Part 6

“Of course! I am not so sure. He will, I suppose, if he is asked.”

“Of course I shall ask him.”

“Nonsense. You will not enjoy that.”

“We are old friends by this time,” said Nora, with terrible irony. “I shall not in the least mind.”

Roger could have choked himself. He had brought his case to this: Fenton a martyred proscript, and Nora a brooding victim of duty. “Do I want to turn the man out of the house?” he cried. “Do me a favor—I insist upon it. Say nothing to him, let him stay as long as he chooses. I am not afraid! I don’t trust him, but I trust you. I am curious to see how long he will have the impudence to stay. A fortnight hence I shall be justified. You will say to me, ‘Roger, you were right. George is not a gentleman.’ There! I insist.”

“A gentleman? Really, what are we talking about? Do you mean that he wears a false diamond in his shirt? He will take it off if I ask him. There’s a long way between wearing false diamonds—”

“And stealing real ones! I don’t know. I have always fancied they go together. At all events, Nora, he is not to suspect that he has been able to make trouble between two old friends.”

Nora stood for a moment in irresponsive meditation. “I think he means to go,” she said. “If you want him to stay, you must ask him.” And without further words she marched out of the room. Roger followed her with his eyes. He thought of Lady Castlewood in “Henry Esmond,” who looked “devilish handsome in a passion.”

Lady Castlewood, meanwhile, ascended to her own room, flung her work upon the floor, and, dropping into a chair, betook herself to weeping. It was late before she slept. She awoke with a new consciousness of the burden of life. Her own burden certainly was small, but her strength, as yet, was untested. She had thought, in her many reveries, of a possible disagreement with Roger, and prayed that it might never come by a fault of hers. The fault was hers now in that she had surely cared less for duty than for joy. Roger, indeed, had shown a pitiful smallness of view. This was a weakness; but who was she, to keep account of Roger’s weaknesses? It was to a weakness of Roger’s that she owed her food and raiment and shelter. It helped to quench her resentment that she felt, somehow, that, whether Roger smiled or frowned, George would still be George. He was not a gentleman: well and good; neither was she, for that matter, a lady. But a certain manful hardness like George’s would not be amiss in the man one was to love.

A simpler soul than Fenton’s might have guessed at the trouble of this quiet household. Fenton read in it as well an omen of needful departure. He accepted the necessity with an acute sense of failure,—almost of injury. He had gained nothing but the bother of being loved. It was a bother, because it gave him an unwonted sense of responsibility. It seemed to fling upon all things a dusky shade of prohibition. Yet the matter had its brightness, too, if a man could but swallow his superstitions. He cared for Nora quite enough to tell her he loved her; he had said as much, with an easy conscience, to girls for whom he cared far less. He felt gratefully enough the cool vestment of tenderness which she had spun about him, like a web of imponderable silver; but he had other uses for his time than to go masquerading through Nora’s fancy. The defeat of his hope that Roger, like a testy old uncle in a comedy, would shower blessings and bank-notes upon his union with his cousin, involved the discomfiture of a secondary project; the design, namely, of borrowing five thousand dollars. The reader will smile; but such is the simplicity of “smart men.” He would content himself now with five hundred. In this collapse of his visions he fell a-musing upon Nora’s financial value.

“Look here,” he said to her, with an air of heroic effort, “I see I’m in the way. I must be off.”

“I am sorry, George,” said Nora, sadly.

“So am I. I never supposed I was proud. But I reckoned without my host!” he said with a bitter laugh. “I wish I had never come. Or rather I don’t. It is worth it all to know you.”

She began to question him soothingly about his projects and prospects; and hereupon, for once, Fenton bent his mettle to simulate a pathetic incapacity. He set forth that he was discouraged; the future was a blank. It was child’s play, attempting to do anything without capital.

“And you have no capital?” said Nora, anxiously.

Fenton gave a poignant smile. “Why, my dear girl, I’m a poor man!”

“How poor?”

“Poor, poor, poor. Poor as a rat.”

“You don’t mean that you are penniless?”

“What is the use of my telling you? You can’t help me. And it would only make you unhappy.”

“If you are unhappy, I want to be!”

This golden vein of sentiment might certainly be worked. Fenton took out his pocket-book, drew from it four bank-notes of five dollars each, and ranged them with a sort of mournful playfulness in a line on his knee. “That’s my fortune.”

“Do you mean to say that twenty dollars is all you have in the world?”

Fenton smoothed out the creases, caressingly, in the soiled and crumpled notes. “It’s a great shame to bring you down to a poor man’s secrets,” he said. “Fortune has raised you above them.”

Nora’s heart began to beat. “Yes, it has. I have a little money, George. Some eighty dollars.”

Eighty dollars! George suppressed a groan. “He keeps you rather low.”

“Why, I have very little use for money, and no chance, here in the country, to spend it. Roger is extremely generous. Every few weeks he makes me take some. I often give it away to the poor people hereabouts. Only a fortnight ago I refused to take any more on account of my still having this. It’s agreed between us that I may give what I please in charity, and that my charities are my own affair. If I had only known of you, George, I should have appointed you my pensioner-in-chief.”

George was silent. He was wondering intently how he might arrange to become the standing recipient of her overflow. Suddenly he remembered that he ought to protest. But Nora had lightly quitted the room. Fenton repocketed his twenty dollars and awaited her reappearance. Eighty dollars were not a fortune; still they were eighty dollars. To his great annoyance, before Nora returned Roger presented himself. The young man felt for an instant as if he had been caught in an act of sentimental burglary, and made a movement to conciliate his detector. “I am afraid I must bid you good by,” he said.

Roger frowned, and wondered whether Nora had spoken. At this moment she reappeared, flushed and out of breath with the excitement of her purpose. She had been counting over her money, and held in each hand a little fluttering package of bank-notes. On seeing Roger she stopped and blushed, exchanging with her cousin a rapid glance of inquiry. He almost glared at her, whether with warning or with menace she hardly knew. Roger stood looking at her, half amazed. Suddenly, as the meaning of her errand flashed upon him, he turned a furious crimson. He made a step forward, but cautioned himself; then, folding his arms, he silently waited. Nora, after a moment’s hesitation, rolling her notes together, came up to her cousin and held out the little package. Fenton kept his hands in his pockets and devoured her with his eyes. “What’s all this?” he said brutally.

“O George!” cried Nora; and her eyes filled with tears.

Roger had divined the situation; the shabby victimization of the young girl and her kinsman’s fury at the disclosure of his avidity. He was angry; but he was even more disgusted. From so vulgar a knave there was little rivalship to fear. “I am afraid I am rather a marplot,” he said. “Don’t insist, Nora. Wait till my back is turned.”

“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” said Nora.

“You? O, nothing whatever!” cried Roger with a laugh.

Fenton stood leaning against the mantel-piece, desperately sullen, with a look of vicious confusion. “It is only I who have anything to be ashamed of,” he said at last, bitterly, with an effort. “My poverty!”

Roger smiled graciously. “Honest poverty is never shameful!”

Fenton gave him an insolent stare. “Honest poverty! You know a great deal about it.”

“Don’t appeal to poor little Nora, man, for her savings,” Roger went on. “Come to me.”

“You are unjust,” said Nora. “He didn’t appeal to me. I appealed to him. I guessed his poverty. He has only twenty dollars in the world.”

“O you poor little fool!” roared Fenton’s eyes. Roger was delighted. At a single stroke he might redeem his incivility and reinstate himself in Nora’s affections. He took out his pocket-book. “Let me help you. It was very stupid of me not to have guessed your embarrassment.” And he counted out a dozen notes.

Nora stepped to her cousin’s side and passed her hand through his arm. “Don’t be proud,” she murmured caressingly.

Roger’s notes were new and crisp. Fenton looked hard at the opposite wall, but, explain it who can, he read their successive figures,—a fifty, four twenties, six tens. He could have howled.

“Come, don’t be proud,” repeated Roger, holding out this little bundle of wealth.

Two great passionate tears welled into the young man’s eyes. The sight of Roger’s sturdy sleekness, of the comfortable twinkle of patronage in his eye, was too much for him. “I shall not give _you_ a chance to be proud,” he said. “Take care! Your papers may go into the fire.”

“O George!” murmured Nora; and her murmur seemed to him delicious.

He bent down his head, passed his arm round her shoulders, and kissed her on her forehead. “Good by, dearest Nora,” he said.

Roger stood staring, with his proffered gift. “You decline?” he cried, almost defiantly.

“‘Decline’ is not the word. A man does not decline an insult.”

Was Fenton, then, to have the best of it, and was his own very generosity to be turned against him? Blindly, passionately, Roger crumpled the notes into his fist and tossed them into the fire. In an instant they began to blaze.

“Roger, are you mad?” cried Nora. And she made a movement to rescue the crackling paper. Fenton burst into a laugh. He caught her by the arm, clasped her round the waist, and forced her to stand and watch the brief blaze. Pressed against his side, she felt the quick beating of his heart. As the notes disappeared her eyes sought Roger’s face. He looked at her stupidly, and then turning on his heel he walked out of the room. Her cousin, still holding her, showered upon her forehead half a dozen fierce kisses. But disengaging herself—“You must leave the house!” she cried. “Something dreadful will happen.”

Fenton had soon packed his valise, and Nora, meanwhile, had ordered a vehicle to carry him to the station. She waited for him in the portico. When he came out, with his bag in his hand, she offered him again her little roll of bills. But he was a wiser man than half an hour before. He took them, turned them over, and selected a one-dollar note. “I will keep this,” he said, “in remembrance, and only spend it for my last dinner.” She made him promise, however, that if trouble really overtook him, he would let her know, and in any case he would write. As the wagon went over the crest of an adjoining hill he stood up and waved his hat. His tall, gaunt young figure, as it rose dark against the cold November sunset, cast a cooling shadow across the fount of her virgin sympathies. Such was the outline, surely, of the conquering hero, not of the conquered. Her fancy followed him forth into the world with a sense of comradeship.

V.

Roger’s quarrel with his young companion, if quarrel it was, was never repaired. It had scattered its seed; they were left lying, to be absorbed in the conscious soil or dispersed by some benignant breeze of accident, as destiny might appoint. But as a manner of clearing the air of its thunder, Roger, a week after Fenton’s departure, proposed she should go with him for a fortnight to town. Later, perhaps, they might arrange to remain for the winter. Nora had been longing vaguely for the relief of a change of circumstances; she assented with great good-will. They lodged at an hotel,—not the establishment at which they had made acquaintance. Here, late in the afternoon, the day after their arrival, Nora sat by the window, waiting for Roger to come and take her to dinner, and watching with the intentness of country eyes the hurrying throng in the street; thinking too at moments of a certain blue bonnet she had bought that morning, and comparing it, not uncomplacently, with the transitory bonnets on the pavement. A gentleman was introduced; Nora had not forgotten Hubert Lawrence. Hubert had occupied for more than a year past a pastoral office in the West, and had recently had little communication with his cousin. Nora he had seen but on a single occasion, that of his visit to Roger, six months after her advent. She had grown in the interval, from the little girl who slept with the “Child’s Own Book” under her pillow and dreamed of the Prince Avenant, into a lofty maiden who reperused the “Heir of Redcliffe,” and mused upon the loves of the clergy. Hubert; too, had changed in his own degree. He was now thirty-one years of age, and his character had lost something of a certain boyish vagueness of outline, which formerly had not been without its grace. But his elder grace was scarcely less effective. Various possible half-shadows in his personality had melted into broad, shallow lights. He was now, distinctly, one of the light-armed troops of the army of the Lord. He fought the Devil as an irresponsible skirmisher, not as a sturdy gunsman planted beside a booming sixty-pounder. The clerical cloth, as Hubert wore it, was not unmitigated sable; and in spite of his cloth, such as it was, humanity rather than divinity got the lion’s share of his attentions. He loved doubtless, in this world, the heavenward face of things, but he loved, as regards heaven, the earthward. He was rather an idler in the walks of theology, and he was uncommitted to any very rigid convictions. He thought the old theological positions in very bad taste, but he thought the new theological negations in no taste at all. In fact, Hubert believed so vaguely and languidly in the Devil that there was but slender logic in his having undertaken the cure of souls. He administered his spiritual medicines in homoeopathic doses. It had been maliciously said that he had turned parson because parsons enjoy peculiar advantages in approaching the fair sex. The presumption is in their favor. Our business, however, is not to pick up idle reports. Hubert was, on the whole, a decidedly light weight, and yet his want of spiritual passion was by no means, in effect, a want of motive or stimulus; for the central pivot of his being continued to operate with the most noiseless precision and regularity,—the slim, erect, inflexible _Ego_. To the eyes of men, and especially to the eyes of women, whatever may have been the moving cause, the outer manifestation was very agreeable. If Hubert had no great firmness of faith, he had a very pretty firmness of manner. He was gentle without timidity, frank without arrogance, clever without pedantry. The common measure of clerical disallowance was reduced in his hands to the tacit protest of a generous personal purity. His appearance bore various wholesome traces of the practical lessons of his Western pastorate. This had not been to his taste; he had had to apply himself, to devote himself, to compromise with a hundred aversions. His talents had been worth less to him than he expected, and he had been obliged, as the French say, to _payer de sa personne_,—that person for which he entertained so delicate a respect. All this had given him a slightly jaded, overwearied look, certain to deepen his interest in feminine eyes. He had actually a couple of fine wrinkles in his seraphic forehead. He secretly rejoiced in his wrinkles. They were his crown of glory. He had suffered, he had worked, he had been bored. Now he believed in earthly compensations.

“Dear me!” he said, “can this be Nora Lambert?”

She had risen to meet him, and held out her hand with girlish frankness. She was dressed in a light, silk dress; she seemed a young woman grown. “I have been growing hard in all these years,” she said. “I have had to catch up with those _pieds énormes_.” The readers will not have forgotten that Hubert had thus qualified her lower members. Ignorant as she was, at the moment, of the French tongue, her memory had instinctively retained the words, and she had taken an early opportunity to look out _pied_ in the dictionary. _Énorme_, of course, spoke for itself.

“You must have caught up with them now,” Hubert said, laughing. “You are an enormous young lady. I should never have known you.” He sat down, asked various questions about Roger, and adjured her to tell him, as he said, “all about herself.” The invitation was flattering, but it met only a partial compliance. Unconscious as yet of her own charm, Nora was oppressed by a secret admiration of her companion, whose presence seemed to open a brilliant vista. She compared him with her cousin, and wondered that he should be at once so impressive and so different. She blushed a little, privately, for Fenton, and was not ill pleased to think he was absent. In the light of Hubert’s good manners, his admission that he was no gentleman acquired an excessive force. By this thrilling intimation of the diversity of the male sex, the mental pinafore of childhood seemed finally dismissed. Hubert was so frank and friendly, so tenderly and gallantly patronizing, that more than once she felt herself beginning to expand; but then, suddenly, something absent in the tone of his assent, a vague fancy that, in the gathering dusk, he was looking at her all at his ease, rather than listening to her, converted her bravery into what she knew to be deplorable little-girlishness. On the whole, this interview may have passed for Nora’s first lesson in the art, indispensable to a young lady on the threshold of society, of talking for half an hour without saying anything. The lesson was interrupted by the arrival of Roger, who greeted his cousin with almost extravagant warmth, and insisted upon his staying to dinner. Roger was to take Nora after dinner to a concert, for which he felt no great enthusiasm; he proposed to Hubert, who was a musical man, to occupy his place. Hubert demurred awhile; but in the meantime Nora, having gone to prepare herself, reappeared, looking extremely well in the blue crape bonnet before mentioned, with her face bright with anticipated pleasure. For a moment Roger was vexed at having resigned his office; Hubert immediately stepped into it. They came home late, the blue bonnet nothing the worse for wear, and the young girl’s face lighted up by her impressions. Her animation was extreme; she treated Roger to a representation of the concert, and made a great show of voice. Her departing childishness, her dawning tact, her freedom with Roger, her half-freedom with Hubert, made a charming mixture, and insured for her auditors the success of the entertainment. When she had retired, amid a mimic storm of applause from the two gentlemen, Roger solemnly addressed his cousin. “Well, what do you think of her? I hope you have no fault to find with her feet.”

“I have had no observation of her feet,” said Hubert; “but she will have very handsome hands. She is a very nice creature.” Roger sat lounging in his chair with his hands in his pockets, his chin on his breast, and a heavy gaze fixed on Hubert. The latter was struck with his deeply preoccupied aspect. “But let us talk of you rather than of Nora,” he said. “I have been waiting for a chance to tell you that you look very poorly.”

“Nora or I,—it’s all one. She is the only thing in life I care for.”

Hubert was startled by the sombre energy of his tone. The old polished, placid Roger was in abeyance. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you are altogether wrong. Live for yourself. You may be sure she will do as much. You take it too hard.”

“Yes, I take it too hard. It troubles me.”

“What’s the matter? Is she a naughty child? Is she more than you bargained for?” Roger sat gazing at him in silence, with the same grave eye. He began to suspect Nora had turned out a losing investment. “Has she—a—low tastes?” he went on. “Surely not with that sweet face!”

Roger started to his feet impatiently. “Don’t misunderstand me!” he cried. “I have been longing to see some one,—to talk,—to get some advice,—some sympathy. I am fretting myself away.”

“Good heavens, man, give her a thousand dollars and send her back to her family. You have educated her.”

“Her family! She has no family! She’s the loneliest as well as the sweetest, wisest, best of creatures! If she were only a tenth as good, I should be a happier man. I can’t think of parting with her; not for all I possess.”

Hubert stared a moment. “Why, you are in love.”

“Yes,” said Roger, blushing. “I am in love.”

“Dear me!” murmured Hubert.

“I am not ashamed of it,” rejoined Roger, softly.

It was no business of Hubert’s, certainly; but he felt the least bit disappointed. “Well,” he said coolly, “why don’t you marry her?”

“It is not so simple as that!”

“She will not have you?”

Roger frowned impatiently. “Reflect a moment. You pretend to be a man of delicacy.”

“You mean she is too young? Nonsense. If you are sure of her, the younger the better.”

“For my unutterable misery,” said Roger, “I have a conscience. I wish to leave her free and take the risk. I wish to be just and let the matter work itself out. You may think me absurd, but I wish to be loved for myself, as other men are loved.”

It was a specialty of Hubert’s that in proportion as other people grew hot, he grew cool. To keep cool, morally, in a heated medium was, in fact, for Hubert a peculiar satisfaction. He broke into a long light laugh. “Excuse me,” he said, “but there is something ludicrous in your attitude. What business has a lover with a conscience? None at all! That’s why I keep out of it. It seems to me your prerogative to be downright. If you waste any more time in hair-splitting, you will find your young lady has taken things in the lump!”

“Do you really think there is danger?” Roger demanded, pitifully. “Not yet awhile. She’s only a child. Tell me, rather, is she only a child? You have spent the evening beside her: how does she strike a stranger?”

While Hubert’s answer lingered on his lips, the door opened and Nora came in. Her errand was to demand the use of Roger’s watch-key, her own having mysteriously vanished. She had begun to take out her pins and had muffled herself for this excursion in a merino dressing-gown of sombre blue. Her hair was gathered for the night into a single massive coil, which had been loosened by the rapidity of her flight along the passage. Roger’s key proved a complete misfit, so that she had recourse to Hubert’s. It hung on the watch-chain which depended from his waistcoat, and some rather intimate fumbling was needed to adjust it to Nora’s diminutive timepiece. It worked admirably, and she stood looking at him with a little smile of caution as it creaked on the pivot. “I would not have troubled you,” she said, “but that without my watch I should oversleep myself. You know Roger’s temper, and what I should suffer if I were late for breakfast!”

Roger was ravished at this humorous sally, and when, on making her escape, she clasped one hand to her head to support her released tresses, and hurried along the corridor with the other confining the skirts of her inflated robe, he kissed his hand after her with more than jocular good-will.

“Ah! it’s as bad as that!” said Hubert, shaking his head.