Part 12

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.