The summer passed away; Nora was turned sixteen. Deeming it time she
should begin to see something of the world, Roger spent the autumn in
travelling. Of his tour in Europe he had ceased to talk; it was
indefinitely deferred. It matters little where they went; Nora
greatly enjoyed the excursion, and found all spots alike delightful.
To Roger himself it gave a great deal of comfort. Whether or no his
companion was pretty, people certainly looked at her. He overheard
them a dozen times call her “striking.” _Striking_! The word seemed
to him rich in meaning; if he had seen her for the first time taking
the breeze on the deck of a river steamer, he certainly should have
been struck. On his return home he found among his letters the
following missive:—
MY DEAR SIR: I have learned, after various fruitless researches, that
you have adopted my cousin. Miss Lambert, at the time she left St.
Louis, was too young to know much about her family, or even to care
much; and you, I suppose, have not investigated the subject. You,
however, better than any one, can understand my desire to make her
acquaintance. I hope you will not deny me the privilege. I am the
second son of a half-sister of her mother, between whom and my own
mother there was always the greatest affection. It was not until
some time after it happened that I heard of Mr. Lambert’s melancholy
death. But it is useless to recur to that painful scene! I resolved
to spare no trouble in ascertaining the fate of his daughter. I have
only just succeeded, after having almost given her up. I have
thought it better to write to you than to her, but I beg you to give
her my compliments. I anticipate no difficulty in satisfying you
that I am not an impostor. I have no hope of being able to better
her circumstances; but, whatever they may be, blood is blood, and
cousins are cousins, especially in the West. A speedy answer will
oblige
Yours truly,
GEORGE FENTON.
The letter was dated in New York, from an hotel. Roger felt a
certain dismay. It had been from the first a peculiar satisfaction
to him that Nora began and ended so distinctly with herself. But
here was a hint of indefinite continuity! Here, at last, was an echo
of her past. He immediately showed the letter to Nora. As she read
it, her face flushed deep with wonder and suppressed relief. She had
never heard, she confessed, of her mother’s half-sister. The “great
affection” between the two ladies must have been anterior to Mrs.
Lambert’s marriage. Roger’s own provisional solution of the problem
was that Mrs. Lambert had married so little to the taste of her
family as to forfeit all communication with them. If he had obeyed
his first impulse, he would have written to his mysterious petitioner
that Miss Lambert was sensible of the honor implied in his request,
but that never having missed his attentions, it seemed needless that,
at this time of day, she should cultivate them. But Nora was
interested in Mr. Fenton; the dormant pulse of kinship had been
quickened; it began to throb with delicious power. This was enough
for Roger. “I don’t know,” he said, “whether he’s an honest man or a
scamp, but at a venture I suppose I must invite him down.” To this
Nora replied that she thought his letter was “so beautiful”; and Mr.
Fenton received a fairly civil summons.
Whether or no he was an honest man remained to be seen; but on the
face of the matter he appeared no scamp. He was, in fact, a person
difficult to classify. Roger had made up his mind that he would be
outrageously rough and Western; full of strange oaths and bearded,
for aught he knew, like the pard. In aspect, however, Fenton was a
pretty fellow enough, and his speech, if not especially conciliatory
to ears polite, possessed a certain homely vigor in which ears polite
might have found their account. He was as little as possible,
certainly, of Roger’s circle; but he carried about him the native
fragrance of another circle, beside which the social perfume familiar
to Roger’s nostrils might have seemed a trifle stale and insipid. He
was invested with a loose-fitting cosmopolitan Occidentalism, which
seemed to say to Roger that, of the two, he was the provincial.
Considering his years,—they numbered but twenty-five,—Fenton’s
tough maturity was very wonderful. You would have confessed,
however, that he had a true genius for his part, and that it became
him better to play at manhood than at juvenility. He could never
have been a ruddy-checked boy. He was tall and lean, with a keen
dark eye, a smile humorous, but not exactly genial, a thin, drawling,
almost feminine voice, and a strange Southwestern accent. His voice,
at first, might have given you certain presumptuous hopes as to a
soft spot in his stiff young hide; but after listening awhile to its
colorless monotone, you would have felt, I think, that though it was
an instrument of one string, that solitary chord was not likely to
become relaxed. Fenton was furthermore flat-chested and
high-shouldered, though he was evidently very strong. His straight
black hair was always carefully combed, and a small diamond pin
adorned the bosom of his shirt. His feet were small and slender, and
his left hand was decorated with a neat specimen of tattooing. You
never would have called him modest, yet you would hardly have called
him impudent; for he had evidently lived with people who had not
analyzed appreciation to this fine point. He had nothing whatever of
the manner of society, but it was surprising how gracefully a certain
shrewd _bonhomie_ and smart good-humor enabled him to dispense with
it. He stood with his hands in his pockets, watching punctilio take
its course, and thinking, probably, what a d——d fool she was to go
so far roundabout to a point he could reach with a single shuffle of
his long legs. Roger, from the first hour of his being in the house,
felt pledged to dislike him. Fenton patronized him; he made him feel
like a small boy, like an old woman; he sapped the roots of the poor
fellow’s comfortable consciousness of being a man of the world.
Fenton was a man of twenty worlds. He had knocked about and dabbled
in affairs and adventures since he was ten years old; he knew the
American continent as he knew the palm of his hand; he was redolent
of enterprise, of “operations,” of a certain fierce friction with
mankind. Roger would have liked to believe that he doubted his word,
that there was a chance of his not being Nora’s cousin, but a youth
of an ardent swindling genius who had come into possession of a
parcel of facts too provokingly pertinent to be wasted. He had
evidently known the late Mr. Lambert,—the poor man must have had
plenty of such friends; but was he, in truth, his wife’s nephew? Had
not this shadowy nepotism been excogitated over an unpaid hotel bill?
So Roger fretfully meditated, but generally with no great gain of
ground. He inclined, on the whole, to believe the young man’s
pretensions were valid, and to reserve his pugnacity for the use he
might possibly make of them. Of course Fenton had not come down to
spend a stupid week in the country out of cousinly affection. Nora
was but the means; Roger’s presumptive wealth and bounty were the
end. “He comes to make love to his cousin, and marry her if he can.
I, who have done so much, will of course do more; settle an income
directly on the bride, make my will in her favor, and die at my
earliest convenience! How furious he must be,” Roger continued to
meditate, “to find me so young and hearty! How furious he would be
if he knew a little more!” This line of argument was justified in a
manner by the frankness of Fenton’s intimation that he was incapable
of any other relation to a fact than a desire to turn it to pecuniary
account. Roger was uneasy, yet he took a certain comfort in the
belief that, thanks to his early lessons, Nora could be trusted to
confine her cousin to the limits of cousinship. In whatever he might
have failed, he had certainly taught her to know a gentleman.
Cousins are born, not made; but lovers may be accepted at discretion.
Nora’s discretion, surely, would not be wanting. I may add also
that, in his desire to order all things well, Roger caught himself
wondering whether, at the worst, a little precursory love-making
would do any harm. The ground might be gently tickled to receive his
own sowing; the petals of the young girl’s nature, playfully forced
apart, would leave the golden heart of the flower but the more
accessible to his own vertical rays.
It was cousinship for Nora, certainly; but cousinship was much; more
than Roger fancied, luckily for his peace of mind. To a girl who had
never had anything to boast of, this late-coming kinsman seemed a
sort of godsend. Nora was so proud of turning out to have a cousin
as well as other people, that she treated Fenton much better than
other people treat their cousins. It must be said that Fenton was
not altogether unworthy of her favors. He meant no especial harm to
his fellow-men save in so far as he meant uncompromising benefit to
himself. The Knight of La Mancha, on the torrid flats of Spain,
never urged his gaunt steed with a grimmer pressure of the knees than
that with which Fenton held himself erect on the hungry hobby of
success. Shrewd as he was, he had perhaps, as well, a ray of Don
Quixote’s divine obliquity of vision. It is at least true that
success as yet had been painfully elusive, and a part of the peril to
Nora’s girlish heart lay in this melancholy grace of undeserved
failure. The young man’s imagination was eager; he had a generous
need of keeping too many irons on the fire. His invention was
feeling rather jaded when he made overtures to Roger. He had learned
six months before of his cousin’s situation, and had felt no great
sentimental need of making her acquaintance; but at last, revolving
many things of a certain sort, he had come to wonder whether these
lucky mortals could not be induced to play into his hands. Roger’s
wealth (which he largely overestimated) and Roger’s obvious taste for
sharing it with other people, Nora’s innocence and Nora’s
prospects,—it would surely take a great fool not to pluck the rose
from so thornless a tree. He foresaw these good things melting and
trickling into the empty channel of his own fortune. Exactly what
use he meant to make of Nora he would have been at a loss to say.
Plain matrimony might or might not be a prize. At any rate, it could
do a clever man no harm to have a rich girl foolishly in love with
him. He turned, therefore, upon his charming cousin the softer side
of his genius. He very soon began to see that he had never known so
delightful a person, and indeed his growing sense of her sweetness
bade fair to make him bungle his dishonesty. She was altogether
sweet enough to be valued for herself. She represented something
that he had never yet encountered. Nora was a young lady; how she
had come to it was one of the outer mysteries; but there she was,
consummate! He made no point of a man being a gentleman; in fact,
when a man was a gentleman you had rather to be one yourself, which
didn’t pay; but for a woman to be a lady was plainly pure gain. He
had wit enough to detect something extremely grateful in Nora’s
half-concessions, her reserve of freshness. Women, to him, had
seemed mostly as cut flowers, blooming awhile in the waters of
occasion, but yielding no second or rarer satisfaction. Nora was
expanding in the sunshine of her cousin’s gallantry. She had known
so few young men that she had not learned to be fastidious, and
Fenton represented to her fancy that great collective manhood from
which Roger was excluded by his very virtues. He had an irresistible
air of action, alertness, and purpose. Poor Roger held one much less
in suspense. She regarded her cousin with something of the thrilled
attention which one bestows on the naked arrow, poised across the
bow. He had, moreover, the inestimable merit of representing her own
side of her situation. He very soon became sensible of this merit,
and you may be sure he entertained her to the top of her bent. He
gossiped by the hour about her father, and gave her very plainly to
understand that poor Mr. Lambert had been more sinned against than
sinning.
Nora was not slow to perceive that Roger had no love for their guest,
and she immediately conceded him his right of judgment, thinking it
natural that they should quarrel about her a little. Fenton’s
presence was a tacit infringement of Roger’s prescriptive right of
property. If her cousin had only never come! This might have been,
though she could not bring herself to wish it. Nora felt vaguely
that here was a chance for tact, for the woman’s peace-making art.
To keep Roger in spirits, she put on a dozen unwonted graces; she
waited on him, appealed to him, smiled at him with unwearied
iteration. But the main effect of these sweet offices was to make
her cousin think her the prettier. Roger’s rancorous suspicion
transmuted to bitterness what would otherwise have been pure delight.
She was turning hypocrite; she was throwing dust in his eyes; she was
plotting with that vulgar Missourian. Fenton, of course, was forced
to admit that he had reckoned without his host. Roger had had the
impudence not to turn out a simpleton; he was not a shepherd of the
golden age; he was a dogged modern, with prosy prejudices; the wind
of his favor blew as it listed. Fenton took the liberty of being
extremely irritated at the other’s want of ductility. “Hang the
man!” he said to himself, “why can’t he trust me? What is he afraid
of? Why don’t he take me as a friend rather than an enemy? Let him
be frank, and I will be frank. I could put him up to several things.
And what does he want to do with Nora, any way?” This latter
question Fenton came very soon to answer, and the answer amused him
not a little. It seemed to him an extremely odd use of one’s time
and capital, this fashioning of a wife to order. There was a
long-winded patience about it, an arrogance of leisure, which excited
his ire. Roger might surely have found his fit ready made! His
disappointment, a certain angry impulse to break a window, as it
were, in Roger’s hothouse, the sense finally that what he should gain
he would gain from Nora alone, though indeed she was too confoundedly
innocent to appreciate his pressing necessities,—these things
combined to heat the young man’s humor to the fever-point, and to
make him strike more random blows than belonged to plain prudence.
The autumn being well advanced, the warmth of the sun had become very
grateful. Nora used to spend much of the morning in strolling about
the dismantled garden with her cousin. Roger would stand at the
window with his honest face more nearly disfigured by a scowl than
ever before. It was the old, old story, to his mind: nothing
succeeds with women like just too little deference. Fenton would
lounge along by Nora’s side, with his hands in his pockets, a cigar
in his mouth, his shoulders raised to his ears, and a pair of
tattered slippers on his absurdly diminutive feet. Not only had Nora
forgiven him this last breach of decency, but she had forthwith begun
to work him a new pair of slippers. “What on earth,” thought Roger,
“do they find to talk about?” Their conversation, meanwhile, ran in
some such strain as this.
“My dear Nora,” said the young man, “what on earth, week in and week
out, do you and Mr. Lawrence find to talk about?”
“A great many things, George. We have lived long enough together to
have a great many subjects of conversation.”
“It was a most extraordinary thing, his adopting you, if you don’t
mind my saying so. Imagine my adopting a little girl.”
“You and Roger are very different men.”
“We certainly are. What in the world did he expect to do with you?”
“Very much what he has done, I suppose. He has educated me, he has
made me what I am.”
“You’re a very nice little person; but, upon my word, I don’t see
that he’s to thank for it. A lovely girl can be neither made nor
marred.”
“Possibly! But I give you notice that I am not a lovely girl. I
have it in me to be, under provocation, anything but a lovely girl.
I owe everything to Roger. You must say nothing against him. I will
not allow it. What would have become of me—” She stopped, betrayed
by her glance and voice.
“Mr. Lawrence is a model of all the virtues, I admit! But, Nora, I
confess I am jealous of him. Does he expect to educate you forever?
You seem to me to have already all the learning a pretty woman needs.
What does he know about women? What does he expect to do with you
two or three years hence? Two or three years hence you will be
number one.” And Fenton began to whistle with vehement gayety,
executing with shuffling feet a momentary fandango. “Two or three
years hence, when you look in the glass, remember I said so!”
“He means to go to Europe one of these days,” said Nora, irrelevantly.
“One of these days! One would think he expects to keep you forever.
Not if I can help it. And why Europe, in the name of all that’s
patriotic? Europe be hanged! You ought to come out to your own
section of the country, and see your own people. I can introduce you
to the best society in St. Louis. I’ll tell you what, my dear. You
don’t know it, but you’re a regular Western girl.”
A certain foolish gladness in being the creature thus denominated
prompted Nora to a gush of momentary laughter, of which Roger, within
the window, caught the soundless ripple. “You ought to know,
George,” she said, “you are Western enough yourself.”
“Of course I am. I glory in it. It’s the only place for a man of
ideas! In the West you can do something! Round here you’re all
stuck fast in ten feet of varnish. For yourself, Nora, at bottom
you’re all right; but superficially you’re just a trifle
overstarched. But we’ll take it out of you! It comes of living with
a stiff-necked—”
Nora bent for a moment her lustrous eyes on the young man, as if to
recall him to order. “I beg you to understand, once for all,” she
said, “that I refuse to listen to disrespectful allusions to Roger.”
“I’ll say it again, just to make you look at me so. If I ever fall
in love with you, it will be when you are scolding me. All I have
got to do is to attack your papa—”
“He is not my papa. I have had one papa; that’s enough. I say it in
all respect.”
“If he is not your papa, what is he? He is a dog in the manger. He
must be either one thing or the other. When you are very little
older, you will understand that.”
“He may be whatever thing you please. I shall be but one,—his best
friend.”
Fenton laughed with a kind of fierce hilarity. “You are so innocent,
my dear, that one doesn’t know where to take you. Do you expect to
marry him?”
Nora stopped in the path, with her eyes on her cousin. For a moment
he was half confounded by their startled severity and the flush of
pain in her cheek. “Marry Roger!” she said, with great gravity.
“Why, he’s a man, after all!”
Nora was silent a moment; and then with a certain forced levity,
walking on: “I had better wait till I am asked.”
“He will ask you! You will see.”
“If he does, I shall be surprised.”
“You will pretend to be. Women always do.”
“He has known me as a child,” she continued, heedless of his sarcasm.
“I shall always be a child, for him.”
“He will like that,” said Fenton. “He will like a child of twenty.”
Nora, for an instant was lost in meditation. “As regards marriage,”
she said at last, quietly, “I will do what Roger wishes.”
Fenton lost patience. “Roger be hanged!” he cried. “You are not his
slave. You must choose for yourself and act for yourself. You must
obey your own heart. You don’t know what you are talking about. One
of these days your heart will say its say. Then we shall see what
becomes of Roger’s wishes! If he wants to make what he pleases of
you, he should have taken you younger,—or older! Don’t tell me
seriously that you can ever love (don’t play upon words: love, I
mean, in the one sense that means anything!) such a solemn little fop
as that! Don’t protest, my dear girl; I must have my say. I speak
in your own interest; I speak, at any rate, from my own heart. I
detest the man. I came here perfectly on the square, and he has
treated me as if I weren’t fit to touch with tongs. I am poor, I
have my way to make, I ain’t fashionable; but I’m an honest man, for
all that, and as good as he, take me altogether. Why can’t he show
me a moment’s frankness? Why can’t he take me by the hand, and say,
‘Come, young man, I’ve got capital, and you’ve got brains; let’s pull
together a stroke?’ Does he think I want to steal his spoons or pick
his pocket? Is that hospitality? It’s a poor kind.”
This passionate outbreak, prompted in about equal measure by baffled
ambition and wounded conceit, made sad havoc with Nora’s loyalty to
her friend. Her sense of natural property in her cousin,—the
instinct of free affection alternating more gratefully than she knew
with the dim consciousness of measured dependence,—had become in her
heart a sort of sweet excitement. It made her feel that Roger’s
mistrust was cruel; it was doubly cruel that George should feel it.
Two angry men, at any rate, were quarrelling about her, and she must
avert an explosion. She promised herself to dismiss Fenton the next
day. Of course, by the very fact of this concession, Roger lost
ground with her, and George acquired the grace of the persecuted.
Meanwhile, Roger’s jealous irritation came to a head. On the evening
following the little scene I have narrated the young couple sat by
the fire in the library; Fenton on a stool at his cousin’s feet
holding, while Nora wound them on reels, the wools which were to be
applied to the manufacture of those invidious slippers. Roger, after
grimly watching their mutual amenities for some time over the cover
of a book, unable to master his fierce discomposure, departed with a
telltale stride. They heard him afterwards walking up and down the
piazza, where he was appealing from his troubled nerves to the
ordered quietude of the stars.
“He hates me so,” said Fenton, “that I believe if I were to go out
there he would draw a knife.”
“O George!” cried Nora, horrified.
“It’s a fact, my dear. I am afraid you’ll have to give me up. I
wish I had never seen you!”
“At all events, we can write to each other.”
“What’s writing? I don’t know how to write! I will, though! I
suppose he will open my letters. So much the worse for him!”
Nora, as she wound her wool, mused intently. “I can’t believe he
really grudges me our friendship. It must be something else.”
Fenton, with a clench of his fist, arrested suddenly the outflow of
the skein from his hand. “It is something else,” he said. “It’s our
possible—more than friendship!” And he grasped her two hands in his
own. “Nora, choose! Between me and him!”
She stared a moment; then her eyes filled with tears. “O George,”
she cried, “you make me very unhappy.” She must certainly tell him
to go; and yet that very movement of his which had made it doubly
needful made it doubly hard. “I will talk to Roger,” she said. “No
one should be condemned unheard. We may all misunderstand each
other.”
Fenton, half an hour later, having, as he said, letters to write,
went up to his own room; shortly after which, Roger returned to the
library. Half an hour’s communion with the starlight and the ringing
crickets had drawn the sting from his irritation. There came to him,
too, a mortifying sense of his guest having outdone him in civility.
This would never do. He took refuge in imperturbable good-humor, and
entered the room in high indifference. But even before he had
spoken, something in Nora’s face caused this wholesome dose of
resignation to stick in his throat. “Your cousin is gone?” he said.
“To his own room. He has some letters to write.”
“Shall I hold your wools?” Roger asked, after a pause.
“Thank you. They are all wound.”
“For whom are your slippers?” He knew, of course; but the question
came.
“For George. Did I not tell you? Do you think them pretty?” And
she held up her work.
“Prettier than he deserves.”
Nora gave him a rapid glance and miscounted her stitch. “You don’t
like poor George,” she said.
“No. Since you ask me, I don’t like poor George.”
Nora was silent. At last: “Well!” she said, “you’ve not the same
reasons as I have.”
“So I am bound to believe! You must have excellent reasons.”
“Excellent. He is my own, you know.”
“Your own—? Ah!” And he gave a little laugh.
“My own cousin,” said Nora.
“Your own grandfather!” cried Roger.
She stopped her work. “What do you mean?” she asked gravely.
Roger began to blush a little. “I mean—I mean—that I don’t believe
in your cousin. He doesn’t satisfy me. I don’t like him. He
contradicts himself, his story doesn’t hang together. I have nothing
but his word. I am not bound to take it.”
“Roger, Roger,” said Nora, with great softness, “do you mean that he
is an impostor?”
“The word is your own. He’s not an honest man.”
She slowly rose from her little bench, gathering her work into the
skirt of her dress. “And, doubting of his honesty, you have let him
take up his abode here, you have let him become dear to me?”
She was making him ten times a fool! “Why, if you liked him,” he
said. “When did I ever refuse you anything?”
There came upon Nora a sudden unpitying sense that Roger was
ridiculous. “Honest or not honest,” she said with vehemence, “I do
like him. Cousin or no cousin, he is my friend.”
“Very good. But I warn you. I don’t enjoy talking to you thus.
Only let me tell you, once for all, that your cousin, your
friend—your—whatever he is!”— He faltered an instant; Nora’s eyes
were fixed on him. “That he disgusts me!”
“You are extremely unjust. You have taken no trouble to know him.
You have treated him from the first with small civility!”
“Was the trouble to be all mine? Civility! he never missed it; he
doesn’t know what it means.”
“He knows more than you think. But we must talk no more about him.”
She rolled together her canvas and reels; and then suddenly, with
passionate inconsequence, “Poor, poor George!” she cried.
Roger watched her a moment; then he said bitterly, “You disappoint
me.”
“You must have formed great hopes of me!” she answered.
“I confess I had.”
“Say good by to them then, Roger. If this is wrong, I am all wrong!”
She spoke with a proud decision, which was very becoming; she had
never yet come so near being beautiful. In the midst of his
passionate vexation Roger admired her. The scene seemed for a moment
a bad dream, from which, with a start, he might wake up to tell her
he loved her.
“Your anger gives an admirable point to your remarks. Indeed, it
gives a beauty to your face. Must a young lady be in the wrong to be
attractive?” he went on, hardly knowing what he said. But a burning
blush in her cheeks recalled him to a kind of self-abhorrence.
“Would to God,” he cried, “your abominable cousin had never come
between us!”
“Between us? He is not between us. I stand as near you, Roger, as I
ever did. Of course George will go away immediately.”
“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.