Nancy Part 63

I neither ring for my maid, nor attempt to undress myself. I either keep walking restlessly to and fro, or I sit by the cas.e.m.e.nt, while the cold little wind lifts my dusty hair, or blows against my hot, stiff eyes; or I stand stupidly before the gla.s.s; bitterly regarding the ruins of my one night's fairness. I do not know for how long; it must be hours, but I could not say how many.

The fiddles' shrill voices grow silent at last; the bounding and stamping ceases; the departing carriage-wheels grind and crunch on the gravel drive. I shall not have much longer to wait; he will be coming soon now. But there is yet another interval. In ungovernable impatience, I open my door and listen. It seems to me that there reaches me from the hall, the sound of voices in loud and angry altercation; it is too far off for me to distinguish to whom they belong. Then there is silence again, and then at last--at last Roger comes. I hear his foot along the pa.s.sage, and run to the door to intercept him, on his way to his dressing-room. He utters an exclamation of surprise on seeing me.

"Not in bed yet? Not undressed? They told me that you were tired and had gone to bed hours ago!"

"Did they?"

I can say only these two little words. I am panting so, as if I had run hard. We are both in the room now, and the door is shut. I suppose I look odd; wild and gray and haggard through the poor remains of my rouge.

"You are late," I say presently, in a voice of low constraint, "are not you? everybody went some time ago."

"I know," he answers, with a slight accent of irritation; "it is Algy's fault! I do not know what has come to that boy; he hardly seems in his right mind to-night; he has been trying to pick a quarrel with Parker, because he lit Mrs. Huntley's candle for her."

"Yes," say I, breathing short and hard. Has not he himself introduced her name?

"And you know Parker is always ready for a row--loves it--and as he is as screwed to-night as he well can be, it has been as much as we could do to make them keep their hands off each other!" After a moment he adds: "Silly boy! he has been doing his best to fall out with _me_, but I would not let him compa.s.s that."

"Has he?"

Roger has begun to walk up and down, as I did a while ago; on his face a look of unquiet discontent.

"It was a mistake his coming here this time," he says, with a sort of anger, and yet compa.s.sion, in his tone. "If he had had a grain of sense, he would have staid away!"

"It is a thousand pities that you cannot send us _all_ home again!" I say, with a tight, pale smile--"send us packing back again, Algy and Barbara and _me_--replace me on the wall among the broken bottles, where you found me."

My voice shakes as I make this dreary joke.

"Why do you say that?" he cries, pa.s.sionately. "Why do you _torment_ me?

You know as well as I do, that it is impossible--out of the question!

You know that I am no more able to free you than--"

"You _would_, then, if you _could_?" cry I, breathing short and hard.

"You _own_ it!"

For a moment he hesitates; then--

"Yes," he says firmly, "I would! I did not think at one time that I should ever have lived to say it, but I _would_."

"You are at least candid," I answer, with a sort of smothered sob, turning away.

"Nancy!" he cries, following me, and taking hold of my cold and clammy hands, while what _looks_--what, at least, I should have once said _looked_--like a great yearning fills his kind and handsome eyes; "we are not very happy, are we? perhaps, child, we never shall be now--often I think so. Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose. We are not the first, and we shall not be the last! (with a deep and bitter sigh). But indeed, I think, dear, that we are unhappier than we need be."

I shrug my shoulders with a sort of careless despair.

"Do you think so? I fancy not. Some people have their happiness thinly spread over their whole lives, like bread-and-sc.r.a.pe!" I say, with a homely bitterness. "Some people have it in a _lump_! that is all the difference! I had mine in a _lump_--all crowded into nineteen years that is, nineteen _very good years_!" I end, sobbing.

He still has hold of my hands. His face is full of distress; indeed, distress is too weak a word--of acute and utter pain.

"What makes you talk like this _now_, to-night?" he asks, earnestly. "I have been deceiving myself with the hope that you were having _one_ happy evening, as I watched you dancing--did you see me? I dare say not--of course you were not thinking of me. You looked like the old light-hearted Nancy that lately I have been thinking was gone forever!"

"Did I?" say I, dejectedly, slowly drawing my hands from his, and wiping my wet eyes with my pocket-handkerchief.

"_Any one_ would have said that you were enjoying yourself," he pursues, eagerly--"_were_ not you?"

"Yes," say I, ruefully, "I was very much." Then, with a sudden change of tone to that sneering key which so utterly--so unnaturally misbecomes me--"And _you_?"

"_I!_" He laughs slightly. "I am a little past the age when one derives any very vivid satisfaction from a ball; and yet," with a softening of eye and voice, "I liked looking at you too!"

"And it was pleasant in the billiard-room, was not it?" say I, with a stiff and coldly ironical smile--"so quiet and shady."

"_In the billiard room?_"

"Do you mean to say," cry I, my fact.i.tious smile vanis.h.i.+ng, and flas.h.i.+ng out into honest, open pa.s.sion, "that you mean to deny that you were there?"

"Deny it!" he echoes, in a tone of the deepest and most displeased astonishment; "of course not! Why should I? What would be the object?

And if there _were_ one--have _I_ ever told _you_ a lie?" with a reproachful accent on the p.r.o.nouns. "I was there half an hour, I should think."

"And why were you?" cry I, losing all command over myself. "What business had you? Were not there plenty of other rooms--rooms where there were lights and people?"

"Plenty!" he replies, coldly, still with that look of heavy displeasure; "and for my part I had far rather have staid there. I went into the billiard-room because Mrs. Huntley asked me to take her. She said she was afraid of the draughts anywhere else."

"Was it the _draughts_ that were making her cry so bitterly, pray?" say I, my eyes--dry now, achingly dry--flas.h.i.+ng a wretched hostility back into his. "I have heard of their making people's eyes run indeed, but I never heard of their causing them to sob and moan."

He has begun again to tramp up and down, and utters an exclamation of weary impatience.

"How could I help her crying?" he asks, with a tired irritation in his tone. "Do you think I _enjoyed_ it? I _hate_ to see a woman weep! it makes me _miserable_! it always did; but I have not the slightest objection--why, in Heaven's name, should I?--to tell you the cause of her tears. She was talking to me about her child."

"Her _child_!" repeat I, in an accent of the sharpest, cuttingest scorn.

"And you were taken in! I knew that she made capital out of that child, but I thought that it was only neophytes like Algy, for whose benefit it was trotted out! I thought that _you_ were too much of a man of the world, that she knew _you_ too well--" I laugh, derisively.

"Would you like to know the true history of the little Huntley?" I go on, after a moment. "Would you like to know that its grandmother, arriving unexpectedly, found it running wild about the lanes, a little neglected heathen, out at elbows, and with its frock up to its knees, and that she took it out of pure pity, Mrs. Zephine not making the slightest objection, but, on the contrary, being heartily glad to be rid of it--do you like to know _that_?"

"How do _you_ know it?" (speaking quickly)--"how did _you_ hear it?"

"I was told."

"But _who_ told you?"

"That is not of the slightest consequence."

"I wish to know."

"Mr. Musgrave told me."

I can manage his name better than I used, but even now I redden. For once in his life, Roger, too, sneers as bitterly as I myself have been doing.

"Mr. Musgrave seems to have told you a good many things."