Nancy Part 52

"I beg your pardon," I say, humbly; "I will not disturb you; I would have knocked if I had known!"

He has risen, and is coming toward me.

"Knock! why, in Heaven's name, _should_ you knock?" he says, with something of his old glad animation; then, suddenly changing his tone to one of courteous friendly coldness, "Why do you stand out there? will not you come in?"

I comply with this invitation, and, entering, sit down in another arm-chair not far from Roger's, but, now that I am here, I do not seem to have much to say.

"You have been in the gardens?" he says, presently, glancing at my little nosegay, and speaking more to hinder total silence from reigning, than for any other reason.

"Yes," I reply, trying to be cheerful and chatty, "I have been picking _these_; the Czar have not half their perfume, though they are three times their size! _these_ smell so good!"

As I speak, I timidly half stretch out the little bunch to him, that he, too, may inhale their odor, but the gesture is so uncertain and faint that he does not perceive it--at least, he takes no notice of it, and I am sure that if he had he would; but yet I am so discouraged by the failure of my little overture that I have not resolution enough to tell him that I had gathered them for him. Instead, I snubbedly and discomfortedly put them in my own breast.

Presently I speak again.

"Do you remember," I say--"no, I dare say you do not, but yet it is so--it is a year to-day since you found me sitting on the top of the wall!--such a situation for a person of nineteen to be discovered in!"

At the recollection I laugh a little, and not bitterly, which is what I do not often do now. I can only see his profile, but it seems to me that a faint smile is dawning on his face, too.

"It was a good jump, was not it?" I go on, laughing again; "I still wonder that I did not knock you down."

He is certainly smiling now; his face has almost its old, tender mirth.

"It will be a year to-morrow," continue I, emboldened by perceiving this, and beginning to count on my fingers, "since Toothless Jack and the curates came to dine, and you staid so long in the dining-room that I fell asleep; the day after to-morrow, it will be a year since we walked by the river-side, and saw the goslings flowering out on the willows; the day after that it will be a year since--"

"Stop!" he cries, interrupting me, with a voice and face equally full of disquiet and pain; "do not go on, where is the use?--I hate anniversaries."

I stop, quenched into silence; my poor little trickle of talk effectually dried. After a pause, he speaks.

"What has made you think of all these dead trivialities?" he asks in a voice more moved--or I think so--less positively steady than his has been of late; "at your age, it is more natural to look on than to look back."

"Is it?" say I, sadly, "I do not know; I seem to have such a great deal of time for _thinking_ now; this house is so _extraordinarily_ silent!

did you never notice it?--of course it is large, and we are only two people in it, but at home it never seemed to me so _deadly_ quiet, even when I was alone in the house."

"_Were_ you ever alone?" he asks, with a smile. He is thinking of the noisy mult.i.tude that are connected in his memory with my father's mansion; that, during all his experience of it, have filled its rooms and pa.s.sages with the hubbub of their strong-lunged jollity.

"Yes, I have been," I reply; "not often, of course! but several times, when the boys were away, and father and mother and Barbara had gone out to dinner; of course it seemed still and dumb, but not--" (shuddering a little)--"not so _aggressively loudly_ silent as this does!"

He looks at me, with a sort of remorseful pain.

"It _is_ very dull for you!" he says, compa.s.sionately; "shut up in endless duet, with a person treble your age! I ought to have thought of that; in a month or so, we shall be going to London, _that_ will amuse you, will not it? and till then, is there any one that you would like to have asked here?--any friend of your own?--any companion of your own age?"

"No," reply I, despondently, staring out of the window, "I have no friends."

"The boys, then?" speaking with a sudden a.s.surance of tone, as one that has certainly hit upon a pleasant suggestion.

I shake my head.

"I could not have Bobby and the Brat, if I would, and I would not have Algy if I could!" I reply with curt dejection.

"Barbara, then?"

Again I shake my head. Not even Barbara will I allow to witness the failure of my dreams, the downfall of my high castles, the sterility of my Promised Land.

"No, I will not have Barbara!" I answer; "last time that she was here--" but I cannot finish my sentence. I break away weeping.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

"I think you hardly know the tender rhyme Of 'Trust me not at all or all in all!'"

There are some wounds, O, my friends, that Time, by himself, with no clever physician to help him, will surely cure. You all know that, do not you? some wounds that he will lay his cool ointment on, and by-and-by they are well. Among such, are the departures hence of those we have strongly loved, and to whom we have always been, as much as in us lay, tender and good. But there are others that he only worsens--yawning gaps that he but widens; as if one were to put one's fingers in a great rent, and tear it asunder. And of these last is mine.

As the year grows apace, as the evenings draw themselves out, and the sun every day puts on fresh strength, we seem to grow ever more certainly apart. Our bodies, indeed, are nigh each other, but our souls are sundered. It never seems to strike any one, it is true, that we are not a happy couple; indeed, it would be very absurd if it did. We never wrangle--we never contradict each other--we have no tiffs; but we are _two_ and not _one_. Whatever may be the cause, whether it be due to his shaken confidence in me, or (I myself a.s.sign this latter as its chief reason) to the constant neighborhood of the woman whom I know him to have loved and coveted years before he ever saw me; whatever may be the cause, the fact remains; I no longer please him. It does not surprise me much. After all, the boys always told me that men would not care about me; that I was not the sort of woman to get on with them! Well, perhaps!

It certainly seems so.

I meet Mrs. Huntley pretty often in society nowadays, at such staid and sober dinners as the neighborhood thinks fit to indulge in, in this lenten season; and, whenever I do so, I cannot refrain from a stealthy and wistful observation of her.

She is ten--twelve years older than I. Between her and me lie the ten years best worth living of a woman's life; and yet, how easily she distances me! With no straining, with no hard-breathed effort, she canters lightly past me. So I think, as I intently and curiously watch her--watch her graceful, languid silence with women, her pretty, lady-like playfulness with men. And how successful she is with them! how highly they relish her! While I, in the uselessness of my round, white youth, sit benched among the old women, dropping spiritless, pointless "yeses" and "noes" among the veteran worldliness of their talk, how they crowd about her, like swarmed bees on some honeyed, spring day! how they scowl at each other! and _finesse_ as to who shall approach most nearly to her cloudy skirts!

Several times I have strained my ears to catch what are the utterances that make them laugh so much, make them look both so fluttered and so smoothed. Each time that I succeed, I am disappointed. There is no touch of genius, no salt of wit in any thing she says. Her utterances are hardly more brilliant than my own.

You will despise me, I think, friends, when I tell you that in these days I made one or two pitiful little efforts to imitate her, to copy, distantly and humbly indeed, the fashion of her clothes, to learn the trick of her voice, of her slow, soft gait, of her little, surprised laugh. But I soon give it up. If I tried till my death-day, I should never arrive at any thing but a miserable travesty. Before--ere Roger's return--I used complacently to treasure up any little civil speeches, any small compliments that people paid me, thinking, "If such and such a one think me pleasing, why may not Roger?" But now I have given this up, too.

I seem to myself to have grown very dull. I think my wits are not so bright as they used to be. At home, I used to be reckoned one of the pleasantest of us: the boys used to laugh when I said things: but not even the most hysterically mirthful could find food for laughter in my talk now.

And so the days pa.s.s; and we go to London. Sometimes I have thought that it will be better when we get there. At least, _she_ will not be there.

How can she, with her husband gnashing his teeth in lonely discomfiture at his exasperated creditors, and receiptless bills, in sultry St.

Thomas? But, somehow, she is. What good Samaritan takes out his twopence and pays for her little apartment, for her stacks of cut flowers, for her brougham and her opera-boxes, is no concern of mine. But, somehow, there always _are_ good Samaritans in those cases; and, let alone Samaritans, there are no priests or Levites stonyhearted enough to pa.s.s by these dear, little, lovely things on the other side.

We go out a good deal, Roger and I, and everywhere he accompanies me. It bores him infinitely, though he does not say so. One night, we are at the play. It is the Prince of Wales's, the one theatre where one may enjoy a pleasant certainty of being rationally amused, of being free from the otherwise universal dominion of _Limelight_ and _Legs_. The little house is very full; it always is. Some of the royalties are here, laughing "_a gorge deployee!_" I have been laughing, too; laughing in my old fashion; not in Mrs. Zephine's little rippling way, but with the thorough-paced, unconventional violence with which I used to reward the homely sallies of Bobby and the Brat. I am laughing still, though the curtain has fallen between the acts, and the orchestra are fiddling gayly away, and the turned-up gas making everybody look pale. My opera-gla.s.ses are in my hand, and I am turning them slowly round the house, making out acquaintances in the stalls, prying into the secrets of the boxes, examining the well-known features of my future king.

Suddenly my smile dies away, and the gla.s.ses drop from my trembling hands into my lap. Who is it that has just entered, and is slipping across the intervening people in the stalls to his own seat, one of the few that have hitherto remained vacant beneath us? Can I help recognizing the close-shorn, cameo-like beauty--to me _no_ beauty; to me deformity and ugliness--of the dark face that for months I daily saw by my fireside? Can there be _two_ Musgraves? No! it is _he_! yes, _he_!

though now there is on his features none of the baffled pa.s.sion, none of the wrathful malignity, which they always wear in my memory, as they wore in the February dusk of Brindley Wood. Now, in their handsome serenity, they wear only the look of subdued sadness that a male Briton always a.s.sumes when he takes his pleasure. Do you remember what Goldsmith says?--"When I see an Englishman laugh, I fancy I rather see him hunting after joy than having caught it."

As soon as my eyes have fallen upon, and certainly recognized him, by a double impulse I draw back behind the curtain of the box, and look at Roger. He, too, has seen him; I can tell it in an instant by his face, and by the expression of his eyes, as they meet mine. I try to look back unflinchingly, indifferently, at him. I would give ten years of my life for an unmoved complexion, but it is no use. Struggle as I will against it, I feel that rush, that torrent of vivid scarlet, that, retiring, leaves me as white as my gown. Oh! it _is_ hard, is not it, that the lying changefulness of a deceitful skin should have power to work me such hurt?

"Are you faint?" Roger asks, bending toward me, and speaking in a low and icy voice; "shall I get you a gla.s.s of water?"

"No, thank you!" I reply, resolutely, and with no hesitation or stammer in my tone, "I am not at all faint."

But, alas! my words cannot undo what my false cheeks, with their meaningless red and their causeless white, have so fully done.

The season is over now; every one has trooped away from the sun-baked squares, and the sultry streets of the great empty town. I have never _done_ a season before, and the heat and the late hours have tired me wofully. Often, when I have gone to a ball, I have longed to go to bed instead. And, now that we are home again, it would seem to me very pleasant to sit in leisurely coolness by the pool, and to watch the birth, and the prosperous short lives, of the late roses, and the great bright gladioli in the garden-borders. Yes, it would have seemed very pleasant to me--if--(why is life so full of _ifs_? "Ifs" and "Buts,"

"Ifs" and "Buts," it seems made up of them! Little ugly words! in heaven there will be none of you!)--if--to back and support the outward good luck, there had been any inward content. But there is none! The trouble that I took with me to London, I have brought back thence whole and undiminished.