched to Barbara the outline of an idea for establishing her in that weather-worn old pile--an idea which I think was born in my mind as long ago as the first evening that I saw its owner at the Linkesches Bad, and heard that he _had_ an abbey, and that it was over against my future home.

Barbara does not altogether deny the desirability of the arrangement; she is not, however, so sanguine as I as to its feasibility, and she positively declines to consent to enter actively into it until she has seen him. This will be on Sunday. To Sunday, therefore, I look forward with pious haste.

Well, it is Sunday now--the Sunday of my first appearance as a bride at Tempest church. A bride without her bridegroom! A pang of mortification and pain shoots through me, as this thought traverses my soul. I look at myself dissatisfiedly in the gla.s.s. Alas! I am no credit to his taste.

If, for this once. I could but look taller, personabler, _older_!

"They will all say that he has made a fool of himself," I say, half aloud.

It is a sultry day, without wind or freshness, and with a great deal of sun; but in spite of this, I put on a silk gown, rich and heavy, as looking more _married_ than the cobweb muslins in which I have hitherto met the summer heat. On my head I place a sedately feathered bonnet, which would not have misbecome mother. I meet Algy and Barbara in my boudoir. They are already dressed. I examine Barbara with critical care, and with a discontented eye, though to a stranger her appearance would seem likely to inspire any feeling rather than dissatisfaction, for she looks as clean and fair and chastely sweet as ever maiden did. Ben Jonson must have known some one like her when he wrote:

"Have you seen but a bright lily grow Before rude hands have touched it?

Have you marked but the fall of the snow Before the soil hath s.m.u.tched it?

Have you felt the wool of the beaver Or swan's-down ever?

Or have smelled of the bud of the brier, Or the nard in the fire?

Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

Oh so white, oh so soft, oh so sweet is she?"

But all the same, having a bonnet on, she is distinctly less like Palma Vecchio's St. Catherine, to which in my talk with Frank I compared her, than she was bareheaded this morning at breakfast. Who in the annals of history ever heard of a saint in a _bonnet_?

"I wish that people might be allowed to go to church without their bonnets these hot Sundays," I say, grumblingly. "_You_ especially, Barbara."

She laughs.

"I should be very glad, but I am afraid the beadle would turn me out."

"For Heaven's sake," says Algy, gravely, putting back his shoulders and throwing out his chest, as he draws on a pair of exact gray gloves, "do not let us make ourselves to stink in the nostrils of the inhabitants by any eccentricities of conduct, on this our first introduction to them.

If we consulted our own comfort, there is no doubt that we should reduce our toilets by a good many more articles than a bonnet--in fact--" (with an air of reflection), "I shudder to think _where_ we should stop!"

We are in church now. I have run the gantlet of the observation of all the parishioners, and have been unable to look calmly unaware of it; on the contrary, have grown consciously rosy red, and have walked over hastily between the open sittings. But now I have reached the shelter of our own seat, near the top of the church, with all the gay bonnets behind me, and only the pulpit, the spread-eagle reading-desk, and the gaudy stained window in front. As soon as I am established--almost sooner, perhaps--I turn my eyes in search of Mr. Musgrave. I know perfectly where to look for him, as he drew a plan of Tempest church and the relative position of our sittings, with the point of his stick on the gravel in the gardens close to the Zwinger at Dresden, while we sat under the trees by the little pool, feeding the pert sparrows and the intimate c.o.c.k-chaffinch that resort thither. He is not there!

Barbara may be crowned with any abomination, in the way of a bonnet, that ever entered into the grotesque imagination of a milliner to conceive--coal-scuttle, cottage, spoon--for all that it matters. The organ strikes up, a file of chorister-boys in dirty surplices--Tempest is a more pretentious church than ours--and a brace of clergy enter. All through the Confession I gape about with vacant inattention--at the grimy whiteness of the choir; at the back of the organist's head; at the parson, a mealy-mouthed fledgling, who, with his finger on his place in the prayer to prevent his losing it, is taking a stealthy inventory of my charms.

Suddenly I hear the door, which has been for some time silent, creak again in opening. Footsteps sound along the aisle. I look up. Yes, it is he! walking as quickly and noiselessly as he can, and looking rather ashamed of himself, while patches of red, blue, and golden light, from the east window, dance on his Sunday coat and on the smooth darkness of his hair. I glance at Barbara, to give her notice of the approach of her destiny, but my glance is lost. Barbara's stooped head is hidden by her hands, and her pure thoughts are away with G.o.d. As a _pis aller_, I look at Algy. No absorption in prayer on _his_ part baffles me. He is leaning his elbow on his knee, and wearily biting the top of his prayer-book. He returns my look by another, which, though wordless, is eloquent. It says, in raised eyebrow and drooped mouth, "Is that all? I do not think much of him?"

The church is full and hot. The windows are open, indeed, but only the infinitesimally small c.h.i.n.k that church-windows ever do open. The pew-opener sedulously closes the great door after every fresh entrance.

I kneel simmering through the Litany. Never before did it seem so long!

Never did the chanted, "We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!" appear so endlessly numerous.

Under cover of my arched hands, shading my eyes, I peep at one after another of the family groups. Most of them are behind me indeed, but there are still a good many that I can get a view of sideways. Among these, the one that oftenest engages my notice is a small white woman, evidently a lady--and, at the moment I first catch sight of her, with closed eyes and drawn-in nostrils, inhaling smelling-salts, as if to her, too, church was up-hill work this morning--in a little seat by herself. At the other pews one glance a piece satisfies me, but, having looked at _her_ once, I look again. I could not tell you _why_ I do it.

There is nothing very remarkable about her in the matter of either youth or beauty, and yet I look.

The service is ended at length, but eagerly as I long for the fresh air, we are--whether to mark our own dignity, or to avoid further scrutiny on the part of our fellow-worshipers--almost the last to issue from the church. At the porch we find Mr. Musgrave waiting. A sort of _mauvaise honte_ and a guilty conscience combine to disable me from promptly introducing him to my people, and before I recover my presence of mind, Algy has walked on with Barbara, and I am left to follow with Frank.

He does not seem in one of his most sunshiny humors, but perhaps the long morning service, so trying in its present arrangement of lengthy prayers, praises, and preaching, to a restless and irritable temper, is to blame for that.

"I suppose," he says, speaking rather stiffly, "that I must congratulate you on the arrival of the first detachment."

"First detachment of what?"

"Of your family. I understood you to say that there were to be _relays_ of them during all Sir Roger's absence."

"It is to be hoped so, I am sure," I say, devoutly; "especially" (looking up at him with mock reproach) "considering the way in which my friends neglect me. You never came, after all! No!" (seeing the utter unsmilingness of his expression, and speaking hastily), "I am not serious; I am only joking! No doubt you heard that they had come, and thought that you would be in the way. But, indeed you would not. We had no secrets to talk; we should not have minded you a bit."

"I _did_ hear that they had arrived," he answers, still speaking ungraciously, "but even if I had not, I should not have come!"

I look up in his face, and laugh.

"You _forgot_? Ah, I told you you would!"

"I did _not_ forget."

Again I look up at him, this time in honest astonishment, awaiting the solution of his enigma.