Nancy Of Paradise Cottage Part 6

After that first dance the whole evening changed for Nancy. She had half doubted that her companion would be a good dancer, but in two moments that doubt was routed. Gliding smoothly, weightlessly as if to the gentle rhythm of a wave, they circled through the moving swarm of dancers; Nancy's cheeks flus.h.i.+ng like two poppies and her eyes glistening with the exhilaration of the music. Her timidity had left her; she felt warm, vivacious and attractive, and it seemed perfectly natural that after that first waltz she had partners for every dance.

Mr. Arnold danced with no one else. When other partners claimed her, he retired to the doorway, and stood with his arms folded, surveying the scene with his whimsical, absent-minded smile; but evidently he regarded it as his right to have each waltz with her.

"My aunt has ordered me to present you to her," he said, when he had at length led her into a corner for an ice, and a moment's chat. "For some reason she has evidently taken a great fancy to you at sight, and she is giving me no peace. She is a very peremptory and badly spoiled old lady, but it's impossible to resist her. I told her that she might frighten you to death, and that then you'd blame me."

"You _didn't_!" cried Nancy, horrified.

"Indeed I did. I've had the experience before--and I told her that I'd be hanged if I a.s.sumed the responsibility of surrendering any unsuspecting person into her clutches without giving them fair warning.

But, seriously, she is a very dear lady,--though an eccentric one--and she has been saying extremely nice things about you. Besides--she asked me to tell you that she knew your father, and that _she_ loved him long before _you_ were born."

Something in his softened, gentle tone went to Nancy's heart. She put down her ice.

"Will you take me now? I think I know--I mean I've seen your aunt already."

"She is a very remarkable person. She can be more terrifying--and more tender, than any woman in the world. Utterly fearless, something of a tyrant--possibly because she has never been denied anything she wanted in her life. She simply doesn't accept denials. If she had been a man she might have been a Pitt, or a Napoleon. As she is, she is a mixture of Queen Elizabeth--and Queen Victoria."

The amazing individual, described by this brief biographical preface, who was still enthroned on the coquettish little French couch, and who was now consuming a pink ice with nave relish, was indeed the old lady in purple--otherwise, Miss Elizabeth Bancroft, of Lowry House (for some reason she had always been given this somewhat English style of designation; possibly because she was the last of her name to be identified with the magnificent collections for which Lowry House, the American roof-tree of aristocratic English colonists, had been famous for more than a hundred years).

As Nancy stood before her, she looked up at the girl keenly, her little blue eyes diminished in size by the thick lenses of her pince-nez.

Then she handed her ice to Mr. Arnold without even glancing at him, and held out both her plump white hands to Nancy. Her whole face softened, with the dimpling, comfortable smile of a motherly old nurse.

"Oh, my dear child--if you were only a boy I could believe you were George again--my George, your father--not this young rascal. Come, sit down beside me. I shan't keep you long. Have you been having a good time, my dear?"

She was not a terrible old lady at all. On the contrary, with wonderful skill, with cosy, affectionate little ways, with her jolly laugh, and her droll stories, she had succeeded in less time than it takes to tell in completely winning Nancy to her. And somehow, although she appeared to be doing all the talking herself, although she touched so lightly and so adroitly that she hardly seemed to touch at all on any topic that was delicately personal to the girl, she had managed within a brief five minutes to glean a hundred little facts, which, by piecing together in her keen old mind, gave her more knowledge concerning the Prescotts than another person could have come by in a week's diligent pumping.

"George, my dear----"

"Yes, Aunt Eliza."

"Oh, nothing. I wish to goodness you were a woman. It just occurred to me that you can't possibly understand what I was going to say to you, so never mind about listening to me. Smoke, if you want to, and let me think in peace."

"Very well." From Mr. Arnold's docile submissiveness it might be surmised that he, too, wanted to think in peace. Miss Bancroft's lumbering, impressive coupe rumbled along over the wet roads toward Lowry House; its two occupants buried in that mood of silence which only two very sympathetic beings know how to respect. Presently Miss Bancroft burst out:

"The child is quite charming. I shall give Tom a good sound piece of my mind. To-morrow."

George Arnold grunted.

"It's only fair sportsmans.h.i.+p to give him twelve hours' warning."

"Poor Lallie Prescott. Like most silly women, she's going to try to beat Providence by pus.h.i.+ng them forward into premature rivalry with girls who have every financial advantage over them, ruin their contentment, so that they will be ready to fling away their happiness on the first little whippersnapper who looks as if he could give them a trip to Paris and a season in Cannes every year. I admire her fighting spirit, but it's hopelessly misdirected."

"Am I meant to understand you, Aunt Eliza?"

"No. Don't even listen to me. Nancy has too much sense for a girl of her age, and that exquisite little Alma has none. Tut-tut. I find that I must interfere."

CHAPTER VI

MISS BANCROFT BEARDS THE OGRE

Miss Bancroft had not made her solemn declaration lightly. She never made any announcements of her intentions without weighty consideration; consequently she was a woman who meant what she said, and meant it thoroughly. Moreover, she never procrastinated; she thought in a straight line, and she acted in a straight line.

Like most women, she took a healthy human delight in "interfering"; but, unlike the majority of her s.e.x, she indulged very rarely. When, however, she had made up her mind on the point of allowing herself to concern herself in other people's business, she experienced the exquisite relish of a strictly self-controlled gamester, who allows himself to play only rarely so that he may enjoy his sport with that peculiar zest which only long abstinence can whet.

On a sunny, warm September day, mellow with the promise of an Indian summer, Miss Bancroft, smart, though rotund, in lavender linen, set out on her pilgrimage to the house of Thomas Prescott.

"I see that you aren't above the traditional wiles of your s.e.x, Aunt,"

commented George Arnold, looking up from his book, and surveying her with twinkling eyes, from the long wicker porch chair, where he had been dozing in the sun. "You've rigged yourself out in full panoply.

That's a jaunty little parasol you have."

Miss Bancroft, standing on the broad steps, put up her parasol at this, to shade the fine texture of her gaily beflowered straw hat from the sun, and then glanced around at her nephew with a demure smile.

"I make a point of looking my best always when I'm going to see Tom Prescott. Of course he thinks me a sensible woman, a remarkably reasonable woman, and all that nonsense; but I like to leave him with at least a half-formed notion that I'm surprisingly well preserved, even if I have rather lost my waist-line. There was a time, you know----" the demure smile quirked the corners of her big, mobile mouth, and sparkled impishly in her eyes; then with a little wag of her head, she ran down the steps like a fat, jolly schoolgirl.

George Arnold, leaning back against a chintz cus.h.i.+on, watched the portly, festive figure that moved away under the trees of the long drive. Miss Bancroft usually seemed to roll slowly, but efficiently, along on wheels as ponderous and impressive as an old-fas.h.i.+oned stage-coach. He caught a last glimpse of lavender and white through the shrubs that bordered the end of the lawn. He felt a good deal of interest in this pilgrimage of his aunt's, although he had no very clear idea of the purpose of it. It had something to do with two very pretty young girls whom he had seen at an otherwise stupid dance the night before. One of the girls looked like a Dresden doll, the other had dark eyes, and a direct, shy, almost boyish smile. Her name was Anne--Nancy. Nancy suited her much better. He had thought about her several times. For no particular reason--she was hardly eighteen, and he was, well, he was thirty-three, though that was neither here nor there. It was simply that he liked her rather better than one likes most girls of that age. She had a way of listening to a man without that stupid, fl.u.s.tered expression, as though she was only wondering what in the world she should say when it should be her turn to talk.

She liked books. He wondered if she knew that he wrote them. Of course he wasn't world-famous, but it might interest her to know that he was the George Arnold whose collections of exquisitely delicate children's stories had already been translated into six foreign languages, "including the Scandinavian."

He smiled to himself at the nave vanity which had prompted this thought; and chastised it by telling himself that it was only too likely that her ignorance or knowledge of what he did or was were matters of like indifference to her.

Meantime, Miss Bancroft, puffing a little under the combined difficulties of avoirdupois and a beaming September sun, was looking with an almost pathetic antic.i.p.ation at the rich cool shadows beneath which slept the rambling mansion of Thomas Prescott.

"I shall order some tea. A man is always so much more amenable to reason over a tea-table--and for my part, I'll not survive half an hour without a little light refreshment. I suppose I'll have to listen to a long discourse on the origin of the Slavic races or the religious customs of the Aztecs, until I can get him down to argue with me on his duty toward his fellow creatures. I hope to Heaven that his principles are drowsy to-day. I can't bear it if I have to combat a lot of principles. It's absolutely heathenish to have principles in warm weather anyway. Of course they are the proper things to have, but, dear me, they _are_ such nuisances. It's all right to have them about yourself, I suppose, but to have them about other people is priggish, and quite useless, so far as I can see. My observation has taught me that if you like a person it makes no difference whether their principles coincide with your own or not, or even if they have none at all; and if you don't like a person, it's downright irritating to have to approve of them." Miss Bancroft's mental grammar, like much of her spoken grammar, was inaccurate, of course; as in other matters, she held rule to scorn, when the rule interfered with her personal conception of what she was trying to make clear to other people or to herself.

Under the vigorous thrust of her plump, direct forefinger, the door-bell pealed clearly in the cool remote regions of the house.

Standing under the arch of the Norman doorway, she surveyed the broad, shade-flecked lawns with interest and a sort of irritable appreciation.

Somewhere under the trees a gardener was raking the drive and burning neat piles of warm, brown leaves, from which the pungent smoke ascended in sinuous blue spirals, like languorously dancing phantoms of the dead leaves; and the pleasant, rhythmic sound of the rake on the gravel intensified the sober peaceful silence peculiar to that bachelor's domain.

The door was opened.

"Tell Mr. Prescott that it's Miss Bancroft. Nonsense, I shan't sit down in the drawing-room at all--it makes me feel like a member of the Ladies' Aid come to pet.i.tion a subscription for a new church carpet or something. Tell Mr. Prescott that I'll be out on the porch."

"Will you come through this way, then, madam?" suggested the old butler, meekly.

Miss Bancroft followed him, sighing a little with relief as the coolness of the great hall, with its smell of old, polished wood and waxed floors, closed about her.

"And, William," she called pathetically after the retreating butler, "do put the kettle on!"

On her way through the house she pa.s.sed a stately succession of large rooms. A handsome drawing-room, with a polished parquetry floor, fit for the dainty crimson heels of a laced and furbelowed French coquette; its great gla.s.s chandelier shrouded in white tarlatan; the dining-room, with high-wainscoted walls, on which hung three or four astonis.h.i.+ngly valuable and even beautiful pictures by masters of the eighteenth century English school. For all its impressive grandeur, the long table, covered with a rare piece of Italian brocade, was, with the single carved chair set at the distant end, a barren table, indeed, for a man whom Miss Bancroft knew to be possessed of one of the warmest, tenderest and most affection-craving hearts in the whole world.

"Principles--fiddlesticks!" she observed aloud. "Tst!"

A living-room, in which no one ever lived, a writing-room, in which no one ever wrote, and long halls, wainscoted in dark oak and quiet as those of a college library, whose silence was never broken by the light staccato footsteps of gay feet, or the murmur of roguish voices. But the air of pathos which all these things wore seemed to rise from the fact that they had been planned and secured not for the enjoyment of a lonely old man, but for some happy purpose that had never been realized. They seemed to wear an expression of disappointment, even of apology for existing so uselessly.

"Tut! How can anyone be patient with a man of principles," again commented Miss Bancroft; but her face had grown a little sad.