# Watch and Ward (Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co., 1878)/Chapter 3

III.
Day by day, near the pretty Peruvian, Roger grew better pleased with the present. It was so happy, so idle, so secure! He protested against the future. He grew impatient of the stiff little figure which he had posted in the distance, to stare at him with those monstrous pale eyes; they seemed to grow and grow as he thought of them. In other words, he was in love with Teresa. She, on her side, was delighted to be loved. She caressed him with her fond dark looks and smiled perpetual assent. Late one afternoon they ascended together to a terrace on the top of the house. The sun had just disappeared; the southern landscape was drinking in the cool of night. They stood awhile in silence; at last Roger felt that he must speak of his love. He walked away to the farther end of the terrace, casting about in his mind for the fitting words. They were hard to find. His companion spoke a little English, and he a little Spanish; but there came upon him a sudden perplexing sense of the infantine rarity of her wits. He had never done her the honor to pay her a compliment, he had never really talked with her. It was not for him to talk, but for her to perceive! She turned about, leaning back against the parapet of the terrace, looking at him and smiling. She was always smiling. She had on an old faded pink morning dress, very much open at the throat, and a ribbon round her neck, to which was suspended a little cross of turquoise. One of the braids of her hair had fallen ​down, and she had drawn it forward, and was plaiting the end with her plump white fingers. Her nails were not fastidiously clean. He went towards her. When he next became perfectly conscious of their relative positions, he knew that he had tenderly kissed her, more than once, and that she had more than suffered him. He stood holding both her hands; he was blushing; her own complexion was undisturbed, her smile barely deepened; another of her braids had come down. He was filled with a sense of pleasure in her sweetness, tempered by a vague feeling of pain in his all-to-easy conquest. There was nothing of poor Teresita but that you could kiss her! It came upon him with a sort of horror that he had never yet distinctly told her that he loved her. "Teresa," he said, almost angrily, "I love you. Do you understand?" For all answer she raised his two hands successively to her lips. Soon after this she went off with her mother to church.
The next morning, one of his friend's clerks brought him a package of letters from his banker. One of them was a note from Nora. It ran as follows:—
​After reading this letter, Roger told his host that he should have to leave him. The young Peruvian demurred, objected, and begged for a reason.
"Well," said Roger, "I find I am in love with your sister." The words sounded on his ear as if some else had spoken them. Teresita's light was quenched, and she had no more fascination than a smouldering lamp, smelling of oil.
"Why, my dear fellow," said his friend, "that seems to me a reason for staying. I shall be most happy to have you for a brother-in-law."
"It 's impossible! I am engaged to a young lady in my own country."
"You are in love here, you are engaged there, and you go where you are engaged! You Englishmen are strange fellows!"
"Tell Teresa that I adore her, but that I am pledged at home. I would rather not see her."
And so Roger departed from Lima, without further communion with Teresita. On his return home he received a letter from her brother, telling him of her engagement to a young merchant of Valparaiso,—an excellent match. The young lady sent him her salutations. Roger, answering his friend's letter, begged that the Doña Teresa would accept, as a wedding-present, of the accompanying trinket,—a little brooch in turquoise. It would look very well with pink!
Roger reached home in the autumn, but left Nora at school till the beginning of the Christmas holidays. He occupied the interval in refurnishing his house, and clearing the stage for the last act of the young girl's childhood. ​He had always possessed a modest taste for upholstery; he now began to apply it under the guidance of a delicate idea. His idea led him to prefer, in all things, the fresh and graceful to the grave and formal, and to wage war throughout his old dwelling on the lurking mustiness of the past. He had a lively regard for elegance, balanced by a horror of wanton luxury. He fancied that a woman is the better for being well dressed and well domiciled, and that vanity, too stingily treated, is sure to avenge itself. So he took vanity into account. Nothing annoyed him more, however, than the fear of seeing Nora a precocious fine lady; so that while he aimed at all possible purity of effect, he stayed his hand here and there before certain admonitory relics of ancestral ugliness and virtue, embodied for the most part in hair-cloth and cotton damask. Chintz and muslin, flowers and photographs and books, gave their clear light tone to the house. Nothing could be more tenderly propitious and virginal, or better chosen both to chasten the young girl's aspirations and to remind her of her protector's tenderness.
Since his return he had designedly refused himself a glimpse of her. He wished to give her a single undivided welcome to his home and his heart. Shortly before Christmas, as he had even yet not set his house in order, Lucinda Brown was sent to fetch her from school. If Roger had expected that Nora would return with any striking accession of beauty, he would have had to say "Amen" with an effort. She had pretty well ceased to be a child; she was still his grave, imperfect Nora. She had gained her full height,—a great height, which her ​young strong slimness rendered the more striking. Her slender throat supported a head of massive mould, bound about with dense auburn braids. Beneath a somewhat serious brow her large, fair eyes retained their collected light, as if uncertain where to fling it. Now and then the lids parted widely and showered down these gathered shafts; and if at these times a certain rare smile divided, in harmony, her childish lips, Nora was for the moment a passable beauty. But for the most part, the best charm of her face was in a modest refinement of line, which rather evaded notice than courted it. The first impression she was likely to produce was of a kind of awkward slender majesty. Roger pronounced her "stately," and for a fortnight thought her too imposing by half; but as the days went on, and the pliable innocence of early maidenhood gave a soul to this formidable grace, he began to feel that in essentials she was still the little daughter of his charity. He even began to observe in her an added consciousness of this lowly position; as if with the growth of her mind she had come to reflect upon it, and deem it less and less a matter of course. He meditated much as to whether he should frankly talk it over with her and allow her to feel that, for him as well, their relation could never become commonplace. This would be in a measure untender, but would it not be prudent? Ought he not, in the interest of his final purpose, to infuse into her soul in her sensitive youth an impression of all that she owed him, so that when his time had come, if her imagination should lead her a-wandering, gratitude would stay her steps? A dozen times over he was on the verge of making his point, of saying, "Nora, ​Nora, these are not vulgar alms; I expect a return. One of these days you must pay your debt. Guess my riddle! I love you less than you think—and more! A word to the wise." But he was silenced by a saving sense of the brutality of such a course and by a suspicion that, after all, it was not needful. A passion of gratitude was silently gathering in the young girl's heart: that heart could be trusted to keep its engagements. A deep conciliatory purpose seemed now to pervade her life, of infinite delight to Roger as little by little it stole upon his mind like the fragrance of a deepening spring. He had his idea; he suspected that she had hers. They were but opposite faces of the same deep need. Her musing silence, her deliberate smiles, the childish keenness of her questionings, the delicacy of her little nameless services and caresses, were all a kind of united acknowledgment and promise.
On Christmas eve they sat together alone by a blazing log-fire in Roger's little library. He had been reading aloud a chapter of his diary, to which Nora sat listening in dutiful demureness, though her thoughts evidently were nearer home than Cuba and Peru. There is no denying it was dull; he could gossip to better purpose. He felt its dulness himself, and closing it finally with good-humored petulance, declared it was fit only to throw into the fire. Upon which Nora looked up, protesting. "You must do no such thing," she said. "You must keep your journals carefully, and one of these days I shall have them bound in morocco and gilt, and ranged in a row in my own bookcase."
"That is but a polite way of burning them up," said ​Roger. "They will be as little read as if they were in the fire. I don't know how it is. They seemed to be very amusing when I wrote them: they are as stale as an old newspaper now. I can't write: that 's the amount of it. I am a very stupid fellow, Nora; you might as well know it first as last."
Nora's school had been of the punctilious Episcopal order, and she had learned there the pretty custom of decorating the house at Christmas-tide with garlands and crowns of evergreen and holly. She had spent the day in decking out the chimney-piece, and now, seated on a stool under the mantel-shelf, she twisted the last little wreath which was to complete her design. A great still snow-storm was falling without, and seemed to be blocking them in from the world. She bit off the thread with which she had been binding her twigs, held out her garland to admire its effect, and then, "I don't believe you are stupid, Roger," she said; "and if I did, I should not much care."
"Is that philosophy, or indifference?" said the young man.
"I don't know that it 's either; it 's because I know you are so good."
"That is what they say about all stupid people."
Nora added another twig to her wreath and bound it up. "I am sure," she said at last, "that when people are as good as you are, they cannot be stupid. I should like some one to tell me you are stupid. I know, Roger; I know!"
The young man began to feel a little uneasy; it was no part of his plan that her good-will should spend itself ​too soon. "Dear me, Nora, if you think so well of me, I shall find it hard to live up to your expectations. I am afraid I shall disappoint you. I have a little gimcrack to put in your stocking to-night; but I 'm rather ashamed of it now."
"A gimcrack more or less is of small account. I have had my stocking hanging up these three years, and everything I possess is a present from you."
Roger frowned; the conversation had taken just such a turn as he had often longed to provoke, but now it was disagreeable to him. "O, come," he said; "I have done simply my duty to my little girl."
"But, Roger," said Nora, staring with expanded eyes, "I am not your little girl."
His frown darkened; his heart began to beat. "Don't talk nonsense!" he said.
"But, Roger, it is true. I am no one's little girl. Do you think I have no memory? Where is my father? Where is my mother?"
"Listen to me," said Roger, sternly. "You must not talk of such things."
"You must not forbid me, Roger. I can't think of them without thinking of you. This is Christmas eve! Miss Murray told us that we must never let it pass without thinking of all that it means. But without Miss Murray, I have been thinking all day of things which are hard to name,—of death and life, of my parents and you, of my incredible happiness. I feel to-night like a princess in a fairy-tale. I am a poor creature, without a friend, without a penny or a home; and yet, here I sit by a blazing fire, with money, with food, with clothes, ​with love. The snow outside is burying the stone-walls, and yet here I can sit and simply say, 'How pretty!' Suppose I were in it, wandering and begging,—I might have been! Should I think it pretty then? Roger, Roger, I am no one's child!" The tremor in her voice deepened, and she broke into a sudden passion of tears. Roger took her in his arms and tried to soothe away her sobs. But she disengaged herself and went on with an almost fierce exaltation: "No, no, I won't be comforted! I have had comfort enough; I hate it. I want for an hour to be myself and feel how little that is, to be my miserable father's daughter, to fancy I hear my mother's voice. I have never spoken of them before; you must let me to-night. You must tell me about my father; you know something. I don't. You never refused me anything, Roger; don't refuse me this. He was not good, like you; but now he can do no harm. You have never mentioned his name to me, but happy as we are here together, we ought not,—we ought not, to despise him!"
Roger yielded to the vehemence of this flood of emotion. He stood watching her with two helpless tears in his own eyes, and then he drew her gently towards him and kissed her on the forehead. She took up her work again, and he told her, with every minutest detail he could recall, the story of his sole brief interview with Mr. Lambert. Gradually he lost the sense of effort and reluctance, and talked freely, abundantly, almost with pleasure. Nora listened very solemnly,—with an amount of self-control which denoted the habit of constant retrospect. She asked a hundred questions as to Roger's impression of her father's appearance. Was he not wonderfully ​handsome? Then taking up the tale herself, she poured out a torrent of feverish reminiscence. She disinterred her early memories with a kind of rapture of relief. Her evident joy in this frolic of confidence gave Roger a pitying sense of what her long silence must have cost her. But evidently she bore him no grudge, and his present tolerance of her rambling gossip seemed to her but another proof of his charity. She rose at last, and stood before the fire, into which she had thrown the refuse of her greenery, watching it blaze up and turn to ashes. "So much for the past!" she said, at last. "The rest is the future. The girls at school used to be always talking about what they meant to do in coming years, what they hoped, what they wished; wondering, choosing, imagining. You don't know how girls talk, Roger: you would be surprised! I never used to say much: my future is fixed. I have nothing to choose, nothing to hope, nothing to fear. I am to make you happy. That's simple enough. You have undertaken to bring me up, Roger; you must do your best, because now I am here, it 's for long, and you would rather have a wise girl than a silly one." And she smiled with a kind of tentative daughterliness through the traces of her recent grief. She put her two hands on his shoulders and eyed him with conscious gravity. "You shall never repent. I shall learn everything, I shall be everything! Oh! I wish I were pretty." And she tossed back her head, in impatience of her fatal plainness, with an air which forced Roger to assure her that she would do very well as she was. "If you are satisfied," she said, "I am!" For a moment Roger felt as if she were twenty years old.
​This serious Christmas eve left its traces upon many ensuing weeks. Nora's education was resumed with a certain added solemnity. Roger was no longer obliged to condescend to the level of her intelligence, and he found reason to thank his stars that he had improved his own mind. He found use for all the knowledge he possessed. The day of childish "lessons" was over, and Nora sought instruction in the perusal of various classical authors, in her own and other tongues, in concert with her friend. They read aloud to each other alternately, discussed their acquisitions, and digested them with perhaps equal rapidity. Roger, in former years, had had but a small literary appetite; he liked a few books and knew them well, but he felt as if to settle down to an unread author were very like starting on a journey,—a case for farewells, packing trunks, and buying tickets. His curiosity, now, however, imbued and quickened with a motive, led him through a hundred untrodden paths. He found it hard sometimes to keep pace with Nora's pattering step; through the flowery lanes of poetry, in especial, she would gallop without drawing breath. Was she quicker-witted than her friend, or only more superficial? Something of one, doubtless, and something of the other. Roger was forever suspecting her of a deeper penetration than his own, and hanging his head with an odd mixture of pride and humility. Her quick perception, at times, made him feel irretrievably dull and antiquated. His ears would tingle, his cheeks would burn, his old hope would fade into a shadow. "It 's worse than useless," he would declare. "How can I ever have for her that charm of infallibility, ​that romance of omniscience, that a woman demands of her lover? She has seen me scratching my head, she has seen me counting on my fingers! Before she is seventeen she will be mortally tired of me, and by the time she is twenty I shall be fatally familiar and incurably stale. It 's very well for her to talk about life-long devotion and eternal gratitude. She doesn't know the meaning of words. She must grow and outgrow, that is her first necessity. She must come to woman's estate and pay the inevitable tribute. I can open the door and let in the lover. If she loves me now I shall have had my turn. I can't hope to be the object of two passions. I must thank the Lord for small favors!" Then as he seemed to taste, in advance, the bitterness of disappointment, casting about him angrily for some means of appeal: "I ought to go away and stay away for years and never write at all, instead of compounding ponderous diaries to make even my absence detestable. I ought to convert myself into a beneficent shadow, a vague tutelary name. Then I ought to come back in glory, fragrant with exotic perfumes and shod with shoes of mystery! Otherwise, I ought to clip the wings of her fancy and put her on half-rations. I ought to snub her and scold her and bully her and tell her she 's deplorably plain,—treat her as Rochester treats Jane Eyre. If I were only a good old Catholic, that I might shut her up in a convent and keep her childish and stupid and contented!" Roger felt that he was too doggedly conscientious; but abuse his conscience as he would, he could not make it yield an inch; so that in the constant strife between his egotistical purpose and his generous temper, ​the latter kept gaining ground, and Nora innocently enjoyed the spoils of victory. It was his very generosity that detained him on the spot, by her side, watching her, working for her, performing a hundred offices which other hands would have but scanted. Roger watched intently for the signs of that inevitable hour when a young girl begins to loosen her fingers in the grasp of a guiding hand and wander softly in pursuit of the sinuous silver thread which deflects, through meadows of perennial green, from the dull gray stream of the common lot. She had relapsed in the course of time into the careless gayety and the light, immediate joys of girlhood. If she cherished a pious purpose in her heart, she made no indecent parade of it. But her very placidity and patience somehow afflicted her friend. She was too monotonously sweet, too easily obedient. If once in a while she would only flash out into petulance or rebellion! She kept her temper so carefully: what in the world was she keeping it for? If she would only bless him for once with an angry look and tell him that he bored her!
During the second year after her return from school Roger began to imagine that she avoided his society and resented his attentions. She was fond of lonely walks, readings, reveries. She was fond of novels, and she read a great many. For works of fiction in general Roger had no great relish, though he confessed to three or four old-fashioned favorites. These were not always Nora's. One evening, in the early spring she sat down to a twentieth perusal of the classic tale of "The Heir of Redcliffe." Roger, as usual, asked her to read aloud. She began, and proceeded through a dozen pages; ​Looking up, at this point, she beheld Roger asleep. She smiled softly, and privately resumed her reading. At the end of an hour, Roger, having finished his nap, rather startled her by his excessive annoyance at his lapse of consciousness. He wondered whether he had snored, but the absurd fellow was ashamed to ask her. Recovering himself finally, "The fact is, Nora," he said, "all novels seem to me stupid. They are nothing to what I can fancy! I have in my heart a prettier romance than any of them."
"A romance?" said Nora, simply. "Pray let me hear it. You are quite as good a hero as this stick of a Philip. Begin!"
He stood before the fire, looking at her with almost funereal gravity. "My dénouement is not yet written," he said. "Wait till the story is finished; then you shall hear the whole."
As at this time Nora put on long dresses and began to arrange her hair as a young lady, it occurred to Roger that he might make some change in his own appearance and reinforce his waning attractions. He was now thirty three; he fancied he was growing stout. Bald, corpulent, middle-aged,—at this rate he should soon be shelved! He was seized with a mad desire to win back the lost graces of youth. He had a dozen interviews with his tailor, the result of which was that for a fortnight he appeared daily in a new garment. Suddenly, amid this restless longing to revise and embellish himself, he determined to suppress his whiskers. This would take off five years. He appeared, therefore, one morning, in the severe simplicity of a mustache. Nora started, and greeted ​him with a little cry of horror. "Don't you like it?" he asked. She hung her head on one side and the other. "Well, no,—to be frank."
"O, of course to be frank! It will only take five years to grow them again. What is the trouble?"
She gave a critical frown. "It makes you look too,—too fat; too much like Mr. Vose." It is sufficient to explain that Mr. Vose was the butcher, who called every day in his cart, and who recently,—Roger with horror only now remembered it,—had sacrificed his whiskers to a mysterious ideal.
"I am sorry!" said Roger. "It was for you I did it!"
"For me!" And Nora burst into a violent laugh.
"Why, my dear Nora," cried the young man with a certain angry vehemence, "don't I do everything in life for you?"
She became grave again. Then, after much meditation, "Excuse my unfeeling levity," she said. "You might cut off your nose, Roger, and I should like your face as well." But this was but half comfort. "Too fat!" Her subtler sense had spoken, and Roger never encountered Mr. Vose for three months after this without wishing to attack him with one of his own cleavers.
He made now an heroic attempt to scale the frowning battlements of the future. He pretended to be making arrangements for a tour in Europe, and for having his house completely remodelled in his absence; noting the while attentively the effect upon Nora of his cunning machinations. But she gave no sign of suspicion that ​his future, to the uttermost day, could be anything but her future too. One evening, nevertheless, an incident occurred which fatally confounded his calculations,—an evening of perfect mid-spring, full of warm, vague odors, of growing daylight, of the sense of bursting sap and fresh-turned earth. Roger sat on the piazza, looking out on these things with an opera-glass. Nora, who had been strolling in the garden, returned to the house and sat down on the steps of the portico. "Roger," she said, after a pause, "has it never struck you as very strange that we should be living together in this way?"
Roger's heart rose to his throat. But he was loath to concede anything, lest he should concede too much. "It is not especially strange," he said.
"Surely it is strange," she answered. "What are you? Neither my brother, nor my father, nor my uncle, nor my cousin,—nor even, by law, my guardian."
"By law! My dear child, what do you know about law?"
"I know that if I should run away and leave you now, you could not force me to return."
"That 's fine talk! Who told you that?"
"No one; I thought of it myself. As I grow older, I ought to think of such things."
"Upon my word! Of running away and leaving me?"
"That is but one side of the question. The other is that you can turn me out of your house this moment, and no one can force you to take me back. I ought to remember such things."
"Pray what good will it do you to remember them?"
Nora hesitated a moment. "There is always some good in not losing sight of the truth."
​"The truth! You are very young to begin to talk about the truth."
"Not too young. I am old for my age. I ought to be!" These last words were uttered with a little sigh which roused Roger to action.
"Since we are talking about the truth," he said, "I wonder whether you know a tithe of it."
For an instant she was silent; then, rising slowly to her feet, "What do you mean?" she asked. "Is there any secret in all that you have done for me?" Suddenly she clasped her hands, end eagerly, with a smile, went on: "You said the other day you had a romance. Is it a real romance, Roger? Are you, after all, related to me,—my cousin, my brother?"
He let her stand before him, perplexed and expectant. "It is more of a romance than that."
She slid upon her knees at his feet. "Dear Roger, do tell me," she said. He began to stroke her hair. "You think so much," he answered; "do you never think about the future, the real future, ten years hence?"
"A great deal."
"What do you think?"
She blushed a little, and then he felt that she was drawing confidence from his face. "Promise not to laugh!" she said, half laughing herself. He nodded. "I think about my husband!" she proclaimed. And then, as if she had, after all, been very absurd, and to forestall his laughter, "And about your wife!" she quickly added. "I want dreadfully to see her. Why don't you marry?"
​He continued to stroke her hair in silence. At last he said sententiously, "I hope to marry one of these days."
"I wish you would do it now," Nora went on. "If only she would be nice! We should be sisters, and I should take care of the children."
"You are too young to understand what you say, or what I mean. Little girls should not talk about marriage. It can mean nothing to you until you come yourself to marry,—as you will, of course. You will have to decide and choose."
"I suppose I shall. I shall refuse him."
"What do you mean?"
But, without answering his question, "Were you ever in love, Roger?" she suddenly asked. "Is that your romance?"
"Almost."
"Then it is not about me, after all?"
"It is about you, Nora; but, after all, it is not a romance. It is solid, it is real, it is truth itself; as true as your silly novels are false. Nora, I care for no one, I shall never care for any one, but you!"
He spoke in tones so deep and solemn that she was impressed. "Do you mean, Roger, that you care so much for me that you will never marry?"
He rose quickly in his chair, pressing his hand over his brow. "Ah, Nora," he cried, "you are very painful!"
If she had annoyed him she was very contrite. She took his two hands in her own. "Roger," she whispered gravely, "if you don't wish it, I promise never, never, never to marry, but to be yours alone,—yours alone!"