Nancy Part 67

As I walk home again through the wintry roads, and my eyes fix themselves with a tired languor on the green ivy-flowers--on the little gray-green lichen-cups on the almshouse-wall, I think, "Does _no one_ remember her? Is she already altogether forgotten?"

It is still early in the afternoon when I reach home. The dark is _coming_ indeed, for it comes soon nowadays, but it has not yet come.

I go into the garden, and begin to pace up and down the gravel walks, under the naked lime-trees that have forgotten their July perfume, and are tossing their bare, cold arms in the evening wind.

Only _one_ of my old playfellows is left me. Jacky still stands on the gravel as if the whole place belonged to him; still stands with his head on one side, roguishly eying the sunset.

Thank Heaven, Jacky is still here, sly and nefarious, as when I bent down to give him my tearful good-by kiss on my wedding-morning. I kneel down, half laughing, half crying, on the damp walk, to stroke his round gray head, and hear his dear cross croak. Whether he resents the blackness of my appearance as being a mean imitation of his own, I do not know, but he will not come near me; he hops stiffly away, and stands eying me from the gra.s.s, with an unworthy affectation of not knowing who I am. I am still wasting useless blandishments on him, when my attention is distracted by the sound of footsteps on the walk.

I look up. Who is this man that is coming, stepping toward me in the gloaming?

I am not long left in doubt. With a slight and sudden emotion of surprised distaste, I see that it is Musgrave. I rise quickly to my feet.

"It is you, is it?" I say, with a cold ungraciousness, for I have not half forgiven him yet--still I bear a grudge against him--still I feel an angry envy that Barbara died with her hand in his.

"Yes, it is I!"

He is dressed in deep mourning. His cheeks are hollow and pale; he looks dejected, and yet fierce. We walk alongside of each other in silence for a few yards.

"Why do not you ask what has brought me here?" he asks suddenly, with a harsh abruptness. "I know that that is what you are thinking of."

"Yes," I reply, gravely, without looking at him, "it is!--what has?"

"I have come to bid you all good-by," he answers, in a low, quick voice, with his eyes bent on the ground; "you know"--raising them, and beginning to laugh hoa.r.s.ely--"if--if--things had gone right--you would have been my nearest relation by now."

I shudder.

"Yes," say I, "I know."

"I am going away," he goes on, raising his voice to a louder tone of reckless unrest, "_where?_--G.o.d knows!--_I_ do not, and do not care either!--going away for good!--I am going to let the abbey."

"To _let_ it!"

"You are _glad_!" he cries in a tone of pa.s.sionate and sombre resentment, while his great eyes, lifted, flash a miserable resentment into mine; "I _knew_ you would be! I have not given you much pleasure very often, have I?"--(still with that same harsh mirth).--"Well, it is something to have done it _once_!"

I clasp my down-hanging hands loosely together. I lift my eyes to the low, dark sky.

"_Am_ I glad?" I say, hazily. "I do not know!--I do not think I am!--I do not think I care one way or another!"

"Nancy!" he says, presently, in a tone no longer of counterfeit mirth, but of deep and serious earnestness, "I do not know why I told you just now that I had come to bid them all good-by--it was not true--you know it was not. What are they to me, or I to them, now? I came--"

"For what did you come, then?" cry I, interrupting him, pantingly, while my eyes, wide and aghast, grow to his face. What is it that he is going to say? He--from whose clasp Barbara's dead hand was freed!

"Do not look at me like that!" he cries, wildly, putting up his hands before his eyes. "It reminds me--great G.o.d! it reminds me--"

He breaks off; then goes on a little more calmly:

"You need not be afraid! Brute and blackguard as I am, I am not quite brute and blackguard enough for _that_!--that would be past _even_ me! I have come to ask you once again to forgive me for that--that old offense" (with a shamed red flush on the pallor of his cheeks); "I asked you once before, you may remember, and you answered"--(recalling my words with a resentful accuracy)--"that you _'would not, and, by G.o.d's help, you never would'_!"

"Did I?" say I, with that same hazy feeling. Those old emotions seem grown so distant and dim. "I dare say!--I did not recollect!"

"And so I have come to ask you once again," he goes on, with a heavy emphasis--"it will do me no great harm if you say 'No' again!--it will do me small good if you say 'Yes.' And yet, before I go away _forever_--yes"--(with a bitter smile)--"cheer up!--_forever!_--I must have one more try!"

I am silent.

"You may as well forgive me!" he says, taking my cold and pa.s.sive hand, and speaking with an intense though composed mournfulness. "After all, I have not done you much harm, have I?--that is no credit to me, I know. I would have done, if I could, but I could not! You may as well forgive me, may not you? G.o.d forgives!--at least"--(with a sigh of heavy and apathetic despair)--"so they say!--would _you_ be less clement than He?"

I am looking back at him, with a quiet fixedness. I no longer feel the slightest embarra.s.sment in his presence; it no longer disquiets me, that he should hold my hand.

"Yes," say I, speaking slowly, and still with my sunk and tear-dimmed eyes calmly resting on the dull despair of his, "yes--if you wish--it is all so long ago--and _she_ liked you!--yes!--I forgive you!"

CHAPTER LII.

"Love is enough."

And so, as the days go by, the short and silent days, it comes to pa.s.s that a sort of peace falls upon my soul; born of a slow yet deep a.s.surance that with Barbara it is well.

One can do with probabilities in prosperity, when to most of us careless ones it seems no great matter whether there be a G.o.d or no? When all the world's wheels seem to roll smoothly, as if of themselves, and one can speculate with a confused curiosity as to the nature of the great far cause that moves them; but in grief--in the dest.i.tute bareness, the famished hunger of soul, when "one is not," how one craves for _certainties_! How one yearns for the solid heaven of one's childhood; the harping angels, the never-failing flowers; the pearl gates and jeweled walls of G.o.d's great s.h.i.+ning town!

They may be gone; I know not, but at least _one_ certainty remains--guaranteed to us by no outside voice, but by the low yet plain tones that each may listen to in his own heart. That, with him who is pure and just and meek, who hates a lie worse than the sharpness of death, and loves others dearer than himself, it shall be well.

Do you ask where? or when? or how? We cannot say. We know not; only we know that it shall be well.

Never, never shall I reach Barbara's clear child-faith; Barbara, to whom G.o.d was as real and certain as I; never shall I attain to the steady confidence of Roger. I can but grope dimly with outstretched hands; sometimes in the outer blackness of a moonless, starless night; sometimes, with strained eyes catching a glimpse of a glimmer in the east. I can but _feel_ after G.o.d, as a plant in a dark place feels after the light.

And so the days go by, and as they do, as the first smart of my despair softens itself into a slow and reverent acquiescence in the Maker's will, my thoughts stray carefully, and heedfully back over my past life: they overleap the gulf of Barbara's death and linger long and wonderingly among the previous months.

With a dazed astonishment I recall that even then I looked upon myself as one most unprosperous, most sorrowful-hearted.

What in Heaven's name ailed me? What did I lack? My jealousy of Roger, such a living, stinging, biting thing _then_; how dead it is now!

Barbara always said I was wrong; always!

As his eyes, in the patient mournfulness of their reproachful appeal, answer again in memory the shrewish violence of my accusation on the night of the ball--the last embers of my jealousy die. He does not love me as he did; of that I am still persuaded. There is now, perhaps, there always will be, a film, a shade between us.

By my peevish tears, by my mean and sidelong reproaches, by my sulky looks, I have necessarily diminished, if not quite squandered the stock of hearty, wholesome, honest love that on that April day he so diffidently laid at my feet. I have already marred and blighted a year and three-quarters of his life. I recollect how much older than me he is, how much time I have already wasted; a pang of remorse, sharp as my knife, runs through my heart; a great and mighty yearning to go back to him at once, to begin over again _at once, this very minute_, to begin over again--overflows and floods my whole being. Late in the day as it is--doubly unseemly and ungracious as the confession will seem now--I will tell him of that lie with which I first sullied the cleanness of our union. With my face hidden on his broad breast, so that I may not see his eyes, I will tell him--yes, I will tell him. "I will arise, and go to him, and say, 'I have sinned against Heaven and before thee.'"

So I go. I am nearing Tempest: as I reach the church-yard gate, I stop the carriage, and get out.

Barbara was always the one that, after any absence from home, I used first to run in search of. I will go and seek her now.

It is drawing toward dusk as I pa.s.s, in my long black gown, up the church-path, between the still and low-lying dead, to the quiet spot where, with the tree-boughs waving over her, with the ivy hanging the loose luxuriance of its garlands on the church-yard wall above her head, our Barbara is taking her rest.

As I near the grave, I see that I am not its only visitor. Some one, a man, is already there, leaning pensively on the railings that surround it, with his eyes fixed on the dark and winterly earth, and on the newly-planted, flagging flowers. It is Roger. As he hears my approaching steps, the swish of my draperies, he turns; and, by the serene and lifted gravity of his eyes, I see that he has been away in heaven with Barbara. He does not speak as I come near; only he opens his arms joyfully, and yet a little diffidently, too, and I fly to then.