Part 17

He was walking up and down, and he swung around and glared at me savagely as I stood in the doorway. He had a paper in his hand (Bennet's letter), and his face was so convulsed and ugly and accusing that involuntarily I shrank back as he came toward me. I have never seen a man in such an ungovernable rage. He did not give me a chance to say anything. There was nothing of which he did not accuse me. I was a thing whose meaning I did not even know. He, so he said, had been a deluded fool, and had let himself be led along by a girl he had supposed too good to take advantage of him. Yet all the while, while I was taking gifts--yes, the clothes on my back--and other favors, even my position, which I kept only because of Mr. Forman's obligations to him, I had, it seems, given myself to another man!

The accusations were so gross and monstrous and black that I could not answer him. I knew what was in Bennet's letter--terms of endearment, expressions of undying love, _and_ (this is where I came under the judgment of Roger) the desire to see me soon again and hold me in his arms.

Yes, Bob had held me in his arms,--he believed I was to be his wife,--but I was not the thing Roger accused me of being. My relations with Bennet were as pure as a girl's can be. It would have been impossible for a girl to have any other kind of relations with a man like Bennet. I stood bewildered under the storm of his accusations and cruel reproaches, and the revelation of the things he had done for me without my knowledge or consent. At first, as he denounced me, I had flinched before him, because I was aware of having really deceived him, in a way; but as he continued to heap abuse upon me, some rebellious spirit arose in me to defy him. I had not had an Irish grandmother for nothing.

I waited till he was through, and then I said:

"You think you are a man, but I declare you are a brute and a coward. Yes, it is true, I am engaged to Mr. Bennet, and I defy you to say to him what you have said to me."

Then I fled from his room to my own. I locked myself in there. He came knocking at my door, and rattling at the handle, but I would not open it, and then he called out:

"Nora, I am going away now--forever--never to come back, you understand. You will never see my face again unless you come out and speak to me now."

But I would not open my door. I heard him going down-stairs and the slam of the front door. Now I realized what had happened. He had actually gone! Never before had he left me like this. I opened my door, went down-stairs, and then I saw him waiting for me in the living-room. I tried to run back, but he was too quick for me. He sprang after me, caught me in his arms, and half carried me up to his room. There he locked the door, and put the key into his pocket. I wouldn't look at him, I wouldn't speak to him. He came over, and tried to put his arms about me, but I shoved him away, and he said in a voice I had never heard from him before:

"So I've lost you, have I, Nora?" And then, as I would not answer him: "So Bennet cut me out. That's it, is it?"

I said:

"No; no one cut you out but yourself. You've shown yourself to me just as you are, and you're ugly. I _hate_ you!" and I burst into tears.

He knelt down beside me. I was sitting on the edge of the big Morris chair, and all the while he talked to me I had my face covered with my hands.

"Listen to me, Nora. I know I've said things to you for which I ought to be horsewhipped; but I was nearly insane. I am still. I don't know what to think of you, what to do to you. The thought that _you_, whom I have cherished as something precious and different from every one else in my life, have been deceiving me all these months drives me distracted. I could _kill_ you without the slightest compunction."

I looked at him at that, and I said:

"Roger, you don't think I've done anything wrong, do you?"

"I don't know what to think," he said. "It is a revelation to me that you were capable of deceiving me at all."

"But I am only _engaged_ to Bob; that's all."

"Only _engaged_! In heaven's name! what do you mean? Do you intend to marry this man?"

"No, I never did; but--"

I was beginning to soften a bit to him. I could see his point of view. He was holding me by the arms so I couldn't get away from him, and when you are very close like that to a man you love (almost in his arms) you cannot help being moved. I was, anyway, and I said:

"I'll try and explain everything to you, if you won't be too angry with me."

"Go on."

"Well, you know when I got that fifty dollars, and gave up my position? Well, I spent it all and got down to ten cents, and I couldn't get work, and I was nearly starving--honestly I was. That last day I didn't have any dinner and hardly any luncheon or breakfast. Well then, I met Bob, and I told him--that very first night--and he lent me ten dollars, and insisted that I should take something from him each week till I got a position."

"In God's name, why did you not ask _me_?"

"I _couldn't_, Roger; I couldn't."

"Why not? Why not?"

"Because--because--I _loved you_. I could take help from a man I didn't love, but not from one I did."

I began to sob, and he sat down in the Morris chair, and lifted me up on his knee, but he held me off, so I could continue with my story.

"Go on now."

So then I told him everything: how, later, when I at last returned the money to Bennet, he had proposed to me, and how I couldn't help accepting him. "And, anyway," I finished, "engagements are nothing. I'm engaged to two other men as well."

I thought this was my chance to make a reckless clean breast of everything.

He tumbled me out of his lap at that, stared at me, gasped, threw back his head, and burst into a sort of wild laughter, almost of relief. Then suddenly he pulled me up into his arms, and held me hard against his breast for the longest time, just as if he were never going to let me go again, and then I knew just as well as anything that he did love me, even though he wouldn't admit it. So, with that knowledge, I was ready to forgive him for anything or everything.

You see, things were all turned about now, and I was in the position of the accuser and not of the accused, and that despite the attitude he pretended to assume. He wanted to know if all three of my friends had kissed me, and I had to admit that they had, and tell him just how many times. Dick had kissed me just that one time, Bob four times, and the Western editor just once. It was a bitter pill for Roger to swallow, and he said:

"And I have been afraid to touch you."

"That's not my fault," I said. "You can kiss me any time you wish."

He didn't accept my hint or invitation. He was walking up and down now, pulling at his lip, and at last he said:

"Nora, get your things all packed. I'll have to take you with me."

"Where?"

"I'm obliged to go abroad on a certain pressing matter. I came here to-day specially to be with you before leaving. I see I can't leave you behind."

"Do you mean--" I said, and for one delirious moment I imagined something that was impossible.

"I mean simply that, though it will be devilishly inconvenient, I shall be obliged to take you with me. I can't trust you here."

That thought still persisted in my foolish head, and I said:

"Roger, do you mean that we are going to be married?"

He stared at me a moment, and then said shortly:

"No. That's impossible."

I swallowed a lump that came up hard in my throat, and I could not speak. Then after a moment I said:

"You want to take me, then, because you are afraid some other man might get me, not because you want me yourself."

He said, with a slight smile:

"The first part of your statement is certainly true; the second part is questionable."

"I'm not going," I told him.

"Oh, yes, you are."

"Oh, no, I'm not."

"Are we to have another combat?"

"I'm not going."

"Can't leave your fiance?" he asked.

"I'm just not going, that's all."

"What do you intend to do, then, while I'm gone?"

"Just what I'm doing now."

"You intend to continue your--er--engagement?"

"No; I'll break that off." I looked at Roger. "I owe that to _him_."

"H-m! Owe nothing to me, eh?"

My eyes filled up. I did owe much to him. He came over, picked my face up by the chin, and then drew me back to the seat by the fireplace, seating himself in the Morris chair, with me on the stool. He talked very gently to me now, and as if he were speaking to a child; but I could think only of one thing--that he was going away and I _could_ not go with him. Why, he had not even told me he loved me, and though a few moments before I had believed he did, now the torturing doubts came up again. If he loved me, would he not want to marry me? Other men, like Bob and Dick, did.

"Roger, tell me this," I said. "Suppose I went to school and then to college, would I be like--other girls--I mean society girls--girls in your class?"

"You're better than they are now. You are in a class all by yourself, Nora."

"Don't answer me like that. You know what I want to know. Would I be socially their equal, for instance?"

"Why, naturally. That's a foolish question, Nora."

"No, it isn't. I just want to know. Now, supposing I got all that--that--culture--and everything, and I had nice manners, and dressed so I looked pretty and everything--and you wouldn't be a bit ashamed of me, and we could say my people were all sorts of grand folks,--they really are in England--my father's people,--well, suppose all this, and then suppose that you really loved me, just as I do you, then wouldn't I be good enough to be your wife?"

"Nora, why do you persist about that? I tell you once and for all that that is absolutely out of the question. I'm not going to marry you. In fact, I can't."

"Why?"

"I won't go into details. Let it suffice that there are reasons, and put the idea out of your head."

So, after that, there was nothing more for me to say; but he realized I would not go with him. When he at last resigned himself to this, he made me promise that while he was gone I would not only break my engagements with Bennet and the Western editor and Dick, but that I would in no circumstances let any man kiss or touch me, or make love to me in any way. He said if I'd promise him that, he'd be able to make his trip to Europe without undue anxiety, and that he would come back just as soon as he could.

"All right, then," I said; "I cross my neck."

I wrote three letters that night, all of which he read. If he had had his way, I would have rewritten them and worded them differently. He thought I ought to say: "Dear Mr. Bennet," "Dear Mr. Lawrence," etc., instead of "Dear Bob," "Dear Dick." My letters were virtually the same in each case. I asked to be released from my engagement; but I begged Bob to forgive me, and I said I should never forget him as long as I lived. Roger argued with me a whole half-hour to take that out. But I didn't, and I even cried at the thought of how I was hurting this boy who loved me. I was so miserable, in fact, that Roger said we'd go out and hear some music, and that would cheer me up.

Conscience is a peculiar thing. We can shut it up tightly, and delude ourselves with diversions that infatuate and blind us. I did not think of Bob while Roger was with me. I put on my prettiest dress, one of the dresses I now knew that he had paid for! It was a shimmering, Oriental-looking thing that had the stamp of Paquin upon it, and I had a wonderful emerald necklace, and a wreath of green leaves, with little diamonds sprinkled like dew over it, in my hair. Roger said that there was no one in the world like me. I suppose there was not. I certainly hope there was not. I was a fine sort of person!

I think it was the Thomas Orchestra we heard. I forget. I should have enjoyed it, I suppose, in ordinary circumstances, but I could not think of anything that night except that Roger was going away and that I might never see him again. And I thought of all the accidents that occurred at sea, and even though he was holding my hand under the program, I felt that I was the most unhappy girl in the world.

We couldn't stop to have even a little supper after the theater, for he was taking a train to New York, whence he was to sail.

His man Holmes (it was the first time I had ever seen him) was at the house when we got back, and had his bag and everything ready, waiting for him. I thought as he was going away on such a long trip he would at least kiss me good-by, and I could not keep from crying when, after we got in, he said right before Holmes, who _wouldn't_ leave the room:

"I'll have to rush now. Be a good girl."

Then he said I was to go down to Mr. Townsend's (his lawyer's) office, and he would tell me about some arrangements he himself had made for me, and I was to write to him every day, though he said nothing about writing to me. He wrote down an address in London where I was to send my letters. The only thing he did that approached a caress was that, when his man went ahead of him down the stairs, he stopped in the upper hall, lifted my face, and gave me a long, searching look. Then he said:

"I'm not likely to think about anything but you, darling." Then he went quickly down the stairs, leaving me sobbing up there.

XXXI

I had enough to occupy my thoughts now without thinking of Bennet. Passionately as I loved Roger, I perceived that night, in a dim sort of way and with a burning remembrance of his brutality to me, that I was fast becoming the infatuated victim of one who was utterly unworthy. He had not hesitated to denounce and accuse me of things of which I was certainly incapable of being guilty. Though he had said I was his cherished and precious girl, and he knew I was a good girl (in the sense the world calls good), yet he did not consider me worthy of being his wife. It irritated him, that poor aspiration of mine. Yet other men, better men than he, men who, I do not doubt, though not possessing his great wealth, were his social equals,--Bennet and my editor,--had not thought me beneath them. I puzzled and tortured myself over it, but I could find no answer.

No one could deny that I was a clever girl. I was not the genius O'Brien and perhaps Roger believed, but I certainly was above the average girl in intelligence. Not many girls of eighteen are writing stories and having them accepted by the magazines. And yet, queerly enough, beyond my one precocious talent, I was in many ways peculiarly gullible and stupid. Why, the girls at the Y. W. C. A. teased me in all sorts of ways because of this, and Estelle used to say a blind beggar could sell me a gold brick at any street corner, and I would believe every word he said. This peculiar streak of credulousness in me was, I suppose, the reason I never found out anything about Mr. Hamilton.

He never talked to me about his business or home affairs. I knew he was president of half a dozen big firms, because I saw his name on stationery. Sometimes he talked to me about his horses and dogs,--he had many of these,--but he always said my little dog Verley, which he had never given back to me, and which was not, after all, a thoroughbred, was his inseparable companion. Even Mrs. Kingston and Mama Owens and Lolly knew more about this man than I did.

Love, it seems, is not only blind, but deaf, dumb, and paralyzed. I heard nothing, I knew nothing, and, what is more, I would have believed nothing that was not good of him. Surely a faith like that is deserving of some reward!

There is an adage of my mother's land something like this, "Our actions are followed by their consequences as surely as a body by its shadow." That proverb recurred to me in the days that followed.

The morning after Roger went, our bell rang before I was up. Our servant "slept out," and had not yet arrived. So Margaret went down, grumbling about the girl, supposing she had lost her key. As I didn't have to be at my office till ten, and as I had been up late, I turned over to go to sleep again, when I heard Margaret at my door. She came in in her bath-robe. She said Mr. Butler was down-stairs, and wanted to see me at once.

I don't know what I thought. I know I felt panic-stricken and afraid. Roger had sent my note to Bob by messenger the previous evening, so he had had it over night. I slipped on a dressing-gown quickly and went down-stairs.

Butler was sitting stiffly in the middle of the reception-hall, and as I came down he stood up, though he did not touch the hand I held out to him. He said abruptly:

"What did you do to Bennet?"

I felt like an overtaken criminal. I could not say a word. I could not look at the face of Bennet's friend. He said:

"Bob had a dinner engagement with me at a friend's house last night. He didn't turn up. I feared something was wrong. In fact, I've feared for Bob ever since he became infatuated with you." Butler did not mince his words; he just stabbed me with them. "He has been walking about the city like a madman all night long. What did you do to him?"

"Oh, George," I said falteringly, "I had to break it off."

As if distinctly to cut me for calling him "George" (I had always called him that), he addressed me as "Miss Ascough."

"Miss Ascough, were you ever really engaged to Bennet?"

He asked that as if the thought of it was something not at all to his liking. I nodded.

"And you broke it off, you say?"

Again I nodded.

"Why?"

"Because I didn't love him," I said truthfully.

I was so nervous and conscience-smitten and unhappy, and the room was so cold, that I was seized with a shivering fit, and could hardly keep my teeth from chattering; but Butler did not seem at all moved by my condition.

"May I ask if you were 'in love,' as you call it, with him when you accepted him?"

I shook my head. I could not trust myself to speak.

"Why did you accept him, then?"

"He had been good to me," I faltered.

"Oh, I see. It was his reward, eh?" He sneered in my face. "I came here," he said, "with some idea of patching up things. I wanted to help Bennet. He's in a bad way."

What could I say? After a while he said:

"Will you go back with me? I have him at our rooms."

"It would do no good."

"You mean you could not be made to reconsider the thing? You may be mistaken. You may care for him, after all. There are few like him, I assure you. You're dead lucky to have a man like poor Bennet care for you. He's of the salt of the earth."

"I know; but--I can't deceive him any longer. I'm--in love--with another man."

There was a long silence after that, Butler just staring at me. Then he asked:

"Been in love long?"

I nodded.

"Before you met Bennet?"

Again I nodded.

He laughed bitterly.

"Personally I suspected you from the first. I had an intuitive feeling that there was something under cover about you. I never could see what Bennet saw in you. He was head and shoulders above you in every way. You're not in his class at all. I don't mean that in the cheap social sense--simply morally. Bennet's been my friend for years. I know him. There's no one like him. It's damned hard luck, I can tell you, for me to see him come up against a proposition like you. According to your own story, you must have deceived him from the first. Women like you--"

He stopped there, for I was crying so bitterly that mama came in to see what the trouble was. Margaret was listening all the time at the head of the stairs. Butler then just clapped his hat on his head, picked up his stick, and went.

And that was the opinion of me of one of the brightest men in the United States, a man who subsequently became internationally famous. Nothing could have equaled the contempt of his looks or his cutting words. He had stripped me bare. For one startling moment the scales dropped from my eyes. I _saw_ myself! And I shrank before what I saw--shrank as only a weak coward can.

O'Brien had called me a "dead-game sport"; Roger once said I was a "mongrel by blood, but a thoroughbred by instinct"; Lolly had called me a "snake"; but George Butler, that keen-sighted, clear-headed man, knew me for something to be despised! What did I think of myself? Like every one else, I was capable of staring wide-eyed at my own shortcomings only for a little while, and then, like every one else, I charitably and hastily and in fear drew the curtains before me, and tried to hide myself behind them.

I pitied Bennet, whom I had hurt; but I had a vaster pity for myself, whom Roger had hurt.

Perhaps it will not be out of place for me to say here that Bennet achieved all that I tried to do. Such fame (if fame I may call it) as came to me later was not of a solid or enduring kind. My work showed always the effect of my life--my lack of training, my poor preparation for the business of writing, my dense ignorance. I can truly say of my novels that they are strangely like myself, unfulfilled promises. But Bennet! He climbed to the top despite me, and there he will always be.

It may well be believed that the days that followed were unhappy ones for me. Not only had I lost my two best friends, Bennet and Lolly, but Roger had disappeared, as it were, completely from my life.

I went to Mr. Townsend's office, as he had told me to do, but I did not accept the "arrangements" that Roger had made for me, and this despite the very earnest exhortations of his lawyer. I did not want, and I would not touch, the money that Roger had directed should be put in banks for me. He ought to have known I would not do that.

All day long my face burned. Something within me, too, was burning like a wild-fire. A thousand thoughts and ideas came rushing upon me. Everything that Roger had ever done for or said to me recurred to my mind, and jumbled with these thoughts came others of Bennet.

His was the most honest heart in the world. The little he had done for me had all been open and above board. He had not even declared his love for me until the day I was out of his debt, and free, therefore, to give him an honest answer.

But Roger! When I would not take what he tried to force upon me, he had found tricky channels through which they would fall upon me, anyway, and then had taunted me with their possession!

When I got home from work that night I asked Margaret if she knew that Roger had been paying for most of my clothes. She answered, with a chuckle:

"Naturally."

"What made you think that?" I asked.

"Because no girl working as you are could afford such things. That Paquin gown alone is easily worth two hundred dollars, if not more."

"I paid twenty for it," I said.

She laughed. I told her about the shop where there were "bargains," and she, as Lolly had done, laughed in my face.

"No shop," she said, "could give you a bargain in sables such as you have."

I had a brown fur set. I did not know they were sables. I had been less than a year in America. I was just eighteen. I came from a large, poor family. I did not know the value of clothes or jewels any more than poor, green Irish or Polish immigrant girls would know it in that time. What could I know of sables?

We lived very quietly now. I had to stay at home, as I had promised Roger to go out with no one till he returned. And then, of course, Bennet and Butler no longer came, and I abandoned my music lessons. I had never taken more than a half-hearted interest in them.

A restless spirit possessed me at this time, and I could not settle my mind to anything. I used to wander about Roger's rooms, with my thoughts disjointed and jumbled. I thought I was brooding over his absence, and then again I thought I was worrying about Bob. Then one day as I stood staring into the leaping flames of that fireplace, almost like an inspiration there came to me a great idea for a story.

For an hour I sat staring into the flames, the story slowly taking root in my mind, and the fascinating plot and characters unraveling before me. It was ten o'clock at night when I began to write, and I worked without stopping till the dawn.