Nancy Stair: A Novel

by Elinor Macartney Lane

"It excites her so not to get her own way, that it couldn't excite her more to have it; so just go up, my dear, go right up!"

In this way, at the time of their lives when each was least prepared for trial and bitterly unhappy, it fell that Danvers and Nancy were thrown together in an intimacy impossible under other circumstances; relieving each other in the watching, sitting together by the bedside through the long hours of the night, or walking back and forth in each other's company to the little village on needful errands for the small household. In the tiny dining-room Nancy served at one side of the table while Danvers carved at the other, the suggestiveness of such an arrangement sending disordered longings to the hearts of both.

One dreadful night when Janet, who was barely conscious, clung to Nancy's hand, although the girl's head ached miserably and she had had no sleep for forty-eight hours, she showed by a sign to Danvers her intention to remain by the bedside in the great arm-chair. Her weariness and suffering made his heart yearn over her, and he leaned forward from the place he sat to put his hand upon her aching brow. His soothing touch, or perhaps a cause more subtle still, comforted her, and she fell asleep, to find the gray light of morn and Danvers, motionless beside her, having sat all those weary hours with his arm in a position which it must have tortured him to maintain. On the instant of her awakening she said, in a whisper:

"Your poor arm, Danvers! Your poor arm!"

And the strain of his mind showed in the answer:

"I would lose an arm altogether for what I have had to-night."

At the end of the fifth day Janet was so far recovered that she was able to sit up for a while against the pillows, and from this on her convalescence was a rapid one, although the tenth day had gone by when she told Danvers, with her customary frankness, to be off about his business. The evening before his departure, Nancy and he sat in Janet's room, fearful of being alone together for even a minute, and past eleven they parted for the night, in the old lady's presence, speaking their farewells in gay voices, with many assurances of meeting again in Edinburgh at some near time.

"I went to my room, Jock," Nancy said, when she told me this tale, "locked and bolted the door, and built a great fire in the chimney, for I was shivering from head to foot. And I thought of you! Only of you! Your love for me! The touch of your kind hands! Your dear gray head!—and before every other thing in life was the thought to do nothing to shame you, nor to cause a pain to that true heart of yours. And then I got down on my knees at the bedside like a little child and prayed to God.

"'O God,' I cried, 'take this pain from my heart, for I can no longer endure it. It's killing me. It's killing me, here, all alone! away from Jock Stair! And if You will do this thing I will never ask another of You in all my days!' Trying to make a compact with my Maker," she finished, "like a foolish child——"

She heard the clock strike four, and knowing the hour near when he must leave, crept to the window to see if enough light had come for her to have a sight of him as he went down the path. While she stood peering out into the darkness, she heard a rap at the bedroom door.