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.”