Part 5

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.”