“PARTY! it was no party at all!” said Nancy, “I have just been giving Arthur a piece of my mind. If he thinks I am going to take the trouble to have a dress made, and go out among folks I don’t know, to meet the Curate and his wife! why, we are just as good as they are! or rather, I should say, a deal better.” She was sitting over the fire next morning, by no means pleased with her entertainment. Now, indeed, was the time when she felt it most—for it had been sweet to think of dazzling her mother and sisters with an account of the grand ladies of the Green; and there was nothing now to comment upon, save poor little Mrs. Curate in her muslin frock! Arthur was in the room behind, shut off with folding doors from this; and she spoke loud that he might have the benefit of her remarks.
“The Curate!” said Mrs. Bates, “my dear, it’s no compliment, it’s an insult to ask you; as if you are not good enough to meet the best.”
“That is just what I said. I tell Arthur, if he were to stick up for me as he ought, nobody would dare to treat me like that. I consider,” said Nancy, “that we paid those Eagles a great compliment going; and to meet the Curate! as if we were not good enough to sit down with the finest folks in this wretched little hole of a place.”
“The Curate is a very nice young man,” said Sarah Jane. “I should not mind him a bit. I call him handsome; but then he’s married,” she added with lessened satisfaction. “And so are you married, so it comes to the same thing. I dare say they thought as you were both young couples—”
“I wish you would think a little what you’re saying,” said Nancy. “Me! and her! a bit of a girl in white muslin! with a hundred and fifty a year, at the outside, to live on; and obliged to work hard among the poor, as hard as if she was a curate too—and me!”
“Yes, indeed, there is no comparison,” said Mrs. Bates. “For shame, Sarah Jane! But, Nancy, you mustn’t forget that your sister has chosen her lot very different. John Raisins is an excellent young man; but he can’t open the doors of high life to her, as Arthur can open them to you. And it’s best that she should make up her mind to what she can have—not hanker after what she can’t. It’s very different, my darling child, with you.”
“I am sure I don’t know if it’s different,” said Nancy. “He hasn’t opened many doors to me yet, and I think he’d shut your door if he could, which is the only one that’s left. Oh, why do girls marry? they are a deal better, if they could only think it, at home.” And with this Nancy began to cry.
Arthur heard everything in the next room. He had himself felt the change in his position sorely on the previous night; and Mr. Eagles’ sharp, yet somewhat mournful adjurations to him not to lose his time, to go on with his work, to do something, had intensified the effect. He had come upstairs early enough to hear the style of Nancy’s conversation with the two ladies, and this also had touched him deeply. What is more painful than to see those whom we love giving what, to our eyes, is a false representation of themselves to the outside world, which does not know them? Arthur felt this tingle to his very finger-points—a painful shame; her foolish rudeness, and the wrong which she did herself by this misrepresentation had made him miserable. If they could but see her as he knew her—as she was on other occasions? This, he said to himself, was not Nancy; it was a foolish braggart of the village, the type of the Bates family, not his wife, who was as much above the Bates in fine taste and perception as she was in beauty. To be sure, her taste had not lately told for very much. But that had been the influence of the uncomfortable position in which she had felt herself, or of her connections, whom she had so unfortunately insisted on coming back to. The pain had been exquisite with which Arthur watched his bride through this first appearance in society. It brought back to him the feelings which he had tried to forget, with which he had come in upon the violent termination of her interview with Mrs. Anthony Curtis. Was there nothing he could do, or say, which would persuade her that this was not the way to meet strangers who might turn out to be friends? He was sitting unhappy enough over his fire, having taken out a book or two, which lay on the table beside the “Times,” the usual occupation of his aimless morning. He had been trying to “read” as Mr. Eagles understood reading; but what were Demosthenes and Cicero to him? He could not go back now, and toil over the intricacies of language and argument which wanted all his attention ceaselessly, with happy ease of mind, not with painful pre-occupation of it, as he had pursued those studies in their earlier stages. He had never been a hard student, and why should he read now? What good would it do him? Would all the reading in the world, or his degree, when he had taken it, restore him to the world in which his wife could not accompany him, and would not try to accompany him, and where he could not go without her? He had been sitting dreamily over the fire, thinking it all over. The vague plan in his mind had been when Nancy was a little better prepared for it, a little more likely to incline in her own mind towards it, and willing to try to make the experiment successful, to take her home and present her to his father and mother, hoping that the surprise and the pleasure of his own return might procure them a welcome; this is what he had thought of even when he had written formal letters to Sir John, and those brief notes to Lucy or his mother, in which there was no reference to Nancy. When he could get her guided to that point—when he could feel that she could bear the trial, then to go. It had been his hope all through, a something vaguely looked forward to, though never brought down to any settled moment of time. But, alas! it had receded before him point by point. Nancy was not willing to do anything to please. She was of opinion that by herself, without any effort, she ought to rule easily over a subject world. She felt herself—not as he did, to be upon the painful threshold of an unexplored country, full of perils, in which all her efforts were needed to find herself a place—but rather to have conquered all that could be put in her way and attained every object—with the exception of the homage of those “stuck up” and disagreeable people, who were envious of her, and therefore would not pay her the attention to which she had a right, and whom Nancy would scorn to do anything to conciliate. What a difference between their points of view! And he who ought to have been the strongest, who was infinitely better educated, and more reasonable than Nancy, he was powerless to convey any other conviction to her mind; although she succeeded in agitating his with all sorts of tumults, with shame that she should show her worse qualities, and earn the disapproval she incurred—yet with hot resentment towards those who disapproved of her. Such sentiments are not unusual in human bosoms. Husbands feel so for their wives, and wives for their husbands, and parents for their children. Why will they show themselves at their worst to make strangers laugh, or wonder, or despise; and at the same time, how do they dare, these strangers, to despise, or laugh, or wonder? A more painful conflict of feeling cannot be.
This was what Arthur was thinking, sitting drearily, not among the ruins of his domestic happiness, but before the sunny, common-place, too trimly new and flimsy altar of those capricious deities who rule the hearth. He had not yet been six months married: but how the bloom had gone off all his hopes, and with how little confidence he regarded the future, which once had seemed to him so bright! And as he sat there, with his books thrown down at his elbow, and the “Times” thrust away from him upon the table, with a sort of loathing in his mind both of the studies which could now, he thought, do him no good if he returned to them, and of the public life, once certain, which now seemed to have become impossible and undesirable, he heard Mrs. Bates and Sarah Jane come in and the conversation that followed. Even now Arthur had sense enough (and it was creditable to him) to throw himself into no vulgar vituperation of his mother-in-law. The woman was well enough; she was kind, and almost fierce in independence, taking nothing from him, giving not receiving hospitality, and in no way disposed to encourage his wife in anything disagreeable to him. It was not Mrs. Bates that was in fault, but Nancy herself—she who had seemed to him such a lily of grace and sweetness among all these common-place people. She was so still, he believed; she was not like them, who were natural to their sphere, and suggested nothing better. He was faithful notwithstanding all imperfections to his first ideal of her; but her words thrilled through and through him, scarring him as with burning arrows. “He had not opened any doors to her. Oh, why did girls marry!” was this what his wife asked after five months of marriage with him? Arthur’s veins seemed to fill full as if some essence of pain had been poured into them. He darted up overcome by sharp misery and shame, and a passionate resentment which he could not restrain. It took him but a moment to throw open the folding doors. If one minute more had elapsed, it would have brought a second thought, but there was no interval in which this was possible. He threw open the door and stood looking at her, for the moment too tremulous and agitated to speak. She had put shame upon him before those women who were the only visitors she cared for. When she saw him, Nancy jumped up too and confronted him.
“Well?” she said, loudly, with a sharp and tremulous voice of interrogation. What had he to say for himself? She had said nothing which she was not ready to stand to, which she would not defend with all her powers. No one had ever known Nancy to flinch. However hot and hasty had been her assertions, however lightly said, she had always stood up for them; and to such a palpable challenge and trumpet call to conflict, it was not likely she would give in now.
He stood and looked at her for a moment almost wavering. It was not the first time she had said such things, why should he resent it so much more than usual?
“Did you mean that?” he said. “Do you really think that I have closed doors but opened none, and that girls would not marry if they knew—”
“I said it, therefore I must have meant it,” cried Nancy, with a flush of angry red. “If you sit and listen to what women are saying! But I never say anything I will not stand to. Yes: what door have you opened to me, Arthur? it was mother’s words first. Not your father and mother’s, which was the first to be thought of, nor any of your friends’; but mother’s has always been open to you.”
“Oh, hush, hush!” cried Mrs. Bates. “Oh, children, you don’t know what you’re doing. Why should you quarrel? Nancy, hold your tongue—you’ll be sorry after that you ever said a word.”
“Not I!” cried Nancy. “I am not one to bottle things up. I’ll say it out plain before you both, and you can be my witness, mother. When I knew Arthur first, I never thought what he was. Gentleman or poor man it was all one to me. He was my fancy, and that was all I thought of. When that man came, that Durant, then I began to see what I was bringing on me; but it was too late to draw back. And I said to myself, I’d let him see it wasn’t his money I wanted, and that I’d never kootoo to one of his grand friends. And I never have,” she cried, with angry energy, “and I never will. You’ve opened no doors to me—nor I don’t want you to; but you shan’t think that it’s been a grand thing for me to marry you, neither you nor anyone belonging to you. It hasn’t. You’d separate me from my own people if you could, and you don’t give me any other; and I say again, if girls only knew—”
“Mrs. Bates,” said Arthur, with trembling lips. “I do not think I have tried to separate your daughter from you. I may defend myself so far as this; and I had hoped that some time or other she would have gone with me to knock at that door which you upbraid me with not having opened. But what am I to do if, as she tells you, she never will? she never has shown the slightest inclination to do so, that is the truth indeed.”
“It was them that should have come to her—that’s what she thinks,” said Mrs. Bates, “and she’s hot-tempered. You know she’s hot-tempered. She don’t mean half of what she says. Oh, don’t now, don’t quarrel, children!” cried the mother. In the mêlée Sarah Jane thought she might as well take a part too.
“I don’t wonder that Nancy was affronted. That stuck up Miss Curtis coming with her ‘dear Arthur’s,’ and her ‘dear brother’s,’ and taking no notice, no more than if we were cabbages, of us; but as for Nancy not thinking of who he was, and that it was a grand marriage, oh, didn’t she just! You may tell that to those that will believe it, you had better not tell it to me.”
“You nasty, spiteful, tale-telling disagreeable thing!” cried Nancy, furious, turning upon her sister, who laughed in her face, and ran round in fright, which was half real, half pretended, to the other side of the round table. Arthur stood aghast while this playful episode, so much out of keeping with his feelings, went on. It was out of keeping to Nancy too. No smile came upon her face. “I thought it was a great marriage I was making, if you please,” she said, after she too had paused with the sense of a crisis, and stared at her sister’s pretended sportiveness. No smile relaxed the lips of either of the contending pair. “I thought so, you may say it. I thought I should be a lady, and mix with the best in the land; what’s come of it? Have I ever set foot among the folks you belong to, or their kind? No, I said the truth, there’s no door been open to me—the other way! You would shut mother’s door upon me if you could, you would keep me away from my own folks—the only friends I have. But you’ll never do it, Arthur, you may as well give it up at once. I’ll stick to them that’s good to me, and I won’t stir a step to court your people, nor to curry favour—no, not if you would ask me on your knees. I wrote to my lady, because I promised, but my lady wouldn’t make much of my letter; and never will I make myself so cheap again, never if I should live hundreds of years.”
“Nancy, Nancy, my child!” cried her mother, “you must not make rash vows. You don’t know what you’ll do till the time comes. She’s hot-tempered. That’s all about. And if Arthur will say he is sorry—”
“What shall I say I am sorry for, Mrs. Bates?”
“Oh, now this is too bad. Don’t you see it will please her? She always was a bit unreasonable and high-tempered. You can’t help your temper, it’s a thing that’s born with you. Say you’re sorry, and smooth her down a little, and she’ll soon come round and promise anything you like. I know my Nancy. She is hot-headed, and she’s contrairy, but her heart’s in the right place,” said the mother. Mrs. Bates was frightened by the contraction in Arthur’s face.
“I have nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “I have made no accusations against anyone; but I cannot always give in. I have come here to please her, and she is not pleased. Let us go away. Let Nancy second me in my attempt to get back into a natural life. It is not natural that I should be cooped up here, doing nothing, wasting my time. I must get out of it somehow. Either you will go with me, Nancy, or I must go alone. I cannot go on in this way any longer.”
“You shan’t then!” she cried, with redoubled heat. “Go—wherever you like for me. Oh, yes, go back to your family that you’re so fond of. You and your friends do nothing but despise me, even a bit of a schoolmaster’s wife! Don’t hold me, don’t keep me back, mamma. I’ll not be left, whatever happens; it’s me that will go, and he can do what he pleases. Don’t I tell you! Nobody shall hold me, nobody shall keep me in one place rather than another against my will. But I shan’t stay to be forsaken. Oh, don’t think it, Arthur! It’s me that will go.”
“I have said nothing about forsaking you,” he said; but he was wearied out with such struggles, and he made no appeal to her to stay. This decided Nancy. She rushed impetuously from the room, leaving them all staring at each other, without giving a word of explanation. Mrs. Bates, whose face was somewhat blank, called to Sarah Jane to follow her sister, and herself turned to Arthur with an attempt at a smile.
“It will soon be over now,” she said. “You mustn’t be hard upon her, Arthur. For all we know, there may be something working with her that she can’t resist. Young women have queer ways, and you can’t tell what’s the cause of it till after. Don’t you mind; go back to your books, there’s a dear, and take no notice. She’ll have a good cry, and she’ll come to herself, and you mustn’t mind.”
It was not this address that quieted him; but what could he do? The position was so impossible that he was glad to withdraw from it. It was worse than ever, now that one of these altercations had taken place before witnesses; he went back sadly to his fire and sat down again, blaming himself for the exasperation which had made him speak. Probably Mrs. Bates was right, and it was all over. She might come downstairs, looking as if nothing had happened, or she might come down penitent, as she sometimes did; and this got the better of him at once. But anyhow, he would not insist upon continuing the altercation, he was too glad that it was over. He sat down, sighing, and drearily drew towards him the Demosthenes that lay on the table. How unimportant all that dead eloquence was, side by side with living passion! The petty stir of domestic dissensions was too near to let him hear the ring of the old disputations, the flow and flood of the old eloquence. Nancy’s voice, in all the warmth of passion, rang more clear on the ear than the greatest of orators. He sat with his nerves all thrilling, and his mind vainly striving to get a little instruction through his eyes. Those eyes read easily enough, hot though they were with the strain they had been subjected to, but the mind received no impression. It was more busy in his ears, listening to what was going on. He heard the hasty sound of Nancy’s footstep upstairs; then he heard her come down, and there were voices in the little hall, confused and undertoned, one voice mingling with another; and then there was the sound of the hall-door closing. He sat after this with a strange sensation, as if that sound of the door had jarred him in every limb. He did not seem able to move to see what it was. But the stillness that fell upon the little house was ominous. Instead of the excited voices which had been audible a little while ago, filling the place with contention, what a strange deadly sort of quiet! Arthur was wearied out. So many vicissitudes of feeling had not occurred in all his previous life as had come to him within these five months past. Happiness, delight, disappointment, vexation, irritated nerves, wounded affection, mortified pride, and that combination of impassioned love and disenchanted vision which is of all things in the world the hardest to bear. How different, how different from his anticipations! How lightly the lovers’ quarrels had gone off, quenched in tears and smiles, and mutual confessions and warmer fondness. “The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love.” But then that must not go too far, or continue too long, and the shiver of hot shame which she had brought over him so often, the uncertainty as to how she would acquit herself which was always present, the passionate mortification with which he had seen other people’s smiles, or heard other people’s comments, all these were very different from the lovers’ quarrels. He held his Demosthenes steadily in his hand, and attempted to read. How far off it was! and the other so near; and of all the things that can occupy a man’s ear, what is so absorbing as the dead silence of vacancy after a struggle which has threatened everything, and had ended in—what? Nothing, silence, vacancy, probably bringing no consequence at all.
Nancy did not come in at the hour of luncheon. He waited for her, refusing that refreshment until it was clear she did not mean to come back. Then he swallowed a glass of wine hastily, and prepared in his turn to go out—not to seek her. He was resolved that this time, at least, she should be left in tranquillity, left to do what pleased her best. He had just gone into the hall to get his hat when some one came to the door. How his heart jumped! and how sick it grew again when it turned out to be only Mr. Eagles, who had come to make a serious remonstrance.
“You oughtn’t to lose your time,” the “coach” said, bending his brows. “If you can’t do anything better, you should come back to me. The old set are still hard at work, and there are two or three new men that will make their mark. It can’t be lively here, doing nothing. Why, you’ve nothing to do, not even fishing or football, eh? I never hear of you playing football. What do you do?”
“Nothing,” said Arthur; “and I can’t say I like it; but what’s the good? I am too old for football and that sort of thing.”
“Ah, four-and-twenty, that’s a great age; but I know what you mean. Married! there’s the rub—feel yourself too grand for it. But look here, Curtis. A man can’t live with nothing to do.”
“The wonder to me is how long a man can live with nothing to do,” said Arthur. “But as I say, what’s the good? I’m too old now to care about my degree. What does it matter, one way or the other? I have got beyond that stage.”
“Married, again!” said Mr. Eagles; “that is what drives me wild—not the fact, which is harmless enough; but Lord, how grand you all think yourselves! However, it don’t last. You can’t feed upon strawberries and cream all your lives, my dear fellow. You must buckle to at something, or you will be nobody. I don’t like anyone who has passed through my hands, to be nobody. You had better read, Curtis, you had better read.”
“Yes,” said Arthur, vaguely.
He was quite willing to pledge himself to anything so long as Mr. Eagles would but go away, and leave him to listen and make sure if anyone came: or get out into the air and distract his mind from listening. One or the other, he felt, he must do.
“The best thing will be to come back to me,” said Mr. Eagles; “at least you won’t lose your time completely, and you’ll find it a relief. Too many sweets will pall upon you; take them in measure and they are delightful enough. Come, Curtis, I make you an offer I needn’t say, for you know, that I don’t require to go hunting for pupils; but, my good fellow, for your own sake you had better come back.”
“Yes,” said Arthur, with a sudden lightening and ease which diffused itself all over him. There was another sound at the door; and this time it must, there could be no doubt, be Nancy. This relief made it possible for him to listen. His countenance cleared. He had not really known what his fears were, but he felt the vague greatness of them in this sense of immediate ease and relief.
But all the blood rushed to his head again, and the pulses began to beat in his brow when the door opened, and not Nancy appeared, but the maid, showing in the unexpected, and in the circumstances, alarming figure of Durant.