Nancy by Rhoda Broughton

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NANCY:

A NOVEL.

BY
RHODA BROUGHTON.

AUTHOR OF
"'GOOD-BYE, SWEETHEART!'" "RED AS A ROSE IS SHE," ETC., ETC.

"As through the land at eve we went,
And plucked the ripened ears,
We fell out, my wife and I,
Oh, we fell out, I know not why,
And kissed again with tears."

1874

NANCY.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

"Put into a small preserving pan three ounces of fresh butter, and, as
soon as it is just melted, add one pound of brown sugar of moderate
quality--"

"Not moderate; the browner the better," interpolates Algy.

"Cannot say I agree with you. I hate brown sugar--filthy stuff!" says
Bobby, contradictiously.

"Not half so _filthy_ as white, if you come to that," retorts Algy,
loftily, looking up from the lemon he is grating to extinguish his
brother. "They clear white sugar with but--"

"Keep these stirred gently over a clear fire for about fifteen minutes,"
interrupt I, beginning to read again very fast, in a loud, dull
recitative, to hinder further argument, "or until a little of the
mixture dipped into cold water breaks clear between the teeth without
sticking to them. When it is boiled to this point it must be poured out
immediately or it will burn."

Having galloped jovially along, scorning stops, I here pause out of
breath. We are a large family, we Greys, and we are _all_ making taffy.
Yes, every one of us. It would take all the fingers of one hand, and the
thumb of the other, to count us, O reader. Six! Yes, six. A Frenchman
might well hold up his hands in astonied horror at the insane
prolificness--the foolhardy fertility--of British householders. We come
very _improbably_ close together, except Tou Tou, who was an
after-thought. There are no two of us, I am proud to say, exactly
simultaneous, but we have come tumbling on each other's heels into the
world in so hot a hurry that we evidently expect to find it a pleasant
place when we get there. Perhaps we do--perhaps we do not; friends, you
will hear and judge for yourselves.

A few years ago when we were little, people used to say that we were
quite a pretty sight, like little steps one above another. We are big
steps now, and no one any longer hazards the suggestion of our being
pretty. On the other hand, nobody denies that we are each as well
furnished with legs, arms, and other etceteras, as our neighbors, nor
can affirm that we are notably more deficient in wits than those of our
friends who have arrived in twos and threes.

We are in the school-room, the big bare school-room, that has seen us
all--that is still seeing some of us--unwillingly dragged, and painfully
goaded up the steep slopes of book-learning. Outside, the March wind is
roughly hustling the dry, brown trees and pinching the diffident green
shoots, while the round and rayless sun of late afternoon is staring,
from behind the elm-twigs in at the long maps on the wall, in at the
high chairs--tall of back, cruelly tiny of seat, off whose rungs we have
kicked all the paint--in at the green baize table, richly freaked with
splashes. Hardly less red than the sun's, are our burnt faces gathered
about the fire.

This fire has no flame--only a glowing, ruddy heart, on which the bright
brass saucepan sits; and kneeling before it, stirring the mess with a
long iron spoon, is Barbara. Algy, as I have before remarked, is grating
a lemon. Bobby is buttering soup-plates. The Brat--the Brat always takes
his ease if he can--is peeling almonds, fishing delicately for them in a
cup of hot water with his finger and thumb; and I, Nancy, am reading
aloud the receipt at the top of my voice, out of a greasy, dog's-eared
cookery-book, which, since it came into our hands, has been the innocent
father of many a hideous compound. Tou Tou alone, in consideration of
her youth, is allowed to be a spectator. She sits on the edge of the
table, swinging her thin legs, and kicking her feet together.

Certainly we deteriorate in looks as we go downward. In Barbara we made
an excellent start: few families a better one, though we say it that
should not. Although in Algy there was a slight falling off, it was not
much to complain of. But I am sensibly uglier than Algy (as indeed he
has, on several occasions, dispassionately remarked to me); the Brat
than me; Bobby than the Brat; and so steadily on, till we reach our
nadir of unhandsomeness in Tou Tou. Tou Tou is our climax, and we
certainly defy our neighbors and acquaintances to outdo her.

Hapless young Tou Tou! made up of the thinnest legs, the widest mouth,
the invisiblest nose, and over-visiblest ears, that ever went to the
composition of a child of twelve years.

"Keep stirring always! You must take care that it does not stick to the
bottom!" say I, closing the receipt-book, and speaking on my own
account, but still as one having authority.

"All very well to say 'Keep stirring always,'" answers Barbara, turning
round a face unavoidably pretty, even though at the present moment
deeply flame-colored; eyes still sweetly laughing with gay good-humor,
even though half burnt out of her head, to answer me; "but if you had
been stirring as long as I have, you would wonder that you had any arm
left to stir with, however feebly. Here, one of you boys, take a turn!
You Brat, you never do any thing for your living!"

The Brat complies, though not with eagerness. They change occupations:
the Brat stirs, and she fishes for almonds. Ten minutes pass: the taffy
is done, and what is more it really is taffy. The upshot of our cookery
is in general so startlingly indifferent from what we had intended, that
the result in the present case takes us by surprise. We all prove
practically that, in the words of the receipt-book, it "breaks clear
between the teeth without sticking to them." It is poured into Bobby's
soup-plate, and we have thrown up the window-sashes, and set it on the
ledge to cool. The searching wind blows in dry and biting. Now it is
rushing in a violent current through the room, for the door has opened.
Mother enters.

"To what may we attribute the honor of this visit?" says Algy, turning
away from the window to meet her, and setting her a chair. Bobby gives
her a kiss, and the Brat a lump of taffy, concerning which it would be
invidious to predicate which were the stickier; so exceedingly adhesive
are both.

"Your father says," begins she, sitting down. She is interrupted by a
loud and universal groan.

"Says what? Something unpleasant of course, who is it now? Who has done
any thing now? I do hope it is the Brat," cries Bobby, viciously; "it is
quite his turn; he has been good boy of the family for the last week."

"I dare say it is," replies the Brat, resignedly; "one can't expect such
prosperity as mine to last forever."

"Of course it is _I_," says Algy, rather bitterly, "it is always I. I
have never been good boy since I was ploughed; and, please God, I never
will be again."

"But what is it? what is it? About how bad is it? Is it to be one of our
worst rows?"

We are all speaking together at the top of our voices; indeed, we rarely
employ a lower key.

"It is no one; no one has done any thing," replies mother, when, at
last, we allow her to make herself heard, "only your father sends you a
message that, as Sir Roger Tempest is coming here to-day, he hopes you
will make less noise this evening in here than you did last night: he
says he could hardly hear the sound of his own voice."

"Ahem!" "Very likely!" "I dare say!" in different tones of angry
incredulity.

"He begs you to see that the swing-door is shut, as he does not wish his
friend to imagine that he keeps a private lunatic asylum."

A universal snort of indignation.

"If we are bedlamites, we know who made us so. We will tell old Roger if
he asks," etc.

"For my part," say I, resolutely pinching my lips together as I kneel on
the carpet, and violently hammer the now cold and hard taffy with the
handle of the poker, which in its day has been put to many uses vile, "I
can tell you that I shall not dine with you to-night: I should
infallibly say something to father--something unfortunate--I feel it
rising; and it would be unseemly to have one of our _emeutes_ before
this old gentleman, would not it?"

"They are nice breezy things when you are used to them," says Barbara,
laughing; "but one requires to be brought up to them."

"Do not you dine either, Brat," say I, looking up, and waving the poker
with suave command at him, "and we will broil bones for tea, and roast
potatoes on the shovel."

"Some of you must dine," says poor mother, rather wearily, "or your
father--"

"He cannot complain if we send our two specimen ones," say I, again
looking up, and indicating Barbara and Algy with my weapon, "our sample
figs: if Sir Robert--Sir Robin--Sir Roger--what is he?--does not see the
rest of us, he may perhaps imagine that we are all equally presentable,
which would be more to your credit, mother, than if Bobby and Tou Tou
and I were to be submitted to the poor old thing's notice."

Mother looks rather at sea.

"What are you talking about? What poor old thing? Oh! I understand."

"He will have to see us," says Tou Tou, rather lugubriously, "he cannot
help it--at prayers."

Tou Tou has descended from the table, and is standing propped against
mother's knee, twisting one leg with ingenious grace round the other.

"Bless your heart," says the Brat, comfortingly, "he will never find out
that we are there: do you suppose that his blear old eyes will see all
across that big room, economically lit up by one pair of candles?"

Mother smiles.

"Wait till you see whether he has blear eyes!"

"He must be very ancient," says Algy, in all the insolence of twenty,
leaning his flat back against the mantel-shelf, "as he was at school
with father."

"Father has not blear eyes," remarks Bobby, dryly. "Would God he had!
For then perhaps he would not see our little vices quite so clearly with
them as he does."

"But then father has not been in India," retorts Algy, stretching.
"India plays the deuce with one's organs and appurtenances."

"I wish you joy of him," say I, rising flushed and untidy from my knees,
having successfully smashed the taffy into little bits; "from soup to
walnuts, you will have to undergo a ceaseless tyranny of tales about
hitmaghars and dak bungalows and Choto Lazery: which of us has not
suffered in our day from the horrible monotony of ideas of an old
Indian?"

"Never you mind, Barbara!" cries the Brat, giving her a sounding
brotherly pat on the back. "Pay no attention to her."

"'What great events from trivial causes spring!' as the poet says: you
may live to bless the day that old Roger Crossed our doors."

"As how?" says Barbara, laughing, and rocking herself backward and
forward in a veteran American rocking-chair which, at different periods
of our history, has served most of us the dirty turn of tipping us over,
and presenting us reversed to the eyes of our family.

"Never you mind," repeats the Brat, oracularly; "truth is stranger than
fiction! odd things happen: I read in the paper the other day of a man
who pulled up the window for an old woman in the train, and she died at
once--I do not mean on the spot, but very soon after, and when she died
--listen, please, all of you--" (speaking very slowly and impressively)
--"she left him _two thousand pounds_ a year."

"I wish I saw the application," answers Barbara, still rocking and
sighing.

"Mind that you set a stool for his gouty foot," says Algy, feeling for
his faint mustache, "and run and search for his spectacle-case, when he
has mislaid it."

"Seriously," say I, "what a grand thing it would be for the family if he
were to adopt you, Barbara!"

"Or me," suggests the Brat, standing before the fire with his coat-tails
under his arm. "Why not _me_? My manners to the aged are always
considered particularly happy."

"Here he is!" cries Tou Tou from the window, whither she has retired,
and now stands, like a heron, on one leg, leaning her elbow on the sill.
"Here is the dog-cart turning the corner!"

We all make a rush to the casement.

"Yes, there he is! sure enough! our future benefactor!" says Algy,
looking over the rest of our heads, and making a counterfeit greeting.--
"Welcome, welcome, good old man!"

"And father, all affability, pointing out the house," supplements Bobby.

We laugh grimly.

"But who is it he has in the fly?" say I, as the second vehicle follows
the first. "His harem, I suppose! half a dozen old Wampoos."

"His valet, to be sure," replies the Brat, chidingly, "with his stays,
and his evening wig, and the calves of his legs."

CHAPTER II.

The wind is even colder than it was, stronger and more withering now
that the sun's faint warmth is withdrawn, and that the small and chilly
stars possess the sky. Nevertheless, both the school-room windows are
open. We are all huddled shivering round the hearth, yet no one talks of
closing them. The fact is, that amateur cooking, though a graceful
accomplishment, has its penalties, and that at the present moment the
smell of broiled bones and fried potatoes that fills our place of
learning is something appalling. Why may not it penetrate beneath the
swing-door, through the passages, and reach the drawing-room? Such a
thing has happened once or twice before. At the bare thought we all
quake. I am in the pleasant situation, just at present, of owning a
chilled body and a blazing face.

Chiefest among the cooks have I been, and now I am sitting trying to fan
my red cheeks and redder nose, with the back of an old atlas, gutted in
some ancient broil, trying, in deference to Sir Roger, to cool down my
appearance a little against prayer-time. Alas! that epoch is nearer than
I think. Ting! tang! the loud bell is ringing through the house. My hair
is loosened and tumbled with stooping over the fire, and I have burnt a
hole right in the fore front of my gown, by letting a hot cinder fall
from the grate upon it. There is, however, now no time to repair these
dilapidations. We issue from our lair, and _en route_ meet the long
string of servants filing from their distant regions. How is it that the
cook's face is so much, _much_ less red than mine? Prayers are held in
the justicing-room, and thither we are all repairing. The accustomed
scene bursts on my eye. At one end the long, straight row of the
servants, immovably devout, staring at the wall, with their backs to us.
In the middle of the room, facing them, father, kneeling upon a chair
with his hands clutched, and his eyes closed, repeating the church
prayers, as if he were rather angry with them than otherwise. Mother,
kneeling on the carpet beside him, like the faithful, ruffed, and
farthingaled wife on a fifteenth-century tomb. Behind them, again, at
some little distance, we and our visitor. With the best will in the
world to do so, I can get but a meagre view of the latter. The room is
altogether rather dark, it being one of our manners and customs not to
throw much light on prayers, and he has chosen the darkest corner of it.
I only vaguely see the outline of a kneeling figure, evidently neither
bulky nor obese, of a flat back and vigorous shoulders. His face is
generally hidden in his hands, but once or twice he lifts it to scan the
proportions of my late grandfather's preposterously fat cob, whose
portrait hangs on the wall above his head.

There is no doubt that on some days the devil reigns with a more potent
sway over people than on others. Tonight he has certainly entered into
the boys. He often does a little, but this evening he is holding a great
and mighty carnival among them. While father's strong, hard voice
vibrates in a loud, dull monotone through the silent room, they are
engaged in a hundred dumb yet ungodly antics behind his back.

Algernon has thrust his head far out between the rungs of his
chair-back, and affects to be unable to withdraw it again, making
movements of simulated suffocation. The Brat is stealthily walking on
his knees across the space that intervenes between them to Barbara, with
intent, as I too well know, of unseemly pinchings. If father unbutton
his eyes, or move his head one barley-corn, we are all dead men. I hold
my breath in a nervous agony. Thank Heaven! the harsh recitation still
flows on with equable loud slowness. In happy ignorance of his
offspring's antics, father is still asking, or rather ordering, the
Almighty (for there is more of command than entreaty in his tone) to
prosper the High Court of Parliament. Also the Brat is now returning to
his place, travelling with surprising noiseless rapidity over the Turkey
carpet, dragging his shins and his feet after him. I draw a long breath
of relief, and drop my hot face into my spread hands. My peace, however,
is not of long duration. I am aroused again by a sort of choking snort
from Tou Tou, who is beside me--a snort that seems compounded of mingled
laughter and pain, and, looking up, detect Bobby in the act of deftly
puncturing one of her long bare legs with a long brass pin, which he has
found straying, after the vagabond manner of pins, over the carpet.

I raise myself, and lean over Tou Tou, to give the offender a silent
buffet of admonition, and, lifting my eyes apprehensively to see if I am
noticed, I meet the blear eyes of Sir Roger fixed upon mine. He has
turned his face quite toward me, and a ray from the candles falls full
upon it. _Blear_! Well, if his eyes are blear, then henceforth blear
must bear a different signification from the unhandsome one it has
hitherto worn. Henceforth it must mean blue as steel: it must mean clear
as a glass of spring water; keen as a well-tempered knife; kindly as the
early sunshine.

I am so astonished at my discovery, that I remain for full two minutes
staring blankly at the object of it, while he also looks stealthily at
me; then, recollecting my manners, I burrow my face into my
chair-bottom, and so remain until mother's gentle Amen, and a noise of
shuffling and scrambling to their feet on the part of the congregation,
tell me that the end has come.

We all go up to father, and coldly and stiffly kiss him. While I am
waiting for my turn to receive our parent's chilly salute, I steal a
second glance at our guest. Yes, he is old certainly. Despite the youth
of his eyes, despite the uprightness, the utter freedom from superfluous
flesh--from the ugly shaky bulkiness of age--in his tall and stalwart
figure, still he is old--old in the eyes of nineteen--as old as father,
perhaps--though in much better preservation--forty-eight or forty-nine;
for is not his hair iron-gray, and his heavy mustache, and the thick and
silky beard that falls on his broad breast, are they not iron-gray too?
I have dropped my small and unwilling kiss on father's forehead--and
said "good-night" in a tone as suppressedly hostile as his own. Now I
may go. We may all go. I am the last, or I think I am, to pass through
the swing-door. I hurry along the passage to join the rest in the
school-room. I upbraid the boys for the rash impiety of their demeanor.
I feel a foot on my garments behind, and hear a long cracking sound that
I too, too well know to mean _gathers_.

"You beast!" cried I, in good nervous English, turning sharply round
with my hand raised in act to strike, "that is the third time this week
that you have torn out my--"

I stop dumfounded. If I mean to box the offender's ears, I must raise my
hand considerably higher than it is at present. Angels and ministers of
grace! what has happened? I have called General Sir Roger Tempest a
_beast_, and offered to cuff him. For a moment, I am dumfounded. Then,
for shyness has never been my besetting sin, and something in the genial
laughter of his eyes reassures me.

I hold out the injured portion of my raiment, and say:

"Look! when you see what you have done, I am sure you will forgive me;
but of course I meant it for Bobby. I never dreamt it was you."

He takes hold of one end of the rent, I of the other, and we both
examine it.

"How exceedingly clumsy of me! how could it have happened? I beg your
pardon ten thousand times."

In his words there is polite remorse and solicitude; in his face only a
friendly mirth. He is old, that is clear. Had he been young, he would
have said, with that variety and suitability of epithets so
characteristic of this generation:

"I am awfully sorry! how awfully stupid of me! what an awful duffer I
am!"

The gas is shining in its garish yellow brightness full down upon us, as
we stand together, illuminating my plain, scorched face, the slatternly
looseness of my hair, and the burnt hole in my gown.

"You will have to give me another," I say, looking up at him and
smiling. I should not have thought of saying it if he had been a young
man, but with a _vieux papa_ one may be at one's ease.

"There is nothing in the world I should like better," he says, with a
sort of hurry and eagerness, not very suggestive of a _vieux papa_; "but
really--" (seeing me look rather ashamed of my proposition)--"is it
_quite hopeless?_ the damage quite irremediable?"

"On the contrary," reply I, tucking my gathers in, with a graceful
movement, at the band of my gown, "five minutes will make it as good as
new--at least" (casting a disparaging eye over its frayed and
taffy-marked surface), "as good as it _ever_ will be in this world."

A little pause.

"I suppose I have lost my way," he says, thinking, I fancy, that I look
rather eager to be gone. "I am never very good at the geography of a
strange house."

"Yes," say I, promptly; "you came through _our_ door, instead of your
own; shall I show you the way back?"

"Since I have come so far, may not I come a little farther?" he asks,
glancing rather longingly at the half-open school-room door, whence
sounds of pious mirth are again beginning to reissue.

"Do you mean _really?_" ask I, with a highly-dissuasive inflection of
voice. "Please not to-night; we are all higgledy-piggledy--at sixes and
sevens! To tell you the truth, we have been _cooking_. I wonder you did
not smell it in the drawing-room."

Again he looks amused.

"May not I cook too? I _can_, though you look disbelieving; there are
few people that can beat me at an Irish stew when I set my mind to it."

A head (Bobby's) appears round the school-room door.

"I say, Nancy, who are you colloquing with out there? I believe you have
got hold of our future benefact--"

An "oh!" of utter discomfiture, and the head is withdrawn.

"I am keeping you," Sir Roger says. "Well, I will say good-night. You
will shake hands, won't you, to show that you bear no malice?"

"That I will," reply I, heartily stretching out my right hand, and
giving his a cordial shake. For was not he at school with father?

CHAPTER III.

Day has followed night. The broiled smell has at length evacuated the
school-room, but a good deal of taffy, spilt in the pouring out, still
adheres to the carpet, making it nice and sticky. The wind is still
running roughly about over the earth, and the yellow crocuses, in the
dark-brown garden-borders, opened to their widest extent, are staring up
at the sun. How _can_ they stare so straight up at him without blinking?
I have been trying to emulate them--trying to stare, too, up at him,
through the pane, as he rides laughing, aloft in the faint far sky; and
my presumptuous eyes have rained down tears in consequence. I am trying
now to read; but a hundred thousand things distract me: the sun shining
warm on my shoulder, as I lean against the window; the divine morning
clamor of the birds; their invitations to come out that will take no
nay; and last, but oh! not, _not_ least, the importunate voices of
Barbara and Tou Tou. Every morning at this hour they have a weary tussle
with the verb "aimer," "to love." It is hard that they should have
pitched upon so tenderhearted a verb for the battle-field of so grim a
struggle:

J'aime, I love.
Tu aimes, Thou lovest.
Il aime, He loves.
Nous aimons, We love.
Vous aimez, You love.
Ils aiment, They love.

This, with endless variations of ingenious and hideous inaccuracies--
this, interspersed with foolish laughter and bitter tears, is what I
have daily been audience to, for the last two months. The day before
yesterday a great stride was taken; the present tense was pronounced
vanquished, and Barbara and her pupil passed on in triumph to the
imperfect, "j'aimais, I loved, or was loving." To-day, in order to be
quite on the safe side, a return has been made to "j'aime," and it has
been discovered that it has utterly disappeared from our young sister's
memory. "J'aimais, I loved, or was loving," has entirely routed and
dispersed his elder brother, "j'aime, I love." The old strain is,
therefore, desperately resumed:

J'aime, I love.
Tu aimes, Thou lovest.
Il aime, He loves, etc.

It is making me drowsy. Ten minutes more, and I shall be asleep in the
sun, with my head down-dropped on the window-sill. I get up, and,
putting on my out-door garments, stray out into the sun, leaving
Barbara--her pretty forehead puckered with ineffectual wrath, and Tou
Tou blurred with grimy tears, to their death-struggle with the restive
verb "to love." It is the end of March, and when one can hide round a
corner from the wind, one has a foretaste of summer, in the sun's warm
strength. I gaze lovingly at the rich brown earth, so lately freed from
the frost's grasp, through which the blunt green buds are gently forcing
themselves. I look down the flaming crocus throats--the imperial purple
goblets with powdery gold stamens--and at the modest little pink faces
of the hepaticas. All over our wood there is a faint yet certain purply
shade, forerunner of the summer green, and the loud and sweet-voiced
birds are abroad. O Spring! Spring! with all your searching east winds,
with your late, shriveling frosts, with your occasional untimely sleets
and snows, you are yet as much better than summer as hope is better than
fruition.

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