“I have adopted a little girl, you know,” Roger said, after this, to
a number of his friends; but he felt, rather, as if she had adopted
him. He found it somewhat difficult to make his terms with the sense
of actual paternity. It was indeed an immense satisfaction to feel,
as time went on, that there was small danger of his repenting of his
bargain. It seemed to him more and more that he had obeyed a divine
voice; though indeed he was equally conscious that there was
something comical in a sleek young bachelor turning nurse and
governess. But for all this he found himself able to look the world
squarely in the face. At first it had been with an effort, a blush,
and a deprecating smile that he spoke of his pious venture; but very
soon he began to take a robust satisfaction in alluding to it freely.
There was but one man of whose jocular verdict he thought with some
annoyance,—his cousin Hubert Lawrence, namely, who was so terribly
clever and trenchant, and who had been through life a commentator
formidable to his modesty, though, in the end, always absolved by his
good-nature. But he made up his mind that, though Hubert might
laugh, he himself was serious; and to prove it equally to himself and
his friends, he determined on a great move. He withdrew altogether
from his profession, and prepared to occupy his house in the country.
The latter was immediately transformed into a home for Nora,—a home
admirably fitted to become the starting-point of a happy life.
Roger’s dwelling stood in the midst of certain paternal acres,—a
little less than a “place,” a little more than a farm; deep in the
country, and yet at two hours’ journey from town. Of recent years a
dusty disorder had fallen upon the house, telling of its master’s
long absences and his rare and restless visits. It was but half
lived in. But beneath this pulverous deposit the rigid household
gods of a former generation stand erect on their pedestals. As Nora
grew older, she came to love her new home with an almost passionate
fondness, and to cherish its transmitted memories as a kind of
compensation for her own obliterated past. There had lived with
Lawrence for many years an elderly woman, of exemplary virtue,
Lucinda Brown by name, who had been a personal attendant of his
mother, and since her death had remained in his service as the lonely
warden of his villa. Roger had an old-time regard for her, and it
seemed to him that her housewifely gossip might communicate to little
Nora a ray of his mother’s peaceful domestic genius. Lucinda, who
had been divided between hope and fear as to Roger’s possibly
marrying,—the fear of a diminished empire having exceeded, on the
whole, the hope of company below stairs,—accepted Nora’s arrival as
a very comfortable compromise. The child was too young to menace her
authority, and yet of sufficient importance to warrant a gradual
extension of the household economy. Lucinda had a vision of new
carpets and curtains, of a regenerated kitchen, of a series of new
caps, of her niece coming to sew. Nora was the narrow end of the
wedge; it would broaden with her growth. Lucinda therefore was
gracious.
For Roger it seemed as if life had begun afresh and the world had put
on a new face. High above the level horizon now, clearly defined
against the empty sky, rose this small commanding figure, with the
added magnitude that objects acquire in this position. She gave him
a great deal to think about. The child a man begets and rears weaves
its existence insensibly into the tissue of his life, so that he
becomes trained by fine degrees to the paternal office. But Roger
had to skip experience, and spring with a bound into the paternal
consciousness. In fact he missed his leap, and never tried again.
Time should induct him at leisure into his proper honors, whatever
they might be. He felt a strong aversion to claim in the child that
prosaic right of property which belongs to the paternal name. He
eagerly accepted his novel duties and cares, but he shrank with a
tender humility of temper from all precise definition of his rights.
He was too young and too sensible of his youth to wish to give this
final turn to things. His heart was flattered, rather, by the idea
of living at the mercy of change which might always be change for the
better. It lay close to his heart, however, to drive away the dusky
fears and sordid memories of Nora’s anterior life. He strove to
conceal the past from her childish sense by a great pictured screen
of present joys and comforts. He wished her life to date from the
moment he had taken her home. He had taken her for better, for
worse; but he longed to quench all baser chances in the daylight of
actual security. His philosophy in this as in all things was
extremely simple,—to make her happy that she might be good.
Meanwhile as he cunningly devised her happiness, his own seemed
securely established. He felt twice as much a man as before, and the
world seemed as much again a world. All his small stale merits
became fragrant with the virtue of unselfish use.
One of his first acts, before he left town, had been to divest Nora
of her shabby mourning and dress her afresh in childish colors. He
learned from the proprietor’s wife at his hotel that this was
considered by several ladies interested in Nora’s fortunes
(especially by her of the subscription) an act of gross impiety; but
he held to his purpose, nevertheless. When she was freshly arrayed,
he took her to a photographer and made her sit for half a dozen
portraits. They were not flattering; they gave her an aged, sombre,
lifeless air. He showed them to two old ladies of his acquaintance,
whose judgment he valued, without saying whom they represented; the
ladies pronounced her a “fright.” It was directly after this that
Roger hurried her away to the peaceful, uncritical country. Her
manner here for a long time remained singularly docile and
spiritless. She was not exactly sad, but neither was she cheerful.
She smiled, as if from the fear to displease by not smiling. She had
the air of a child who has been much alone, and who has learned quite
to underestimate her natural right to amusement. She seemed at times
hopelessly, defiantly torpid. “Heaven help me!” thought Roger, as he
surreptitiously watched her: “is she going to be simply stupid?” He
perceived at last, however, that her listless quietude covered a
great deal of observation, and that growing may be a very soundless
process. His ignorance of the past distressed and vexed him, jealous
as he was of admitting even to himself that she had ever lived till
now. He trod on tiptoe in the region of her early memories, in the
dread of reviving some dormant claim, some ugly ghost. Yet he felt
that to know so little of her twelve first years was to reckon
without an important factor in his problem; as if, in spite of his
summons to all the fairies for this second baptism, the
godmother-in-chief lurked maliciously apart. Nora seemed by instinct
to have perceived the fitness of not speaking of her own affairs, and
indeed displayed in the matter a precocious good taste. Among her
scanty personal effects the only object referring too vividly to the
past had been a small painted photograph of her mother, a
languid-looking lady in a low-necked dress, with a good deal of
rather crudely rendered prettiness. Nora had apparently a timid
reserve of complacency in the fact, which she once imparted to Roger
with a kind of desperate abruptness, that her mother had been a
public singer; and the heterogeneous nature of her own culture
testified to some familiarity with the scenery of Bohemia. The
common relations of things seemed quite reversed in her brief
experience, and immaturity and precocity shared her young mind in the
freest fellowship. She was ignorant of the plainest truths and
credulous of the quaintest falsities; unversed in the commonest
learning and instructed in the rarest. She barely knew that the
earth is round, but she knew that Leonora is the heroine of _Il
Trovatore_. She could neither write nor spell, but she could perform
the most surprising tricks with cards. She confessed to a passion
for strong green tea, and to an interest in the romances of the
Sunday newspapers. Evidently she had sprung from a horribly vulgar
soil; she was a brand snatched from the burning. She uttered various
impolite words with the most guileless accent and glance, and was as
yet equally unsuspicious of the grammar and the Catechism. But when
once Roger had straightened out her phrase she was careful to
preserve its shape; and when he had decimated her vocabulary she made
its surviving particles suffice. For the rudiments of theological
learning, also, she manifested a due respect. Considering her
makeshift education, he wondered she was so much of a lady. His
impression of her father was fatal, ineffaceable; the late Mr.
Lambert had been a blackguard. Roger had a fancy, however, that this
was not all the truth. He was free to assume that the poor fellow’s
wife had been of a gentle nurture and temper; and he even framed on
this theme an ingenious little romance, which gave him a great deal
of comfort. Mrs. Lambert had been deceived by the impudent
plausibility of her husband, and had come to her senses amid shifting
expedients and struggling poverty, during which she had been glad to
turn to account the voice which the friends of her happier girlhood
had praised. She had died outwearied and broken-hearted, invoking
human pity on her child. Roger established in this way a sentimental
intimacy with the poor lady’s spirit, and exchanged many a greeting
over the little girl’s head with this vague maternal shape. But he
was by no means given up to these thin-spun joys; he gave himself
larger satisfactions. He determined to drive in the first nail with
his own hands, to lay the smooth foundation-stones of Nora’s culture,
to teach her to read and write and cipher, to associate himself
largely with the growth of her primal sense of things. Behold him
thus converted into a gentle pedagogue, prompting her with small
caresses and correcting her with smiles. A moted morning sunbeam
used to enter his little study, and, resting on Nora’s auburn hair,
seemed to make of the place a humming school-room. Roger began also
to anticipate the future exactions of preceptorship. He plunged into
a course of useful reading, and devoured a hundred volumes on
education, on hygiene, on morals, on history. He drew up a table of
rules and observances for the child’s health; he weighed and measured
her food, and spent hours with Lucinda, the minister’s wife, and the
doctor, in the discussion of her regimen and clothing. He bought her
a pony, and rode with her over the neighboring country, roamed with
her in the woods and fields, and picked out nice acquaintances for
her among the little damsels of the country-side. A doting granddam,
in all this matter, could not have shown a finer genius for detail.
His zeal indeed left him very little peace, and Lucinda often
endeavored to assuage it by the assurance that he was fretting
himself away and wearing himself thin on his happiness. He passed a
dozen times a week from the fear of coddling and spoiling the child
to the fear of letting her run wild and grow coarse and rustic.
Sometimes he dismissed her tasks for days together, and kept her
idling at his side in the winter sunshine; sometimes for a week he
kept her within doors, reading to her, preaching to her, showing her
prints, and telling her stories. She had an excellent musical ear,
and the promise of a charming voice; Roger took counsel in a dozen
quarters as to whether he ought to make her use her voice or spare
it. Once he took her up to town to a _matinée_ at one of the
theatres, and was in anguish for a week afterwards, lest he had
quickened some inherited tendency to dissipation. He used to lie
awake at night, trying hard to fix in his mind the happy medium
between coldness and weak fondness. With a heart full of tenderness,
he used to measure out his caresses. He was in doubt for a long time
as to what he should make her call him. At the outset he decided
instinctively against “papa.” It was a question between “Mr.
Lawrence” and his baptismal name. He weighed the proprieties for a
week, and then he determined the child should choose for herself.
She had as yet avoided addressing him by name; at last he asked what
name she preferred. She stared rather blankly at the time, but a few
days afterwards he heard her shouting “Roger!” from the garden under
his window. She had ventured upon a small shallow pond enclosed by
his land, and now coated with thin ice. The ice had cracked with a
great report under her tread, and was swaying gently beneath her
weight, at some yards from the edge. In her alarm her heart had
chosen, and her heart’s election was never subsequently gainsaid.
Circumstances seemed to affect her slowly; for a long time she showed
few symptoms of change. Roger in his slippers, by the fireside, in
the winter evenings, used to gaze at her with an anxious soul, and
wonder whether it was not only a stupid child that could sit for an
hour by the chimney-corner, stroking the cat’s back in absolute
silence, asking neither questions nor favors. Then, meeting her
intelligent eyes, he would fancy that she was wiser than he knew;
that she was mocking him or judging him, and counterplotting his
pious labors with elfish subtlety. Arrange it as he might, he could
not call her pretty. Plain women are apt to be clever; might she not
(horror of horrors!) turn out too clever? In the evening, after she
had attended Nora to bed, Lucinda would come into the little library,
and she and Roger would solemnly put their heads together. In
matters in which he deemed her sex gave her an advantage of judgment,
he used freely to ask her opinion. She made a great parade of
motherly science, rigid spinster as she was, and hinted by many a nod
and wink at the mystic depths of her sagacity. As to the child’s
being thankless or heartless, she quite reassured him. Didn’t she
cry herself to sleep, under her breath, on her little pillow? Didn’t
she mention him every night in her prayers,—him, and him alone?
However much her family may have left to be desired as a
“family,”—and of its shortcomings in this respect Lucinda had an
altogether awful sense,—Nora was clearly a lady in her own right.
As for her plain face, they could wait awhile for a change.
Plainness in a child was almost always prettiness in a woman; and at
all events, if she was not to be pretty, she need never be proud.
Roger had no wish to remind his young companion of what she owed him;
for it was the very keystone of his plan that their relation should
ripen into a perfect matter of course; but he watched patiently, as a
wandering botanist for the first woodland violets for the year, for
the shy field-flower of spontaneous affection. He aimed at nothing
more or less than to inspire the child with a passion. Until he had
detected in her glance and tone the note of passionate tenderness his
experiment must have failed. It would have succeeded on the day when
she should break out into cries and tears and tell him with a
clinging embrace that she loved him. So he argued with himself; but,
in fact, he expected perhaps more than belongs to the lame logic of
this life. As a child, she would be too irreflective to play so
pretty a part; as a young girl, too self-conscious. I undertake,
however, to tell no secrets. Roger, being by nature undemonstrative,
continued to possess his soul in patience. Nora, meanwhile,
seemingly showed as little of distrust as of positive tenderness.
She grew and grew in ungrudged serenity. It was in person, first,
that she began gently, or rather ungently, to expand; acquiring a
well-nurtured sturdiness of contour, but passing quite into the
shambling and sheepish stage of girlhood. Lucinda cast about her in
vain for possibilities of future beauty, and took refuge in vigorous
attention to the young girl’s bountiful auburn hair, which she combed
and braided with a kind of fierce assiduity. The winter had passed
away, the spring was well advanced. Roger, looking at the object of
his adoption, felt a certain sinking of the heart as he thought of
his cousin Hubert’s visit. As matters stood, Nora bore rather
livelier testimony to his charity than to his taste.
He had debated some time as to whether he should write to Hubert and
as to how he should write. Hubert Lawrence was some four years his
junior; but Roger had always allowed him a large precedence in the
things of the mind. Hubert had just commenced parson; it seemed now
that grace would surely lend a generous hand to nature and complete
the circle of his accomplishments. He was extremely good-looking and
clever with just such a cleverness as seemed but an added personal
charm. He and Roger had been much together in early life and had
formed an intimacy strangely compounded of harmony and discord.
Utterly unlike in temper and tone, they neither thought nor felt nor
acted together on any single point. Roger was constantly differing,
mutely and profoundly, and Hubert frankly and sarcastically; but
each, nevertheless, seemed to find in the other an irritating
counterpart and complement. They had between them a kind of boyish
levity which kept them from lingering long on delicate ground; but
they felt at times that they belonged, by temperament, to
irreconcilable camps, and that the more each of them came to lead his
own life, the more their lives would diverge. Roger was of a loving
turn of mind, and it cost him many a sigh that a certain glassy
hardness of soul on his cousin’s part was forever blunting the edge
of his affection. He nevertheless had a deep regard for Hubert; he
admired his talents, he enjoyed his society, he wrapped him about
with his good-will. He had told him more than once that he cared for
him more than Hubert would ever believe, could in the nature of
things believe. He was willing to take his cousin seriously, even
when he knew his cousin was not taking him so. Hubert, who reserved
his faith for heavenly mysteries, had small credence for earthly
ones, and he would have affirmed that to his perception they loved
each other with a precisely equal ardor, beyond everything in life,
to wit, but themselves. Roger had in his mind a kind of metaphysical
“idea” of a possible Hubert, which the actual Hubert took a wanton
satisfaction in turning upside down. Roger had drawn in his fancy a
pure and ample outline, into which the young ecclesiastic projected a
perversely ill-fitting shadow. Roger took his cousin more seriously
than the young man took himself. In fact, Hubert had apparently come
into the world to play. He played at life, altogether; he played at
learning, he played at theology, he played at friendship; and it was
to be conjectured that, on particular holidays, he would play pretty
hard at love. Hubert, for some time, had been settled in New York,
and of late they had exchanged but few letters. Something had been
said about Hubert’s coming to spend a part of his summer vacation
with his cousin; now that the latter was at the head of a household
and a family, Roger reminded him of their understanding. He had
finally told him his little romance, with a fine bravado of
indifference to his verdict; but he was, in secret, extremely anxious
to obtain Hubert’s judgment of the heroine. Hubert replied that he
was altogether prepared for the news, and that it must be a very
pretty sight to see him at dinner pinning her bib, or to hear him
sermonizing her over a torn frock.
“But, pray, what relation is the young lady to me?” he added. “How
far does the adoption go, and where does it stop? Your own proper
daughter would be my cousin; but you can’t adopt for other people. I
shall wait till I see her; then if she is pleasing, I shall admit her
into cousinship.”
He came down for a fortnight, in July, and was soon introduced to
Nora. She came sidling shyly into the room, with a rent in her
short-waisted frock, and the “Child’s Own Book” in her hand, with her
finger in the history of “The Discreet Princess.” Hubert kissed her
gallantly, and declared that he was happy to make her acquaintance.
She retreated to a station beside Roger’s knee, and stood staring at
the young man. “_Elle a les pieds énormes_,” said Hubert.
Roger was annoyed, partly with himself, for he made her wear big
shoes. “What do you think of him?” he asked, stroking the child’s
hair, and hoping, half maliciously, that, with the frank perspicacity
of childhood, she would make some inspired “hit” about the young man.
But to appreciate Hubert’s failings, one must have had vital
experience of them. At this time, twenty-five years of age, he was a
singularly handsome youth. Although of about the same height as his
cousin, the pliant slimness of his figure made him look taller. He
had a cool blue eye and clustering yellow locks. His features were
cut with admirable purity; his teeth were white, his smile superb.
“I think,” said Nora, “that he looks like the _Prince Avenant_.”
Before Hubert went away, Roger asked him for a deliberate opinion of
the child. Was she ugly or pretty? was she interesting? He found it
hard, however, to induce him to consider her seriously. Hubert’s
observation was exercised rather less in the interest of general
truth than of particular profit; and of what profit to Hubert was
Nora’s shambling childhood? “I can’t think of her as a girl,” he
said: “she seems to me a boy. She climbs trees, she scales fences,
she keeps rabbits, she straddles upon your old mare. I found her
this morning wading in the pond. She is growing up a hoyden; you
ought to give her more civilizing influences than she enjoys
hereabouts; you ought to engage a governess, or send her to school.
It is well enough now; but, my poor fellow, what will you do when she
is twenty?”
You may imagine, from Hubert’s sketch, that Nora’s was a happy life.
She had few companions, but during the long summer days, in woods and
fields and orchards, Roger initiated her into all those rural
mysteries which are so dear to childhood and so fondly remembered in
later years. She grew more hardy and lively, more inquisitive, more
active. She tasted deeply of the joy of tattered dresses and
sunburnt cheeks and arms, and long nights at the end of tired days.
But Roger, pondering his cousin’s words, began to believe that to
keep her longer at home would be to fail of justice to the _ewige
Weibliche_. The current of her growth would soon begin to flow
deeper than the plummet of a man’s wit. He determined, therefore, to
send her to school, and he began with this view to investigate the
merits of various seminaries. At last, after a vast amount of
meditation and an extensive correspondence with the school-keeping
class, he selected one which appeared rich in fair promises. Nora,
who had never known an hour’s schooling, entered joyously upon her
new career; but she gave her friend that sweet and long-deferred
emotion of which I have spoken, when, on parting with him, she hung
upon his neck with a sort of convulsive fondness. He took her head
in his two hands and looked at her; her eyes were streaming with
tears. During the month which followed he received from her a dozen
letters, sadly misspelled, but divinely lachrymose.
It is needless to relate in detail this phase of Nora’s history,
which lasted two years. Roger found that he missed her sadly; his
occupation was gone. Still, her very absence occupied him. He wrote
her long letters of advice, told her everything that happened to him,
and sent her books and useful garments, biscuits and oranges. At the
end of a year he began to long terribly to take her back again; but
as his judgment forbade this measure, he determined to beguile the
following year by travel. Before starting, he went to the little
country town which was the seat of her academy, to bid Nora farewell.
He had not seen her since she left him, as he had chosen,—quite
heroically, poor fellow,—to have her spend her vacation with a
schoolmate, the bosom friend of this especial period. He found her
surprisingly altered. She looked three years older; she was growing
by the hour. Prettiness and symmetry had not yet been vouchsafed to
her; but Roger found in her young imperfection a sweet assurance that
her account with nature was not yet closed. She had, moreover, an
elusive grace. She had reached that charming girlish moment when the
crudity of childhood begins to be faintly tempered by the sense of
sex. She was coming fast, too, into her woman’s heritage of
garrulity. She entertained him for a whole morning; she took him
into her confidence; she rattled and prattled unceasingly upon all
the swarming little school interests,—her likes and aversions, her
hopes and fears, her friends and teachers, her studies and
story-books. Roger sat grinning in high enchantment; she seemed to
him the very genius of girlhood. For the very first time, he became
conscious of her character; there was an immense deal of her; she
overflowed. When they parted, he gave his hopes to her keeping in a
long, long kiss. She kissed him too, but this time with smiles, not
with tears. She neither suspected nor could she have understood the
thought which, during this interview, had blossomed in her friend’s
mind. On leaving her, he took a long walk in the country over
unknown roads. That evening he consigned his thought to a short
letter, addressed to Mrs. Keith. This was the present title of the
lady who had once been Miss Morton. She had married and gone abroad;
where, in Rome, she had done as the Americans do, and entered the
Roman Church. His letter ran as follows:—
MY DEAR MRS. KEITH,—I promised you once to be very unhappy, but I
doubt whether you believed me; you did not look as if you believed
me. I am sure, at all events, you hoped otherwise. I am told you
have become a Roman Catholic. Perhaps you have been praying for me
at St. Peter’s. This is the easiest way to account for my
conversion, to a worthier state of mind. You know that, two years
ago, I adopted a homeless little girl. One of these days she will be
a lovely woman. I mean to do what I can to make her one. Perhaps,
six years hence, she will be grateful enough not to refuse me as you
did. Pray for me more than ever. I have begun at the beginning; it
will be my own fault if I have not a perfect wife.