‘There’s something I think I ought to tell you,’ said Horace, speaking as though he were the elder and felt a responsibility. ‘People have been talking about you and Mr. Crewe.’
‘What!’ She flashed into excessive anger. ‘Who has been talking?’
‘The people over there. Of course I know it’s all nonsense. At least’—he raised his eyebrows—‘I suppose it is.’
‘I should suppose so,’ said Nancy, with vehement scorn.
Their father’s illness imposed a restraint upon trifling conversation. Mary Woodruff, now attending upon Mr. Lord under the doctor’s directions, had held grave talk with Nancy. The Barmbys, father and son, called frequently, and went away with gloomy faces. Nancy and her brother were summoned, separately, to the invalid’s room at uncertain times, but neither was allowed to perform any service for him; their sympathy, more often than not, excited irritation; the sufferer always seemed desirous of saying more than the few and insignificant words which actually passed his lips, and generally, after a long silence, he gave the young people an abrupt dismissal. With his daughter he spoke at length, in language which awed her by its solemnity; Nancy could only understand him as meaning that his end drew near. He had been reviewing, he said, the course of her life, and trying to forecast her future.
‘I give you no more advice; it would only be repeating what I have said hundreds of times. All I can do for your good, I have done. You will understand me better if you live a few more years, and I think, in the end, you will be grateful to me.’
Nancy, sitting by the bedside, laid a hand upon her father’s and sobbed. She entreated him to believe that even now she understood how wisely he had guided her.
‘Tried to, Nancy; tried to, my dear. Guidance isn’t for young people now-a-days. Don’t let us shirk the truth. I have never been satisfied with you, but I have loved you—’
‘And I you, dear father—I have! I have!—I know better now how good your advice was. I wish—far, far more sincerely than you think—that I had kept more control upon myself—thought less of myself in every way—’
Whilst she spoke through her tears, the yellow, wrinkled face upon the pillow, with its sunken eyes and wasted lips, kept sternly motionless.