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Nancy. Broughton Rhoda
Читать онлайн.Название Nancy
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4057664586889
Автор произведения Broughton Rhoda
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
I think that Sir Roger is beginning to find me rather tiresome: evidently he is not listening: he has even turned away his head.
There is a movement among the guests, the first detachment are bidding good-night, the rest speedily do the like. Father follows his favorite miss into the hall, cloaks her with gallant care, and through the door I hear him playfully firing off parting jests at her as she drives away. Then he returns to the drawing-room. Sir Roger has gone to put on his smoking-coat, I suppose. Father is alone with his wife and his two lovely daughters. We make a faint movement toward effacing ourselves, but our steps are speedily checked.
"Barbara! Nancy!"
"Yes, father" (in a couple of very small voices).
"May I ask what induced you to keep my guests waiting half an hour for their dinner to-night?"
No manner of answer. How hooked his nose looks! how fearfully like a hawk he has grown all in a minute!
"When you have houses of your own," he continues with iced politeness, "you may of course treat your visitors to what vagaries you please, but as long as you deign to honor my roof with your presence, you will be good enough to behave to my guests with decent civility, do you hear?"
"Well, Roger, how is the glass? up or down? What is it doing? Are we to have a fine day to-morrow?"
For Roger apparently has got quickly into his smoking-coat: at least he is here: he has heard all. Barbara and I crawl away with no more spring or backbone in us than a couple of torpid, wintery flies.
Five minutes later, "Do you wonder that we hate him?" cry I, with flaming cheeks, holding a japanned candlestick in one hand, and Sir Roger's right hand in the other.
"I do not care if he does hear me!—yes, I do, though" (giving a great jump as a door bangs close to me).
Sir Roger is looking down at me with an expression of most thorough discomfiture and silent pain in his face.
"He did not mean it, Nancy!" he says, hesitatingly, and with a sort of look of shamed wonder in his friendly eyes.
"Did not he?" (ironically).
A little pause, the position of the japanned candlestick and of Sir Roger's hand still remaining the same. "How I wish that you were my father instead!" I say with a sort of sob. He does not, as I fully expect, say, "So do I!" and I go to bed, feeling rather small, as one who has gushed, and whose gush has not been welcome to the recipient.
CHAPTER VI.
A fortnight has passed. Two Sundays, two Mondays, two Tuesdays, etc. Fourteen times have I sleepily laid head on pillow. Fourteen times have I yawningly raised it from my pillow. Fourteen times have I hungrily eaten my dinner, since the night when I stood in the hall with Sir Roger's hand in mine, raging against my parent. And Sir Roger is here still. After all, there is nothing like the tenacity of boyish friendship, is there?
I suppose that, to Sir Roger, father is still the manly, debonair youth that he remembers thirty years ago. In happy ignorance he slurs over the thirty intervening years of moroseness, and goes back to that blest epoch in which I have so much difficulty in believing, and about which he, walking beside me now and again through the tender, springing grass of the meadows, has told me many a tale. For our promised walk has come off, and so has many others like it.
He must be dotingly fond of father. It is the 15th of April. I dare say, O reader, that it seems to you much like any other date, but to me, through every back-coming year, it seems to gain fresh significance—the date that marks the most important day—take it for all in all—of my life, though, whether for good or ill, who shall say, until I am dead, and my life's sum reckoned up. I awake on that morning with no forecast of what is coming? I tear myself from my morning dreams with as sleepy unwillingness as usual. I eat my bread-and-butter with as stolidly healthy an appetite. I run with as scampering feet, as evenly-beating a heart as is my wont, with little Vick along the garden-walks, in the royal morning sun. For one of God's own days has come—one that must have lost his way, and strayed from paradise.
It has the steady heat of June, though we are only in mid-April, and the freshness of the prune. The leaves on the trees are but tender and tiny, and through them the sun sends his might. The tulips are all a-blaze and a-stare, making one blink with the dazzle of their odorless beauty: the frolicsome young wind is shaking out their balm from the hyacinth-bells, and the sweet Nancies—my flowers—blowing all together, are swaying and congéeing to the morning airs.
O wise men, who know all things, do you know this? Can you tell it me? Where does the flower hide her scent? From what full cup of hidden sweets does one suck it?
It is one of those days when one feels most convinced of being immortal—when the spirits of men stretch out longing arms toward the All-Good, the Altogether Beautiful—when souls thirst for God, yearn most deeply for the well of his unfathomed truth—when, to those who have lost, their dead come back in most pleasant, gentle guise. As for me, I have lost nothing and no one as yet. All my treasures are still about me; I can stretch out live hands, and touch them alive; none of my dear names are yet to be spoken sparingly with bated breath, as too holy for common talk. And yet I, too, as I walk and bask, and bend to smell the hyacinth-blooms, feel that same vague and most unnamed yearning—a delicate pain that he who has it would barter for no boisterous joy. The clocks tick out the scented hours, and with loud singing of happy birds, with pomp of flowers and bees, and freaked butterflies, God's day treads royally past.
It is afternoon, and the morning wind, heaving with too much fragrance, has lain down to sleep. A great warm stillness is on the garden and house. The sweet Nancies no longer bow. They stand straight up, all a-row, making the whole place honeyed. The school-room is one great nosegay. Every vase and jug, and cup, and pot and pan and pipkin that we can command, is crammed with heavy-headed daffodils, with pale-cheeked primroses, with wine-colored gilly-flowers, every thing that spring has thrust most plentifully into our eager hands.
The boys have been out fishing.
Algy and Bobby have been humorously trying to drown the Brat.
He looks small and cold in consequence, and his little pert nose is tinged with a chilly pink. Half an hour ago, mother called me away to a private conference, exciting thereby a mighty curiosity not unmixed with envy in my brethren.
Our colloquy is ended now, and I am reëntering the school-room.
"Well, what was it? out with it," cries Algy, almost before I am inside the door again. Algy is sitting more than half—more than three-quarters out of the window, balancing himself with great nicety on the sill. He is in the elegant négligé of a decrepit shooting-jacket, no waistcoat, and no collar.
"What have you been doing to your face?" says Bobby, drawing nigh, and peering with artless interest into the details of my appearance; "it is the color of this" (pointing to a branch of red rhibes, which is hanging its drooped flowers, and joining its potent spice to the other flower-scents).
"Is it?" I answer, putting both hands to my cheeks, to feel their temperature. "I dare say! so would yours be, perhaps, if you had, like me, been having a—" I stop suddenly.
"Having a what?"
"I will not say what I was going to say," I cry, emphatically, "it was nonsensical!"
"But what has she told you, Nancy?" asks Barbara, who, enervated by the first hot day, is languishing in the rocking-chair, slowly see-sawing. "What could it have been that she might not as well have said before us all?"
"You