Roger’s journey was long and various. He went to the West Indies and
to South America, whence, taking a ship at one of the eastern ports,
he sailed round the Horn and paid a visit to Mexico. He journeyed
thence to California, and returned home across the Isthmus, stopping
awhile on his upward course at various Southern cities. It was in
some degree a sentimental journey. Roger was a practical man; as he
went he gathered facts and noted manners and customs; but the muse of
observation for him was the little girl at home, the ripening
companion of his own ripe years. It was for her sake that he
collected impressions and laid up treasure. He had determined that
she should be a lovely woman and a perfect wife; but to be worthy of
such a woman as his fancy foreshadowed, he himself had much to learn.
To be a good husband, one must first be a wise man; to educate her,
he should first educate himself. He would make it possible that
daily contact with him should be a liberal education, and that his
simple society should be a benefit. For this purpose he should be a
fountain of knowledge, a compendium of experience. He travelled in a
spirit of solemn attention, like some grim devotee of a former age
making a pilgrimage for the welfare of one he loved. He kept with
great labor a copious diary, which he meant to read aloud on the
winter nights of coming years. His diary was directly addressed to
Nora, she being implied throughout as reader or auditor. He thought
at moments of his vow to Isabel Morton, and asked himself what had
become of the passion of that hour. It had betaken itself to the
common limbo of our dead passions. He rejoiced to know that she was
well and happy; he meant to write to her again on his return and tell
her that he himself was as happy as she could wish to see him. He
mused ever and anon on the nature of his affection for Nora, and
wondered what earthly name he could call it by. Assuredly he was not
in love with her: you could not fall in love with a child. But if he
had not a lover’s love, he had at least a lover’s jealousy; it would
have made him miserable to believe his scheme might miscarry. It
would fail, he fondly assured himself, by no fault of hers. He was
sure of her future; in that last interview at school he had guessed
the answer to the riddle of her formless girlhood. If he could only
be as sure of his own constancy as of hers! On this point poor Roger
might fairly have let his conscience rest; but to test his
resolution, he deliberately courted temptation, and on a dozen
occasions allowed present loveliness to measure itself with absent
promise. At the risk of a large expenditure of blushes, he bravely
incurred the blandishments of various charming persons of the South.
They failed signally, in every case but one, to quicken his pulses.
He studied these gracious persons, he noted their gifts and graces,
so that he might know the range of the feminine charm. Of the utmost
that women can be and do he wished to have personal experience. But
with the sole exception I have mentioned, not a syren of them all but
shone with a radiance less magical than that dim but rounded shape
which glimmered forever in the dark future, like the luminous
complement of the early moon. It was at Lima that his poor little
potential Nora suffered temporary eclipse. He made here the
acquaintance of a young Spanish lady whose plump and full-blown
innocence seemed to him divinely amiable. If ignorance is grace,
what a lamentable folly to be wise! He had crossed from Havana to
Rio on the same vessel with her brother, a friendly young fellow, who
had made him promise to come and stay with him on his arrival at
Lima. Roger, in execution of this promise, passed three weeks under
his roof, in the society of the lovely Teresita. She caused him to
reflect, with a good deal of zeal. She moved him the more because,
being wholly without coquetry, she made no attempt whatever to
interest him. Her charm was the charm of absolute naïveté, and a
certain tame unseasoned sweetness,—the sweetness of an angel who is
without mundane reminiscences; to say nothing of a pair of liquid
hazel eyes and a coil of crinkled blue-black hair. She could barely
write her name, and from the summer twilight of her mind, which
seemed to ring with amorous bird-notes, she flung a disparaging
shadow upon Nora’s prospective condition. Roger thought of Nora, by
contrast, as a kind of superior doll, a thing wound up with a key,
whose virtues would make a _tic-tic_ if one listened. Why travel so
far about for a wife, when here was one ready made to his heart, as
illiterate as an angel, and as faithful as the little page of a
mediæval ballad,—and with those two perpetual love-lights beneath
her silly little forehead?
Day by day, near the pretty Peruvian, Roger grew better pleased with
the present. It was so happy, so idle, so secure! He protested
against the future. He grew impatient of the stiff little figure
which he had posted in the distance, to stare at him with those
monstrous pale eyes; they seemed to grow and grow as he thought of
them. In other words, he was in love with Teresa. She, on her side,
was delighted to be loved. She caressed him with her fond dark looks
and smiled perpetual assent. Late one afternoon they ascended
together to a terrace on the top of the house. The sun had just
disappeared; the southern landscape was drinking in the cool of
night. They stood awhile in silence; at last Roger felt that he must
speak of his love. He walked away to the farther end of the
terrace, casting about in his mind for the fitting words. They were
hard to find. His companion spoke a little English, and he a little
Spanish; but there came upon him a sudden perplexing sense of the
infantine rarity of her wits. He had never done her the honor to pay
her a compliment, he had never really talked with her. It was not
for him to talk, but for her to perceive! She turned about, leaning
back against the parapet of the terrace, looking at him and smiling.
She was always smiling. She had on an old faded pink morning dress,
very much open at the throat, and a ribbon round her neck, to which
was suspended a little cross of turquoise. One of the braids of her
hair had fallen down, and she had drawn it forward, and was plaiting
the end with her plump white fingers. Her nails were not
fastidiously clean. He went towards her. When he next became
perfectly conscious of their relative positions, he knew that he had
tenderly kissed her, more than once, and that she had more than
suffered him. He stood holding both her hands; he was blushing; her
own complexion was undisturbed, her smile barely deepened; another of
her braids had come down. He was filled with a sense of pleasure in
her sweetness, tempered by a vague feeling of pain in his all-to-easy
conquest. There was nothing of poor Teresita but that you could kiss
her! It came upon him with a sort of horror that he had never yet
distinctly told her that he loved her. “Teresa,” he said, almost
angrily, “I love you. Do you understand?” For all answer she raised
his two hands successively to her lips. Soon after this she went off
with her mother to church.
The next morning, one of his friend’s clerks brought him a package of
letters from his banker. One of them was a note from Nora. It ran
as follows:—
DEAR ROGER: I want so much to tell you that I have just got the prize
for the piano. I hope you will not think it very silly to write so
far only to tell you this. But I am so proud I want you to know it.
Of the three girls who tried for it, two were seventeen. The prize
is a beautiful picture called “Mozart à Vienne”; probably you have
seen it. Miss Murray says I may hang it up in my bedroom. Now I
have got to go and practise, for Miss Murray says I must practise
more than ever. My dear Roger, I do hope you are enjoying your
travels. I have learned a great deal of geography, following you on
the map. Don’t ever forget your loving NORA.
After reading this letter, Roger told his host that he should have to
leave him. The young Peruvian demurred, objected, and begged for a
reason.
“Well,” said Roger, “I find I am in love with your sister.” The words
sounded on his ear as if some one else had spoken them. Teresita’s light
was quenched, and she had no more fascination than a smouldering lamp,
smelling of oil.
“Why, my dear fellow,” said his friend, “that seems to me a reason
for staying. I shall be most happy to have you for a brother-in-law.”
“It’s impossible! I am engaged to a young lady in my own country.”
“You are in love here, you are engaged there, and you go where you
are engaged! You Englishmen are strange fellows!”
“Tell Teresa that I adore her, but that I am pledged at home. I
would rather not see her.”
And so Roger departed from Lima, without further communion with
Teresita. On, his return home he received a letter from her brother,
telling him of her engagement to a young merchant of Valparaiso,—an
excellent match. The young lady sent him her salutations. Roger,
answering his friend’s letter, begged that the Doña Teresa would
accept, as a wedding-present, of the accompanying trinket,—a little
brooch in turquoise. It would look very well with pink!
Roger reached home in the autumn, but left Nora at school till the
beginning of the Christmas holidays. He occupied the interval in
refurnishing his house, and clearing the stage for the last act of
the young girl’s childhood. He had always possessed a modest taste
for upholstery; he now began to apply it under the guidance of a
delicate idea. His idea led him to prefer, in all things, the fresh
and graceful to the grave and formal, and to wage war throughout his
old dwelling on the lurking mustiness of the past. He had a lively
regard for elegance, balanced by a horror of wanton luxury. He
fancied that a woman is the better for being well dressed and well
domiciled, and that vanity, too stingily treated, is sure to avenge
itself. So he took vanity into account. Nothing annoyed him more,
however, than the fear of seeing Nora a precocious fine lady; so that
while he aimed at all possible purity of effect, he stayed his hand
here and there before certain admonitory relics of ancestral ugliness
and virtue, embodied for the most part in hair-cloth and cotton
damask. Chintz and muslin, flowers and photographs and books, gave
their clear light tone to the house. Nothing could be more tenderly
propitious and virginal, or better chosen both to chasten the young
girl’s aspirations and to remind her of her protector’s tenderness.
Since his return he had designedly refused himself a glimpse of her.
He wished to give her a single undivided welcome to his home and his
heart. Shortly before Christmas, as he had even yet not set his
house in order, Lucinda Brown was sent to fetch her from school. If
Roger had expected that Nora would return with any striking accession
of beauty, he would have had to say “Amen” with an effort. She had
pretty well ceased to be a child; she was still his grave, imperfect
Nora. She had gained her full height,—a great height, which her
young strong slimness rendered the more striking. Her slender throat
supported a head of massive mould, bound about with dense auburn
braids. Beneath a somewhat serious brow her large, fair eyes
retained their collected light, as if uncertain where to fling it.
Now and then the lids parted widely and showered down these gathered
shafts; and if at these times a certain rare smile divided, in
harmony, her childish lips, Nora was for the moment a passable
beauty. But for the most part, the best charm of her face was in a
modest refinement of line, which rather evaded notice than courted
it. The first impression she was likely to produce was of a kind of
awkward slender majesty. Roger pronounced her “stately,” and for a
fortnight thought her too imposing by half; but as the days went on,
and the pliable innocence of early maidenhood gave a soul to this
formidable grace, he began to feel that in essentials she was still
the little daughter of his charity. He even began to observe in her
an added consciousness of this lowly position; as if with the growth
of her mind she had come to reflect upon it, and deem it less and
less a matter of course. He meditated much as to whether he should
frankly talk it over with her and allow her to feel that, for him as
well, their relation could never become commonplace. This would be
in a measure untender, but would it not be prudent? Ought he not, in
the interest of his final purpose, to infuse into her soul in her
sensitive youth an impression of all that she owed him, so that when
his time had come, if her imagination should lead her a-wandering,
gratitude would stay her steps? A dozen times over he was on the
verge of making his point, of saying, “Nora, Nora, these are not
vulgar alms; I expect a return. One of these days you must pay your
debt. Guess my riddle! I love you less than you think—and more! A
word to the wise.” But he was silenced by a saving sense of the
brutality of such a course and by a suspicion that, after all, it was
not needful. A passion of gratitude was silently gathering in the
young girl’s heart: that heart could be trusted to keep its
engagements. A deep conciliatory purpose seemed now to pervade her
life, of infinite delight to Roger as little by little it stole upon
his mind like the fragrance of a deepening spring. He had his idea;
he suspected that she had hers. They were but opposite faces of the
same deep need. Her musing silence, her deliberate smiles, the
childish keenness of her questionings, the delicacy of her little
nameless services and caresses, were all a kind of united
acknowledgment and promise.
On Christmas eve they sat together alone by a blazing log-fire in
Roger’s little library. He had been reading aloud a chapter of his
diary, to which Nora sat listening in dutiful demureness, though her
thoughts evidently were nearer home than Cuba and Peru. There is no
denying it was dull; he could gossip to better purpose. He felt its
dulness himself, and closing it finally with good-humored petulance,
declared it was fit only to throw into the fire. Upon which Nora
looked up, protesting. “You must do no such thing,” she said. “You
must keep your journals carefully, and one of these days I shall have
them bound in morocco and gilt, and ranged in a row in my own
bookcase.”
“That is but a polite way of burning them up,” said Roger. “They
will be as little read as if they were in the fire. I don’t know how
it is. They seemed to be very amusing when I wrote them: they are as
stale as an old newspaper now. I can’t write: that’s the amount of
it. I am a very stupid fellow, Nora; you might as well know it first
as last.”
Nora’s school had been of the punctilious Episcopal order, and she
had learned there the pretty custom of decorating the house at
Christmas-tide with garlands and crowns of evergreen and holly. She
had spent the day in decking out the chimney-piece, and now, seated
on a stool under the mantel-shelf, she twisted the last little wreath
which was to complete her design. A great still snow-storm was
falling without, and seemed to be blocking them in from the world.
She bit off the thread with which she had been binding her twigs,
held out her garland to admire its effect, and then, “I don’t believe
you are stupid, Roger,” she said: “and if I did, I should not much
care.”
“Is that philosophy, or indifference?” said the young man.
“I don’t know that it’s either; it’s because I know you are so good.”
“That is what they say about all stupid people.”
Nora added another twig to her wreath and bound it up. “I am sure,”
she said at last, “that when people are as good as you are, they
cannot be stupid. I should like some one to tell me you are stupid.
I know, Roger; _I_ know!”
The young man began to feel a little uneasy; it was no part of his
plan that her good-will should spend itself too soon. “Dear me,
Nora, if you think so well of me, I shall find it hard to live up to
your expectations. I am afraid I shall disappoint you. I have a
little gimcrack to put in your stocking to-night; but I’m rather
ashamed of it now.”
“A gimcrack more or less is of small account. I have had my stocking
hanging up these three years, and everything I possess is a present
from you.”
Roger frowned; the conversation had taken just such a turn as he had
often longed to provoke, but now it was disagreeable to him. “O,
come,” he said: “I have done simply my duty to my little girl.”
“But, Roger,” said Nora, staring with expanded eyes, “I am not your
little girl.”
His frown darkened; his heart began to beat. “Don’t talk nonsense!”
he said.
“But, Roger, it is true. I am no one’s little girl. Do you think I
have no memory? Where is my father? Where is my mother?”
“Listen to me,” said Roger, sternly. “You must not talk of such
things.”
“You must not forbid me, Roger. I can’t think of them without
thinking of you. This is Christmas eve! Miss Murray told us that we
must never let it pass without thinking of all that it means. But
without Miss Murray, I have been thinking all day of things which are
hard to name,—of death and life, of my parents and you, of my
incredible happiness. I feel to-night like a princess in a
fairy-tale. I am a poor creature, without a friend, without a penny
or a home; and yet, here I sit by a blazing fire, with money, with
food, with clothes, with love. The snow outside is burying the
stone-walls, and yet here I can sit and simply say, ‘How pretty!’
Suppose I were in it, wandering and begging,—I might have been!
Should I think it pretty then? Roger, Roger, I am no one’s child!”
The tremor in her voice deepened, and she broke into a sudden passion
of tears. Roger took her in his arms and tried to soothe away her
sobs. But she disengaged herself and went on with an almost fierce
exaltation: “No, no, I won’t be comforted! I have had comfort
enough; I hate it. I want for an hour to be myself and feel how
little that is, to be my miserable father’s daughter, to fancy I hear
my mother’s voice. I have never spoken of them before; you must let
me to-night. You must tell me about my father; you know something.
I don’t. You never refused me anything, Roger; don’t refuse me this.
He was not good, like you; but now he can do no harm. You have never
mentioned his name to me, but happy as we are here together, we ought
not,—we ought not, to despise him!”
Roger yielded to the vehemence of this flood of emotion. He stood
watching her with two helpless tears in his own eyes, and then he
drew her gently towards him and kissed her on the forehead. She took
up her work again, and he told her, with every minutest detail he
could recall, the story of his sole brief interview with Mr. Lambert.
Gradually he lost the sense of effort and reluctance, and talked
freely, abundantly, almost with pleasure. Nora listened very
solemnly,—with an amount of self-control which denoted the habit of
constant retrospect. She asked a hundred questions as to Roger’s
impression of her father’s appearance. Was he not wonderfully
handsome? Then taking up the tale herself, she poured out a torrent
of feverish reminiscence. She disinterred her early memories with a
kind of rapture of relief. Her evident joy in this frolic of
confidence gave Roger a pitying sense of what her long silence must
have cost her. But evidently she bore him no grudge, and his present
tolerance of her rambling gossip seemed to her but another proof of
his charity. She rose at last, and stood before the fire, into which
she had thrown the refuse of her greenery, watching it blaze up and
turn to ashes. “So much for the past!” she said, at last. “The rest
is the future. The girls at school used to be always talking about
what they meant to do in coming years, what they hoped, what they
wished; wondering, choosing, imagining. You don’t know how girls
talk, Roger: you would be surprised! I never used to say much: my
future is fixed. I have nothing to choose, nothing to hope, nothing
to fear. I am to make you happy. That’s simple enough. You have
undertaken to bring me up, Roger; you must do your best, because now
I am here, it’s for long, and you would rather have a wise girl than
a silly one.” And she smiled with a kind of tentative daughterliness
through the traces of her recent grief. She put her two hands on his
shoulders and eyed him with conscious gravity. “You shall never
repent. I shall learn everything, I shall be everything! Oh! I
wish I were pretty.” And she tossed back her head, in impatience of
her fatal plainness, with an air which forced Roger to assure her
that she would do very well as she was. “If you are satisfied,” she
said, “I am!” For a moment Roger felt as if she were twenty years
old.
This serious Christmas eve left its traces upon many ensuing weeks.
Nora’s education was resumed with a certain added solemnity. Roger
was no longer obliged to condescend to the level of her intelligence,
and he found reason to thank his stars that he had improved his own
mind. He found use for all the knowledge he possessed. The day of
childish “lessons” was over, and Nora sought instruction in the
perusal of various classical authors, in her own and other tongues,
in concert with her friend. They read aloud to each other
alternately, discussed their acquisitions, and digested them with
perhaps equal rapidity. Roger, in former years, had had but a small
literary appetite; he liked a few books and knew them well, but he
felt as if to settle down to an unread author were very like starting
on a journey,—a case for farewells, packing trunks, and buying
tickets. His curiosity, now, however, imbued and quickened with a
motive, led him through a hundred untrodden paths. He found it hard
sometimes to keep pace with Nora’s pattering step; through the
flowery lanes of poetry, in especial, she would gallop without
drawing breath. Was she quicker-witted than her friend, or only more
superficial? Something of one, doubtless, and something of the
other. Roger was forever suspecting her of a deeper penetration than
his own, and hanging his head with an odd mixture of pride and
humility. Her quick perception, at times, made him feel
irretrievably dull and antiquated. His ears would tingle, his cheeks
would burn, his old hope would fade into a shadow. “It’s worse than
useless,” he would declare. “How can I ever have for her that charm
of infallibility, that romance of omniscience, that a woman demands
of her lover? She has seen me scratching my head, she has seen me
counting on my fingers! Before she is seventeen she will be mortally
tired of me, and by the time she is twenty I shall be fatally
familiar and incurably stale. It’s very well for her to talk about
life-long devotion and eternal gratitude. She doesn’t know the
meaning of words. She must grow and outgrow, that is her first
necessity. She must come to woman’s estate and pay the inevitable
tribute. I can open the door and let in the lover. If she loves me
now I shall have had my turn. I can’t hope to be the object of two
passions. I must thank the Lord for small favors!” Then as he
seemed to taste, in advance, the bitterness of disappointment,
casting about him angrily for some means of appeal: “I ought to go
away and stay away for years and never write at all, instead of
compounding ponderous diaries to make even my absence detestable. I
ought to convert myself into a beneficent shadow, a vague tutelary
name. Then I ought to come back in glory, fragrant with exotic
perfumes and shod with shoes of mystery! Otherwise, I ought to clip
the wings of her fancy and put her on half-rations. I ought to snub
her and scold her and bully her and tell her she’s deplorably
plain,—treat her as Rochester treats Jane Eyre. If I were only a
good old Catholic, that I might shut her up in a convent and keep her
childish and stupid and contented!” Roger felt that he was too
doggedly conscientious; but abuse his conscience as he would, he
could not make it yield an inch; so that in the constant strife
between his egotistical purpose and his generous temper, the latter
kept gaining ground, and Nora innocently enjoyed the spoils of
victory. It was his very generosity that detained him on the spot,
by her side, watching her, working for her, performing a hundred
offices which other hands would have but scanted. Roger watched
intently for the signs of that inevitable hour when a young girl
begins to loosen her fingers in the grasp of a guiding hand and
wander softly in pursuit of the sinuous silver thread which deflects,
through meadows of perennial green, from the dull gray stream of the
common lot. She had relapsed in the course of time into the careless
gayety and the light, immediate joys of girlhood. If she cherished a
pious purpose in her heart, she made no indecent parade of it. But
her very placidity and patience somehow afflicted her friend. She
was too monotonously sweet, too easily obedient. If once in a while
she would only flash out into petulance or rebellion! She kept her
temper so carefully: what in the world was she keeping it for? If
she would only bless him for once with an angry look and tell him
that he bored her!
During the second year after her return from school Roger began to
imagine that she avoided his society and resented his attentions.
She was fond of lonely walks, readings, reveries. She was fond of
novels, and she read a great many. For works of fiction in general
Roger had no great relish, though he confessed to three or four
old-fashioned favorites. These were not always Nora’s. One evening
in the early spring she sat down to a twentieth perusal of the
classic tale of “The Heir of Redcliffe.” Roger, as usual, asked her
to read aloud. She began, and proceeded through a dozen pages.
Looking up, at this point, she beheld Roger asleep. She smiled
softly, and privately resumed her reading. At the end of an hour,
Roger, having finished his nap, rather startled her by his excessive
annoyance at his lapse of consciousness. He wondered whether he had
snored, but the absurd fellow was ashamed to ask her. Recovering
himself finally, “The fact is, Nora,” he said, “all novels seem to me
stupid. They are nothing to what _I_ can fancy! I have in my heart
a prettier romance than any of them.”
“A romance?” said Nora, simply. “Pray let me hear it. You are quite
as good a hero as this stick of a Philip. Begin!”
He stood before the fire, looking at her with almost funereal
gravity. “My dénouement is not yet written,” he said. “Wait till
the story is finished; then you shall hear the whole.”
As at this time Nora put on long dresses and began to arrange her
hair as a young lady, it occurred to Roger that he might make some
change in his own appearance and reinforce his waning attractions.
He was now thirty-three; he fancied he was growing stout. Bald,
corpulent, middle-aged,—at this rate he should soon be shelved! He
was seized with a mad desire to win back the lost graces of youth.
He had a dozen interviews with his tailor, the result of which was
that for a fortnight he appeared daily in a new garment. Suddenly,
amid this restless longing to revise and embellish himself, he
determined to suppress his whiskers. This would take off five years.
He appeared, therefore, one morning, in the severe simplicity of a
mustache. Nora started, and greeted him with a little cry of horror.
“Don’t you like it?” he asked.
She hung her head on one side and the other. “Well, no,—to be
frank.”
“O, of course to be frank! It will only take five years to grow them
again. What is the trouble?”
She gave a critical frown. “It makes you look too,—too fat; too
much like Mr. Vose.” It is sufficient to explain that Mr. Vose was
the butcher, who called every day in his cart, and who
recently,—Roger with horror only now remembered it,—had sacrificed
his whiskers to a mysterious ideal.
“I am sorry!” said Roger. “It was for you I did it!”
“For me!” And Nora burst into a violent laugh.
“Why, my dear Nora,” cried the young man with a certain angry
vehemence, “don’t I do everything in life for you?”
She became grave again. Then, after much meditation, “Excuse my
unfeeling levity,” she said. “You might cut off your nose, Roger,
and I should like your face as well.” But this was but half comfort.
“Too fat!” Her subtler sense had spoken, and Roger never encountered
Mr. Vose for three months after this without wishing to attack him
with one of his own cleavers.
He made now an heroic attempt to scale the frowning battlements of
the future. He pretended to be making arrangements for a tour in
Europe, and for having his house completely remodelled in his
absence; noting the while attentively the effect upon Nora of his
cunning machinations. But she gave no sign of suspicion that his
future, to the uttermost day, could be anything but her future too.
One evening, nevertheless, an incident occurred which fatally
confounded his calculations,—an evening of perfect mid-spring, full
of warm, vague odors, of growing daylight, of the sense of bursting
sap and fresh-turned earth. Roger sat on the piazza, looking out on
these things with an opera-glass. Nora, who had been strolling in
the garden, returned to the house and sat down on the steps of the
portico. “Roger,” she said, after a pause, “has it never struck you
as very strange that we should be living together in this way?”
Roger’s heart rose to his throat. But he was loath to concede
anything, lest he should concede too much. “It is not especially
strange,” he said.
“Surely it is strange,” she answered. “What are you? Neither my
brother, nor my father, nor my uncle, nor my cousin,—nor even, by
law, my guardian.”
“By law! My dear child, what do you know about law?”
“I know that if I should run away and leave you now, you could not
force me to return.”
“That’s fine talk! Who told you that?”
“No one; I thought of it myself. As I grow older, I ought to think
of such things.”
“Upon my word! Of running away and leaving me?”
“That is but one side of the question. The other is that you can
turn me out of your house this moment, and no one can force you to
take me back. I ought to remember such things.”
“Pray what good will it do you to remember them?”
Nora hesitated a moment. “There is always some good in not losing
sight of the truth.”
“The truth! You are very young to begin to talk about the truth.”
“Not too young. I am old for my age. I ought to be!” These last
words were uttered with a little sigh which roused Roger to action.
“Since we are talking about the truth,” he said, “I wonder whether
you know a tithe of it.”
For an instant she was silent; then, rising slowly to her feet, “What
do you mean?” she asked. “Is there any secret in all that you have
done for me?” Suddenly she clasped her hands, and eagerly, with a
smile, went on: “You said the other day you had a romance. Is it a
real romance, Roger? Are you, after all, related to me,—my cousin,
my brother?”
He let her stand before him, perplexed and expectant. “It is more of
a romance than that.”
She slid upon her knees at his feet. “Dear Roger, do tell me,” she
said.
He began to stroke her hair. “You think so much,” he answered: “do
you never think about the future, the real future, ten years hence?”
“A great deal.”
“What do you think?”
She blushed a little, and then he felt that she was drawing
confidence from his face. “Promise not to laugh!” she said, half
laughing herself. He nodded. “I think about my husband!” she
proclaimed. And then, as if she had, after all, been very absurd,
and to forestall his laughter, “And about your wife!” she quickly
added. “I want dreadfully to see her. Why don’t you marry?”
He continued to stroke her hair in silence. At last he said
sententiously, “I hope to marry one of these days.”
“I wish you would do it now,” Nora went on. “If only she would be
nice! We should be sisters, and I should take care of the children.”
“You are too young to understand what you say, or what I mean.
Little girls should not talk about marriage. It can mean nothing to
you until you come yourself to marry,—as you will, of course. You
will have to decide and choose.”
“I suppose I shall. I shall refuse him.”
“What do you mean?”
But, without answering his question, “Were you ever in love, Roger?”
she suddenly asked. “Is that your romance?”
“Almost.”
“Then it is not about me, after all?”
“It is about you, Nora; but, after all, it is not a romance. It is
solid, it is real, it is truth itself; as true as your silly novels
are false. Nora, I care for no one, I shall never care for any one,
but you!”
He spoke in tones so deep and solemn that she was impressed. “Do you
mean, Roger, that you care so much for me that you will never marry?”
He rose quickly in his chair, pressing his hand over his brow. “Ah,
Nora,” he cried, “you are very painful!”
If she had annoyed him she was very contrite. She took his two hands
in her own. “Roger,” she whispered gravely, “if you don’t wish it, I
promise never, never, never to marry, but to be yours alone,—yours
alone!”