Nancy dreamed that night that she was married to Dick, and that Hitty made and served them pâté de foies gras dumplings, while Collier Pratt in freckles and overalls sat in a high 150 chair, and had his dinner with the family. Later it was discovered that Betty had poisoned his bread and milk, and he died in Nancy’s arms in dreadful agony, swearing in a beautiful Irish brogue that in all his life he had never looked at another woman,—which even in her dream seemed to Nancy a somewhat irreconcilable statement.
CHAPTER X
The Portrait
To Nancy’s surprise Hitty welcomed the little girl warmly, when she was introduced into the family circle. She liked to be busy all day, and her duties in taking care of Nancy were not onerous enough to keep her full energy employed. She liked children and family life, and she seemed to have the feeling that if Nancy continued to assemble the various parts that go to make up a family, she would end by adding to it the essential masculine element, though it was Dick and not Collier Pratt that she visualized at the head of the table cutting up Sheila’s meat for her. Collier Pratt was to her a necessary but insignificant detail in Nancy’s scheme of things, a poor artist who had “frittered away so much time in furrin parts” that he was incapable of supporting his only child—“poor little motherless lamb!”—in anything like a befitting and adequate manner. Whenever he came to see Sheila she treated him with the condescension of a poor relation, and 152 served his tea in the second best china with the kitchen silver and linen, unless Nancy caught her at it in time to demand the best.
Nancy had expected that Collier Pratt would try to make some business arrangement with her when she took Sheila in charge,—that he would insist on paying her at least a nominal sum a week for the child’s board. She had lain awake nights planning the conversations with him in which she would overcome his delicate but natural scruples in the matter and persuade him to her own way of thinking. She had even fixed on the smallest sum—two dollars and a half a week—at which she thought she might induce him to compromise, if all her eloquence failed. She knew that he considered her the hard working, paid manager of Outside Inn, and took it for granted that she had no other source of income. She was a little disconcerted that he made no effort, beyond thanking her sincerely and simply for her kindness, to put the matter on a more concrete basis, but when he told her presently that he was going to do a portrait of her, she scourged herself for her New England perspective on an affair that he handled with so much delicacy.
Her friends were, on the whole, pleased with her experiment in vicarious motherhood. Dick instinctively resented the fact that Nancy had taken Collier Pratt’s daughter into her home and heart, but the child herself was a delight to him, and he spent hours romping with her and telling her stories, loading her with toys and sweetmeats, and taking her off for enchanting holiday excursions “over the Palisades and far away.” Billy was hardly less diverted with her, and Betty regarded her advent as a provision on the part of Providence against things becoming too commonplace. Caroline, as was her wont, took the child very seriously, and tried to interest Nancy in all the latest educational theories for her development, including posture dancing, and potato raising.
Nancy herself had loved the child from the moment the big lustrous gray eyes opened, on the day of her sudden illness at Outside Inn, and looked confidingly up into hers. For the first time in her life her maternal ardor—the instinct which made her yearn to nourish and minister to a race—had concentrated on a single human being. Sheila, hungry for mothering, had turned to her with the simplicity of the 154 people among whom she had been brought up, taking her sympathetic response as a matter of course; and the two were soon on the closest, most affectionate terms.
Sheila and Outside Inn divided Nancy’s time to the practical exclusion of all other interests. She had, without realizing her processes, taken into her life artificial responsibilities in almost exact proportion to the normal ones of any woman who makes the choice of marriage rather than that of a career. She was doing housekeeping on a large scale,—she had a child to care for, and she felt that she had entirely disproved any lingering feeling in the mind of any one associated with her that she ought to marry,—at least that she ought to marry Dick.