WATCH AND WARD.


  BY

  HENRY JAMES Jr.


  BOSTON:
  HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY.
  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
  1878.




  COPYRIGHT, 1878.
  BY HENRY JAMES Jr.

  _All rights reserved._




  UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & Co.,
  CAMBRIDGE.




NOTE.


“Watch and Ward” first appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in the year
1871.  It has now been minutely revised, and has received many verbal
alterations.

April, 1878.




WATCH AND WARD.




I.


Roger Lawrence had come to town for the express purpose of doing a
certain act, but as the hour for action approached he felt his ardor
rapidly ebbing.  Of the ardor that comes from hope, indeed, he had
felt little from the first; so little that as he whirled along in the
train he wondered to find himself engaged in this fool’s errand.  But
in default of hope he was sustained, I may almost say, by despair.
He should fail, he was sure, but he must fail again before he could
rest.  Meanwhile he was restless enough.  In the evening, at his
hotel, having roamed aimlessly about the streets for a couple of
hours in the dark December cold, he went up to his room and dressed,
with a painful sense of having but partly succeeded in giving himself
the figure of an impassioned suitor.  He was twenty-nine years old,
sound and strong, with a tender heart, and a genius, almost, for
common-sense; his face told clearly of youth and kindness and sanity,
but it had little other beauty.  His complexion was so fresh as to be
almost absurd in a man of his age,—an effect rather enhanced by a
too early baldness.  Being extremely short-sighted, he went with his
head thrust forward; but as this infirmity is considered by persons
who have studied the picturesque to impart an air of distinction, he
may have the benefit of the possibility.  His figure was compact and
sturdy, and, on the whole, his best point; although, owing to an
incurable personal shyness, he had a good deal of awkwardness of
movement.  He was fastidiously neat in his person, and extremely
precise and methodical in his habits, which were of the sort supposed
to mark a man for bachelorhood.  The desire to get the better of his
diffidence had given him a certain formalism of manner which many
persons found extremely amusing.  He was remarkable for the
spotlessness of his linen, the high polish of his boots, and the
smoothness of his hat.  He carried in all weathers a peculiarly neat
umbrella.  He never smoked; he drank in moderation.  His voice,
instead of being the robust barytone which his capacious chest led
you to expect, was a mild, deferential tenor.  He was fond of going
early to bed, and was suspected of what is called “fussing” with his
health.  No one had ever accused him of meanness, yet he passed
universally for a cunning economist.  In trifling matters, such as
the choice of a shoemaker or a dentist, his word carried weight; but
no one dreamed of asking his opinion on politics or literature.  Here
and there, nevertheless, an observer less superficial than the
majority would have whispered you that Roger was an undervalued man,
and that in the long run he would come out even with the best.  “Have
you ever studied his face?” such an observer would say.  Beneath its
simple serenity, over which his ruddy blushes seemed to pass like
clouds in a summer sky, there slumbered a fund of exquisite human
expression.  The eye was excellent; small, perhaps, and somewhat
dull, but with a certain appealing depth, like the tender dumbness in
the gaze of a dog.  In repose Lawrence may have looked stupid; but as
he talked his face slowly brightened by gradual fine degrees, until
at the end of an hour it inspired you with a confidence so perfect as
to be in some degree a tribute to its owner’s intellect, as it
certainly was to his integrity.  On this occasion Roger dressed
himself with unusual care and with a certain sober elegance.  He
debated for three minutes over two cravats, and then, blushing in his
mirror at his puerile vanity, he reassumed the plain black tie in
which he had travelled.  When he had finished dressing it was still
too early to go forth on his errand.  He went into the reading-room
of the hotel, but here soon appeared two smokers.  Wishing not to be
infected by their fumes, he crossed over to the great empty
drawing-room, sat down, and beguiled his impatience with trying on a
pair of lavender gloves.

While he was so engaged there came into the room a person who
attracted his attention by the singularity of his conduct.  This was
a man of less than middle age, good-looking, pale, with a
pretentious, pointed mustache and various shabby remnants of finery.
His face was haggard, his whole aspect was that of grim and hopeless
misery.  He walked straight to the table in the centre of the room,
and poured out and drank without stopping three full glasses of
ice-water, as if he were striving to quench some fever in his vitals.
He then went to the window, leaned his forehead against the cold
pane, and drummed a nervous tattoo with his long stiff finger-nails.
Finally he strode over to the fireplace, flung himself into a chair,
leaned forward with his head in his hands, and groaned audibly.
Lawrence, as he smoothed down his lavender gloves, watched him and
reflected.  “What an image of fallen prosperity, of degradation and
despair!  I have been fancying myself in trouble; I have been
dejected, doubtful, anxious.  I am hopeless.  But what is my
sentimental sorrow to this?”  The unhappy gentleman rose from his
chair, turned his back to the chimney-piece, and stood with folded
arms gazing at Lawrence, who was seated opposite to him.  The young
man sustained his glance, but with sensible discomfort.  His face was
as white as ashes, his eyes were as lurid as coals.  Roger had never
seen anything so tragic as the two long harsh lines which descended
from his nose, beside his mouth, in seeming mockery of his foppish,
relaxed mustache.  Lawrence felt that his companion was going to
address him; he began to draw off his gloves.  The stranger suddenly
came towards him, stopped a moment, eyed him again with insolent
intensity, and then seated himself on the sofa beside him.  His first
movement was to seize the young man’s arm.  “He is simply crazy!”
thought Lawrence.  Roger was now able to appreciate the pathetic
disrepair of his appearance.  His open waistcoat displayed a soiled
and crumpled shirt-bosom, from whose empty buttonholes the studs had
recently been wrenched.  In his normal freshness he must have looked
like a gambler with a run of luck.  He spoke in a rapid, excited
tone, with a hard, petulant voice.

“You’ll think me crazy, I suppose.  Well, I shall be soon.  Will you
lend me a hundred dollars?”

“Who are you?  What is your trouble?” Roger asked.

“My name would tell you nothing.  I’m a stranger here.  My
trouble,—it’s a long story!  But it’s grievous, I assure you.  It’s
pressing upon me with a fierceness that grows while I sit here
talking to you.  A hundred dollars would stave it off,—a few days at
least.  Don’t refuse me!”  These last words were uttered half as an
entreaty, half as a threat.  “Don’t say you haven’t got them,—a man
that wears such pretty gloves!  Come; you look like a good fellow.
Look at me!  I’m a good fellow, too.  I don’t need to swear to my
being in distress.”

Lawrence was touched, disgusted, and irritated. The man’s distress
was real enough, but there was something horribly disreputable in his
manner. Roger declined to entertain his request without learning more
about him. From the stranger’s persistent reluctance to do more than
simply declare that he was from St. Louis, and repeat that he was in a
tight place, in a d——d tight place, Lawrence was led to believe that
he had been dabbling in crime. The more he insisted upon some definite
statement of his circumstances, the more fierce and peremptory became
the other’s petition. Lawrence was before all things deliberate and
perspicacious; the last man in the world to be hustled and bullied. It
was quite out of his nature to do a thing without distinctly knowing
why. He of course had no imagination, which, as we know, should always
stand at the right hand of charity; but he had good store of that
wholesome discretion whose place is at the left. Discretion told him
that his companion was a dissolute scoundrel, who had sinned through
grievous temptation, perhaps, but who had certainly sinned. His misery
was palpable, but Roger felt that he could not patch up his misery
without in some degree condoning his vices. It was not in his power,
at any rate, to present him, out of hand, a hundred dollars. He
compromised. “I can’t think of giving you the sum you ask,” he said.
“I have no time, moreover, to investigate your case at present. If you
will meet me here to-morrow morning, I will listen to anything you
shall have made up your mind to say. Meanwhile, here are ten dollars.”

The man looked at the proffered note and made no movement to accept
it.  Then raising his eyes to Roger’s face,—eyes streaming with
tears of helpless rage and baffled want,—“O, the devil!” he cried.
“What can I do with ten dollars?  D—n it, I don’t know how to beg.
Listen to me!  If you don’t give me what I ask, I shall cut my
throat!  Think of that.  On your head be the penalty!”

Lawrence pocketed his note and rose to his feet.  “No, decidedly,” he
said, “you don’t know how to beg!”  A moment after, he had left the
hotel and was walking rapidly toward a well-remembered dwelling.  He
was shocked and discomposed by this brutal collision with want and
vice; but as he walked, the cool night-air suggested sweeter things.
The image of his heated petitioner was speedily replaced by the
calmer figure of Isabel Morton.

He had come to know Isabel Morton three years before, through a visit
she had then made to one of his neighbors in the country.  In spite
of his unventurous tastes and the even tenor of his habits, Lawrence
was by no means lacking, as regards life, in what the French call
_les grandes curiosités_; but from an early age his curiosity had
chiefly taken the form of a timid but strenuous desire to fathom the
depths of matrimony.  He had dreamed of this gentle bondage as other
men dream of the “free unhoused condition” of celibacy.  He had been
born a marrying man, with a conscious desire for progeny.  The world
in this respect had not done him justice.  It had supposed him to be
wrapped up in his petty comforts: whereas, in fact, he was serving a
devout apprenticeship to the profession of husband and father.
Feeling at twenty-six that he had something to offer a woman, he
allowed himself to become interested in Miss Morton.  It was rather
odd that a man of tremors and blushes should in this line have been
signally bold; for Miss Morton had the reputation of being extremely
fastidious, and was supposed to wear some dozen broken hearts on her
girdle, as an Indian wears the scalps of his enemies.

It is said that, as a rule, men fall in love with their opposites;
certainly Lawrence’s mistress was not fashioned in his own image.  He
was the most unobtrusively natural of men; she, on the other hand,
was pre-eminently artificial.  She was pretty, but not really so
pretty as she seemed; clever, but not intelligent; amiable, but not
sympathetic.  She possessed in perfection the manner of society,
which she lavished with indiscriminate grace on the just and the
unjust, and which very effectively rounded and completed the somewhat
meagre outline of her personal character.  In reality, Miss Morton
was keenly ambitious.  A woman of simpler needs, she might very well
have accepted our hero.  He offered himself with urgent and obstinate
warmth.  She esteemed him more than any man she had known,—so she
told him; but she added that the man she married must satisfy her
heart.  Her heart, she did not add, was bent upon a carriage and
diamonds.

From the point of view of ambition, a match with Roger Lawrence was
not worth discussing.  He was therefore dismissed with gracious but
inexorable firmness.  From this moment the young man’s sentiment
hardened into a passion.  Six months later he heard that Miss Morton
was preparing to go to Europe.  He sought her out before her
departure, urged his suit afresh, and lost it a second time.  But his
passion had cost too much to be flung away unused.  During her
residence abroad he wrote her three letters, only one of which she
briefly answered, in terms which amounted to little more than this:
“Dear Mr. Lawrence, do leave me alone!”  At the end of two years she
returned, and was now visiting her married brother.  Lawrence had
just heard of her arrival, and had come to town to make, as we have
said, a supreme appeal.

Her brother and his wife were out for the evening; Roger found her in
the drawing-room, under the lamp, teaching a stitch in crochet to her
niece, a little girl of ten, who stood leaning at her side.  She
seemed to him prettier than before; although, in fact, she looked
older and stouter.  Her prettiness, for the most part, however, was a
matter of coquetry; and naturally, as youth departed, coquetry filled
the vacancy.  She was fair and plump, and she had a very pretty trick
of suddenly turning her head and showing a charming white throat and
ear.  Above her well-filled corsage these objects produced a most
agreeable effect.  She always dressed in light colors, but with
unerring taste.  Charming as she may have been, there was,
nevertheless, about her so marked a want of the natural, that, to
admire her particularly, it was necessary to be, like Roger, in love
with her.  She received him with such flattering friendliness and so
little apparent suspicion of his purpose, that he almost took heart
and hope.  If she did not fear a declaration, perhaps she desired
one.  For the first half-hour Roger’s attack hung fire.  Isabel
talked to better purpose than before she went abroad, and for the
moment he sat tongue-tied for very modesty.  Miss Morton’s little
niece was a very pretty child; her hair was combed out into a golden
cloud, which covered her sloping shoulders.  She kept her place
beside her aunt, clasping one of the latter’s hands, and staring at
Lawrence with that sweet curiosity of little girls.  There glimmered
mistily in the young man’s brain a vision of a home-scene in the
future,—a lamp-lit parlor on a winter night, a placid wife and
mother wreathed in household smiles, a golden-haired child, and, in
the midst, his sentient self, drunk with possession and gratitude.
As the clock struck nine the little girl was sent to bed, having been
kissed by her aunt and rekissed—or unkissed shall I say?—by her
aunt’s lover.  When she had disappeared Roger proceeded to business.
He had proposed so often to Miss Morton, that, actually, practice had
begun to tell.  It took but a few moments to make his meaning plain.
Miss Morton addressed herself to her niece’s tapestry, and, as her
lover went on with manly eloquence, glanced up at him from her work
with feminine keenness.  He spoke of his persistent love, of his long
waiting and his passionate hope.  Her acceptance of his hand was the
only thing that could make him happy.  He should never love another
woman; if she now refused him, it was the end of all things; he
should continue to exist, to work and act, to eat and sleep, but he
should have ceased to _live_.

“In Heaven’s name,” he said, “don’t answer me as you have answered me
before.”

She folded her hands, and with a serious smile, “I shall not,
altogether,” she said.  “When I have refused you before, I have
simply told you that I could not love you.  I cannot love you, Mr.
Lawrence!  I must repeat it again to-night, but with a better reason
than before.  I love another man; I am engaged.”

Roger rose to his feet like a man who has received a heavy blow and
springs forward in self-defence.  But he was indefensible, his
assailant inattackable.  He sat down again and hung his head.  Miss
Morton came to him and took his hand and demanded of him, as a right,
that he should be resigned.  “Beyond a certain point,” she said, “you
have no right to thrust your regrets upon me.  The injury I do you in
refusing you is less than that I should do you in accepting you
without love.”

He looked at her with his eyes full of tears.  “Well!  I shall never
marry,” he said.  “There is something you cannot refuse me.  Though I
shall never possess you, I may at least espouse your memory and live
in intimate union with your image.  I shall live with my eyes fixed
upon it.”  She smiled at this fine talk; she had heard so much in her
day!  He had fancied himself prepared for the worst, but as he walked
back to his hotel, it seemed intolerably bitter.  Its bitterness,
however, quickened his temper, and prompted a violent reaction.  He
would now, he declared, cast his lot with pure reason.  He had tried
love and faith, but they would none of him.  He had made a woman a
goddess, and she had made him a fool.  He would henceforth care
neither for woman nor man, but simply for comfort, and, if need
should be, for pleasure.  Beneath this gathered gust of cynicism the
future lay as hard and narrow as the silent street before him.  He
was absurdly unconscious that good-humor was lurking round the very
next corner.

It was not till near morning that he was able to sleep.  His sleep,
however, had lasted less than an hour when it was interrupted by a
loud noise from the adjoining room.  He started up in bed, lending
his ear to the stillness.  The sound was immediately repeated; it was
that of a pistol-shot.  This second report was followed by a loud,
shrill cry.  Roger jumped out of bed, thrust himself into his
trousers, quitted his room, and ran to the neighboring door.  It
opened without difficulty, and revealed an astonishing scene.  In the
middle of the floor lay a man, in his trousers and shirt, his head
bathed in blood, his hand grasping the pistol from which he had just
sent a bullet through his brain.  Beside him stood a little girl in
her nightdress, her long hair on her shoulders, shrieking and
wringing her hands.  Stooping over the prostrate body, Roger
recognized, in spite of his bedabbled visage, the person who had
addressed him in the parlor of the hotel.  He had kept the spirit, if
not the letter, of his menace.  “O father, father, father!” sobbed
the little girl.  Roger, overcome with horror and pity, stooped
towards her and opened his arms.  She, conscious of nothing but the
presence of human help, rushed into his embrace and buried her head
in his grasp.

The rest of the house was immediately aroused, and the room invaded
by a body of lodgers and servants.  Soon followed a couple of
policemen, and finally the proprietor in person.  The fact of suicide
was so apparent that Roger’s presence was easily explained.  From the
child nothing but sobs could be obtained.  After a vast amount of
talking and pushing and staring, after a physician had affirmed that
the stranger was dead, and the ladies had passed the child from hand
to hand through a bewildering circle of caresses and questions, the
multitude dispersed, and the little girl was borne away in triumph by
the proprietor’s wife, further investigation being appointed for the
morrow.  For Roger, seemingly, this was to have been a night of
sensations.  There came to him, as it wore away, a cruel sense of his
own accidental part in his neighbor’s tragedy.  His refusal to help
the poor man had brought on the catastrophe.  The idea haunted him
awhile; but at last, with an effort, he dismissed it.  The next man,
he assured himself, would have done no more than he; might possibly
have done less.  He felt, however, a certain indefeasible fellowship
in the sorrow of the little girl.  He lost no time, the next
morning, in calling on the wife of the proprietor.  She was a kindly
woman enough, but so thoroughly the mistress of a public house that
she seemed to deal out her very pity over a bar.  She exhibited
toward her protégée a hard, business-like charity which foreshadowed
vividly to Roger’s mind the poor child’s probable portion in life,
and repeated to him the little creature’s story, as she had been able
to learn it.  The father had come in early in the evening, in great
trouble and excitement, and had made her go to bed.  He had kissed
her and cried over her, and, of course, made her cry.  Late at night
she was aroused by feeling him again at her bedside, kissing her,
fondling her, raving over her.  He bade her good night and passed
into the adjoining room, where she heard him fiercely knocking about.
She was very much frightened; she fancied he was out of his mind.
She knew that their troubles had lately been thickening fast; now the
worst had come.  Suddenly he called her.  She asked what he wanted,
and he bade her get out of bed and come to him.  She trembled, but
she obeyed.  On reaching the threshold of his room she saw the gas
turned low, and her father standing in his shirt against the door at
the other end.  He ordered her to stop where she was.  Suddenly she
heard a loud report and felt beside her cheek the wind of a bullet.
He had aimed at her with a pistol.  She retreated in terror to her
own bedside and buried her head in the clothes.  This, however, did
not prevent her from hearing a second report, followed by a deep
groan.  Venturing back again, she found her father on the floor,
bleeding from the face.  “He meant to kill her, of course,” said the
landlady, “that she mightn’t be left alone in the world.  It’s a
wonderful mixture of cruelty and kindness!”

It seemed to Roger an altogether pitiful tale.  He related his own
interview with the deceased, and the latter’s menace of suicide.  “It
gives me,” he said, “a sickening sense of connection with this
bloodshed.  But how could I help it?  All the same, I wish he had
taken my ten dollars.”

Of the antecedent history of the dead man they could learn little.
The child had recognized Lawrence, and had broken out again into a
quivering convulsion of tears.  Little by little, from among her
sobs, they gathered a few facts.  Her father had brought her during
the preceding month from St. Louis; they had stopped some time in New
York.  Her father had been for months in great want of money.  They
had once had money enough; she could not say what had become of it.
Her mother had died many months before; she had no other kindred nor
friends.  Her father may have had friends, but she never saw them.
She could indicate no source of possible assistance or sympathy.
Roger put the poor little fragments of her story together.  The most
salient fact among them all was her absolute destitution.

“Well, sir,” said the proprietress, “living customers are better than
dead ones; I must go about my business.  Perhaps you can learn
something more.”  The little girl sat on the sofa with a pale face
and swollen eyes, and, with a stupefied, helpless stare, watched her
friend depart.  She was by no means a pretty child.  Her clear auburn
hair was thrust carelessly into a net with broken meshes, and her
limbs encased in a suit of rusty, scanty mourning.  In her
appearance, in spite of her childish innocence and grief, there was
something undeniably vulgar.  “She looks as if she belonged to a
circus troupe,” Roger said to himself.  Her face, however, though
without beauty, was not without interest.  Her forehead was
symmetrical and her mouth expressive.  Her eyes were light in color,
yet by no means colorless.  A sort of arrested, concentrated
brightness, a soft introversion of their rays, gave them a remarkable
depth.  “Poor little betrayed, unfriended mortal!” thought the young
man.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Nora Lambert,” said the child.

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“And you live in St. Louis?”

“We used to live there.  I was born there.”

“Why had your father come to the East?”

“To make money.”

“Where was he going to live?”

“Anywhere he could find business.”

“What was his business?”

“He had none.  He wanted to find some.”

“You have no friends nor relations?”

The child gazed a few moments in silence.  “He told me when he woke
me up and kissed me, last night, that I had not a friend in the world
nor a person that cared for me.”

Before the exquisite sadness of this statement Lawrence was silent.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the child,—the little
forlorn, precocious, potential woman.  His own sense of recent
bereavement rose powerful in his heart and seemed to respond to hers.
“Nora,” he said, “come here.”

She stared a moment, without moving, and then left the sofa and came
slowly towards him.  She was tall for her years.  She laid her hand
on the arm of his chair and he took it.  “You have seen me before,”
he said.  She nodded.  “Do you remember my taking you last night in
my arms?”  It was his fancy that, for an answer, she faintly blushed.
He laid his hand on her head and smoothed away her thick disordered
hair.  She submitted to his consoling touch with a plaintive
docility.  He put his arm round her waist.  An irresistible sense of
her childish sweetness, of her tender feminine promise, stole softly
into his pulses.  A dozen caressing questions rose to his lips.  Had
she been to school?  Could she read and write?  Was she musical?  She
murmured her answers with gathering confidence.  She had never been
to school; but her mother had taught her to read and write a little,
and to play a little.  She said, almost with a smile, that she was
very backward.  Lawrence felt the tears rising to his eyes; he felt
in his heart the tumult of a new emotion.  Was it the inexpugnable
instinct of paternity?  Was it the restless ghost of his buried hope?
He thought of his angry vow the night before to live only for himself
and turn the key on his heart.  “From the lips of babes and
sucklings....”—he softly mused.  Before twenty-four hours had
elapsed a child’s fingers were fumbling with the key.  He felt
deliciously contradicted; he was after all but a lame egotist.  Was
he to believe, then, that he could not live without love, and that he
must take it where he found it?  His promise to Miss Morton seemed
still to vibrate in his heart.  But there was love and love!  He
could be a protector, a father, a brother.  What was the child before
him but a tragic embodiment of the misery of isolation, a warning
from his own blank future?  “God forbid!” he cried.  And as he did
so, he drew her towards him and kissed her.

At this moment the landlord appeared with a scrap of paper, which he
had found in the room of the deceased; it being the only object which
gave a clew to his circumstances.  He had evidently burned a mass of
papers just before his death, as the grate was filled with fresh
ashes.  Roger read the note, which was scrawled in a hurried,
vehement hand, and ran as follows:—

“This is to say that I must—I must—I must!  Starving, without a
friend in the world, and a reputation worse than worthless,—what can
I do?  Life’s impossible.  Try it yourself.  As regards my
daughter,—anything, everything is cruel; but this is the shortest
way.”

“She has had to take the longest, after all,” said the proprietor,
_sotto voce_, with a kindly wink at Roger.  The landlady soon
reappeared with one of the ladies who had been present overnight,—a
little pushing, patronizing woman, who seemed strangely familiar with
the various devices of applied charity.  “I have come to arrange,”
she said, “about our subscription for the little one.  I shall not be
able to contribute myself, but I will go round among the other ladies
with a paper.  I have just been seeing the reporter of the
‘Universe’; he is to insert a kind of ‘appeal,’ you know, in his
account of the affair.  Perhaps this gentleman will draw up our
paper?  And I think it will be a beautiful idea to take the child
with me.”

Lawrence was sickened.  The world’s tenderness had fairly begun.
Nora gazed at her energetic benefactress, and then, with her eyes,
appealed mutely to Roger.  Her glance, somehow, moved him to the
soul.  Poor little disfathered daughter,—poor little uprooted germ
of womanhood!  Her innocent eyes seemed to more than beseech,—to
admonish almost, and command.  Should he speak and rescue her?
Should he subscribe the whole sum, in the name of human charity?  He
thought of the risk.  She was an unknown quantity.  Her nature, her
heritage, her good and bad possibilities, were an unsolved problem.
Her father had been an adventurer; what had her mother been?
Conjecture was useless; she was a vague spot of light on a dark
background.  He was unable even to decide whether, after all, she was
plain.

“If you want to take her round with you,” said the landlady to her
companion, “I had better just sponge off her face.”

“No indeed!” cried the other, “she is much better as she is.  If I
could only have her little nightgown with the blood on it!  Are you
sure the bullet didn’t strike your dress, deary?  I am sure we can
easily get fifty names at five dollars apiece.  Two hundred and fifty
dollars.  Perhaps this gentleman will make it three hundred.  Come,
sir, now!”

Thus adjured, Roger turned to the child.  “Nora,” he said, “you know
you are quite alone.  You have no home.”  Her lips trembled, but her
eyes were fixed and fascinated.  “Do you think you could love me?”
She flushed to the tender roots of her tumbled hair.  “Will you come
and try?”  Her range of expression of course was limited; she could
only answer by another burst of tears.




II.


“I have adopted a little girl, you know,” Roger said, after this, to
a number of his friends; but he felt, rather, as if she had adopted
him.  He found it somewhat difficult to make his terms with the sense
of actual paternity.  It was indeed an immense satisfaction to feel,
as time went on, that there was small danger of his repenting of his
bargain.  It seemed to him more and more that he had obeyed a divine
voice; though indeed he was equally conscious that there was
something comical in a sleek young bachelor turning nurse and
governess.  But for all this he found himself able to look the world
squarely in the face.  At first it had been with an effort, a blush,
and a deprecating smile that he spoke of his pious venture; but very
soon he began to take a robust satisfaction in alluding to it freely.
There was but one man of whose jocular verdict he thought with some
annoyance,—his cousin Hubert Lawrence, namely, who was so terribly
clever and trenchant, and who had been through life a commentator
formidable to his modesty, though, in the end, always absolved by his
good-nature.  But he made up his mind that, though Hubert might
laugh, he himself was serious; and to prove it equally to himself and
his friends, he determined on a great move.  He withdrew altogether
from his profession, and prepared to occupy his house in the country.
The latter was immediately transformed into a home for Nora,—a home
admirably fitted to become the starting-point of a happy life.
Roger’s dwelling stood in the midst of certain paternal acres,—a
little less than a “place,” a little more than a farm; deep in the
country, and yet at two hours’ journey from town.  Of recent years a
dusty disorder had fallen upon the house, telling of its master’s
long absences and his rare and restless visits.  It was but half
lived in.  But beneath this pulverous deposit the rigid household
gods of a former generation stand erect on their pedestals.  As Nora
grew older, she came to love her new home with an almost passionate
fondness, and to cherish its transmitted memories as a kind of
compensation for her own obliterated past.  There had lived with
Lawrence for many years an elderly woman, of exemplary virtue,
Lucinda Brown by name, who had been a personal attendant of his
mother, and since her death had remained in his service as the lonely
warden of his villa.  Roger had an old-time regard for her, and it
seemed to him that her housewifely gossip might communicate to little
Nora a ray of his mother’s peaceful domestic genius.  Lucinda, who
had been divided between hope and fear as to Roger’s possibly
marrying,—the fear of a diminished empire having exceeded, on the
whole, the hope of company below stairs,—accepted Nora’s arrival as
a very comfortable compromise.  The child was too young to menace her
authority, and yet of sufficient importance to warrant a gradual
extension of the household economy.  Lucinda had a vision of new
carpets and curtains, of a regenerated kitchen, of a series of new
caps, of her niece coming to sew.  Nora was the narrow end of the
wedge; it would broaden with her growth.  Lucinda therefore was
gracious.

For Roger it seemed as if life had begun afresh and the world had put
on a new face.  High above the level horizon now, clearly defined
against the empty sky, rose this small commanding figure, with the
added magnitude that objects acquire in this position.  She gave him
a great deal to think about.  The child a man begets and rears weaves
its existence insensibly into the tissue of his life, so that he
becomes trained by fine degrees to the paternal office.  But Roger
had to skip experience, and spring with a bound into the paternal
consciousness.  In fact he missed his leap, and never tried again.
Time should induct him at leisure into his proper honors, whatever
they might be.  He felt a strong aversion to claim in the child that
prosaic right of property which belongs to the paternal name.  He
eagerly accepted his novel duties and cares, but he shrank with a
tender humility of temper from all precise definition of his rights.
He was too young and too sensible of his youth to wish to give this
final turn to things.  His heart was flattered, rather, by the idea
of living at the mercy of change which might always be change for the
better.  It lay close to his heart, however, to drive away the dusky
fears and sordid memories of Nora’s anterior life.  He strove to
conceal the past from her childish sense by a great pictured screen
of present joys and comforts.  He wished her life to date from the
moment he had taken her home.  He had taken her for better, for
worse; but he longed to quench all baser chances in the daylight of
actual security.  His philosophy in this as in all things was
extremely simple,—to make her happy that she might be good.
Meanwhile as he cunningly devised her happiness, his own seemed
securely established.  He felt twice as much a man as before, and the
world seemed as much again a world.  All his small stale merits
became fragrant with the virtue of unselfish use.

One of his first acts, before he left town, had been to divest Nora
of her shabby mourning and dress her afresh in childish colors.  He
learned from the proprietor’s wife at his hotel that this was
considered by several ladies interested in Nora’s fortunes
(especially by her of the subscription) an act of gross impiety; but
he held to his purpose, nevertheless.  When she was freshly arrayed,
he took her to a photographer and made her sit for half a dozen
portraits.  They were not flattering; they gave her an aged, sombre,
lifeless air.  He showed them to two old ladies of his acquaintance,
whose judgment he valued, without saying whom they represented; the
ladies pronounced her a “fright.”  It was directly after this that
Roger hurried her away to the peaceful, uncritical country.  Her
manner here for a long time remained singularly docile and
spiritless.  She was not exactly sad, but neither was she cheerful.
She smiled, as if from the fear to displease by not smiling.  She had
the air of a child who has been much alone, and who has learned quite
to underestimate her natural right to amusement.  She seemed at times
hopelessly, defiantly torpid.  “Heaven help me!” thought Roger, as he
surreptitiously watched her: “is she going to be simply stupid?”  He
perceived at last, however, that her listless quietude covered a
great deal of observation, and that growing may be a very soundless
process.  His ignorance of the past distressed and vexed him, jealous
as he was of admitting even to himself that she had ever lived till
now.  He trod on tiptoe in the region of her early memories, in the
dread of reviving some dormant claim, some ugly ghost.  Yet he felt
that to know so little of her twelve first years was to reckon
without an important factor in his problem; as if, in spite of his
summons to all the fairies for this second baptism, the
godmother-in-chief lurked maliciously apart.  Nora seemed by instinct
to have perceived the fitness of not speaking of her own affairs, and
indeed displayed in the matter a precocious good taste.  Among her
scanty personal effects the only object referring too vividly to the
past had been a small painted photograph of her mother, a
languid-looking lady in a low-necked dress, with a good deal of
rather crudely rendered prettiness.  Nora had apparently a timid
reserve of complacency in the fact, which she once imparted to Roger
with a kind of desperate abruptness, that her mother had been a
public singer; and the heterogeneous nature of her own culture
testified to some familiarity with the scenery of Bohemia.  The
common relations of things seemed quite reversed in her brief
experience, and immaturity and precocity shared her young mind in the
freest fellowship.  She was ignorant of the plainest truths and
credulous of the quaintest falsities; unversed in the commonest
learning and instructed in the rarest.  She barely knew that the
earth is round, but she knew that Leonora is the heroine of _Il
Trovatore_.  She could neither write nor spell, but she could perform
the most surprising tricks with cards.  She confessed to a passion
for strong green tea, and to an interest in the romances of the
Sunday newspapers.  Evidently she had sprung from a horribly vulgar
soil; she was a brand snatched from the burning.  She uttered various
impolite words with the most guileless accent and glance, and was as
yet equally unsuspicious of the grammar and the Catechism.  But when
once Roger had straightened out her phrase she was careful to
preserve its shape; and when he had decimated her vocabulary she made
its surviving particles suffice.  For the rudiments of theological
learning, also, she manifested a due respect.  Considering her
makeshift education, he wondered she was so much of a lady.  His
impression of her father was fatal, ineffaceable; the late Mr.
Lambert had been a blackguard.  Roger had a fancy, however, that this
was not all the truth.  He was free to assume that the poor fellow’s
wife had been of a gentle nurture and temper; and he even framed on
this theme an ingenious little romance, which gave him a great deal
of comfort.  Mrs. Lambert had been deceived by the impudent
plausibility of her husband, and had come to her senses amid shifting
expedients and struggling poverty, during which she had been glad to
turn to account the voice which the friends of her happier girlhood
had praised.  She had died outwearied and broken-hearted, invoking
human pity on her child.  Roger established in this way a sentimental
intimacy with the poor lady’s spirit, and exchanged many a greeting
over the little girl’s head with this vague maternal shape.  But he
was by no means given up to these thin-spun joys; he gave himself
larger satisfactions.  He determined to drive in the first nail with
his own hands, to lay the smooth foundation-stones of Nora’s culture,
to teach her to read and write and cipher, to associate himself
largely with the growth of her primal sense of things.  Behold him
thus converted into a gentle pedagogue, prompting her with small
caresses and correcting her with smiles.  A moted morning sunbeam
used to enter his little study, and, resting on Nora’s auburn hair,
seemed to make of the place a humming school-room.  Roger began also
to anticipate the future exactions of preceptorship.  He plunged into
a course of useful reading, and devoured a hundred volumes on
education, on hygiene, on morals, on history.  He drew up a table of
rules and observances for the child’s health; he weighed and measured
her food, and spent hours with Lucinda, the minister’s wife, and the
doctor, in the discussion of her regimen and clothing.  He bought her
a pony, and rode with her over the neighboring country, roamed with
her in the woods and fields, and picked out nice acquaintances for
her among the little damsels of the country-side.  A doting granddam,
in all this matter, could not have shown a finer genius for detail.
His zeal indeed left him very little peace, and Lucinda often
endeavored to assuage it by the assurance that he was fretting
himself away and wearing himself thin on his happiness.  He passed a
dozen times a week from the fear of coddling and spoiling the child
to the fear of letting her run wild and grow coarse and rustic.
Sometimes he dismissed her tasks for days together, and kept her
idling at his side in the winter sunshine; sometimes for a week he
kept her within doors, reading to her, preaching to her, showing her
prints, and telling her stories.  She had an excellent musical ear,
and the promise of a charming voice; Roger took counsel in a dozen
quarters as to whether he ought to make her use her voice or spare
it.  Once he took her up to town to a _matinée_ at one of the
theatres, and was in anguish for a week afterwards, lest he had
quickened some inherited tendency to dissipation.  He used to lie
awake at night, trying hard to fix in his mind the happy medium
between coldness and weak fondness.  With a heart full of tenderness,
he used to measure out his caresses.  He was in doubt for a long time
as to what he should make her call him.  At the outset he decided
instinctively against “papa.”  It was a question between “Mr.
Lawrence” and his baptismal name.  He weighed the proprieties for a
week, and then he determined the child should choose for herself.
She had as yet avoided addressing him by name; at last he asked what
name she preferred.  She stared rather blankly at the time, but a few
days afterwards he heard her shouting “Roger!” from the garden under
his window.  She had ventured upon a small shallow pond enclosed by
his land, and now coated with thin ice.  The ice had cracked with a
great report under her tread, and was swaying gently beneath her
weight, at some yards from the edge.  In her alarm her heart had
chosen, and her heart’s election was never subsequently gainsaid.
Circumstances seemed to affect her slowly; for a long time she showed
few symptoms of change.  Roger in his slippers, by the fireside, in
the winter evenings, used to gaze at her with an anxious soul, and
wonder whether it was not only a stupid child that could sit for an
hour by the chimney-corner, stroking the cat’s back in absolute
silence, asking neither questions nor favors.  Then, meeting her
intelligent eyes, he would fancy that she was wiser than he knew;
that she was mocking him or judging him, and counterplotting his
pious labors with elfish subtlety.  Arrange it as he might, he could
not call her pretty.  Plain women are apt to be clever; might she not
(horror of horrors!) turn out too clever?  In the evening, after she
had attended Nora to bed, Lucinda would come into the little library,
and she and Roger would solemnly put their heads together.  In
matters in which he deemed her sex gave her an advantage of judgment,
he used freely to ask her opinion.  She made a great parade of
motherly science, rigid spinster as she was, and hinted by many a nod
and wink at the mystic depths of her sagacity.  As to the child’s
being thankless or heartless, she quite reassured him.  Didn’t she
cry herself to sleep, under her breath, on her little pillow?  Didn’t
she mention him every night in her prayers,—him, and him alone?
However much her family may have left to be desired as a
“family,”—and of its shortcomings in this respect Lucinda had an
altogether awful sense,—Nora was clearly a lady in her own right.
As for her plain face, they could wait awhile for a change.
Plainness in a child was almost always prettiness in a woman; and at
all events, if she was not to be pretty, she need never be proud.

Roger had no wish to remind his young companion of what she owed him;
for it was the very keystone of his plan that their relation should
ripen into a perfect matter of course; but he watched patiently, as a
wandering botanist for the first woodland violets for the year, for
the shy field-flower of spontaneous affection.  He aimed at nothing
more or less than to inspire the child with a passion.  Until he had
detected in her glance and tone the note of passionate tenderness his
experiment must have failed.  It would have succeeded on the day when
she should break out into cries and tears and tell him with a
clinging embrace that she loved him.  So he argued with himself; but,
in fact, he expected perhaps more than belongs to the lame logic of
this life.  As a child, she would be too irreflective to play so
pretty a part; as a young girl, too self-conscious.  I undertake,
however, to tell no secrets.  Roger, being by nature undemonstrative,
continued to possess his soul in patience.  Nora, meanwhile,
seemingly showed as little of distrust as of positive tenderness.
She grew and grew in ungrudged serenity.  It was in person, first,
that she began gently, or rather ungently, to expand; acquiring a
well-nurtured sturdiness of contour, but passing quite into the
shambling and sheepish stage of girlhood.  Lucinda cast about her in
vain for possibilities of future beauty, and took refuge in vigorous
attention to the young girl’s bountiful auburn hair, which she combed
and braided with a kind of fierce assiduity.  The winter had passed
away, the spring was well advanced.  Roger, looking at the object of
his adoption, felt a certain sinking of the heart as he thought of
his cousin Hubert’s visit.  As matters stood, Nora bore rather
livelier testimony to his charity than to his taste.

He had debated some time as to whether he should write to Hubert and
as to how he should write.  Hubert Lawrence was some four years his
junior; but Roger had always allowed him a large precedence in the
things of the mind.  Hubert had just commenced parson; it seemed now
that grace would surely lend a generous hand to nature and complete
the circle of his accomplishments.  He was extremely good-looking and
clever with just such a cleverness as seemed but an added personal
charm.  He and Roger had been much together in early life and had
formed an intimacy strangely compounded of harmony and discord.
Utterly unlike in temper and tone, they neither thought nor felt nor
acted together on any single point.  Roger was constantly differing,
mutely and profoundly, and Hubert frankly and sarcastically; but
each, nevertheless, seemed to find in the other an irritating
counterpart and complement.  They had between them a kind of boyish
levity which kept them from lingering long on delicate ground; but
they felt at times that they belonged, by temperament, to
irreconcilable camps, and that the more each of them came to lead his
own life, the more their lives would diverge.  Roger was of a loving
turn of mind, and it cost him many a sigh that a certain glassy
hardness of soul on his cousin’s part was forever blunting the edge
of his affection.  He nevertheless had a deep regard for Hubert; he
admired his talents, he enjoyed his society, he wrapped him about
with his good-will.  He had told him more than once that he cared for
him more than Hubert would ever believe, could in the nature of
things believe.  He was willing to take his cousin seriously, even
when he knew his cousin was not taking him so.  Hubert, who reserved
his faith for heavenly mysteries, had small credence for earthly
ones, and he would have affirmed that to his perception they loved
each other with a precisely equal ardor, beyond everything in life,
to wit, but themselves.  Roger had in his mind a kind of metaphysical
“idea” of a possible Hubert, which the actual Hubert took a wanton
satisfaction in turning upside down.  Roger had drawn in his fancy a
pure and ample outline, into which the young ecclesiastic projected a
perversely ill-fitting shadow.  Roger took his cousin more seriously
than the young man took himself.  In fact, Hubert had apparently come
into the world to play.  He played at life, altogether; he played at
learning, he played at theology, he played at friendship; and it was
to be conjectured that, on particular holidays, he would play pretty
hard at love.  Hubert, for some time, had been settled in New York,
and of late they had exchanged but few letters.  Something had been
said about Hubert’s coming to spend a part of his summer vacation
with his cousin; now that the latter was at the head of a household
and a family, Roger reminded him of their understanding.  He had
finally told him his little romance, with a fine bravado of
indifference to his verdict; but he was, in secret, extremely anxious
to obtain Hubert’s judgment of the heroine.  Hubert replied that he
was altogether prepared for the news, and that it must be a very
pretty sight to see him at dinner pinning her bib, or to hear him
sermonizing her over a torn frock.

“But, pray, what relation is the young lady to me?” he added.  “How
far does the adoption go, and where does it stop?  Your own proper
daughter would be my cousin; but you can’t adopt for other people.  I
shall wait till I see her; then if she is pleasing, I shall admit her
into cousinship.”

He came down for a fortnight, in July, and was soon introduced to
Nora.  She came sidling shyly into the room, with a rent in her
short-waisted frock, and the “Child’s Own Book” in her hand, with her
finger in the history of “The Discreet Princess.”  Hubert kissed her
gallantly, and declared that he was happy to make her acquaintance.
She retreated to a station beside Roger’s knee, and stood staring at
the young man.  “_Elle a les pieds énormes_,” said Hubert.

Roger was annoyed, partly with himself, for he made her wear big
shoes.  “What do you think of him?” he asked, stroking the child’s
hair, and hoping, half maliciously, that, with the frank perspicacity
of childhood, she would make some inspired “hit” about the young man.
But to appreciate Hubert’s failings, one must have had vital
experience of them.  At this time, twenty-five years of age, he was a
singularly handsome youth.  Although of about the same height as his
cousin, the pliant slimness of his figure made him look taller.  He
had a cool blue eye and clustering yellow locks.  His features were
cut with admirable purity; his teeth were white, his smile superb.
“I think,” said Nora, “that he looks like the _Prince Avenant_.”

Before Hubert went away, Roger asked him for a deliberate opinion of
the child.  Was she ugly or pretty? was she interesting?  He found it
hard, however, to induce him to consider her seriously.  Hubert’s
observation was exercised rather less in the interest of general
truth than of particular profit; and of what profit to Hubert was
Nora’s shambling childhood?  “I can’t think of her as a girl,” he
said: “she seems to me a boy.  She climbs trees, she scales fences,
she keeps rabbits, she straddles upon your old mare.  I found her
this morning wading in the pond.  She is growing up a hoyden; you
ought to give her more civilizing influences than she enjoys
hereabouts; you ought to engage a governess, or send her to school.
It is well enough now; but, my poor fellow, what will you do when she
is twenty?”

You may imagine, from Hubert’s sketch, that Nora’s was a happy life.
She had few companions, but during the long summer days, in woods and
fields and orchards, Roger initiated her into all those rural
mysteries which are so dear to childhood and so fondly remembered in
later years.  She grew more hardy and lively, more inquisitive, more
active.  She tasted deeply of the joy of tattered dresses and
sunburnt cheeks and arms, and long nights at the end of tired days.
But Roger, pondering his cousin’s words, began to believe that to
keep her longer at home would be to fail of justice to the _ewige
Weibliche_.  The current of her growth would soon begin to flow
deeper than the plummet of a man’s wit.  He determined, therefore, to
send her to school, and he began with this view to investigate the
merits of various seminaries.  At last, after a vast amount of
meditation and an extensive correspondence with the school-keeping
class, he selected one which appeared rich in fair promises.  Nora,
who had never known an hour’s schooling, entered joyously upon her
new career; but she gave her friend that sweet and long-deferred
emotion of which I have spoken, when, on parting with him, she hung
upon his neck with a sort of convulsive fondness.  He took her head
in his two hands and looked at her; her eyes were streaming with
tears.  During the month which followed he received from her a dozen
letters, sadly misspelled, but divinely lachrymose.

It is needless to relate in detail this phase of Nora’s history,
which lasted two years.  Roger found that he missed her sadly; his
occupation was gone.  Still, her very absence occupied him.  He wrote
her long letters of advice, told her everything that happened to him,
and sent her books and useful garments, biscuits and oranges.  At the
end of a year he began to long terribly to take her back again; but
as his judgment forbade this measure, he determined to beguile the
following year by travel.  Before starting, he went to the little
country town which was the seat of her academy, to bid Nora farewell.
He had not seen her since she left him, as he had chosen,—quite
heroically, poor fellow,—to have her spend her vacation with a
schoolmate, the bosom friend of this especial period.  He found her
surprisingly altered.  She looked three years older; she was growing
by the hour.  Prettiness and symmetry had not yet been vouchsafed to
her; but Roger found in her young imperfection a sweet assurance that
her account with nature was not yet closed.  She had, moreover, an
elusive grace.  She had reached that charming girlish moment when the
crudity of childhood begins to be faintly tempered by the sense of
sex.  She was coming fast, too, into her woman’s heritage of
garrulity.  She entertained him for a whole morning; she took him
into her confidence; she rattled and prattled unceasingly upon all
the swarming little school interests,—her likes and aversions, her
hopes and fears, her friends and teachers, her studies and
story-books.  Roger sat grinning in high enchantment; she seemed to
him the very genius of girlhood.  For the very first time, he became
conscious of her character; there was an immense deal of her; she
overflowed.  When they parted, he gave his hopes to her keeping in a
long, long kiss.  She kissed him too, but this time with smiles, not
with tears.  She neither suspected nor could she have understood the
thought which, during this interview, had blossomed in her friend’s
mind.  On leaving her, he took a long walk in the country over
unknown roads.  That evening he consigned his thought to a short
letter, addressed to Mrs. Keith.  This was the present title of the
lady who had once been Miss Morton.  She had married and gone abroad;
where, in Rome, she had done as the Americans do, and entered the
Roman Church.  His letter ran as follows:—


MY DEAR MRS. KEITH,—I promised you once to be very unhappy, but I
doubt whether you believed me; you did not look as if you believed
me.  I am sure, at all events, you hoped otherwise.  I am told you
have become a Roman Catholic.  Perhaps you have been praying for me
at St. Peter’s.  This is the easiest way to account for my
conversion, to a worthier state of mind.  You know that, two years
ago, I adopted a homeless little girl.  One of these days she will be
a lovely woman.  I mean to do what I can to make her one.  Perhaps,
six years hence, she will be grateful enough not to refuse me as you
did.  Pray for me more than ever.  I have begun at the beginning; it
will be my own fault if I have not a perfect wife.




III.


Roger’s journey was long and various.  He went to the West Indies and
to South America, whence, taking a ship at one of the eastern ports,
he sailed round the Horn and paid a visit to Mexico.  He journeyed
thence to California, and returned home across the Isthmus, stopping
awhile on his upward course at various Southern cities.  It was in
some degree a sentimental journey.  Roger was a practical man; as he
went he gathered facts and noted manners and customs; but the muse of
observation for him was the little girl at home, the ripening
companion of his own ripe years.  It was for her sake that he
collected impressions and laid up treasure.  He had determined that
she should be a lovely woman and a perfect wife; but to be worthy of
such a woman as his fancy foreshadowed, he himself had much to learn.
To be a good husband, one must first be a wise man; to educate her,
he should first educate himself.  He would make it possible that
daily contact with him should be a liberal education, and that his
simple society should be a benefit.  For this purpose he should be a
fountain of knowledge, a compendium of experience.  He travelled in a
spirit of solemn attention, like some grim devotee of a former age
making a pilgrimage for the welfare of one he loved.  He kept with
great labor a copious diary, which he meant to read aloud on the
winter nights of coming years.  His diary was directly addressed to
Nora, she being implied throughout as reader or auditor.  He thought
at moments of his vow to Isabel Morton, and asked himself what had
become of the passion of that hour.  It had betaken itself to the
common limbo of our dead passions.  He rejoiced to know that she was
well and happy; he meant to write to her again on his return and tell
her that he himself was as happy as she could wish to see him.  He
mused ever and anon on the nature of his affection for Nora, and
wondered what earthly name he could call it by.  Assuredly he was not
in love with her: you could not fall in love with a child.  But if he
had not a lover’s love, he had at least a lover’s jealousy; it would
have made him miserable to believe his scheme might miscarry.  It
would fail, he fondly assured himself, by no fault of hers.  He was
sure of her future; in that last interview at school he had guessed
the answer to the riddle of her formless girlhood.  If he could only
be as sure of his own constancy as of hers!  On this point poor Roger
might fairly have let his conscience rest; but to test his
resolution, he deliberately courted temptation, and on a dozen
occasions allowed present loveliness to measure itself with absent
promise.  At the risk of a large expenditure of blushes, he bravely
incurred the blandishments of various charming persons of the South.
They failed signally, in every case but one, to quicken his pulses.
He studied these gracious persons, he noted their gifts and graces,
so that he might know the range of the feminine charm.  Of the utmost
that women can be and do he wished to have personal experience.  But
with the sole exception I have mentioned, not a syren of them all but
shone with a radiance less magical than that dim but rounded shape
which glimmered forever in the dark future, like the luminous
complement of the early moon.  It was at Lima that his poor little
potential Nora suffered temporary eclipse.  He made here the
acquaintance of a young Spanish lady whose plump and full-blown
innocence seemed to him divinely amiable.  If ignorance is grace,
what a lamentable folly to be wise!  He had crossed from Havana to
Rio on the same vessel with her brother, a friendly young fellow, who
had made him promise to come and stay with him on his arrival at
Lima.  Roger, in execution of this promise, passed three weeks under
his roof, in the society of the lovely Teresita.  She caused him to
reflect, with a good deal of zeal.  She moved him the more because,
being wholly without coquetry, she made no attempt whatever to
interest him.  Her charm was the charm of absolute naïveté, and a
certain tame unseasoned sweetness,—the sweetness of an angel who is
without mundane reminiscences; to say nothing of a pair of liquid
hazel eyes and a coil of crinkled blue-black hair.  She could barely
write her name, and from the summer twilight of her mind, which
seemed to ring with amorous bird-notes, she flung a disparaging
shadow upon Nora’s prospective condition.  Roger thought of Nora, by
contrast, as a kind of superior doll, a thing wound up with a key,
whose virtues would make a _tic-tic_ if one listened.  Why travel so
far about for a wife, when here was one ready made to his heart, as
illiterate as an angel, and as faithful as the little page of a
mediæval ballad,—and with those two perpetual love-lights beneath
her silly little forehead?

Day by day, near the pretty Peruvian, Roger grew better pleased with
the present.  It was so happy, so idle, so secure!  He protested
against the future.  He grew impatient of the stiff little figure
which he had posted in the distance, to stare at him with those
monstrous pale eyes; they seemed to grow and grow as he thought of
them.  In other words, he was in love with Teresa.  She, on her side,
was delighted to be loved.  She caressed him with her fond dark looks
and smiled perpetual assent.  Late one afternoon they ascended
together to a terrace on the top of the house.  The sun had just
disappeared; the southern landscape was drinking in the cool of
night.  They stood awhile in silence; at last Roger felt that he must
speak of his love.  He walked away to the farther end of the
terrace, casting about in his mind for the fitting words.  They were
hard to find.  His companion spoke a little English, and he a little
Spanish; but there came upon him a sudden perplexing sense of the
infantine rarity of her wits.  He had never done her the honor to pay
her a compliment, he had never really talked with her.  It was not
for him to talk, but for her to perceive!  She turned about, leaning
back against the parapet of the terrace, looking at him and smiling.
She was always smiling.  She had on an old faded pink morning dress,
very much open at the throat, and a ribbon round her neck, to which
was suspended a little cross of turquoise.  One of the braids of her
hair had fallen down, and she had drawn it forward, and was plaiting
the end with her plump white fingers.  Her nails were not
fastidiously clean.  He went towards her.  When he next became
perfectly conscious of their relative positions, he knew that he had
tenderly kissed her, more than once, and that she had more than
suffered him.  He stood holding both her hands; he was blushing; her
own complexion was undisturbed, her smile barely deepened; another of
her braids had come down.  He was filled with a sense of pleasure in
her sweetness, tempered by a vague feeling of pain in his all-to-easy
conquest.  There was nothing of poor Teresita but that you could kiss
her!  It came upon him with a sort of horror that he had never yet
distinctly told her that he loved her.  “Teresa,” he said, almost
angrily, “I love you.  Do you understand?”  For all answer she raised
his two hands successively to her lips.  Soon after this she went off
with her mother to church.

The next morning, one of his friend’s clerks brought him a package of
letters from his banker.  One of them was a note from Nora.  It ran
as follows:—


DEAR ROGER: I want so much to tell you that I have just got the prize
for the piano.  I hope you will not think it very silly to write so
far only to tell you this.  But I am so proud I want you to know it.
Of the three girls who tried for it, two were seventeen.  The prize
is a beautiful picture called “Mozart à Vienne”; probably you have
seen it.  Miss Murray says I may hang it up in my bedroom.  Now I
have got to go and practise, for Miss Murray says I must practise
more than ever.  My dear Roger, I do hope you are enjoying your
travels.  I have learned a great deal of geography, following you on
the map.  Don’t ever forget your loving NORA.


After reading this letter, Roger told his host that he should have to
leave him.  The young Peruvian demurred, objected, and begged for a
reason.

“Well,” said Roger, “I find I am in love with your sister.” The words
sounded on his ear as if some one else had spoken them. Teresita’s light
was quenched, and she had no more fascination than a smouldering lamp,
smelling of oil.

“Why, my dear fellow,” said his friend, “that seems to me a reason
for staying.  I shall be most happy to have you for a brother-in-law.”

“It’s impossible!  I am engaged to a young lady in my own country.”

“You are in love here, you are engaged there, and you go where you
are engaged!  You Englishmen are strange fellows!”

“Tell Teresa that I adore her, but that I am pledged at home.  I
would rather not see her.”

And so Roger departed from Lima, without further communion with
Teresita.  On, his return home he received a letter from her brother,
telling him of her engagement to a young merchant of Valparaiso,—an
excellent match.  The young lady sent him her salutations.  Roger,
answering his friend’s letter, begged that the Doña Teresa would
accept, as a wedding-present, of the accompanying trinket,—a little
brooch in turquoise.  It would look very well with pink!

Roger reached home in the autumn, but left Nora at school till the
beginning of the Christmas holidays.  He occupied the interval in
refurnishing his house, and clearing the stage for the last act of
the young girl’s childhood.  He had always possessed a modest taste
for upholstery; he now began to apply it under the guidance of a
delicate idea.  His idea led him to prefer, in all things, the fresh
and graceful to the grave and formal, and to wage war throughout his
old dwelling on the lurking mustiness of the past.  He had a lively
regard for elegance, balanced by a horror of wanton luxury.  He
fancied that a woman is the better for being well dressed and well
domiciled, and that vanity, too stingily treated, is sure to avenge
itself.  So he took vanity into account.  Nothing annoyed him more,
however, than the fear of seeing Nora a precocious fine lady; so that
while he aimed at all possible purity of effect, he stayed his hand
here and there before certain admonitory relics of ancestral ugliness
and virtue, embodied for the most part in hair-cloth and cotton
damask.  Chintz and muslin, flowers and photographs and books, gave
their clear light tone to the house.  Nothing could be more tenderly
propitious and virginal, or better chosen both to chasten the young
girl’s aspirations and to remind her of her protector’s tenderness.

Since his return he had designedly refused himself a glimpse of her.
He wished to give her a single undivided welcome to his home and his
heart.  Shortly before Christmas, as he had even yet not set his
house in order, Lucinda Brown was sent to fetch her from school.  If
Roger had expected that Nora would return with any striking accession
of beauty, he would have had to say “Amen” with an effort.  She had
pretty well ceased to be a child; she was still his grave, imperfect
Nora.  She had gained her full height,—a great height, which her
young strong slimness rendered the more striking.  Her slender throat
supported a head of massive mould, bound about with dense auburn
braids.  Beneath a somewhat serious brow her large, fair eyes
retained their collected light, as if uncertain where to fling it.
Now and then the lids parted widely and showered down these gathered
shafts; and if at these times a certain rare smile divided, in
harmony, her childish lips, Nora was for the moment a passable
beauty.  But for the most part, the best charm of her face was in a
modest refinement of line, which rather evaded notice than courted
it.  The first impression she was likely to produce was of a kind of
awkward slender majesty.  Roger pronounced her “stately,” and for a
fortnight thought her too imposing by half; but as the days went on,
and the pliable innocence of early maidenhood gave a soul to this
formidable grace, he began to feel that in essentials she was still
the little daughter of his charity.  He even began to observe in her
an added consciousness of this lowly position; as if with the growth
of her mind she had come to reflect upon it, and deem it less and
less a matter of course.  He meditated much as to whether he should
frankly talk it over with her and allow her to feel that, for him as
well, their relation could never become commonplace.  This would be
in a measure untender, but would it not be prudent?  Ought he not, in
the interest of his final purpose, to infuse into her soul in her
sensitive youth an impression of all that she owed him, so that when
his time had come, if her imagination should lead her a-wandering,
gratitude would stay her steps?  A dozen times over he was on the
verge of making his point, of saying, “Nora, Nora, these are not
vulgar alms; I expect a return.  One of these days you must pay your
debt.  Guess my riddle!  I love you less than you think—and more!  A
word to the wise.”  But he was silenced by a saving sense of the
brutality of such a course and by a suspicion that, after all, it was
not needful.  A passion of gratitude was silently gathering in the
young girl’s heart: that heart could be trusted to keep its
engagements.  A deep conciliatory purpose seemed now to pervade her
life, of infinite delight to Roger as little by little it stole upon
his mind like the fragrance of a deepening spring.  He had his idea;
he suspected that she had hers.  They were but opposite faces of the
same deep need.  Her musing silence, her deliberate smiles, the
childish keenness of her questionings, the delicacy of her little
nameless services and caresses, were all a kind of united
acknowledgment and promise.

On Christmas eve they sat together alone by a blazing log-fire in
Roger’s little library.  He had been reading aloud a chapter of his
diary, to which Nora sat listening in dutiful demureness, though her
thoughts evidently were nearer home than Cuba and Peru.  There is no
denying it was dull; he could gossip to better purpose.  He felt its
dulness himself, and closing it finally with good-humored petulance,
declared it was fit only to throw into the fire.  Upon which Nora
looked up, protesting.  “You must do no such thing,” she said.  “You
must keep your journals carefully, and one of these days I shall have
them bound in morocco and gilt, and ranged in a row in my own
bookcase.”

“That is but a polite way of burning them up,” said Roger.  “They
will be as little read as if they were in the fire.  I don’t know how
it is.  They seemed to be very amusing when I wrote them: they are as
stale as an old newspaper now.  I can’t write: that’s the amount of
it.  I am a very stupid fellow, Nora; you might as well know it first
as last.”

Nora’s school had been of the punctilious Episcopal order, and she
had learned there the pretty custom of decorating the house at
Christmas-tide with garlands and crowns of evergreen and holly.  She
had spent the day in decking out the chimney-piece, and now, seated
on a stool under the mantel-shelf, she twisted the last little wreath
which was to complete her design.  A great still snow-storm was
falling without, and seemed to be blocking them in from the world.
She bit off the thread with which she had been binding her twigs,
held out her garland to admire its effect, and then, “I don’t believe
you are stupid, Roger,” she said: “and if I did, I should not much
care.”

“Is that philosophy, or indifference?” said the young man.

“I don’t know that it’s either; it’s because I know you are so good.”

“That is what they say about all stupid people.”

Nora added another twig to her wreath and bound it up.  “I am sure,”
she said at last, “that when people are as good as you are, they
cannot be stupid.  I should like some one to tell me you are stupid.
I know, Roger; _I_ know!”

The young man began to feel a little uneasy; it was no part of his
plan that her good-will should spend itself too soon.  “Dear me,
Nora, if you think so well of me, I shall find it hard to live up to
your expectations.  I am afraid I shall disappoint you.  I have a
little gimcrack to put in your stocking to-night; but I’m rather
ashamed of it now.”

“A gimcrack more or less is of small account.  I have had my stocking
hanging up these three years, and everything I possess is a present
from you.”

Roger frowned; the conversation had taken just such a turn as he had
often longed to provoke, but now it was disagreeable to him.  “O,
come,” he said: “I have done simply my duty to my little girl.”

“But, Roger,” said Nora, staring with expanded eyes, “I am not your
little girl.”

His frown darkened; his heart began to beat.  “Don’t talk nonsense!”
he said.

“But, Roger, it is true.  I am no one’s little girl.  Do you think I
have no memory?  Where is my father?  Where is my mother?”

“Listen to me,” said Roger, sternly.  “You must not talk of such
things.”

“You must not forbid me, Roger.  I can’t think of them without
thinking of you.  This is Christmas eve!  Miss Murray told us that we
must never let it pass without thinking of all that it means.  But
without Miss Murray, I have been thinking all day of things which are
hard to name,—of death and life, of my parents and you, of my
incredible happiness.  I feel to-night like a princess in a
fairy-tale.  I am a poor creature, without a friend, without a penny
or a home; and yet, here I sit by a blazing fire, with money, with
food, with clothes, with love.  The snow outside is burying the
stone-walls, and yet here I can sit and simply say, ‘How pretty!’
Suppose I were in it, wandering and begging,—I might have been!
Should I think it pretty then?  Roger, Roger, I am no one’s child!”
The tremor in her voice deepened, and she broke into a sudden passion
of tears.  Roger took her in his arms and tried to soothe away her
sobs.  But she disengaged herself and went on with an almost fierce
exaltation: “No, no, I won’t be comforted!  I have had comfort
enough; I hate it.  I want for an hour to be myself and feel how
little that is, to be my miserable father’s daughter, to fancy I hear
my mother’s voice.  I have never spoken of them before; you must let
me to-night.  You must tell me about my father; you know something.
I don’t.  You never refused me anything, Roger; don’t refuse me this.
He was not good, like you; but now he can do no harm.  You have never
mentioned his name to me, but happy as we are here together, we ought
not,—we ought not, to despise him!”

Roger yielded to the vehemence of this flood of emotion.  He stood
watching her with two helpless tears in his own eyes, and then he
drew her gently towards him and kissed her on the forehead.  She took
up her work again, and he told her, with every minutest detail he
could recall, the story of his sole brief interview with Mr. Lambert.
Gradually he lost the sense of effort and reluctance, and talked
freely, abundantly, almost with pleasure.  Nora listened very
solemnly,—with an amount of self-control which denoted the habit of
constant retrospect.  She asked a hundred questions as to Roger’s
impression of her father’s appearance.  Was he not wonderfully
handsome?  Then taking up the tale herself, she poured out a torrent
of feverish reminiscence.  She disinterred her early memories with a
kind of rapture of relief.  Her evident joy in this frolic of
confidence gave Roger a pitying sense of what her long silence must
have cost her.  But evidently she bore him no grudge, and his present
tolerance of her rambling gossip seemed to her but another proof of
his charity.  She rose at last, and stood before the fire, into which
she had thrown the refuse of her greenery, watching it blaze up and
turn to ashes.  “So much for the past!” she said, at last.  “The rest
is the future.  The girls at school used to be always talking about
what they meant to do in coming years, what they hoped, what they
wished; wondering, choosing, imagining.  You don’t know how girls
talk, Roger: you would be surprised!  I never used to say much: my
future is fixed.  I have nothing to choose, nothing to hope, nothing
to fear.  I am to make you happy.  That’s simple enough.  You have
undertaken to bring me up, Roger; you must do your best, because now
I am here, it’s for long, and you would rather have a wise girl than
a silly one.”  And she smiled with a kind of tentative daughterliness
through the traces of her recent grief.  She put her two hands on his
shoulders and eyed him with conscious gravity.  “You shall never
repent.  I shall learn everything, I shall be everything!  Oh!  I
wish I were pretty.”  And she tossed back her head, in impatience of
her fatal plainness, with an air which forced Roger to assure her
that she would do very well as she was.  “If you are satisfied,” she
said, “I am!”  For a moment Roger felt as if she were twenty years
old.

This serious Christmas eve left its traces upon many ensuing weeks.
Nora’s education was resumed with a certain added solemnity.  Roger
was no longer obliged to condescend to the level of her intelligence,
and he found reason to thank his stars that he had improved his own
mind.  He found use for all the knowledge he possessed.  The day of
childish “lessons” was over, and Nora sought instruction in the
perusal of various classical authors, in her own and other tongues,
in concert with her friend.  They read aloud to each other
alternately, discussed their acquisitions, and digested them with
perhaps equal rapidity.  Roger, in former years, had had but a small
literary appetite; he liked a few books and knew them well, but he
felt as if to settle down to an unread author were very like starting
on a journey,—a case for farewells, packing trunks, and buying
tickets.  His curiosity, now, however, imbued and quickened with a
motive, led him through a hundred untrodden paths.  He found it hard
sometimes to keep pace with Nora’s pattering step; through the
flowery lanes of poetry, in especial, she would gallop without
drawing breath.  Was she quicker-witted than her friend, or only more
superficial?  Something of one, doubtless, and something of the
other.  Roger was forever suspecting her of a deeper penetration than
his own, and hanging his head with an odd mixture of pride and
humility.  Her quick perception, at times, made him feel
irretrievably dull and antiquated.  His ears would tingle, his cheeks
would burn, his old hope would fade into a shadow.  “It’s worse than
useless,” he would declare.  “How can I ever have for her that charm
of infallibility, that romance of omniscience, that a woman demands
of her lover?  She has seen me scratching my head, she has seen me
counting on my fingers!  Before she is seventeen she will be mortally
tired of me, and by the time she is twenty I shall be fatally
familiar and incurably stale.  It’s very well for her to talk about
life-long devotion and eternal gratitude.  She doesn’t know the
meaning of words.  She must grow and outgrow, that is her first
necessity.  She must come to woman’s estate and pay the inevitable
tribute.  I can open the door and let in the lover.  If she loves me
now I shall have had my turn.  I can’t hope to be the object of two
passions.  I must thank the Lord for small favors!”  Then as he
seemed to taste, in advance, the bitterness of disappointment,
casting about him angrily for some means of appeal: “I ought to go
away and stay away for years and never write at all, instead of
compounding ponderous diaries to make even my absence detestable.  I
ought to convert myself into a beneficent shadow, a vague tutelary
name.  Then I ought to come back in glory, fragrant with exotic
perfumes and shod with shoes of mystery!  Otherwise, I ought to clip
the wings of her fancy and put her on half-rations.  I ought to snub
her and scold her and bully her and tell her she’s deplorably
plain,—treat her as Rochester treats Jane Eyre.  If I were only a
good old Catholic, that I might shut her up in a convent and keep her
childish and stupid and contented!”  Roger felt that he was too
doggedly conscientious; but abuse his conscience as he would, he
could not make it yield an inch; so that in the constant strife
between his egotistical purpose and his generous temper, the latter
kept gaining ground, and Nora innocently enjoyed the spoils of
victory.  It was his very generosity that detained him on the spot,
by her side, watching her, working for her, performing a hundred
offices which other hands would have but scanted.  Roger watched
intently for the signs of that inevitable hour when a young girl
begins to loosen her fingers in the grasp of a guiding hand and
wander softly in pursuit of the sinuous silver thread which deflects,
through meadows of perennial green, from the dull gray stream of the
common lot.  She had relapsed in the course of time into the careless
gayety and the light, immediate joys of girlhood.  If she cherished a
pious purpose in her heart, she made no indecent parade of it.  But
her very placidity and patience somehow afflicted her friend.  She
was too monotonously sweet, too easily obedient.  If once in a while
she would only flash out into petulance or rebellion!  She kept her
temper so carefully: what in the world was she keeping it for?  If
she would only bless him for once with an angry look and tell him
that he bored her!

During the second year after her return from school Roger began to
imagine that she avoided his society and resented his attentions.
She was fond of lonely walks, readings, reveries.  She was fond of
novels, and she read a great many.  For works of fiction in general
Roger had no great relish, though he confessed to three or four
old-fashioned favorites.  These were not always Nora’s.  One evening
in the early spring she sat down to a twentieth perusal of the
classic tale of “The Heir of Redcliffe.”  Roger, as usual, asked her
to read aloud.  She began, and proceeded through a dozen pages.
Looking up, at this point, she beheld Roger asleep.  She smiled
softly, and privately resumed her reading.  At the end of an hour,
Roger, having finished his nap, rather startled her by his excessive
annoyance at his lapse of consciousness.  He wondered whether he had
snored, but the absurd fellow was ashamed to ask her.  Recovering
himself finally, “The fact is, Nora,” he said, “all novels seem to me
stupid.  They are nothing to what _I_ can fancy!  I have in my heart
a prettier romance than any of them.”

“A romance?” said Nora, simply.  “Pray let me hear it.  You are quite
as good a hero as this stick of a Philip.  Begin!”

He stood before the fire, looking at her with almost funereal
gravity.  “My dénouement is not yet written,” he said.  “Wait till
the story is finished; then you shall hear the whole.”

As at this time Nora put on long dresses and began to arrange her
hair as a young lady, it occurred to Roger that he might make some
change in his own appearance and reinforce his waning attractions.
He was now thirty-three; he fancied he was growing stout.  Bald,
corpulent, middle-aged,—at this rate he should soon be shelved!  He
was seized with a mad desire to win back the lost graces of youth.
He had a dozen interviews with his tailor, the result of which was
that for a fortnight he appeared daily in a new garment.  Suddenly,
amid this restless longing to revise and embellish himself, he
determined to suppress his whiskers.  This would take off five years.
He appeared, therefore, one morning, in the severe simplicity of a
mustache.  Nora started, and greeted him with a little cry of horror.
“Don’t you like it?” he asked.

She hung her head on one side and the other.  “Well, no,—to be
frank.”

“O, of course to be frank!  It will only take five years to grow them
again.  What is the trouble?”

She gave a critical frown.  “It makes you look too,—too fat; too
much like Mr. Vose.”  It is sufficient to explain that Mr. Vose was
the butcher, who called every day in his cart, and who
recently,—Roger with horror only now remembered it,—had sacrificed
his whiskers to a mysterious ideal.

“I am sorry!” said Roger.  “It was for you I did it!”

“For me!”  And Nora burst into a violent laugh.

“Why, my dear Nora,” cried the young man with a certain angry
vehemence, “don’t I do everything in life for you?”

She became grave again.  Then, after much meditation, “Excuse my
unfeeling levity,” she said.  “You might cut off your nose, Roger,
and I should like your face as well.”  But this was but half comfort.
“Too fat!”  Her subtler sense had spoken, and Roger never encountered
Mr. Vose for three months after this without wishing to attack him
with one of his own cleavers.

He made now an heroic attempt to scale the frowning battlements of
the future.  He pretended to be making arrangements for a tour in
Europe, and for having his house completely remodelled in his
absence; noting the while attentively the effect upon Nora of his
cunning machinations.  But she gave no sign of suspicion that his
future, to the uttermost day, could be anything but her future too.
One evening, nevertheless, an incident occurred which fatally
confounded his calculations,—an evening of perfect mid-spring, full
of warm, vague odors, of growing daylight, of the sense of bursting
sap and fresh-turned earth.  Roger sat on the piazza, looking out on
these things with an opera-glass.  Nora, who had been strolling in
the garden, returned to the house and sat down on the steps of the
portico.  “Roger,” she said, after a pause, “has it never struck you
as very strange that we should be living together in this way?”

Roger’s heart rose to his throat.  But he was loath to concede
anything, lest he should concede too much.  “It is not especially
strange,” he said.

“Surely it is strange,” she answered.  “What are you?  Neither my
brother, nor my father, nor my uncle, nor my cousin,—nor even, by
law, my guardian.”

“By law!  My dear child, what do you know about law?”

“I know that if I should run away and leave you now, you could not
force me to return.”

“That’s fine talk!  Who told you that?”

“No one; I thought of it myself.  As I grow older, I ought to think
of such things.”

“Upon my word!  Of running away and leaving me?”

“That is but one side of the question.  The other is that you can
turn me out of your house this moment, and no one can force you to
take me back.  I ought to remember such things.”

“Pray what good will it do you to remember them?”

Nora hesitated a moment.  “There is always some good in not losing
sight of the truth.”

“The truth!  You are very young to begin to talk about the truth.”

“Not too young.  I am old for my age.  I ought to be!”  These last
words were uttered with a little sigh which roused Roger to action.

“Since we are talking about the truth,” he said, “I wonder whether
you know a tithe of it.”

For an instant she was silent; then, rising slowly to her feet, “What
do you mean?” she asked.  “Is there any secret in all that you have
done for me?”  Suddenly she clasped her hands, and eagerly, with a
smile, went on: “You said the other day you had a romance.  Is it a
real romance, Roger?  Are you, after all, related to me,—my cousin,
my brother?”

He let her stand before him, perplexed and expectant.  “It is more of
a romance than that.”

She slid upon her knees at his feet.  “Dear Roger, do tell me,” she
said.

He began to stroke her hair.  “You think so much,” he answered: “do
you never think about the future, the real future, ten years hence?”

“A great deal.”

“What do you think?”

She blushed a little, and then he felt that she was drawing
confidence from his face.  “Promise not to laugh!” she said, half
laughing herself.  He nodded.  “I think about my husband!” she
proclaimed.  And then, as if she had, after all, been very absurd,
and to forestall his laughter, “And about your wife!” she quickly
added.  “I want dreadfully to see her.  Why don’t you marry?”

He continued to stroke her hair in silence.  At last he said
sententiously, “I hope to marry one of these days.”

“I wish you would do it now,” Nora went on.  “If only she would be
nice!  We should be sisters, and I should take care of the children.”

“You are too young to understand what you say, or what I mean.
Little girls should not talk about marriage.  It can mean nothing to
you until you come yourself to marry,—as you will, of course.  You
will have to decide and choose.”

“I suppose I shall.  I shall refuse him.”

“What do you mean?”

But, without answering his question, “Were you ever in love, Roger?”
she suddenly asked.  “Is that your romance?”

“Almost.”

“Then it is not about me, after all?”

“It is about you, Nora; but, after all, it is not a romance.  It is
solid, it is real, it is truth itself; as true as your silly novels
are false.  Nora, I care for no one, I shall never care for any one,
but you!”

He spoke in tones so deep and solemn that she was impressed.  “Do you
mean, Roger, that you care so much for me that you will never marry?”

He rose quickly in his chair, pressing his hand over his brow.  “Ah,
Nora,” he cried, “you are very painful!”

If she had annoyed him she was very contrite.  She took his two hands
in her own.  “Roger,” she whispered gravely, “if you don’t wish it, I
promise never, never, never to marry, but to be yours alone,—yours
alone!”




IV.


The summer passed away; Nora was turned sixteen.  Deeming it time she
should begin to see something of the world, Roger spent the autumn in
travelling.  Of his tour in Europe he had ceased to talk; it was
indefinitely deferred.  It matters little where they went; Nora
greatly enjoyed the excursion, and found all spots alike delightful.
To Roger himself it gave a great deal of comfort.  Whether or no his
companion was pretty, people certainly looked at her.  He overheard
them a dozen times call her “striking.”  _Striking_!  The word seemed
to him rich in meaning; if he had seen her for the first time taking
the breeze on the deck of a river steamer, he certainly should have
been struck.  On his return home he found among his letters the
following missive:—


MY DEAR SIR: I have learned, after various fruitless researches, that
you have adopted my cousin.  Miss Lambert, at the time she left St.
Louis, was too young to know much about her family, or even to care
much; and you, I suppose, have not investigated the subject.  You,
however, better than any one, can understand my desire to make her
acquaintance.  I hope you will not deny me the privilege.  I am the
second son of a half-sister of her mother, between whom and my own
mother there was always the greatest affection.  It was not until
some time after it happened that I heard of Mr. Lambert’s melancholy
death.  But it is useless to recur to that painful scene!  I resolved
to spare no trouble in ascertaining the fate of his daughter.  I have
only just succeeded, after having almost given her up.  I have
thought it better to write to you than to her, but I beg you to give
her my compliments.  I anticipate no difficulty in satisfying you
that I am not an impostor.  I have no hope of being able to better
her circumstances; but, whatever they may be, blood is blood, and
cousins are cousins, especially in the West.  A speedy answer will
oblige

  Yours truly,
        GEORGE FENTON.


The letter was dated in New York, from an hotel.  Roger felt a
certain dismay.  It had been from the first a peculiar satisfaction
to him that Nora began and ended so distinctly with herself.  But
here was a hint of indefinite continuity!  Here, at last, was an echo
of her past.  He immediately showed the letter to Nora.  As she read
it, her face flushed deep with wonder and suppressed relief.  She had
never heard, she confessed, of her mother’s half-sister.  The “great
affection” between the two ladies must have been anterior to Mrs.
Lambert’s marriage.  Roger’s own provisional solution of the problem
was that Mrs. Lambert had married so little to the taste of her
family as to forfeit all communication with them.  If he had obeyed
his first impulse, he would have written to his mysterious petitioner
that Miss Lambert was sensible of the honor implied in his request,
but that never having missed his attentions, it seemed needless that,
at this time of day, she should cultivate them.  But Nora was
interested in Mr. Fenton; the dormant pulse of kinship had been
quickened; it began to throb with delicious power.  This was enough
for Roger.  “I don’t know,” he said, “whether he’s an honest man or a
scamp, but at a venture I suppose I must invite him down.”  To this
Nora replied that she thought his letter was “so beautiful”; and Mr.
Fenton received a fairly civil summons.

Whether or no he was an honest man remained to be seen; but on the
face of the matter he appeared no scamp.  He was, in fact, a person
difficult to classify.  Roger had made up his mind that he would be
outrageously rough and Western; full of strange oaths and bearded,
for aught he knew, like the pard.  In aspect, however, Fenton was a
pretty fellow enough, and his speech, if not especially conciliatory
to ears polite, possessed a certain homely vigor in which ears polite
might have found their account.  He was as little as possible,
certainly, of Roger’s circle; but he carried about him the native
fragrance of another circle, beside which the social perfume familiar
to Roger’s nostrils might have seemed a trifle stale and insipid.  He
was invested with a loose-fitting cosmopolitan Occidentalism, which
seemed to say to Roger that, of the two, he was the provincial.
Considering his years,—they numbered but twenty-five,—Fenton’s
tough maturity was very wonderful.  You would have confessed,
however, that he had a true genius for his part, and that it became
him better to play at manhood than at juvenility.  He could never
have been a ruddy-checked boy.  He was tall and lean, with a keen
dark eye, a smile humorous, but not exactly genial, a thin, drawling,
almost feminine voice, and a strange Southwestern accent.  His voice,
at first, might have given you certain presumptuous hopes as to a
soft spot in his stiff young hide; but after listening awhile to its
colorless monotone, you would have felt, I think, that though it was
an instrument of one string, that solitary chord was not likely to
become relaxed.  Fenton was furthermore flat-chested and
high-shouldered, though he was evidently very strong.  His straight
black hair was always carefully combed, and a small diamond pin
adorned the bosom of his shirt.  His feet were small and slender, and
his left hand was decorated with a neat specimen of tattooing.  You
never would have called him modest, yet you would hardly have called
him impudent; for he had evidently lived with people who had not
analyzed appreciation to this fine point.  He had nothing whatever of
the manner of society, but it was surprising how gracefully a certain
shrewd _bonhomie_ and smart good-humor enabled him to dispense with
it.  He stood with his hands in his pockets, watching punctilio take
its course, and thinking, probably, what a d——d fool she was to go
so far roundabout to a point he could reach with a single shuffle of
his long legs.  Roger, from the first hour of his being in the house,
felt pledged to dislike him.  Fenton patronized him; he made him feel
like a small boy, like an old woman; he sapped the roots of the poor
fellow’s comfortable consciousness of being a man of the world.
Fenton was a man of twenty worlds.  He had knocked about and dabbled
in affairs and adventures since he was ten years old; he knew the
American continent as he knew the palm of his hand; he was redolent
of enterprise, of “operations,” of a certain fierce friction with
mankind.  Roger would have liked to believe that he doubted his word,
that there was a chance of his not being Nora’s cousin, but a youth
of an ardent swindling genius who had come into possession of a
parcel of facts too provokingly pertinent to be wasted.  He had
evidently known the late Mr. Lambert,—the poor man must have had
plenty of such friends; but was he, in truth, his wife’s nephew?  Had
not this shadowy nepotism been excogitated over an unpaid hotel bill?
So Roger fretfully meditated, but generally with no great gain of
ground.  He inclined, on the whole, to believe the young man’s
pretensions were valid, and to reserve his pugnacity for the use he
might possibly make of them.  Of course Fenton had not come down to
spend a stupid week in the country out of cousinly affection.  Nora
was but the means; Roger’s presumptive wealth and bounty were the
end.  “He comes to make love to his cousin, and marry her if he can.
I, who have done so much, will of course do more; settle an income
directly on the bride, make my will in her favor, and die at my
earliest convenience!  How furious he must be,” Roger continued to
meditate, “to find me so young and hearty!  How furious he would be
if he knew a little more!”  This line of argument was justified in a
manner by the frankness of Fenton’s intimation that he was incapable
of any other relation to a fact than a desire to turn it to pecuniary
account.  Roger was uneasy, yet he took a certain comfort in the
belief that, thanks to his early lessons, Nora could be trusted to
confine her cousin to the limits of cousinship.  In whatever he might
have failed, he had certainly taught her to know a gentleman.
Cousins are born, not made; but lovers may be accepted at discretion.
Nora’s discretion, surely, would not be wanting.  I may add also
that, in his desire to order all things well, Roger caught himself
wondering whether, at the worst, a little precursory love-making
would do any harm.  The ground might be gently tickled to receive his
own sowing; the petals of the young girl’s nature, playfully forced
apart, would leave the golden heart of the flower but the more
accessible to his own vertical rays.

It was cousinship for Nora, certainly; but cousinship was much; more
than Roger fancied, luckily for his peace of mind.  To a girl who had
never had anything to boast of, this late-coming kinsman seemed a
sort of godsend.  Nora was so proud of turning out to have a cousin
as well as other people, that she treated Fenton much better than
other people treat their cousins.  It must be said that Fenton was
not altogether unworthy of her favors.  He meant no especial harm to
his fellow-men save in so far as he meant uncompromising benefit to
himself.  The Knight of La Mancha, on the torrid flats of Spain,
never urged his gaunt steed with a grimmer pressure of the knees than
that with which Fenton held himself erect on the hungry hobby of
success.  Shrewd as he was, he had perhaps, as well, a ray of Don
Quixote’s divine obliquity of vision.  It is at least true that
success as yet had been painfully elusive, and a part of the peril to
Nora’s girlish heart lay in this melancholy grace of undeserved
failure.  The young man’s imagination was eager; he had a generous
need of keeping too many irons on the fire.  His invention was
feeling rather jaded when he made overtures to Roger.  He had learned
six months before of his cousin’s situation, and had felt no great
sentimental need of making her acquaintance; but at last, revolving
many things of a certain sort, he had come to wonder whether these
lucky mortals could not be induced to play into his hands.  Roger’s
wealth (which he largely overestimated) and Roger’s obvious taste for
sharing it with other people, Nora’s innocence and Nora’s
prospects,—it would surely take a great fool not to pluck the rose
from so thornless a tree.  He foresaw these good things melting and
trickling into the empty channel of his own fortune.  Exactly what
use he meant to make of Nora he would have been at a loss to say.
Plain matrimony might or might not be a prize.  At any rate, it could
do a clever man no harm to have a rich girl foolishly in love with
him.  He turned, therefore, upon his charming cousin the softer side
of his genius.  He very soon began to see that he had never known so
delightful a person, and indeed his growing sense of her sweetness
bade fair to make him bungle his dishonesty.  She was altogether
sweet enough to be valued for herself.  She represented something
that he had never yet encountered.  Nora was a young lady; how she
had come to it was one of the outer mysteries; but there she was,
consummate!  He made no point of a man being a gentleman; in fact,
when a man was a gentleman you had rather to be one yourself, which
didn’t pay; but for a woman to be a lady was plainly pure gain.  He
had wit enough to detect something extremely grateful in Nora’s
half-concessions, her reserve of freshness.  Women, to him, had
seemed mostly as cut flowers, blooming awhile in the waters of
occasion, but yielding no second or rarer satisfaction.  Nora was
expanding in the sunshine of her cousin’s gallantry.  She had known
so few young men that she had not learned to be fastidious, and
Fenton represented to her fancy that great collective manhood from
which Roger was excluded by his very virtues.  He had an irresistible
air of action, alertness, and purpose.  Poor Roger held one much less
in suspense.  She regarded her cousin with something of the thrilled
attention which one bestows on the naked arrow, poised across the
bow.  He had, moreover, the inestimable merit of representing her own
side of her situation.  He very soon became sensible of this merit,
and you may be sure he entertained her to the top of her bent.  He
gossiped by the hour about her father, and gave her very plainly to
understand that poor Mr. Lambert had been more sinned against than
sinning.

Nora was not slow to perceive that Roger had no love for their guest,
and she immediately conceded him his right of judgment, thinking it
natural that they should quarrel about her a little.  Fenton’s
presence was a tacit infringement of Roger’s prescriptive right of
property.  If her cousin had only never come!  This might have been,
though she could not bring herself to wish it.  Nora felt vaguely
that here was a chance for tact, for the woman’s peace-making art.
To keep Roger in spirits, she put on a dozen unwonted graces; she
waited on him, appealed to him, smiled at him with unwearied
iteration.  But the main effect of these sweet offices was to make
her cousin think her the prettier.  Roger’s rancorous suspicion
transmuted to bitterness what would otherwise have been pure delight.
She was turning hypocrite; she was throwing dust in his eyes; she was
plotting with that vulgar Missourian.  Fenton, of course, was forced
to admit that he had reckoned without his host.  Roger had had the
impudence not to turn out a simpleton; he was not a shepherd of the
golden age; he was a dogged modern, with prosy prejudices; the wind
of his favor blew as it listed.  Fenton took the liberty of being
extremely irritated at the other’s want of ductility.  “Hang the
man!” he said to himself, “why can’t he trust me?  What is he afraid
of?  Why don’t he take me as a friend rather than an enemy?  Let him
be frank, and I will be frank.  I could put him up to several things.
And what does he want to do with Nora, any way?”  This latter
question Fenton came very soon to answer, and the answer amused him
not a little.  It seemed to him an extremely odd use of one’s time
and capital, this fashioning of a wife to order.  There was a
long-winded patience about it, an arrogance of leisure, which excited
his ire.  Roger might surely have found his fit ready made!  His
disappointment, a certain angry impulse to break a window, as it
were, in Roger’s hothouse, the sense finally that what he should gain
he would gain from Nora alone, though indeed she was too confoundedly
innocent to appreciate his pressing necessities,—these things
combined to heat the young man’s humor to the fever-point, and to
make him strike more random blows than belonged to plain prudence.

The autumn being well advanced, the warmth of the sun had become very
grateful.  Nora used to spend much of the morning in strolling about
the dismantled garden with her cousin.  Roger would stand at the
window with his honest face more nearly disfigured by a scowl than
ever before.  It was the old, old story, to his mind: nothing
succeeds with women like just too little deference.  Fenton would
lounge along by Nora’s side, with his hands in his pockets, a cigar
in his mouth, his shoulders raised to his ears, and a pair of
tattered slippers on his absurdly diminutive feet.  Not only had Nora
forgiven him this last breach of decency, but she had forthwith begun
to work him a new pair of slippers.  “What on earth,” thought Roger,
“do they find to talk about?”  Their conversation, meanwhile, ran in
some such strain as this.

“My dear Nora,” said the young man, “what on earth, week in and week
out, do you and Mr. Lawrence find to talk about?”

“A great many things, George.  We have lived long enough together to
have a great many subjects of conversation.”

“It was a most extraordinary thing, his adopting you, if you don’t
mind my saying so.  Imagine my adopting a little girl.”

“You and Roger are very different men.”

“We certainly are.  What in the world did he expect to do with you?”

“Very much what he has done, I suppose.  He has educated me, he has
made me what I am.”

“You’re a very nice little person; but, upon my word, I don’t see
that he’s to thank for it.  A lovely girl can be neither made nor
marred.”

“Possibly!  But I give you notice that I am not a lovely girl.  I
have it in me to be, under provocation, anything but a lovely girl.
I owe everything to Roger.  You must say nothing against him.  I will
not allow it.  What would have become of me—”  She stopped, betrayed
by her glance and voice.

“Mr. Lawrence is a model of all the virtues, I admit!  But, Nora, I
confess I am jealous of him.  Does he expect to educate you forever?
You seem to me to have already all the learning a pretty woman needs.
What does he know about women?  What does he expect to do with you
two or three years hence?  Two or three years hence you will be
number one.”  And Fenton began to whistle with vehement gayety,
executing with shuffling feet a momentary fandango.  “Two or three
years hence, when you look in the glass, remember I said so!”

“He means to go to Europe one of these days,” said Nora, irrelevantly.

“One of these days!  One would think he expects to keep you forever.
Not if I can help it.  And why Europe, in the name of all that’s
patriotic?  Europe be hanged!  You ought to come out to your own
section of the country, and see your own people.  I can introduce you
to the best society in St. Louis.  I’ll tell you what, my dear.  You
don’t know it, but you’re a regular Western girl.”

A certain foolish gladness in being the creature thus denominated
prompted Nora to a gush of momentary laughter, of which Roger, within
the window, caught the soundless ripple.  “You ought to know,
George,” she said, “you are Western enough yourself.”

“Of course I am.  I glory in it.  It’s the only place for a man of
ideas!  In the West you can do something!  Round here you’re all
stuck fast in ten feet of varnish.  For yourself, Nora, at bottom
you’re all right; but superficially you’re just a trifle
overstarched.  But we’ll take it out of you!  It comes of living with
a stiff-necked—”

Nora bent for a moment her lustrous eyes on the young man, as if to
recall him to order.  “I beg you to understand, once for all,” she
said, “that I refuse to listen to disrespectful allusions to Roger.”

“I’ll say it again, just to make you look at me so.  If I ever fall
in love with you, it will be when you are scolding me.  All I have
got to do is to attack your papa—”

“He is not my papa.  I have had one papa; that’s enough.  I say it in
all respect.”

“If he is not your papa, what is he?  He is a dog in the manger.  He
must be either one thing or the other.  When you are very little
older, you will understand that.”

“He may be whatever thing you please.  I shall be but one,—his best
friend.”

Fenton laughed with a kind of fierce hilarity.  “You are so innocent,
my dear, that one doesn’t know where to take you.  Do you expect to
marry him?”

Nora stopped in the path, with her eyes on her cousin.  For a moment
he was half confounded by their startled severity and the flush of
pain in her cheek.  “Marry Roger!” she said, with great gravity.

“Why, he’s a man, after all!”

Nora was silent a moment; and then with a certain forced levity,
walking on: “I had better wait till I am asked.”

“He will ask you!  You will see.”

“If he does, I shall be surprised.”

“You will pretend to be.  Women always do.”

“He has known me as a child,” she continued, heedless of his sarcasm.
“I shall always be a child, for him.”

“He will like that,” said Fenton.  “He will like a child of twenty.”

Nora, for an instant was lost in meditation.  “As regards marriage,”
she said at last, quietly, “I will do what Roger wishes.”

Fenton lost patience.  “Roger be hanged!” he cried.  “You are not his
slave.  You must choose for yourself and act for yourself.  You must
obey your own heart.  You don’t know what you are talking about.  One
of these days your heart will say its say.  Then we shall see what
becomes of Roger’s wishes!  If he wants to make what he pleases of
you, he should have taken you younger,—or older!  Don’t tell me
seriously that you can ever love (don’t play upon words: love, I
mean, in the one sense that means anything!) such a solemn little fop
as that!  Don’t protest, my dear girl; I must have my say.  I speak
in your own interest; I speak, at any rate, from my own heart.  I
detest the man.  I came here perfectly on the square, and he has
treated me as if I weren’t fit to touch with tongs.  I am poor, I
have my way to make, I ain’t fashionable; but I’m an honest man, for
all that, and as good as he, take me altogether.  Why can’t he show
me a moment’s frankness?  Why can’t he take me by the hand, and say,
‘Come, young man, I’ve got capital, and you’ve got brains; let’s pull
together a stroke?’  Does he think I want to steal his spoons or pick
his pocket?  Is that hospitality?  It’s a poor kind.”

This passionate outbreak, prompted in about equal measure by baffled
ambition and wounded conceit, made sad havoc with Nora’s loyalty to
her friend.  Her sense of natural property in her cousin,—the
instinct of free affection alternating more gratefully than she knew
with the dim consciousness of measured dependence,—had become in her
heart a sort of sweet excitement.  It made her feel that Roger’s
mistrust was cruel; it was doubly cruel that George should feel it.
Two angry men, at any rate, were quarrelling about her, and she must
avert an explosion.  She promised herself to dismiss Fenton the next
day.  Of course, by the very fact of this concession, Roger lost
ground with her, and George acquired the grace of the persecuted.
Meanwhile, Roger’s jealous irritation came to a head.  On the evening
following the little scene I have narrated the young couple sat by
the fire in the library; Fenton on a stool at his cousin’s feet
holding, while Nora wound them on reels, the wools which were to be
applied to the manufacture of those invidious slippers.  Roger, after
grimly watching their mutual amenities for some time over the cover
of a book, unable to master his fierce discomposure, departed with a
telltale stride.  They heard him afterwards walking up and down the
piazza, where he was appealing from his troubled nerves to the
ordered quietude of the stars.

“He hates me so,” said Fenton, “that I believe if I were to go out
there he would draw a knife.”

“O George!” cried Nora, horrified.

“It’s a fact, my dear.  I am afraid you’ll have to give me up.  I
wish I had never seen you!”

“At all events, we can write to each other.”

“What’s writing?  I don’t know how to write!  I will, though!  I
suppose he will open my letters.  So much the worse for him!”

Nora, as she wound her wool, mused intently.  “I can’t believe he
really grudges me our friendship.  It must be something else.”

Fenton, with a clench of his fist, arrested suddenly the outflow of
the skein from his hand.  “It is something else,” he said.  “It’s our
possible—more than friendship!”  And he grasped her two hands in his
own.  “Nora, choose!  Between me and him!”

She stared a moment; then her eyes filled with tears.  “O George,”
she cried, “you make me very unhappy.”  She must certainly tell him
to go; and yet that very movement of his which had made it doubly
needful made it doubly hard.  “I will talk to Roger,” she said.  “No
one should be condemned unheard.  We may all misunderstand each
other.”

Fenton, half an hour later, having, as he said, letters to write,
went up to his own room; shortly after which, Roger returned to the
library.  Half an hour’s communion with the starlight and the ringing
crickets had drawn the sting from his irritation.  There came to him,
too, a mortifying sense of his guest having outdone him in civility.
This would never do.  He took refuge in imperturbable good-humor, and
entered the room in high indifference.  But even before he had
spoken, something in Nora’s face caused this wholesome dose of
resignation to stick in his throat.  “Your cousin is gone?” he said.

“To his own room.  He has some letters to write.”

“Shall I hold your wools?” Roger asked, after a pause.

“Thank you.  They are all wound.”

“For whom are your slippers?”  He knew, of course; but the question
came.

“For George.  Did I not tell you?  Do you think them pretty?”  And
she held up her work.

“Prettier than he deserves.”

Nora gave him a rapid glance and miscounted her stitch.  “You don’t
like poor George,” she said.

“No.  Since you ask me, I don’t like poor George.”

Nora was silent.  At last: “Well!” she said, “you’ve not the same
reasons as I have.”

“So I am bound to believe!  You must have excellent reasons.”

“Excellent.  He is my own, you know.”

“Your own—?  Ah!”  And he gave a little laugh.

“My own cousin,” said Nora.

“Your own grandfather!” cried Roger.

She stopped her work.  “What do you mean?” she asked gravely.

Roger began to blush a little.  “I mean—I mean—that I don’t believe
in your cousin.  He doesn’t satisfy me.  I don’t like him.  He
contradicts himself, his story doesn’t hang together.  I have nothing
but his word.  I am not bound to take it.”

“Roger, Roger,” said Nora, with great softness, “do you mean that he
is an impostor?”

“The word is your own.  He’s not an honest man.”

She slowly rose from her little bench, gathering her work into the
skirt of her dress.  “And, doubting of his honesty, you have let him
take up his abode here, you have let him become dear to me?”

She was making him ten times a fool!  “Why, if you liked him,” he
said.  “When did I ever refuse you anything?”

There came upon Nora a sudden unpitying sense that Roger was
ridiculous.  “Honest or not honest,” she said with vehemence, “I do
like him.  Cousin or no cousin, he is my friend.”

“Very good.  But I warn you.  I don’t enjoy talking to you thus.
Only let me tell you, once for all, that your cousin, your
friend—your—whatever he is!”—  He faltered an instant; Nora’s eyes
were fixed on him.  “That he disgusts me!”

“You are extremely unjust.  You have taken no trouble to know him.
You have treated him from the first with small civility!”

“Was the trouble to be all mine?  Civility! he never missed it; he
doesn’t know what it means.”

“He knows more than you think.  But we must talk no more about him.”
She rolled together her canvas and reels; and then suddenly, with
passionate inconsequence, “Poor, poor George!” she cried.

Roger watched her a moment; then he said bitterly, “You disappoint
me.”

“You must have formed great hopes of me!” she answered.

“I confess I had.”

“Say good by to them then, Roger.  If this is wrong, I am all wrong!”
She spoke with a proud decision, which was very becoming; she had
never yet come so near being beautiful.  In the midst of his
passionate vexation Roger admired her.  The scene seemed for a moment
a bad dream, from which, with a start, he might wake up to tell her
he loved her.

“Your anger gives an admirable point to your remarks.  Indeed, it
gives a beauty to your face.  Must a young lady be in the wrong to be
attractive?” he went on, hardly knowing what he said.  But a burning
blush in her cheeks recalled him to a kind of self-abhorrence.
“Would to God,” he cried, “your abominable cousin had never come
between us!”

“Between us?  He is not between us.  I stand as near you, Roger, as I
ever did.  Of course George will go away immediately.”

“Of course!  I am not so sure.  He will, I suppose, if he is asked.”

“Of course I shall ask him.”

“Nonsense.  You will not enjoy that.”

“We are old friends by this time,” said Nora, with terrible irony.
“I shall not in the least mind.”

Roger could have choked himself.  He had brought his case to this:
Fenton a martyred proscript, and Nora a brooding victim of duty.  “Do
I want to turn the man out of the house?” he cried.  “Do me a
favor—I insist upon it.  Say nothing to him, let him stay as long as
he chooses.  I am not afraid!  I don’t trust him, but I trust you.  I
am curious to see how long he will have the impudence to stay.  A
fortnight hence I shall be justified.  You will say to me, ‘Roger,
you were right.  George is not a gentleman.’  There!  I insist.”

“A gentleman?  Really, what are we talking about?  Do you mean that
he wears a false diamond in his shirt?  He will take it off if I ask
him.  There’s a long way between wearing false diamonds—”

“And stealing real ones!  I don’t know.  I have always fancied they
go together.  At all events, Nora, he is not to suspect that he has
been able to make trouble between two old friends.”

Nora stood for a moment in irresponsive meditation.  “I think he
means to go,” she said.  “If you want him to stay, you must ask him.”
And without further words she marched out of the room.  Roger
followed her with his eyes.  He thought of Lady Castlewood in “Henry
Esmond,” who looked “devilish handsome in a passion.”

Lady Castlewood, meanwhile, ascended to her own room, flung her work
upon the floor, and, dropping into a chair, betook herself to
weeping.  It was late before she slept.  She awoke with a new
consciousness of the burden of life.  Her own burden certainly was
small, but her strength, as yet, was untested.  She had thought, in
her many reveries, of a possible disagreement with Roger, and prayed
that it might never come by a fault of hers.  The fault was hers now
in that she had surely cared less for duty than for joy.  Roger,
indeed, had shown a pitiful smallness of view.  This was a weakness;
but who was she, to keep account of Roger’s weaknesses?  It was to a
weakness of Roger’s that she owed her food and raiment and shelter.
It helped to quench her resentment that she felt, somehow, that,
whether Roger smiled or frowned, George would still be George.  He
was not a gentleman: well and good; neither was she, for that matter,
a lady.  But a certain manful hardness like George’s would not be
amiss in the man one was to love.

A simpler soul than Fenton’s might have guessed at the trouble of
this quiet household.  Fenton read in it as well an omen of needful
departure.  He accepted the necessity with an acute sense of
failure,—almost of injury.  He had gained nothing but the bother of
being loved.  It was a bother, because it gave him an unwonted sense
of responsibility.  It seemed to fling upon all things a dusky shade
of prohibition.  Yet the matter had its brightness, too, if a man
could but swallow his superstitions.  He cared for Nora quite enough
to tell her he loved her; he had said as much, with an easy
conscience, to girls for whom he cared far less.  He felt gratefully
enough the cool vestment of tenderness which she had spun about him,
like a web of imponderable silver; but he had other uses for his time
than to go masquerading through Nora’s fancy.  The defeat of his hope
that Roger, like a testy old uncle in a comedy, would shower
blessings and bank-notes upon his union with his cousin, involved the
discomfiture of a secondary project; the design, namely, of borrowing
five thousand dollars.  The reader will smile; but such is the
simplicity of “smart men.”  He would content himself now with five
hundred.  In this collapse of his visions he fell a-musing upon
Nora’s financial value.

“Look here,” he said to her, with an air of heroic effort, “I see I’m
in the way.  I must be off.”

“I am sorry, George,” said Nora, sadly.

“So am I.  I never supposed I was proud.  But I reckoned without my
host!” he said with a bitter laugh.  “I wish I had never come.  Or
rather I don’t.  It is worth it all to know you.”

She began to question him soothingly about his projects and
prospects; and hereupon, for once, Fenton bent his mettle to simulate
a pathetic incapacity.  He set forth that he was discouraged; the
future was a blank.  It was child’s play, attempting to do anything
without capital.

“And you have no capital?” said Nora, anxiously.

Fenton gave a poignant smile.  “Why, my dear girl, I’m a poor man!”

“How poor?”

“Poor, poor, poor.  Poor as a rat.”

“You don’t mean that you are penniless?”

“What is the use of my telling you?  You can’t help me.  And it would
only make you unhappy.”

“If you are unhappy, I want to be!”

This golden vein of sentiment might certainly be worked.  Fenton took
out his pocket-book, drew from it four bank-notes of five dollars
each, and ranged them with a sort of mournful playfulness in a line
on his knee.  “That’s my fortune.”

“Do you mean to say that twenty dollars is all you have in the world?”

Fenton smoothed out the creases, caressingly, in the soiled and
crumpled notes.  “It’s a great shame to bring you down to a poor
man’s secrets,” he said.  “Fortune has raised you above them.”

Nora’s heart began to beat.  “Yes, it has.  I have a little money,
George.  Some eighty dollars.”

Eighty dollars!  George suppressed a groan.  “He keeps you rather
low.”

“Why, I have very little use for money, and no chance, here in the
country, to spend it.  Roger is extremely generous.  Every few weeks
he makes me take some.  I often give it away to the poor people
hereabouts.  Only a fortnight ago I refused to take any more on
account of my still having this.  It’s agreed between us that I may
give what I please in charity, and that my charities are my own
affair.  If I had only known of you, George, I should have appointed
you my pensioner-in-chief.”

George was silent.  He was wondering intently how he might arrange to
become the standing recipient of her overflow.  Suddenly he
remembered that he ought to protest.  But Nora had lightly quitted
the room.  Fenton repocketed his twenty dollars and awaited her
reappearance.  Eighty dollars were not a fortune; still they were
eighty dollars.  To his great annoyance, before Nora returned Roger
presented himself.  The young man felt for an instant as if he had
been caught in an act of sentimental burglary, and made a movement to
conciliate his detector.  “I am afraid I must bid you good by,” he
said.

Roger frowned, and wondered whether Nora had spoken.  At this moment
she reappeared, flushed and out of breath with the excitement of her
purpose.  She had been counting over her money, and held in each hand
a little fluttering package of bank-notes.  On seeing Roger she
stopped and blushed, exchanging with her cousin a rapid glance of
inquiry.  He almost glared at her, whether with warning or with
menace she hardly knew.  Roger stood looking at her, half amazed.
Suddenly, as the meaning of her errand flashed upon him, he turned a
furious crimson.  He made a step forward, but cautioned himself;
then, folding his arms, he silently waited.  Nora, after a moment’s
hesitation, rolling her notes together, came up to her cousin and
held out the little package.  Fenton kept his hands in his pockets
and devoured her with his eyes.  “What’s all this?” he said brutally.

“O George!” cried Nora; and her eyes filled with tears.

Roger had divined the situation; the shabby victimization of the
young girl and her kinsman’s fury at the disclosure of his avidity.
He was angry; but he was even more disgusted.  From so vulgar a knave
there was little rivalship to fear.  “I am afraid I am rather a
marplot,” he said.  “Don’t insist, Nora.  Wait till my back is
turned.”

“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” said Nora.

“You?  O, nothing whatever!” cried Roger with a laugh.

Fenton stood leaning against the mantel-piece, desperately sullen,
with a look of vicious confusion.  “It is only I who have anything to
be ashamed of,” he said at last, bitterly, with an effort.  “My
poverty!”

Roger smiled graciously.  “Honest poverty is never shameful!”

Fenton gave him an insolent stare.  “Honest poverty!  You know a
great deal about it.”

“Don’t appeal to poor little Nora, man, for her savings,” Roger went
on.  “Come to me.”

“You are unjust,” said Nora.  “He didn’t appeal to me.  I appealed to
him.  I guessed his poverty.  He has only twenty dollars in the
world.”

“O you poor little fool!” roared Fenton’s eyes.  Roger was delighted.
At a single stroke he might redeem his incivility and reinstate
himself in Nora’s affections.  He took out his pocket-book.  “Let me
help you.  It was very stupid of me not to have guessed your
embarrassment.”  And he counted out a dozen notes.

Nora stepped to her cousin’s side and passed her hand through his
arm.  “Don’t be proud,” she murmured caressingly.

Roger’s notes were new and crisp.  Fenton looked hard at the opposite
wall, but, explain it who can, he read their successive figures,—a
fifty, four twenties, six tens.  He could have howled.

“Come, don’t be proud,” repeated Roger, holding out this little
bundle of wealth.

Two great passionate tears welled into the young man’s eyes.  The
sight of Roger’s sturdy sleekness, of the comfortable twinkle of
patronage in his eye, was too much for him.  “I shall not give _you_
a chance to be proud,” he said.  “Take care!  Your papers may go into
the fire.”

“O George!” murmured Nora; and her murmur seemed to him delicious.

He bent down his head, passed his arm round her shoulders, and kissed
her on her forehead.  “Good by, dearest Nora,” he said.

Roger stood staring, with his proffered gift.  “You decline?” he
cried, almost defiantly.

“‘Decline’ is not the word.  A man does not decline an insult.”

Was Fenton, then, to have the best of it, and was his own very
generosity to be turned against him?  Blindly, passionately, Roger
crumpled the notes into his fist and tossed them into the fire.  In
an instant they began to blaze.

“Roger, are you mad?” cried Nora.  And she made a movement to rescue
the crackling paper.  Fenton burst into a laugh.  He caught her by
the arm, clasped her round the waist, and forced her to stand and
watch the brief blaze.  Pressed against his side, she felt the quick
beating of his heart.  As the notes disappeared her eyes sought
Roger’s face.  He looked at her stupidly, and then turning on his
heel he walked out of the room.  Her cousin, still holding her,
showered upon her forehead half a dozen fierce kisses.  But
disengaging herself—“You must leave the house!” she cried.
“Something dreadful will happen.”

Fenton had soon packed his valise, and Nora, meanwhile, had ordered a
vehicle to carry him to the station.  She waited for him in the
portico.  When he came out, with his bag in his hand, she offered him
again her little roll of bills.  But he was a wiser man than half an
hour before.  He took them, turned them over, and selected a
one-dollar note.  “I will keep this,” he said, “in remembrance, and
only spend it for my last dinner.”  She made him promise, however,
that if trouble really overtook him, he would let her know, and in
any case he would write.  As the wagon went over the crest of an
adjoining hill he stood up and waved his hat.  His tall, gaunt young
figure, as it rose dark against the cold November sunset, cast a
cooling shadow across the fount of her virgin sympathies.  Such was
the outline, surely, of the conquering hero, not of the conquered.
Her fancy followed him forth into the world with a sense of
comradeship.




V.


Roger’s quarrel with his young companion, if quarrel it was, was
never repaired.  It had scattered its seed; they were left lying, to
be absorbed in the conscious soil or dispersed by some benignant
breeze of accident, as destiny might appoint.  But as a manner of
clearing the air of its thunder, Roger, a week after Fenton’s
departure, proposed she should go with him for a fortnight to town.
Later, perhaps, they might arrange to remain for the winter.  Nora
had been longing vaguely for the relief of a change of circumstances;
she assented with great good-will.  They lodged at an hotel,—not the
establishment at which they had made acquaintance.  Here, late in the
afternoon, the day after their arrival, Nora sat by the window,
waiting for Roger to come and take her to dinner, and watching with
the intentness of country eyes the hurrying throng in the street;
thinking too at moments of a certain blue bonnet she had bought that
morning, and comparing it, not uncomplacently, with the transitory
bonnets on the pavement.  A gentleman was introduced; Nora had not
forgotten Hubert Lawrence.  Hubert had occupied for more than a year
past a pastoral office in the West, and had recently had little
communication with his cousin.  Nora he had seen but on a single
occasion, that of his visit to Roger, six months after her advent.
She had grown in the interval, from the little girl who slept with
the “Child’s Own Book” under her pillow and dreamed of the Prince
Avenant, into a lofty maiden who reperused the “Heir of Redcliffe,”
and mused upon the loves of the clergy.  Hubert; too, had changed in
his own degree.  He was now thirty-one years of age, and his
character had lost something of a certain boyish vagueness of
outline, which formerly had not been without its grace.  But his
elder grace was scarcely less effective.  Various possible
half-shadows in his personality had melted into broad, shallow
lights.  He was now, distinctly, one of the light-armed troops of the
army of the Lord.  He fought the Devil as an irresponsible
skirmisher, not as a sturdy gunsman planted beside a booming
sixty-pounder.  The clerical cloth, as Hubert wore it, was not
unmitigated sable; and in spite of his cloth, such as it was,
humanity rather than divinity got the lion’s share of his attentions.
He loved doubtless, in this world, the heavenward face of things, but
he loved, as regards heaven, the earthward.  He was rather an idler
in the walks of theology, and he was uncommitted to any very rigid
convictions.  He thought the old theological positions in very bad
taste, but he thought the new theological negations in no taste at
all.  In fact, Hubert believed so vaguely and languidly in the Devil
that there was but slender logic in his having undertaken the cure of
souls.  He administered his spiritual medicines in homoeopathic
doses.  It had been maliciously said that he had turned parson
because parsons enjoy peculiar advantages in approaching the fair
sex.  The presumption is in their favor.  Our business, however, is
not to pick up idle reports.  Hubert was, on the whole, a decidedly
light weight, and yet his want of spiritual passion was by no means,
in effect, a want of motive or stimulus; for the central pivot of his
being continued to operate with the most noiseless precision and
regularity,—the slim, erect, inflexible _Ego_.  To the eyes of men,
and especially to the eyes of women, whatever may have been the
moving cause, the outer manifestation was very agreeable.  If Hubert
had no great firmness of faith, he had a very pretty firmness of
manner.  He was gentle without timidity, frank without arrogance,
clever without pedantry.  The common measure of clerical disallowance
was reduced in his hands to the tacit protest of a generous personal
purity.  His appearance bore various wholesome traces of the
practical lessons of his Western pastorate.  This had not been to his
taste; he had had to apply himself, to devote himself, to compromise
with a hundred aversions.  His talents had been worth less to him
than he expected, and he had been obliged, as the French say, to
_payer de sa personne_,—that person for which he entertained so
delicate a respect.  All this had given him a slightly jaded,
overwearied look, certain to deepen his interest in feminine eyes.
He had actually a couple of fine wrinkles in his seraphic forehead.
He secretly rejoiced in his wrinkles.  They were his crown of glory.
He had suffered, he had worked, he had been bored.  Now he believed
in earthly compensations.

“Dear me!” he said, “can this be Nora Lambert?”

She had risen to meet him, and held out her hand with girlish
frankness.  She was dressed in a light, silk dress; she seemed a
young woman grown.  “I have been growing hard in all these years,”
she said.  “I have had to catch up with those _pieds énormes_.”  The
readers will not have forgotten that Hubert had thus qualified her
lower members.  Ignorant as she was, at the moment, of the French
tongue, her memory had instinctively retained the words, and she had
taken an early opportunity to look out _pied_ in the dictionary.
_Énorme_, of course, spoke for itself.

“You must have caught up with them now,” Hubert said, laughing.  “You
are an enormous young lady.  I should never have known you.”  He sat
down, asked various questions about Roger, and adjured her to tell
him, as he said, “all about herself.”  The invitation was flattering,
but it met only a partial compliance.  Unconscious as yet of her own
charm, Nora was oppressed by a secret admiration of her companion,
whose presence seemed to open a brilliant vista.  She compared him
with her cousin, and wondered that he should be at once so impressive
and so different.  She blushed a little, privately, for Fenton, and
was not ill pleased to think he was absent.  In the light of Hubert’s
good manners, his admission that he was no gentleman acquired an
excessive force.  By this thrilling intimation of the diversity of
the male sex, the mental pinafore of childhood seemed finally
dismissed.  Hubert was so frank and friendly, so tenderly and
gallantly patronizing, that more than once she felt herself beginning
to expand; but then, suddenly, something absent in the tone of his
assent, a vague fancy that, in the gathering dusk, he was looking at
her all at his ease, rather than listening to her, converted her
bravery into what she knew to be deplorable little-girlishness.  On
the whole, this interview may have passed for Nora’s first lesson in
the art, indispensable to a young lady on the threshold of society,
of talking for half an hour without saying anything.  The lesson was
interrupted by the arrival of Roger, who greeted his cousin with
almost extravagant warmth, and insisted upon his staying to dinner.
Roger was to take Nora after dinner to a concert, for which he felt
no great enthusiasm; he proposed to Hubert, who was a musical man, to
occupy his place.  Hubert demurred awhile; but in the meantime Nora,
having gone to prepare herself, reappeared, looking extremely well in
the blue crape bonnet before mentioned, with her face bright with
anticipated pleasure.  For a moment Roger was vexed at having
resigned his office; Hubert immediately stepped into it.  They came
home late, the blue bonnet nothing the worse for wear, and the young
girl’s face lighted up by her impressions.  Her animation was
extreme; she treated Roger to a representation of the concert, and
made a great show of voice.  Her departing childishness, her dawning
tact, her freedom with Roger, her half-freedom with Hubert, made a
charming mixture, and insured for her auditors the success of the
entertainment.  When she had retired, amid a mimic storm of applause
from the two gentlemen, Roger solemnly addressed his cousin.  “Well,
what do you think of her?  I hope you have no fault to find with her
feet.”

“I have had no observation of her feet,” said Hubert; “but she will
have very handsome hands.  She is a very nice creature.”  Roger sat
lounging in his chair with his hands in his pockets, his chin on his
breast, and a heavy gaze fixed on Hubert.  The latter was struck with
his deeply preoccupied aspect.  “But let us talk of you rather than
of Nora,” he said.  “I have been waiting for a chance to tell you
that you look very poorly.”

“Nora or I,—it’s all one.  She is the only thing in life I care for.”

Hubert was startled by the sombre energy of his tone.  The old
polished, placid Roger was in abeyance.  “My dear fellow,” he said,
“you are altogether wrong.  Live for yourself.  You may be sure she
will do as much.  You take it too hard.”

“Yes, I take it too hard.  It troubles me.”

“What’s the matter?  Is she a naughty child?  Is she more than you
bargained for?”  Roger sat gazing at him in silence, with the same
grave eye.  He began to suspect Nora had turned out a losing
investment.  “Has she—a—low tastes?” he went on.  “Surely not with
that sweet face!”

Roger started to his feet impatiently.  “Don’t misunderstand me!” he
cried.  “I have been longing to see some one,—to talk,—to get some
advice,—some sympathy.  I am fretting myself away.”

“Good heavens, man, give her a thousand dollars and send her back to
her family.  You have educated her.”

“Her family!  She has no family!  She’s the loneliest as well as the
sweetest, wisest, best of creatures!  If she were only a tenth as
good, I should be a happier man.  I can’t think of parting with her;
not for all I possess.”

Hubert stared a moment.  “Why, you are in love.”

“Yes,” said Roger, blushing.  “I am in love.”

“Dear me!” murmured Hubert.

“I am not ashamed of it,” rejoined Roger, softly.

It was no business of Hubert’s, certainly; but he felt the least bit
disappointed.  “Well,” he said coolly, “why don’t you marry her?”

“It is not so simple as that!”

“She will not have you?”

Roger frowned impatiently.  “Reflect a moment.  You pretend to be a
man of delicacy.”

“You mean she is too young?  Nonsense.  If you are sure of her, the
younger the better.”

“For my unutterable misery,” said Roger, “I have a conscience.  I
wish to leave her free and take the risk.  I wish to be just and let
the matter work itself out.  You may think me absurd, but I wish to
be loved for myself, as other men are loved.”

It was a specialty of Hubert’s that in proportion as other people
grew hot, he grew cool.  To keep cool, morally, in a heated medium
was, in fact, for Hubert a peculiar satisfaction.  He broke into a
long light laugh.  “Excuse me,” he said, “but there is something
ludicrous in your attitude.  What business has a lover with a
conscience?  None at all!  That’s why I keep out of it.  It seems to
me your prerogative to be downright.  If you waste any more time in
hair-splitting, you will find your young lady has taken things in the
lump!”

“Do you really think there is danger?” Roger demanded, pitifully.
“Not yet awhile.  She’s only a child.  Tell me, rather, is she only a
child?  You have spent the evening beside her: how does she strike a
stranger?”

While Hubert’s answer lingered on his lips, the door opened and Nora
came in.  Her errand was to demand the use of Roger’s watch-key, her
own having mysteriously vanished.  She had begun to take out her pins
and had muffled herself for this excursion in a merino dressing-gown
of sombre blue.  Her hair was gathered for the night into a single
massive coil, which had been loosened by the rapidity of her flight
along the passage.  Roger’s key proved a complete misfit, so that she
had recourse to Hubert’s.  It hung on the watch-chain which depended
from his waistcoat, and some rather intimate fumbling was needed to
adjust it to Nora’s diminutive timepiece.  It worked admirably, and
she stood looking at him with a little smile of caution as it creaked
on the pivot.  “I would not have troubled you,” she said, “but that
without my watch I should oversleep myself.  You know Roger’s temper,
and what I should suffer if I were late for breakfast!”

Roger was ravished at this humorous sally, and when, on making her
escape, she clasped one hand to her head to support her released
tresses, and hurried along the corridor with the other confining the
skirts of her inflated robe, he kissed his hand after her with more
than jocular good-will.

“Ah! it’s as bad as that!” said Hubert, shaking his head.

“I had no idea she had such hair,” murmured Roger.  “You are right,
it is no case for shilly-shallying.”

“Take care!” said Hubert.  “She is only a child.”

Roger looked at him a moment.  “My dear fellow, you are a hypocrite.”

Hubert colored the least bit, and then took up his hat and began to
smooth it with his handkerchief.  “Not at all.  See how frank I can
be.  I recommend you to marry the young lady and have done with it.
If you wait, it will be at your own risk.  I assure you I think she
is charming, and if I am not mistaken, this is only a hint of future
possibilities.  Don’t sow for others to reap.  If you think the
harvest is not ripe, let it ripen in milder sunbeams than these
vigorous hand-kisses.  Lodge her with some proper person and go to
Europe; come home from Paris a year hence with her trousseau in your
trunks, and I will perform the ceremony without another fee than the
prospect of having an adorable cousin.”  With these words Hubert left
his companion pensive.

His words reverberated in Roger’s mind; I may almost say that they
rankled.  A couple of days later, in the hope of tenderer counsel, he
called upon our friend Mrs. Keith.  This lady had completely rounded
the cape of matrimony, and was now buoyantly at anchor in the placid
cove of well-dowered widowhood.  You have heard many a young
unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, “Ah me!  I
wish I were a widow!”  Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young
unmarried ladies wish to be.  With her diamonds in her dressing-case
and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather’s weight of
encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition.
Her wants had been definite; these once gratified, she had not
presumed further.  She was a very much worthier woman than in those
hungry virginal days when Roger had wooed her.  Prosperity had agreed
equally well with her beauty and her temper.  The wrinkles on her
brow had stood still, like Joshua’s sun, and a host of good
intentions and fair promises seemed to illuminate her person.  Roger,
as he stood before her, not only felt that his passion was incurably
defunct, but allowed himself to doubt that this _veuve consolée_
would have made an ideal wife.  The lady, mistaking his embarrassment
for the fumes of smouldering ardor, determined to transmute his
devotion by the subtle chemistry of friendship.  This she found easy
work; in ten minutes the echoes of the past were hushed in the
small-talk of the present.  Mrs. Keith was on the point of sailing
for Europe, and had much to say of her plans and arrangements,—of
the miserable rent she was to get for her house.  “Why shouldn’t one
turn an honest penny?” she asked.  “And now,” she went on, when the
field had been cleared, “tell me about the young lady.”  This was
precisely what Roger wished; but just as he was about to begin his
story there came an irruption of visitors, fatal to the confidential.
Mrs. Keith found means to take him aside.  “Seeing is better than
hearing,” she said, “and I am dying to see her.  Bring her this
evening to dinner, and we shall have her to ourselves.”

Mrs. Keith had long been for Nora an object of mystical veneration.
Roger had been in the habit of alluding to her, not freely nor
frequently, but with a certain implicit consideration which more than
once had set Nora wondering.  She entered the lady’s drawing-room
that evening with an oppressive desire to please.  The interest
manifested by Roger in the question of what she should wear assured
her that he had staked a nameless something on the impression she
might make.  She was not only reassured, however, but altogether
captivated, by the lavish cordiality of her hostess.  Mrs. Keith
kissed her on both cheeks, held her at her two arms’ length, gave a
twist to the fall of her sash, and made her feel very plainly that
she was being inspected and appraised.  All this was done, however,
with a certain flattering light in the eye and a tender matronly
smile which rather increased than diminished the young girl’s
composure.  Mrs. Keith was herself so elegant, so finished, so
fragrant of taste and sense, that before an hour was over Nora felt
that she had borrowed the hint of a dozen indispensable graces.
After dinner her hostess bade her sit down to the piano.  Here,
feeling sure of her ground, Nora surpassed herself.  Mrs. Keith
beckoned to Roger to come and sit beside her on the sofa, where, as
she nodded time to the music with her head, she softly conversed.
Prosperity, as I have intimated, had acted on her moral nature very
much as a medicinal tonic—quinine or iron—acts upon the physical.
She was in a comfortable glow of charity.  She itched gently, she
hardly knew where,—was it in heart or brain?—to render some one a
service.  She had on hand a small capital of sentimental patronage
for which she desired a secure investment.  Here was her chance.  The
project which Roger had imparted to her three years before seemed to
her, now she had taken Nora’s measure, to contain such pretty
elements of success that she deemed it a sovereign pity it should not
be rounded into symmetry.  She determined to lend an artistic hand.
“Does she know it, that matter?” she asked in a whisper.

“I have never told her.”

“That’s right.  I approve your delicacy.  Of course you are sure of
your case.  She is altogether lovely,—she is one in a thousand.  I
really envy you; upon my word, Mr. Lawrence, I am jealous.  She has a
style of her own.  It is not quite beauty; it is not quite
cleverness.  It belongs neither altogether to her person, nor yet to
her mind.  It’s a kind of way she has.  It’s a way that may lead her
far.  She has pretty things, too; one of these days she may take it
into her head to be a beauty of beauties.  Nature never meant her to
hold up her head so well for nothing.  Ah, how wrinkled and faded it
makes one feel!  To be sixteen years old, with that head of hair,
with health and good connections, with that amount of good-will at
the piano, it’s the very best thing in the world, if they but knew
it!  But no! they must leave it all behind them; they must pull their
hair to pieces; they must get rid of their complexions; they must be
twenty; they must have lovers, and go their own gait.  Well, since it
must come, we must attend to the profits: they will take care of the
pleasures.  Give Nora to me for a year.  She needs a woman, a wise
woman, a woman like me.  Men, when they undertake to meddle with a
young girl’s education, are veriest old grandmothers.  Let me take
her to Europe and bring her out in Rome.  Don’t be afraid; I will
guard your interests.  I will bring you back the most charming girl
in America.  I see her from here!”  And describing a great curve in
the air with her fan, Mrs. Keith inclined her head to one side in a
manner suggestive of a milliner who descries in the bosom of futurity
the ideal bonnet.  Looking at Roger, she saw that her point was
gained; and Nora, having just finished her piece, was accordingly
summoned to the sofa and made to sit down at Mrs. Keith’s feet.
Roger went and stood before the fire.  “My dear Nora,” said Mrs.
Keith, as if she had known her from childhood, “how should you like
to go with me to Rome?”

Nora started to her feet, and stood looking open-eyed from one to the
other.  “Really?” she said.  “Does Roger—”

“Roger,” said Mrs. Keith, “finds you so hard to manage that he has
made you over to me.  I forewarn you, I am a terrible woman.  But if
you are not afraid, I shall scold you and pinch you no harder than I
would a daughter of my own.”

“I give you up for a year,” said Roger.  “It is hard, troublesome as
you are.”

Nora stood wavering for a moment, hesitating where to deposit her
excess of joy.  Then graciously dropping on her knees before Mrs.
Keith, she bent her young head and got rid of it in an ample kiss.
“I am not afraid of you,” she said simply.  Roger turned round and
began to poke the fire.

The next day Nora went forth to buy certain articles necessary in
travelling.  It was raining so heavily that, at Roger’s direction,
she took a carriage.  Coming out of a shop, in the course of her
expedition, she encountered Hubert Lawrence tramping along in the
wet.  He helped her back to her carriage, and stood for a moment
talking to her through the window.  As they were going in the same
direction, she invited him to get in; and on his hesitating, she
added that she hoped their interview was not to end there, as she was
going to Europe with Mrs. Keith.  At this news Hubert jumped in and
placed himself on the front seat.  The knowledge that she was
drifting away gave a sudden value to the present occasion.  Add to
this that in the light of Roger’s revelation after the concert, this
passive, predestined figure of hers had acquired for the young man a
certain picturesque interest.  Nora found herself strangely at ease
with her companion.  From time to time she strove to check her happy
freedom: but Hubert evidently, with his superior urbanity, was not
the person to note a little more or less in a school-girl’s primness.
Her enjoyment of his presence, her elation in the prospect of
departure, made her gayety reckless.  They went together to half a
dozen shops and talked and laughed so distractedly over her
purchases, that she made them sadly at haphazard.  At last their
progress was arrested by a dead-lock of vehicles in front of them,
caused by the breaking down of a streetcar.  The carriage drew up
near the sidewalk in front of a confectioner’s.  On Nora’s regretting
the delay, and saying she was ravenous for lunch, Hubert went into
the shop, and returned with a bundle of tarts.  The rain came down in
sheeted torrents, so that they had to close both the windows.
Circled about with this watery screen, they feasted on their tarts
with peculiar relish.  In a short time Hubert made another excursion,
and returned with a second course.  His diving to and fro in the rain
excited them to extravagant mirth.  Nora had bought some
pocket-handkerchiefs, which were in that cohesive state common to
these articles in the shop.  It seemed a very pretty joke to spread
the piece across their knees as a table-cloth.

“To think of picnicking in the midst of Washington Street!” cried
Nora, with her lips besprinkled with flakes of pastry.

“For a young lady about to leave her native land, her home, and
friends, and all that is dear to her,” said Hubert, “you seem to me
in very good spirits.”

“Don’t speak of it,” said Nora.  “I shall cry to-night; it is
feverish gayety.”

“You will not be able to do this kind of thing abroad,” said Hubert.
“Do you know we are monstrously improper?  For a young girl it’s by
no means pure gain, going to Europe.  She comes into a very pretty
heritage of prohibitions.  You have no idea of the number of improper
things a young girl can do.  You are walking on the edge of a
precipice.  Don’t look over or you will lose your head and never walk
straight again.  Here, you are all blindfold.  Promise me not to lose
this blessed bandage of American innocence.  Promise me that, when
you come back, we shall spend another morning together as free and
delightful as this one!”

“I promise you!” said Nora; but Hubert’s words had potently
foreshadowed the forfeiture of sweet possibilities.  For the rest of
the drive she was in a graver mood.  They found Roger beneath the
portico of the hotel, watch in hand, staring up and down the street.
Preceding events having been explained to him, he offered to drive
his cousin home.

“I suppose Nora has told you,” he began, as they proceeded.

“Yes!  Well, I am sorry.  She is a charming girl.”

“Ah!” Roger cried: “I knew you thought so!”

“You are as knowing as ever!  She sails, she tells me, on Wednesday
next.  And you, when do you sail?”

“I don’t sail at all.  I am going home.”

“Are you sure of that?”

Roger gazed for a moment out of the window.  “I mean for a year,” he
said, “to allow her perfect liberty.”

“And to accept the consequences?”

“Absolutely.”  And Roger folded his arms.

This conversation took place on a Friday.  Nora was to sail from New
York on the succeeding Wednesday; for which purpose she was to leave
Boston with Mrs. Keith on the Monday.  The two ladies were of course
to be attended to the ship by Roger.  Early Sunday morning Nora
received a visit from her friend.  The reader will perhaps remember
that Mrs. Keith was a recent convert to the Roman Catholic faith; as
such, she performed her religious duties with peculiar assiduity.
Her present errand was to propose that Nora should go with her to
church and join in offering a mass for their safety at sea.  “I don’t
want to bring you over, you know; but I think it would be so nice,”
said Mrs. Keith.  Appealing to Roger, Nora received permission to do
as she chose; she therefore lent herself with fervor to this pious
enterprise.  The two ladies spent an hour at the foot of the
altar,—an hour of romantic delight to the younger one.  On Sunday
evening Roger, who, as the day of separation approached, became
painfully anxious and reluctant, betook himself to Mrs. Keith, with
the desire to enforce upon her mind a solemn sense of her
responsibilities and of the value of the treasure he had confided to
her.  Nora, left alone, sat wondering whether Hubert might not come
to bid her farewell.  Wandering listlessly about the room, her eye
fell on the Saturday-evening paper.  She took it up and glanced down
the columns.  In one of them she perceived a list of the various
church services of the morrow.  Last in the line stood this
announcement: “At the —— —— Church, the Rev. Hubert Lawrence, at
eight o’clock.”  It gave her a gentle shock; it destroyed the vision
of his coming in and their having, under the lamp, by the fire, the
serious counterpart of their frolicsome _tête-à-tête_ in the
carriage.  She longed to show him that she was not a giggling child,
but a wise young lady.  But no; in a dimly-crowded church, before a
hundred eyes, he was speaking of divine things.  How did he look in
the pulpit?  If she could only see him!  And why not?  She looked at
her watch; it lacked ten minutes to eight.  She made no pause to
reflect; she only felt that she must hurry.  She rang the bell and
ordered a carriage, and then, hastening to her room, put on her shawl
and bonnet,—the blue crape bonnet of the concert.  In a few moments
she was on her way to the church.  When she reached it, her heart was
beating fast; she was on the point of turning back.  But the coachman
opened the carriage door with such a flourish that she was ashamed
not to get out.  She was late; the church was full, the service had
gone forward, the sermon was about to begin.  The sexton with great
solemnity conducted her up the aisle to a pew directly beneath the
pulpit.  She bent her eyes on the ground, but she knew that there was
a deep expectant silence, and that Hubert was upright before the desk
looking at her.  She sat down beside a very grim-visaged old lady
with bushy eyebrows, who stared at her so hard, that to hide her
confusion she buried her head and prolonged her prayer; upon which
the old lady seemed to stare more intently, as if she thought her
very pretentious.  When she raised her head, Hubert had begun to
speak; he was looking above her and beyond her, and during the sermon
his level glance never met her own.  Of what did he speak and what
was the moral of his discourse?  Nora could not have told you; yet
not a soul in the audience, not all those listening souls together,
were more devoutly attentive than she.  But it was not on what he
said, but on what he was, or seemed to be, that her perception was
centred.  Hubert Lawrence had an excellent gift of oratory.  His
voice was full of penetrating sweetness, and, modulated with infinite
art, it sank with a silvery cadence.  His speech was silver, though I
doubt whether his silence was ever golden.  His utterance seemed to
Nora the perfection of eloquence.  She thought of her uplifted
feeling in the morning, in the incense-thickened air of the Catholic
church; but what a straighter flight to heaven was this!  Hubert’s
week-day face was a summer cloud, with a lining of celestial
brightness.  Now, how the divine truth overlapped its relenting edges
and seemed to transform it into a dazzling focus of light!  He spoke
for half an hour, but Nora took no note of time.  As the service drew
to a close, he gave her from the pulpit a rapid glance, which she
interpreted as a request to remain.  When the congregation began to
disperse, a number of persons, chiefly ladies, waited for him near
the pulpit, and, as he came down, met him with greetings and
compliments.  Nora watched him from her place, listening, smiling,
and passing his handkerchief over his forehead.  At last they
released him, and he came up to her.  She remembered for years
afterward the strange half-smile on his face.  There was something in
it like a pair of eyes peeping over a wall.  It seemed to express so
fine an acquiescence in what she had done, that, for the moment, she
had a startled sense of having committed herself to something.  He
gave her his hand, without manifesting any surprise.  “How did you
get here?”

“In a carriage.  I saw it in the paper at the last moment.”

“Does Roger know you came?”

“No; he had gone to Mrs. Keith’s.”

“So you started off alone, at a moment’s notice?”

She nodded, blushing.  He was still holding her hand; he pressed it
and dropped it.  “O Hubert,” cried Nora, suddenly, “now I know you!”

Two ladies were lingering near, apparently mother and daughter.  “I
must be civil to them,” he said: “they have come from New York to
hear me.”  He quickly rejoined them and conducted them toward their
carriage.  The younger one was extremely pretty, and looked a little
like a Jewess.  Nora observed that she wore a great diamond in each
ear; she eyed our heroine rather severely as they passed.  In a few
minutes Hubert came back, and, before she knew it, she had taken his
arm and he was beside her in her own carriage.  They drove to the
hotel in silence; he went up stairs with her.  Roger had not
returned.  “Mrs. Keith is very agreeable,” said Hubert.  “But Roger
knew that long ago.  I suppose you have heard,” he added: “but
perhaps you have not heard.”

“I have not heard,” said Nora, “but I have suspected—”

“What?”

“No; it is for you to say.”

“Why, that Mrs. Keith might have been Mrs. Lawrence.”

“Ah, I was right,—I was right,” murmured Nora, with a little air of
triumph.  “She may be still.  I wish she would!”  Nora was removing
her bonnet before the mirror over the chimney-piece; as she spoke,
she caught Hubert’s eye in the glass.  He dropped it and took up his
hat.  “Won’t you wait?” she asked.

He said he thought he had better go, but he lingered without sitting
down.  Nora walked about the room, she hardly knew why, smoothing the
table-covers and rearranging the chairs.

“Did you cry about your departure, the other night, as you promised?”
Hubert asked.

“I confess that I was so tired with our adventures that I went
straight to sleep.”

“Keep your tears for a better cause.  One of the greatest pleasures
in life is in store for you.  There are a hundred things I should
like to say to you about Rome.  How I only wish I were going to show
it you!  Let me beg you to go some day to a little place in the Via
Felice, on the Pincian,—a house with a terrace adjoining the fourth
floor.  There is a plasterer’s shop in the basement.  You can reach
the terrace by the common staircase.  I occupied the rooms adjoining
it, and it was my peculiar property.  I remember I used often to
share it with a poor little American sculptress who lived below.  She
made my bust; the Apollo Belvedere was nothing to it.  I wonder what
has become of her!  Take a look at the view,—the view I woke up to
every morning, read by, studied by, lived by.  I used to alternate my
periods of sight-seeing with fits of passionate study.  In another
winter I think I might have learned something.  Your real lover of
Rome oscillates with a kind of delicious pain between the city in
itself and the city in literature.  They keep forever referring you
to each other and bandying you to and fro.  If we had eyes for
metaphysical things, Nora, you might see a hundred odd bits of old
ambitions and day-dreams strewing that little terrace.  Ah, as I sat
there, how the Campagna used to take up the tale and respond to my
printed page!  If I know anything of the lesson of history (a man of
my profession is supposed to), I learned it in that enchanted air!  I
should like to know who is sitting in the same school now.  Perhaps
you will write me a word.”

“I will piously gather up the crumbs of your feasts and make a meal
of them,” said Nora.  “I will let you know how they taste.”

“Pray do.  And one more request.  Don’t let Mrs. Keith make a
Catholic of you.”  And he put out his hand.

She shook her head slowly; as she took it.  “I will have no Pope but
you,” she said.

And after that he went.




VI.


Roger had assured his cousin that he meant to return home, and
indeed, after Nora’s departure, he spent a fortnight in the country.
But finding he had no patience left for solitude, he again came to
town and established himself for the winter.  A restless need of
getting rid of time caused him to resume his earlier social habits.
It began to be said of him that now he had disposed of that queer
little girl that he had picked up Heaven knew where (whom it was
certainly very good-natured of Mrs. Keith to take off his hands), he
was going to look about him for a young person whom he might take to
his home in earnest.  Roger felt as if he were now establishing
himself in society in behalf of that larger personality into which
his narrow singleness was destined to expand.  He was paving the way
for Nora.  It seemed to him that she might find it an easy way to
tread.  He compared her attentively with every young girl he met;
many were prettier, some possessed in larger degree the air of
“brightness”; but none revealed that deep-shrined natural force,
lurking in the shadow of modesty like a statue in a recess, which you
hardly know whether to denominate humility or pride.

One evening, at a large party, Roger found himself approached by an
elderly lady who had known him from his boyhood and for whom he had a
traditional regard, but with whom of late years he had relaxed his
intercourse, from a feeling that, being a very worldly old woman, her
influence on Nora might be pernicious.  She had never smiled on the
episode of which Nora was the heroine, and she hailed Roger’s
reappearance as a sign that this episode was at an end and that he
had repented of his abrupt eccentricity.  She was somewhat cynical in
her shrewdness, and, so far as she might, she handled matters without
gloves.

“I am glad to see you have found your wits again,” she said, “and
that that forlorn little orphan—Dora, Flora, what’s her name?—has
not altogether made a fool of you.  You want to marry; come, don’t
deny it.  You can no more remain unmarried than I can remain standing
here.  Go ask that little man for his chair.  With your means and
your disposition and all the rest of it, you ought by this time to be
setting a good example.  But it’s never too late to mend.  I have got
the thing for you.  Have you been introduced to Miss Sands?  Who is
Miss Sands?  There you are to the life!  Miss Sands is Miss Sands,
the young lady in whose honor we are here convened.  She is staying
with my sister.  You must have heard of her.  New York, but good New
York; so pretty that she might be as silly as you please, yet as
clever and good as if she were as plain as I.  She is everything a
man can want.  If you have not seen her it’s providential.  Come;
don’t protest for the sake of protesting.  I have thought it all out.
Allow me! in this matter I am a woman of genius.  I know at a glance
what will do and what won’t.  You are made for each other.  Come and
be presented.  You have just time to settle down to it before supper.”

Then came into Roger’s honest visage a sort of Mephistophelian
glee,—the momentary intoxication of duplicity.  “Well, well,” he
said, “let us see all that’s to be seen.”  And he thought of his
Peruvian Teresa.  Miss Sands, however, proved no Teresa, and Roger’s
friend had not overstated her merits.  Her beauty was remarkable; and
strangely, in spite of her blooming maturity, something in her
expression, her smile, reminded him forcibly of Nora.  So Nora might
look after ten or twelve years of evening parties.  There was a hint,
just a hint, of customary triumph in the poise of her head, an air of
serene success in her carriage; but it was her especial charm that
she seemed to melt downward and condescend from this altitude of
loveliness with a benignant and considerate grace; to drop, as it
were, from the zenith of her favor, with a little shake of
invitation, the silken cable of a gradual smile.  Roger felt that
there was so little to be feared from her that he actually enjoyed
the mere surface-glow of his admiration; the sense of floating
unmelted in the genial zone of her presence, like a polar ice-block
in a summer sea.  The more he observed her, the more she seemed to
foreshadow his prospective Nora; so that at last, borrowing
confidence from this phantasmal identity, he addressed her with
unaffected friendliness.  Miss Sands, who was a woman of perceptions,
seeing an obviously modest man swimming, as it were, in this mystical
calm, became interested.  She divined in Roger’s manner an unusual
species of admiration.  She had feasted her fill on uttered flattery;
but here was a good man whose appreciation left compliments far
behind.  At the end of ten minutes Roger mentioned that she reminded
him singularly of a young girl he knew.  “A young girl, forsooth,”
thought Miss Sands.  “Is he coming to his _fadaises_, like the rest
of them?”

“You are older than she,” Roger added, “but I expect her to look like
you some time hence.”

“I gladly bequeath her my youth, as I come to give it up.”

“You can never have been plain,” said Roger.  “My friend, just now,
is no beauty.  But I assure you, you encourage me.”

“Tell me about this young lady,” his companion rejoined.  “It is
interesting to hear about people one looks like.”

“I should like to tell you,” said Roger, “but you would laugh at me.”

“You do me injustice.  Evidently this is a matter of sentiment.
Genuine sentiment is the best thing in the world; and when I catch
myself laughing at a mortal who confesses to it, I submit to being
told that I have grown old only to grow silly.”

Roger smiled approval.  “I can only say,” he answered, “that this
young friend of mine is, to me, the most interesting object in the
world.”

“In other words, you are engaged to marry her.”

“Not a bit of it.”

“Why, then, she is a deaf-mute whom you have rendered vocal, or a
pretty heathen whom you have brought to Sunday school.”

Roger laughed exuberantly.  “You have hit it,” he said: “a deaf-mute
whom I have taught to speak.  Add to that, that she was a little
blind, and that now she recognizes me with spectacles, and you will
admit that I have reason to be proud of my work.”  Then, after a
pause he pursued, seriously, “If anything were to happen to her—”

“If she were to lose her faculties—”

“I should be in despair.  But I know what I should do.  I should come
to you.”

“O, I should be a poor substitute!”

“I should make love to you,” Roger went on.

“You would be in despair indeed.  But you must bring me some supper.”

Half an hour later, as the ladies were cloaking themselves, Mrs.
Middleton, who had undertaken Roger’s case, asked Miss Sands for her
impressions.  These seemed to have been highly propitious.  “He is
not a shining light, perhaps,” the young lady said, “but he is an
honest man.  He is in earnest; after what I have been through, that
is very pleasant.  And by the way, what is this little deaf and dumb
girl in whom he is interested?”

Mrs. Middleton stared.  “I never heard she was deaf and dumb.  Very
likely.  He adopted her and brought her up.  He has sent her
abroad—to learn the languages!”

Miss Sands mused as they descended the stairs.  “He is a good man,”
she said.  “I like him.”

It was in consequence, doubtless, of this last remark that Roger, the
next morning, received a note from his friend.  “You have made a hit;
I shall never forgive you, if you don’t follow it up.  You have only
to be decently civil and then propose.  Come and dine with me on
Wednesday.  I shall have only one guest.  You know I always take a
nap after dinner.”

The same post that brought Mrs. Middleton’s note brought a letter
from Nora.  It was dated from Rome, and ran as follows:—

“I hardly know, dearest Roger, whether to begin with an apology or a
scolding.  We have each something to forgive, but you have certainly
least.  I have before me your two poor little notes, which I have
been reading over for the twentieth time; trying, in this city of
miracles, to work upon them the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
But the miracle won’t come; they remain only two very much bethumbed
epistles.  Dear Roger, I have been extremely vexed and uneasy.  I
have fancied you were ill, or, worse,—that out of sight is out of
mind.  It is not with me, I assure you.  I have written you _twelve_
little letters.  They have been short only because I have been
horribly busy.  To-day I declined an invitation to drive on the
Campagna, on purpose to write to you.  The Campagna,—do you hear?  I
can hardly believe that, five months ago, I was watching the ripe
apples drop in the orchard at C——.  We are always on our second
floor on the Pincian, with plenty of sun, which you know is the great
necessity here.  Close at hand are the great steps of the Piazza di
Spagna, where the beggars and models sit at the receipt of custom.
Some of them are so handsome, sunning themselves there in their
picturesqueness, that I cannot help wishing I knew how to paint or
draw.  I wish I had been a good girl three years ago and done as you
wished, and taken drawing-lessons in earnest.  Dear Roger, I never
neglected your advice but to my cost.  Mrs. Keith is extremely kind,
and determined I shall have not come abroad to ‘mope,’ as she says.
She does not care much for sight-seeing, having done it all before;
though she keeps pretty well _au courant_ of the various church
festivals.  She very often talks of you, and is very fond of you.
She is full of good points, but that is her best one.  My own
sight-seeing habits do not at all incommode her, owing to my having
made the acquaintance of a little old German lady who lives at the
top of our house.  She is a queer wizened oddity of a woman, but she
is very clever and friendly, and she has the things of Rome on her
fingers’ ends.  The reason of her being here is very sad and
beautiful.  Twelve years ago her younger sister, a beautiful girl
(she has shown me her miniature), was deceived and abandoned by her
betrothed.  She fled away from her home, and after many weary
wanderings found her way to Rome, and gained admission to the convent
with the dreadful name,—the Sepolte Vive.  Here, ever since, she has
been immured.  The inmates are literally buried alive; they are dead
to the outer world.  My poor little Mademoiselle Stamm followed her
and took up her dwelling here, to be near her.  But they have a dead
stone wall between them.  For twelve years she has never seen her.
Her only communication with Lisa—her conventual name she doesn’t
even know—is once a week to deposit a bouquet of flowers, with her
name attached, in the little blind wicket of the convent wall.  To do
this with her own hands, she lives in Rome.  She composes her bouquet
with a kind of passion; I have seen her and helped her.  Fortunately
flowers in Rome are very cheap, for my friend is deplorably poor.  I
have had a little pleasure, or rather a great pleasure.  For the past
two months I have furnished the flowers, and I assure you we have had
the best.  I go each time with Mademoiselle Stamm to the wicket, and
we put in our bouquet and see it gobbled up into the speechless maw
of the cloister.  It is a dismal amusement, but I confess it
interests me.  I feel as if I knew this poor Lisa; though, after all,
she may be dead, and we may be worshipping a shadow.  But in this
city of shadows and memories, what is one shadow the more?  Don’t
think, however, that we spend all our time in playing with shadows.
We go everywhere, we see everything; I could not be in better hands.
Mrs. Keith has doubts about my friend’s moral influence; she accuses
her of being a German philosopher in petticoats.  She is a German,
she wears petticoats; and having known poverty and unhappiness, she
is obliged to be something of a philosopher.  As for her metaphysics,
they may be very wicked, but I should be too stupid to understand
them, and it is less trouble to abide by my own—and Mrs. Keith’s!
At all events, I have told her all about you, and she says you are
the one good man she ever heard of; so it’s not for you to
disapprove of her!  My mornings I spend with her; after lunch I go
out with Mrs. Keith.  We drive to the various villas, make visits
upon all kinds of people, go to studios and churches and palaces.  In
the evenings we hold high revel.  Mrs. Keith knows every one; she
receives a great many people, and we go out in proportion.  It is a
most amusing world.  I have seen more people in the last six weeks
than I ever expected to in a lifetime.  I feel so old,—you wouldn’t
know me!  One grows more in a month in this wonderful Rome than in a
year at home.  Mrs. Keith is very much liked and admired.  She has
lightened her mourning and looks much better; but, as she says, she
will never be herself till she gets back to pink.  As for me, I wear
pink and blue and every color of the rainbow.  It appears that
everything suits me; there is no spoiling me.  Of course, I am
_out_,—a thousand miles out.  I came out six weeks ago at the great
ball of the Princess X.  How the Princess X.—poor lady!—came to
serve my turn, is more than I can say; but Mrs. Keith is a fairy
godmother; she shod me in glass slippers and we went.  I fortunately
came home with my slippers on my feet.  I was very much frightened
when we went in.  I courtesied to the Princess: and the Princess
stared good-naturedly; while I heard Mrs. Keith behind me whispering,
‘Lower, lower!’  But I have yet to learn how to courtesy to
condescending princesses.  Now I can drop a little bow to a good old
cardinal as smartly as you please.  Mrs. Keith has presented me to
half a dozen, with whom I pass, I suppose, for an interesting
convert.  Alas, I am only a convert to worldly vanities, which I
confess I vastly enjoy.  Dear Roger, I am hopelessly frivolous.  The
shrinking diffidence of childhood I have utterly cast away.  I speak
up at people as bold as brass.  I like having them introduced to me,
and having to be interested and interesting at a moment’s notice.  I
like listening and watching; I like sitting up to the small hours; I
like talking myself.  But I need hardly to tell you this, at the end
of my ten pages of chatter.  I have talked about my own affairs,
because I know they will interest you.  Profit by my good example,
and tell me all about yours.  Do you miss me?  I have read over and
over your two little notes, to find some little hint that you do; but
not a word!  I confess I wouldn’t have you too unhappy.  I am so glad
to hear you are in town, and not at that dreary, wintry C——.  Is
our old C—— life at an end, I wonder?  Nothing can ever be the same
after a winter in Rome.  Sometimes I am half frightened at having had
it in my youth.  It leaves such a chance to be dull afterwards!  But
I shall come back some day with you.  And not even the Princess X.
shall make me forget my winter seat by the library fire at C——, my
summer seat under the great elm.”

This production seemed to Roger a marvel of intellectual promise and
epistolary grace; it filled his eyes with grateful tears; he carried
it in his pocket-book and read it to a dozen people.  His tears,
however, were partly those of penitence, as well as of delight.  He
had had a purpose in preserving that silence, which had cost so much
to his good-nature.  He wished to make Nora miss him, and to let
silence combine with absence to plead for him.  Had he succeeded?
Not too well, it would seem; yet well enough to make him feel that he
had been cruel.  His letter occupied him so intensely that it was not
till within an hour of Mrs. Middleton’s dinner that he remembered his
engagement.  In the drawing-room he found Miss Sands, looking even
more beautiful in a dark high-necked dress than in the glory of gauze
and flowers.  During dinner he was in excellent spirits; he uttered
perhaps no epigrams, but he gave, by his laughter, an epigrammatic
turn to the ladyish gossip of his companions.  Mrs. Middleton
entertained the best hopes.  When they had left the table she betook
herself to her arm-chair, and erected a little hand-screen before her
face, behind which she slept or not, as you choose.  Roger, suddenly
bethinking himself that if Miss Sands had been made a party to the
old lady’s views, his alacrity of manner might compromise him,
checked his vivacity, and asked his companion stiffly if she played
the piano.  On her confessing to this accomplishment, he of course
proceeded to open the instrument which stood in the adjoining room.
Here Miss Sands sat down and played with great resolution an
exquisite composition of Schubert.  As she struck the last note he
uttered some superlative of praise.  She was silent for a moment, and
then, “That is a thing I rarely play,” she said.

“It is very difficult, I suppose.”

“It is not only difficult, but it is too sad.”

“Sad!” cried Roger, “I should call it very joyous.”

“You must be in very good spirits!  I take it to have been meant for
pure sadness.  This is what should suit your mood!” and she attacked
with great animation one of Strauss’s waltzes.  But she had played
but a dozen chords when he interrupted her.  “Spare me,” he said.  “I
may be glad, but not with that gladness.  I confess that I am in
spirits.  I have just had a letter from that young friend of whom I
spoke to you.”

“Your adopted daughter?  Mrs. Middleton told me about her.”

“Mrs. Middleton,” said Roger, in downright fashion, “knows nothing
about her.  Mrs. Middleton,” and he lowered his voice and laughed,
“is not an oracle of wisdom.”  He glanced into the other room at
their hostess and her complaisant screen.  He felt with peculiar
intensity that, whether she was napping or no, she was a sadly
superficial,—in fact a positively immoral,—old woman.  It seemed
absurd to believe that this fair, wise creature before him had lent
herself to a scheme of such a one’s making.  He looked awhile at her
deep clear eyes and her gracious lips.  It would be a satisfaction to
smile with her over Mrs. Middleton’s machinations.  “Do you know what
she wants to do with us?” he went on.  “She wants to make a match
between us.”

He waited for her smile, but it was heralded by a blush,—a blush
portentous, formidable, tragical.  Like a sudden glow of sunset in a
noonday sky, it covered her fair face and burned on her cloudless
brow.  “The deuce!” thought Roger.  “Can it be,—can it be?”  The
smile he had invoked followed fast; but this was not the order of
nature.

“A match between _us_!” said Miss Sands.  “What a brilliant idea!”

“Not that I cannot easily imagine falling in love with you,” Roger
rejoined: “but—but—”

“But you are in love with some one else.”  Her eyes, for a moment,
rested on him intently.  “With your protégée!”

Roger hesitated.  It seemed odd to be making this sacred confidence
to a stranger; but with this matter of Mrs. Middleton’s little
arrangement between them, she was hardly a stranger.  If he had
offended her, too, the part of gallantry was to admit everything.
“Yes, I am in love!” he said.  “And with the young lady you so much
resemble.  She doesn’t know it.  Only one or two persons know it,
save yourself.  It is the secret of my life, Miss Sands.  She is
abroad.  I have wished to do what I could for her.  It is an odd sort
of position, you know.  I have brought her up with the view of making
her my wife, but I have never breathed a word of it to her.  She must
choose for herself.  My hope is that she will choose me.  But Heaven
knows what turn she may take, what may happen to her over there in
Rome.  I hope for the best; but I think of little else.  Meanwhile I
go about with a sober face, and eat and sleep and talk, like the rest
of the world; but all the while I am counting the hours.  Really, I
don’t know what has set me going in this way.  I don’t suppose you
will at all understand my situation; but you are evidently so good
that I feel as if I might count on your sympathy.”

Miss Sands listened with her eyes bent downward, and with great
gravity.  When he had spoken, she gave him her hand with a certain
passionate abruptness.  “You have my sympathy!” she said.  “Much good
may it do you!  I know nothing of your friend, but it is hard to
fancy her disappointing you.  I perhaps don’t altogether enter into
your situation.  It is novel, but it is extremely interesting.  I
hope before rejecting you she will think twice.  I don’t bestow my
esteem at random, but you have it, Mr. Lawrence, absolutely.”  And
with these words she rose.  At the same moment their hostess
suspended her siesta, and the conversation became general.  It can
hardly be said, however, to have prospered.  Miss Sands talked with a
certain gracious zeal which was not unallied, I imagine, to a desire
to efface the trace of that superb blush I have attempted to
chronicle.  Roger brooded and wondered; and Mrs. Middleton, fancying
that things were not going well, expressed her displeasure by abusing
every one who was mentioned.  She took heart again for the moment
when, on the young lady’s carriage being announced, the latter,
turning in farewell to Roger, asked him if he ever came to New York.
“When you are next there,” she said, “you must make a point of coming
to see me.  You will have something to tell me.”

After she had gone Roger demanded of Mrs. Middleton whether she had
imparted to Miss Sands her scheme for their common felicity.  “Never
mind what I said or did not say,” she replied.  “She knows enough not
to be taken unawares.  And now tell me—”  But Roger would tell her
nothing.  He made his escape, and as he walked home in the frosty
starlight, his face wore a smile of the most shameless elation.  He
had gone up in the market.  Nora might do worse!  There stood that
beautiful woman knocking at his door.

A few evenings after this Roger called upon Hubert.  Not immediately,
but on what may be called the second line of conversation, Hubert
asked him what news he had from Nora.  Roger replied by reading her
letter aloud.  For some moments after he had finished Hubert was
silent.  “‘One grows more in a month in this wonderful Rome,’” he
said at last, quoting, “‘than in a year at home.’”

“Grow, grow, grow, and Heaven speed it!” said Roger.

“She is growing, you may depend upon it.”

“Of course she is; and yet,” said Roger, discriminatingly, “there is
a kind of girlish freshness, a childish simplicity, in her style.”

“Strongly marked,” said Hubert, laughing.  “I have just got a letter
from her you would take to be written by a child of ten.”

“_You_ have a letter?”

“It came an hour ago.  Let me read it.”

“Had you written to her?”

“Not a word.  But you will see.”  And Hubert in his dressing-gown,
standing before the fire, with the same silver-sounding accents Nora
had admired, distilled her own gentle prose into Roger’s attentive
ear.

“‘I have not forgotten your asking me to write to you about your
beloved Pincian view.  Indeed, I have been daily reminded of it by
having that same view continually before my eyes.  From my own window
I see the same dark Rome, the same blue Campagna.  I have rigorously
performed my promise, however, of ascending to your little terrace.
I have an old German friend here, a perfect archæologist in
petticoats, in whose company I think as little of climbing to
terraces and towers as of diving into catacombs and crypts.  We chose
the finest day of the winter, and made the pilgrimage together.  The
plaster-merchant is still in the basement.  We saw him in his
doorway, standing to dry, whitened over as if he meant personally to
be cast.  We reached your terrace in safety.  It was flooded with
light,—you know the Roman light,—the yellow and the purple.  A
young painter who occupies your rooms had set up his easel under an
umbrella in the open air.  A young _contadina_ imported, I suppose,
from the Piazza di Spagna, was sitting to him in the sunshine, which
deepened her brown face, her blue-black hair, and her white
head-cloth.  He was flattering her to his heart’s content, and of
course to hers.  When I want my portrait painted, I shall know where
to go.  My friend explained to him that we had come to look at his
terrace on behalf of an unhappy far-away American gentleman who had
once been lodger there.  Hereupon he was charmingly polite.  He
showed us the little _salotto_, the fragment of bas-relief inserted
in the wall,—was it there in your day?—and a dozen of his own
pictures.  One of them was a very pretty version of the view from the
terrace.  Does it betray an indecent greed for applause to let you
know that I bought it, and that, if you are very good and write me a
delightful long letter, you shall have it when I get home?  It seemed
to me that you would be glad to learn that your little habitation is
not turned to baser uses, and that genius and ambition may still be
found there.  In your case, I suppose, they were not found in company
with dark-eyed _contadine_, though they had an admirer in the person
of that poor little American sculptress.  I asked the young painter
if she had left any memory behind her.  Only a memory, it appears.
She died a month after his arrival.  I never was so bountifully
thanked for anything as for buying our young man’s picture.  As he
poured out his lovely Italian gratitude, I felt like some patronizing
duchess of the Renaissance.  You will have to do your best, when I
transfer the picture to your hands, to give as pretty a turn to your
thanks.  This is only one specimen of a hundred delightful rambles I
have had with Mlle. Stamm.  We go a great deal to the churches; I
never tire of them.  Not in the least that I am turning Papist;
though in Mrs. Keith’s society, if I chose to do so, I might treat
myself to the luxury of being a nine days’ wonder, (admire my
self-denial!) but because they are so picturesque and historic; so
redolent of memories, so rich with traditions, so haunted with the
past.  To go into most of the churches is like reading some novel,
better than I find most novels.  They are for different days.  On a
fine day, if I have on my best bonnet, if I have been to a party the
night before, I like to go to Santa-Maria Maggiore.  Standing there,
I dream, I dream, I dream; I should be ashamed to tell you the
nonsense I _do_ dream!  On a rainy day, when I tramp out with Mlle.
Stamm in my waterproof; when the evening before, instead of going to
a party, I have sat quietly at home reading Rio’s “Art Chrétien”
(recommended by the Abbé Leblond, Mrs. Keith’s confessor), I like to
go to the Ara Cœli.  There you stand among the very bric-à-brac of
Christian history.  Something takes you at the throat,—but you will
have felt it; I needn’t try to define the indefinable.  Nevertheless,
in spite of M. Rio and the Abbé Leblond (he is a very charming old
man too, and a keeper of _ladies’_ consciences, if there ever was
one), there is small danger of my changing my present faith for one
that will make it a sin to go and hear you preach.  Of course, we
don’t only haunt the churches.  I know in a way the Vatican, the
Capitol, and those charming galleries of the great palaces.  Of
course, you know them far better.  I am stopped short on every side
by my deplorable ignorance; still, as far as may be given to a silly
girl, I enjoy.  I wish you were here, or that I knew some benevolent
man of culture.  My little German duenna is a marvel of learning and
communicativeness, and when she fairly harangues me, I feel as if in
my single person I were a young ladies’ boarding-school.  But only a
man can talk really to the point of this manliest of cities.  Mrs.
Keith sees a great many gentlemen of one sort and another; but what
do they know of Brutus and Augustus, of Emperors and Popes?  I shall
keep my impressions, such as they are, and we shall talk them over at
our leisure.  I shall bring home plenty of photographs; we shall have
charming evenings looking at them.  Roger writes that he means next
winter to take a furnished house in town.  You must come often and
see us.  We are to spend the summer in England....  Do you often see
Roger?  I suppose so,—he wrote he was having a ‘capital winter.’  By
the way, I am ‘out.’  I go to balls and wear Paris dresses.  I toil
not, neither do I spin.  There is apparently no end to my banker’s
account, and Mrs. Keith sets me a prodigious example of buying.  Is
Roger meanwhile going about with patched elbows?”

At this point Hubert stopped, and, on Roger’s asking him if there was
nothing more, declared that the rest was private.  “As you please,”
said Roger.  “By Jove! what a letter,—what a letter!”

Several months later, in September, he hired for the ensuing winter a
small furnished house.  Mrs. Keith and her companion were expected to
reach home on the 10th of October.  On the 6th, Roger took possession
of his house.  Most of the rooms had been repainted, and on preparing
to establish himself in one for the night, Roger found that the fresh
paint emitted such an odor as to make his position untenable.
Exploring the premises, he discovered in the lower regions, in a kind
of sub-basement, a small vacant apartment, destined to a servant, in
which he had a bed put up.  It was damp, but, as he thought, not too
damp, the basement being dry, as basements go.  For three nights be
occupied this room.  On the fourth morning he woke up with a chill
and a headache.  By noon he had a fever.  The physician, being sent
for, pronounced him seriously ill, and assured him that he had been
guilty of a gross imprudence.  He might as well have slept in a
burial-vault.  It was the first sanitary indiscretion Roger had ever
committed; he had a dismal foreboding of its results.  Towards
evening the fever deepened, and he began to lose his head.  He was
still distinctly conscious that Nora was to arrive on the morrow, and
sadly disgusted that she was to find him in this sorry plight.  It
was a bitter disappointment that he might not meet her at the
steamer.  Still, Hubert might go.  He sent for Hubert accordingly,
who was brought to his bedside.  “I shall be all right in a day or
two,” he said, “but meanwhile some one must receive Nora.  I know you
will be glad to do it, you villain!”

Hubert declared that he was no villain, but that he should be happy
to perform this service.  As he looked at his poor fever-stricken
cousin, however, he doubted strongly if Roger would be “all right” in
a day or two.  On the morrow he went down to the ship.




VII.


On arriving at the landing-place of the European steamer, Hubert
found the passengers filing ashore from the tug-boat in which they
had been transferred from the ship.  He instructed himself, as he
took his place near the gangway, to allow for a certain change in
Nora’s appearance; but even with this allowance none of the various
advancing ladies seemed to be Nora.  Suddenly he found himself
confronted with a fair stranger, a smile, and an outstretched hand.
The smile and the offered hand of course proclaimed the young lady’s
identity.  Yet in spite of them, Hubert’s surprise was great; his
allowance had been too small.  But the next moment, “Now you speak,”
he said, “I recognize you”; and the next he had greeted Mrs. Keith,
who immediately followed her companion; after which he ushered the
two ladies, with their servant and their various feminine
impedimenta, into a carriage.  Mrs. Keith was to return directly to
her own house, where, hospitable even amid prospective chaos, she
invited Hubert to join them at dinner.  He had, of course, been
obliged to inform Nora offhand of the cause of Roger’s absence,
though as yet he made light of his illness.  It was agreed, however,
that Nora should remain with her companion until she had communicated
with her guardian.

Entering Mrs. Keith’s drawing-room a couple of hours later, Hubert
found the young girl on her knees before the hearth.  He sat down
near by, and in the glow of the firelight he noted her altered
aspect.  A year, somehow, had made more than a year’s difference.
Hubert, in his intercourse with women, was accustomed to indulge in a
sort of cool contemplation which, as a habit, found favor according
to the sensibility of the ladies touching whom it was practised.  It
had been intimated to him more than once, that, in spite of his
cloth, just a certain turn of the head made this a license.  But on
this occasion his gaze was all respectful.  He was lost in
admiration; for Nora was beautiful.  She had left home a simple
maiden of common gifts, with no greater burden of loveliness than the
slender, angular, neutral grace of youth and freshness; and here she
stood, a mature, consummate, superb young woman!  It was as if she
had bloomed into ripeness in the sunshine of a great contentment; as
if, fed by the sources of æsthetic delight, her nature had risen
calmly to its allotted level.  A singular harmony and serenity seemed
to pervade her person.  Her beauty lay in no inordinate perfection of
individual features, but in the deep sweet fellowship that reigned
between smile and step and glance and tone.  The total effect was an
impression of the simplest and yet the richest loveliness.  “Pallas
Athene,” said Hubert to himself, “sprang full-armed, we are told,
from the brain of Jove.  But we have a Western version of the myth.
She was born in Missouri; for years she wore aprons and carried
lesson-books.  Then one fine day she was eighteen, and she sported a
black silk dress of Paris!”  Meanwhile Pallas Athene had been asking
about Roger.  “Shall I see him to-morrow, at least?” she demanded.

“I think not; he will not get out for several days.”

“But I can easily go to him.  It is very tiresome.  Things never turn
out as we arrange them.  I had arranged this meeting of ours to
perfection!  He was to dine with us here, and we were to talk, talk,
talk, till midnight; and then I was to go home with him; and there we
were to stand leaning on the banisters at his room door, and talk,
talk; talk till morning.”

“And where was I to be?” asked Hubert.

“I had not arranged for you.  But I expected to see you to-morrow.
To-morrow I shall go to Roger.”

“If the doctor allows,” said Hubert.

Nora rose to her feet.  “You don’t mean to say, Hubert, that it is as
bad as _that_?”  She frowned a little and bent her eyes eagerly on
his face.  Hubert heard Mrs. Keith’s voice in the hall; in a moment
their tête-à-tête would be at an end.  Instead of answering her
question,—“Nora,” he said, in his deepest, lowest voice, “you are
wonderfully beautiful!”  He caught her startled, unsatisfied glance;
then he turned and greeted Mrs. Keith.  He had not pleased Nora,
evidently; it was premature.  So to efface the solemnity of his
speech, he repeated it aloud: “I tell Nora she is very beautiful!”

“Bah!” said Mrs. Keith: “you needn’t tell her; she knows it.”

Nora smiled unconfusedly.  “O, say it all the same!”

“Was it not the French ambassador, in Rome,” Mrs. Keith demanded,
“who attacked you in that fashion?  He asked to be introduced.
There’s an honor!  ‘_Mademoiselle, vous êtes parfaitement belle._’”

“He was very ugly himself,” said Nora.

Hubert was a lover of the luxuries and splendors of life.  He had no
immediate personal need of them; he could make his terms with narrow
circumstances; but his imagination was a born aristocrat.  He liked
to be reminded that certain things were,—ambassadors, ambassadorial
compliments, Old-World drawing-rooms with duskily moulded ceilings.
Nora’s beauty, to his vision, took a deeper color from this homage of
an old starched and embroidered diplomatist.  It was valid, it had
passed the ordeal.  He had little need at table to play at discreet
inattention.  Mrs. Keith, preoccupied with her housekeeping and the
“dreadful state” in which her freshly departed tenants had left her
rooms, indulged in a tragic monologue and dispensed with responses.
Nora, looking frankly at Hubert, consoled their hostess with gentle
optimism; and Hubert returned her looks, wondering.  He mused upon
the mystery of beauty.  What sudden magic had made her so handsome?
She was the same tender slip of girlhood who had come trembling to
hear him preach a year before; the same, yet how different!  And how
sufficient she had grown, withal, to her beauty!  How with the added
burden had come an added strength,—with the greater charm a greater
force,—a force subtle, sensitive, just faintly self-suspecting.
Then came the thought that all this was Roger’s,—Roger’s
speculation, Roger’s property!  He pitied the poor fellow, lying
senseless and helpless instead of sitting there delightedly, drawing
her out and showing her off.  After dinner Nora talked little,
partly, as he felt, from anxiety about her friend, and partly because
of that natural reserve of the altered mind when confronted with old
associations.  He would have been glad to believe that she was taking
pensive note of his own appearance.  He had made his mark in her mind
a twelvemonth before.  Innumerable scenes and figures had since
passed over it; but his figure, Nora now discovered, had not been
obliterated.  Fixed there indelibly, it had grown with the growth of
her imagination.  She knew that she had changed, and she had wondered
whether Hubert would have lost favor with difference.  Would he
suffer by contrast with people she had seen?  Would he seem
graceless, colorless, common?  Little by little, as his presence
defined itself, it became plain to her that the Hubert of the past
had a lease of the future.  As he rose to take his leave, she begged
him to let her write a line to Roger, which he might carry.

“He will not be able to read it,” said Hubert.

Nora mused.  “I will write it, nevertheless.  You will place it by
his bedside, and the moment he is better he will find it at hand.”

When she had left the room, Mrs. Keith demanded tribute.  “Have not I
done well?  Have not I made a charming girl of her?”

“She does you great credit,” said Hubert, with a mental reservation.

“O, but wait awhile!  You have not seen her yet.  She is tired, and
anxious about your cousin.  Wait till she comes out.  My dear Mr.
Lawrence, she is perfect.  She lacks nothing, she has nothing too
much.  You must do me justice.  I saw it all in the rough, and I knew
just what it wanted.  I wish she were my daughter: you should see
great doings!  And she’s as good as gold.  It’s her nature.  After
all, unless your nature is right, what are you?”  But before Hubert
could reply to this little philosophic proposition, Nora reappeared
with her note.

The next morning Mrs. Keith went to call officially upon her
mother-in-law; and Nora, left alone and thinking much of Roger’s
condition, conceived an intense desire to see him.  He had never been
so dear to her as now, and no one’s right to be with him was equal to
hers.  She dressed hastily and repaired to the little dwelling they
were to have so happily occupied.  She was admitted by her old friend
Lucinda, who, between trouble and wonder, found a thousand things to
say.  Nora’s beauty had never received warmer tribute than the
affectionate marvellings of this old woman who had known her early
plainness so well.  She led her into the drawing-room, opened the
windows and turned her about in the light, patted her braided
tresses, and rejoiced with motherly unction in her tallness and
straightness and elegance.  Of Roger she spoke with tearful eyes.
“It would be for him to see you, my dear,” she said: “he would not be
disappointed.  You are better than his brightest dreams.  O, I know
all about it!  He used to talk to me evenings, after you were in bed.
‘Lucinda, do you think she’s pretty?  Lucinda, do you think she’s
plain?  Lucinda, do you dress her warm?  Lucinda, have you changed
her shoes?  And mind, Lucinda, take good care of her hair; it’s the
only thing we are sure of!’  Yes, my dear, you have me to thank for
these big braids.  Would he feel sure of you now, poor man?  You must
keep yourself in cotton-wool till he recovers.  You are like a
picture; you ought to be enclosed in a gilt frame and stand against
the wall.”  Lucinda begged, however, that Nora would not insist upon
seeing him; and her great reluctance betraying his evil case, Nora
consented to wait.  Her own small experience could avail nothing.
“He is flighty,” said Lucinda, “and I’m afraid he wouldn’t recognize
you.  If he shouldn’t, it would do you no good; and if he should, it
would do him none; it would increase his fever.  He’s bad, my dear,
he’s bad; but leave him to me!  I nursed him as a baby; I nursed him
as a boy; I will nurse him as a man grown.  I have seen him worse
than this, with the scarlet fever at college, when his poor mother
was dying at home.  Baby, boy, and man, he has always had the
patience of a saint.  I will keep him for you, Miss Nora, now I have
seen you!  I shouldn’t dare to meet him in heaven, if I were to let
him miss you!”

When Lucinda had returned to her bedside duties, Nora wandered about
the house with a soundless tread, taking melancholy note of the
preparations Roger had made for her return.  His choice, his taste,
his ingenuity, were everywhere visible.  The best beloved of her
possessions from the old house in the country had been transferred
hither and placed in such kindly half-lights as would temper justice
with mercy; others had found expensive substitutes.  Nora went into
the drawing-room, where the blinds were closed and the chairs and
sofas shrouded in brown linen, and sat sadly revolving possibilities.
How, with Roger’s death, loneliness again would close about her; how
he was her world, her strength, her fate!  He had made her life; she
needed him still to watch his work.  She seemed to apprehend, as by a
sudden supernatural light, the extent of his affection and his
wisdom.  In the perfect stillness of the house she could almost hear
his tread on the stairs, hear his voice utter her name with that
tender adjustment of tone which conveyed a benediction in a
commonplace.  Her heart rose to her throat; she felt a passionate
desire to scream.  She buried her head in a cushion to stifle the
sound; her silent tears fell upon the silk.  Suddenly she heard a
step in the hall; she had only time to brush them away before Hubert
Lawrence came in.  He greeted her with surprise.  “I came to bring
your note,” he said: “I did not expect to find you.’”

“Where better should I be?” she asked, with intensity.  “I can do
nothing here, but I should look ill elsewhere.  Give me back my note,
please.  It does not say half I feel.”  He gave it back, and stood
watching her while she tore it in bits and threw it into the empty
fireplace.  “I have been wandering over the house,” she added.
“Everything tells me of poor Roger.”  She felt an indefinable need of
protesting of her affection for him.  “I never knew till now,” she
said, “how much I loved him.  I am sure you don’t know him, Hubert;
not as I do.  I don’t believe any one does.  People always speak of
him with a little air of amusement.  Even Mrs. Keith is witty at his
expense.  But I know him; I grew to know him in thinking of him while
I was away.  There is more of him than the world knows or than the
world would ever know, if it were left to his modesty and the world’s
stupidity!”  Hubert began to smile at her eloquence.  “But I mean to
put an end to his modesty.  I mean to say, ‘Come, Roger, hold up your
head and speak out your mind and do yourself justice.’  I have seen
people without a quarter of his goodness who had twenty times his
assurance and his success.  I shall turn the tables!  People shall
have no favor from me, unless they are good to Roger.  If they want
me, they must take him too.  They tell me I am a beauty, and I can do
what I please.  We shall see.  The first thing I shall do will be to
make them show him a great deal of respect.”

“I admire your spirit,” said Hubert.  “Dr. Johnson liked a good
hater; I like a good lover.  On the whole, it’s more rarely found.
But aren’t you the least bit Quixotic, with your terrible loyalty?
No one denies that Roger is the best of the best of the best!  But do
what you please, Nora, you cannot make virtue entertaining.  As a
clergyman, you know, I have had to try it.  But it’s no use; there’s
a fatal family likeness between goodness and dulness.  Of course you
are fond of Roger.  So am I, so is every one in his heart of hearts.
But what are we to do about it?  The kindest thing is to leave him
alone.  His virtues are his own affair.  You describe him perfectly
when you say that everything in the house here sings his
praise,—already, before he has been here ten days!  The chairs are
all straight, the pictures are admirably hung, the locks are oiled,
the winter fuel is stocked, the bills are paid!  Look at the tidies
pinned on the chairs.  I will warrant you he pinned them with his own
hands.  Such is Roger!  Such virtues, in a household, are priceless.
He ought never to marry; his wife would die for want of occupation.
What society cares for in a man is not his household virtues, but his
worldly ones.  I am talking now, of course, as a man of the world.
Society wants to see things by the large end of the telescope, not by
the small.  ‘Be as good as you please,’ it says, ‘but unless you are
interesting, I’ll none of you!’”

“Interesting!” cried Nora, with a rosy flush.  “I have seen some very
interesting people who have bored me to death.  But if people don’t
care for Roger, it’s their own loss!”  Pausing a moment she fixed
Hubert with the searching candor of her gaze.  “You are unjust,” she
said.

This charge was pleasant to the young man’s soul; he would not, for
the world, have summarily rebutted it.  “Explain, dear cousin,” he
said, smiling kindly.  “Wherein am I unjust?”

It was the first time he had called her cousin; the word made a sweet
confusion in her thoughts.  But looking at him still while she
collected them, “You don’t care to know!” she cried.  “Not when you
smile so!  You are laughing at me, at Roger, at every one!”  Clever
men had ere this been called dreadfully satirical by pretty women;
but never, surely, with just that imperious naïveté.  She spoke with
a kind of joy in her frankness; the sense of intimacy with the young
man had effaced the sense of difference.

“The scoffing fiend!  That’s a pretty character to give a clergyman!”
said Hubert.

“Are you, at heart, a clergyman?  I have been wondering.”

“You have heard me preach.”

“Yes, a year ago, when I was a silly little girl.  I want to hear you
again.”

“No, I have gained my crown, I propose to keep it.  I would rather
not be found out.  Besides, I am not preaching now; I am resting.
Some people think me a clergyman, Nora,” he said, lowering his voice
with a hint of mock humility.  “But do you know you are formidable,
with your fierce friendships and your jealous suspicions?  If you
doubt of me, well and good.  Let me walk like an Homeric god in a
cloud; without my cloud, I should be sadly ungodlike.  Indeed, for
that matter, I doubt of myself.  But I don’t really undervalue Roger.
I love him, I admire him, I envy him.  I would give the world to be
able to exchange my restless imagination for his silent, sturdy
usefulness.  I feel as if I were toiling in the sun, and he were
sitting under green trees resting from an effort which he has never
needed to make.  Well, virtue, I suppose, is welcome to the shade.
It’s cool, but it’s dreadfully obscure!  People are free to find out
the best and the worst of _me_!  Here I stand, with all my
imperfections on my head; tricked out with a surplice, baptized with
a _reverend_, (Heaven save the mark!) equipped with platform and
pulpit and text and audience,—erected into a mouthpiece of the
spiritual aspirations of mankind.  Well, I confess our sins; that’s
good humble-minded work.  And I must say, in justice, that when once
I don my surplice (I insist on the surplice, I can do nothing without
it) and mount into the pulpit, I feel conscious of a certain power.
They call it eloquence; I suppose it is.  I don’t know what it’s
worth, but they seem to like it.”

Nora sat speechless, with expanded eyes, hardly knowing whether his
humility or his audacity became him best; flattered, above all, by
what she deemed the recklessness of his confidence.  She had removed
her hat, which she held in her hand, gently curling its great black
feather.  Few things in a woman could be prettier than her uncovered
forehead, illumined with her gentle wonder.  The moment, for Hubert,
was critical.  He knew that a young girl’s heart stood trembling on
the verge of his influence; he felt, without fatuity, that a glance
might beckon her forward, a word might fix her there.  Should he
speak his word?  This mystic circle was haunted with the rustling
ghosts of women who had ventured within and found no rest.  But as
the innermost meaning of Nora’s beauty grew vivid before him, it
seemed to him that she, at least, might cleanse it of its sinister
memories and fill it with the sense of peace.  He knew that to such
as Nora he was no dispenser of peace; but as he looked at her she
seemed to him as an angel knocking at his gates.  He could not turn
her away.  Let her come, at her risk!  For angels there is a special
providence.  “Don’t think me worse than I am,” he said, “but don’t
think me better!  I shall love Roger well until I begin to fancy that
you love him too well.  Then,—it’s absurd, perhaps, but I feel it
will be so,—I shall be jealous.”

The words were lightly uttered, but his eyes and voice gave them
meaning.  Nora colored and rose; she went to the mirror and put on
her hat.  Then turning round with a laugh which, to one in the
secret, might have seemed to sound the coming-of-age of her maiden’s
fancy, “If you mean to be jealous,” she said, “now is your time!  I
love Roger now with all my heart.  I cannot do more!”  She remained
but a moment longer.

Roger’s illness baffled the doctors, though the doctors were clever.
For a fortnight it went from bad to worse.  Nora remained constantly
at home, and played but a passive part to the little social drama
enacted in Mrs. Keith’s drawing-room.  This lady had already cleared
her stage and rung up her curtain.  To the temporary indisposition of
her young performer she resigned herself with that serene good grace
which she had always at command, and which was so subtle an
intermixture of kindness and shrewdness that it would have taken a
wiser head than Nora’s to discriminate them.  She valued the young
girl for her social uses; but she spared her at this trying hour,
just as an impresario, with an eye to the whole season, spares a
prima donna who is threatened with bronchitis.  Between these two,
though there was little natural sympathy, there was a wondrous
exchange of caresses and civilities.  They had quietly judged each
other and each sat serenely encamped in her estimate as in a
strategical position.  Nevertheless I would have trusted neither
lady’s account of the other.  Nora, for perfect fairness, had too
much to learn, and Mrs. Keith too much to unlearn.  With her
companion, however, she had unlearned much of that circumspect
jealousy with which, in the interest of her remnant of youth and
beauty, she taxed her commerce with most of the fashionable
sisterhood.  She strove to repair her one notable grievance against
fate by treating Nora as a daughter.  She mused with real maternal
ardor upon the young girl’s matrimonial possibilities, and among them
upon that design of which Roger had dropped her a hint of old.  He
held to his purpose of course; if he had fancied Nora then, he could
but fancy her now.

But were his purpose and his fancy to be viewed with undiminished
complacency?  What might have been a great prospect for Nora as a
plain homeless child, was a small prospect for a young lady who was
turning out one of the beauties of the day.  Roger would be the best
of husbands; but in Mrs. Keith’s philosophy a very good husband might
represent a very indifferent marriage.  She herself had married a
fool, but she had married well.  Her easy, opulent widowhood was
there to show it.  To call things by their names, would Nora, in
marrying Roger, marry money?  Mrs. Keith desired to appraise the
worldly goods of her rejected suitor.  At the time of his suit she
had the matter at her fingers’ ends; but she suspected that since
then he had been lining his pockets.  He puzzled her; he had a way of
seeming neither rich nor poor.  When he spent largely, he had the air
of a man straining a point; yet when he abstained, it seemed rather
from taste than from necessity.  She had been surprised more than
once, while abroad, by his copious remittances to Nora.  The point
was worth making sure of.  The reader will agree with me that her
conclusion warranted her friend either a fool or a hero; for she
graciously assumed that if, financially, Roger should be found
wanting, she could easily prevail upon him to make way for a
millionnaire.  She had several millionnaires in her eye.  Never was
better evidence that Roger passed for a good fellow.  In any event,
however, Mrs. Keith had no favor to spare for Hubert and his marked
and increasing “attentions.”  She had determined to beware of false
alarms; but meanwhile she was vigilant.  Hubert presented himself
daily with a report of his cousin’s condition,—a report most minute
and exhaustive, seemingly, as a couple of hours were needed to make
it.  Nora, moreover, went frequently to her friend’s house, wandered
about aimlessly, and talked with Lucinda; and here Hubert, coming on
the same errand, was sure to be found or to find her.  Roger’s malady
had defined itself as virulent typhus fever; strength and reason were
at the lowest ebb.  Of course on these occasions Hubert walked home
with the young girl; and as the autumn weather made walking
delightful, they chose the longest way.  They might have been seen at
this period perambulating in deep discourse certain outlying regions,
the connection of which with the main line of travel between Mrs.
Keith’s abode and Roger’s was not immediately obvious.  Apart from
her prudent fears, Mrs. Keith had a scantier kindness for Hubert than
for most brilliant men.  “What is he, when you come to the point?”
she impatiently demanded of a friend to whom she had imparted her
fears.  “He is neither fish nor flesh, neither a priest nor a layman.
I like a clergyman to bring with him a little odor of
sanctity,—something that rests you, after all your bother.  Nothing
is so pleasant, near the fire, at the sober end of one’s
drawing-room.  If he doesn’t fill a certain place, he is in the way.
The Reverend Hubert is in any place and every place.  His manners are
neither of this world nor, I hope, of the next.  Last night he let me
bring him a cup of tea and sat lounging in his chair while I put it
into his hand.  O, he knows what he’s about.  He is pretentious, with
all his nonchalance.  He finds the prayer-book rather meagre fare for
week-days; so he consoles himself with his pretty parishioners.  To
be a parishioner, you needn’t go to his church.”

But in spite of Mrs. Keith’s sceptical criticism, these young persons
played their game in their own way, with wider moves, even, and
heavier stakes, than their shrewd hostess suspected.  As Nora, for
the present, declined all invitations, Mrs. Keith in the evening
frequently went out alone, leaving her in the drawing-room to
entertain Hubert Lawrence.  Roger’s illness furnished a grave
undercurrent to their talk and gave it a tone of hazardous
melancholy.  Nora’s young life had known no such hours as these.  She
hardly knew, perhaps, just what made them what they were.  She hardly
wished to know; she shrank from breaking the charm with a question.
The scenes of the past year had gathered into the background like a
huge distant landscape, glowing with color and swarming with life;
she seemed to stand with her friend in the shadow of a passing cloud,
looking off into the mighty picture, caressing its fine outlines, and
lingering where the haze of regret lay purple in its hollows.
Hubert, meanwhile, told over the legends of town and tower, of hill
and stream.  Never, she fondly fancied, had a young couple conversed
with less of narrow exclusiveness; they took all history, all
culture, into their confidence; the radiant light of an immense
horizon seemed to shine between them.  Nora had felt perfectly
satisfied; she seemed to live equally in every need of her being, in
soul and sense, in heart and mind.  As for Hubert, he knew nothing,
for the time, save that the angel was within his gates and must be
treated to angelic fare.  He had for the time the conscience, or the
no-conscience, of a man who is feasting in Elysian meadows.  He
thought no evil; he designed no harm; the hard face of destiny was
twisted into a smile.  If only, for Hubert’s sake, this had been an
irresponsible world, without penalties to pay, without turnings to
the longest lanes!  If the peaches and plums in the garden of
pleasure had no cheeks but ripe ones, and if, when we have eaten the
fruit, we had not to dispose of the stones!  Nora’s charm of charms
was a certain maidenly reserve which Hubert both longed and feared to
abolish.  While it soothed his conscience it irritated his ambition.
He wished to know in what depth of water he stood; but there was no
telltale ripple in this tropic calm.  Was he drifting in mid-ocean,
or was he cruising idly among the sandy shallows?  As the days
elapsed, he found his rest troubled by this folded rose-leaf of
doubt; for he was not used to being baffled by feminine riddles.  He
determined to pluck out the heart of the mystery.

One evening, at Mrs. Keith’s urgent request, Nora had prepared to go
to the opera, as the season was to be very brief.  Mrs. Keith was to
dine with some friends and go thither in their company; one of the
ladies was to call for Nora after dinner, and they were to join the
party at the theatre.  In the afternoon there came to Mrs. Keith’s a
young German lady, a pianist of merit who had her way to make, a
niece of Nora’s regular professor, with whom Nora had an engagement
to practise duets twice a week.  It so happened that, owing to a
violent rain, Miss Lilienthal had been unable to depart after their
playing; whereupon Nora had kept her to dinner, and the two, over
their sweetbread, had sworn an eternal friendship.  After dinner Nora
went up to dress for the opera, and, on descending, found Hubert
sitting by the fire deep in German discourse with the musical
stranger.  “I was afraid you would be going,” said Hubert: “I saw
_Der Freyschütz_ on the placards.  Well, lots of pleasure!  Let me
stay here awhile and polish up my German with Mademoiselle.  It is
great fun.  And when the rain is over, Fraülein, perhaps you’ll not
mind my walking home with you.”

But Mademoiselle was gazing in mute envy at Nora, standing before her
in festal array.  “She can take the carriage,” said Nora, “when we
have used it.”  And then reading the burden of that wistful
regard—“Have you never heard _Der Freyschütz_?”

“Often!” said the other, with a poignant smile.

Nora reflected a moment, then drew off her gloves.  “You shall go,
you shall take my place.  I will stay at home.  Your dress will do;
you shall wear my shawl.  Let me put this flower into your hair, and
here are my gloves and my fan.  So!  You are charming.  My gloves are
large,—never mind.  The others will be delighted to have you; come
to-morrow and tell me all about it.”  Nora’s friend, in her carriage,
was already at the door.  The gentle Fraülein, half shrinking, half
eager, suffered herself to be hurried down to the carriage.  On the
doorstep she turned and kissed her hostess with a fervent “_Da
allerliebste!_”  Hubert wondered whether Nora’s purpose had been to
please her friend or to please herself.  Was it that she preferred
his society to Weber’s music?  He knew that she had a passion for
Weber.  “You have lost the opera,” he said, when she reappeared: “but
let us have an opera of our own.  Play something; play Weber.”  So
she played Weber for more than an hour; and I doubt whether, among
the singers who filled the theatre with their melody, the master
found that evening a truer interpreter than the young girl playing in
the lamp-lit parlor to the man she loved.  She played herself tired.
“You ought to be extremely grateful,” she said, as she struck the
last chord: “I have never played so well.”

Later they came to speak of a novel which lay on the table, and which
Nora had been reading.  “It is very silly,” she said, “but I go on
with it in spite of myself.  I am afraid I am too easily pleased; no
novel is so silly I can’t read it.  I recommend you this, by the way.
The hero is a young clergyman, endowed with every charm, who falls in
love with a Roman Catholic.  She is rather a bigot, and though she
loves the young man, she loves her religion better.  To win his suit
he comes near going over to Rome; but he pulls up short and
determines the mountain shall come to Mahomet.  He sets bravely to
work, converts the young lady, baptizes her one week and marries her
the next.”

“Heaven preserve us, what a hotch-potch!” cried Hubert.  “Is that
what they are writing nowadays?  I very seldom read a novel, but when
I glance into one, I am sure to find some such stuff as that!
Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.
Common life,—I don’t say it’s a vision of bliss, but it’s better
than that.  Their stories are like the underside of a
carpet,—nothing but the stringy grain of the tissue,—a muddle of
figures without shape and flowers without color.  When I read a novel
my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden
in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the
dénouement.  Your clergyman here with his Romish sweetheart must be a
very poor creature.  Why didn’t he marry her first and convert her
afterwards?  Isn’t a clergyman after all, before all, a man?  I mean
to write a novel about a priest who falls in love with a pretty
Mahometan and swears by Allah to win her.”

“O Hubert!” cried Nora, “would you like a clergyman to love a pretty
Mahometan better than the truth?”

“The truth?  A pretty Mahometan may be the truth.  If you can get it
in the concrete, after shivering all your days in the cold abstract,
it’s worth a bit of a compromise.  Nora, Nora!” he went on,
stretching himself back on the sofa and flinging one arm over his
head, “I stand up for passion!  If a thing can take the shape of
passion, that’s a fact in its favor.  The greater passion is the
better cause.  If my love wrestles with my faith, as the angel with
Jacob, and if my love stands upper-most, I will admit it’s a fair
game.  Faith is faith, under a hundred forms!  Upon my word, I should
like to prove it.  What a fraction of my personality is this clerical
title!  How little it expresses; how little it covers!  On Sundays,
in the pulpit, I stand up and talk to five hundred people.  Does each
of them, think you, appropriate his five hundredth share of my
discourse?  I can imagine talking to one person and saying five
hundred times as much, even though she were a pretty Mahometan or a
prepossessing idolatress!  I can imagine being five thousand miles
away from this blessed Boston,—in Turkish trousers, if you please,
with a turban on my head and a chibouque in my mouth, with a great
blue ball of Eastern sky staring in through the round window, high
up; all in perfect indifference to the fact that Boston was abusing,
or, worse still, forgetting me!  But, my dear Nora,” Hubert added,
suddenly, “don’t let me introduce confusion into your ideas.”  And he
left his sofa and came and leaned against the mantel-shelf.  “This is
between ourselves; I talk to you as I would to no one else.
Understand me and forgive me!  There are times when I must speak out
and pay my respects to the possible, the ideal!  I must protest
against the vulgar assumption of people who don’t see beyond their
noses; that people who do, you and I for instance, are living up to
the top of our capacity; that we are contented, satisfied, balanced.
I promise you I am not satisfied, not I!  I have room for more.  I
only half live; I am like a purse filled at one end with small coin
and empty at the other.  Perhaps the other will never know the golden
rattle!  The Lord’s will be done; I can say that with the best of
them.  But I shall never pretend that I have known happiness, that I
have known life.  On the contrary, I shall maintain I am a failure.
I had the wit to see, but I lacked the courage to do,—and yet I have
been called reckless, irreverent, audacious.  My dear Nora, I am the
veriest coward on earth; pity me, if you don’t despise me.  There are
men born to imagine things, others born to do them.  Evidently I am
not one of the doers.  But I imagine things, I assure you!”

Nora listened to this flow of sweet unreason without staying her hand
in the work, which, as she perceived the drift of his talk, she had
rapidly caught up, but with a beating heart and a sense of rising
tears.  It was a ravishing mixture of passion and reason, the agony
of a restless soul.  Of old, she had thought of Hubert’s nature as
immutably placid and fixed; it gave her the notion of lucid depth and
soundless volume.  But of late, with greater nearness, she had seen
the ripples on its surface and heard it beating its banks.  This was
not the first time; but the waves had never yet broken so high; she
had never felt their salt spray on her cheeks.  The touch of it now
was delicious.  She went on with her work, mechanically taking her
stitches.  She felt Hubert’s intense blue eyes; the little blue
flower in her tapestry grew under her quick needle.  A door had
suddenly been opened between their hearts; she passed through it.
“What is it you imagine,” she asked, with intense curiosity: “what is
it you dream of doing?”

“I dream,” he said, “of breaking some law for your sake!”

The answer frightened her; passion was outstripping reason.  What had
she to do with broken laws?  She trembled and rolled up her work.  “I
dream,” she said, trying to smile, “of the beauty of keeping laws.  I
expect to get a deal of pleasure from it yet.”  And she left her
chair.  For an instant Hubert was confused.  Was this the last
struggle which precedes submission, or the mere prudence of
indifference?  Nora’s eyes were on the clock.  It rang out eleven.
“To begin with,” she said, “let me keep the law of going early to
bed.  Good night!”

Hubert wondered; he hardly knew whether this was a rebuke or a
challenge.  “You will at least shake hands,” he said reproachfully.

She had meant in self-defence to omit this ceremony, but she let him
take her hand.  Hubert gazed at her a moment and raised it to his
lips.  She blushed, and rapidly withdrew it.  “There!” cried Hubert,
“I have broken a law!”

“Much good may it do you!” she answered, and went her way.  He stood
for a moment, waiting, and fancying, rather fatuously, that she might
come back.  Then, as he took up his hat, he wondered whether she too
was not a bit of a coquette.

Nora wondered on her own side whether this scene had not been a
little pre-arranged.  For a day love and doubt fared in company.
Lucinda’s mournful discourse on the morrow was not of a nature to
restore her calmness.  “Last night,” said Roger’s nurse, “he was very
bad.  He woke up out of his stupor, but he was none the better for
that.  He talked all night about you.  If he murmurs a word, it’s
always your name.  He asked a dozen times if you had arrived, and
forgot as often as I told him,—he, dear man, who used to remember
the very hairs of your head.  He kept wondering whether anything had
happened to you.  Late in the evening, when the carriages began to
pass, he cried out that each of them was you, and what would you
think of him for not coming to meet you?  ‘Don’t tell her how bad I
am,’ he says; ‘I must have been in bed two or three days, haven’t I,
Lucinda?  Say I shall be out to-morrow; that I have only a little
cold.  Hubert will do everything for her,’ he kept saying.  And then
when, at midnight, the wind began to blow, he declared it was a
storm, that your ship was on the coast.  God keep you safe, he cried.
Then he asked if you were changed and grown; were you pretty, were
you tall, should he know you?  And he took the hand-glass and looked
at himself and wondered if you would know him.  He cried out that he
was ugly, he was horrible, you would hate him.  He bade me bring him
his dressing things so that he might make himself look better, and
when I wouldn’t, he began to rage and call me names, and then he
broke down and cried like a child.”  Hearing these things, Nora
prayed intently for Roger’s recovery,—prayed that he might live to
see her more cunningly and lovingly his debtor.  She wished to do
something, she hardly knew what, not only to prove, but forever to
commemorate, her devotion.  She felt capable of erecting a monument
of self-sacrifice.  Her conscience was perfectly at rest.

For a couple of days she saw nothing of Hubert.  On the third there
came excellent news of Roger, who had taken a marked turn for the
better, and had passed the crisis.  She had declined, for the
evening, a certain attractive invitation; but on the receipt of these
tidings she revoked her refusal.  Coming down to the drawing-room
with Mrs. Keith, dressed and shawled, she found Hubert in waiting,
with a face which uttered bad news.  Roger’s improvement had been
momentary, a relapse had followed, and he was worse than ever.  She
tossed off her shawl with an energy not unnoted by her duenna.  “Of
course I cannot go,” she said.  “It is neither possible nor proper.”
Mrs. Keith would have given her biggest bracelet that this thing
should not have happened in just this way; but she submitted with a
good grace,—for a duenna.  Hubert went down with her to her
carriage.  At the foot of the stairs she stopped, and while gathering
up her skirts, “Mr. Lawrence,” she demanded, “are you going to remain
here?”

“A little while,” said Hubert, with his imperturbable smile.

“A very little while, I hope.”  She had been wondering whether
admonition would serve as a check or a stimulus.  “I need hardly tell
you that the young lady up stairs is not a person to be trifled with.”

“I hardly know what you mean,” said Hubert.  “Am I a person to
trifle?”

“Is it serious, then?”

Hubert hesitated a moment.  She perceived a sudden watchful quiver in
his eye, like a sword turned edge outward.  She unsheathed one of her
own steely beams, and for the tenth of a second there was a dainty
crossing of blades.  “I admire Miss Lambert,” cried Hubert, “with all
my heart.”

“True admiration,” said Mrs. Keith, “is one half respect and the
other half self-denial.”

Hubert laughed, ever so politely.  “I will put that into a sermon,”
he said.

“O, I have a sermon to preach you,” she answered.  “Take your hat and
go.”

He looked very grave: “I will go up and get my hat.”  Mrs. Keith,
catching his eye as he closed the carriage door, wished to Heaven
that she had held her tongue.  “I have done him injustice,” she
murmured as she went.  “I have fancied him light, but I see he’s
vicious.”  Hubert, however, kept his promise in so far as that he did
take up his hat.  Having held it a moment he put it down.  He had
reckoned without his hostess!  Nora was seated by the fire, with her
bare arms folded, with a downcast brow.  Dressed in pale corn-color,
her white throat confined by a band of blue velvet overstitched with
a dozen pearls, she was not a subject for summary farewells.  Meeting
her eyes, he saw they were filled with tears.  “You must not take
this thing too hard,” he said.

For a moment she answered nothing; then she bent her face into her
hands and her tears flowed.  “O poor, poor Roger!” she cried.

Hubert watched her weeping in her ball-dress those primitive tears.
“I have not given him up,” he said at last.  “But suppose I had—”
She raised her head and looked at him.  “O,” he cried, “I should have
a hundred things to say!  Both as a clergyman and as a man, I should
preach resignation.  In this crisis, let me speak my mind.  Roger is
part of your childhood; your childhood’s at an end.  Possibly, with
it he too is to go!  At all events you are not to feel that in losing
him you lose everything.  I protest!  As you sit here he belongs to
your past.  Ask yourself what part he may play in your future.
Believe me, you will have to settle it, you will have to choose.
Here, in any case, _your_ life begins.  Your tears are for the dead
past; this is the future, with its living needs.  Roger’s fate is
only one of them.”

She rose with her tears replaced by a passionate gravity.  “Ah, you
don’t know what you say!” she cried.  “Talk of my future if you like,
but not of my past!  No one can speak of it, no one knows it!  Such
as you see me here, bedecked and bedizened, I am a penniless,
homeless, friendless creature!  But for Roger, I might be in the
streets!  Do you think I have forgotten it, that I ever can forget
it?  There are things that color one’s life, memories that last
forever.  I have my share!  What am I to settle, between whom am I to
choose?  My love for Roger is no choice, it is part and parcel of my
being!”

Hubert was inspired; he forgot everything but that she was lovely.
“I wish to Heaven,” he cried, “that you had never ceased to be
penniless and friendless!  I wish Roger had left you alone and not
smothered you beneath this terrible burden of gratitude!  Give him
back his gifts!  Take all _I_ have!  In the streets?  In the streets
I should have found you, as lovely in your poverty as you are now in
your finery, and a thousand times more free!”  He seized her hand and
met her eyes with irresistible ardor.  Pain and pleasure, at once,
possessed Nora’s heart.  It was as if joy, bursting in, had trampled
certain tender flowers that bloomed on the threshold.  But Hubert had
cried, “I love you!  I love you!” and joy had taken up the words.
She was unable to speak audibly; but in an instant she was spared the
effort.  The servant hastily came in with a note superscribed with
her name.  She motioned to Hubert to open it.  He read it aloud.
“Mr. Lawrence is sinking.  You had better come.  I send my carriage.”
Nora’s voice came to her with a cry,—“He is dying, he is dying!”

In a minute’s time she found herself wrapped in her shawl and seated
with Hubert in the doctor’s coupé.  A few moments more and the doctor
received them at the door of Roger’s room.  They passed in, and Nora
went straight to the bed.  Hubert stood an instant and saw her drop
on her knees beside the pillow.  She flung back her shawl with
vehemence, as if to release her arms; she was throwing them round her
friend.  Hubert went on into the adjoining chamber, of which the door
stood open.  The room was dark, the other lit by a night-lamp.  He
stood listening awhile, but heard nothing; then he began to walk
slowly to and fro, past the doorway.  He could see nothing but the
shining train of Nora’s dress lying on the carpet beyond the angle of
the bed.  He wanted terribly to see more, but he feared to see too
much.  At moments he thought he heard whispers.  This lasted some
time; then the doctor came in, with what seemed to him an odd,
unprofessional smile.  “The young lady knows a few remedies not
taught in the schools,” he whispered.  “He has recognized her.  He is
good for to-night, at least.  Half an hour ago he had no pulse at
all, but this has started it.  I will come back in an hour.”  After
he had gone Lucinda came, self-commissioned, and shut the door in
Hubert’s face.  He stood a moment, with an unreasoned sense of insult
and defeat.  Then he walked straight out of the house.  But the next
morning, after breakfast, a more generous sentiment moved him to
return.  The doctor was just coming away.  “It was a Daniel come to
judgment,” the doctor declared.  “I verily believe she saved him.  He
will be sitting up in a fortnight.”  Hubert learned that, having
achieved her miracle, Nora had returned to Mrs. Keith’s.  What arts
she had used he was left to imagine.  He had still a sore feeling of
having just missed a crowning joy; but there might yet be time to
grasp it.  He felt, too, an urgent need of catching a glimpse of the
afterglow of Nora’s mystical effluence.  He repaired to Mrs. Keith’s,
hoping to find the young girl alone.  But the elder lady, as luck
would have it, was established in the drawing-room, and she made
haste to inform him that Nora, fatigued by her “watching,” had not
yet left her room.  But if Hubert was sombre, Mrs. Keith was radiant.
Now was her chance to preach her promised sermon; she had just come
into possession of facts that furnished a capital text.

“I suppose you will call me a meddling busybody,” she said.  “I
confess I seem to myself a model of forbearance.  Be so good as to
tell me in three words whether you are in love with Nora.”

Taken thus abruptly to task, Hubert, after a moment’s trepidation,
kept his balance.  He measured the situation at a glance, and
pronounced it bad.  But if heroic urbanity would save it, he would be
urbane.  “It is hardly a question to answer in two words,” he
answered, with an ingenuous smile.  “I wish you could tell me!”

“Really,” said Mrs. Keith, “it seems to me that by this time you
might know.  Tell me at least whether you are prepared to marry her?”

Hubert hesitated just an instant.  “Of course not,—so long as I am
not sure I am in love with her!”

“And pray when will you make up your mind?  And what is to become of
poor Nora meanwhile?”

“Why, Mrs. Keith, if Nora can wait, surely you can.”  The urbanity
need not be all on his side.

“Nora can wait?  That’s easily said.  Is a young girl a thing to be
tried like a piano,—to be strummed on for a pretty tune?  O Mr.
Lawrence, if I had ever doubted of the selfishness of men!  What this
matter has been for you, you know best yourself; but I may tell you
that for Nora it has been serious.”  At these words Hubert passed his
hand nervously through his hair and walked to the window.  “The
miserable fop!” said Mrs. Keith, privately.  “His vanity is the only
thing that has ears.  It is very true they are long ones!  If you are
not able to make Nora a handsome offer of marriage,” she proceeded,
“you have no business here.  Retire, quietly, expeditiously, humbly.
Leave Nora to me.  I will heal her bruises.  They shall have been
wholesome ones.”

Hubert felt that these peremptory accents implied a menace, and that
the lady spoke by book.  His vanity rankled, but discretion drew a
long breath.  For a fortnight it had been shut up in a closet.  He
thanked his stars they had no witnesses; from Mrs. Keith, for once,
he could afford to take a lesson.  He remained silent for a moment,
with his brow bent in meditation.  Then turning suddenly, he faced
the music.  “Mrs. Keith,” he said, “you have done me a service.  I
thank you sincerely.  I have gone further than I meant; I admit it.
I am selfish, I am vain, I am anything you please.  My only excuse is
Nora’s loveliness.  It had made an ass of me; I had forgotten that
this is a life of logic.”  And he bravely took up his hat.

Mrs. Keith was prepared for a “scene”; she was annoyed at missing it,
and her easy triumph led her on.  She thought, too, of the young girl
up stairs, combing out her golden hair, and seeing no logic in her
looking-glass.  She had dragged a heavy gun to the front; she
determined to fire her shot.  So much virtue had never inspired her
with so little respect.  She played a moment with the bow on her
morning dress.  “Let me thank you for your great humility,” she said.
“Do you know I was going to be afraid of you, so that I had
intrenched myself behind a great big preposterous fact?  I met, last
evening, Mrs. Chatterton of New York.  You know she’s a great talker,
but she talks to the point.  She mentioned your engagement to a
certain young lady, a dark-eyed person,—need I repeat the name?”
There was no need of her repeating names; Hubert stood before her,
flushing crimson, with his blue eyes flashing cold wrath.  He
remained silent a moment, shaking a scornful finger at her.  “For
shame, madam,” he cried.  “That’s in shocking taste!  You might have
been generous; it seems to me I deserve it.”  And with a summary bow
he departed.

Mrs. Keith repented of this extra touch of zeal; the more so as she
found that, practically, Nora was to be the victim of the young man’s
displeasure.  For four days he gave no sign; Nora was left to explain
his absence as she might.  Even Roger’s amendment failed to console
her.  At last, as the two ladies were sitting at lunch, his card was
brought in, superscribed _P.P.C._  Nora read it in silence, and for a
moment rested her eyes on her companion with a piteous look which
seemed to ask, “Is it you I have to thank for this?”  A torrent of
remonstrances rose to Nora’s lips, but they were sealed by the
reflection that, though her friend might have been concerned in
Hubert’s desertion, its peculiar abruptness had a peculiar motive.
She pretended to occupy herself with her plate; but her self-control
was rapidly ebbing.  She silently rose and retreated to her own room,
leaving Mrs. Keith moralizing, over her mutton-chop, upon the
miseries of young-ladyhood and the immeasurable egotism of the man
who would rather produce a cruel effect than none at all.  For a week
after this Nora was seriously ill.  On the day she left her room she
received a short note from Hubert.


NEW YORK.

DEAR NORA: You have, I suppose, been expecting to hear from me; but I
have not written, because I am unable to write as I wish and
unwilling to write as—other people would wish!  I left Boston
suddenly, but not unadvisedly.  I shall for the present be occupied
here.  The last month I spent there will remain one of the best
memories of my life.  But it was time it should end!  Remember me a
little—what do I say?—forget me!  Farewell.  I received this
morning from the doctor the best accounts of Roger.


Nora handled this letter somewhat as one may imagine a pious maiden
of the antique world to have treated a messenger from the Delphic
oracle.  It was obscure, it was even sinister; but deep in its sacred
dimness there seemed to glow a fiery particle of truth.  She locked
it up in her dressing-case and wondered and waited.  Shortly after
came a missive of a different cast.  It was from her cousin, George
Fenton, and also dated New York.


DEAR NORA,—You have left me to find out your return in the papers.
I saw your name a month ago in the steamer’s list.  But I hope the
fine people and things you have been seeing haven’t driven me quite
out of your heart,—that you remember at least who I am.  I received
your answer to my letter of last February; after which I immediately
wrote again, but in vain!  Perhaps you never got my letter; I could
scarcely decipher your Italian address.  Excuse my want of learning!
Your photograph is a joy forever.  Are you really as handsome as
that?  It taxes even the credulity of one who knows how pretty you
used to be; how good you must be still.  When I last wrote I told you
of my having taken stock in an enterprise for working over refuse
iron.  But what do you care for refuse iron?  It’s awfully dirty, and
not fit to be talked of to a fine lady like you.  Still, if you have
any odd bits,—old keys, old nails,—the smallest contributions
thankfully received!  We think there is money in it; if there isn’t,
I’m afloat again.  If this fails, I think of going to Texas.  I wish
I might see you first.  Get Mr. Lawrence to bring you to New York for
a week.  I suppose it wouldn’t do for me to call on you in the light
of day; but I might hang round your hotel and see you going in and
out.  Does he love me as much as ever, Mr. Lawrence?  Poor man, tell
him to take it easy; I shall never trouble him again.  Are you ever
lonely in the midst of your grandeur?  Do you ever feel that, after
all, these people are not of your blood and bone?  I should like you
to quarrel with them, to know a day’s friendlessness or a day’s
freedom, so that you might remember that here in New York, in a dusty
iron-yard, there is a poor devil who is your natural protector.




VIII.


Roger’s convalescence went smoothly forward.  One morning as he lay
coquetting deliciously with returning sense, he became aware that a
woman was sitting at his window in the sun.  She seemed to be
reading.  He fancied vaguely that she was Lucinda; but at last it
occurred to him that Lucinda was not addicted to literature, and that
Lucinda’s tresses, catching the light, were not of a kind to take on
the likeness of a queenly crown.  She was no vision; his visions had
been dark and troubled; and this image was radiant and fixed.  He
half closed his eyes and watched her lazily through the lids.  There
came to him, out of his boyish past, a vague, delightful echo of the
“Arabian Nights.”  The room was gilded by the autumn sunshine into
the semblance of an enamelled harem court; he himself seemed a
languid Persian, lounging on musky cushions; the fair woman at the
window a Scheherazade, a Badoura.  He closed his eyes completely and
gave a little groan, to see if she would move.  When he opened them,
she had moved; she stood near his bed, looking at him.  For a moment
his puzzled gaze still told him nothing but that she was fictitiously
fair.  She smiled and smiled, and, after a little, as he only stared
confusedly, she blushed, not like Badoura or Scheherazade, but like
Nora.  Her frequent presence after this became the great fact in his
convalescence.  The thought of her beauty filled the long empty hours
during which he was forbidden to do anything but grow strong.
Sometimes he wondered whether his impression of it was only part of
the universal optimism of a man with a raging appetite.  Then he
would question Lucinda, who would shake her head and chuckle with
elderly archness.  “Wait till you are on your feet, sir, and judge
for yourself,” she would say.  “Go and call on her at Mrs. Keith’s,
and then tell me what you think.”  He grew well with a beating heart;
he would have stayed his recovery for the very dread of facing his
happiness.  But at last, one Sunday, he discarded his dressing-gown
and sat up, clothed and in his right mind.  The effort, of course,
gave him a huge appetite, and he dealt vigorous justice upon his
luncheon.  He had just finished, and his little table was still in
position near his arm-chair, when Nora made her appearance.  She had
been to church, and on leaving church had taken a long walk.  She
wore one of those dark rich toilets of early winter that are so
becoming to fair beauties; but her face lacked freshness; she was
pale and tired.  On Roger’s remarking it, she said the service had
given her a headache; as a remedy, she had marched off briskly at
haphazard, missed her way, and wandered hither and thither.  But here
she was, safe and sound and hungry.  She asked for a share of Roger’s
luncheon, and, taking off her bonnet, was bountifully served at his
table.  She ate largely and hungrily, jesting at her appetite and
getting back her color.  Roger leaned back in his chair, watching
her, carving her partridge, offering her this and that; in a word,
falling in love.  It happened as naturally as if he had never allowed
for it.  The flower of her beauty had bloomed in a night, that of his
passion in a day.  When at last she laid down her fork, and, sinking
back in her chair, folded her hands on her arms and sat facing him
with a friendly, pointless, satisfied smile, and then, raising her
goblet, threw back her head and showed her white throat and glanced
at him over the brim, while he noted her plump ringless hand, with
the little finger curled out, he felt that he was in health again.
She strolled about the room, idly touching the instruments on his
dressing-table and the odds and ends on his chimney-piece.  Her
dress, which she had released from the loops and festoons then in
fashion, trailed rustling on the carpet, and lent her a sumptuous,
ladyish air which seemed to give a price to this domiciliary visit.
“Everywhere, everywhere, a little dust,” she said.  “I see it is more
than time I should be back here.  I have been waiting for you to
invite me; but as you don’t seem inclined, I invite myself.”

Roger said nothing for a moment.  Then with a blush, “I don’t mean to
invite you; I don’t want you.”

Nora stared.  “Don’t want me?  _Par exemple!_”

“I want you as a visitor, but not as a—”  And he fumbled for his
word.

“As a resident?” She took it gayly.  “You turn me out of doors?”

“No; I don’t take you in—yet awhile.  My dear child, I have a
reason.”

Nora wondered, still smiling.  “I might consider this very unkind,”
she said, “if I had not the patience of an angel.  Would you kindly
mention your reason?”

“Not now,” he answered.  “But never fear, when it comes it will be
all-sufficient!”  But he imparted it, a couple of days after, to Mrs.
Keith, who came late in the afternoon to present her compliments on
his recovery.  She displayed an almost sisterly graciousness,
enhanced by a lingering spice of coquetry; but somehow, as she
talked, he felt as if she were an old woman and he still a young man.
It seemed a sort of hearsay that they should ever have been mistress
and lover.  “Nora will have told you,” he said, “of my wishing you
kindly to keep her awhile longer.  I can give you no better proof of
my regard, for the fact is, my dear friend, I am in love with her.”

“Come!” she cried.  “This is interesting.”

“I wish her to accept me freely, as she would accept any other man.
For that purpose I must cease to be, in all personal matters, her
guardian.”

“She must herself forget her wardship, if there is to be any
sentimentalizing between you,—all but forget it, at least.  Let me
speak frankly,” she went on.  Whereupon Roger frowned a bit, for he
had known her frankness to be somewhat incisive.  “It is all very
well that you should be in love with her.  You are not the first.
Don’t be frightened; your chance is fair.  The needful point is that
she should be just the least bit in love with you.”

He shook his head with melancholy modesty.  “I don’t expect that.
She loves me a little, I hope; but I say nothing to her imagination.
Circumstances are fatally against it.  If she falls in love, it will
be with a man as unlike me as possible.  Nevertheless, I do hope she
may, without pain, learn to think of me as a husband.  I hope,” he
cried, with appealing eyes, “that she may see a certain rough
propriety in it.  After all, who can make her such a husband as I?  I
am neither handsome, nor clever, nor accomplished, nor celebrated.
She might choose from a dozen men who are.  Pretty lovers doubtless
they would make; but, my friend, it’s the _husband_, the husband,
that is the test!”  And he beat his clenched hand on his knee.  “Do
they know her, have they watched her, as I have done?  What are their
months to my years, their vows to my acts?  Mrs. Keith!”—and he
grasped her hand as if to call her to witness,—“I undertake to make
her happy.  I know what you can say,—that a woman’s happiness is
worth nothing unless imagination lends a hand.  Well, even as a
lover, perhaps I am not a hopeless case!  And then, I confess, other
things being equal, I would rather Nora should not marry a poor man.”

Mrs. Keith spoke, on this hint.  “You are a rich one, then?”

Roger folded up his pocket-handkerchief and patted it out on his
knee, with pregnant hesitation.  “Yes, I am rich,—I may call it so.
I am rich!” he repeated with unction.  “I can say it at last.”  He
paused a moment, and then, with unstudied irony,—“I was not
altogether a pauper when you refused me.  Since then, for the last
six years, I have been saving and sparing and counting.  My purpose
has sharpened my wits, and fortune, too, has favored me.  I have
speculated a little, I have handled stock and turned this and that
about, and now I can offer my wife a very pretty fortune.  It has
been going on very quietly; people don’t know it; but Nora, if she
cares to, shall show them!”  Mrs. Keith colored and mused; she was
lost in a tardy afterthought.  “It seems odd to be talking to you
this way,” Roger went on, exhilarated by this summing-up of his
career.  “Do you remember that letter of mine from P——?”

“I did not tear it up in a rage,” she answered.  “I came across it
the other day.”

“It was rather odd, my writing it, you know,” Roger confessed.  “But
in my sudden desire to register a vow, I needed a friend.  I turned
to you as my best friend.”  Mrs. Keith acknowledged the honor with a
toss of her head.  Had she made a mistake of old?  She very soon
decided that Nora should not repeat it.  Her hand-shake, as she left
her friend, was generous; it seemed to assure him that he might count
upon her.

When, soon after, he made his appearance in her drawing-room, she
gave him many a hint as to how to play his cards.  But he irritated
her by his slowness; he was too circumspect by half.  It was only in
the evening that he took a hand in the game.  During the day he left
Nora to her own affairs, and was in general neither more nor less
attentive than if he had been a merely susceptible stranger.  To
spectators his present relation with the young girl was somewhat
puzzling; though Mrs. Keith, by no ambiguous giving out, as Hamlet
says, had diffused a sympathetic expectancy.  Roger wondered again
and again whether Nora had guessed his meaning.  He observed in her
at times, as he fancied, a sort of nervous levity which seemed born
of a need to conjure away the phantom of sentiment.  And of this
hostile need, of course, he hereupon strove to trace the lineage.  He
talked with her little, as yet, and never interfered in her talk with
others; but he watched her devotedly from corners, and caught her
words through the hum of voices.  Sometimes she looked at him as if
she were on the point of telling him something.  What had she to tell
him?  In trying to guess, Roger made up his mind that she was in
love.  Search as he could, however, he was unable to find her lover.
It was no one there present; they were all alike wasting their shot;
the enemy had stolen a march and was hidden in the very heart of the
citadel.  He appealed distractedly to Mrs. Keith.
“Lovesick,—lovesick is the word,” he groaned.  “I have read of it
all my days in the poets, but here it is in the flesh.  The poor girl
plays her part well; she’s wound up tight; but the spring will snap
and the watch run down.  D—n the man!  I would rather he carried her
off than sit and see this.”  He saw that his friend had bad news.
“Tell me everything,” he said: “don’t spare me.”

“You have noticed it at last,” she answered.  “I was afraid you
would.  Well! he’s not far to seek.  Think it over; can’t you guess?
My dear Mr. Lawrence, you are celestially simple.  Your cousin Hubert
is not.”

“Hubert!” Roger echoed, staring.  A spasm passed over his face; his
eyes flashed.  At last he hung his head.  “Dear, dear,” he said:
“have I done it all for Hubert?”

“Not if I can help it!” cried Mrs. Keith, sharply.  “She may not
marry you; but, at the worst, she shall not marry him!”

Roger laid his hand on her arm; first heavily, then gently.  “Dear
friend, she must be happy, at any cost.  If she loves Hubert, she
must marry him.  I will settle an income!”

Mrs. Keith gave his knuckles a great rap with her fan.  “You will
settle a fiddlestick!  You will keep your money and you will marry
Miss Nora.  Leave it to me!  If you have no regard for your rights,
at least I have.”

“Rights? what rights have I?  I might have let her alone.  I needn’t
have settled down on her in this deadly fashion.  But Hubert’s a
happy man!  Does he know it?  You must write to him.  I can’t!”

Mrs. Keith burst into a ringing laugh.  “Know it?  You are amazing!
Hadn’t I better telegraph?”

Roger stared and frowned.  “Does he suspect it, then?”

Mrs. Keith rolled up her eyes.  “Come,” she said, “we must begin at
the beginning.  When you speak of your cousin, you open up a gulf.
There is not much in it, it’s true; but it’s a gulf.  Your cousin is
a humbug,—neither more nor less.  Allow me; I know what I say.  He
knew, of course, of your plans for Nora!”  Roger nodded.  “Of course
he did!  He took his chance, therefore, while you were well out of
the way.  He lost no time, and if Nora is in love with him, he can
tell you why.  He knew that he could not marry her, that he should
not, that he would not.  But he made love to her, to pass the time.
Happily, it passed soon.  I had of course to be cautious; but as soon
as I saw how things were going, I spoke, and spoke to the point.
Though he’s a humbug, he is not a fool; that was all he needed.  He
made his excuses, such as they were!  I shall know in future what to
think of him.”

Roger shook his head mournfully.  “I am afraid it’s not to be so
easily settled.  As you say, Hubert’s a gulf.  I never sounded it.
The fact remains that they love each other.  It’s hard, but it’s
fatal.”

Mrs. Keith lost patience.  “Don’t try the heroic; you will break
down,” she cried.  “You are the best of men, but after all you are
human.  To begin with, Hubert doesn’t love her.  He loves no one but
himself.  Nora must find her happiness where women as good have found
it before this, in a sound, sensible marriage.  She cannot marry
Hubert; he is engaged to another person.  Yes, I have the facts; a
young girl in New York with whom he has been off and on for a couple
of years, but who holds him to his bargain.  I wish her joy of it!
He is not to be pitied; she is not Nora, but she is extremely fond of
him, and she is to have money.  So good by to Hubert.  As for you,
cut the knot!  She’s a bit sentimental just now; but one sentiment,
at that age, is as good as another.  And, my dear man, the girl has a
conscience, it’s to be hoped; give her a chance to show it.  A word
to the wise!”

Thus exhorted, Roger determined to act.  The next day was a Sunday.
While the ladies were at church he took up his position in their
drawing-room.  Nora came in alone; Mrs. Keith had made a pretext for
ascending to her own room, where she waited with some solemnity.  “I
am glad to find you,” Nora said.  “I have been wanting particularly
to speak to you.  Is my probation not over?  May not I now come back?”

“It’s about that,” he answered, “that I came to talk to you.  The
probation has been mine.  Has it lasted long enough?  Do you love me
yet?  Come back to me,—come back to me as my wife.”

She looked at him, as he spoke, with a clear, unfrightened gaze, and,
with his last words, broke frankly into a laugh.  But as his own face
was intensely grave, a gradual blush arrested her laugh.  “Your wife,
Roger?” she asked gently.

“My wife.  I offer you my hand.  Dear Nora, is it so incredible?”

To his uttermost meaning, somehow, her ear was still closed; she
still took it as a jest.  “Is that the only condition on which we can
live together?” she asked.

“The only one,—for me!”

She looked at him, still sounding his eyes with her own.  But his
passion, merciful still, retreated before her frank doubt.  “Ah,” she
said, smiling, “what a pity I have grown up!”

“Well,” he said, “since you are grown we must make the best of it.
Think of it, Nora, think of it.  I am not so old, you know.  I was
young when we began.  You know me so well; you would be safe.  It
would simplify matters vastly; it’s at least worth thinking of,” he
went on, pleading for very tenderness, in this pitiful minor key.  “I
know it must seem odd; but I make you the offer!”

Nora was almost shocked.  In this strange new character of a lover
she seemed to see him eclipsed as a friend, now when, in the trouble
of her love, she turned longingly to friendship.  She was silent
awhile, with her embarrassment.  “Dear Roger,” she answered, at last,
“let me love you in the old, old way.  Why need we change?  Nothing
is so good, so safe as that.  I thank you from my heart for your
offer.  You have given me too much already.  Marry any woman you
please, and I will be her serving-maid.”

He had no heart to meet her eyes; he had wrought his own fate.
Mechanically, he took up his hat and turned away, without speaking.
She looked at him an instant, uncertain, and then, loath to part with
him so abruptly, she laid her arm round his neck.  “You don’t think
me unkind?” she said.  “I will do anything for you on earth”—_But
that_ was unspoken, yet Roger heard it.  The dream of years was
shattered; he felt sick; he was dumb.  “You forgive me?” she went on.
“O Roger, Roger!” and, with a strange inconsequence of lovingness,
she dropped her head on his shoulder.  He held her for a moment as
close as he had held his hope, and then released her as suddenly as
he had parted with it.  Before she knew it, he was gone.

Nora drew a long breath.  It had all come and gone so fast that she
was bewildered.  It had been what she had heard called a “chance.”
Suppose she had grasped at it?  She felt a kind of relief in the
thought that she had been wise.  That she had been cruel, she never
suspected.  She watched Roger, from the window, cross the street and
take his way up the sunny slope.  Two ladies passed him, friends, as
Nora saw; but he made no bow.  Suddenly Nora’s reflections deepened
and the scene became portentous.  If she had been wrong, she had been
horribly wrong.  She hardly dared to think of it.  She ascended to
her own room, to take counsel of familiar privacy.  In the hall, as
she passed, she found Mrs. Keith at her open door.  This lady put her
arm round her waist, led her into the chamber toward the light.
“Something has happened,” she said, looking at her curiously.

“Yes, I have had an offer of marriage.  From Roger.”

“Well, well?”  Mrs. Keith was puzzled by her face.

“Isn’t it kind of him?  To think he should have thought it necessary!
It was soon settled.”

“Settled, dearest?  How?”

“Why—why—”  And Nora began to smile the more resolutely, as her
imagination had taken alarm.  “I declined.”

Mrs. Keith released her with a gesture almost tragical.  “Declined?
Unhappy girl!”  The words were charged with a righteous indignation
so unusual to the speaker that Nora’s conscience took the hint.

She turned very pale.  “What have I done?” she asked, appealingly.

“Done, my dear?  You have done a blind, cruel act!  Look here.”  And
Mrs. Keith having hastily ransacked a drawer, turned about with an
open letter.  “Read that and repent.”

Nora took the letter; it was old and crumpled, the ink faded.  She
glanced at the date,—that of her first school year.  In a moment she
had read to the closing sentence.  “It will be my own fault if I have
not a perfect wife.”  In a moment more its heavy meaning overwhelmed
her; its vital spark flashed back over the interval of years.  She
seemed to see Roger’s bent, stunned head in the street.  Mrs. Keith
was frightened at her work.  Nora dropped the letter and stood
staring, open-mouthed, pale as death, with her poor young face blank
with horror.




IX.


Nora frequently wondered in after years how that Sunday afternoon had
worked itself away; how, through the tumult of amazement and grief,
decision, illumination, action, had finally come.  She had
disembarrassed herself of a vague attempt of Mrs. Keith’s towards
some compensatory caress, and making her way half blindly to her own
room, had sat down face to face with her trouble.  Here, if ever, was
thunder from a clear sky.  Her friend’s disclosure took time to swell
to its full magnitude; for an hour she sat, half stunned, seeming to
see it climb heaven-high and glare upon her like some monstrous
blighting sun.  Then at last she broke into a cry and wept.  Her
immense pain gushed and filtered through her heart, and passed out in
shuddering sobs.  The whole face of things was hideously altered; a
sudden horror had sprung up in her innocent past, and it seemed to
fling forward a shadow which made the future a blank darkness.  She
felt cruelly deluded and injured; the sense of suffered wrong
absorbed for the time the thought of wrong inflicted.  She was too
weak for indignation, but she overflowed with delicate resentment.
That Roger, whom all these years she had fancied as simple as
charity, should have been as double as interest, should have played a
part and laid a train, that she had been living in darkness, on
illusion and lies, all this was an intolerable thing.  And the worst
was that she had been cheated of the chance to be really loyal.  Why
had he never told her that she wore a chain?  Why, when he took her,
had he not drawn up his terms and made his bargain?  She would have
kept the bargain to the letter; she would have taught herself to be
his wife.  Duty then would have been duty; sentiment would have been
sentiment; her youth would not have been so wretchedly misspent.  She
would have given up her heart betimes; doubtless it would have
learned to beat to a decent and satisfied measure; but now it had
throbbed to a finer music, a melody that would ring in her ears
forever.  Thinking of what her conscience might have done, however,
brought her to thinking of what it might still do.  While she turned
in her pain, angrily questioning it, Mrs. Keith knocked at the door.
Nora repaired to the dressing-glass, to efface the traces of her
tears; and while she stood there, she saw in her open dressing-case
her last letter from her cousin.  It gave her the help she was
vaguely groping for.  By the time she had crossed the room and opened
the door she had welcomed and blessed this help; and while she
gravely shook her head in response to Mrs. Keith’s softly urgent,
“Nora, dear, won’t you let me come to you?” she had passionately made
it her own.  “I would rather be alone,” she said: “I thank you very
much.”

It was past six o’clock; Mrs. Keith was dressed for the evening.  It
was her gracious practice on Sundays to dine with her mother-in-law.
Nora knew, therefore, that if her companion accepted this present
dismissal, she would be alone for several hours.

“Can’t I do something for you?” Mrs. Keith inquired, soothingly.

“Nothing at all, thank you.  You are very kind.”

Mrs. Keith looked at her, wondering whether this was the irony of
bitter grief; but a certain cold calmness in the young girl’s face,
overlying her agitation, seemed to intimate that she had taken a wise
resolve.  And, in fact, Nora was now soaring sublime on the wings of
purpose, and viewed Mrs. Keith’s offence as a diminished fact.  Mrs.
Keith took her hands.  “Write him a line, my dear,” she gently urged.

Nora nodded.  “Yes, I will write him a line.”

“And when I come back, it will be all over?”

“Yes,—all over.”

“God bless you, my dear.”  And on this theological amenity the two
women kissed and separated.  Nora returned to her dressing-case and
read over her cousin’s letter.  Its clear friendliness seemed to ring
out audibly amid this appalling hush of familiar harmony.  “I wish
you might know a day’s friendlessness or a day’s freedom,—a poor devil
who is your natural protector.”  Here was indeed the voice of nature,
of predestined tenderness; if her cousin had been there Nora would
have flung herself into his arms.  She sat down at her writing-table,
with her brow in her hands, light-headed with her passionate purpose,
steadying herself to think.  A day’s freedom had come at last; a
lifetime’s freedom confronted her.  For, as you will have guessed,
immediate retrocession and departure had imperiously prescribed
themselves.  Until this had taken place, there could be nothing but
deeper trouble.  On the old terms there could be no clearing up; she
could speak to Roger again only in perfect independence.  She must
throw off those suffocating bounties which had been meant to bribe
her to the service in which she had so miserably failed.  Her failure
now she felt no impulse to question, her decision no energy to
revise.  I shall have told my story ill if these things seem to lack
logic.  The fault lay deeper and dated from longer ago than her
morning’s words of denial.  Roger and she shared it between them; it
was a heavy burden for both.

She wrote her “line,” as she had promised Mrs. Keith, rapidly,
without erasure; then wrote another to Mrs. Keith, folded and
directed them and laid them on her dressing-table.  She remembered
now, distinctly, that she had heard of a Sunday-evening train to New
York.  She hastened down stairs, found in a newspaper the railway
advertisement, and learned that the train started at eight; satisfied
herself, too, that the coast was clear of servants, and that she
might depart unquestioned.  She bade a gleeful farewell to her
borrowed possessions,—unearned wages, ineffective lures.  She
exchanged the dress she had worn to church for an old black silk one,
put a few articles of the first necessity into a small
travelling-bag, and emptied her purse of all save a few dollars.
Then bonneted, shawled, veiled, with her bag in her hand, she went
forth into the street.  She would begin as she would have to proceed;
she started for the station, savingly, on foot.  Happily it was not
far off; she reached it through the wintry darkness, out of breath,
but in safety.  She seemed to feel about her, as she went, the old
Bohemianism of her childhood; she was once more her father’s
daughter.  She bought her ticket and found a seat in the train
without adventure; with a sort of shame, in fact, that this great
deed of hers should be so easy to do.  But as the train rattled
hideously through the long wakeful hours of the night, difficulties
came thickly; in the mere oppression of her conscious purpose, in the
keener vision at moments of Roger’s distress, in a vague dread of the
great unknown into which she was rushing.  But she could do no
other,—no other; with this refrain she lulled her doubts.  It was
strange how, as the night elapsed and her heart-beats seemed to keep
time to the crashing swing of the train, her pity for Roger
increased.  It would have been an immense relief to be able to hate
him.  Her undiminished affection, forced back upon her heart, swelled
and rankled there tormentingly.  But if she was unable to hate Roger,
she could at least abuse herself.  Every circumstance of the last six
years, in this new light, seemed to have taken on a vivid meaning,—a
meaning that made a sort of crime of her own want of foreknowledge.
She kept thinking of expiation, and determined she would write to
Miss Murray, her former schoolmistress, and beg that she might come
and teach little girls their scales.  She kept her cousin’s letter
clinched in her hand; but even when she was not thinking of Roger she
was not always thinking of Fenton.  She could tell Hubert Lawrence
now that she was as poor and friendless as he had ever wished he
could see her.

Toward morning she fell asleep for weariness.  She was roused by a
great tumult and the stopping of the train, which had arrived.  She
found with dismay that, as it was but seven o’clock, she had two or
three hours on her hands.  George would hardly be at his place of
business before ten, and the interval seemed formidable.  The dusk of
a winter’s morning lingered still, and increased her trouble.  But
she followed her companions and stood in the street.  Half a dozen
hackmen attacked her; a facetious gentleman, lighting a cigar, asked
her if she wouldn’t take a carriage with him.

She made her escape from the bustle and hurried along the street,
praying to be unnoticed.  She told herself sternly that now her
difficulties had begun and must be bravely faced; but as she stood at
the street-corner, beneath an unextinguished lamp, listening to the
nascent hum of the town, she felt a most unreasoned sinking of the
heart.  A Dutch grocer, behind her, was beginning to open his shop;
an ash-barrel stood beside her, and while she lingered an old woman
with a filthy bag on her back came and poked in it with a stick; a
policeman, muffled in a comforter, came lounging squarely along the
pavement and took her slender measure with his hard official eye.
What a hideous, sordid world!  She was afraid to do anything but walk
and walk.  Fortunately, in New York, in the upper region, it is
impossible to lose one’s way; and she knew that by keeping downward
and to the right she should reach her appointed refuge.  The streets
looked shabby and of ill-repute; the houses seemed mean and sinister.
When, to fill her time, she stopped before the window of some small
shop, the objects within seemed, in their ugliness, to mock at her
unnatural refinement.  She must give that up.  At last she began to
feel faint and hungry, for she had fasted since the previous morning.
She ventured into an establishment which had _Ladies’ Café_ inscribed
in gilt letters on a blue tablet in the window, and justified its
title by an exhibition of stale pies and fly-blown festoons of
tissue-paper.  On her request, humbly preferred, for a cup of tea,
she was served staringly and condescendingly by a half-dressed young
woman, with frowzy hair and tumid eyes.  The tea was bad, yet Nora
swallowed it, not to complicate the situation.  The young woman had
come and sat down at her table, handled her travelling-bag, and asked
a number of plain questions; among others, if she wouldn’t like to go
up and lie down.  “I guess it’s a dollar,” said this person, to
conclude her achievements, alluding to the cup of tea.  Nora came
afterwards to a square, in which was an enclosure containing trees, a
frozen fountain, thawing fast, and benches.  She went in and sat down
on one of the benches.  Several of the others were occupied by shabby
men, sullen with fasting, with their hands thrust deep into their
pockets, swinging their feet for warmth.  She felt a faint fellowship
in their grim idleness; but the fact that they were all men and she
the only woman, seemed to open out deeper depths in her loneliness.
At last, when it was nine o’clock, she made her way to Tenth Avenue
and to George’s address.  It was a neighborhood of storehouses and
lumber-yards, of wholesale traffic in articles she had never heard
of, and of multitudinous carts, drawn up along the pavement.  She
found a large cheap-looking sign in black and white,—_Franks and
Fenton_.  Beneath it was an alley, and at the end of this alley a
small office which seemed to communicate with an extension of the
precinct in the rear.  The office was open; a small ragged boy was
sweeping it with a broom.  From him she learned that neither Franks
nor Fenton had arrived, but that if she wanted, she might come in and
wait.  She sat down in a corner, tremulous with conjecture, and
scanned the room, trying to bridge over this dull interval with some
palpable memento of her cousin.  But the desk, the stove, the iron
safe, the chairs, the sordid ink-spotted walls, were as blank and
impersonal as so many columns of figures.  When at last the door
opened and a man appeared, it was not Fenton, but, presumably,
Franks.  Mr. Franks was a small meagre man, with a whitish coloring,
weak blue eyes and thin yellow whiskers, suffering apparently from
some nervous malady.  He nodded, he stumbled, he jerked his arms and
legs about with pitiful comicality.  He had a huge protuberant
forehead, such a forehead as would have done honor to a Goethe or a
Newton; but poor Mr. Franks must have been at best a man of latent
genius.  Superficially he was a very witless person.  He informed
Nora, on learning her errand, that his partner (“pardner,” he called
it) was gone to Williamsburg on business, and would not return till
noon; meanwhile, was it anything _he_ could do?  Nora’s heart sank at
this vision of comfort still deferred; but she thanked Mr. Franks,
and begged leave to sit in her corner and wait.  Her presence seemed
to redouble his agitation; she remained for an hour gazing in painful
fascination at his unnatural shrugs and spasms, as he busied himself
at his desk.  The Muse of accounts, for poor Mr. Franks, was, in
fact, not habitually a young woman, thrice beautiful with trouble,
sitting so sensibly at his elbow.  Nora wondered how George had come
to choose so foolish an associate; then she guessed that it was his
want of capital that had discovered a secret affinity with Mr.
Franks’s want of brains.  The merciless intensity of thought begotten
by her excitement suggested that there was something dishonorable in
this connection.  From time to time Mr. Franks wheeled about in his
chair and fixed her solemnly with his pallid glance, as if to offer
her the privilege of telling him her story; and on her failure to
avail herself of it, turned back to his ledger with a little grunt of
injury and a renewal of his grotesque agitation.  As the morning wore
away, various gentlemen of the kind designated as “parties” came in
and demanded Fenton, in a tone that made the smallest possible
account of Mr. Franks.  Several of them sat awhile on tilted chairs,
chewing their toothpicks, stroking their beards, and listening with a
half-bored grin to what appeared to be an intensely confidential
exposition of Mr. Franks’s wrongs.  One of them, as he departed,
gave Nora a wink, as if to imply that the state of affairs between
the two members of the firm was so broad a joke that even a pretty
young woman might enjoy it.  At last, when they had been alone again
for half an hour, Mr. Franks closed with a slap the great leathern
flanks of his account-book, and sat a moment burying his head in his
arms.  Then he suddenly rose and stood before the young girl.  “Mr.
Fenton’s your cousin, Miss, you say, eh?  Well, then, let me tell you
that your cousin’s a swindler!  I can prove it to you on those books!
Nice books they are!  Where is my money, thirty thousand dollars that
I put into this d——d humbug of a business?  What is there to show
for it?  I have been made a fool of,—as if I wasn’t fool enough
already.”  The tears stood in his eyes, he stamped with the
bitterness of his spite; and then, thrusting his hat on his head and
giving Nora’s amazement no time to reply, he darted out of the door
and went up the alley.  Nora saw him from the window, looking up and
down the street.  Suddenly, while he stood and while she looked,
George came up.  Mr. Franks’s fury seemed suddenly to evaporate; he
received his companion’s hand-shake and nodded toward the office, as
if to tell of Nora’s being there; while, to her surprise, George
hereupon, without looking toward the window, turned back into the
street.  In a few minutes, however, he reappeared alone, and in
another moment he stood before her.  “Well!” he cried: “here you are,
then!”

“George,” she said, “I have taken you at your word.”

“My word?  O yes!” cried George, bravely.

She saw that he was changed, and not for the better.  He looked
older, he was better dressed and more prosperous; but as Nora looked
at him, she felt that she had asked too much of her imagination.  He
eyed her from head to foot, and in a moment he had noted her simple
dress and her pale face.  “What on earth has happened?” he asked,
closing the door with a kick.

Nora hesitated, feeling that, with words, tears might come.

“You are sick,” he said, “or you are going to be sick.”

This horrible idea helped her to recall her self-control.  “I have
left Mr. Lawrence,” she said.

“So I see!” said George, wavering between relish and disapproval.
When, a few moments before, his partner had told him that a young
lady was in the office, calling herself his cousin, he had
straightway placed himself on his guard.  The case was delicate; so
that, instead of immediately advancing, he had retreated behind a
green baize door twenty yards off, had “taken something,” and briskly
meditated.  She had taken him at his word; he knew that before she
told him.  But confound his word if it came to this!  It had been
meant, not as an invitation to put herself under his care, but as a
kind of speculative “feeler.”  Fenton, however, had a native sympathy
with positive measures; and he felt, moreover, the instinct to angle
in Nora’s troubled waters.  “What’s the matter now?” he asked.  “Have
you quarrelled?”

“Don’t call it a quarrel, George!  He is as kind, he is kinder than
ever,” Nora cried.  “But what do you think?  He has asked me to marry
him.”

“Eh, my dear, I told you he would.”

“I didn’t believe you.  I ought to have believed you.  But it is not
only that.  It is that, years ago, he adopted me with that view.  He
brought me up for that purpose.  He has done everything for me on
that condition.  I was to pay my debt and be his wife.  I never
dreamed of it.  And now at last that I have grown up and he makes his
claim, I can’t, I can’t!”

“You can’t, eh?  So you have left him!”

“Of course I have left him.  It was the only thing to do.  It was
give and take.  I cannot give what he wants, and I cannot give back
what I have received.  But I can refuse to take more.”

Fenton sat on the edge of his desk, swinging his leg.  He folded his
arms and whistled a lively air, looking at Nora with a brightened
eye.  “I see, I see,” he said.

Telling her tale had deepened her color and added to her beauty.  “So
here I am,” she went on.  “I know that I am dreadfully alone, that I
am homeless and helpless.  But it’s a heaven to living as I have
lived.  I have been content all these days, because I thought I could
content him.  But we never understood each other.  He has given me
immeasurable happiness; I know that; and he knows that I know it;
don’t you think he knows, George?” she cried, eager even in her
reserve.  “I would have made him a sister, a friend.  But I don’t
expect you to understand all this.  It’s enough that I am satisfied.
I am satisfied,” the poor girl repeated vehemently.  “I have no
illusions about it now; you can trust me, George.  I mean to earn my
own living.  I can teach; I am a good musician; I want above all
things to work.  I shall look for some employment without delay.  All
this time I might have been writing to Miss Murray.  But I was sick
with impatience to see you.  To come to you was the only thing I
could do; but I shall not trouble you for long.”

Fenton seemed to have but half caught the meaning of this impassioned
statement, for simple admiration of her exquisite purity of purpose
was fast getting the better of his caution.  He gave his knee a loud
slap.  “Nora,” he said, “you’re a wonderful young lady!”

For a moment she was silent and thoughtful.  “For mercy’s sake,” she
cried at last, “say nothing to make me feel that I have done this
thing too easily, too proudly and recklessly!  Really, I am anything
but brave.  I am full of doubts and fears.”

“You’re uncommonly handsome; that’s one sure thing!” said Fenton.  “I
would rather marry you than lose you.  Poor Mr. Lawrence!”  Nora
turned away in silence and walked to the window, which grew to her
eyes, for the moment, as the “glimmering square” of the poet.  “I
thought you loved him so!” he added, abruptly.  Nora turned back with
an effort and a blush.  “If he were to come to you now,” he went on,
“and go down on his knees and beg and plead and rave and all that
sort of thing, would you still refuse him?”

She covered her face with her hands.  “O George, George!” she cried.

“He will follow you, of course.  He will not let you go so easily.”

“Possibly; but I have begged him solemnly to let me take my way.
Roger is not one to rave and rage.  At all events, I shall refuse to
see him now.  A year hence I will think of it.  His great desire will
be, of course, that I don’t suffer.  I shall not suffer.”

“By Jove, not if I can help it!” cried Fenton, with warmth.  Nora
answered with a faint, grave smile, and stood looking at him in
appealing silence.  He colored beneath her glance with the pressure
of his thoughts.  They resolved themselves chiefly into the recurring
question, “What can be made of it?”  While he was awaiting
inspiration, he took refuge in a somewhat inexpensive piece of
gallantry.  “By the way, you must be hungry.”

“No, I am not hungry,” said Nora, “but I am tired.  You must find me
a lodging,—in some quiet hotel.”

“O, you shall be quiet enough,” he answered; but he insisted that
unless, meanwhile, she took some dinner, he should have her ill on
his hands.  They quitted the office, and he hailed a hack, which
drove them over to the upper Broadway region, where they were soon
established in a well-appointed restaurant.  They made, however, no
very hearty meal.  Nora’s hunger of the morning had passed away in
fever, and Fenton himself was, as he would have expressed it, off his
feed.  Nora’s head had begun to ache; she had removed her bonnet, and
sat facing him at their small table, leaning wearily against the
wall, her plate neglected, her arms folded, her bright expanded eyes
consulting the uncertain future.  He noted narrowly how much prettier
she was; but more even than by her prettiness he was struck by her
high spirit.  This belonged to an order of things in which he felt no
commission to dabble; but in a creature of another sort he was free
to admire such a luxury of conscience.  In man or woman the capacity
then and there to act was the thing he most relished.  Nora had not
faltered and wavered; she had chosen, and here she sat.  It was an
irritation to him to feel that he was not the manner of man for whom
such a girl would burn her ships; for, as he looked askance at her
beautiful absent eyes, he more than suspected that there was a
positive as well as a negative side to her refusal of her friend.
Poor Roger had a happier counterpart.  It was love, and not
indifference, that had pulled the wires of her adventure.  Fenton, as
we have intimated, was one who, when it suited him, could ride
rough-shod to his mark.  “You have told me half your story,” he said,
“but your eyes tell the rest.  You’ll not be Roger’s wife, but you’ll
not die an old maid.”

Nora blushed, but she answered simply, “Please don’t say that.”

“My dear girl,” he said, “I religiously respect your secrets.”  But,
in truth, he only half respected them.  Stirred as he was by her
beauty and by that sense of feminine appealingness which may be an
inspiring motive even to a very shabby fellow, he was keenly
mortified by feeling that her tenderness passed him by, barely
touching him with the hem of its garment.  She was doing mighty fine
things, but she was using him, her hard, vulgar cousin, as a
senseless stepping-stone.  These reflections quickened his
appreciation of her charm, but took the edge from his delicacy.  As
they rose to go, Nora, who in spite of her absent eyes had watched
him well, felt that cousinship had melted to a mere name.  George had
been to her maturer vision a painful disappointment.  His face, from
the moment of their meeting, had given her warning to withdraw her
trust.  Was it she or he who had changed since that fervid youthful
parting of sixteen months before?  She, in the interval, had been
refined by life; he had been vulgarized.  She had seen the world; she
had known better things and better men; she had known Hubert, and,
more than ever, she had known Roger.  But as she drew on her gloves
she reflected with horror that distress was making her fastidious.
She wished to be coarse and careless; she wished that she might have
eaten a heavy dinner, that she might enjoy taking George’s arm.  And
the slower flowed the current of her confidence, the softer dropped
her words.  “Now, dear George,” she said, with a desperate attempt at
a cheerful smile, “let me know where you mean to take me.”

“Upon my soul, Nora,” he said, with a hard grin, “I feel as if I had
a jewel I must lay in soft cotton.  The thing is to find it soft
enough.”  George himself, perhaps, she might endure; but she had a
growing horror of his friends.  Among them, probably, were the female
correlatives of the “parties” who had come to chat with Mr. Franks.
She prayed he might not treat her to company.  “You see I want to do
the pretty thing,” he went on.  “I want to treat you, by Jove, as I
would treat a queen!  I can’t thrust you all alone into an hotel, and
I can’t put up at one with you,—can I?”

“I am not in a position to be fastidious,” said Nora.  “I shall not
object to going alone.”

“No, no!” he cried, with a flourish of his hand.  “I will do for you
what I would do for my own sister.  I am not a fine gentleman, but I
know what’s proper.  I live in the house of a lady who lets out
rooms,—a very nice little woman; she and I are great cronies; I’m
sure you’ll like her.  She will give you the comforts of a home, and
all that sort of thing.”

Nora’s heart sank, but she assented.  They re-entered their carriage,
and a drive of moderate length brought them to a brownstone dwelling
of the third order of gentility, as one may say, stationed in a cheap
and serried row.  In a few moments, in a small tawdry front parlor,
Nora was introduced to George’s hostess, the nice little woman, Mrs.
Paul by name.  Nice enough she seemed, for Nora’s comfort.  She was
young and fair, plump and comely; she wore a great many ringlets.
She was a trifle too loving on short acquaintance, perhaps; but,
after all, thought Nora, who was she now, to complain of that?  When
the two women had gone up stairs, Fenton put on his hat,—he could
never meditate without it (he had written that last letter to Nora
with his beaver resting on the bridge of his nose),—and paced slowly
up and down the narrow entry, chewing the end of a cigar, with his
hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.  In ten minutes Mrs.
Paul reappeared.  “Well, sir,” she cried, “what does all this mean?”

“It means money, if you’ll not scream so loud,” he answered.  “Come
in here.”  They went into the parlor and remained there for a couple
of hours with closed doors.  At last Fenton came forth and left the
house.  He walked along the street, humming gently to himself.  Dusk
had fallen; he stopped beneath a lighted lamp at the corner, looked
up and down a moment, and then exhaled a deep, an almost melancholy
sigh.  Having thus relieved his conscience, he proceeded to business.
He consulted his watch; it was five o’clock.  An empty hack rolled
by; he called it and got in, breathing the motto of great spirits,
“Confound the expense!”  His business led him to visit successively
several of the best hotels.  Roger, he argued, starting immediately
in pursuit of Nora, would have taken the first train from Boston, and
would now have been more than an hour in town.  Fenton could, of
course, proceed only by probabilities; but according to these, Roger
was to be found at one of the establishments I have mentioned.
Fenton knew his New York, and, from what he knew of Roger, he
believed him to be at the “quietest” of these.  Here, in fact, he
found his name freshly registered.  He would give him time, however;
he would take time himself.  He stretched his long legs awhile on one
of the divans in the hall.  At last Roger appeared, strolling
gloomily down the corridor, with his eyes on the ground.  For a
moment Fenton scarcely recognized him.  He was pale and grave;
distress had already made him haggard.  Fenton observed that, as he
passed, people stared at him.  He walked slowly to the street door;
whereupon Fenton, fearing he might lose him, followed him, and stood
for a moment behind him.  Roger turned suddenly, as if from an
instinct of the other’s nearness, and the two faced each other.
Those dumb eyes of Roger’s for once were eloquent.  They glowed like
living coals.




X.


The good lady who enjoyed the sinecure of being mother-in-law to Mrs.
Keith passed on that especial Sunday an exceptionally dull evening.
Her son’s widow was oppressed and preoccupied, and took an early
leave.  Mrs. Keith’s first question on reaching home was as to
whether Nora had left her room.  On learning that she had quitted the
house alone, after dark, Mrs. Keith made her way, stirred by vague
conjecture, to the empty chamber, where, of course, she speedily laid
her hands on those two testamentary notes to which allusion has been
made.  In a moment she had read the one addressed to herself.
Perturbed as she was, she yet could not repress an impulse of
intelligent applause.  “Ah, how character plays the cards!” she
mused.  “How a good girl’s very errors set her off!”  If Roger longed
for Nora to-day, who could measure the morrow’s longing?  He might
enjoy, however, without waiting for the morrow, this refinement of
desire.  In spite of the late hour, Mrs. Keith repaired to his abode,
armed with the other letter, deeming this, at such a moment, a more
gracious course than to send for him.  The letter Roger found to be
brief but pregnant.  “Dear Roger,” it ran, “I learned this afternoon
the secret of all these years,—too late for our happiness.  I have
been strangely blind; you have been too forbearing,—generous where
you should have been strictly just.  I never dreamed of what this day
would bring.  Now, I must leave you; I can do nothing else.  This is
no time to thank you for what you have been to me, but I shall live
to do so yet.  Dear Roger, get married, and send me your children to
teach.  I shall live by teaching.  I have a family, you know; I go to
New York to-night.  I write this on my knees, imploring you to be
happy.  One of these days, when I have learned to be myself again, we
shall be better friends than ever.  I beg you, I beg you, not to
follow me.”

Mrs. Keith sat a long time with her host.  For the first time in her
knowledge of him she saw Roger violent,—violent with horror and
self-censure and vain imprecation.  “Take her at her word,” she said;
“don’t follow her.  Let her knock against the world a little, and she
will have you yet.”

This philosophy seemed to Roger too stoical by half; to sit at home
and let Nora knock against the world was more than he could
undertake.  “Whether she will have me or not,” he said, “I must bring
her back.  I am morally responsible for her.  Good God! think of her
afloat in that horrible city with that rascal of a half-cousin—her
‘family’ she calls him!—for a pilot!”  He took, of course, the first
train to New York.  How to proceed, where to look, was a hard
question; but to linger and waver was agony.  He was haunted, as he
went, with dreadful visions of what might have befallen her; it
seemed to him that he had never loved her before.

Fenton, as he recognized him, was a comfortable sight, in spite of
his detested identity.  He was better than uncertainty.  “You have
news for me!” Roger cried.  “Where is she?”

Fenton looked about him at his leisure, feeling, agreeably, that now
_he_ held the cards.  “Gently,” he said.  “Hadn’t we better retire?”
Upon which Roger, grasping his arm with grim devotion, led him to his
own apartment.  “I rather hit it,” George went on.  “I am not the
fool you once tried to make me seem.”

“Where is she,—tell me that!” Roger repeated.

“Allow me, dear sir,” said Fenton, settling himself in spacious
vantage.  “If I have come here to oblige you, you must let me take my
own way.  You don’t suppose I have rushed to meet you for the
pleasure of the thing.  I owe it to my cousin, in the first place, to
say that I have come without her knowledge.”

“If you mean only to torture me,” Roger answered, “say so outright.
Is she well? is she safe?”

“Safe? the safest creature in the city, sir!  A delightful home,
maternal care!”

Roger wondered whether Fenton was making horrible sport of his
trouble; he turned cold at the thought of maternal care of his
providing.  But he admonished himself to lose nothing by arrogance.
“I thank you extremely for your kindness.  Nothing remains but that I
should see her.”

“Nothing, indeed!  You are very considerate.  You know that she
particularly objects to seeing you.”

“Possibly!  But that is for her to say.  I claim the right to take
the refusal from her own lips.”

Fenton looked at him with an impudent parody of compassion.  “Don’t
you think you have had refusals enough?  You must enjoy them!”

Roger turned away with an imprecation, but he continued to swallow
his impatience.  “Mr. Fenton,” he said, “you have not come here, I
know, to waste words, nor have I to waste temper.  You see before you
a desperate man.  Come, make the most of me!  I am willing, I am
delighted, to be fleeced!  You will help me, but not for nothing.
Name your terms.”

Fenton flinched, but he did not protest; he only gave himself the
luxury of swaggering a little.  “Well, you see,” he answered, “my
assistance is worth something.  Let me explain how much.  You will
never guess!  I know your story; Nora has told me
everything,—everything!  We have had a great talk.  Let me give you
a little hint of my story,—and excuse egotism!  You proposed to her;
she refused you.  You offered her money, luxury, a position.  She
knew you, she liked you enormously, yet she refused you flat!  Now
reflect on this.”

There was something revolting to Roger in seeing his adversary
profaning these sacred mysteries; he protested.  “I _have_ reflected,
quite enough.  You can tell me nothing.  Her affections,” he added
stiffly, to make an end of it, “were pre-engaged.”

“Exactly!  You see how that complicates matters.  Poor, dear little
Nora!”  And Fenton gave a twist to his mustache.  “Imagine, if you
can, how a man placed as I am feels toward a woman,—toward _the_
woman!  If he reciprocates, it’s love, it’s passion, it’s what you
will, but it’s common enough!  But when he doesn’t repay her in kind,
when he can’t, poor devil, it’s—it’s—upon my word,” cried Fenton,
slapping his knee, “it’s chivalry!”

For some moments Roger failed to appreciate the remarkable purport of
these observations; then, suddenly, it dawned upon him.  “Do I
understand you,” he asked, in a voice gentle by force of wonder,
“that you are the man?”

Fenton squared himself in his chair.  “You have hit it, sir.  I am
the man,—the happy, the unhappy man.  D—n it, sir, it’s not my
fault!”

Roger stood staring; Fenton felt his eyes penetrating him to the
core.  “Excuse me,” said Roger, at last, “if I suggest your giving me
some slight evidence in support of this extraordinary claim!”

“Evidence? isn’t there about evidence enough?  When a young girl
gives up home and friends and fortune and—and reputation, and rushes
out into the world to throw herself into a man’s arms, it seems to me
you have got your evidence.  But if you’ll not take my word, you may
leave it!  I may look at the matter once too often, let me tell you!
I admire Nora with all my heart; I worship the ground she treads on;
but I confess I’m afraid of her; she’s too good for me; she was meant
for a finer gentleman than I!  By which I don’t mean you, of
necessity.  But you have been good to her, and you have a claim.  It
has been cancelled in a measure; but you wish to set it up again.
Now you see that I stand in your way; that if I had a mind to, I
might stand there forever!  Hang it, sir, I am playing the part of a
saint.  I have but a word to say to settle my case, and to settle
yours.  But I have my eye on a lady neither so young nor so pretty as
my cousin, yet whom I can marry with a better conscience, for she
expects no more than I can give her.  Nevertheless, I don’t answer
for myself.  A man isn’t a saint every day in the week.  Talk about
conscience when a beautiful girl sits gazing at you through a mist of
tears!  O, you have yourself to thank for it all!  A year and a half
ago, if you hadn’t treated me like a swindler, Nora would have been
content to treat me like a friend.  But women have a fancy for an
outlaw.  You turned me out of doors, and Nora’s heart went with me.
It has followed me ever since.  Here I sit with my ugly face and hold
it in my hand.  As I say, I don’t quite know what to do with it.  You
propose an arrangement, I inquire your terms.  A man loved is a man
listened to.  If I were to say to Nora to-morrow, ‘My dear girl, you
have made a mistake.  You are in a false position.  Go back to Mr.
Lawrence directly, and then we will talk about it!’ she would look at
me a moment with those beautiful eyes of hers, she would sigh, she
would gather herself up like a princess on trial for treason,
remanded to prison,—and she would march to your door.  Once she’s
within it, it’s your own affair.  That’s what I can do.  Now what can
you do?  Come, something handsome!”

Fenton spoke loud and fast, as if to outstrip self-contempt.  Roger
listened amazedly to this tissue of falsity, impudence, and greed,
and at last, as Fenton paused, and he seemed to see Nora’s very image
turning away with a shudder, his disgust broke forth.  “Upon my word,
sir,” he cried, “you go too far; you ask too much.  Nora in love with
you,—you, who haven’t the grace even to lie decently!  Tell me she’s
ill, she’s lost, she’s dead; but don’t tell me she can look at you
without horror!”

Fenton rose and stood for a moment, glaring with anger at his useless
self-exposure.  For an instant, Roger expected a tussle.  But Fenton
deemed that he could deal harder vengeance than by his fists.  “Very
good!” he cried.  “You have chosen.  I don’t mind your words; you’re
an ass at best, and of course you are twenty times an ass when you
are put out by a disagreeable truth.  But you are not such a fool, I
guess, as not to repent!”  And Fenton made a rather braver exit than
you might have expected.

Roger’s recent vigil with Mrs. Keith had been dismal enough; but he
was yet to learn that a sleepless night may contain deeper
possibilities of suffering.  He had flung back Fenton’s words, but
they returned to the charge.  When once the gate is opened to
self-torture, the whole army of fiends files in.  Before morning he
had fairly out-Fentoned Fenton.  There was no discretion in his own
love; why should there be in Nora’s?  We love as we must, not as we
should; and she, poor girl, might have bowed to the common law.  In
the morning he slept awhile for weariness, but he awoke to a world of
agitation.  If Fenton’s tale was true, and if, at Mrs. Keith’s
instigation, his own suspicions had done Hubert wrong, he would go to
Hubert, pour out his woes, and demand aid and comfort.  He must move
to find rest.  Hubert’s lodging was far up town; Roger started on
foot.  The weather was perfect; one of those happy days of February
which seem to snatch a mood from May,—a day when any sorrow is twice
a sorrow.  The winter was melting and trickling; you heard on all
sides, in the still sunshine, the raising of windows; on the edges of
opposing house-tops rested a vault of vernal blue.  Where was she
hidden, in the vast bright city?  The streets and crowds and houses
that concealed her seemed hideous.  He would have beggared himself
for the sound of her voice, though her words might damn him.  When at
last he reached Hubert’s dwelling, a sudden sense of all that he
risked checked his steps.  Hubert, after all, and Hubert alone, was a
possible rival, and it would be sad work to put the torch into his
hands!  So he turned heavily back to the Fifth Avenue and kept his
way to the Park.  Here, for some time he walked about, heeding,
feeling, seeing nothing but the glaring, mocking brightness of the
day.  At last he sat down on a bench; the delicious mildness of the
air almost sickened him.  It was some time before he perceived
through the mist of his thoughts that two ladies had descended from a
carriage hard by, and were approaching his bench,—the only one near
at hand.  One of these ladies was of great age and evidently infirm;
she came slowly, leaning on her companion’s arm; she wore a green
shade over her eyes.  The younger lady, who was in the prime of youth
and beauty, supported her friend with peculiar tenderness.  As Roger
rose to give them place, he dimly observed on the young lady’s face a
movement of recognition, a smile,—the smile of Miss Sands!  Blushing
slightly, she frankly greeted him.  He met her with the best grace at
his command, and felt her eyes, as he spoke, scanning the trouble in
his aspect.  “There is no need of my introducing you to my aunt,” she
said.  “She has lost her hearing, and her only pleasure is to bask in
the sun.”  She turned and helped this venerable invalid to settle
herself on the bench, put a shawl about her, and satisfied her feeble
needs with filial solicitude.  At the end of ten minutes of
commonplace talk, relieved however by certain intelligent glances on
either side, Roger found a kind of healing quality in the presence of
this agreeable woman.  At last these sympathetic eye-beams resolved
themselves, on Miss Sands’s part, into speech.  “You are either very
unwell, Mr. Lawrence, or very unhappy.”

Roger hesitated an instant, under the empire of that stubborn
aversion to complaint which, in his character, was half modesty and
half philosophy.  But Miss Sands seemed to sit there eying him so
like the genius of friendship, that he answered simply, “I am
unhappy!”

“I was afraid it would come!” said Miss Sands.  “It seemed to me when
we met, a year ago, that your spirits were too high for this life.
You know you told me something which gives me the right,—I was going
to say, to be interested; let me say, at least, to be compassionate.”

“I hardly remember what I told you.  I only know that I admired you
to a degree which may very well have loosened my tongue.”

“O, it was about the charms of another you spoke!  You told me about
the young girl to whom you had devoted yourself.”

“I was dreaming then; now I am awake!”  Roger hung his head and poked
the ground with his stick.  Suddenly he looked up, and she saw that
his eyes were filled with tears.  “Dear lady,” he said, “you have
stirred deep waters!  Don’t question me.  I am ridiculous with
disappointment and sorrow!”

She gently laid her hand upon his arm.  “Let me hear it all!  I
assure you I can’t go away and leave you sitting here the same image
of suicidal despair I found you.”

Thus urged, Roger told his story.  Her attention made him understand
it better himself, and, as he talked, he worked off the superficial
disorder of his grief.  When he came to speak of this dismal
contingency of Nora’s love for her cousin, he threw himself frankly
upon Miss Sands’s pity, upon her wisdom.  “Is such a thing possible?”
he asked.  “Do you believe it?”

She raised her eyebrows.  “You must remember that I know neither Miss
Lambert nor the gentleman you speak of.  I can hardly risk a
judgment; I can only say this, that the general effect of your story
is to diminish my esteem for women,—to elevate my opinion of men.”

“O, except Nora on one side, and Fenton on the other!  Nora is an
angel!”

Miss Sands gave a vexed smile.  “Possibly!  You are a man, and you
ought to have loved a woman.  Angels have a good conscience
guaranteed them; they may do what they please.  If I should except
any one, it would be Mr. Hubert Lawrence.  I met him the other
evening.”

“You think it is Hubert then?” Roger demanded mournfully.

Miss Sands broke into a brilliant laugh.  “For an angel, Miss Lambert
hasn’t lost her time on earth!  But don’t ask me for advice, Mr.
Lawrence; at least not now and here.  Come and see me to-morrow, or
this evening.  Don’t regret having spoken; you may believe at least
that the burden of your grief is shared.  It was too miserable that
at such a time you should be sitting here alone, feeding upon your
own heart.”

These seemed to Roger excellent words; they lost nothing on the
speaker’s lips.  She was indeed extremely beautiful; her face,
softened by intelligent pity, was lighted by a gleam of tender irony
of his patience.  Was he, after all, stupidly patient, ignobly fond?
There was in Miss Sands something delightfully rich and mellow.
Nora, for an instant, seemed a flighty school-girl.  He looked about
him, vaguely questioning the empty air, longing for rest, yet
dreading forfeiture.  He left his place and strolled across the
dull-colored turf.  At the base of a tree, on its little bed of
sparse raw verdure, he suddenly spied the first violet of the year.
He stooped and picked it: its mild firm tint was the color of
friendship.  He brought it back to Miss Sands, who now had risen with
her companion and was preparing to return to the carriage.  He
silently offered her the violet,—a mere pin’s head of bloom; a
passionate throb of his heart had told him that this was all he could
offer her.  She took it with a sober smile; it seemed to grow pale
beneath her dark blue eyes.  “We shall see you again?” she said.

Roger felt himself blushing to his brows.  He had a vision on either
hand of an offered cup,—the deep-hued wine of illusion,—the bitter
draught of constancy.  A certain passionate instinct answered,—an
instinct deeper than his wisdom, his reason, his virtue,—deep as his
love.  “Not now,” he said.  “A year hence!”

Miss Sands turned away and stood for a moment as motionless as some
sculptured statue of renunciation.  Then, passing her arm caressingly
round her companion, “Come, dear aunt,” she murmured: “we must go.”
This little address to the stone-deaf dame was her single tribute to
confusion.  Roger walked with the ladies to their carriage and
silently helped them to enter it.  He noted the affectionate tact
with which Miss Sands adjusted her movements to those of her
companion.  When he lifted his hat, his friend bowed, as he fancied,
with an air of redoubled compassion.  She had but imagined his prior
loss,—she knew his present one!  “She would make an excellent wife!”
he said, as the carriage rolled away.  He stood watching it for some
minutes; then, as it wheeled round a turn, he was seized with a
deeper, sorer sense of his impotent idleness.  He would go to Hubert
with his accusation, if not with his appeal.




XI.


Nora, relieved of her hostess’s company, turned the key in her door
and went through certain motions mechanically suggestive of her being
at rest and satisfied.  She unpacked her little bag and repaired her
disordered toilet.  She took out her inkstand and prepared to write a
letter to Miss Murray.  But she had not written many words before she
lapsed into sombre thought.  Now that she had seen George again and
judged him, she was coming rapidly to feel that to have exchanged
Roger’s care for his care was, for the time, to have paid a scanty
compliment to Roger.  But she took refuge from this reflection in her
letter, and begged for an immediate reply.  From time to time, as she
wrote, she heard a step in the house, which she supposed to be
George’s; it somehow quickened her pen and the ardor of her petition.
This was just finished when Mrs. Paul reappeared, bearing a salver
charged with tea and toast,—a gracious attention, which Nora was
unable to repudiate.  The lady took advantage of it to open a
conversation.  Mrs. Paul’s overtures, as well as her tea and toast,
were the result of her close conference with Fenton; but though his
instructions had made a very pretty show as he laid them down, they
dwindled sensibly in the vivid glare of Nora’s mistrust.  Mrs. Paul,
nevertheless, seated herself bravely on the bed and rubbed her plump
pretty hands like the best little woman in the world.  But the more
Nora looked at her, the less she liked her.  At the end of five
minutes she had conceived a horror of her comely stony face, her
false smile, her little tulle cap, her artificial ringlets.  Mrs.
Paul called her my dear, and tried to take her hand; Nora was afraid
that, the next thing, she would kiss her.  With a defiant flourish,
Nora addressed her letter with Miss Murray’s venerated title: “I
should like to have this posted, please,” she said.

“Give it to me, my dear; I will attend to it,” said Mrs. Paul; and
straightway read the address.  “I suppose this is your old
schoolmistress.  Mr. Fenton told me all about it.”  Then, after
turning the letter for a moment, “Keep it over a day!”

“Not an hour,” said Nora, with decision, “My time is precious.”

“Why, my dear,” said Mrs. Paul, “we shall be delighted to keep you a
month.”

“You are very good.  You know I have my living to make.”

“Don’t talk about that!  I make _my_ living,—I know what it means!
Come, let me talk to you as a friend.  Don’t go too far.  Suppose,
now, you take it all back?  Six months hence, it may be too late.  If
you leave him lamenting too long, he’ll marry the first pretty girl
he sees.  They always do,—a man refused is just like a widower.
They’re not so faithful as the widows!  But let me tell you it’s not
every girl that gets such a chance; I would have snapped at it.
He’ll love you the better, you see, for your having led him a little
dance.  But he mustn’t dance too long!  Excuse the liberty I take;
but Mr. Fenton and I, you see, are great friends, and I feel as if
his cousin was my cousin.  Take back this letter and give me just one
word to post,—_Come_!  Poor little man!  You must have a high
opinion of men, my dear, to play such a game with this one!”

If Roger had wished for a proof that Nora still cared for him, he
would have found it in the disgust she felt at hearing Mrs. Paul
undertake his case.  The young girl colored with her sense of the
defilement of sacred things.  George, surely, for an hour, at least,
might have kept her story intact.  “Really, madam,” she answered, “I
can’t discuss this matter.  I am extremely obliged to you.”  But Mrs.
Paul was not to be so easily baffled.  Poor Roger, roaming helpless
and hopeless, would have been amazed to hear how warmly his cause was
being urged.  Nora, of course, made no attempt to argue the case.
She waited till the lady had exhausted her eloquence, and then, “I am
a very obstinate person,” she said; “you waste your words.  If you go
any further I shall take offence.”  And she rose, to signify that
Mrs. Paul might do likewise.  Mrs. Paul took the hint, but in an
instant she had turned about the hard reverse of her fair face, in
which defeated self-interest smirked horribly.  “Bah! you’re a silly
girl!” she cried; and swept out of the room.  Nora, after this,
determined to avoid a second interview with George.  Her bad headache
furnished a sufficient pretext for escaping it.  Half an hour later
he knocked at her door; quite too loudly, she thought, for good
taste.  When she opened it, he stood there, excited, angry,
ill-disposed.  “I am sorry you are ill,” he said: “but a night’s rest
will put you right.  I have seen Roger.”

“Roger! is he here?”

“Yes, he’s here.  But he don’t know where you are.  Thank the Lord
you left him! he’s a brute!”  Nora would fain have learned
more,—whether he was angry, whether he was suffering, whether he had
asked to see her; but at these words she shut the door in her
cousin’s face.  She hardly dared think of what offered impertinence
this outbreak of Fenton’s was the rebound.  Her night’s rest brought
little comfort.  She wondered whether Roger had supposed George to be
her appointed mediator, and asked herself whether it was not her duty
to see him once again and bid him a respectfully personal farewell.
It was a long time after she rose before she could bring herself to
leave her room.  She had a vague hope that if she delayed, her
companions might have gone out.  But in the dining-room, in spite of
the late hour, she found George gallantly awaiting her.  He had
apparently had the discretion to dismiss Mrs. Paul to the background,
and apologized for her absence by saying that she had breakfasted
long since and had left the house.  He seemed to have slept off his
wrath and was full of brotherly _bonhomie_.  “I suppose you will want
to know about Roger,” he said, when they were seated at breakfast.
“He had followed you directly, in spite of your hope that he
wouldn’t; but it was not to beg you to come back.  He counts on your
repentance, and he expects you to break down and come to him on your
knees, to beg his pardon and promise never to do it again.  Pretty
terms to marry a man on, for a woman of spirit!  But he doesn’t know
his woman, does he, Nora?  Do you know what he intimated? indeed, he
came right out with it.  That you and I want to make a match!  That
you’re in love with me, Miss, and ran away to marry me.  That we
expected him to forgive us and endow us with a pile of money.  But
he’ll not forgive us,—not he!  We may starve, we and our brats,
before he looks at us.  Much obliged!  We shall thrive, for many a
year, as brother and sister, sha’n’t we, Nora, and need neither his
money nor his pardon?”

In reply to this speech, Nora sat staring in pale amazement.  “Roger
thought,” she at last found words to say, “that it was to marry _you_
I refused him,—to marry _you_ I came to New York?”

Fenton, with seven-and-twenty years of impudence at his back, had
received in his day snubs and shocks of various shades of intensity;
but he had never felt in his face so chilling a blast of reprobation
as this cold disgust of Nora’s.  We know that the scorn of a lovely
woman makes cowards brave; it may do something towards making knaves
honest men.  “Upon my word, my dear,” he cried, “I am sorry I hurt
your feelings.  It may be offensive, but it is true.”

Nora wished in after years she had been able to laugh at this
disclosure; to pretend, at least, to an exhilaration she so little
felt.  But she remained almost sternly silent, with her eyes on her
plate, stirring her tea.  Roger, meanwhile, was walking about under
this detestable deception.  Let him think anything but that!  “What
did you reply,” she asked, “to this—to this—”

“To this handsome compliment?  I replied that I only wished it were
true; but that I feared I had no such luck!  Upon which he told me to
go to the Devil,—in a tone which implied that he didn’t much care if
you went with me.”

Nora listened to this speech in freezing silence.  “Where is Roger?”
she asked at last.

Fenton shot her a glance of harsh mistrust.  “Where is he?  What do
you want to know that for?”

“Where is he, please!” she simply repeated.  And then, suddenly, she
wondered how and where it was the two men had happened to meet.
“Where did you find him?” she went on.  “How did it happen?”

Fenton drained his cup of tea at one long gulp before he answered.
“My dear Nora,” he said, “it’s all very well to be modest, it’s all
very well to be proud; but take care you are not ungrateful!  I went
purposely to look him up.  I was convinced he would have followed you
to beg and implore you, as I supposed, to come back.  I wanted to say
to him, ‘She’s safe, she’s happy, she’s in the best hands.  Don’t
waste your time, your words, your hopes.  Give her rope.  Go quietly
home and leave things to me.  If she gets homesick, I will let you
know.’  You see I’m frank, Nora; that’s what I meant to say.  But I
was received with this broadside.  I found a perfect bluster of
injured vanity.  ‘You’re her lover, she’s your mistress, and be
d——d to both of you!’”

That George deliberately lied Nora did not distinctly say to herself,
for she lacked practice in this range of incrimination.  But she as
little said to herself that this could be the truth.  “I am not
ungrateful,” she answered firmly.  “But where was it?”

At this, George pushed back his chair.  “Where—where?  Don’t you
believe me?  Do you want to go and ask him if it’s true?  What is the
matter with you, anyway?  What are you up to?  Have you put yourself
into my hands, or not?”  A certain manly indignation was now kindled
in his breast; he was equally angry with Roger, with Nora, and with
himself; fate had offered him an overdose of contumely, and he felt a
reckless, savage impulse to wring from the occasion that compliment
to his power which had been so rudely denied to his delicacy.  “Are
you using me simply as a vulgar tool?  Don’t you care for me the
least little bit?  Let me suggest that for a girl in your—your
ambiguous position, you are several shades too proud.  Don’t go back
to Roger in a hurry!  You are not the immaculate young person you
were but two short days ago.  Who am I, what am I, to the people
whose opinion you care for?  A very low fellow, my dear; and yet, in
the eyes of the world, you have certainly taken up with me.  If you
are not prepared to do more, you should have done less.  Nora, Nora,”
he went on, breaking into a vein none the less revolting for being
more ardent, “I confess I don’t understand you!  But the more you
puzzle me the more you fascinate me; and the less you like me the
more I love you.  What has there been, anyway, between you and
Lawrence?  Hang me if I can understand!  Are you an angel of purity,
or are you the most audacious of flirts?”

She had risen before he had gone far.  “Spare me,” she said, “the
necessity of hearing your opinions or answering your questions.
Please be a gentleman!  Tell me, I once more beg of you, where Roger
is to be found?”

“Be a gentleman!” was a galling touch.  He placed himself before the
door.  “I refuse the information,” he said.  “I don’t mean to have
been played with, to have been buffeted hither by Roger and thither
by you!  I mean to make something out of all this.  I mean to request
you to remain quietly in this room.  Mrs. Paul will keep you company.
You didn’t treat her over well, yesterday; but, in her way, she is
quite as strong as you.  Meanwhile I shall go to our friend.  ‘She’s
locked up tight,’ I will say; ‘she’s as good as in jail.  Give me
five thousand dollars and I’ll let her out.’  Of course he will begin
to talk about legal proceedings.  Then I will tell him that he is
welcome to take legal proceedings if he doesn’t mind the exposure.
The exposure won’t be pleasant for you, Nora, you know; for the
public takes things in the lump.  It won’t hurt me!”

“Heaven forgive you!” murmured Nora, for all response to this
explosion.  It made a hideous whirl about her; but she felt that to
advance in the face of it was her best safety.  It sickened rather
than frightened her.  She went to the door.  “Let me pass!” she said.

Fenton stood motionless, leaning his head against the door, with his
eyes closed.  She faced him a moment, looking at him intently.  He
seemed ineffably repulsive.  “Coward!” she cried.  He opened his eyes
at the sound; for an instant they met hers; then a burning blush
blazed out strangely on his dead complexion; he strode past her,
dropped into a chair, and buried his face in his hands.  “O Lord!” he
cried.  “I am an ass!”

Nora made it the work of a single moment to reach her own room and
fling on her bonnet and shawl, of another to descend to the hall
door.  Once in the street she never stopped running till she had
turned a corner and put the house out of sight.  She went far,
hurried along by the ecstasy of relief and escape, and it was some
time before she perceived that this was but half the question, and
that she was now quite without refuge.  Thrusting her hand into her
pocket to feel for her purse, she found that she had left it in her
room.  Stunned and sickened as she was already, it can hardly be said
that the discovery added to her grief.  She was being precipitated
toward a great decision; sooner or later made little difference.  The
thought of seeing Hubert Lawrence had now taken possession of her.
Reserve, prudence, mistrust, had melted away; she was mindful only of
her trouble, of his nearness, and of the way he had once talked to
her.  His address she well remembered, and she neither paused nor
faltered.  To say even that she reflected would be to speak amiss,
for her longing and her haste were one.  Between them both it was
with a beating heart that she reached his door.  The servant admitted
her without visible surprise (for Nora wore, as she conceived, the
air of some needy parishioner) and ushered her into his bachelor’s
parlor.  As she crossed the threshold, she perceived with something
both of regret and of relief, that he was not alone.  He was sitting
somewhat stiffly, with folded arms, facing the window, near which,
before an easel, stood a long-haired gentleman of foreign and
artistic aspect, giving the finishing touches to a portrait in
crayons.  Hubert was in position for a likeness of his handsome face.
When Nora appeared, his handsome face remained for a moment a blank;
the next it turned most eloquently pale.  “Miss Lambert!” he cried.

There was such a tremor in his voice that Nora felt that, for the
moment, she must have self-possession for both.  “I interrupt you,”
she said with extreme deference.

“We are just finishing!” Hubert answered.  “It is my portrait, you
see.  You must look at it.”  The artist made way for her before the
easel, laid down his implements, and took up his hat and gloves.  She
looked mechanically at the picture, while Hubert accompanied him to
the door, and they talked awhile about another sitting, and about a
frame that was to be sent home.  The portrait was clever, but
superficial; better looking, at once, and worse looking than
Hubert,—elegant, effeminate, unreal.  An impulse of wonder passed
through her mind that she should happen just then to find him engaged
in this odd self-reproduction.  It was a different Hubert that turned
and faced her as the door closed behind his companion, the real, the
familiar Hubert.  He had gained time; but surprise, admiration,
conjecture, a lively suggestion of dismay, were shining in his
handsome eyes.  Nora had dropped into the chair vacated by the
artist; and as she sat there with clasped hands, she felt the young
man reading the riddle of her shabby dress and her excited face.  For
him, too, she was the real Nora.  Dismay in Hubert’s face began to
elbow its companions.  He advanced, pushed towards her the chair in
which he had been posturing, and, as he seated himself, made a
half-movement to offer his hand; but before she could take it, he had
begun to play with his watch-chain.  “Nora,” he asked, “what is it?”

What was it, indeed?  What was her errand, and in what words could it
be told?  An inexpressible weakness had taken possession of her, a
sense of having reached the goal of her journey, the term of her
strength.  She dropped her eyes on her shabby skirt and passed her
hand over it with a gesture of eloquent simplicity.  “I have left
Roger,” she said.

Hubert made no answer, but his silence seemed to fill the room.  He
sank back in his chair, still looking at her with startled eyes.  The
fact intimidated him; he was amazed and confused; yet he felt he must
say something, and in his confusion he uttered a gross absurdity.
“Ah,” he said: “with his consent?”

The sound of his voice was so grateful to her that, at first, she
hardly heeded his words.  “I am alone,” she added, “I am free.”  It
was after she had spoken, as she saw him, growing, to his own sense,
infinitely small in the large confidence of her gaze, rise in a kind
of agony of indecision and stand before her, stupidly staring, that
she felt he had neither taken her hand, nor dropped at her feet, nor
divinely guessed her trouble; that, in fact, his very silence was a
summons to tell her story and justify herself.  Her presence there
was either a rapture or a shame.  Nora felt as if she had taken a
jump, and was learning in mid-air that the distance was tenfold what
she had imagined.  It is strange how the hinging-point of great
emotions may rest on an instant of time.  These instants, however,
seem as ages, viewed from within; and in such a reverberating moment
Nora felt something that she had believed to be a passion melting
from beneath her feet, crumbling and crashing into the gulf on whose
edge she stood.  But her shame at least should be brief.  She rose
and bridged this dizzy chasm with some tragic counterfeit of a smile.
“I have come—I have come—”  She began and faltered.  It was a pity
some great actress had not been there to note upon the tablets of her
art the light, all-eloquent tremor of tone with which she transposed
her embarrassment into the petition, “Could you lend me a little
money?”

Hubert was simply afraid of her.  All his falsity, all his levity,
all his egotism and sophism, seemed to crowd upon him and accuse him
in deafening chorus; he seemed exposed and dishonored.  It was with
an immense sense of relief that he heard her ask this simple favor.
Money?  Would money buy his release?  He took out his purse and
grasped a roll of bills; then suddenly he was overwhelmed by a sense
of his cruelty.  He flung the thing on the floor, and passed his
hands over his face.  “Nora, Nora,” he cried, “say it outright; you
despise me!”

He had become, in the brief space of a moment, the man she once had
loved; but if he was no longer the rose, he stood too near it to be
wantonly bruised.  Men and women alike need in some degree to respect
those they have suffered to wrong them.  She stooped and picked up
the porte-monnaie, like a beggar-maid in a ballad.  “A very little
will do,” she said.  “In a day or two I hope to be independent.”

“Tell me at least what has happened!” he cried.

She hesitated a moment.  “Roger has asked me to be his wife.”
Hubert’s head swam with the vision of all that this simple statement
embodied and implied.  “I refused,” Nora added, “and, having refused,
I was unwilling to live any longer on his—on his—”  Her speech at
the last word melted into silence, and she seemed to fall a-musing.
But in an instant she recovered herself.  “I remember your once
saying that you would have liked to see me poor and homeless.  Here I
am!  You ought at least,” she added with a laugh, “to pay for the
exhibition!”

Hubert abruptly drew out his watch.  “I expect here at any moment,”
he said, “a young lady of whom you may have heard.  She is to come
and see my portrait.  I am engaged to marry her.  I was engaged to
marry her five months ago.  She is rich, pretty, charming.  Say but a
single word, that you don’t despise me, that you forgive me, and I
will give her up, now, here, forever, and be anything you will take
me for,—your husband, your friend, your slave!”  To have been able
to make this speech gave Hubert immense relief.  He felt almost
himself again.

Nora fixed her eyes on him, with a kind of unfathomable gentleness.
“You are engaged, you were engaged?  How strangely you talk about
giving her up!  Give her my compliments!”  It seemed, however, that
Nora was to have the chance of offering her compliments personally.
The door was thrown open and admitted two ladies whom Nora vaguely
remembered to have seen.  In a moment she recognized them as the
persons whom, on the evening she had gone to hear Hubert preach, he
had left her, after the sermon, to conduct to their carriage.  The
younger one was decidedly pretty, in spite of a nose a trifle too
aquiline.  A pair of imperious dark eyes, as bright as the diamond
which glittered in each of her ears, and a nervous, capricious
rapidity of motion and gesture, gave her an air of girlish
brusquerie, which was by no means without charm.  Her mother’s
aspect, however, testified to its being as well to enjoy this charm
at a distance.  She was a stout, coarse-featured, good-natured woman,
with a jaded, submissive expression, and seemed to proclaim by a
certain ponderous docility, as she followed in her daughter’s wake,
the subserviency of matter to mind.  Both ladies were dressed to the
uttermost limit of opportunity.  They came into the room staring
frankly at Nora, and overlooking Hubert, with a gracious implication
of his being already one of the family.  The situation was a trying
one, but he faced it as he might.

“This is Miss Lambert,” he said gravely; and then with an effort to
dissipate embarrassment by a jest, waving his hand toward his
portrait, “This is the Reverend Hubert Lawrence!”

The elder lady moved toward the picture, but the other came straight
to Nora.  “I have seen you before!” she cried defiantly, and with
defiance in her pretty eyes.  “And I have heard of you too!  Yes, you
are certainly very handsome.  But pray, what are you doing here?”

“My dear child!” said Hubert, imploringly, and with a burning
side-glance at Nora.  The world seemed to him certainly very cruel.

“My dear Hubert,” said the young lady, “what is she doing here?  I
have a right to know.  Have you come running after him even here?
You are a wicked girl.  You have done me a wrong.  You have tried to
turn him away from me.  You kept him in Boston for weeks, when he
ought to have been here; when I was writing to him day after day to
come.  I heard all about it!  I don’t know what is the matter with
you.  I thought you were so very well off!  You look very poor and
unhappy, but I must say what I think!”

“My own darling, be reasonable!” murmured her mother.  “Come and look
at this beautiful picture.  There’s no deceit in that noble face!”

Nora smiled charitably.  “Don’t attack me,” she said.  “If I ever
wronged you, I was quite unconscious of it, and I beg your pardon
now.”

“Nora,” murmured Hubert, piteously, “spare me!”

“Ah, does he call you Nora?” cried the young lady.  “The harm’s done,
madam!  He will never be what he was.  You have changed, Hubert!”
And she turned passionately upon her intended.  “You know you have!
You talk to me, but you think of her.  And what is the meaning of
this visit?  You are both strangely excited; what have you been
talking about?”

“Mr. Lawrence has been telling me about you,” said Nora: “how pretty,
how charming, how gentle you are!”

“I am not gentle!” cried the other.  “You are laughing at me!  Was it
to talk about my prettiness you came here?  Do you go about alone,
this way?  I never heard of such a thing.  You are shameless! do you
know that?  But I am very glad of it; because once you have done this
for him, he will not care for you.  That’s the way with men.  And I
am not pretty either, not as you are!  You are pale and tired; you
have got a horrid dress and shawl, and yet you are beautiful!  Is
that the way I must look to please you?” she demanded, turning back
to Hubert.

Hubert, during this rancorous _tirade_, had stood looking as dark as
thunder, and at this point he broke out fiercely, “Good God, Amy!
hold your tongue,—I command you.”

Nora, gathering her shawl together, gave Hubert a glance.  “She loves
you,” she said, softly.

Amy stared a moment at this vehement adjuration; then she melted into
a smile and turned in ecstasy to her mother.  “O, did you hear that?”
she cried.  “That’s how I like him.  Please say it again!”

Nora left the room; and, in spite of her gesture of earnest
deprecation, Hubert followed her downstairs to the street.  “Where
are you going?” he asked in a whisper.  “With whom are you staying?”

“I am alone,” said Nora.

“Alone in this great city?  Nora, I _will_ do something for you.”

“Hubert,” she said, “I never in my life needed help less than at this
moment.  Farewell.”  He fancied for an instant that she was going to
offer him her hand, but she only motioned him to open the door.  He
did so, and she passed out.

She stood there on the pavement, strangely, almost absurdly, free and
light of spirit.  She knew neither whither she should turn nor what
she should do, yet the fears which had haunted her for a whole day
and night had vanished.  The sky was blazing blue overhead; the
opposite side of the street was all in sun; she hailed the joyous
brightness of the day with a kind of answering joy.  She seemed to be
in the secret of the universe.  A nursery-maid came along, pushing a
baby in a perambulator.  She stooped and greeted the child, and
talked pretty nonsense to it with a fervor which left the young woman
staring.  Nurse and child went their way, and Nora lingered, looking
up and down the empty street.  Suddenly a gentleman turned into it
from the cross-street above.  He was walking fast; he had his hat in
his hand, and with his other hand he was passing his handkerchief
over his forehead.  As she stood and watched him draw near, down the
bright vista of the street, there came upon her a singular and
altogether nameless sensation, strangely similar to the one she had
felt a couple of years before, when a physician had given her a dose
of ether.  The gentleman, she perceived, was Roger; but the short
interval of space and time which separated them seemed to expand into
a throbbing immensity and eternity.  She seemed to be watching him
for an age, and, as she did so, to be floating through the whole
circle of emotion and the full realization of being.  Yes, she was in
the secret of the universe, and the secret of the universe was, that
Roger was the only man in it who had a heart.  Suddenly she felt a
palpable grasp.  Roger stood before her, and had taken her hand.  For
a moment he said nothing; but the touch of his hand spoke loud.  They
stood for an instant scanning the change in each other’s faces.
“Where are you going?” said Roger, at last, imploringly.

Nora read silently in his haggard eyes the whole record of his
suffering.  It is a strange truth that this seemed the most beautiful
thing she had ever looked upon; the sight of it was delicious.  It
seemed to whisper louder and louder that secret about Roger’s heart.

Nora collected herself as solemnly as one on a deathbed making a
will; but Roger was still in miserable doubt and dread.  “I have
followed you,” he said, “in spite of that request in your letter.”

“Have you got my letter?” Nora asked.

“It was the only thing you had left me,” he said, and drew it forth,
creased and crumpled.

She took it from him and thrust it into the pocket of her dress,
never taking her eyes off his own.  “Don’t try and forget that I
wrote it,” she said.  “I want you to see me burn it up, and to
remember that.”

“What does it mean, Nora?” he asked, in hardly audible tones.

“It means that I am a wiser girl to-day than _then_.  I know myself
better, I know you better.  O Roger!” she cried, “it means
everything!”

He passed her hand through his arm and held it there against his
heart, while he stood looking hard at the pavement, as if to steady
himself amid this great convulsion of things.  Then raising his head,
“Come,” he said; “come!”

But she detained him, laying her other hand on his arm.  “No; you
must understand first.  If I am wiser now, I have learnt wisdom at my
cost.  I am not the girl you proposed to on Sunday.  I feel—I feel
_dishonored_!” she said, uttering the word with a vehemence that
stirred his soul to its depths.

“My own poor child!” he murmured, staring.

“There is a young girl in that house,” Nora went on, “who will tell
you that I am shameless!”

“What house? what young girl?”

“I don’t know her name.  Hubert is engaged to marry her.”

Roger gave a glance at the house behind them, as if to fling defiance
and oblivion upon all that it suggested and contained.  Then turning
to Nora with a smile of exquisite tenderness: “My dear Nora, what
have we to do with Hubert’s young girls?”

Roger, the reader will admit, was on a level with the occasion,—as
with every other occasion that subsequently presented itself.

Mrs. Keith and Mrs. Lawrence are very good friends.  On being
complimented on possessing the confidence of so charming a woman as
Mrs. Lawrence, Mrs. Keith has been known to say, opening and shutting
her fan, “The fact is, Nora is under a very peculiar obligation to
me!”


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