IX.
Nora frequently wondered in after years how that Sunday afternoon had worked itself away; how, through the tumult of amazement and grief, decision, illumination, action, had finally come. She had disembarrassed herself of a vague attempt of Mrs. Keith’s towards some compensatory caress, and making her way half blindly to her own room, had sat down face to face with her trouble. Here, if ever, was thunder from a clear sky. Her friend’s disclosure took time to swell to its full magnitude; for an hour she sat, half stunned, seeming to see it climb heaven-high and glare upon her like some monstrous blighting sun. Then at last she broke into a cry and wept. Her immense pain gushed and filtered through her heart, and passed out in shuddering sobs. The whole face of things was hideously altered; a sudden horror had sprung up in her innocent past, and it seemed to fling forward a shadow which made the future a blank darkness. She felt cruelly deluded and injured; the sense of suffered wrong absorbed for the time the thought of wrong inflicted. She was too weak for indignation, but she overflowed with delicate resentment. That Roger, whom all these years she had fancied as simple as charity, should have been as double as interest, should have played a part and laid a train, that she had been living in darkness, on illusion and lies, all this was an intolerable thing. And the worst was that she had been cheated of the chance to be really loyal. Why had he never told her that she wore a chain? Why, when he took her, had he not drawn up his terms and made his bargain? She would have kept the bargain to the letter; she would have taught herself to be his wife. Duty then would have been duty; sentiment would have been sentiment; her youth would not have been so wretchedly misspent. She would have given up her heart betimes; doubtless it would have learned to beat to a decent and satisfied measure; but now it had throbbed to a finer music, a melody that would ring in her ears forever. Thinking of what her conscience might have done, however, brought her to thinking of what it might still do. While she turned in her pain, angrily questioning it, Mrs. Keith knocked at the door. Nora repaired to the dressing-glass, to efface the traces of her tears; and while she stood there, she saw in her open dressing-case her last letter from her cousin. It gave her the help she was vaguely groping for. By the time she had crossed the room and opened the door she had welcomed and blessed this help; and while she gravely shook her head in response to Mrs. Keith’s softly urgent, “Nora, dear, won’t you let me come to you?” she had passionately made it her own. “I would rather be alone,” she said: “I thank you very much.”
It was past six o’clock; Mrs. Keith was dressed for the evening. It was her gracious practice on Sundays to dine with her mother-in-law. Nora knew, therefore, that if her companion accepted this present dismissal, she would be alone for several hours.
“Can’t I do something for you?” Mrs. Keith inquired, soothingly.
“Nothing at all, thank you. You are very kind.”
Mrs. Keith looked at her, wondering whether this was the irony of bitter grief; but a certain cold calmness in the young girl’s face, overlying her agitation, seemed to intimate that she had taken a wise resolve. And, in fact, Nora was now soaring sublime on the wings of purpose, and viewed Mrs. Keith’s offence as a diminished fact. Mrs. Keith took her hands. “Write him a line, my dear,” she gently urged.
Nora nodded. “Yes, I will write him a line.”
“And when I come back, it will be all over?”
“Yes,—all over.”
“God bless you, my dear.” And on this theological amenity the two women kissed and separated. Nora returned to her dressing-case and read over her cousin’s letter. Its clear friendliness seemed to ring out audibly amid this appalling hush of familiar harmony. “I wish you might know a day’s friendlessness or a day’s freedom,—a poor devil who is your natural protector.” Here was indeed the voice of nature, of predestined tenderness; if her cousin had been there Nora would have flung herself into his arms. She sat down at her writing-table, with her brow in her hands, light-headed with her passionate purpose, steadying herself to think. A day’s freedom had come at last; a lifetime’s freedom confronted her. For, as you will have guessed, immediate retrocession and departure had imperiously prescribed themselves. Until this had taken place, there could be nothing but deeper trouble. On the old terms there could be no clearing up; she could speak to Roger again only in perfect independence. She must throw off those suffocating bounties which had been meant to bribe her to the service in which she had so miserably failed. Her failure now she felt no impulse to question, her decision no energy to revise. I shall have told my story ill if these things seem to lack logic. The fault lay deeper and dated from longer ago than her morning’s words of denial. Roger and she shared it between them; it was a heavy burden for both.