Part 4

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.