Nancy Part 56

"You will _not_!" he cries, starting back with an expression of the utmost anger and discomfiture. "You will _not_! you will carry vengeance for one mad minute through a whole life! It is _impossible! impossible!_ if _you_ are so unforgiving, how do you expect G.o.d to forgive you your sins?"

I shrug my shoulders with a sort of despairing contempt. G.o.d has seemed to me but dim of late.

"He may forgive them or leave them unforgiven as He sees best; but--_I will never forgive you!_"

"What!" he cries, his face growing even more ash-white than it was before, and his voice quivering with a pa.s.sionate anger; "not for _Barbara's_ sake?"

I shudder. I hate to hear him p.r.o.nounce her name.

"No," say I, steadily, "not for Barbara's sake!"

"You will have to," he cries violently; "it is nonsense! think of the close connection, of the _relationship_ that there will be between us!

think of the remarks you will excite! you will defeat your own object!"

"I will excite no remark!" I reply resolutely. "I will be quite civil to you! I will say 'good-morning' and 'good-evening' to you; if you ask me a question I will answer it; but--I will _never_ forgive you!"

We are standing, as I before observed, close together, and are so wholly occupied--voices, eyes, and ears--with each other, that we do not perceive the approach of two hitherto unseen people who are coming dawdling and chatting up the conservatory that opens out of the room; two people that I suppose have been there, unknown to us, all along.

They have come quite close now, and we must needs perceive them.

In a second our eager talk drops into silence, and we look with involuntary, startled apprehension toward them. They are Roger and Mrs.

Huntley. This is why he acceded with such alacrity to my request. This is why he was so afraid of being late. He has been helping her to smell the jasmine, and to look down the datura's great white trumpet-throats.

Even at this agitated moment I have time to think this with a jeering pain. The next instant all other feelings are swallowed up in breathless dread as to how they will meet. My fears are groundless. On first becoming aware, indeed, whose _tete-a-tete_ it is that he has interrupted, whose low, quick voices they are that have dropped into such sudden, suspicious silence at his approach--I can see him start perceptibly, can see his gray eyes dart with lightning quickness from Musgrave to me, and from me to Musgrave; and in his voice there is to me an equally perceptible tone of ice-coldness; but to an ordinary observer it would seem the greeting, neither more nor less warm, exchanged between two moderately friendly acquaintances meeting after absence.

"How are you, Musgrave? I had no idea that you were in this part of the world!"

"No more had I!" answers Musgrave, with an exaggerated laugh. "No more I was, until--until _to-day_."

He has not caught the infection of Roger's stately calm. His face has not recovered a _trace_ of even its usual slight color, and his eyes are twitching nervously. Mrs. Huntley appears unaware of any thing. Her artistic eye has been caught by the tight bean-pot, and her fingers are employed in trying to give a little air of ease and liberty to its crowded inmates. Then, thank G.o.d, the others come in, and dinner is announced, and the situation is ended.

The old host, still under the influence of his hallucination, is bearing down like a hawk (with his old bent elbow extended) on Barbara, until intercepted and redirected by a whispered roar and graphic pantomime on the part of his nephew. Then, at last, he realizes Roger's bad taste, and we go in.

As soon as we are seated, I look about me. It is a round table. For my part, I hate a round table. There is no privacy in it. Everybody seems eavesdropping on everybody else.

There are only eight of us in all--those I have enumerated, and Algy.

Yes, he is here. Bellona is a G.o.ddess who can always spare her sons when there is any chance of their getting into mischief. Roger has taken Mrs.

Huntley. _That_, poor man, he could hardly help, his only alternative being his own sister-in-law. Musgrave has taken Barbara. He is still as white as the table-cloth, and hardly speaks. It is clear that _he_ will not get up his conversation again, until after the champagne has been round. Algy has taken no one; and, consequently, a bear is an amiable and affable beast in comparison of him. I am placed between our host and his nephew. The latter comes in for a good deal of my conversation, as most of my remarks have to be taken up and rebellowed by him with a loud emphasis, that contrasts absurdly with their triviality; and even then they mostly miscarry, and turn into something totally different.

Talking to the old man is not a dialogue, but a couple of soliloquies, carried on mostly on different subjects, which in vain try to become the same, between two interlocutors. Through soup we prospered--that is to say, we talked of the weather; and though I said several things about it that surprised me a good deal, yet we both knew that we _were_ talking of the weather. But since then we have been diverging ever more and more hopelessly. _He_ is at the shah's visit, and so he imagines am I. I, on the contrary, am at the Bishop of Winchester's death, and, for the last five minutes have been trying, with all the force of my lungs, and with a face rendered scarlet by the double action of heat and of the consciousness of being the object of respectful attention to the whole company, to convey to him that, in my opinion, the deceased prelate ought to have been buried in Westminster Abbey. I have at last succeeded, at least in so far as to make him understand that I wish _somebody_ to be buried in Westminster Abbey; but, as he still persists in thinking it the shah, we are perhaps not much better off than we were before. I lean back with a sense of despairing defeat, and, behind my fan, turn to the young man on the other side. He is a jolly-looking fellow, with an aureole of fiery red hair.

"Would you mind," say I, with panting appeal, "trying to make him understand that it _is not_ the shah?"

He complies, and, while he is trying to make it clear to his uncle that he wrongs me in crediting me with any wish to thrust the Persian monarch among the ashes of the Plantagenets, I take breath, and look round again. Algy is eating nothing, and is drinking every thing that is offered to him. His face is not much redder than Musgrave's, and he is glancing across the table at Mrs. Huntley, with the haggard anger of his eyes. Of this, however, she seems innocently unaware. She is leaning back in her chair; so is Roger. They are talking low and quickly, and looking smilingly at each other. When does his face ever light up into such alert animation when he is talking to me? There can be no doubt of it! Why blink a thing because it is unpleasant? I _bore him_.

I have no intention of listening, and yet I hear some of their words--enough to teach me the drift of their talk. "Residency!"

"Cawnpore!" "Simlah!" "_Cursed_ Simlah!" "_Cursed_ Cawnpore!" My attention is recalled by the voice of my old neighbor.

"Talking of that--" he says--(talking of _what_, in Heaven's name?)--"I once knew a man--a doctor, at Norwich--who did not marry till he was seventy-eight, and had four as fine children as any man need wish to see."

By the extraordinary irrelevancy of this anecdote, I am so taken aback that, for a moment, I am unable to utter. Seeing, however, that some comment is expected from me, I stammer something about its being a great age. He, however, imagines that I am asking whether they were boys or girls.

"Three boys and a girl, or three girls and a boy!" he answers, with loud distinctness--"I cannot recollect which; but, after all--" (with an acrid chuckle)--"that is not the point of the story!"

I sink back in my chair, with a slight shiver.

"Give it up!" says my other neighbor, with a compa.s.sionate smile, and speaking in a voice not a whit lower than usual--"_I_ would!--it really is no good!"

"Why does not he have a _trumpet_?" ask I, with a slight accent of irritation, for I have suffered much, and it is hot.

"He had one once," replies my companion, still pityingly regarding the flushed discomposure of my face; "but people _would_ insist on bawling so loudly down it, that they nearly broke the drum of his ear, and so _he_ broke _it_."

I laugh a little, but in a puny way. There is not much laugh in me.

Again I look round the table. Musgrave is better; he is a better color than he was. Under the influence of Barbara's gentle talk, his features have rea.s.sumed almost serenity. Algy is _no_ better. I see him lean back, and speak to the servant behind him. He is asking for more champagne. I wish he would not. He has had quite enough already. Roger and Mrs. Huntley are much as they were. They are still leaning back in their chairs--still looking with friendly intimacy into each other's eyes--still smiling. Again a few words of their talk reach me.

"Do you recollect?"

"Do you remember?"

"Have you forgotten?"

Clearly, they have fallen upon old times. I wish--I dearly wish--that I might bite a piece out of somebody.

CHAPTER XLIII.

"I saw pale kings, and princes, too; Pale warriors, death-pale were they all, They cried, 'La Belle Dame, sans merci,'

Hath thee in thrall."

The long penance of dinner is over at last, thank G.o.d! I may intermit my hopeless roarings, melancholy as those of any caged zoological beast.

Roger and Zephine must also fain suspend their reminiscences. There being no lady of the house, I have taken upon myself to hasten the date of our departure. Before Mrs. Zephine has finished her last grape, I have swept her incontinently away into the drawing-room. But I might as well have let it alone: almost before you could say "Knife" they are after us. I suppose that when three are eager to come, and only two anxious to stay--(I acquit my old friend and his nephew of any over-hurry to rejoin us)--the three must needs get their way. Anyhow, here they all five are! I am so hot! so hot! Nothing heats one like bellowing and being miserable and a failure. I have again taken advantage of the mistressless condition of the establishment, have drawn back the window-curtains, and lifted the heavy sash. The night always soothes me. There is something so stilling in the far placidity of the high stars--in the sweet sharpness of the night winds. I have sat down on a couch in the embrasure, alone.

When the men come in, I remain alone. It does not at all surprise or much vex me. I have nothing pleasant to say to any one. Also, I think I must be almost hidden by the droop of the curtains. Roger, indeed, sent his eyes round the room on his first entry, as if searching for something or somebody. It cannot be Mrs. Huntley, who is right under his nose, and who is, indeed, saying something playful to him over the top of her black fan. For once, he does not hear her. He is still looking.

Then he catches a glimpse of my skirts, and comes straight toward me.

Thank G.o.d! it _was_ me he was looking for. I feel a little throb of disused gladness, as I realize this.

"Are not you cold?" he says, perceiving the open window.

"Not I!" reply I, brusquely--"naught never comes to harm."

"I wish you would have a shawl!" he says, as the evening wind comes, with the tartness of autumn, to his face.

"Why do not you say, '_do, for my sake!_' as Algy once said to me, when he mistook me in the dark for Mrs. Huntley?" reply I, with a mocking laugh--"I am not sure that he did not add _darling_, but I will excuse _that_!"

At the mention of Algy, a shade crosses his face, and his eye travels to where, in the dignified solitude of a corner, my eldest brother is sitting, biting his lips, and reading "Alice Through the Looking-gla.s.s,"

upside down.