“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.