Part 10

“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?”