“I wish,” cried Nora, as they rolled along the quiet road, “that you would not drag me in wherever John Erskine is going, Car!”
They all called him John Erskine. It was the habit of the neighbourhood, from which even strangers could scarcely get free.
“I drag you in! Ah, see how selfish we are without knowing!” said Carry. “I thought only that between Mr. Torrance and myself—there would be little amusement.”
“Amusement!” cried Nora—“always amusement! Is that all that is ever to be thought of even at a dinner-party?”
Carry was too serious to take up this challenge. “Dear Nora,” she said, “I am afraid of John Erskine, though I cannot tell you why. I think Mr. Torrance tries to irritate him: he does not mean it—but they are so different. I know by my own experience that sometimes a tone, a look—which is nothing, which means nothing—will drive one beside one’s self. That is why I would rather he did not come; and when he comes, I want someone—someone indifferent—to help me to make it seem like a common little dinner—like every day.”
“Is it not like every day? Is there—anything? If you want me, Carry, of course there is not a word to be said.” Nora looked at her with anxious, somewhat astonished eyes. She, too, was aware that before Carry’s marriage—before the family came to Lindores—there had been someone else. But if that had been John, how then did it happen that Edith—Nora stopped short, confounded. To her young imagination the idea, not so very dreadful a one, that a man who had loved one sister might afterwards console himself with another, was a sort of sacrilege. But friendship went above all.
“I do not think I can explain it to you, Nora,” said Lady Caroline. “There are so many things one cannot explain. Scarcely anything in this world concerns one’s very self alone and nobody else. That always seems to make confidences so impossible.”
“Never mind confidences,” cried Nora, wounded. “I did not ask why. I said if you really wanted me, Carry—”
“I know you would not ask why. And there is nothing to tell. Mr. Torrance has had a mistaken idea. But it is not that altogether. I am frightened without any reason. I suppose it is as my mother says, because of all the old associations he brings back. Marriage is so strange a thing. It cuts your life in two. What was before seems to belong to someone else—to another world.”
“Is it always so, I wonder?” said Nora, wistfully.
“So far as I know,” Carry said.
“Then I think St. Paul is right,” cried the girl, decisively, “and that it is not good in that case to marry; but never mind, if you want me. There is nothing to be frightened about in John Erskine. He is nice enough. He would not do anything to make you uncomfortable. He is not ill-tempered nor ready to take offence.”
“I did not know that you knew him so well, Nora.”
“Oh yes—when you have a man thrust upon you as he has been—when you have always heard of him all your life; when people have said for years—in fun, you know, of course, but still they have said it—‘Wait till you see John Erskine!’ ”
Nora’s tone was slightly aggrieved. She could not help feeling herself a little injured that, after so much preparation and so many indications of fate, John Erskine should turn out to be nothing to her after all.
Lady Caroline listened with an eager countenance. Before Nora had done speaking, she turned upon her, taking both her hands. Her soft grey eyes widened out with anxious questions. The corners of her mouth drooped. “Nora, dear child, dear child!” she said, “you cannot mean—you do not say—”
“Oh, I don’t say anything at all,” cried Nora, half angry, half amused, with a laugh at herself which was about a quarter part inclined to crying. “No, of course not, Car. How could I care for him—a man I had never seen? But just—it seems so ludicrous, after this going on all one’s life, that it should come to nothing in a moment. I never can help laughing when I think of it. ‘Oh, wait till you see John Erskine!’ Since I was fifteen everybody has said that. And then when he did appear at last, oh—I thought him very nice—I had no objection to him—I was not a bit unwilling—to see him calmly turn his back upon me, as he did today at the station!”
Nora laughed till the tears came into her eyes; but Lady Caroline, whose seriousness precluded any admixture of humour in the situation, took the younger girl in her arms and kissed her, with a pitying tenderness and enthusiasm of consolation. “My little Nora! my little Nora!” she said. She was too much moved with the most genuine emotion and sympathy to say more; at which Nora, half accepting the crisis, half struggling against it, laughed again and again till the tears rolled over her cheeks.
“Lady Car! Lady Car! it is not for sorrow; it is the fun of it—the fun of it!” she cried.
But Carry did not see the fun. She wanted to soothe the sorrow away.
“Dearest Nora, this sort of disappointment is only visionary,” she said. “It is your imagination that is concerned, not your heart. Oh, believe me, dear, you will laugh at it afterwards; you will think it nothing at all. How little he knows! I shall think less of his good sense, less of his discrimination, than I was disposed to do. To think of a man so left to himself as to throw my Nora away!”
“He has not thrown me away,” cried Nora, with a little pride; “because, thank heaven, he never knew that he had me in his power! But you must think more, not less, of his discrimination, Carry; for if he never had any eyes
