Nancy Stair Part 16

"She's well enough," he replied indifferently.

"I believe," said Nancy, looking through her wine-gla.s.s far off somewhere, "that she'll suit you better than I."

"She treats me better."

"She doesn't write verses?" this with a glance from under her eyelids.

"She does not."

"Nor think her own way always the best?"

"She's very sweet and yielding, as becomes a woman," Danvers answered teasingly.

"She's just without sin at all," Nancy continued with apparent dejection.

"Entirely," Danvers returned solemnly, but with a laugh s.h.i.+ning through his long black lashes.

"Then I'd better not meet with her--I, who have so many failings."

"Have you failings?" Dandy asked, and the teasing tone left him. "I've yet to find them."

And at this Nancy broke into a laugh so funny and contagious that the two of us joined with her.

"Have I failings?" she repeated. "That I have! And so many 'twould be a day's work to name them.

"Sometimes," she began, "I make light of other folks' religion when I disagree with it--and that's little short of scandalous. And I belittle the people whom I don't like--and there's no breeding in that; and where a friend is concerned I'm like the Stewarts, 'Back to back, and a claymore in each hand,' and----"

"Ye're right in that," Danvers and I broke in like a chorus.

"And sometimes," she went on, and the humor she found in these revelations concerning herself was a droll thing to see, "sometimes I use bad language----"

We men broke into a roar of laughter at this.

"Once, I remember," she said, with the gleam in her eye, "I danced till three in the morning at Peggy MacBride's wedding, and getting out of the coach twisted my arm till I thought I'd broken it. About four of the same morning I rose with a raging tooth, and crossing the room for laudanum, I struck the elbow of the injured arm against a chest of drawers, and before I thought I said----"

"What?" Danvers cried, his face lit up with merriment.

"Nothing will ever make me tell," she said firmly, "nothing!"

"Whatever it was, it was moderate. You haven't a vocabulary sufficient for that situation, Nancy Stair," I laughed.

"Then, too, I'm no respecter of family," she went on, as though set for complete absolution. "It's mayhap because my own mother was an Irish gipsy----"

"Nancy!" Dandy cried with amazement.

"She was so," Nancy insisted, "and the present lord's grandfather was a strange old c.u.mmer who ran away with another man's wife----"

"Nancy!" I expostulated, "Nancy, you mustn't talk in that way of your forbears----"

"Why not?" she inquired.

"It's a thing ye can't explain, my dear; but it just isn't done," Dandy said.

"Is it not?" she asked, and there was a look in her eyes of amused amazement. "Is it not? You see, I, in my poor blind way, can not understand why the naming of a thing is worse than the being of it--but if ye say it is, I'm amiable. I'll give out that my forbears were all kings and queens of the Egyptians, and that I ate my haggis when I was a child from the seat of the throne. It makes no difference to me, for I'm something more than the Laird of Stair's daughter."

"Meaning the future Countess of Glenmore, mayhap?" I suggested.

"I'm not meaning any such thing, and it's perhaps not becoming for me to explain what I do mean; but whether I say it of myself or 'tis said of me in the Glasgow Sentinel, it makes little differ, for I have the verse-making, and 'tis more to me than lands or t.i.tles.

"Aye," she said, after a pause, with a laugh as though making fun of her conceit of herself, "I have the genius----"

At the end of the meal, before she left us, bewildered by her vivacity and charm, she stopped at the door.

"Am I nice?" she asked.

"Very," said Danvers and I.

"And will ye give me," she asked, as a child might have done, "the thousand pounds for Father Michel?"

"I will not," I answered, the yielding in me showing through the words.

Danvers saw his chance and took it with the spur.

"I will," he said, going toward her to open the door, but it looked more as though he meant to take her in his arms, "I will, Nancy."

She looked at him with a softness in her eyes.

"Thank you, Danvers," she said, and the glance made me think that, even did I allow such a manifest impossibility, he could never have invested money in any way to bring him a richer return.

It was a task beyond me to get sensible talk from him with Nancy waiting in the moonlight, a moonlight fragrant with honeysuckle and climbing roses; and I bade him to be off to her; and I opened the papers which had come by a late post.

I heard a merry talk between them as Huey came in to say that the white night-flowers were in bloom by the fountain, and I went off with him to have a look at them. As I came back I turned into the path which led to the porch, intending to tell them of these wonderful blooms, when I saw the two of them on the steps, standing near together, and Danvers's arms were around the girl he loved, and he was looking down into her eyes with rapture in his fond, handsome face, and I heard him say:

"When, when, _when_?"

"When do you want it?" she asked.

"When do I want it! Now, to-night," and he drew her lips to his.

"Wife!" he said.

When I reentered the library I found it occupied by Sandy, who had walked across country from his own place with some news concerning the whisky tax. As we sat in dispute over it, upward of an hour later, I heard Nancy go to her room without coming in to wish us a good night, and a second later Danvers Carmichael stood in the doorway. It was good for us older men to see the lad, and at the sight of him I was out under the stars of Landgore; the sound of gipsy singing, the salt from the sea, and the odor of blown hawthorn were in the room, and I was young again with Marian Ingarrach folded in my arms. The brooding look was gone from his eyes and his face bore a strange illumination. He had added something to, rather than lost any of the c.o.c.ksureness of his manner; but the happiness of him, combined with the love and pa.s.sion of his ardent nature, made him a singularly handsome creature as he came toward us.

"Will you not congratulate me?" he said, looking from one to the other of us.

"Is she willing to marry you?" his father asked, with exaggerated amazement.