I.

Roger Lawrence had come to town for the express purpose of doing a

certain act, but as the hour for action approached he felt his ardor

rapidly ebbing. Of the ardor that comes from hope, indeed, he had

felt little from the first; so little that as he whirled along in the

train he wondered to find himself engaged in this fool’s errand. But

in default of hope he was sustained, I may almost say, by despair.

He should fail, he was sure, but he must fail again before he could

rest. Meanwhile he was restless enough. In the evening, at his

hotel, having roamed aimlessly about the streets for a couple of

hours in the dark December cold, he went up to his room and dressed,

with a painful sense of having but partly succeeded in giving himself

the figure of an impassioned suitor. He was twenty-nine years old,

sound and strong, with a tender heart, and a genius, almost, for

common-sense; his face told clearly of youth and kindness and sanity,

but it had little other beauty. His complexion was so fresh as to be

almost absurd in a man of his age,—an effect rather enhanced by a

too early baldness. Being extremely short-sighted, he went with his

head thrust forward; but as this infirmity is considered by persons

who have studied the picturesque to impart an air of distinction, he

may have the benefit of the possibility. His figure was compact and

sturdy, and, on the whole, his best point; although, owing to an

incurable personal shyness, he had a good deal of awkwardness of

movement. He was fastidiously neat in his person, and extremely

precise and methodical in his habits, which were of the sort supposed

to mark a man for bachelorhood. The desire to get the better of his

diffidence had given him a certain formalism of manner which many

persons found extremely amusing. He was remarkable for the

spotlessness of his linen, the high polish of his boots, and the

smoothness of his hat. He carried in all weathers a peculiarly neat

umbrella. He never smoked; he drank in moderation. His voice,

instead of being the robust barytone which his capacious chest led

you to expect, was a mild, deferential tenor. He was fond of going

early to bed, and was suspected of what is called “fussing” with his

health. No one had ever accused him of meanness, yet he passed

universally for a cunning economist. In trifling matters, such as

the choice of a shoemaker or a dentist, his word carried weight; but

no one dreamed of asking his opinion on politics or literature. Here

and there, nevertheless, an observer less superficial than the

majority would have whispered you that Roger was an undervalued man,

and that in the long run he would come out even with the best. “Have

you ever studied his face?” such an observer would say. Beneath its

simple serenity, over which his ruddy blushes seemed to pass like

clouds in a summer sky, there slumbered a fund of exquisite human

expression. The eye was excellent; small, perhaps, and somewhat

dull, but with a certain appealing depth, like the tender dumbness in

the gaze of a dog. In repose Lawrence may have looked stupid; but as

he talked his face slowly brightened by gradual fine degrees, until

at the end of an hour it inspired you with a confidence so perfect as

to be in some degree a tribute to its owner’s intellect, as it

certainly was to his integrity. On this occasion Roger dressed

himself with unusual care and with a certain sober elegance. He

debated for three minutes over two cravats, and then, blushing in his

mirror at his puerile vanity, he reassumed the plain black tie in

which he had travelled. When he had finished dressing it was still

too early to go forth on his errand. He went into the reading-room

of the hotel, but here soon appeared two smokers. Wishing not to be

infected by their fumes, he crossed over to the great empty

drawing-room, sat down, and beguiled his impatience with trying on a

pair of lavender gloves.

While he was so engaged there came into the room a person who

attracted his attention by the singularity of his conduct. This was

a man of less than middle age, good-looking, pale, with a

pretentious, pointed mustache and various shabby remnants of finery.

His face was haggard, his whole aspect was that of grim and hopeless

misery. He walked straight to the table in the centre of the room,

and poured out and drank without stopping three full glasses of

ice-water, as if he were striving to quench some fever in his vitals.

He then went to the window, leaned his forehead against the cold

pane, and drummed a nervous tattoo with his long stiff finger-nails.

Finally he strode over to the fireplace, flung himself into a chair,

leaned forward with his head in his hands, and groaned audibly.

Lawrence, as he smoothed down his lavender gloves, watched him and

reflected. “What an image of fallen prosperity, of degradation and

despair! I have been fancying myself in trouble; I have been

dejected, doubtful, anxious. I am hopeless. But what is my

sentimental sorrow to this?” The unhappy gentleman rose from his

chair, turned his back to the chimney-piece, and stood with folded

arms gazing at Lawrence, who was seated opposite to him. The young

man sustained his glance, but with sensible discomfort. His face was

as white as ashes, his eyes were as lurid as coals. Roger had never

seen anything so tragic as the two long harsh lines which descended

from his nose, beside his mouth, in seeming mockery of his foppish,

relaxed mustache. Lawrence felt that his companion was going to

address him; he began to draw off his gloves. The stranger suddenly

came towards him, stopped a moment, eyed him again with insolent

intensity, and then seated himself on the sofa beside him. His first

movement was to seize the young man’s arm. “He is simply crazy!”

thought Lawrence. Roger was now able to appreciate the pathetic

disrepair of his appearance. His open waistcoat displayed a soiled

and crumpled shirt-bosom, from whose empty buttonholes the studs had

recently been wrenched. In his normal freshness he must have looked

like a gambler with a run of luck. He spoke in a rapid, excited

tone, with a hard, petulant voice.

“You’ll think me crazy, I suppose. Well, I shall be soon. Will you

lend me a hundred dollars?”

“Who are you? What is your trouble?” Roger asked.

“My name would tell you nothing. I’m a stranger here. My

trouble,—it’s a long story! But it’s grievous, I assure you. It’s

pressing upon me with a fierceness that grows while I sit here

talking to you. A hundred dollars would stave it off,—a few days at

least. Don’t refuse me!” These last words were uttered half as an

entreaty, half as a threat. “Don’t say you haven’t got them,—a man

that wears such pretty gloves! Come; you look like a good fellow.

Look at me! I’m a good fellow, too. I don’t need to swear to my

being in distress.”

Lawrence was touched, disgusted, and irritated. The man’s distress

was real enough, but there was something horribly disreputable in his

manner. Roger declined to entertain his request without learning more

about him. From the stranger’s persistent reluctance to do more than

simply declare that he was from St. Louis, and repeat that he was in a

tight place, in a d——d tight place, Lawrence was led to believe that

he had been dabbling in crime. The more he insisted upon some definite

statement of his circumstances, the more fierce and peremptory became

the other’s petition. Lawrence was before all things deliberate and

perspicacious; the last man in the world to be hustled and bullied. It

was quite out of his nature to do a thing without distinctly knowing

why. He of course had no imagination, which, as we know, should always

stand at the right hand of charity; but he had good store of that

wholesome discretion whose place is at the left. Discretion told him

that his companion was a dissolute scoundrel, who had sinned through

grievous temptation, perhaps, but who had certainly sinned. His misery

was palpable, but Roger felt that he could not patch up his misery

without in some degree condoning his vices. It was not in his power,

at any rate, to present him, out of hand, a hundred dollars. He

compromised. “I can’t think of giving you the sum you ask,” he said.

“I have no time, moreover, to investigate your case at present. If you

will meet me here to-morrow morning, I will listen to anything you

shall have made up your mind to say. Meanwhile, here are ten dollars.”

The man looked at the proffered note and made no movement to accept

it. Then raising his eyes to Roger’s face,—eyes streaming with

tears of helpless rage and baffled want,—“O, the devil!” he cried.

“What can I do with ten dollars? D—n it, I don’t know how to beg.

Listen to me! If you don’t give me what I ask, I shall cut my

throat! Think of that. On your head be the penalty!”

Lawrence pocketed his note and rose to his feet. “No, decidedly,” he

said, “you don’t know how to beg!” A moment after, he had left the

hotel and was walking rapidly toward a well-remembered dwelling. He

was shocked and discomposed by this brutal collision with want and

vice; but as he walked, the cool night-air suggested sweeter things.

The image of his heated petitioner was speedily replaced by the

calmer figure of Isabel Morton.

He had come to know Isabel Morton three years before, through a visit

she had then made to one of his neighbors in the country. In spite

of his unventurous tastes and the even tenor of his habits, Lawrence

was by no means lacking, as regards life, in what the French call

_les grandes curiosités_; but from an early age his curiosity had

chiefly taken the form of a timid but strenuous desire to fathom the

depths of matrimony. He had dreamed of this gentle bondage as other

men dream of the “free unhoused condition” of celibacy. He had been

born a marrying man, with a conscious desire for progeny. The world

in this respect had not done him justice. It had supposed him to be

wrapped up in his petty comforts: whereas, in fact, he was serving a

devout apprenticeship to the profession of husband and father.

Feeling at twenty-six that he had something to offer a woman, he

allowed himself to become interested in Miss Morton. It was rather

odd that a man of tremors and blushes should in this line have been

signally bold; for Miss Morton had the reputation of being extremely

fastidious, and was supposed to wear some dozen broken hearts on her

girdle, as an Indian wears the scalps of his enemies.

It is said that, as a rule, men fall in love with their opposites;

certainly Lawrence’s mistress was not fashioned in his own image. He

was the most unobtrusively natural of men; she, on the other hand,

was pre-eminently artificial. She was pretty, but not really so

pretty as she seemed; clever, but not intelligent; amiable, but not

sympathetic. She possessed in perfection the manner of society,

which she lavished with indiscriminate grace on the just and the

unjust, and which very effectively rounded and completed the somewhat

meagre outline of her personal character. In reality, Miss Morton

was keenly ambitious. A woman of simpler needs, she might very well

have accepted our hero. He offered himself with urgent and obstinate

warmth. She esteemed him more than any man she had known,—so she

told him; but she added that the man she married must satisfy her

heart. Her heart, she did not add, was bent upon a carriage and

diamonds.

From the point of view of ambition, a match with Roger Lawrence was

not worth discussing. He was therefore dismissed with gracious but

inexorable firmness. From this moment the young man’s sentiment

hardened into a passion. Six months later he heard that Miss Morton

was preparing to go to Europe. He sought her out before her

departure, urged his suit afresh, and lost it a second time. But his

passion had cost too much to be flung away unused. During her

residence abroad he wrote her three letters, only one of which she

briefly answered, in terms which amounted to little more than this:

“Dear Mr. Lawrence, do leave me alone!” At the end of two years she

returned, and was now visiting her married brother. Lawrence had

just heard of her arrival, and had come to town to make, as we have

said, a supreme appeal.

Her brother and his wife were out for the evening; Roger found her in

the drawing-room, under the lamp, teaching a stitch in crochet to her

niece, a little girl of ten, who stood leaning at her side. She

seemed to him prettier than before; although, in fact, she looked

older and stouter. Her prettiness, for the most part, however, was a

matter of coquetry; and naturally, as youth departed, coquetry filled

the vacancy. She was fair and plump, and she had a very pretty trick

of suddenly turning her head and showing a charming white throat and

ear. Above her well-filled corsage these objects produced a most

agreeable effect. She always dressed in light colors, but with

unerring taste. Charming as she may have been, there was,

nevertheless, about her so marked a want of the natural, that, to

admire her particularly, it was necessary to be, like Roger, in love

with her. She received him with such flattering friendliness and so

little apparent suspicion of his purpose, that he almost took heart

and hope. If she did not fear a declaration, perhaps she desired

one. For the first half-hour Roger’s attack hung fire. Isabel

talked to better purpose than before she went abroad, and for the

moment he sat tongue-tied for very modesty. Miss Morton’s little

niece was a very pretty child; her hair was combed out into a golden

cloud, which covered her sloping shoulders. She kept her place

beside her aunt, clasping one of the latter’s hands, and staring at

Lawrence with that sweet curiosity of little girls. There glimmered

mistily in the young man’s brain a vision of a home-scene in the

future,—a lamp-lit parlor on a winter night, a placid wife and

mother wreathed in household smiles, a golden-haired child, and, in

the midst, his sentient self, drunk with possession and gratitude.

As the clock struck nine the little girl was sent to bed, having been

kissed by her aunt and rekissed—or unkissed shall I say?—by her

aunt’s lover. When she had disappeared Roger proceeded to business.

He had proposed so often to Miss Morton, that, actually, practice had

begun to tell. It took but a few moments to make his meaning plain.

Miss Morton addressed herself to her niece’s tapestry, and, as her

lover went on with manly eloquence, glanced up at him from her work

with feminine keenness. He spoke of his persistent love, of his long

waiting and his passionate hope. Her acceptance of his hand was the

only thing that could make him happy. He should never love another

woman; if she now refused him, it was the end of all things; he

should continue to exist, to work and act, to eat and sleep, but he

should have ceased to _live_.

“In Heaven’s name,” he said, “don’t answer me as you have answered me

before.”

She folded her hands, and with a serious smile, “I shall not,

altogether,” she said. “When I have refused you before, I have

simply told you that I could not love you. I cannot love you, Mr.

Lawrence! I must repeat it again to-night, but with a better reason

than before. I love another man; I am engaged.”

Roger rose to his feet like a man who has received a heavy blow and

springs forward in self-defence. But he was indefensible, his

assailant inattackable. He sat down again and hung his head. Miss

Morton came to him and took his hand and demanded of him, as a right,

that he should be resigned. “Beyond a certain point,” she said, “you

have no right to thrust your regrets upon me. The injury I do you in

refusing you is less than that I should do you in accepting you

without love.”

He looked at her with his eyes full of tears. “Well! I shall never

marry,” he said. “There is something you cannot refuse me. Though I

shall never possess you, I may at least espouse your memory and live

in intimate union with your image. I shall live with my eyes fixed

upon it.” She smiled at this fine talk; she had heard so much in her

day! He had fancied himself prepared for the worst, but as he walked

back to his hotel, it seemed intolerably bitter. Its bitterness,

however, quickened his temper, and prompted a violent reaction. He

would now, he declared, cast his lot with pure reason. He had tried

love and faith, but they would none of him. He had made a woman a

goddess, and she had made him a fool. He would henceforth care

neither for woman nor man, but simply for comfort, and, if need

should be, for pleasure. Beneath this gathered gust of cynicism the

future lay as hard and narrow as the silent street before him. He

was absurdly unconscious that good-humor was lurking round the very

next corner.

It was not till near morning that he was able to sleep. His sleep,

however, had lasted less than an hour when it was interrupted by a

loud noise from the adjoining room. He started up in bed, lending

his ear to the stillness. The sound was immediately repeated; it was

that of a pistol-shot. This second report was followed by a loud,

shrill cry. Roger jumped out of bed, thrust himself into his

trousers, quitted his room, and ran to the neighboring door. It

opened without difficulty, and revealed an astonishing scene. In the

middle of the floor lay a man, in his trousers and shirt, his head

bathed in blood, his hand grasping the pistol from which he had just

sent a bullet through his brain. Beside him stood a little girl in

her nightdress, her long hair on her shoulders, shrieking and

wringing her hands. Stooping over the prostrate body, Roger

recognized, in spite of his bedabbled visage, the person who had

addressed him in the parlor of the hotel. He had kept the spirit, if

not the letter, of his menace. “O father, father, father!” sobbed

the little girl. Roger, overcome with horror and pity, stooped

towards her and opened his arms. She, conscious of nothing but the

presence of human help, rushed into his embrace and buried her head

in his grasp.

The rest of the house was immediately aroused, and the room invaded

by a body of lodgers and servants. Soon followed a couple of

policemen, and finally the proprietor in person. The fact of suicide

was so apparent that Roger’s presence was easily explained. From the

child nothing but sobs could be obtained. After a vast amount of

talking and pushing and staring, after a physician had affirmed that

the stranger was dead, and the ladies had passed the child from hand

to hand through a bewildering circle of caresses and questions, the

multitude dispersed, and the little girl was borne away in triumph by

the proprietor’s wife, further investigation being appointed for the

morrow. For Roger, seemingly, this was to have been a night of

sensations. There came to him, as it wore away, a cruel sense of his

own accidental part in his neighbor’s tragedy. His refusal to help

the poor man had brought on the catastrophe. The idea haunted him

awhile; but at last, with an effort, he dismissed it. The next man,

he assured himself, would have done no more than he; might possibly

have done less. He felt, however, a certain indefeasible fellowship

in the sorrow of the little girl. He lost no time, the next

morning, in calling on the wife of the proprietor. She was a kindly

woman enough, but so thoroughly the mistress of a public house that

she seemed to deal out her very pity over a bar. She exhibited

toward her protégée a hard, business-like charity which foreshadowed

vividly to Roger’s mind the poor child’s probable portion in life,

and repeated to him the little creature’s story, as she had been able

to learn it. The father had come in early in the evening, in great

trouble and excitement, and had made her go to bed. He had kissed

her and cried over her, and, of course, made her cry. Late at night

she was aroused by feeling him again at her bedside, kissing her,

fondling her, raving over her. He bade her good night and passed

into the adjoining room, where she heard him fiercely knocking about.

She was very much frightened; she fancied he was out of his mind.

She knew that their troubles had lately been thickening fast; now the

worst had come. Suddenly he called her. She asked what he wanted,

and he bade her get out of bed and come to him. She trembled, but

she obeyed. On reaching the threshold of his room she saw the gas

turned low, and her father standing in his shirt against the door at

the other end. He ordered her to stop where she was. Suddenly she

heard a loud report and felt beside her cheek the wind of a bullet.

He had aimed at her with a pistol. She retreated in terror to her

own bedside and buried her head in the clothes. This, however, did

not prevent her from hearing a second report, followed by a deep

groan. Venturing back again, she found her father on the floor,

bleeding from the face. “He meant to kill her, of course,” said the

landlady, “that she mightn’t be left alone in the world. It’s a

wonderful mixture of cruelty and kindness!”

It seemed to Roger an altogether pitiful tale. He related his own

interview with the deceased, and the latter’s menace of suicide. “It

gives me,” he said, “a sickening sense of connection with this

bloodshed. But how could I help it? All the same, I wish he had

taken my ten dollars.”

Of the antecedent history of the dead man they could learn little.

The child had recognized Lawrence, and had broken out again into a

quivering convulsion of tears. Little by little, from among her

sobs, they gathered a few facts. Her father had brought her during

the preceding month from St. Louis; they had stopped some time in New

York. Her father had been for months in great want of money. They

had once had money enough; she could not say what had become of it.

Her mother had died many months before; she had no other kindred nor

friends. Her father may have had friends, but she never saw them.

She could indicate no source of possible assistance or sympathy.

Roger put the poor little fragments of her story together. The most

salient fact among them all was her absolute destitution.

“Well, sir,” said the proprietress, “living customers are better than

dead ones; I must go about my business. Perhaps you can learn

something more.” The little girl sat on the sofa with a pale face

and swollen eyes, and, with a stupefied, helpless stare, watched her

friend depart. She was by no means a pretty child. Her clear auburn

hair was thrust carelessly into a net with broken meshes, and her

limbs encased in a suit of rusty, scanty mourning. In her

appearance, in spite of her childish innocence and grief, there was

something undeniably vulgar. “She looks as if she belonged to a

circus troupe,” Roger said to himself. Her face, however, though

without beauty, was not without interest. Her forehead was

symmetrical and her mouth expressive. Her eyes were light in color,

yet by no means colorless. A sort of arrested, concentrated

brightness, a soft introversion of their rays, gave them a remarkable

depth. “Poor little betrayed, unfriended mortal!” thought the young

man.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Nora Lambert,” said the child.

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“And you live in St. Louis?”

“We used to live there. I was born there.”

“Why had your father come to the East?”

“To make money.”

“Where was he going to live?”

“Anywhere he could find business.”

“What was his business?”

“He had none. He wanted to find some.”

“You have no friends nor relations?”

The child gazed a few moments in silence. “He told me when he woke

me up and kissed me, last night, that I had not a friend in the world

nor a person that cared for me.”

Before the exquisite sadness of this statement Lawrence was silent.

He leaned back in his chair and looked at the child,—the little

forlorn, precocious, potential woman. His own sense of recent

bereavement rose powerful in his heart and seemed to respond to hers.

“Nora,” he said, “come here.”

She stared a moment, without moving, and then left the sofa and came

slowly towards him. She was tall for her years. She laid her hand

on the arm of his chair and he took it. “You have seen me before,”

he said. She nodded. “Do you remember my taking you last night in

my arms?” It was his fancy that, for an answer, she faintly blushed.

He laid his hand on her head and smoothed away her thick disordered

hair. She submitted to his consoling touch with a plaintive

docility. He put his arm round her waist. An irresistible sense of

her childish sweetness, of her tender feminine promise, stole softly

into his pulses. A dozen caressing questions rose to his lips. Had

she been to school? Could she read and write? Was she musical? She

murmured her answers with gathering confidence. She had never been

to school; but her mother had taught her to read and write a little,

and to play a little. She said, almost with a smile, that she was

very backward. Lawrence felt the tears rising to his eyes; he felt

in his heart the tumult of a new emotion. Was it the inexpugnable

instinct of paternity? Was it the restless ghost of his buried hope?

He thought of his angry vow the night before to live only for himself

and turn the key on his heart. “From the lips of babes and

sucklings....”—he softly mused. Before twenty-four hours had

elapsed a child’s fingers were fumbling with the key. He felt

deliciously contradicted; he was after all but a lame egotist. Was

he to believe, then, that he could not live without love, and that he

must take it where he found it? His promise to Miss Morton seemed

still to vibrate in his heart. But there was love and love! He

could be a protector, a father, a brother. What was the child before

him but a tragic embodiment of the misery of isolation, a warning

from his own blank future? “God forbid!” he cried. And as he did

so, he drew her towards him and kissed her.

At this moment the landlord appeared with a scrap of paper, which he

had found in the room of the deceased; it being the only object which

gave a clew to his circumstances. He had evidently burned a mass of

papers just before his death, as the grate was filled with fresh

ashes. Roger read the note, which was scrawled in a hurried,

vehement hand, and ran as follows:—

“This is to say that I must—I must—I must! Starving, without a

friend in the world, and a reputation worse than worthless,—what can

I do? Life’s impossible. Try it yourself. As regards my

daughter,—anything, everything is cruel; but this is the shortest

way.”

“She has had to take the longest, after all,” said the proprietor,

_sotto voce_, with a kindly wink at Roger. The landlady soon

reappeared with one of the ladies who had been present overnight,—a

little pushing, patronizing woman, who seemed strangely familiar with

the various devices of applied charity. “I have come to arrange,”

she said, “about our subscription for the little one. I shall not be

able to contribute myself, but I will go round among the other ladies

with a paper. I have just been seeing the reporter of the

‘Universe’; he is to insert a kind of ‘appeal,’ you know, in his

account of the affair. Perhaps this gentleman will draw up our

paper? And I think it will be a beautiful idea to take the child

with me.”

Lawrence was sickened. The world’s tenderness had fairly begun.

Nora gazed at her energetic benefactress, and then, with her eyes,

appealed mutely to Roger. Her glance, somehow, moved him to the

soul. Poor little disfathered daughter,—poor little uprooted germ

of womanhood! Her innocent eyes seemed to more than beseech,—to

admonish almost, and command. Should he speak and rescue her?

Should he subscribe the whole sum, in the name of human charity? He

thought of the risk. She was an unknown quantity. Her nature, her

heritage, her good and bad possibilities, were an unsolved problem.

Her father had been an adventurer; what had her mother been?

Conjecture was useless; she was a vague spot of light on a dark

background. He was unable even to decide whether, after all, she was

plain.

“If you want to take her round with you,” said the landlady to her

companion, “I had better just sponge off her face.”

“No indeed!” cried the other, “she is much better as she is. If I

could only have her little nightgown with the blood on it! Are you

sure the bullet didn’t strike your dress, deary? I am sure we can

easily get fifty names at five dollars apiece. Two hundred and fifty

dollars. Perhaps this gentleman will make it three hundred. Come,

sir, now!”

Thus adjured, Roger turned to the child. “Nora,” he said, “you know

you are quite alone. You have no home.” Her lips trembled, but her

eyes were fixed and fascinated. “Do you think you could love me?”

She flushed to the tender roots of her tumbled hair. “Will you come

and try?” Her range of expression of course was limited; she could

only answer by another burst of tears.