Henry James - Henry James - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 10)

Roger began to blush a little. "I mean—I mean—that I don't believe in your cousin. He does n't satisfy me. I don't like him. He contradicts himself, his story does n't hang together. I have nothing but his word. I am not bound to take it."

"Roger, Roger," said Nora, with great softness, "do you mean that he is an impostor?"

"The word is your own. He 's not an honest man."

She slowly rose from her little bench, gathering her work into the skirt of her dress. "And, doubting of his honesty, you have let him take up his abode here, you have let him become dear to me?"

She was making him ten times a fool! "Why, if you liked him," he said. "When did I ever refuse you anything?"

There came upon Nora a sudden unpitying sense that Roger was ridiculous. "Honest or not honest," she said with vehemence, "I do like him. Cousin or no cousin, he is my friend."

"Very good. But I warn you. I don't enjoy talking to you thus. Only let me tell you, once for all, that your cousin, your friend—your—whatever he is!"—He faltered an instant; Nora's eyes were fixed on him. "That he disgusts me!"

"You are extremely unjust. You have taken no trouble to know him. You have treated him from the first with small civility!"

"Was the trouble to be all mine? Civility! he never missed it; he does n't know what it means."

"He knows more than you think. But we must talk no more about him." She rolled together her canvas and reels; and then suddenly, with passionate inconsequence, "Poor, poor George!" she cried.

Roger watched her a moment; then he said bitterly, "You disappoint me."

"You must have formed great hopes of me!" she answered.

"I confess I had."

"Say good by to them then, Roger. If this is wrong, I am all wrong!" She spoke with a proud decision, which was very becoming; she had never yet come so near being beautiful. In the midst of his passionate vexation Roger admired her. The scene seemed for a moment a bad dream, from which, with a start, he might wake up to tell her he loved her.

"Your anger gives an admirable point to your remarks. Indeed, it gives a beauty to your face. Must a young lady be in the wrong to be attractive?" he went on, hardly knowing what he said. But a burning blush in her cheeks recalled him to a kind of self-abhorrence. "Would to God," he cried, "your abominable cousin had never come between us!"

"Between us? He is not between us. I stand as near you, Roger, as I ever did. Of course George will go away immediately."

"Of course! I am not so sure. He will, I suppose, if he is asked."

"Of course I shall ask him."

"Nonsense. You will not enjoy that."

"We are old friends by this time," said Nora, with terrible irony. "I shall not in the least mind."

Roger could have choked himself. He had brought his case to this: Fenton a martyred prescript, and Nora a brooding victim of duty. "Do I want to turn the man out of the house?" he cried. "Do me a favor—I insist upon it. Say nothing to him, let him stay as long as he chooses. I am not afraid! I don't trust him, but I trust you. I am curious to see how long he will have the impudence to stay. A fortnight hence I shall be justified. You will say to me, 'Roger, you were right. George is not a gentleman.' There! I insist."

"A gentleman? Really, what are we talking about? Do you mean that he wears a false diamond in his shirt? He will take it off if I ask him. There 's a long way between wearing false diamonds—"

"And stealing real ones! I don't know. I have always fancied they go together. At all events, Nora, he is not to suspect that he has been able to make trouble between two old friends."

Nora stood for a moment in irresponsive meditation. "I think he means to go," she said. "If you want him to stay, you must ask him." And without further words she marched out of the room. Roger followed her with his eyes. He thought of Lady Castlewood in "Henry Esmond," who looked "devilish handsome in a passion."

Lady Castlewood, meanwhile, ascended to her own room, flung her work upon the floor, and, dropping into a chair, betook herself to weeping. It was late before she slept. She awoke with a new consciousness of the burden of life. Her own burden certainly was small, but her strength, as yet, was untested. She had thought, in her many reveries, of a possible disagreement with Roger, and prayed that it might never come by a fault of hers. The fault was hers now in that she had surely cared less for duty than for joy. Roger, indeed, had shown a pitiful smallness of view. This was a weakness; but who was she, to keep account of Roger's weaknesses? It was to a weakness of Roger's that she owed her food and raiment and shelter. It helped to quench her resentment that she felt, somehow, that, whether Roger smiled or frowned, George would still be George. He was not a gentleman: well and good; neither was she, for that matter, a lady. But a certain manful hardness like George's would not be amiss in the man one was to love.

A simpler soul than Fenton's might have guessed at the trouble of this quiet household. Fenton read in it as well an omen of needful departure. He accepted the necessity with an acute sense of failure,—almost of injury. He had gained nothing but the bother of being loved. It was a bother, because it gave him an unwonted sense of responsibility. It seemed to fling upon all things a dusky shade of prohibition. Yet the matter had its brightness, too, if a man could but swallow his superstitions. He cared for Nora quite enough to tell her he loved her; he had said as much, with an easy conscience, to girls for whom he cared far less. He felt gratefully enough the cool vestment of tenderness which she had spun about him, like a web of imponderable silver; but he had other uses for his time than to go masquerading through Nora's fancy. The defeat of his hope that Roger, like a testy old uncle in a comedy, would shower blessings and bank-notes upon his union with his cousin, involved the discomfiture of a secondary project; the design, namely, of borrowing five thousand dollars. The reader will smile; but such is the simplicity of "smart men." He would content himself now with five hundred. In this collapse of his visions he fell a-musing upon Nora's financial value.

"Look here," he said to her, with an air of heroic effort, "I see I 'm in the way. I must be off."

"I am sorry, George," said Nora, sadly.

"So am I. I never supposed I was proud. But I reckoned without my host!" he said with a bitter laugh. "I wish I had never come. Or rather I don't. It is worth it all to know you."

She began to question him soothingly about his projects and prospects; and hereupon, for once, Fenton bent his mettle to simulate a pathetic incapacity. He set forth that he was discouraged; the future was a blank. It was child's play, attempting to do anything without capital.

"And you have no capital?" said Nora, anxiously.

Fenton gave a poignant smile. "Why, my dear girl, I 'm a poor man!"

"How poor?"

"Poor, poor, poor. Poor as a rat."

"You don't mean that you are penniless?"

"What is the use of my telling you? You can't help me. And it would only make you unhappy."

"If you are unhappy, I want to be!"

This golden vein of sentiment might certainly be worked. Fenton took out his pocket-book, drew from it four bank-notes of five dollars each, and ranged them with a sort of mournful playfulness in a line on his knee. "That 's my fortune."

"Do you mean to say that twenty dollars is all you have in the world?"

Fenton smoothed out the creases, caressingly, in the soiled and crumpled notes. "It 's a great shame to bring you down to a poor man's secrets," he said, "Fortune has raised you above them."

Nora's heart began to beat. "Yes, it has. I have a little money, George. Some eighty dollars."