She kneels down beside me, and softly drawing down my face, till it is on a level with hers, and our cheeks touch, says in a tone of gentle entreaty and compa.s.sion, as if _I_ were the one to be considered--the prime sufferer:

"Do not fret about it, Nancy! it is of no--no consequence!--there is no harm done!"

I struggle to say _something_, but for the life of me I can frame no words.

"It was my own fancy!" she says, faltering, "I suppose my vanity misled me!"

"It is all my fault!" cry I, suddenly finding pa.s.sionate words, starting up, and beginning to walk feverishly to and fro--"_all!_--there never was any one in all this world so blind, so ill-judging, so miserably mistaken! If it had not been for me, you never would have thought twice of him--never; and I"--(beginning to speak with weeping indistinctness)--"I thought it would be so nice to have you near me--I thought that there was nothing the matter with him, but his temper; _many_ men are ill-tempered--nearly _all_. If" (tightly clinching my hands, and setting my teeth) "I had had any idea of his being the _scoundrel_ that he is--"

"But he is not," she interrupts quickly, wincing a little at my words; "indeed he is not! What ill have we heard from him? If you do not mind"

(laying her hand with gentle entreaty on my arm), "I had rather, _far_ rather, that you did not say any thing hard of him! I was always so glad that you and he were such friends--always--and I do not know why--there is no sense in it; but I am glad of it still."

"We were _not_ friends," say I, writhing a little; "why do you say so?"

She looks at me with a great and unfeigned astonishment.

"_Not friends!_" she echoes, slowly repeating my words; then, seeing the expression of my face, stops suddenly.

"Are you _sure_," cry I, feverishly s.n.a.t.c.hing her hands and looking with searching anxiety into her face, "that you spoke truth just now?--that you do not mind much--that you will get over it!--that it will not _kill_ you?"

"_Kill_ me!" she says, with a little sorrowful smile of derision; "no, no! I am not so easily killed."

"Are you _sure_?" persist I, with a pa.s.sionate eagerness, still reading her tear-stained face, "that it will not take the taste out of every thing?--that it will not make you hate all your life?--it would me."

"_Quite_ sure!--certain!" she says, looking back at me with a steady meekness, though her blue eyes brim over; "because G.o.d has taken from me _one_ thing--one that I never had any right to expect--should I do well, do you think, to quarrel with all that He has left me?"

I cannot answer; her G.o.dly patience is too high a thing for me.

"Even if my life _were_ spoilt," she goes on, after a moment or two, her voice gaining firmness, and her face a pale serenity, "even if it were--but it is _not_--indeed it is not. In a very little while it will seem to me as good and pleasant and full as ever; but even if it _were_"

(looking at me with a lovely confidence in her eyes), "it would be no such very great matter--_this_ life is not every thing!"

"Is not it?" say I, with a doubting shiver. "Who can tell you that? who knows?"

"_No one_ has been to blame," she continues, with a gentle persistence. "I should like you to see that! There has been only a--a--_mistake_"--(her voice failing a little again), "a mistake that has been corrected in time, and for which no one--_no one_, Nancy, is the worse!"

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

So this is the way in which Barbara's hope dies! Our hopes have as many ways of dying as our bodies. Sometimes they pine and fall into a slow consumption, we nursing, c.o.c.kering, and physicking them to the last.

Sometimes they fall down dead suddenly, as one that in full health, with his bones full of marrow, and his eyes full of light, drops wordless into the next world unaware. This last has been Barbara's case. When she thought it healthiest, and most vigorous in its stalwart life, then the death-mark was on it. To most of us, O friends, troubles are as great stones cast unexpectedly on a smooth road; over which, in a dark night, we trip, and grumblingly stumble, cursing, and angrily bruising our limbs. To a few of us, they are ladders, by which we climb to G.o.d; hills, that lift us nearer heaven--that heaven, which, however certainly--with whatever mathematical precision--it has been demonstrated to us that it exists not here, nor there, nor yet anywhere, we still dimly, with yearning tears and high longings, grasp at. Barbara has always looked heavenward. In all her mirth, G.o.d has mixed. Now, therefore, in this grief that He has sent her--this ign.o.ble grief, that yet cuts the none less deeply for being ign.o.ble, and excluding the solace of human sympathy, she but thrusts her hand with a fuller confidence in his, and fixes her sweet eyes with a more reverent surety on the one prime consoler of humankind, who, from his Cross, has looked royally down the toiling centuries--the king, whom this generation, above all generations, is laboring--and, as not a few think, _successfully_--to discrown. To her, his kingship is as unquestioned as when heretics and paynims burnt to prove it.

Often, since then, in those vain longings that come to each of us, I suppose, I tried in after-days--sometimes I try now, to stretch my arms out wide-backward toward the past--to speak the words that would have been as easily spoken then as any other--that no earthly power can ever make spoken words now, of sympathy and appreciation to Barbara.

I did say loving things, but they seem to me now to have been but scant and shabby. Why did not I say a great many more? Oh, all of you who live with those that are dearer to you than they seem, tell them every day how much you love them! at the risk of _wearying_ them, tell them, I pray you: it will save you, perhaps, many after-pangs.

I think that, at this time, there are in me _two_ Nancys--Barbara's Nancy, and Roger's Nancy; the one so vexed, thwarted, and humiliated in spirit, that she feels as if she never could laugh quite heartily again; the other, so utterly and triumphantly glad, that any future tears or trials seem to her in the highest degree improbable. And Barbara herself is on the side of this latter. From her hopeful speech and her smiles, you would think that some good news had come to her--that she was on the eve of some long-looked-for, yet hardly-hoped prosperity. Not that she is unnaturally or hysterically lively--an error into which many, making such an effort and struggle for self-conquest, would fall. Barbara's mirth was never noisy, as mine and the boys' so often was. Perhaps--nay, I have often thought since, _certainly_--she weeps as she prays, in secret; but G.o.d is the only One who knows of her tears, as of her prayers. She has always been one to go halves in her pleasures, but of her sorrows she will give never a morsel to any one.

Her very quietness under her trouble--her silence under it--her equanimity--mislead me. It is the impulse of any hurt thing to cry out.

I, myself, have always done it. Half unconsciously, I am led by this reasoning to think that Barbara's wound cannot be very deep, else would she shrink and writhe beneath it. So I talk to her all day, with merciless length, about Roger. I go through all the old queries. I again critically examine my face, and arrive--not only at the former conclusion, that one side is worse-looking than the other, but also that it looks ten years older.

I have my flax hair built in many strange and differing fashions, and again _un_built: piled high, to give me height; twisted low, in a vain endeavor to liken me to the Greeks; curled, plaited, frizzed, and again unfrizzed. I inst.i.tute a searching and critical examination of my wardrobe, rejecting this and that; holding one color against my cheek, to see whether my pallor will be able to bear it; turning away from another with a grimace of self-disgust.

And this is the same "_I_," who thought it so little worth while to win the good opinion of father's blear-eyed old friend, that I went to my first meeting with him with a scorched face, loose hair, tottering, all through prayers, on the verge of a descent about my neck, and a large round hole, smelling horribly of singeing, burnt in the very front of my old woolen frock.

His coming is near now. This _very_ day I shall see him come in that door. He will sit in that chair. His head will dent that cushion. I shall sit on a footstool at his feet. The better to imagine the position, I push a footstool into the desired neighborhood to Roger's arm-chair, and already see myself, with the eye of faith, in solid reality occupying it. I rehea.r.s.e all the topics that will engage my tongue. The better to realize their effect upon him, I give utterance out loud to the many greetings, to the numberless fond and pretty things with which I mean to load him.

He always looked so very joyful when I said any little civil thing to him, and I so seldom, _seldom_ did. Ah! we will change all that! He shall be nauseated with sweets. And then, still sitting by him, holding his hand, and with my head (dressed in what I finally decide upon as the becomingest fashion) daintily rested on his arm, I will tell him all my troubles. I will tell him of Algy's estrangement, his cold looks and harsh words. Without any outspoken or bitter abuse of her, I will yet manage cunningly to set him on his guard against Mrs. Huntley. I will lament over Bobby to him. Yes, I will tell him _all_ my troubles--_all_, that is, with one reservation.

Barbara is no longer here. She has gone home.

"You will be better by yourselves," she says, gently, when she announces her intention of going. "He will like it better. I should if I were he.

It will be like a new honey-moon."

"_That_ it will not," reply I, stoutly, recollecting how much I yawned, and how largely Mr. Musgrave figured in the first. "I have no opinion of honey-moons; no more would _you_ if you had _had_ one."

"_Should_ not I?" speaking a little absently, while her eyes stray through the window to the serene coldness of the sky, and the pallid droop of the snow-drops in the garden-border.

"You are sure," say I, earnestly, taking her light hand in mine, "that you are not going because you think that you are not _wanted_ now--that now, that I have my--my own property again" (smiling irrepressibly), "I can do very well without you."

"_Quite_ sure, Nancy!" looking back into my eager eyes with confident affection.

"And you will come back _very_ soon? _very?_"

"When you quarrel," she answers, her face dimpling into a laugh, "I will come and make it up between you."

"You must come before _then_," say I, with a proud smile, "or your visit is likely to be indefinitely postponed."

Roger and I quarrel! We both find the idea so amusing that we laugh in concert.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

"_Gertrude._ Is my knight come? O the Lord, my band! Sister, do my cheeks look well? Give me a little box o' the ear, that I may seem to blush."--EASTWARD HOE.

She is gone now. The atmosphere of the house seems less clear, less pure, now that she has left it. As she drives away, it seems to me, looking after her, that no flower ever had a modester face, a more delicate bloom. If I had time to think about it, I should fret sorely after her, I should grievously miss her; but I have none.

The carriage that takes her to the station is to wait half an hour, and then bring back Roger. There is, therefore, not more than enough time for me to make the careful and lengthy toilet, on which I have expended so much painstaking thought. I have deferred making it till now, so that I may appear in perfect dainty freshness, as if I had just emerged from the manifold silver papers of a bandbox, before him when he arrives--that not a hair of my flax head may be displaced from its silky sweep; that there may be no risk of Vick jumping up, and defiling me with muddy paws that know no respect of clothes.

I take a long time over it. I snub my maid more than I ever did in my life before. But I am complete now; to the last pin I am finished.

Perhaps--though this does not strike me till the last moment--perhaps I am rather, nay, more than _rather_, overdressed for the occasion. But surely this, in a person who has not long been in command of fine clothes, and even in that short time has had very few opportunities of airing them, is pardonable.

You remember that it is February. Well, then, this is the warm splendor in which I am clad. Genoa velvet, of the color of a dark sapphire, trimmed with silver-fox fur; and my head crowned with a mob-cap, concerning which I am in doubt, and should be nervously glad to have the boys here to enlighten me as to whether it is very becoming or rather ridiculous. The object of the mob-cap is to approximate my age to Roger's, and to a.s.sure all such as the velvet and fur leave in doubt, that I am ent.i.tled to take my stand among the portly ranks of British matrons.