Nancy | Page 5

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