“Heaven preserve us, what a hotch-potch!” cried Hubert. “Is that what they are writing nowadays? I very seldom read a novel, but when I glance into one, I am sure to find some such stuff as that! Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination. Common life,—I don’t say it’s a vision of bliss, but it’s better than that. Their stories are like the underside of a carpet,—nothing but the stringy grain of the tissue,—a muddle of figures without shape and flowers without color. When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the dénouement. Your clergyman here with his Romish sweetheart must be a very poor creature. Why didn’t he marry her first and convert her afterwards? Isn’t a clergyman after all, before all, a man? I mean to write a novel about a priest who falls in love with a pretty Mahometan and swears by Allah to win her.”
“O Hubert!” cried Nora, “would you like a clergyman to love a pretty Mahometan better than the truth?”
“The truth? A pretty Mahometan may be the truth. If you can get it in the concrete, after shivering all your days in the cold abstract, it’s worth a bit of a compromise. Nora, Nora!” he went on, stretching himself back on the sofa and flinging one arm over his head, “I stand up for passion! If a thing can take the shape of passion, that’s a fact in its favor. The greater passion is the better cause. If my love wrestles with my faith, as the angel with Jacob, and if my love stands upper-most, I will admit it’s a fair game. Faith is faith, under a hundred forms! Upon my word, I should like to prove it. What a fraction of my personality is this clerical title! How little it expresses; how little it covers! On Sundays, in the pulpit, I stand up and talk to five hundred people. Does each of them, think you, appropriate his five hundredth share of my discourse? I can imagine talking to one person and saying five hundred times as much, even though she were a pretty Mahometan or a prepossessing idolatress! I can imagine being five thousand miles away from this blessed Boston,—in Turkish trousers, if you please, with a turban on my head and a chibouque in my mouth, with a great blue ball of Eastern sky staring in through the round window, high up; all in perfect indifference to the fact that Boston was abusing, or, worse still, forgetting me! But, my dear Nora,” Hubert added, suddenly, “don’t let me introduce confusion into your ideas.” And he left his sofa and came and leaned against the mantel-shelf. “This is between ourselves; I talk to you as I would to no one else. Understand me and forgive me! There are times when I must speak out and pay my respects to the possible, the ideal! I must protest against the vulgar assumption of people who don’t see beyond their noses; that people who do, you and I for instance, are living up to the top of our capacity; that we are contented, satisfied, balanced. I promise you I am not satisfied, not I! I have room for more. I only half live; I am like a purse filled at one end with small coin and empty at the other. Perhaps the other will never know the golden rattle! The Lord’s will be done; I can say that with the best of them. But I shall never pretend that I have known happiness, that I have known life. On the contrary, I shall maintain I am a failure. I had the wit to see, but I lacked the courage to do,—and yet I have been called reckless, irreverent, audacious. My dear Nora, I am the veriest coward on earth; pity me, if you don’t despise me. There are men born to imagine things, others born to do them. Evidently I am not one of the doers. But I imagine things, I assure you!”
Nora listened to this flow of sweet unreason without staying her hand in the work, which, as she perceived the drift of his talk, she had rapidly caught up, but with a beating heart and a sense of rising tears. It was a ravishing mixture of passion and reason, the agony of a restless soul. Of old, she had thought of Hubert’s nature as immutably placid and fixed; it gave her the notion of lucid depth and soundless volume. But of late, with greater nearness, she had seen the ripples on its surface and heard it beating its banks. This was not the first time; but the waves had never yet broken so high; she had never felt their salt spray on her cheeks. The touch of it now was delicious. She went on with her work, mechanically taking her stitches. She felt Hubert’s intense blue eyes; the little blue flower in her tapestry grew under her quick needle. A door had suddenly been opened between their hearts; she passed through it. “What is it you imagine,” she asked, with intense curiosity: “what is it you dream of doing?”
“I dream,” he said, “of breaking some law for your sake!”
The answer frightened her; passion was outstripping reason. What had she to do with broken laws? She trembled and rolled up her work. “I dream,” she said, trying to smile, “of the beauty of keeping laws. I expect to get a deal of pleasure from it yet.” And she left her chair. For an instant Hubert was confused. Was this the last struggle which precedes submission, or the mere prudence of indifference? Nora’s eyes were on the clock. It rang out eleven. “To begin with,” she said, “let me keep the law of going early to bed. Good night!”
Hubert wondered; he hardly knew whether this was a rebuke or a challenge. “You will at least shake hands,” he said reproachfully.
She had meant in self-defence to omit this ceremony, but she let him take her hand. Hubert gazed at her a moment and raised it to his lips. She blushed, and rapidly withdrew it. “There!” cried Hubert, “I have broken a law!”
“Much good may it do you!” she answered, and went her way. He stood for a moment, waiting, and fancying, rather fatuously, that she might come back. Then, as he took up his hat, he wondered whether she too was not a bit of a coquette.
Nora wondered on her own side whether this scene had not been a little pre-arranged. For a day love and doubt fared in company. Lucinda’s mournful discourse on the morrow was not of a nature to restore her calmness. “Last night,” said Roger’s nurse, “he was very bad. He woke up out of his stupor, but he was none the better for that. He talked all night about you. If he murmurs a word, it’s always your name. He asked a dozen times if you had arrived, and forgot as often as I told him,—he, dear man, who used to remember the very hairs of your head. He kept wondering whether anything had happened to you. Late in the evening, when the carriages began to pass, he cried out that each of them was you, and what would you think of him for not coming to meet you? ‘Don’t tell her how bad I am,’ he says; ‘I must have been in bed two or three days, haven’t I, Lucinda? Say I shall be out to-morrow; that I have only a little cold. Hubert will do everything for her,’ he kept saying. And then when, at midnight, the wind began to blow, he declared it was a storm, that your ship was on the coast. God keep you safe, he cried. Then he asked if you were changed and grown; were you pretty, were you tall, should he know you? And he took the hand-glass and looked at himself and wondered if you would know him. He cried out that he was ugly, he was horrible, you would hate him. He bade me bring him his dressing things so that he might make himself look better, and when I wouldn’t, he began to rage and call me names, and then he broke down and cried like a child.” Hearing these things, Nora prayed intently for Roger’s recovery,—prayed that he might live to see her more cunningly and lovingly his debtor. She wished to do something, she hardly knew what, not only to prove, but forever to commemorate, her devotion. She felt capable of erecting a monument of self-sacrifice. Her conscience was perfectly at rest.