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 vastly enjoyed the excursion and found all spots alike delightful. For Roger, too, it was full of a certain reassuring felicity. His remoter visions were merged in the present overflow of sympathy and pride, in his happy sense of her quickened observation and in the gratified vanity of possession. Whether or no she 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 would 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'll 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 fairly 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 a humbug. 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
The letter was dated in New York, from a hotel. Roger was shocked. 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 immediate 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 society, it seemed needless that, at this time of day, she should cultivate it. But Nora had become infected by a huge curiosity; 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 "lovely"; 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 monde; but he carried about him the native fragrance of another monde, beside which the social perfume familiar to Roger's nostrils must 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 provincial. Whether or no Fenton was a good man, he was a good American; though I doubt that he would, after the saying, have sought his Mahomet's Paradise in Paris. Considering his years,—they numbered but twenty-five,—Fenton's precocity and maturity of tone were an amazing spectacle. You would have very soon 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-cheeked 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 tough 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 had been tempered in brine. Fenton was furthermore flat-chested and high-shouldered, but without any look of debility. He wore a little dead black mustache, which, at first, you would have been likely to suspect unjustly of a borrowed tint. 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 would never have called him modest, yet you would hardly have called him impudent; for he had evidently lived with people among whom the ideas of modesty and impudence, in their finer shades, had no great circulation. 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 taking 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. He 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? Was not this shadowy nepotism 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 mistrust 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 pure 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 frank assurance which Fenton was constantly at pains to convey, 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 precinct 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. In the utter penury of her native gifts, her tardy kinsman acquired a portentous value. She was so proud of turning out to have a cousin as well as other folks, that she lavished on the young man all the idle tenderness of her primitive instincts, the savings and sparings, such as they were, of her girlish good-will. It must be said that Fenton was not altogether unworthy of her favors. He meant no especial harm to other people, 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 a trifle restless; he had a generous need of keeping too many irons on the fire. It had been in a kind of fanciful despair of doing better, for the time, that he had 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 good people couldn't 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 shallow current of his own career. 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 sunny side of his genius. He very soon began to doubt that he had ever known so delightful a person, and indeed his growing sense of her sweetness bade fair to make him bungle his naughtiness. She was altogether sweet enough to be valued for herself. She made him feel that he had never encountered a really fine girl. 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 a fine enough sense to detect something extremely grateful in the half-concessions, the reserve of freshness, the fugitive dignity, of gently nurtured maidenhood. Women, to him, had seemed mostly as cut flowers, blooming awhile in the waters of occasion, but yielding no second or rarer freshness. Nora was fast overtaking herself in the exhilarating atmosphere 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 of which Roger was not. He had an irresistible air of action, alertness, and purpose. Poor Roger, beside him, was most prosaically passive. 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. His wrongs, his sufferings, his ambitions and adventures, formed on Fenton's lips not only a most pathetic recital, but a standing pretext for Western anecdotes, not always strictly adapted, it must be confessed, to the melting mood. Of her mother, too, he discoursed with a wholesale fecundity of praise and reminiscence. Facts, facts, facts was Nora's demand: she got them, and if here and there a fiction slipped into the basket, it passed muster with the rest.
Nora was not slow to perceive that Roger had no love for their guest, and she immediately conceded him his right of judgment. She allowed for a certain fatal and needful antagonism in their common interest in herself. Fenton's presence was a tacit infringement of Roger's prescriptive right of property. If her cousin had only never come! It 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 deepen her gracious radiance in her cousin's eyes. 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'll be frank. I could put him up to 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 in it a long-winded patience, a broad arrogance of leisure, which excited his ire. Roger might surely have found his fit ready made! His disappointment, a certain angry impulse to rescue his cousin from this pitiful compression of circumstance, the sense finally that what he should gain he would gain from her alone, though indeed she was too confoundedly innocent to appreciate his fierce immediate ends;—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 civility, 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 interests in common."
"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'm 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 won't have 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'm 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'll be—" And Fenton, breaking off, began to whistle with vehement gayety and executed 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, laughing.
"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 people in St. Louis. It's a glorious place, worth a thousand of your dismal Bostons. 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're 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 a Slough of Despond. 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 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've got to do is to attack your papa—"
"He's not my papa. I have had one papa; that's enough. I say it in all respect."
"If he's not your papa, what is he? He's a dog in the manger. He must be either one thing or the other. When you're very little older, you'll 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're so innocent, my dear, that one doesn't know where to take you. You expect, in other words, 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.
Nora was silent a moment; and then with a certain forced levity, walking on: "I'd better wait till I'm asked."
"If he does, I shall be surprised."
"You'll 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'll like that," said Fenton, with heat. "He'll like a child of twenty."
Nora, for an instant, was sunk in meditation. "As regards marriage," she said at last, with a slightly defiant emphasis, "I'll do what Roger wishes."
Fenton lost patience. "Roger be hanged!" he cried. "You're not his slave. You must choose for yourself and act for yourself. You must obey your own heart. You don't know what you're talking about. One of these days your heart will say its say. Then we'll see what becomes of Roger's wishes! If he wants to mould you to his will, 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 in all deference and honesty, and he has treated me as if I weren't fit to touch with a tongs. I'm poor, I've my way to make, I'm on the world; 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? If that's the way they understand it hereabouts, I prefer the Western article!"
This passionate outbreak, prompted in about equal measure by baffled ambition and wounded sensibility, made sad havoc with Nora's strenuous loyalty to her friend. Her sense of infinite 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 boundless and absolute rapture. She desired neither to question nor to set a term to it: she only knew that while it lasted it was potently sweet. Roger's mistrust was certainly cruel; it was crueller still that he should obtrude it on poor George's notice. She felt, however, that two angry men were muttering over her head and her main desire was to avert an explosion. She promised herself to dismiss Fenton the next day. Of course, by the very fact of this concession, Roger lost ground in her tenderness, 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 tell-tale 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'd draw a knife on me."
"O George!" cried Nora, horrified.
"It's a fact, my dear. I'm 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'll open my letters. So much the worse for him!"
Nora, as she wound her spool, mused intently. "I can't believe he really grudges me our friendship. It must be something else."
Fenton, with a clinch 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'll 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 star-light and the long beat of the 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 with a bravado of cool 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's gone?" he said.
"To his own room. He has some letters to write."
"Shall I hold your wools?" Roger asked, after a pause, with a rather awkward air of overture.
"Thank you. They are all wound."
"For whom are your slippers?" He knew, of course; but the question came.
"For George. Didn't I tell you? Aren't they pretty?" And she held up her work.
Nora gave him a rapid glance and miscounted her stitch. "You don't like poor George," she said.
"Poor George" set his wound a-throbbing again. "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'm bound to believe!" cried Roger, with a laugh. "You must have excellent reasons."
"Excellent. He's my own, you know."
"Your own— Oho!" And he laughed louder.
His tone forced Nora to blush. "My own cousin," she cried.
"Your own fiddlestick!" cried Roger.
She stopped her work. "What do you mean?" she asked gravely.
Roger himself began to blush a little. "I mean—I mean—that I don't half believe in your cousin. He doesn't satisfy me. I don't like him. He's a jumble of contradictions. I have nothing but his own word. I'm not bound to take it. He tells the truth, if you like, but he tells fibs too."
"Roger, Roger," said Nora, with great softness, "do you mean that he's an impostor?"
"The word is your own. He's not honest."
She slowly rose from her little bench, gathering her work into the skirt of her dress. "And, doubting of his honesty, you've let him take up his abode here, you've 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 then and there Roger was ridiculous. "Honest or not honest," she said with vehemence, "I do like him. Cousin or no cousin, he's my friend."
"Very good. But I warn you. I don't enjoy talking to you thus. But 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're extremely unjust. You've taken no trouble to know him. You've treated him from the first with small civility!"
"Good heavens! 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, rankling with that unsatisfied need, familiar alike to good men and bad when vanity is at stake, of smothering feminine right in hard manly fact. "Nora," he said, cruelly, "you disappoint me."
"You must have formed great hopes of me!" she cried.
"Say good by to them then, Roger. If this is wrong, I'm all wrong!" She spoke with a rich displeasure which transformed with admirable effect her habitual expression of docility. She had never yet come so near being beautiful. In the midst of his passionate vexation he admired her. The scene seemed for a moment a bad dream, from which, with a start, he might awake into a declaration of love.
"Your anger gives an admirable point to your remarks. Indeed, it gives a beauty to your face. Must a woman be in the wrong to be charming?" 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's not between us. I stand as near you, Roger, as I ever did. Of course George will leave immediately."
"Of course! I'm not so sure. He will, I suppose, if he's asked."
"Nonsense. You'll not enjoy that."
"We're old friends by this time," said Nora, with terrible malice. "I sha'n't 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 demand it. Say nothing to him, let him stay as long as he pleases. I'm not afraid! I don't trust him, but I trust you. I'm curious to see how long he'll have the hardihood to stay. A fortnight hence, I shall be justified. You'll say to me, `Roger, you were right. George isn't 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'll 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's 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 keener 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 rupture of harmony 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. There was a discord now in that daily commonplace of happiness which had seemed to repeat the image of their mutual trust as a lucid pool reflects the cloudless blue. But if the discord should deepen and swell, it was sweet to think she might deafen her sense in that sturdy cousinship.
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 needfu [sic] 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 a vague importunate sense of responsibility. It seemed to fling upon all things a gray 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 imponderous 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 an ideal oncle de comedie, would shower blessings and bank-notes upon his union with his cousin, involved the discomfiture of a secondary project; that, namely, of borrowing five thousand dollars. The reader will smile: but such is the naivete of "smart men." He would consent, now, to be put off 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'm 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. My girl of girls!"
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!"
"Poor, poor, poor. Poor as a rat."
"You don't mean that you're penniless?"
"What's 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 these sordid mysteries of misery," 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 little use for money, and no chance, here in the country, to spend it. Roger is extremely generous. Every few weeks he forces money upon me. I often give it away to the poor people hereabouts. Only a fortnight ago I refused to take any more on account of my having this unspent. 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 was not a fortune; still it was a sum. 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'm 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'm afraid I'm 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's only I who have anything to be ashamed of," he said at last, bitterly, with an effort. "My poverty!"
Roger smiled graciously, [sic] "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're 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 sha'n't 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 around 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' isn't the word. A man doesn't 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 in his fist and tossed them into the fire. In an instant they begun 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, clapsed [sic] 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'll 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 tender impulse of comradeship. >
