There was such a tremor in his voice that Nora felt that, for the moment, she must have self-possession for both. “I interrupt you,” she said with extreme deference.
“We are just finishing!” Hubert answered. “It is my portrait, you see. You must look at it.” The artist made way for her before the easel, laid down his implements, and took up his hat and gloves. She looked mechanically at the picture, while Hubert accompanied him to the door, and they talked awhile about another sitting, and about a frame that was to be sent home. The portrait was clever, but superficial; better looking, at once, and worse looking than Hubert,—elegant, effeminate, unreal. An impulse of wonder passed through her mind that she should happen just then to find him engaged in this odd self-reproduction. It was a different Hubert that turned and faced her as the door closed behind his companion, the real, the familiar Hubert. He had gained time; but surprise, admiration, conjecture, a lively suggestion of dismay, were shining in his handsome eyes. Nora had dropped into the chair vacated by the artist; and as she sat there with clasped hands, she felt the young man reading the riddle of her shabby dress and her excited face. For him, too, she was the real Nora. Dismay in Hubert’s face began to elbow its companions. He advanced, pushed towards her the chair in which he had been posturing, and, as he seated himself, made a half-movement to offer his hand; but before she could take it, he had begun to play with his watch-chain. “Nora,” he asked, “what is it?”
What was it, indeed? What was her errand, and in what words could it be told? An inexpressible weakness had taken possession of her, a sense of having reached the goal of her journey, the term of her strength. She dropped her eyes on her shabby skirt and passed her hand over it with a gesture of eloquent simplicity. “I have left Roger,” she said.
Hubert made no answer, but his silence seemed to fill the room. He sank back in his chair, still looking at her with startled eyes. The fact intimidated him; he was amazed and confused; yet he felt he must say something, and in his confusion he uttered a gross absurdity. “Ah,” he said: “with his consent?”
The sound of his voice was so grateful to her that, at first, she hardly heeded his words. “I am alone,” she added, “I am free.” It was after she had spoken, as she saw him, growing, to his own sense, infinitely small in the large confidence of her gaze, rise in a kind of agony of indecision and stand before her, stupidly staring, that she felt he had neither taken her hand, nor dropped at her feet, nor divinely guessed her trouble; that, in fact, his very silence was a summons to tell her story and justify herself. Her presence there was either a rapture or a shame. Nora felt as if she had taken a jump, and was learning in mid-air that the distance was tenfold what she had imagined. It is strange how the hinging-point of great emotions may rest on an instant of time. These instants, however, seem as ages, viewed from within; and in such a reverberating moment Nora felt something that she had believed to be a passion melting from beneath her feet, crumbling and crashing into the gulf on whose edge she stood. But her shame at least should be brief. She rose and bridged this dizzy chasm with some tragic counterfeit of a smile. “I have come—I have come—” She began and faltered. It was a pity some great actress had not been there to note upon the tablets of her art the light, all-eloquent tremor of tone with which she transposed her embarrassment into the petition, “Could you lend me a little money?”
Hubert was simply afraid of her. All his falsity, all his levity, all his egotism and sophism, seemed to crowd upon him and accuse him in deafening chorus; he seemed exposed and dishonored. It was with an immense sense of relief that he heard her ask this simple favor. Money? Would money buy his release? He took out his purse and grasped a roll of bills; then suddenly he was overwhelmed by a sense of his cruelty. He flung the thing on the floor, and passed his hands over his face. “Nora, Nora,” he cried, “say it outright; you despise me!”
He had become, in the brief space of a moment, the man she once had loved; but if he was no longer the rose, he stood too near it to be wantonly bruised. Men and women alike need in some degree to respect those they have suffered to wrong them. She stooped and picked up the porte-monnaie, like a beggar-maid in a ballad. “A very little will do,” she said. “In a day or two I hope to be independent.”
“Tell me at least what has happened!” he cried.
She hesitated a moment. “Roger has asked me to be his wife.” Hubert’s head swam with the vision of all that this simple statement embodied and implied. “I refused,” Nora added, “and, having refused, I was unwilling to live any longer on his—on his—” Her speech at the last word melted into silence, and she seemed to fall a-musing. But in an instant she recovered herself. “I remember your once saying that you would have liked to see me poor and homeless. Here I am! You ought at least,” she added with a laugh, “to pay for the exhibition!”
Hubert abruptly drew out his watch. “I expect here at any moment,” he said, “a young lady of whom you may have heard. She is to come and see my portrait. I am engaged to marry her. I was engaged to marry her five months ago. She is rich, pretty, charming. Say but a single word, that you don’t despise me, that you forgive me, and I will give her up, now, here, forever, and be anything you will take me for,—your husband, your friend, your slave!” To have been able to make this speech gave Hubert immense relief. He felt almost himself again.