← catalogue

The High Heart

by Basil King · English · Gutenberg #35463 · 676,505 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The High Heart
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The High Heart

Author: Basil King


        
Release date: March 3, 2011 [eBook #35463]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35463

Credits: Produced by Barbara Watson, Ross Cooling and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at
        http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from
        images generously made available by The Internet
        Archive/Canadian Libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HIGH HEART ***




Produced by Barbara Watson, Ross Cooling and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at
http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet
Archive/Canadian Libraries)









  Books by the
  AUTHOR OF "THE INNER SHRINE"

  [BASIL KING]

  THE HIGH HEART. Illustrated.
  THE LIFTED VEIL. Illustrated.
  THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS. Illustrated.
  THE LETTER OF THE CONTRACT. Illustrated.
  THE WAY HOME. Illustrated.
  THE WILD OLIVE. Illustrated.
  THE INNER SHRINE. Illustrated.
  THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT. Illustrated.
  LET NOT MAN PUT ASUNDER. Post 8vo.
  IN THE GARDEN OF CHARITY. Post 8vo.
  THE STEPS OF HONOR. Post 8vo.
  THE GIANT'S STRENGTH. Post 8vo.


  HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
  Established 1817




[Illustration: "I've been thinking a good deal during the past few weeks
of your law of Right"]




  THE HIGH HEART

  BY
  BASIL KING

  AUTHOR OF
  "_The Inner Shrine_" "_The Lifted Veil_" _Etc._

  ILLUSTRATED



  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
  NEW YORK AND LONDON




  The High Heart

  Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
  Printed in the United States of America
  Published September, 1917




  ILLUSTRATIONS


  "I've Been Thinking a Good Deal During the
    Past Few Weeks of Your Law of Right"                 _Frontispiece_

  The Marriage She Had Missed Was on Her Mind.
    It Created an Obsession or a Broken Heart,
    I Wasn't Quite Sure Which                           _Facing p._ 118

  I Saw a Man and a Woman Consumed with Longing
    for Each Other                                          "       192

  "I've Had Great Trials . . . I've Always Been
    Misjudged. . . . They've Put Me Down as
    Hard and Proud"                                         "       410




  THE HIGH HEART


  CHAPTER I


I could not have lived in the Brokenshire circle for nearly a year
without recognizing the fact that in the eyes of his family J. Howard,
as he was commonly called by the world, was the Great Dispenser; but my
first intimation that he meant to act in that capacity toward me came
from Larry Strangways, on a bright July morning during the summer of
1913, when we were at Newport.

I was crossing the lawn, going toward the sea, with little Gladys
Rossiter, to whom I acted as companion in the hours when she was out of
the nursery, with a specific duty to speak French. Larry Strangways was
tutor to the Rossiter boy, and in our relative positions we were bound
to exercise toward each other a good deal of discretion. We fraternized
with constraint. We fraternized because--well, chiefly because we
couldn't help it. In the mocking flare of his eye, which contradicted
the assumed young gravity of his manner, I read an opinion of the
Rossiter household and of the Brokenshire family in general similar to
my own. That would have been enough for mutual comprehension had there
been no instinctive sympathies between us; but there were. Allowing for
the fact that we were of different nationalities, we had the same kind
of antecedents; we spoke the same kind of social language; we had the
same kind of aims in life. Neither of us regarded the position in the
Rossiter establishment as a permanent status. He was a tutor merely for
the minute, while feeling his way to that first rung of the ladder which
I was convinced would lead him to some high place in American life. I
was a nursery governess only on the way to getting married. Matrimony
was the continent toward which more or less consciously I had been
traveling for five or six years, without having actually descried a
port. In this connection I may relate a little incident which had taken
place between myself and Mrs. Rossiter after I had accepted my situation
in her family. It will retard my meeting with Larry Strangways on the
lawn, but it will throw light on it when it comes.

I had met Mrs. Rossiter, who was J. Howard Brokenshire's daughter, in
the way that is known as socially. I never understood why she should
have taken a house for the summer in our quiet old town of Halifax,
unless she was urged to it by the vague restlessness which was one of
her characteristics. But there she was in a roomy old brick mansion I
had known all my life, with gardens and conservatories and lawns running
down to the fiord or back-harbor which we call the Northwest Arm, and a
fine English air of seclusion. In our easy, neighborly way she was well
received, and made herself agreeable. She flirted with the officers of
both Army and Navy enough to create talk without raising scandal; and
she was sufficiently good-natured to be civil to us girls, among whom
she singled me out for attentions. I attributed this kindness to our
recent bereavement and financial crash, which had left me poor after
twenty-four years of comfort, and was proportionately grateful. It was
partly gratitude, and partly a natural love of children, and partly a
special affection for the exquisite thing herself, that drew me to
little Gladys Rossiter, to playing with her on the lawns, and rowing her
on the Arm, and--as I had been for three or four years at school in
Paris--dropping into a habit of lisping French to her. As the child
liked me the mother left her more and more to my care, gaining thus the
greater scope for her innocuous flirtations.

It was toward the end of the summer that Mrs. Rossiter began to sigh, "I
don't know how I shall ever tear Gladys away from you," and, "I do wish
you were coming with us."

I wished it in a way myself, since I was rather at a loss as to what to
do. I had never expected to have to earn a living; I had expected to get
married. My two elder sisters, Louise and Victoria, had married easily
enough, the one in the Navy, the other in the Army; but with me suitors
seemed to lag. They came and saw--but they never went far enough for
conquest. I couldn't understand it. I was not stupid; I was not ugly;
and I was generally spoken of as having charm. But there was the fact
that I was twenty-four, with scarcely a penny, and drawing nearer and
nearer to the end of my expedients. I was not without some social
experience, having kept house in a generous way for my widowed father,
till his death, some two years before the summer when I met Mrs.
Rossiter, brought with it our financial collapse. If he hadn't left a
lot of old books--_Canadiana_, the pamphlets were called--and rare first
editions of all kinds, which I took over to London and sold at
Sothbey's, I shouldn't have had enough on which to dress. This business
being settled, I stayed as long as I decently could with Louise at
Southsea and Victoria at Gibraltar; but no man asked me to marry him
during the course of either visit. Had there been a sign of any such
possibility the sisters would have put themselves out to keep me; but as
nothing warranted them in doing so they let me go. An uncle and aunt
having offered to give me shelter for a time at Halifax, there was
nothing left for it but to go back and renew the search for my fortunes
in my native town.

When, therefore, Mrs. Rossiter, in her pretty, helpless way said to me
one day, "Why shouldn't you come with me, dear Miss Adare?" I jumped
inwardly at the opportunity, though I smiled and replied in an offhand
manner, "Oh, that would have to be discussed."

Mrs. Rossiter admitted the truth of this observation somewhat pensively.
I know now that I took her up with too much promptitude.

"Yes, of course," she returned, absently, and the subject was dropped.

It was taken up again, however, and our bargain made. On Mrs. Rossiter's
part it was made astutely, not in the matter of money, but in the way in
which she shifted me from the position of a friend into that of a
retainer. It was done with the most perfect tact, but it was done. I had
no complaint to make. What she wanted was a nursery governess. My own
first preoccupations were food and shelter for which I should not be
dependent on my kin. We came to the incident I am about to relate very
gradually; but when we did come to it I had no difficulty in seeing that
it had been in the back of Mrs. Rossiter's mind from the first. It had
been the cause of that second thought on the day when I had taken her up
too readily.

She began by telling me about her father. Beyond the fact that some man
who seemed to be specially well informed would occasionally say with
awe, "She's J. Howard Brokenshire's daughter," I knew nothing whatever
about him. But I began to see him now as the central sun round whom all
the Brokenshires revolved. They revolved round him, not so much from
adoration or even from natural affection as from some tremendous rotary
force to which there was no resistance.

Up to this time I had heard no more of American life than American life
had heard of me. The great country south of our border was scarcely on
my map. The Halifax in which I was born and grew up was not the bustling
Canadian port, dependent on its hinterland, it is to-day; it was an
outpost of England, with its face always turned to the Atlantic and the
east. My own face had been turned the same way. My home had been
literally a jumping-off place, in that when we left it we never expected
to go in any but the one direction. I had known Americans when they came
into our midst as summer visitors, but only in the way one knows the
stars which dawn and fade and leave no trace of their passage on actual
happenings.

In the course of Mrs. Rossiter's confidences I began to see a vast
cosmogony beyond my own personal sun, with J. Howard Brokenshire as the
pivot of the new universe. With a curious little shock of surprise I
discovered that there could be other solar systems besides the one to
which I was accustomed, and that Canada was not the whole of North
America. It was like looking through a telescope which Mrs. Rossiter
held to my eye, a telescope through which I saw the nebular evidence of
an immense society, wealthy, confused, more intellectual than our own,
but more provincial too, perhaps; more isolated, more timid, more
conservative, less instinct with the great throb of national and
international impulse which all of us feel who live on the imperial red
line and, therefore, less daring, but interesting all the same. I began
to glow with the spirit of adventure. My position as a nursery governess
presented the opportunities not merely of a Livingstone or a Stanley,
but of a Galileo or a Copernicus.

I learned that Mrs. Rossiter's mother had been a Miss Brew, and that the
Brews were a great family in Boston. She was the mother of all Mr.
Brokenshire's children. By looks and hints and sighs I gathered from
Mrs. Rossiter that her father's second marriage had been a trial to his
family. Not that there had been any social descent. On the contrary, the
present Mrs. Brokenshire had been Editha Billing, of Philadelphia, and
there could be nothing better than that. It was a question of fitness,
of necessity, of age. "There was no need for him to marry again at all,"
Mrs. Rossiter complained. "If she'd only been a middle-aged woman," she
said to me later, "we might not have felt. . . . But she's younger than
Mildred and only a year or two older than I am." "Oh yes," was another
remark, "she's pretty; very pretty . . . but I often--wonder."

She described her brothers and her sister by degrees. One day she told
me about Mildred, another about Jack, so coming toward her point.
Mildred was the eldest of the family, a great invalid. She had been
thrown from her horse years before while hunting in England, and had
injured her spine. Jack had just gone into business with his father, and
had married Pauline Gray, of Baltimore. Though she didn't say it in so
many words I judged that it was not a happy marriage in the highest
sense--that Jack was somewhat light of love, while Pauline "went her own
way" to a degree that made her talked about. It was not till the day
before her departure for New York that Mrs. Rossiter mentioned her
younger brother, Hugh.

I was helping her to pack--that is, I was helping the maid while Mrs.
Rossiter directed. Just at that minute, however, she was standing up,
shaking out the folds of an evening dress. She seemed to peep at me
round its garnishings as she said, apropos of nothing:

"There's my brother Hugh. He's the youngest of us all--just twenty-six.
He has no occupation as yet--he's just studying languages and things. My
father wants him to go into diplomacy." As I caught her eye there was a
smile in it, but a special kind of smile. It was the smile to go with
the sensible, kindly, coaxing inflection with which she said, "You'll
leave him alone, won't you?"

I took the dress out of her hand to carry it to the maid in the next
room.

"Leave him alone--how?"

She flushed to a lovely pink.

"Oh, you know what I mean. I don't have to explain."

"You mean that in my position in the household it will be for me to--to
keep out of his way?"

"It's you who put it like that, dear Miss Adare--"

"But it's the way you want me to put it?"

"Well, if I admit that it is?"

"Then I don't think I care for the place."

"What?"

I stated my position more simply.

"If I'm to have nothing to do with your brother, Mrs. Rossiter, I don't
want to go."

In the audacity of this response she saw something that amused her, for,
snatching the dress from my hand, she ran with it into the next room,
laughing.

During the following winter in New York and the early summer of the next
year in Newport I saw a good deal of Mr. Hugh Brokenshire, but never
with any violent restriction on the part of Mrs. Rossiter. I say
violent with intention, for she did intervene when she could do so. Only
once did I hear that she knew he was kind to me, and that was from Larry
Strangways. It was an observation he had overheard as it passed from
Mrs. Rossiter to her husband, and which, in the spirit of our silent
_camaraderie_, he thought it right to hand along.

"I can't be responsible for Hugh!" Mrs. Rossiter had said. "He's old
enough to look after himself. If he wants a row with father he must have
it; and he seems to me in a fair way to get it. If he does it will be
his own fault; it won't be Miss Adare's."

Fortified by this acquittal, I went on my way as quietly as I could,
though I cannot say I was free from perturbation.

Perturbation caught me like a whiff of wind as I saw Larry Strangways
deflect from his course across the lawn and come in my direction. I knew
he wouldn't have done that unless he felt himself authorized; and
nothing could give him the authorization but something in the way of a
message or command. To all observers we were strangers. We should have
been strangers even to each other had it not been for that freemasonry
of caste, that secret mutual comprehension, which transcends speech and
opportunities of meeting, and which, on our part, at least, had little
expression beyond smiles and flying glances.

Of course he was good-looking. It has often seemed to me the privilege
of ineligible men to be tall and slim and straight, with just such a
flash in the eye and just such a beam about the mouth as belonged to
Larry Strangways. Instinct had told me from the first that it would be
wise for me to avoid him, while prudence, as I have hinted, gave him the
same indication to keep at a distance from me. Luckily he didn't live
in the house, but in lodgings in the town. We hardly ever met face to
face, and then only under the eye of Mrs. Rossiter when each of us
marshaled a pupil to lunch or to tea.

As the collie at his heels and the wire-haired terrier at ours made a
bee-line for each other the children kept them company, which gave us
space for those few minutes of privacy the occasion apparently demanded.
Though he lifted his hat formally, and did his best to preserve the
decorum of our official situations, the prank in his eye flung out that
signal to which I could never do anything but respond.

"I've a message for you, Miss Adare."

I managed to stammer out the word "Indeed?" I couldn't be surprised, and
yet I could hardly stand erect from fear.

He glanced at the children to make sure they were out of earshot.

"It's from the great man himself--indirectly."

I was so near to collapse that I could only say, "Indeed?" again, though
I rallied sufficiently to add, "I didn't know he was aware of my
existence."

"Apparently he wasn't--but he is now. He desires you--I give you the
verb as Spellman, the secretary, passed it on to me--he desires you to
be in the breakfast loggia here at three this afternoon."

I could barely squeak the words out:

"Does he mean that he's coming to see me?"

"That, it seems, isn't necessary for you to know. Your business is to be
there. There's quite a subtle point in the limitation. Being there,
you'll see what will happen next. It isn't good for you to be told too
much at a time."

My spirit began to revive.

"I'm not his servant. I'm Mrs. Rossiter's. If he wants anything of me
why doesn't he say so through her?"

"'Sh, 'sh, Miss Adare! You mustn't dictate to God, or say he should act
in this way or in that."

"But he's not God."

"Oh, as to that--well, you'll see." He added, with his light laugh,
"What will you bet that I don't know what it's all about?"

"Oh, I bet you do."

"Then," he warned, "you're up against it."

I was getting on my mettle.

"Perhaps I am--but I sha'n't be alone."

"No; but you'll be made to feel alone."

"Even so--"

As I was anxious to keep from boasting beforehand, I left the sentence
there.

"Yes?" he jogged. "Even so--what?"

"Oh, nothing. I only mean that I'm not afraid of him--that is," I
corrected, "I'm not afraid of him fundamentally."

He laughed again. "Not afraid of him fundamentally! That's fine!"
Something in his glance seemed to approve of me. "No, I don't believe
you are; but I wonder a little why not."

I reflected, gazing beyond his shoulder, down the velvety slopes of the
lawn, and across the dancing blue sea to the islets that were mere
specks on the horizon. In the end I decided to speak soberly. "I'm not
afraid of him," I said at last, "because I've got a sure thing."

"You mean him?"

I knew the reference was to Hugh Brokenshire. "If I mean him," I
replied, after a minute's thinking, "it's only as the greater includes
the less, or as the universal includes everything."

He whistled under his breath.

"Does that mean anything? Or is it just big talk?"

Half shy and half ashamed of going on with what I had to say, I was
obliged to smile ruefully.

"It's big talk because it's a big principle. I don't know how to manage
it with anything small." I tried to explain further, knowing that my
dark skin flushed to a kind of dahlia-red while I was doing so. "I don't
know whether I've read it--or whether I heard it--or whether I've just
evolved it--but I seem to have got hold of--of--don't laugh too hard,
please--of the secret of success."

"Good for you! I hope you're not going to be stingy with it."

"No; I'll tell you--partly because I want to talk about it to some one,
and just at present there's no one else."

"Thanks!"

"The secret of success, as I reason it out, must be something that will
protect a weak person against a strong one--me, for instance, against J.
Howard Brokenshire--and work everything out all right. There," I cried,
"I've said the word."

"You've said a number. Which is the one?"

Anxiety not to seem either young or didactic or a prig made my tone
apologetic.

"There's such a thing as Right, written with a capital. If I persist in
doing Right--still with a capital--then nothing but right can come of
it."

"Oh, can't it!"

"I know it sounds like a platitude--"

"No, it doesn't," he interrupted, rudely, "because a platitude is
something obviously true; and this isn't."

I felt some relief.

"Oh, isn't it? Then I'm glad. I thought it must be."

"You won't go on thinking it. Suppose you do right and somebody else
does wrong?"

"Then I should be willing to back my way against his. Don't you see?
That's the point. That's the secret I'm telling you about. Right works;
wrong doesn't."

"That's all very fine--"

"It's all very fine because it's so. Right is--what's the word William
James put into the dictionary?"

He suggested pragmatism.

"That's it. Right is pragmatic, which I suppose is the same thing as
practical. Wrong must be impractical; it must be--"

"I shouldn't bank too confidently on that in dealing with the great J.
Howard."

"But I'm going to bank on it. It's where I'm to have him at a
disadvantage. If he does wrong while I do right, why, then I'll get him
on the hip."

"How do you know he's going to do wrong?"

"I don't. I merely surmise it. If he does right--"

"He'll get you on the hip."

"No, because there can't be a right for him which isn't a right for me.
There can't be two rights, each contrary to the other. That's not in
common sense. If he does right then I shall be safe--whichever way I
have to take it. Don't you see? That's where the success comes in as
well as the secret. It can't be any other way. Please don't think I'm
talking in what H. G. Wells calls the tin-pot style--but one must
express oneself somehow. I'm not afraid, because I feel as if I'd got
something that would hang about me like a magic cloak. Of course for
you--a man--a magic cloak may not be necessary; but I assure you that
for a girl like me, out in the world on her own--"

He, too, sobered down from his chaffing mood.

"But in this case what is going to be Right--written with a capital?"

I had just time to reply, "Oh, that I shall have to see!" when the
children and dogs came scampering up and our conversation was over.

On returning from my walk with Gladys I informed Mrs. Rossiter of the
order I had received. I could see her distressed look in the mirror
before which she sat doing something to her hair.

"Oh, dear!" she sighed, "it's just what I was afraid of. Now I suppose
he'll want you to leave."

"That is, he'll want you to send me away."

"It's the same thing," she said, fretfully, and sat with hands lying
idly in her lap.

She stared out of the window. It was a large bow window, with a
window-seat cushioned in flowered chintz. Couch, curtains, and
easy-chairs reproduced this Enchanted Garden effect, forming a
paradisiacal background for her intensely modern and somewhat neurotic
prettiness. I had seen her sit by the half-hour like this, gazing over
the shrubberies, lawns, and waves, with a yearning in her eyes like that
of some twentieth-century Blessed Damozel.

It was her unhappy hour of the day. Between getting up at nine or ten
and descending languidly to lunch, life was always a great load to her.
It pressed on one too weak to bear its weight and yet too conscientious
to throw it off, though, as a matter of fact, this melancholy was only
the reaction of her nerves from the mild excitements of the night
before. I was generally with her during some portion of this forenoon
time, reading her notes and answering them, speaking for her at the
telephone, or keeping her company and listening to her confidences while
she nibbled without appetite at a bit of toast and sipped her tea.

To put matters on the common footing I said:

"Is there anything you'd like me to do, Mrs. Rossiter?"

She ignored this question, murmuring in a way she had, through
half-closed lips, as if mere speech was more than she was equal to: "And
just when we were getting on so well--and the way Gladys adores you--"

"And the way I adore Gladys."

"Oh, well, you don't spoil the child, like that Miss Phips. I suppose
it's your sensible English bringing up."

"Not English," I interrupted.

"Canadian then. It's almost the same thing." She went on without
transition of tone: "Mr. Millinger was there again last night. He was on
my left. I do wish they wouldn't keep putting him next to me. It makes
everything look so pointed--especially with Harry Scott glowering at me
from the other end of the table. He hardly spoke to Daisy Burke, whom
he'd taken in. I must say she was a fright. And Mr. Millinger so
imprudent! I'm really terrified that Jim will hear gossip when he comes
down from New York--or notice something." There was the slightest
dropping of the soft fluting voice as she continued: "I've never
pretended to love Jim Rossiter more than any man I've ever seen. That
was one of papa's matches. He's a born match-maker, you know, just as
he's a born everything else. I suppose you didn't think of that. But
since I am Jim's wife--"

As I was the confidante of what she called her affairs--a role for which
I was qualified by residence in British garrison towns--I interposed
diplomatically, "But so long as Mr. Millinger hasn't said anything, not
any more than Mr. Scott--"

"Oh, if I were to allow men to say things, where should I be? You can go
far with a man without letting him come to that. It's something I should
think you'd have known--with your sensible bringing up--and the heaps of
men you had there in Halifax--and I suppose at Southsea and Gibraltar,
too." It was with a hint of helpless complaint that she added, "You
remember that I asked you to leave him alone, now don't you?"

"Oh, I remember--quite. And suppose I did--and he didn't leave me
alone?"

"Of course there's that, though it won't have any effect on papa. You
are unusual, you know. Only one man in five hundred would notice it; but
there always is that man. It's what I was afraid of about Hugh from the
first. You're different--and it's the sort of thing he'd see."

"Different from what?" I asked, with natural curiosity.

Her reply was indirect.

"Oh, well, we Americans have specialized too much on the girl. You're
not half as good-looking as plenty of other girls in Newport, and when
it comes to dress--"

"Oh, I'm not in their class, I know."

"No; it's what you seem not to know. You aren't in their class--but it
doesn't seem to matter. If it does matter, it's rather to your
advantage."

"I'm afraid I don't see that."

"No, you wouldn't. You're not sufficiently subtle. You're really not
subtle at all, in the way an American girl would be." She picked up the
thread she had dropped. "The fact is we've specialized so much on the
girl that our girls are too aware of themselves to be wholly human.
They're like things wound up to talk well and dress well and exhibit
themselves to advantage and calculate their effects--and lack character.
We've developed the very highest thing in exquisite girl-mechanics--a
work of art that has everything but a soul." She turned half round to
where I stood respectfully, my hands resting on the back of an
easy-chair. She was lovely and pathetic and judicial all at once. "The
difference about you is that you seem to spring right up out of the soil
where you're standing--just like an English country house. You belong to
your background. Our girls don't. They're too beautiful for their
background, too expensive, too produced. Take any group of girls here in
Newport--they're no more in place in this down-at-the-heel old town than
a flock of parrakeets in a New England wood. It's really inartistic,
though we don't know it. You're more of a woman and less of a lovely
figurine. But that won't appeal to papa. He likes figurines. Most
American men do. Hugh is an exception, and I was afraid he'd see in you
just what I've seen myself. But it won't go down with papa."

"If it goes down with Hugh--" I began, meekly.

"Papa is a born match-maker, which I don't suppose you know. He made my
match and he made Jack's. Oh, we're--we're satisfied now--in a way; and
I suppose Hugh will be, too, in the long run." I wanted to speak, but
she tinkled gently on: "Papa has his designs for him, which I may as
well tell you at once. He means him to marry Lady Cissie Boscobel. She's
Lord Goldborough's daughter, and papa and he are very intimate. Papa
knew him when we lived in England before grandpapa died. Papa has done
things for him in the American money-market, and when we're in England
he does things for us. Two or three of our men have married earls'
daughters during the last few years, and it hasn't turned out so badly.
Papa doesn't want not to be in the swim."

"Does"--I couldn't pronounce Hugh's name again--"does your brother know
of Mr. Brokenshire's intentions?"

"Yes. I told him so. I told him when I began to see that he was noticing
you."

"And may I ask what he said?"

"It would be no use telling you that, because, whatever he said, he'd
have to do as papa told him in the end."

"But suppose he doesn't?"

"You can't suppose he doesn't. He will. That's all that can be said
about it." She turned fully round on me, gazing at me with the largest
and sweetest and tenderest eyes. "As for you, dear Miss Adare," she
murmured, sympathetically, "when papa comes to see you this afternoon,
as apparently he means to do, he'll grind you to powder. If there's
anything smaller than powder he'll grind you to that. After he's gone we
sha'n't be able to find you. You'll be dust."




  CHAPTER II


At five minutes to three, precisely, I took my seat in the breakfast
loggia.

The front of the house with the garden looked toward Ochre Point Avenue.
The so-called breakfast loggia was thrown out from the dining-room in
the direction of the sea. Here the family and their guests could gather
on warm evenings, and in fine weather eat in the open air. Paved with
red tiles, it was furnished with a long oak table, ornately carved, and
some heavy old oak chairs that might have come from a monastery. Steamer
chairs and wicker easy-chairs were scattered on the grass outside. On
the left the loggia was screened from the neighboring property by a
hedge of rambler roses that now ran the gamut of shades from crimson to
sea-shell pink, while on the right it commanded a view of the two
terraces supporting the house, with their long straight lines of
flowers. The house itself had been built piecemeal, and was now a low,
rambling succession of pavilions or _corps de logis_, to which a series
of rose-colored awnings gave the only unifying principle.

Just now it was a house deserted by every one but the servants and
myself. Mrs. Rossiter, having gone out to luncheon, had been careful not
to return, and even the children had been sent over to Mrs. Jack
Brokenshire, on the pretext of playing with her baby, but really to be
out of the way. From Hugh I had had no sign of life since the previous
afternoon. As to whether his father was coming as his enemy, his master,
or his interpreter I could do nothing but conjecture.

But as far as I could I kept myself from conjecturing; holding my
faculties in suspense. I had enough to do in assuring myself that I was
not afraid--fundamentally. Superficially I was terrified. I should have
been terrified had the great man but passed me in the hall and cast a
look at me. He had passed me in the hall on occasions, but as he had
never cast the look I had escaped. He had struck me then as a master of
that art of seeing without seeing which I had hitherto thought of as
feminine. Even when he stopped and spoke to Gladys he seemed not to know
that I occupied the ground I stood on. I cannot say I enjoyed this
treatment. I was accustomed to being seen. Moreover, I had lived with
people who were courteous to inferiors, however cavalier with equals.
The great J. Howard was neither courteous nor cavalier toward me, for
the reason that where I was he apparently saw nothing but a vacuum.

Out to the loggia I took my work-basket and some sewing. Having no idea
from which of the several approaches my visitor would come on me, I drew
up one of the heavy arm-chairs and sat facing toward the sea. With the
basket on the table beside me and my sewing in my hands I felt
indefinably more mistress of myself.

It was a still afternoon and hot, with scarcely a sound but the pounding
of the surf on the ledges at the foot of the lawn. Though the sky was
blue overhead, a dark low bank rose out of the horizon, foretelling a
change of wind with fog. In the air the languorous scent of roses and
honeysuckle mingled with the acrid tang of the ocean.

I felt extraordinarily desolate. Not since hearing what the lawyer had
told me on the afternoon of my father's funeral had I seemed so entirely
alone. The fact that for nearly twenty-four hours Hugh had got no word
to me threw me back upon myself. "You'll be made to feel alone," Mr.
Strangways had said in the morning; and I was. I didn't blame Hugh. I
had purposely left the matter in such a way that there was nothing he
could say or do till after his father had spoken. He was probably
waiting impatiently; I had, indeed, no doubt about that; but the fact
remained that I, a girl, a stranger, in a certain sense a foreigner, was
to make the best of my situation without help. J. Howard Brokenshire
could grind me to powder--when he had gone away I should be dust.

"If I do right, nothing but right can come of it."

The maxim was my only comfort. By sheer force of repeating it I got
strength to thread my needle and go on with my seam, till on the stroke
of three the dread personage appeared.

I saw him from the minute he mounted the steps that led up from the
Cliff Walk to Mr. Rossiter's lawn. He was accompanied by Mrs.
Brokenshire, while a pair of greyhounds followed them. Having reached
the lawn, they crossed it diagonally toward the loggia. Because of the
heat and the up-hill nature of the way, they advanced slowly, which gave
me leisure to observe.

Mrs. Brokenshire's presence had almost caused my heart to stop beating.
I could imagine no motive for her coming but one I refused to accept. If
the mission was to be unfriendly, she surely would have stayed away; but
that it could be other than unfriendly was beyond my strength to hope.

I had never seen her before except in glimpses or at a distance. I
noticed now that she was a little thing, looking the smaller for the
stalwart six-foot-two beside which she walked. She was in white and
carried a white parasol. I saw that her face was one of the most
beautiful in features and finish I had ever looked into. Each trait was
quite amazingly perfect. The oval was perfect; the coloring was perfect;
mouth and nose and forehead might have been made to a measured scale.
The finger of personified Art could have drawn nothing more exquisite
than the arch of the eyebrows, or more delicately fringed than the lids.
It might have been a doll's face, or the face for the cover of an
American magazine, had it not been saved by something I hadn't the time
to analyze, though I was later to know what it was.

As for him, he was as perfect in his way as she in hers. When I say that
he wore white shoes, white-duck trousers, a navy-blue jacket, and a
yachting-cap I give no idea of the something noble in his personality.
He might have been one of the more ornamental Italian princes of
immemorial lineage. A Jove with a Vandyke beard one could have called
him, and if you add to that the conception of Jove the Thunderer, Jove
with the look that could strike a man dead, perhaps the description
would be as good as any. He was straight and held his head high. He
walked with a firm setting of his feet that impressed you with the fact
that some one of importance was coming.

It is not my purpose to speak of this man from the point of view of the
ordinary member of the public. Of that I know next to nothing. I was
dimly aware that his wealth and his business interests made him
something of a public character; but apart from having heard him
mentioned as a financier I could hardly have told what his profession
was. So, too, with questions of morals. I have been present when, by
hints rather than actual words, he was introduced as a profligate and a
hypocrite; and I have also known people of good judgment who upheld him
both as man and as citizen. On this subject no opinion of mine would be
worth giving. I have always relegated the matter into that limbo of
disputed facts with which I have nothing to do. I write of him only as I
saw him in daily life, or at least in direct intercourse, and with that
my testimony must end. Other people have been curious with regard to
those aspects of his character on which I can throw no light. To me he
became interesting chiefly because he was one of those men who from a
kind of naive audacity, perhaps an unthinking audacity, don't hesitate
to play the part of the Almighty.

When they drew near enough to the loggia I stood up, my sewing in my
hand. The two greyhounds, who had outdistanced them, came sniffing to
the threshold and stared at me. I felt myself an object to be stared at,
though I had taken pains with my appearance and knew that I was neat.
Neatness, I may say in passing, is my strong point. Where many other
girls can stand expensive dressing I am at my best when meticulously
tidy. The shape of my head makes the simplest styles of doing the hair
the most distinguished. My figure lends itself to country clothes and
the tailor-made. In evening dress I can wear the cheapest and flimsiest
thing, so long as it is dependent only on its lines. I was satisfied,
therefore, with the way I looked, and when I say I felt myself an object
to be stared at I speak only of my consciousness of isolation.

I cannot affirm, however, that J. Howard Brokenshire stared at me. He
stared; but only at the general effects in which I was a mere detail.
The loggia being open on all sides, he paused for half a second to take
it and its contents in. I went with the contents. I looked at him; but
nothing in the glance he cast over me recognized me as a human being. I
might have been the table; I might have been the floor; for him I was
hardly in existence.

I wonder if you have ever stood under the gaze of one who considered you
too inferior for notice. The sensation is quite curious. It produces not
humiliation or resentment so much as an odd apathy. You sink in your own
sight; you go down; you understand that abjection of slaves which kept
them from rising against their masters. Negatively at least you concede
the right that so treats you. You are meek and humble at once; and yet
you can be strong. I think I never felt so strong as when I saw that
cold, deep eye, which was steely and fierce and most inconsistently
sympathetic all in one quick flash, sweep over me and pay me no
attention. _Ecce Femina_ I might have been saying to myself, as a
pendant in expression to the _Ecce Homo_ of the Praetorium.

He moved aside punctiliously at the lower of the two steps that led up
to the loggia to let his wife precede him. As she came in I think she
gave me a salutation that was little more than a quiver of the lids.
Having closed her parasol, she slipped into one of the arm-chairs not
far from the table.

Now that he was at close quarters, with his work before him, he
proceeded to the task at once. In the act of laying his hat and stick on
a chair he began with the question, "Your name is--?"

The voice had a crisp gentleness that seemed to come from the effort to
despatch business with the utmost celerity and spend no unnecessary
strength on words. The fact that he must have heard my name from Hugh
was plainly to play no part in our discussion. I was so unutterably
frightened that when I tried to whisper the word "Adare" hardly a sound
came forth.

As he raised himself from the placing of his cap and stick he was
obliged to utter a sharp, "What?"

"Adare."

"Oh. Adare!"

It is not a bad name as names go; we like to fancy ourselves connected
with the famous Fighting Adares of the County Limerick; but on J. Howard
Brokenshire's lips it had the undiscriminating commonness of Smith or
Jones. I had never been ashamed of it before.

"And you're one of my daughter's--"

"I'm her nursery governess."

"Sit down."

As he took the chair at the end of the table I dropped again into that
at the side from which I had risen. It was then that something happened
which left me for a second in doubt as to whether to take it as comic or
catastrophic. His left eye closed; his left nostril quivered; he winked.
To avoid having to face this singular phenomenon a second time I lowered
my eyes and began mechanically to sew.

"Put that down!"

I placed the work on the table and once more looked at him. The striking
eyes were again as striking as ever. In their sympathetic hardness there
was nothing either ribald or jocose.

I suppose my scrutiny annoyed him, though I was unconscious of more than
a mute asking for orders. He pointed to a distant chair, a chair in a
corner, just within the loggia as you come from the direction of the
dining-room.

"Sit there."

I know now that his wink distressed him. It was something which at that
time had come upon him recently, and that he could neither control nor
understand. A less imposing man, a man to whom personal impressiveness
was less of an asset in daily life and work, would probably have been
less disturbed by it; but to J. Howard Brokenshire it was a trial in
more ways than one. Curiously, too, when the left eye winked the right
grew glassy and quite terrible.

Not knowing that he was sensitive in this respect, I took my retreat to
the corner as a kind of symbolic banishment.

"Hadn't I better stand up?" I asked, proudly, when I had reached my
chair.

"Be good enough to sit down."

I seemed to fall backward. The tone had the effect of a shot. If I had
ever felt small and foolish in my life it was then. I flushed to my
darkest crimson. Angry and humiliated, I was obliged to rush to my maxim
in order not to flash back in some indignant retort.

And then another thing happened of which I was unable at the minute to
get the significance. Mrs. Brokenshire sprang up with the words:

"You're quite right, Howard. It's ever so much cooler over here by the
edge. I never felt anything so stuffy as the middle of this place. It
doesn't seem possible for air to get into it."

While speaking she moved with incomparable daintiness to a chair
corresponding to mine and diagonally opposite. With the length and width
of the loggia between us we exchanged glances. In hers she seemed to
say, "If you are banished I shall be banished too"; in mine I tried to
express gratitude. And yet I was aware that I might have misunderstood
both movement and look entirely.

My next surprise was in the words Mr. Brokenshire addressed to me. He
spoke in the soft, slightly nasal staccato which I am told had on his
business associates the effect of a whip-lash.

"We've come over to tell you, Miss--Miss Adare, how much we appreciate
your attitude toward our boy, Hugh. I understand from him that he's
offered to marry you, and that very properly in your situation you've
declined. The boy is foolish, as you evidently see. He meant nothing; he
could do nothing. You're probably not without experience of a similar
kind among the sons of your other employers. At the same time, as you
doubtless expect, we sha'n't let you suffer by your prudence--"

It was a bad beginning. Had he made any sort of appeal to me, however
unkindly worded, I should probably have yielded. But the tradition of
the Fighting Adares was not in me for nothing, and after a smothering
sensation which rendered me speechless I managed to stammer out:

"Won't you allow me to say that--"

The way in which his large, white, handsome hand went up was meant to
impose silence upon me while he himself went on:

"In order that you may not be annoyed by my son's folly in the future
you will leave my daughter's employ, you'll leave Newport--you'll be
well advised, indeed, in going back to your own country, which I
understand to be the British provinces. You will lose nothing, however,
by this conduct, as I've given you to understand. Three--four--five
thousand dollars--I think five ought to be sufficient--generous, in
fact--"

"But I've not refused him," I was able at last to interpose. "I--I mean
to accept him."

There was an instant of stillness during which one could hear the
pounding of the sea.

"Does that mean that you want me to raise your price?"

"No, Mr. Brokenshire. I have no price. If it means anything at all that
has to do with you, it's to tell you that I'm mistress of my acts and
that I consider your son--he's twenty-six--to be master of his."

There was a continuation of the stillness. His voice when he spoke was
the gentlest sound I had ever heard in the way of human utterance. If it
were not for the situation it could have been considered kind:

"Anything at all that has to do with me? You seem to attach no
importance to the fact that Hugh is my son."

I do not know how words came to me. They seemed to flow from my lips
independently of thought.

"I attach importance only to the fact that he's a man. Men who are never
anything but their father's sons aren't men."

"And yet a father has some rights."

"Yes, sir; some. He has the right to follow where his grown-up children
lead. He hasn't the right to lead and require his grown-up children to
follow."

He shifted his ground. "I'm obliged to you for your opinion, but at
present it's not to the point--"

I broke in breathlessly: "Pardon me, sir; it's exactly to the point. I'm
a woman; Hugh's a man. We're--we're in love with each other; it's all we
have to be concerned with."

"Not quite; you've got to be concerned--with me."

"Which is what I deny."

"Oh, denial won't do you any good. I didn't come to hear your denials,
or your affirmations, either. I've come to tell you what to do."

"But if I know that already?"

"That's quite possible--if you mean to play your game as doubtless
you've played it before. I only want to warn you--"

I looked toward Mrs. Brokenshire for help, but her eyes were fixed on
the floor, on which she was drawing what seemed like a design with the
tip of her parasol. The greyhounds were stretched at her feet. I could
do nothing but speak for myself, which I did with a calmness that
surprised me.

"Mr. Brokenshire," I interrupted, "you are a man and I'm a woman. What's
more, you're a strong man, while I'm a woman with no protection at all.
I ask you--do you think you're playing a man's part in insulting me?"

His tone grew kind almost to affection. "My dear young lady, you
misunderstand me. Insult couldn't be further from my thoughts. I'm
speaking entirely for your own sake. You're young; you're very pretty; I
won't say you've no knowledge of the world because I see you have--"

"I've a good deal of knowledge of the world."

"Only not such knowledge as would warrant you in pitting yourself
against me."

"But I don't. If you'd leave me alone--"

"Let us keep to what we're talking of. I'm sorry for you; I really am.
You're at the beginning of what might euphemistically--do you know the
meaning of the word?--be called a career. I should like to save you from
it; that's all. It's why I'm speaking to you very plainly and using
language that can't be misunderstood. There's nothing original in your
proceeding, believe me. Nearly every family of the standing of mine has
had to reckon with something of the sort. Where there are young men, and
young women of--what do you want me to say?--young women who mean to do
the best they can for themselves--let us put it in that way--"

"I'm a gentleman's daughter," I broke in, weakly.

He smiled. "Oh yes; you're all gentlemen's daughters. Neither is there
anything original in that."

"Mrs. Rossiter will tell you that my father was a judge in Canada--"

"The detail doesn't interest me."

"No, but it interests me. It gives me a sense of being equal to--"

"If you please! We'll not go into that."

"But I must speak. If I'm to marry Hugh you must let me tell you who I
am."

"It's not necessary. You're not to marry Hugh. Let that be absolutely
understood. Once you've accepted the fact--"

"I could only accept it from Hugh himself."

"That's foolish. Hugh will do as I tell him."

"But why should he in this case?"

"That again is something we needn't discuss. All that matters, my dear
young lady, is your own interest. I'm working for that, don't you see,
against yourself--"

I burst out, "But why shouldn't I marry him?"

He leaned on the table, tapping gently with his hand. "Because we don't
want you to. Isn't that enough?"

I ignored this. "If it's because you don't know anything about me I
could tell you."

"Oh, but we do know something about you. We know, for example, since
you compel me to say it, that you're a little person of no importance
whatever."

"My family is one of the best in Canada."

"And admitting that that's so, who would care what constituted a good
family in Canada? To us here it means nothing; in England it would mean
still less. I've had opportunities of judging how Canadians are regarded
in England, and I assure you it's nothing to make you proud."

Of the several things he had said to sting me I was most sensitive to
this. I, too, had had opportunities of judging, and knew that if
anything could make one ashamed of being a British colonial of any kind
it would be British opinion of colonials.

"My father used to say--"

He put up his large, white hand. "Another time. Let us keep to the
subject before us."

I omitted the mention of my father to insist on a theory as to which I
had often heard him express himself: "If it's part of the subject before
us that I'm a Canadian and that Canadians are ground between the upper
and lower millstones of both English and American contempt--"

"Isn't that another digression?"

"Not really," I hurried on, determined to speak, "because if I'm a
sufferer by it, you are, too, in your degree. It's part of the
Anglo-Saxon tradition for those who stay behind to despise those who go
out as pioneers. The race has always done it. It isn't only the British
who've despised their colonists. The people of the Eastern States
despised those who went out and peopled the Middle West; those in the
Middle West despised those who went farther West." I was still quoting
my father. "It's something that defies reason and eludes argument. It's
a base strain in the blood. It's like that hierarchy among servants by
which the lady's maid disdains the cook, and the cook disdains the
kitchen-maid, and the proudest are those who've nothing to be proud of.
For you to look down on me because I'm a Canadian, when the commonest of
Englishmen, with precisely the same justification, looks down on you--"

"Dear young lady," he broke in, soothingly, "you're talking wildly.
You're speaking of things you know nothing about. Let us get back to
what we began with. My son has offered to marry you--"

"He didn't offer to marry me. He asked me--he begged me--to marry him."

"The way of putting it is of no importance."

"Ah, but it is."

"I mean that, however he expressed it--however you express it--the
result must be the same."

I nerved myself to look at him steadily. "I mean to accept him. When he
asked me yesterday I said I wouldn't give him either a Yes or a No till
I knew what you and his family thought of it. But now that I do know--"

"You're determined to try the impossible."

"It won't be the impossible till he tells me so."

He seemed for a second or two to study me. "Suppose I accepted you as
what you say you are--as a young woman of good antecedents and honorable
character. Would you still persist in the effort to force yourself on a
family that didn't want you?"

I confess that in the language Mr. Strangways and I had used in the
morning, he had me here "on the hip." To force myself on a family that
didn't want me would normally have been the last of my desires. But I
was fighting now for something that went beyond my desires--something
larger--something national, as I conceived of nationality--something
human--though I couldn't have said exactly what it was. I answered only
after long deliberation.

"I couldn't stop to consider a family. My object would be to marry the
man who loved me--and whom I loved."

"So that you'd face the humiliation--"

"It wouldn't be humiliation, because it would have nothing to do with
me. It would pass into another sphere."

"It wouldn't be another sphere to him."

"I should have to let him take care of that. It's all I can manage to
look out for myself--"

There seemed to be some admiration in his tone.

"Which you seem marvelously well fitted to do."

"Thank you."

"In fact, it's one of the ways in which you betray yourself. An innocent
girl--"

I strained forward in my chair. "Wouldn't it be fair for you to tell me
what you mean by the word innocent?"

"I mean a girl who has no special ax to grind--"

I could hear my foot tapping on the floor, but I was too indignant to
restrain myself. "Even that figure of speech leaves too much to the
imagination."

He studied me again. "You're very sharp."

"Don't I need to be," I demanded, "with an enemy of your acumen?"

"But I'm not your enemy. It's what you don't seem to see. I'm your
friend. I'm trying to keep you out of a situation that would kill you if
you got into it."

I think I laughed. "Isn't death preferable to dishonor?" I saw my
mistake in the quickness with which Mrs. Brokenshire looked up. "There
are more kinds of dishonor than one," I explained, loftily, "and to me
the blackest would be in allowing you to dictate to me."

"My dear young woman, I dictate to men--"

"Oh, to men!"

"I see! You presume on your womanhood. It's a common American expedient,
and a cheap one. But I don't stop for that."

"You may not stop for womanhood, Mr. Brokenshire; but neither does
womanhood stop for you."

He rose with an air of weary patience. "I'm afraid we sha'n't gain
anything by talking further--"

"I'm afraid not." I, too, rose, advancing to the table. We confronted
each other across it, while one of the dogs came nosing to his master's
hand. I had barely the strength to gasp on: "We've had our talk and you
see where I am. I ask nothing but the exercise of human liberty--and the
measure of respect I conceive to be due to every one. Surely you, an
American, a representative of what America is supposed to stand for,
can't think of it as too much."

"If America is supposed to stand for your marrying my son--"

"America stands, so I've been told by Americans, for the reasonable
freedom of the individual. If Hugh wants to marry me--"

"Hugh will marry the woman I approve of."

"Then that apparently is what we must put to the test."

I was now so near to tears that I suppose he saw an opening to his own
advantage. Coming round the table, he stood looking down at me with that
expression which I can only describe as sympathetic. With all the
dominating aggressiveness which either forced you to give in to him or
urged you to fight him till you dropped, there was that about him which
left you with a lingering suspicion that he might be right. It was the
man who might be right who was presently sitting easily on the edge of
the table, so that his face was on a level with my own, and saying in a
kindly voice:

"Now look here! Let's be reasonable. I don't want to be unfair to you,
or to say anything a man isn't justified in saying to a woman. I'm
willing to throw the whole blame on Hugh--"

"I'm not," I declared, hotly.

"That's generous; but I'm speaking of myself. I'm willing to throw the
whole blame on Hugh, because he's my son. I'll absolve you, if you like,
because you're a stranger and a girl, and consider you a victim--"

"I'm not a victim," I insisted. "I'm only a human being, asking for a
human being's rights."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, rights! Who knows what rights are?"

"I do. That is," I corrected, "I know my own."

"Oh, of course! One always knows one's own. One's own rights are
everything one can get. Now you can't get Hugh; but you can get five
thousand dollars. That's a lot of money. There are men all over the
United States who'd cut off a hand for it. You won't have to cut off a
hand. You only need to be a good, sensible little girl and--get out."
Perhaps he thought I was yielding, for he tapped his side pocket as he
went on speaking. "It won't take a minute. I've got a check-book here--a
stroke of the pen--"

My work was lying on the table a few inches away. Leaning forward
deliberately I put it into the basket, which I tucked under my arm. I
looked at Mrs. Brokenshire, who was leaning forward and looking at me. I
inclined my head with a slight salutation, to which she did not respond,
and turned away. Of him I took no notice.

"So it's war."

I was half-way to the dining-room when I heard him say that. As I paused
to look back he was still sitting sidewise on the edge of the table,
swinging a leg and staring after me.

"No, sir," I said, quietly. "It takes two to fight, and I should never
think of being one."

"You know, of course, that I shall have no mercy on you."

"No, sir; I don't."

"Then you can know it now. I'm sorry for you; but I can't afford to
spare you. Bigger things than you have come in my way--and have been
blasted."

Mrs. Brokenshire made a quick little movement behind his back. It told
me nothing I understood then, though I was able to interpret it later. I
could only say, in a voice that shook with the shaking of my whole body:

"You couldn't blast me, sir, because--because--"

"Yes? Because--what? I should like to know."

There was a robin hopping on the lawn outside and I pointed to it. "You
couldn't blast a little bird like that with a bombshell."

"Oh, birds have been shot."

"Yes, sir; with a fowling-piece; but not with a howitzer. The one is too
big; the other is too small."

I was about to drop him a little courtesy when I saw him wink. It was a
grotesque, amusing wink that quivered and twisted till it finally
closed the left eye. If he had been a less handsome man the effect would
have been less absurd.

I made my courtesy the deeper, bending my head and lowering my eyes so
as to spare him the knowledge that I saw.




  CHAPTER III


"He attacked my country. I think I could forgive him everything but
that."

It was an hour after Mr. and Mrs. Brokenshire had left me. I was half
crying by this time--that is, half crying in the way one cries from
rage, and yet laughing nervously, in flashes, at the same time. From the
weakness of sheer excitement I had dropped to one of the steps leading
down to the Cliff Walk, while Larry Strangways leaned on the stone post.
I had met him there as I was going out and he was coming toward the
house. We couldn't but stop to exchange a word, especially with his
knowledge of the situation. He took what I had to say with the light,
gleaming, non-committal smile which he brought to bear on everything. I
was glad of that because it kept him detached. I didn't want him any
nearer to me than he was.

"Attacked your country? Do you mean England?"

"No; Canada. England is my grandmother; but Canada's my mother. He said
you all despised her."

"Oh no, we don't. He was trying to put something over on you."

"Your 'No, we don't' lacks conviction; but I don't mind you. I shouldn't
mind him if I hadn't seen so much of it."

"So much of what?"

"Being looked down upon geographically. Of all the ways of being proud,"
I declared, indignantly, "that which depends on your merely accidental
position with regard to land and water strikes me as the most
poor-spirited. I can't imagine any one dragging himself down to it who
had another rag of a reason for self-respect. As a matter of fact, I
don't believe any one ever does. The people I've heard express
themselves on the subject--well, I'll give you an illustration: There
was a woman at Gibraltar--a major's wife, a big, red-faced woman. Her
name was Arbuthnot--her father was a dean or something--a big, red-faced
woman, with one of those screechy, twangy English voices that cut you
like a saw--you know there are some--a good many--and they don't know
it. Well, she was saying something sneering about Canadians. I was
sitting opposite--it was at a dinner-party--and so I leaned across the
table and asked her why she didn't like them. She said colonials were
such dreadful form. I held her with my eye"--I showed him how--"and made
myself small and demure as I said, 'But, dear lady, how clever of you!
Who would ever have supposed that you'd know that?' My sister Vic
pitched into me about it after we got home. She said the Arbuthnot
person didn't understand what I meant--nor any one else at the table,
they're so awfully thick-skinned--and that it's better to let them
alone. But that's the kind of person who--"

He tried to comfort me. "They'll come round in time. One of these days
England will see what she owes to her colonists and do them justice."

"Never!" I declared, vehemently. "It will be always the same--till we
knock the Empire to pieces. Then they'll respect us. Look at the Boer
War. Didn't our men sacrifice everything to go out that long
distance--and win battles--and lay down their lives--only to have the
English say afterward--especially the army people--that they were more
trouble than they were worth? It will be always the same. When we've
given our last penny and shed our last drop of blood they'll still tell
us we've been nothing but a nuisance. You may live to see it and
remember that I said so. If when Shakespeare wrote that it's sharper
than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child he'd gone on to add
that it's the very dickens to have a picturesque, self-satisfied old
grandmother who thinks her children's children should give her
everything and take kicks instead of ha'pence for their pay, he'd have
been up to date. Mind you, we don't object to giving our last penny and
shedding our last drop of blood; we only hate being abused and sneered
at for doing it."

I warmed to my subject as I dabbed fiercely at my eyes.

"I'll tell you what the typical John Bull is like. He's like those
men--big, flabby men they generally are--who'll be brutes to you so long
as you're civil to them, but will climb down the minute you begin to hit
back. Look at the way they treat you Americans! They can't do enough for
you--because you snap your fingers in their faces and show them you
don't care a hang about them. They come over here, and give you
lectures, and marry your girls, and pocket your money, and adopt your
bad form as delightful originality--and respect you. Now that earls'
daughters are beginning to cast an eye on your millionaires--Mrs.
Rossiter told me that--they won't leave you a rag to your back. But with
us who've been faithful and loyal they're all the other way. I can
hardly tell you the small pin-pricking indignities to which my sisters
and I have been subjected for being Canadians. And they'll never change.
It will never be otherwise, no matter what we do, no matter what we
become, no matter if we give our bodies to be burned, as the Bible says.
It will never be otherwise--not till we imitate you and strike them in
the face. _Then_ you'll see how they'll come round."[1]

He still smiled, with an aloofness in which there was a beam of
sweetness. "I had no idea that you were such a little rebel."

"I'm not a rebel. I'm loyal to the King. That is, I'm loyal to the great
Anglo-Saxon ideal of which the King is the symbol--and I suppose he's as
good a symbol as any other, especially as he's already there. The
English are only partly Anglo-Saxon. 'Saxon and Norman and Dane are
they'--didn't Tennyson say that? Well, there's a lot that's Norman, and
a lot that's Dane, and a lot that's Scotch and Irish and rag-tag in
them. But they're saved by the pure Anglo-Saxon ideal in so far as they
hold to it--just as you'll be, with all your mixed bloods--and just as
we shall be ourselves. It's like salt in the meat, it's like grace in
the Christian religion--it's the thing that saves, and I'm loyal to
that. My father used to say that it's the fact that English and
Canadians and Australians are all devoted to the same principle that
holds us together as an Empire, and not the subservience of distant
lands to a Parliament sitting at Westminster. And so it is. We don't
always like each other; but that doesn't matter. What does matter is
that we should betray the fact that we don't like each other to
outsiders--and so give them a handle against us."

"You mean that J. Howard should be in a position to side with the
English in looking down on you as a Canadian?"

"Yes, and that the English should give him that position. He's an
American and an enemy--every American is an enemy to England _au fond_.
Oh yes, he is! You needn't deny it! It's something fundamental, deeper
down than anything you understand. Even those of you who like England
are hostile to her at heart and would be glad to see her in trouble. So,
I say, he's an American and an enemy, and yet they hand me, their child
and their friend, over to him to be trampled on. He's had opportunities
of judging how Canadians are regarded in England, he says--and he
assures me it's nothing to be proud of. That's it. I've had
opportunities too--and I have to admit that he's right. Don't you see?
That's what enrages me. As far as their liking us and our not liking
them is concerned, why, it's all in the family. So long as it's kept in
the family it's like the pick that Louise and Vic have always had on me.
I'm the youngest and the plainest--"

"Oh, you're the plainest, are you? What on earth are they like?"

"They're quite good-looking, and they're awfully chic. But that's in
parentheses. What I mean is that they're always hectoring me because I'm
not attractive--"

"Really?"

"I'm not fishing for compliments. I'm too busy and too angry for that. I
want to go on talking about what we're talking about."

"But I want to know why they said you were unattractive."

"Well, perhaps they didn't say it. What they have said is this, and it's
what Mrs. Rossiter says--she said it to-day--that I'm only attractive to
one man in five hundred--"

"But very attractive to him?"

"No; she didn't say that. She merely admitted that her brother Hugh was
that man--"

He interrupted with something I wished at the time he hadn't said, and
which I tried to ignore:

"He's the man in that five hundred--and I know another in another five
hundred, which makes two in a thousand. You'd soon get up to a high
percentage, when you think of all the men there are in the world."

As he had never hinted at anything of the kind before, it gave me--how
shall I put it?--I can only think of the word fright--it gave me a
little fright. It made me uneasy. It was nothing, really. It was spoken
with that gleaming smile of his which seemed to put distance between him
and me--between him and everything else that was serious--and yet
subconsciously I felt as one feels on hearing the first few notes, in an
opera or a symphony, of that arresting phrase which is to work up into a
great motive. I tried to get back to my original theme, rising to move
on as I did so.

"Good gracious!" I cried. "Isn't the world big enough for us all? Why
should we go about saying unkind and untrue things of one other, when
each of us is an essential part of a composite whole? Isn't it the foot
saying to the hand I have no need of thee, and the eye saying the same
thing to the nose? We've got something you haven't got, and you've got
something we haven't got. Why shouldn't we be appreciative toward each
other, and make our exchange with mutual respect as we do with trade
commodities?"

It was probably to urge me on to talk that he said, with a challenging
smile: "What have you Canadians got that we haven't? Why, we could buy
and sell you."

"Oh no, you couldn't; because our special contribution toward the
civilization of the American continent isn't a thing for sale. It can be
given; it can be inherited; it can be caught; but it can't be
purchased."

"Indeed? What is this elusive endowment?"

I answered frankly enough: "I don't know. It's there--and I can't tell
you what it is. Ever since I've been living among you I've felt how much
we resemble each other--what a difference. I think--mind you, I only
think--that what it consists in is a sense of the _comme il faut_. We're
simpler than you; and less intellectual; and poorer, of course; and
less, much less, self-analytical; and yet we've got a knowledge of
what's what that you couldn't command with money. None of the
Brokenshires have it at all, and, as far as I can see, none of their
friends. They command it with money, and the difference is like having a
copy of a work of art instead of the original. It gives them the air of
being--I'm using Mrs. Rossiter's word--of being produced. Now we
Canadians are not produced. We just come--but we come the right
way--without any hooting or tooting or beating of tin pans or
self-advertisement. We just are--and we say nothing about it. Let me
make an example of what Mrs. Rossiter was discussing this morning. There
are lots of pretty girls in my country--as many to the hundred as you
have here--but we don't make a fuss about them or talk as if we'd
ordered a special brand from the Creator. We grow them as you grow
flowers in a garden, at the mercy of the air and sunshine. You grow
yours like plants in a hothouse, to be exhibited in horticultural shows.
Please don't think I'm bragging--"

He laughed aloud. "Oh no!"

"Well, I'm not," I insisted. "You asked me a question and I'm trying to
answer it--and incidentally to justify my own existence, which J. Howard
has called into question. You've got lots to offer us, and many of us
come and take it thankfully. What we can offer to you is a simpler and
healthier and less self-conscious standard of life, with a great deal
less talk about it--with no talk about it at all, if you could get
yourselves down to that--and a willingness to be instead of an
everlasting striving to become. You won't recognize it or take it, of
course. No one ever does. Nations seem to me insane, and ruled by insane
governments. Don't the English need the Germans, and the Germans the
French, and the French the Austrians, and the Austrians the Russians,
and so on? Why on earth should the foot be jealous of the nose? But
there! You're simply making me say things--and laughing at me all the
while--so I'm off to take my walk. We'll get even with J. Howard and all
the first-class powers some day, and till then--_au revoir_."

I had waved my hand to him and gone some paces into the fog that had
begun to blow in when he called to me.

"Wait a minute. I've something to tell you."

I turned, without going back.

"I'm--I'm leaving."

I was so amazed that I retraced a step or two toward him. "What?"

His smile underwent a change. It grew frozen and steely instead of being
bright with a continuous play suggesting summer lightning, which had
been its usual quality.

"My time is up at the end of the month--and I've asked Mr. Rossiter not
to expect me to go on."

I was looking for something of the sort sooner or later, but now that it
had come I saw how lonely I should be.

"Oh! Where are you going? Have you got anything in particular?"

"I'm going as secretary to Stacy Grainger."

"I've some connection with that name," I said, absently, "though I can't
remember what it is."

"You've probably heard of him. He's a good deal in the public eye."

"Have you known him long?" I asked, for the sake of speaking, though I
was only thinking of myself.

"Never knew him at all." He came nearer to me. "I've a confession to
make, though it won't be of interest to you. All the while I've been
here, playing with little Broke Rossiter, I've been--don't laugh--I've
been contributing to the press--_moi qui vous parle_!"

"What about?"

"Oh, politics and finance and foreign policy and public things in
general. Always had a taste that way. Now it seems that something I
wrote for the _Providence Express_--people read it a good deal--has
attracted the attention of the great Stacy. Yes, he's great, too--J.
Howard's big rival for--"

I began to recall something I had heard. "Wasn't there a story about him
and Mr. Brokenshire and Mrs. Brokenshire?"

"That's the man. Well, he's noticed my stuff, and written to the
editor--and to me, and I'm to go to him."

I was still thinking of myself and the loss of his _camaraderie_. "I
hope he's going to pay you well."

"Oh, for me it will be wealth."

"It will probably be more than that. It will be the first long step up."

He nodded confidently. "I hope so."

I had again begun to move away when he stopped me the second time.

"Miss Adare, what's your first name? Mine's Lawrence, as you know."

If I laughed a little it was to conceal my discomfort at this abrupt
approach to the intimate.

"I'm rather sorry for my name," I said, apologetically. "You see my
father was one of those poetically loyal Canadians who rather overdo the
thing. My eldest sister should have been Victoria, because Victoria was
the queen. But the Duchess of Argyll was in Canada at that time--and
very nice to father and mother--and so the first of us had to be Louise.
He couldn't begin on the queens till there was a second one. That's poor
Vic; while I'm--I know you'll shout--I'm Alexandra. If there'd been a
fourth she'd have been a Mary; but poor mother died and the series
stopped."

He shook hands rather gravely. "Then I shall think of you as Alexandra."

"If you are going to think of me at all," I managed to say, with a
little _moue_, "put me down as Alix. That's what I've always been
called."

[Footnote 1: This was said before the Great War. It is now supposed that
when peace is made there will be a change in English opinion. With my
knowledge of my country--the British Empire--I permit myself to doubt
it. There is a proverb which begins, "When the devil was sick." I shall,
however, be glad if I am proved wrong.--Alexandra Adare.]




CHAPTER IV


I was glad of the fog. It was cool and refreshing; it was also
concealing. I could tramp along under its protection with little or no
fear of being seen. Wearing tweeds, thick boots, and a felt hat, I was
prepared for wet, and as a Canadian girl I was used to open air in all
weathers. The few stragglers generally to be seen on the Cliff Walk
having rushed to their houses for shelter, I had the rocks and the
breakers, the honeysuckle and the patches of dog-roses, to myself. In
the back of my mind I was fortified, too, by the knowledge that dampness
curls my hair into pretty little tendrils, so that if I did meet any one
I should be looking at my best.

The path is like no other in the world. I have often wondered why the
American writer-up of picturesque bits didn't make more of it. Trouville
has its _Plage_, and Brighton its King's Road, and Nice its Promenade
des Anglais, but in no other kingdom of leisure that I know anything
about will you find the combination of qualities, wild and subdued, that
mark this ocean-front of the island of Aquidneck. Neither will you
easily come elsewhere so near to a sense of the primitive human
struggle, of the crude social clash, of the war of the rights of
man--Fisherman's Rights, as this coast historically knows them--against
encroachment, privilege, and seclusion. As you crunch the gravel, and
press the well-rolled turf, and sniff the scent of the white and red
clover and Queen Anne's lace that fringe the precipice leaning over the
sea, you feel in the air those elements of conflict that make drama.

In clinging to the edge of the cliff, in twisting round every curve of
the shore line, in running up hill and down dale, under crags and over
them, the path is, of course, not the only one of its kind. You will
find the same thing anywhere on the south coast of England or the north
coast of France. But in the sum of human interest it sucks into the
three miles of its course I can think of nothing else that resembles it.
As guaranteeing the rights of the fisherman it is, so I believe,
inalienable public property. The fisherman can walk on it, sit on it,
fish from it, right into eternity. So much he has secured from the past
history of colony and state; but he has done it at the cost of making
himself offensive to the gentlemen whose lawns he hems as a seamstress
hems a skirt.

It is a hem like a serpent, with a serpent's sinuosity and grace, but
also with a serpent's hatefulness to those who can do nothing but accept
it as a fact. Since, as a fact, it cannot be abolished it has to be put
up with; and since it has to be put up with the means must needs be
found to deal with it effectively. Effectively it has been dealt with.
Money, skill, and imagination have been spent on it, to adorn it, or
disguise it, or sink it out of sight. The architect, the landscape
gardener, and the engineer have all been called into counsel. On
Fisherman's Rights the smile and the frown are exercised by turns, each
with its phase of ingenuity. Along one stretch of a hundred yards bland
recognition borders the way with roses or spans the miniature chasms
with decorative bridges; along the next shuddering refinement grows a
hedge or digs a trench behind which the obtrusive wayfarer may pass
unseen. But shuddering refinement and bland recognition alike withdraw
into themselves as far as broad lawns and lofty terraces permit them to
retire, leaving to the owner of Fisherman's Rights the enjoyment of
ocher and umber rocks and sea and sky and grain-fields yellowing on far
headlands.

It gave me the nearest thing to glee I ever felt in Newport. It was
bracing and open and free. It suggested comparisons with scrambles along
Nova-Scotian shores or tramps on the moors in Scotland. I often hated
the fine weather; it was oppressive; it was strangling. But a day like
this, with its whiffs of wild wind and its handfuls of salt slashing
against eyes and mouth and nostrils, was not only exhilarating, it was
glorious. I was glad, too, that the prim villas and pretentious
chateaux, most of them out of proportion to any scale of housekeeping of
which America is capable, could only be descried like castles in a dream
through the swirling, diaphanous drift. I could be alone to rage and
fume--or fly onward with a speed that was in itself a relief.

I could be alone till, on climbing the slope of a shorn and wind-swept
bluff, I saw a square-shouldered figure looming on the crest. It was no
more than a deepening of the texture of the fog, but I knew its lines.
Skimming up the ascent with a little cry, I was in Hugh's arms, my head
on his burly breast.

I think it was his burliness that made the most definite appeal to me.
He was so sturdy and strong, and I was so small and desolate. From the
beginning, when he first used to come near me, I felt his presence, as
the Bible says, like the shadow of a rock in a thirsty land. That was in
my early homesick time, before I had seized the new way of living and
the new national point of view. The fact, too, that, as I expressed it
to myself, I was in the second cabin when I had always been accustomed
to the first, inspired a discomfort for which unwittingly I sought
consolation. Nobody thought of me as other than Mrs. Rossiter's
retainer, but this one kindly man.

I noticed his kindliness almost before I noticed him, just as, I think,
he noticed my loneliness almost before he noticed me. He opened doors
for me when I went in or out; he served me with things if he happened to
be there at tea; he dropped into a chair beside me when I was the only
member of a group whom no one spoke to. If Gladys was of the company I
was of it too, with a nominal footing but a virtual exclusion. The men
in the Rossiter circle were of the four hundred and ninety-nine to whom
I wasn't attractive; the women were all civil--from a distance.
Occasionally some nice old lady would ask me where I came from and if I
liked my work, or talk to me of new educational methods in a way which,
with my bringing up, was to me as so much Greek; but I never got any
other sign of friendliness. Only this short, stockily built young
fellow, with the small, blue eyes, ever recognized me as a human being
with the average yearning for human intercourse.

During the winter in New York he never went further than that. I
remembered Mrs. Rossiter's recommendation and "let him alone." I knew
how to do it. He was not the first man I had ever had to deal with, even
if no one had asked me to marry him. I accepted his small, kindly acts
with that shade of discretion which defined the distance between us. As
far as I could observe, he himself had no disposition to cross the lines
I set--not till we moved to Newport.

There was a fortnight between our going there and his--a fortnight which
seemed to work a change in him. The Hugh Brokenshire I met on one of my
first rambles along the cliffs was not the Hugh Brokenshire I had last
seen in Fifth Avenue. Perhaps I was not the same myself. In the new
surroundings I had missed him--a little. I will not say that his absence
had meant an aching void to me; but where I had had a friend, now I had
none--since I was unable to count Larry Strangways. Had it not been for
this solitude I should have been less receptive to his comings when he
suddenly began to pursue me.

Pursuit is the only word I can use. I found him everywhere, quiet,
deliberate, persistent. If he had been ten or even five years older I
could have taken his advances without uneasiness. But he was only
twenty-six and a dependent. He had no work; apart from his allowance
from his father he had no means. And yet when, on the day before my
chronicle begins, he stole upon me as I sat in a sheltered nook below
the cliffs to which I was fond of retreating when I had time--when he
stole upon me there, and kissed me and kissed me and kissed me, I
couldn't help confessing that I loved him.

I must leave to some woman who has had to fend for herself the task of
telling what it means when a man comes to offer her his heart and his
protection. It goes without saying that it means more to her than to the
sheltered woman, for it means things different and more wonderful. It is
the expected unexpected come to pass; it is the impossible achieved. It
is not only success; it is success with an aureole of glory.

I suppose I must be parasitical by nature, for I never have conceived of
life as other than dependent on some man who would love me and take care
of me. Even when no such man appeared and I was forced out to earn my
bread, I looked upon the need as temporary only. In the loneliest of
times at Mrs. Rossiter's, at periods when I didn't see a man for weeks,
the hero never seemed farther away than just behind the scenes. I
confess to minutes when I thought he tarried unnecessarily long; I
confess to terrified questionings as to what would happen were he never
to come at all; I confess to solitary watches of the night in company
with fears and tears; but I cannot confess to anything more than a low
burning of that lamp of hope which never went out entirely.

When, therefore, Hugh Brokenshire offered me what he had to offer me I
felt for a few minutes--ten, fifteen, twenty perhaps--that sense of the
fruition of the being which I am sure comes to us but rarely in this
life, and perhaps is a foretaste of eternity. I was like a creature that
has long been struggling up to some higher state--and has reached it.

I am ashamed to say, too, that my first consciousness came in pictures
to which the dear young man himself was only incidental. Two scenes in
particular that for ten years past had been only a little below the
threshold of my consciousness came out boldly, like developed
photographs. I was the center of both. In one I saw a dainty little
dining-room, where the table was laid. The damask was beautiful; the
silver rich; the glasses crystalline. Wearing an inexpensive but
extremely chic little gown, I was seating the guests. The other picture
was more dim, but only in the sense that the room was deliciously
darkened. It had white furnishings, a little white cot, and toys. In its
very center was a bassinet, and I was leaning over it, wearing a
delicate lace peignoir.

Ought I to blush to say that while Hugh stammered out his impassioned
declarations I was seeing these two tableaux emerging from the state of
only half-acknowledged dreams into real possibility? I dare say. I
merely affirm that it was so. Since the dominant craving of my nature
was to have a home and a baby, I saw the baby and the home before I
could realize a husband or a father, or bring my mind to the definite
proposals faltered by poor Hugh.

But I did bring my mind to them, with the result of which I have already
given a sufficient indication. Even in admitting that I loved him I
thrust and parried and postponed. The whole idea was too big for me to
grapple with on the spur of a sudden moment. I suggested his talking the
matter over with his father chiefly to gain time.

       *     *     *     *     *

But to rest in his arms had only a subordinate connection with the great
issue I had to face. It was a joy in itself. It was a pledge of the
future, even if I were never to take anything but the pledge. After my
shifts and struggles and anxieties I could feel the satisfaction of
knowing it was in my power to let them all roll off. If I were never to
do it, if I were to go back to my uncertainties, this minute would
mitigate the trial in advance. I might fight for existence during all
the rest of my life, and yet I should still have the bliss of
remembering that some one was willing to fight for me.

He released me at last, since there might be people in Newport as
indifferent to weather as ourselves.

"What happened?" he asked then, with an eagerness which almost choked
the question in its utterance. "Was it awful?"

I was too nearly hysterical to enter on anything like a recital. "It
might have been worse," I half laughed and half sobbed, trying to
recover my breath and dry my eyes.

His spirit seemed to leap at the answer. "Do you mean to say you got
concessions from him--or anything like that?"

I couldn't help clinging to the edge of his raincoat. "Did you expect me
to?"

"I didn't know but what, when he saw you--"

"Oh, but he didn't see me. That was part of the difficulty. He looked
where I was--but he didn't find anything there."

He laughed, with a hint of disappointment. "I know what you mean; but
you mustn't be surprised. He'll see you yet." He clasped me again. "I
didn't see you at first, little girl; I swear I didn't. You're like
that. A fellow must look at you twice before he knows that you're there;
but when he begins to take notice--" I struggled out of his embrace,
while he continued: "It's the same with all the great things--with
pictures and mountains and cathedrals, and so on. Often thought about it
when we've been abroad. See something once and pass it by. Next time you
look at it a little. Third time it begins to grow on you. Fourth time
you've found a wonder. You're a wonder, little Alix, do you know it?"

"Oh no, I'm not. I must warn you, Hugh darling, that I'm very prosaic
and practical and ordinary. You mustn't put me on a pedestal--"

"Put you on a pedestal? You were born on a pedestal. You're the woman
I've seen in hopes and dreams--"

We began to walk on, coming to a little hollow that dipped near enough
to the shore to allow of our scrambling over the rocks to where we could
sit down among them. As we were here below the thickest belt of the fog
line, I could see him in a way that had been impossible on the bluff.

If he was good-looking it was only in the handsome-ugly sense. Mrs.
Rossiter often said he was the one member of the family who inherited
from the Brews of Boston, a statement I could verify from the first Mrs.
Brokenshire's portrait by Carolus-Duran. Hugh's features were not
ill-formed so much as they were out of proportion to each other,
becoming thus a mere jumble of organs. The blue eyes were too small and
too wide apart; the forehead was too broad for its height; the nose,
which started at the same fine angle as his father's, changed in
mid-course to a knob; the upper lip was intended to be long, but
half-way in its descent took a notion to curve upward, making a hollow
for a tender, youthful, fair mustache that didn't quite meet in the
center and might have been applied with a camel's-hair brush; the lower
lip turned outward with a little fullness that spilled over in a little
fall, giving to the whole expression something lovably good-natured.

Because the sea boiled over the ledges and scraped on the pebbles with a
screechy sound we were obliged to sit close together in order to make
ourselves heard. His arm about me was amazingly protective. I felt safe.

The account of his interview with his father was too incoherent to give
me more than the idea that they had talked somewhat at cross-purposes.
To Hugh's statement that he wished to marry Miss Adare, the little
nursery governess at Ethel's, his father had responded by reading a
letter from Lord Goldborough inviting Hugh to his place in Scotland for
the shooting.

"It would be well for you to accept," the father commented, as he
folded the letter. "I've cabled to Goldborough to say you'd sail on--"

"But, father, how can I sail when I've asked Miss Adare to marry me?"

To this the reply was the mention of the steamer and the date. He went
on to say, however: "If you've asked any one to marry you it's absurd,
of course. But I'll take care of that. If you go by that boat you'll
reach London in plenty of time to fit out at your tailor's and still be
at Strath-na-Cloid by the twelfth. In case you're short of money--"

Apparently they got no further than that. To Hugh's assertions and
objections his father had but one response. It was a response, as I
understood, which confronted the younger man like a wall he had neither
the force to break down nor the agility to climb over, and left him
staring at a blank.

Then followed another outburst which to my unaccustomed ear was as wild,
sweet music. It wasn't merely that he loved me, he adored me; it wasn't
merely that I was young and pretty and captivating with a sly,
unobtrusive fascination that held you enchanted when it held you at all.
I was mistress of the wisdom of the ages. Among the nice expensively
dressed young girls with whom he danced and rode and swam and flirted,
Hugh had never seen any one who could "hold a candle" to me in knowledge
of human nature and the world. It wasn't that I had seen more than they
or done more than they; it was that I had a mind through which every
impression filtered and came out as something of my own. It was what he
had always been looking for in a woman, and had given up the hope of
finding. He spoke as if he was forty. He was serious himself, he
averred; he had reflected, and held original convictions. Though a rich
man's son, with corresponding prospects, his heart was with the masses
and he labeled himself a Socialist.

It was not the same thing to be a Socialist now, he explained to me, as
it had been twenty years before, since so many men of education and
position had adopted this system of opinion. In fact, his own conversion
had been partly due to young Lord Ernest Hayes, of the British Embassy,
who had spent the preceding summer at Newport, though his inclinations
had gone in this direction ever since he had begun to think. It was
because I was so open-eyed and so sincere that he had been drawn to me
as soon as he had started in to notice me. It was true that he had
noticed me first of all because I was in a subordinate position and
alone, but, having done so, he had found a queen disguised as a working
girl. I was a queen of the vital things in life, a queen of
intelligence, of sympathy, of the defiance of convention, of everything
that was great. I was the woman a Socialist could love, of whom a
Socialist could make his star.

"If father would only give me credit for being twenty-six and a man,"
the dear boy went on earnestly, "with a man's responsibility to society
and the human race! But he doesn't. He thinks I ought to quit being a
Socialist because he tells me to--or else he doesn't think at all. Nine
times out of ten, when I begin to say what I believe, he talks of
something else--just as he did last night in bringing up the
Goldboroughs."

I found the opportunity for which I had been looking during his
impassioned rhapsody. The mention of the Goldboroughs gave me that kind
of chill about the heart which the mist imparted to the hands and face.

"You know them all very well," I said, when I found an opening in which
I could speak.

"Oh yes," he admitted, indifferently. "Known them all my life. Father
represented Meek & Brokenshire in England till my grandfather died.
Goldborough used to be an impecunious chap, land poor, till he and
father began to pull together. Father's been able to give him tips on
the market, and he's given father-- Well, dad's always had a taste for
English swells. Never could stand the Continental kind--gilt gingerbread
he's called 'em--and so, well, you can see."

I admitted that I could see, going on to ask what the Goldborough family
consisted of.

There was Lord Leatherhead, the eldest son; then there were two younger
sons, one in the army and one preparing for the Church; and there were
three girls.

"Any of the daughters married?" I ventured, timidly.

There was nothing forced in the indifference with which he made his
explanations. Laura was married to a banker named Bell; Janet, he
thought he had heard, was engaged to a chap in the Inverness Rangers;
Cecilia--Cissie they usually called her--was to the best of his
knowledge still wholly free, but the best of his knowledge did not go
far.

I pumped up my courage again. "Is she--nice?"

"Oh, nice enough." He really didn't know much about her. She was
generally away at school when he had been at Goldborough Castle. When
she was there he hadn't seen more than a long-legged, gawky girl, rather
good at tennis, with red hair hanging down her back.

Satisfied with these replies, I went on to tell him of my interview with
his father an hour or two before. Of this he seized on one point with
some ecstasy.

"So you told him you'd take me! Oh, Alix--gosh!"

The exclamation was a sigh of relief as well as of rapture. I could
smile at it because it was so boyish and American, especially as he
clasped me again and held me in a way that almost stopped my breath.
When I freed myself, however, I said, with a show of firmness:

"Yes, Hugh; it's what I said to him; but it's not what I'm going to
repeat to you."

"Not what you're going to repeat to me? But if you said it to him--"

"I'm still not obliged to accept you--to-day."

"But if you mean to accept me at all--"

"Yes, I mean to accept you--if all goes well."

"But what do you mean by that?"

"I mean--if your family should want me."

I could feel his clasp relax as he said: "Oh, if you're going to wait
for that!"

"Hugh, darling, how can I not wait for it? I told him I couldn't stop to
consider a family; but--but I see I must."

"Oh, but why? We shall lose everything if you do that. To wait for my
family to want you to marry me--"

I detached myself altogether from his embrace, pretending to arrange my
skirts about my feet. He leaned forward, his fingers interlocked, his
elbows on his knees, his kind young face disconsolate.

"When I talked to your father," I tried to explain, "I saw chiefly the
individual's side of the question of marriage. There is that side; but
there's another. Marriage doesn't concern a man and a woman alone; it
concerns a family--sometimes two."

His cry came out with the explosive force of a slowly gathering groan.
"Oh, rot, Alix!" He went on to expostulate: "Can't you see? If we were
to go now and buy a license--and be married by the first clergyman we
met--the family couldn't say a word."

"Exactly; it's just what I do see. Since you want it I could force
myself on them--the word is your father's--and they'd have no choice but
to accept me."

"Well, then?"

"Hugh, dear, I--I can't do it that way."

"Then what way could you do it?"

"I'm not sure yet. I haven't thought of it. I only know in advance that
even if I told you I'd marry you against--against all their wishes, I
couldn't keep my promise in the end."

"That is," he said, bitterly, "you think more of them than you do of
me."

I put my hand on his clasped fingers. "Nonsense. I--I love you. Don't
you see I do? How could I help loving you when you've been so kind to
me? But marriage is always a serious thing to a woman; and when it comes
to marriage into a family that would look on me as a great
misfortune--Hugh, darling, I don't see how I could ever face it."

"I do," he declared, promptly. "It isn't so bad as you think. Families
come round. There was Tracy Allen. Married a manicure. The Allens kicked
up a row at first--wouldn't see Tracy and all that; but now--"

"Yes, but, Hugh, I'm not a manicure."

"You're a nursery governess."

"By accident--and a little by misfortune. I wasn't a nursery governess
when I first knew your sister."

"But what difference does that make?"

"It makes this difference: that a manicure would probably not think of
herself as your equal. She'd expect coldness at first, and be prepared
for it."

"Well, couldn't you?"

"No, because, you see, I'm your equal."

He hunched his big shoulders impatiently. "Oh, Alix, I don't go into
that. I'm a Socialist. I don't care what you are."

"But you see I do. I don't want to expose myself to being looked down
upon, and perhaps despised, for the rest of my life, because my family
is quite as good as your own."

He turned slowly from peering into the fog-bank to fix on me a look of
which the tenderness and pity and incredulity seemed to stab me. I felt
the helplessness of a sane person insisting on his sanity to some one
who believes him mad.

"Don't let us talk about those things, darling little Alix," he begged,
gently. "Let's do the thing in style, like Tracy Allen, without any
flummery or fluff. What's family--once you get away from the idea? When
I sink it I should think that you could afford to do it too. If I take
you as Tracy Allen took Libby Jaynes--that was her name, I remember
now--not a very pretty girl--but if I take you as he took her, and you
take me as she took him--"

"But, Hugh, I can't. If I were Libby Jaynes, it's possible I could; but
as it is--"

And in the end he came round to my point of view. That is to say, he
appreciated my unwillingness to reward Mrs. Rossiter's kindness to me by
creating a scandal, and he was not without some admiration for what he
called my "magnanimity toward his old man" in hesitating to drive him to
extremes.

And yet it was Hugh himself who drove him to extremes, over questions
which I hardly raised. That was some ten days later, when Hugh refused
point-blank to sail on the steamer his father had selected to take him
on the way to Strath-na-Cloid. I was, of course, not present at the
interview, but having heard of it from Hugh, and got his account
corroborated by Ethel Rossiter, I can describe it much as it took place.

I may say here, perhaps, that I still remained with Mrs. Rossiter. My
marching orders, expected from hour to hour, didn't come. Mrs. Rossiter
herself explained this delay to me some four days after that scene in
the breakfast loggia which had left me in a state of curiosity and
suspense.

"Father seems to think that if he insisted on your leaving it would make
Hugh's asking you to marry him too much a matter of importance."

"And doesn't he himself consider it a matter of importance?"

Mrs. Rossiter patted a tress of her brown hair into place. "No, I don't
think he does."

Perhaps nothing from the beginning had made me more inwardly indignant
than the simplicity of this reply. I had imagined him raging against me
in his heart and forming deep, dark plans to destroy me.

"It would be a matter of importance to most people," I said, trying not
to betray my feeling of offense.

"Most people aren't father," Mrs. Rossiter contented herself with
replying, still occupied with her tress of hair.

It was the confidential hour of the morning in her big chintzy room. The
maid having departed, I had been answering notes and was still sitting
at the desk. It was the first time she had broached the subject in the
four days which had been to me a period of so much restlessness.
Wondering at this detachment, I had the boldness to question her.

"Doesn't it seem important to you?"

She threw me a glance over her shoulder, turning back to the mirror at
once. "What have I got to do with it? It's father's affair--and Hugh's."

"And mine, too, I suppose?" I hazarded, interrogatively.

To this she said nothing. Her silence gave me to understand what so many
other little things impressed upon me--that I didn't count. What Hugh
did or didn't do was a matter for the Brokenshires to feel and for J.
Howard Brokenshire to deal with. Ethel Rossiter herself was neither for
me nor against me. I was her nursery governess, and useful as an
unofficial companion-secretary. As long as it was not forbidden she
would keep me in that capacity; when the order came she would send me
away. As for anything I had to suffer, that was my own lookout. Hugh
would be managed by his father, and from that fate there was no appeal.
There was nothing, therefore, to worry Mrs. Rossiter. She could dismiss
the whole matter, as she presently did, to discuss her troubles over the
rival attentions of Mr. Millinger and Mr. Scott, and to protest against
their making her so conspicuous. She had the kindness to say, however,
just as she was leaving the house for Bailey's Beach:

"I don't talk to you about this affair of Hugh's because I really don't
see much of father. It's his business, you see, and nothing for me to
interfere with. With that woman there I hardly ever go to their house,
and he doesn't often come here. Her mother's with them, too, just
now--that's old Mrs. Billing--a harpy if ever there was one--and with
all the things people are saying! If father only knew! But, of course,
he'll be the last one to hear it."

She was getting into her car by this time and I seized no more; but at
lunch I had a few minutes in which to bring my searchings of heart
before Larry Strangways.

It was not often we took this repast alone with the children, but it had
to happen sometimes. Mrs. Rossiter had telephoned from Bailey's that she
had accepted the invitation of some friends and we were not to expect
her. We should lunch, however, she informed me, in the breakfast loggia,
where the open air would act as chaperon and insure the necessary
measure of propriety.

So long as Broke and Gladys were present we were as demure as if we had
met by chance in the restaurant car of a train. With the coffee the
children begged to be allowed to play with the dogs on the grass, which
left us for a few minutes as man and woman.

"How is everything?" he asked at once, taking on that smile which seemed
to put him outside the sphere of my interests.

I shrugged my shoulders and looked down at the spoon with which I was
dabbling in my cup. "Oh, just the same," I glanced up to say. "Tell me.
Have people in this country no other measure of your standing but that
of money?"

"Have they any such measure in any country?"

I was beginning with the words, "Why, yes," when he interrupted me.

"Think."

"I am thinking," I insisted. "In England and Canada and the British
Empire generally--"

"You attach some importance to birth. Yes; so do we here--when it goes
with money. Without the basis of that support neither you nor we give
what is so deliciously called birth the honor of a second thought."

"Oh yes, we do--"

"When it's your only asset--yes; but you do it alone. No one else pays
it any attention."

I colored. "That's rather cruel--"

"It's not a bit more cruel than the fact. Take your case and mine as an
illustration. As the estimate of birth goes in this country, I'm as well
born as the majority. My ancestors were New-Englanders, country doctors
and lawyers and ministers--especially the ministers. But as long as I
haven't the cash I'm only a tutor, and eat at the second table. Jim
Rossiter's forebears were much the same as mine; but the fact that he
has a hundred thousand dollars a year and I've hardly got two is the
only thing that would be taken into consideration, by any one in either
the United Kingdom or the United States. It would be the same if I
descended from Crusaders. If I've got nothing but that and my character
to recommend me--" He raised his hand and snapped his fingers with a
scornful laugh. "Take your case," he hurried on as I was about to speak.
"You're probably like me, sprung of a line of professional men--"

"And soldiers," I interrupted, proudly. "The first of my family to
settle in Canada was a General Adare in the middle of the seventeen
hundreds. He'd been in the garrison at Halifax and chose to remain in
Nova Scotia." Perhaps there was some boastfulness in my tone as I added,
"He came of the famous Fighting Adares of the County Limerick."

"And all that isn't worth a row of pins--except to yourself. If you
were the daughter of a miner who'd struck it rich you'd be a candidate
for the British peerage. You'd be received in the best houses in London;
you could marry a duke and no one would say you nay. As it is--"

"As it is," I said, tremulously, "I'm just a nursery governess, and
there's no getting away from the fact."

"Not until you get away from the condition."

"So that when I told Hugh Brokenshire the other day that in point of
family I was his equal--"

"He probably didn't believe you."

The memory of Hugh's look still rankled in me. "No, I don't think he
did."

"Of course he didn't. As the world counts--as we all count--no poor
family, however noble, is the equal of any rich family, however base."
There was that transformation of his smile from something sunny to
something hard which I had noticed once before, as he went on to add,
"If you want to marry Hugh Brokenshire--"

"Which I do," I interposed, defiantly.

"Then you must enter into his game as he enters into it himself. He
thinks of himself as doing the big romantic thing. He's marrying a poor
girl who has nothing but herself as guaranty. That your
great-grandfather was a general and one of the--what did you call
them?--Fighting Adares of the County Cork would mean no more to him than
if you said you were descended from the Lacedaemonians and the dragon's
teeth. As far as that goes, you might as well be an immigrant girl from
Sweden; you might as well be a cook. He's stooping to pick up his
diamond from the mire, instead of buying it from a jeweler's window.
Very well, then, you must let him stoop. You mustn't try to
underestimate his condescension. You mustn't tell him you were once in
a jeweler's window, and only fell into the mire by chance--"

"Because," I smiled, "the mire is where I belong, until I'm taken out of
it."

"We belong," he stated, judicially, "where the world puts us. If we're
wise we'll stay there--till we can meet the world's own terms for
getting out."




  CHAPTER V


I come at last to Hugh's defiance of his father. It took place not only
without my incitement, but without my knowledge. No one could have been
more sick with misgiving than I when I learned that the boy had left his
father's house and gone to a hotel. If I was to blame at all it was in
mentioning from time to time his condition of dependence.

"You haven't the right to defy your father's wishes," I said to him. "so
long as you're living on his money. What it comes to is that he pays you
to do as he tells you. If you don't do as he tells you, you're not
earning your allowance honestly."

The point of view was new to him. "But if I was making a living of my
own?"

"Ah, that would be different."

"You'd marry me then?"

I considered this. "It would still have to depend," I was obliged to say
at last.

"Depend on what?"

"On the degree to which you made yourself your own master."

"I should be my own master if I earned a good income."

I admitted this.

"Very well," he declared, with decision. "I shall earn it."

I didn't question his power to do that. I had heard so much of the
American man's ability to make money that I took it for granted, as I
did a bird's capacity for flight. As far as Hugh was concerned, it
seemed to me more a matter of intention than of opportunity. I reasoned
that if he made up his mind to be independent, independent he would be.
It would rest with him. It was not of the future I was thinking so much
as of the present; and in the present I was chiefly dodging his plea
that we settle the matter by taking the law into our own hands.

"It won't be as bad as you think," he kept urging. "Father would be sure
to come round to you if you were my wife. He never quarrels with the
accomplished fact. That's been part of the secret of his success. He'll
fight a thing as long as he can; but when it's carried over his head no
one knows better than he how to make the best of it."

"But, Hugh, I don't want to have him make the best of it that way--at
least, so long as you're not your own master."

One day at the Casino he pointed out Libby Jaynes to me. I was there in
charge of the children, and he managed to slip over from the tennis he
was playing for a word:

"There she is--that girl with the orange-silk sweater."

The point of his remark was that Libby Jaynes was one of a group of half
a dozen people, and was apparently received at Newport like anybody
else. The men were in flannels; the women in the short skirts and easy
attitudes developed by a sporting life. The silk sweater in its
brilliant hues was to the Casino grounds as the parrot to Brazilian
woods. Libby Jaynes wasn't pretty; her lips were too widely parted and
her teeth too big; but her figure was adapted to the costume of the day,
and her head to the slouching panama. She wore both with a decided
_chic_. She was the orange spot where there was another of purple and
another of pink and another of bright emerald-green. As far as I could
see no one remembered that she had ever rubbed men's finger-nails in the
barber's room of a hotel, and she certainly betrayed no sign of it. It
was what Hugh begged me to observe. If I liked I could within a year be
a member of this privileged troop instead of an outsider looking on.
"You'd be just as good as she is," he declared with a naivete I couldn't
help taking with a smile.

I was about to say, "But I don't feel inferior to her as it is," when I
recalled the queer look of incredulity he had given me on the beach.

And then one morning I heard he had quarreled with his father. It was
Hugh who told me first, but Mrs. Rossiter gave me all the details within
an hour afterward.

It appeared that they had had a dinner-party in honor of old Mrs.
Billing which had gone off with some success. The guests having left,
the family had gathered in Mildred's sitting-room to give the invalid an
account of the entertainment. It was one of those domestic reunions on
which the household god insisted from time to time, so that his wife
should seem to have that support from his children which both he and she
knew she didn't have. The Jack Brokenshires were there, and Hugh, and
Ethel Rossiter.

It was exactly the scene for a tragi-comedy, and had the kind of setting
theatrical producers liked before the new scene-painters set the note of
allegorical simplicity. Mildred had the best corner room up-stairs,
though, like the rest of the house, her surroundings suffered from her
father's taste for the Italianate and over-rich. Heavy dark cabinets,
heavy dark chairs, gilt candelabra, and splendidly brocaded stuffs threw
the girl's wan face and weak figure into prominence. I think she often
sighed for pretty papers and cretonnes, for Sevres and colored prints,
but she took her tapestries and old masters and majolica as decreed by a
power she couldn't question. When everything was done for her comfort
the poor thing had nothing to do for herself.

The room had the further resemblance to a scene on the stage since, as I
was given to understand, no one felt the reality of the friendliness
enacted. To all J. Howard's children it was odious that he should
worship a woman who was younger than Mildred and very little older than
Ethel. They had loved their mother, who had been plain. They resented
the fact that their father had got hold of her money for himself, had
made her unhappy, and had forgotten her. That he should have become
infatuated with a girl who was their own contemporary would have been a
humiliation to them in any case; but when the story of his fight for her
became public property, when it was the joke of the Stock Exchange and
the subject of leading articles in the press, they could only hold their
heads high and carry the situation with bravado. It was a proof of his
grip on New York that he could put Editha Billing where he wished to see
her, and find no authority, social or financial, bold enough to question
him; it was equally a proof of his dominance in his family that neither
son nor daughter could treat his new wife with anything but deference.
She was the _maitresse en titre_ to whom even the princes and princesses
had to bow.

They were bowing on this evening by treating old Mrs. Billing as if they
liked her and counted her one of themselves. As the mother of the
favorite she could reasonably claim this homage, and no one refused it
but poor Hugh. He turned his back on it. Mildred being obliged to lie on
a couch, he put himself at her feet, refusing thus to be witness of what
he called a flattering hypocrisy that sickened him. That went on in the
dimly, richly lighted room behind him, where the others sat about,
pretending to be gay.

Then the match went into the gunpowder all at once.

"I'm the more glad the evening has been pleasant," J. Howard observed,
blandly, "since we may consider it a farewell to Hugh. He's sailing
on--"

Hugh merely said over his shoulder, "No, father; I'm not."

The startled silence was just long enough to be noticed before the
father went on, as if he had not been interrupted:

"He's sailing on--"

"No, father; I'm not."

There was no change in Hugh's tone any more than in his parent's. I
gathered from Mrs. Rossiter that all present held their breaths as if in
expectation that this blasphemer would be struck dead. Mentally they
stood off, too, like the chorus in an opera, to see the great tragedy
acted to the end without interference of their own. Jack Brokenshire,
who was fingering an extinct cigar, twiddled it nervously at his lips.
Pauline clasped her hands and leaned forward in excitement. Mrs.
Brokenshire affected to hear nothing and arranged her five rows of
pearls. Mrs. Billing, whom Mrs. Rossiter described as a condor with lace
on her head and diamonds round her shrunken neck, looked from one to
another through her lorgnette, which she fixed at last on her
son-in-law. Ethel Rossiter kept herself detached. Knowing that Hugh had
been riding for a fall, she expected him now to come his cropper.

It caused some surprise to the lookers-on that Mr. Brokenshire should
merely press the electric bell. "Tell Mr. Spellman to come here," he
said, quietly, to the footman who answered his ring.

Mr. Spellman appeared, a smooth-shaven man of indefinite age, with dark
shadows in the face, and cadaverous. His master instructed him with a
word or two. There was silence during the minute that followed the man's
withdrawal, a silence ominous with expectation. When Spellman had
returned and handed a long envelope to his employer and withdrawn again,
the suspended action was renewed.

Hugh, who was playing in seeming unconcern with the tassel of Mildred's
dressing-gown, had given no attention to the small drama going on behind
him.

"Hugh, here's father," Mildred whispered.

Her white face was drawn; she was fond of Hugh; she seemed to scent the
catastrophe. Hugh continued to play with the tassel without glancing
upward.

It was not J. Howard's practice to raise his voice or to speak with
emphasis except when the occasion demanded it. He was very gentle now as
his hand slipped over Hugh's shoulder.

"Hugh, here's your ticket and your letter of credit. I asked Spellman to
see to them when he was in New York."

The young man barely turned his head. "Thank you, father; but I don't
want them. I can't go over--because I'm going to marry Miss Adare."

As it was no time for the chorus of an opera to intervene, all waited
for what would happen next. Old Mrs. Billing, turning her lorgnette on
the rebellious boy, saw nothing but the back of his head. The father's
hand wavered for a minute over the son's shoulder and let the envelope
fall. Hugh continued to play with the tassel.

For once Howard Brokenshire was disconcerted. Having stepped back a pace
or two, he said in his quiet voice, "What did you say, Hugh?"

The answer was quite distinct. "I said I was going to marry Miss Adare."

"Who's that?"

"You know perfectly well, father. She's Ethel's nursery governess.
You've been to see her, and she's told you she's going to marry me."

"Oh, but I thought that was over and done with."

"No, you didn't, father. Please don't try to come that. I told you
nearly a fortnight ago that I was perfectly serious--and I am."

"Oh, are you? Well, so am I. The Goldboroughs are expecting you for the
twelfth--"

"The Goldboroughs can go to--"

"Hugh!" It was Mildred who cut him short with a cry that was almost a
petition.

"All right, Milly," he assured her under his breath. "I'm not going to
make a scene."

That J. Howard expected to become the principal in a duel, under the
eyes of excited witnesses, I do not think. If he had chosen to speak
when witnesses were present, it was because of his assumption that
Hugh's submission would be thus more easily secured. As it was his
policy never to enter into a conflict of authorities, or of will against
will, he was for the moment nonplussed. I have an idea he would have
retired gracefully, waiting for a more convenient opportunity, had it
not been for old Mrs. Billing's lorgnette.

It will, perhaps, not interrupt my narrative too much if I say here that
of all the important women he knew he was most afraid of her. She had
coached him when he was a beginner in life and she an established young
woman of the world. She must then have had a certain _beaute du diable_
and that nameless thing which men find exciting in women. I have been
told that she was an example of the modern Helen of Troy, over whom men
fight while she holds the stakes, and I can believe it. Her history was
said to be full of dramatic episodes, though I never knew what they
were. Even at sixty, which was the age at which I saw her, she had that
kind of presence which challenges and dares. She was ugly and hook-nosed
and withered; but she couldn't be overlooked. To me she suggested that
Madame Poisson who so carefully prepared her daughter to become the
Marquise de Pompadour. Stacy Grainger, I believe, was the Louis XV. of
her earlier plans, though, like a born strategist, she changed her
methods when reasons arose for doing so. I shall return to this later in
my story. At present I only want to say that I do not believe that Mr.
Brokenshire would have pushed things to an issue that night had her
lorgnette not been there to provoke him.

"Has it occurred to you, Hugh," he asked, in his softest tones, on
reaching a stand before the chimney which was filled with dwarfed potted
palms, "that I pay you an allowance of six thousand dollars a year?"

Hugh continued to play with the tassel of Mildred's gown. "Yes, father;
and as a Socialist I don't think it right. I've been coming to the
decision that--"

"You'll spare us your poses and let the Socialist nonsense drop. I
simply want to remind you--"

"I can't let the Socialist nonsense drop, father, because--"

The tartness of the tone betrayed a rising irritation.

"Be good enough to turn round this way. I don't understand what you're
saying. Perhaps you'll take a chair, and leave poor Mildred alone."

Mildred whispered: "Oh, Hugh, be careful. I'll do anything for you if
you won't get him worked up. It'll hurt his face--and his poor eye."

Hugh slouched--the word is Mrs. Rossiter's--to a nearby chair, where he
sat down in a hunched position, his hands in his trousers pockets and
his feet thrust out before him. The attitude was neither graceful nor
respectful to the company.

"It's no use talking, father," he declared, sulkily, "because I've said
my last word."

"Oh no, you haven't, for I haven't said my first."

In the tone in which Hugh cried out there must have been something of
the plea of a little boy before he is punished:

"Please don't give me any orders, father, because I sha'n't be able to
obey them."

"Hugh, your expression 'sha'n't be able to obey' is not in the
vocabulary with which I'm familiar."

"But it's in the one with which I am."

"Then you've probably learnt it from Ethel's little servant--I've
forgotten the name--"

Hugh spoke with spirit. "She's not a servant; and her name is Alexandra
Adare. Please, dad, try to fix it in your memory. You'll find you'll
have a lot of use for it."

"Don't be impertinent."

"I'm not impertinent. I'm stating a fact. I ask every one here to
remember that name--"

"We needn't bring any one else into this foolish business. It's between
you and me. Even so, I wish to have no argument."

"Nor I."

"Then in that case we understand each other. You'll be with the
Goldboroughs for the twelfth--"

Hugh spoke very distinctly: "Father--I'm--not--going."

In the silence that followed one could hear the ticking of the
mantelpiece clock.

"Then may I ask where you are going?"

Hugh raised himself from his sprawling attitude, holding his bulky young
figure erect. "I'm going to earn a living."

Some one, perhaps old Mrs. Billing, laughed. The father continued to
speak with great if dangerous courtesy.

"Ah? Indeed! That's interesting. And may I ask at what?"

"At what I can find."

"That's more interesting still. Earning a living in New York is like the
proverbial looking for the needle in the haystack. The needle is there,
but it takes--"

"Very good eyesight to detect it. All right, dad. I shall be on the
job."

"Good! And when do you propose to begin?"

It had not been Hugh's intention to begin at any time in particular,
but, thus challenged, he said, boldly, "To-morrow."

"That's excellent. But why put it off so long? I should think you'd
start out--to-night."

Mrs. Billing's "Ha-a!" subdued and prolonged, was like that tense
exclamation which the spectators utter at some exiting moment of a game.
It took no sides, but it did justice to a sporting situation. As Hugh
told me the story on the following day he confessed that more than any
other occurrence it put the next move "up to him." According to Ethel
Rossiter he lumbered heavily to his feet and crossed the room toward his
father. He began to speak as he neared the architectural chimneypiece,
merely throwing the words at J. Howard as he passed.

"All right, father. Since you wish it--"

"Oh no. My wishes are out of it. As you defy those I've expressed,
there's no more to be said."

Hugh paused in his walk, his hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket,
and eyed his father obliquely. "I don't defy your wishes, dad. I only
claim the right, as a man of twenty-six, to live my own life. If you
wouldn't make yourself God--"

The handsome hand went up. "We'll not talk about that, if you please.
I'd no intention of discussing the matter any longer. I merely thought
that if I were in the situation in which you've placed yourself, I
should be--getting busy. Still, if you want to stay the night--"

"Oh, not in the least." Hugh was as nonchalant as he had the power to
make himself. "Thanks awfully, father, all the same." He looked round on
the circle where each of the chorus sat with an appropriate expression
of horror--that is, with the exception of the old lady Billing, who,
with her lorgnette still to her eyes, nodded approval of so much spirit.
"Good night, every one," Hugh continued, coolly, and made his way toward
the door.

He had nearly reached it when Mildred cried out: "Hugh! Hughie! You're
not going away like that!"

He retraced his steps to the couch, where he stooped, pressed his
sister's thin fingers, and kissed her. In doing so he was able to
whisper:

"Don't worry, Milly dear. Going to be all right. Shall be a man now. See
you soon again." Having raised himself, he nodded once more. "Good
night, every one."

Mrs. Rossiter said that he was so much like a young fellow going to his
execution that she couldn't respond by a word.

Hugh then marched up to his father and held out his hand. "Good night,
dad. We needn't have any ill-feeling even if we don't agree."

But the Great Dispenser didn't see him. An imposing figure standing with
his hands behind his back, he kept his fingers clasped. Looking through
his son as if he was no more than air, he remarked to the company in
general:

"I don't think I've ever seen Daisy Burke appear better than she did
to-night. She's usually so badly dressed." He turned with a little
deferential stoop to where Mrs. Brokenshire--whom Ethel Rossiter
described as a rigid, exquisite thing staring off into vacancy--sat on a
small upright chair. "What do you think, darling?"

Hugh could hear the family trying to rally to the hint that had thus
been given them, and doing their best to discuss the merits and demerits
of Daisy Burke, as he stood in the big, square hall outside, wondering
where he should seek shelter.




  CHAPTER VI


What Hugh did in the end was simple. Finding the footman who was
accustomed to valet him, he ordered him to bring a supply of linen and
some suits to a certain hotel early on the following morning. He then
put on a light overcoat and a cap and left the house.

The first few steps from the door he closed behind him gave him, so he
told me next day, the strangest feeling he had ever experienced. He was
consciously venturing forth into life without any of his usual supports.
What those supports had been he had never realized till then. He had
always been stayed by some one else's authority and buoyed all round by
plenty of money. Now he felt, to change the simile as he changed it
himself, as if he had been thrown out of the nest before having learnt
to fly. As he walked resolutely down the dark driveway toward Ochre
Point Avenue he was mentally hovering and balancing and trembling, with
a tendency to flop. There was no longer a downy bed behind him; no
longer a parent bill to bring him his daily worm. The outlook which had
been one thing when he was within that imposing, many-lighted mansion
became another now that he was turning his back on it permanently and in
the dark.

This he confessed when he had surprised me by appearing at the breakfast
loggia, where I was having my coffee with little Gladys Rossiter
somewhere between half past eight and nine. He was not an early riser,
except when the tide enticed him to get up at some unusual hour to take
his dip, and even then he generally went back to bed. To see him coming
through the shrubbery now, carefully dressed, pallid and grave, half
told me his news before he had spoken.

Luckily Gladys was too young to follow anything we said, so that after
having joyfully kissed her uncle Hugh she went on with her bread and
milk. Hugh took a cup of coffee, sitting sidewise to the table of which
only one end was spread, while I was at the head. It was the hour of the
day when we were safest. Mrs. Rossiter never left her room before eleven
at earliest, and no one else whom we were afraid of was likely to be
about.

"Well, the fat's all in the fire, little Alix," were the words in which
he announced his position. "I'm out on my own at last."

I could risk nothing in the way of tenderness, partly because of the
maid who was coming and going, and partly because that was something
Gladys would understand. I tried to let him see by my eyes, however, the
sympathy I felt. I knew he was taking the new turn of events soberly,
and soberly, with an immense semi-maternal yearning over him, I couldn't
help taking it myself.

He told his tale quietly, with almost no interruption on my part. I was
pleased to note that he expressed nothing in the way of recrimination
toward his father. With the exception of an occasional fling at old Mrs.
Billing, whom he seemed to regard as a joss or a bottle imp, he was
temperate, too, in his remarks about everybody else. I liked his
sporting attitude and told him so.

"Oh, there's nothing sporting in it," he threw off with a kind of
serious carelessness. "I'm a man; that's all. As I look back over the
past I seem to have been a doll."

I asked him what were his plans. He said he was going to apply to his
cousin, Andrew Brew, of Boston, going on to tell me more about the Brews
than I had ever heard. He was surprised that I knew nothing of the
important house of Brew, Borrodaile & Co., of Boston, who did such an
important business with England and Europe in general. I replied that in
Canada all my connections had been with the law, and with Service people
in England. I noticed, as I had noticed before in saying things like
that, that, in common with most American business men, he looked on the
Army and Navy as inferior occupations. There was no money in either.
That in itself was sufficient to condemn them in the eyes of a
gentleman.

I forgot to be nettled, as I sometimes had been, because of finding
myself so deeply immersed in his interests. Up to that minute, too, I
had had no idea that he had so much pride of birth. He talked of the
Brews and the Brokenshires as if they had been Bourbons and
Hohenzollerns, making me feel a veritable Libby Jaynes never to have
heard of them. Of the Brews in particular he spoke with reverence. There
had been Brews in Boston, he said, since the year one. Like all other
American families, as I came to know later, they were descended from
three brothers. In Norfolk and Suffolk they had been, so I
guessed--though Hugh passed the subject over with some vagueness--of
comparatively humble stock, but under the American flag they had
acquired money, a quasi-nobility and coats of arms. To hear a man
boasting, however modestly--and he was modest--of these respectable
nobodies, who had simply earned money and saved it, made me blush
inwardly in such a way that I vowed never to mention the Fighting Adares
again.

I could do this with no diminution of my feeling for poor Hugh. His
artless glory in a line of ancestry of which the fame had never gone
beyond the shores of Massachusetts Bay was, after all, a harmless bit of
vanity. It took nothing away from his kindness, his good intentions, or
his solid worth. When he asked me how I should care to live in Boston I
replied that I should like it very much. I had always heard of it as a
pleasant city of English characteristics and affiliations.

Wherever he was, I told him, I should be at home--if I made up my mind
to marry him.

"But you have made up your mind, haven't you?" he asked, anxiously.

I was obliged to reply with frankness, "Not quite, Hugh, because--"

"Then what's the use of my getting into this hole, if it isn't to be
with you?"

"You mean by the hole the being, as you call it, out on your own? But I
thought you did that to be a Socialist--and a man."

"I've done it because father won't let me marry you any other way."

"Then if that's all, Hugh--"

"But it isn't all," he interrupted, hastily. "I don't say but what if
father had given us his blessing, and come down with another six
thousand a year--we could hardly scrub along on less--I'd have taken it
and been thankful. But now that he hasn't--well, I can see that it's
all for the best. It's--it's brought me out, as you might say, and
forced me to a decision."

I harked back to the sentence in which he had broken in on me. "If it
was all, Hugh, then that would oblige me to make up my mind at once. I
couldn't be the means of compelling you to break with your family and
give up a large income."

He cried out impatiently, "Alix, what the dickens is a family and a
large income to me in comparison with you?"

I must say that his intensity touched me. Tears sprang into my eyes. I
risked Gladys's presence to say: "Hugh, darling, I love you. I can't
tell you what your generosity and nobleness mean to me. I hadn't
imagined that there was a man like you in the world. But if you could be
in my place--"

He pushed aside his coffee-cup to lean with both arms on the table and
look me fiercely in the eyes. "If I can't be in your place, Alix, I've
seen women who were, and who didn't beat so terribly about the bush.
Look at the way Libby Jaynes married Tracy Allen. She didn't talk about
his family or his giving up a big income. She trusted him."

"And I trust you; only--" I broke off, to get at him from another point
of view. "Do you know Libby Jaynes personally?"

He nodded.

"Is she--is she anything like me?"

"No one is like you," he exclaimed, with something that was almost
bitterness in the tone. "Isn't that what I'm trying to make you see?
You're the one of your kind in the world. You've got me where a woman
has never got a man before. I'd give up everything--I'd starve--I'd
lick dust--but I'd follow you to the ends of the earth, and I'd cling to
you and keep you." He, too, risked Gladys's presence. "But you're so
damn cool, Alix--"

"Oh no, I'm not, Hugh, daring," I pleaded on my own behalf. "I may seem
like that on the outside, because--oh, because I've such a lot to think
of, and I have to think for us two. That's why I'm asking you if you
found Libby Jaynes like me."

He looked puzzled. "She's--she's decent." he said, as if not knowing
what else to say.

"Yes, of course; but I mean--does she strike you as having had my kind
of ways? Or my kind of antecedents?"

"Oh, antecedents! Why talk about them?"

"It's what you've been doing, isn't it, for the past half-hour?"

"Oh, mine, yes; because I want you to see that I've got a big asset in
Cousin Andrew Brew. I know he'll do anything for me, and if you'll trust
me, Alix--"

"I do trust you, Hugh, and as soon as you have anything like what would
make you independent, and justified in braving your family's
disapproval--"

He took an apologetic tone. "I said just now that we couldn't scrape
along on less than twelve thousand a year--"

To me the sum seemed ridiculously enormous. "Oh, I'm sure we could."

"Well, that's what I've been thinking," he said, wistfully. "That figure
was based on having the Brokenshire position to keep up. But if we were
to live in Boston, where less would be expected of us, we could manage,
I should think, on ten."

Even that struck me as too much. "On five, Hugh," I declared, with
confidence. "I know I could manage on five, and have everything we
needed."

He smiled at my eagerness. "Oh, well, darling, I sha'n't ask you to come
down to that. Ten will be the least."

To me this was riches. I saw the vision of the dainty dining-room again,
and the nursery with the bassinet; but I saw Hugh also in the
background, a little shadowy, perhaps, a little like a dream as an
artist embodies it in a picture, and yet unmistakably himself. I spoke
reservedly, however, far more reservedly than I felt, because I hadn't
yet made my point quite clear to him.

"I'm sure we could be comfortable on that. When you get it--"

I hadn't realized that this was the detail as to which he was most
sensitive.

"There you go again! When I get it! Do you think I sha'n't get it?"

I felt my eyebrows going up in surprise. "Why, no, Hugh, dear. I suppose
you know what you can get and what you can't. I was only going to say
that when you do get it I shall feel as if you were free to give
yourself away, and that I shouldn't have"--I tried to smile at him--"and
that I shouldn't have the air of--of stealing you from your family.
Can't you see, dear? You keep quoting Libby Jaynes at me; but in my
opinion she did steal Tracy Allen. That the Allens have made the best of
it has nothing to do with the original theft."

"Theft is a big word."

"Not bigger than the thing. For Libby Jaynes it was possibly all right.
I'm not condemning her. But it wouldn't be all right for me."

"Why not? What's the difference?"

"I can't explain it to you, Hugh, if you don't see it already. It's a
difference of tradition."

"But what's difference of tradition got to do with love? Since you admit
that you love me, and I certainly love you--"

"Yes, I admit that I love you, but love is not the only thing in the
world."

"It's the biggest thing in the world."

"Possibly; and yet it isn't necessarily the surest guide in conduct.
There's honor, for instance. If one had to take love without honor, or
honor without love, surely one would choose the latter."

"And what would you call love without honor in this case?"

I reflected. "I'd call it doing this thing--getting engaged or married,
whichever you like--just because we have the physical power to do it,
and making the family, especially the father, to whom you're indebted
for everything you are, unhappy."

"He doesn't mind making you and me unhappy."

"But that's his responsibility. We haven't got to do what's right for
him; we've only got to do what's right for ourselves." I fell back on my
maxim, "If we do right, only right will come of it, whatever the wrong
it seems to threaten now."

"But if I made ten thousand a year of my own--"

"I should consider you free. I should feel free myself. I should feel
free on less than so big an income."

His spirits began to return.

"I don't call that big. We should have to pinch like the devil to keep
our heads above water--no motor--no butler--"

"I've never had either," I smiled at him, "nor a lot of the things that
go with them. Not having them might be privations to you--"

"Not when you were there, little Alix. You can bet your sweet life on
that."

We laughed together over the expression, and as Broke came bounding out
to his breakfast, with the cry, "Hello, Uncle Hughie!" we lapsed into
that language of signs and nods and cryptic things which we mutually
understood to elude his sharp young wits. By this method of _double
entendre_ Hugh gave me to understand his intention of going to Boston by
an afternoon train. He thought it possible he might stay there. The
friendliness of Cousin Andrew Brew would probably detain him till he
should go to work, which was likely to be in a day or two. Even if he
had to wait a week he would prefer to do so at Boston, where he had not
only ties of blood, but acquaintances and interests dating back to his
Harvard days, which had ended three years before.

In the mean time, my position might prove to be precarious. He
recognized that, making it an excuse for once more forcing on me his
immediate protection. Marriage was not named by word on Broke's account,
but I understood that if I chose we could be marred within an hour or
two, go to Boston together, and begin our common life without further
delays.

My answer to this being what it had been before, we discussed, over the
children's heads, the chances that could befall me before night. Of
these the one most threatening was that I might be sent away in
disgrace. If sent away in disgrace I should have to go on the instant. I
might be paid for a month or two ahead; it was probable I should be. It
was J. Howard's policy to deal with his cashiered employees with that
kind of liberality, so as to put himself more in the right. But I
should have to go with scarcely the time to pack my boxes, as Hugh had
gone himself, and must know of a place where I could take shelter.

I didn't know of any such refuge. My sojourn under Mrs. Rossiter's roof
had been remarkably free from contacts or curiosities of my own. Hugh
knew no more than I. I could, therefore, only ask his consent to my
consulting Mr. Strangways, a proposal to which he agreed. This I was
able to do when Larry came for Broke, not many minutes after Hugh had
taken his departure.

I could talk to him the more freely because of his knowledge of my
relation to Hugh. With the fact that I was in love with another man kept
well in the foreground between us, he could acquit me of those ulterior
designs on himself the suspicion of which is so disturbing to a woman's
friendship with a man. As the maid was clearing the table, as Broke had
to go to his lessons, as Gladys had to be remanded to the nursery while
I attended to Mrs. Rossiter's telephone calls and correspondence, our
talk was squeezed in during the seconds in which we retreated through
the dining-room into the main part of the house.

"The long and short of it is," Larry Strangways summed up, when I had
confided to him my fears of being sent about my business as soon as Hugh
had left for Boston--"the long and the short of it is that I shall have
to look you up another job."

It is almost absurd to point out that the idea was new to me. In going
to Mrs. Rossiter I had never thought of starting out on a career of
earning a living professionally, as you might say. I clung to the
conception of myself as a lady, with all sorts of possibilities in the
way of genteel interventions of Providence coming in between me and a
lifetime of work. I had always supposed that if I left Mrs. Rossiter I
should go back to my uncle and aunt at Halifax. After all, if Hugh was
going to marry me, it would be no more than correct that he should do it
from under their wing. Larry Strangways's suggestions of another job
threw open a vista of places I should fill in the future little short of
appalling to a woman instinctively looking for a man to come and support
her.

I shelved these considerations, however, to say, as casually as I could:
"Why should you do it? Why shouldn't I look out for myself?"

"Because when I've gone to Stacy Grainger it may be right in my line."

"But I'd rather you didn't have me on your mind."

He laughed--uneasily, as it seemed to me. "Perhaps it's too late for
that."

It was another of the things I was sorry to hear him say. I could only
reply, still on the forced casual note: "But it's not too late for me to
look after my own affairs. What I'm chiefly concerned with is that if I
have to leave here--to-night, let us say--I sha'n't in the least know
where to go."

He was ready for me in the event of this contingency. I suspected that
he had already considered it. He had a married sister in New York, a
Mrs. Applegate, a woman of philanthropic interests, a director on the
board of a Home for Working-Girls. Again I shied at the word. He must
have seen that I did, for he went on, with a smile in which I detected a
gleam of mockery:

"You are a working-girl, aren't you?"

I answered with the kind of humility I can only describe as spirited,
and which was meant to take the wind out of his sails:

"I suppose so--as long as I'm working." But I gave him a flying upward
glance as I asked the imprudent question, "Is that how you've thought of
me?"

I was sorry to have said it as soon as the words were out. I didn't want
to know what he thought of me. It was something with which I was so
little concerned that I colored with embarrassment at having betrayed so
much futile curiosity. Apparently he saw that, too, hastening to come to
my relief.

"I've thought of you," he laughed, when we had reached the main
stairway, "as a clever little woman, with a special set of aptitudes,
who ought to be earning more money than she's probably getting here; and
when I'm with Stacy Grainger--"

Grateful for this turning of the current into the business-like and
commonplace, I called Gladys, who was lagging in the dining-room with
Broke, and went on my way up-stairs.

Mrs. Rossiter was sitting up in bed, her breakfast before her on a light
wicker tray that stood on legs. It was an abstemious breakfast,
carefully selected from foods containing most nutrition with least
adipose deposit. She had reached the age, within sight of the thirties,
when her figure was becoming a matter for consideration. It was almost
the only personal detail as to which she had as yet any cause for
anxiety. Her complexion was as bright as at eighteen; her brown hair,
which now hung in a loose, heavy coil over her left shoulder, was thick
and silky and long; her eyes were clear, her lips ruby. I always noticed
that she waked with the sleepy softness of a flower uncurling to the
sun. In the great walnut bed, of which the curves were gilded _a la_
Louis Quinze, she made me think of that Jeanne Becu who became Comtesse
du Barry, in the days of her indolence and luxury.

Having no idea as to how she would receive me, I was not surprised that
it should be as usual. Since I had entered her employ she was never what
I should call gracious, but she was always easy and familiar. Sometimes
she was petulant; often she was depressed; but beyond a belief that she
inspired tumultuous passions in young men there was no pose about her
nor any haughtiness. I was not afraid of her, therefore; I was only
uneasy as to the degree in which she would let herself be used against
me as a tool.

"The letters are here on the bed," was her response to my greeting,
which I was careful to make in the form in which I made it every day.

Taking the small arm-chair at the bedside, I sorted the pile. The notes
she had not glanced at for herself I read aloud, penciling on the
margins the data for the answers. Some I replied to by telephone, which
stood within her reach on the _table de nuit_; for a few I sat down at
the desk and wrote. I was doing the latter, and had just scribbled the
words "Mrs. James Worthington Rossiter will have much pleasure in
accepting--" when she said, in a slightly querulous tone:

"I should think you'd do something about Hugh--the way he goes on."

I continued to write as I asked, "How does he go on?"

"Like an idiot."

"Has he been doing anything new?"

My object being to get a second version of the story Hugh had told me, I
succeeded. Mrs. Rossiter's facts were practically the same as her
brother's, only viewed from a different angle. As she presented the case
Hugh had been merely preposterous, dashing his head against a stone
wall, with nothing he could gain by the exercise.

"The idea of his saying he'll not go to the Goldboroughs for the
twelfth! Of course he'll go. Since father means him to do it, he will."

I was addressing an envelope, and went on with my task. "But I thought
you said he'd left home?"

"Oh, well, he'll come back."

"But suppose he doesn't? Suppose he goes to work?"

"Pff! The idea! He won't keep that up long."

I was glad to be sitting with my back to her. To disguise the quaver in
my voice I licked the flap of the envelope as I said:

"But he'll have to if he means to support a wife."

"Support a wife? What nonsense! Father means him to marry Cissie
Boscobel, as I've told you already--and he'll fix them up with a good
income."

"But apparently Hugh doesn't see things that way. He's told me--"

"Oh, he'd tell you anything."

"He's told me," I persisted, boldly, "that he--he loves me; and he's
made me say that--that I love him."

"And that's where you're so foolish, dear Miss Adare. You let him take
you in. It isn't that he's not sincere; I don't say that for a minute.
But people can't go about marrying every one they love, now can they? I
should think you'd have seen that--with the heaps of men you had there
at Halifax--hardly room to step over them."

I said, slyly, "I never saw them that way."

"Oh, well, I did. And by the way, I wonder what's become of that Captain
Venables. He was a case! He could take more liberties in a
half-hour--don't you think?"

"He never took any liberties with me."

"Then that must have been your fault. Talk about Mr. Millinger! Our men
aren't in it with yours--not when it comes to the real thing."

I got back to the subject in which I was most interested by saying, as I
spread another note before me:

"It seems to be the real thing with Hugh."

"Oh, I dare say it is. It was the real thing with Jack. I don't
say"--her voice took on a tender tremolo--"I don't say that it wasn't
the real thing with me. But that didn't make any difference to father.
It was the real thing with Pauline Gray--when she was down there at
Baltimore; but when father picked her out for Jack, because of her money
and his relations with old Mr. Gray--"

I couldn't help half turning round, to cry out in tones of which I was
unable to conceal the exasperation: "But I don't see how you can all let
yourselves be hooked by the nose like that--not even by Mr.
Brokenshire!"

Her fatalistic resignation gave me a sense of helplessness.

"Oh, well, you will before father has done with you--if Hugh goes on
this way. Father's only playing with you so far."

"He can't touch me," I declared, indignantly.

"But he can touch Hugh. That's all he needs to know, as far as you're
concerned." She asked, in another tone, "What are you answering now?"

I told her it was the invitation to Mrs. Allen's dance.

"Then tear it up and say I can't go. Say I've a previous engagement. I'd
forgotten that they had that odious Mrs. Tracy Allen there."

I tore up the sheet slowly, throwing the fragments into the waste-paper
basket.

"Why is she odious?"

"Because she is." She dropped for a second into the tone of the early
friendly days in Halifax. "My dear, she was a shop-girl--or worse. I've
forgotten what she was, but it was awful, and I don't mean to meet her."

I began to write the refusal.

"She goes about with very good people, doesn't she?"

"She doesn't go about with me, nor with some others I know, I can tell
you that. If she did it would queer us."

In the hope of drawing out some such repudiation as that which I felt
myself, I said, dryly: "Hugh tells me that if I married him I could be
as good as she is--by this time next year."

I got nothing for my pains.

"That wouldn't help you much--not among the people who count."

There was white anger underneath my meekness.

"But perhaps I could get along with the people who don't count."

"Yes, you might--but Hugh wouldn't."

She dismissed the subject as one in which she took only a secondary
interest to say that old Mrs. Billing was coming to lunch, and that
Gladys and I should have to take that repast up-stairs. She was never
direct in her denunciations of her father's second marriage. She brought
them in by reference and innuendo, like a prisoner who keeps in mind the
fact that walls have ears. She gave me to understand, however, that she
considered Mrs. Billing a witch out of "Macbeth" or a wicked old
vulture--I could take my choice of comparisons--and she hated having her
in the house. She wouldn't do it only that, in ways she could hardly
understand, Mrs. Billing was the power behind the throne. She didn't
loathe her stepmother, she said in effect, so much as she loathed her
father's attitude toward her. I have never forgotten the words she used
in this connection, dropping her voice and glancing about her, afraid
she might be overheard. "It's as if God himself had become the slave of
some silly human woman just because she had a pretty face." The sentence
not only betrayed the Brokenshire attitude of mind toward J. Howard, but
sent a chill down my back.

Having finished my notes and addressed them I rose to return to Gladys;
but there was still an unanswered question in my mind. I asked it,
standing for a minute beside the bed:

"Then you don't want me to go away?"

She arched her lovely eyebrows. "Go away? What for?"

"Because of the danger of my marrying Hugh."

She gave a little laugh. "Oh, there's no danger of that."

"But there is," I insisted. "He's asked me a number of times to go with
him to the nearest clergyman, and settle the question once for all."

"Only you don't do it. There you are! What father doesn't want doesn't
happen; and what he does want does. That's all there is to be said."




  CHAPTER VII


As a matter of fact, that was all Mrs. Rossiter and I did say. I was so
relieved at not being thrown out of house and home on the instant that I
went back to Gladys and her lisping in French almost cheerily. You will
think me pusillanimous--and I was. I didn't want to go to Mrs. Applegate
and the Home for Working-Girls. As far as food and shelter were
concerned I liked them well enough where I was. I liked Mrs. Rossiter
too. I should be sorry to give the impression that she was supercilious
or unkind. She was neither the one nor the other. If she betrayed little
sentiment or sympathy toward me, it was because of admitting me into
that feminine freemasonry in which the emotional is not called for. I
might suffer while she remained indifferent; I might be killed on the
spot while she wouldn't shed a tear; and yet there was a heartless,
good-natured, live-and-let-live detachment about her which left me with
nothing but good-will.

Then, too, I knew that when I married Hugh she would do nothing of her
own free will against me. She would not brave her father's decree, but
she wouldn't be intolerant; she might think Hugh had been a fool, but
when she could do so surreptitiously she would invite him and me to
dinner.

As this was a kind of recognition in advance, I could not be otherwise
than grateful.

It made waiting for Hugh the easier. I calculated that if he entered
into some sort of partnership with his cousin Andrew Brew--I didn't in
the least know what--we might be married within a month or two. At
furthest it might be about the time when Mrs. Rossiter removed to New
York, which would make it October or November. I could then slip quietly
back to Halifax, be quietly married, and quietly settle with Hugh in
Boston. In the mean time I was glad not to be disturbed.

I spent, therefore, a pleasant morning with my pupil, and ate a pleasant
lunch, watching from the gable window of the school-room the great
people assemble in the breakfast loggia in honor of the Marquise de
Pompadour's mother. I am not sure that old Madame Poisson ever went to
court; but if she did I know the courtiers must have shown her just such
deference as that which Mrs. Rossiter's guests exhibited to this
withered old lady with the hooked nose and the lorgnette.

I was curious about the whole entertainment. It was not the only one of
the kind I had seen from a distance since coming to Mrs. Rossiter, and I
couldn't help comparisons with the same kind of thing as done in the
ways with which I was familiar. Here it was less a luncheon than it was
an exquisite thing on the stage, rehearsed to the last point. In
England, in Canada, luncheon would be something of a friendly haphazard,
primarily for the sake of getting food, secondly as a means to a
scrambling, jolly sort of social intercourse, and hardly at all a
ceremonial. Here the ceremonial came first. Hostess and guests seemed
alike to be taking part in a rite of seeing and being seen. The food,
which was probably excellent, was a matter of slight importance. The
social intercourse amounted to nothing, since they all knew one another
but too well, and had no urgent vitality of interests in any case. The
rite was the thing. Every detail was prepared for that. Silver,
porcelain, flowers, doilies, were of the most expensive and the most
correct. The guests were dressed to perfection--a little too well,
according to the English standard, but not too well for a function. As a
function it was beautiful, an occasion of privilege, a proof of
attainment. It was the best thing of its kind America could show. Those
who had money could alone present the passport that would give the right
of admission.

If I had a criticism to make, it was that the guests were too much
alike. They were all business men, and the wives or widows of business
men. The two or three who did nothing but live on inherited incomes were
business men in heart and in blood. Granted that in the New World the
business man must be dominant, it was possible to have too much of him.
Having too much of him lowered the standard of interest, narrowed the
circle of taste. In the countries I knew the business man might be
present at such a festivity, but there would be something to give him
color, to throw him into relief. There would be a touch of the creative
or the intellectual, of the spiritual or the picturesque. The company
wouldn't be all of a gilded drab. There would be a writer or a painter
or a politician or an actor or a soldier or a priest. There would be
something that wasn't money before it was anything else. Here there was
nothing. Birds of a feather were flocking together, and they were all
parrots or parrakeets. They had plumage, but no song. They drove out the
thrushes and the larks and the wild swans. Their shrill screeches and
hoarse shouts came up in a not wholly pleasant babel to the open window
where I sat looking down and Gladys hovered and hopped, wondering if
Thomas, the rosy-cheeked footman, would remember to bring us some of the
left-over ice-cream.

I thought it was a pity. With elements as good as could be found
anywhere to form a Society--that fusion of all varieties of achievement
to which alone the word written with a capital can be applied--there was
no one to form it. It was a woman's business; and for the role of
hostess in the big sense the American woman, as far as I could judge,
had little or no aptitude. She was too timid, too distrustful of
herself, too much afraid of doing the wrong thing or of knowing the
wrong people. She was so little sure of her standing that, as Mrs.
Rossiter expressed it, she could be "queered" by shaking hands with
Libby Jaynes. She lacked authority. She could stand out in a throng by
her dress or her grace, but she couldn't lead or combine or co-ordinate.
She could lend a charming hand where some one else was the Lady Holland
or the Madame de Stael, but she couldn't take the seemingly
heterogeneous types represented by the writer, the painter, the
politician, the actor, the soldier, the priest, and the business man and
weld them into the delightful, promiscuous, entertaining whole to be
found, in its greater or lesser degree, according to size or importance
of place, almost anywhere within the borders of the British Empire. I
came to the conclusion that this was why there were few "great houses"
in America and fewer women of importance.

It was why, too, the guests were subordinated to the ceremonial. It
couldn't be any other way. With flint and steel you can get a spark; but
where you have nothing but flint or nothing but steel, friction produces
no light. The American hostess, in so far as she exists, rarely hopes
for anything from the clash of minds, and therefore centers her
attention on her doilies. It must be admitted that she has the most
tasteful doilies in the world. There is a pathos in the way in which,
for want of the courage to get interesting human specimens together, she
spends her strength on the details of her rite. It is like the instinct
of women who in default of babies lavish their passion on little dogs.
One can say that it is _faute de mieux_. _Faute de mieux_ was, I am
sure, the reason why Ethel Rossiter took her table appointments with
what seemed to me such extraordinary seriousness. When all was said and
done it was the only real thing to care about.

I repeat that I thought it was a pity. I had dreams, as I looked down,
of what I could do with the same use of money, the same position of
command. I had dreams that the Brokenshires accepted me, that Hugh came
into the means that would be his in the ordinary course. I saw myself
standing at the head of the stairway of a fine big house in Washington
or New York. People were streaming upward, and I was shaking hands with
a delightful, smiling _desinvolture_. I saw men and women of all the
ranks and orders of conspicuous accomplishment, each contributing a
gift--some nothing but beauty, some nothing but wit, some nothing but
money, some nothing but position, some nothing but fame, some nothing
but national importance. The Brokenshire clan was there, and the
Billings and the Grays and the Burkes; but statesmen and diplomatists,
too, were there, and those leaders in the world of the pen and the brush
and the buskin of whom, oddly enough, I saw Larry Strangways, with his
eternal defensive smile, emerging from the crowd as chief. I was wearing
diamonds, black velvet, and a train, waving in my disengaged hand a
spangled fan.

From these visions I was roused by Gladys, who came prancing from the
stair-head.

"_V'la, Mademoiselle! V'la Thomas et le ice-cream!_"

Having consumed this dainty, we watched the company wander about the
terraces and lawns and finally drift away. I was getting Gladys ready
for her walk when Thomas, with a pitying expression on his boyish face,
came back to say that Mr. Brokenshire would like to speak with me
down-stairs.

I was never so near fainting in my life. I had barely the strength to
gasp, "Very well, Thomas, I'll come," and to send Gladys to her nurse.
Thomas watched me with his good, kind, sympathetic eyes. Like the other
servants, he must have known something of my secret and was on my side.
I called him the _bouton de rose_, partly because his clean, pink cheeks
suggested a Killarney breaking into flower, and partly because in his
waiting on Gladys and me he had the yearning, care-taking air of a
fatherly little boy. Just now he could only march down the passage ahead
of me, throw open the door of my bedroom as if he was lord chamberlain
to a queen, and give me a look which seemed to say, "If I can be your
liege knight against this giant, pray, dear lady, command me." I threw
him my thanks in a trumped-up smile, which he returned with such sweet
encouragement as to nearly unman me.

I stayed in my room only long enough to be sure that I was neat,
smoothing my hair and picking one or two threads from my white-linen
suit. The suit had scarlet cuffs and a scarlet belt, and as there was a
scarlet flush beneath my summer tan, like the color under the glaze of a
Chinese jar, I could see for myself that my appearance was not
ineffective.

The _bouton de rose_ was in waiting at the foot of the stairs as I came
down. Through the hall and the dining-room he ushered me royally; but as
I came out on the breakfast loggia my royalty stopped with what I can
only describe as a bump.

The guests had gone, but the family remained. The last phase of the
details of the rite were also on the table. All the doilies were there,
and the magnificent lace centerpiece which Mrs. Rossiter had at various
times called on me to admire. The old Spode dessert service was the more
dimly, anciently brilliant because of the old polished oak, and so were
the glasses and finger-bowls picked out in gold.

Mr. Brokenshire, whom I had seen from my window strolling with some
ladies on the lawn, had returned to the foot of the table, opposite to
the door by which I came out, where he now sat in a careless, sidewise
attitude, fingering his cigar. Old Mrs. Billing, who was beside him on
his right, put up her lorgnette immediately I appeared in the entrance.
Mrs. Rossiter had dropped into a chance chair half-way down the table on
the left; but Mrs. Brokenshire, oddly enough, was in that same seat in
the far corner to which she had retreated on the occasion of my
summoning ten days before. I wondered whether this was by intention or
by chance, though I was presently to know.

Terrified though I was, I felt salvation to lie in keeping a certain
dignity. I made, therefore, something between a bow and a courtesy,
first to Mr. Brokenshire, then to Mrs. Billing, then to Mrs. Rossiter,
and lastly to Mrs. Brokenshire, to whom I raised my eyes and looked all
the way diagonally across the loggia. I took my time in making these
four distinct salutations, though in response I was only stared at.
After that there was a space of some seconds in which I merely stood, in
my pose of _Ecce Femina_!

"Sit down!"

The command came, of course, from J. Howard. The chair to which I had
once before been banished being still in its corner, I slipped into it.

"I wished to speak to you, Miss--a--Miss--"

He glanced helplessly toward his daughter, who supplied the name.

"Ah yes. I wished to speak to you, Miss Adare, because my son has been
acting very foolishly."

I made my tone as meek as I could, scarcely daring to lift my eyes from
the floor. "Wouldn't it be well, sir, to talk to him about that?"

Mrs. Billing's lorgnette came down. She glanced toward her son-in-law as
though finding the point well taken.

He went on imperturbably. "I've said all I mean to say to him. My
present appeal is to you."

"Oh, then this is an--appeal?"

He seemed to hesitate, to reflect. "If you choose to take it so," he
admitted, stiffly.

"It surely isn't as I choose to take it, sir; it's as you choose to
mean."

"Don't bandy words."

"But I must use words, sir. I only want to be sure that you're making an
appeal to me, and not giving me commands."

He spoke sharply. "I wish you to understand that you're inducing a young
man to act in a way he is going to find contrary to his interests."

I could barely nerve myself to look up at him. "If by the 'young man'
you mean Mr. Hugh Brokenshire, then I'm inducing him to do nothing
whatever; unless," I added, "you call it an inducement that I--I"--I was
bound to force the word out--"unless you call it an inducement that I
love him."

"But that's it," Mrs. Rossiter broke in. "That's what my father means.
If you'd stop caring anything about him you wouldn't give him
encouragement."

I looked at her with a dim, apologetic smile. It was a time, I felt, to
speak not only with more courage, but with more sentiment than I was
accustomed to use in expressing myself.

"I'm afraid I can't give my heart, and take it back, like that."

"I can," she returned, readily. She spoke as if it was a matter of
cracking her knuckles or wagging her ears. "If I don't want to like a
person I don't do it. It's training and self-command."

"You're fortunate," I said, quietly. Why I should have glanced again at
Mrs. Brokenshire I hardly know; but I did so, as I added: "I've had no
training of that kind--and I doubt if many women have."

Mrs. Brokenshire, who was gazing at me with the same kind of fascinated
stare as on the former occasion, faintly, but quite perceptibly,
inclined her head. In this movement I was sure I had the key to the
mystery that seemed to surround her.

"All this," J. Howard declared, magisterially, "is beside the point. If
you've told my son that you'd marry him--"

"I haven't."

"Or even given him to understand that you would--"

"I've only given him to understand that I'd marry him--on conditions."

"Indeed? And would it be discreet on my part to inquire the terms you've
been kind enough to lay down?"

I pulled myself together and spoke firmly. "The first is that I'll marry
him--if his family come to me and express a wish to have me as a sister
and a daughter."

Old Mrs. Billing emitted the queer, cracked cackle of a hen when it
crows, but she put up her lorgnette and examined me more closely. Ethel
Rossiter gasped audibly, moving her chair a little farther round in my
direction. Mrs. Brokenshire stared with concentrated intensity, but
somehow, I didn't know why, I felt that she was backing me up.

The great man contented himself with saying, "Oh, you will!"

I ignored the tone to speak with a decision and a spirit I was far from
feeling.

"Yes, sir, I will. I shall not steal him from you--not so long as he's
dependent."

"That's very kind. And may I ask--"

"You haven't let me tell you my other condition."

"True. Go on."

I panted the words out as best I could. "I've told him I'd marry him--if
he rendered himself independent; if he earned his own money and became a
man."

"Ah! And you expect one or the other of these miracles to take place?"

"I expect both."

Though the words uttered themselves, without calculation or expectation
on my part, they gave me so much of the courage of conviction that I
held up my head. To my surprise Mrs. Billing didn't crow again or so
much as laugh. She only gasped out that long "Ha-a!" which proclaims
the sporting interest, of which both Hugh and Ethel Rossiter had told me
in the morning.

Mr. Brokenshire seemed to brace himself, leaning forward, with his elbow
on the table and his cigar between the fingers of his raised right hand.
His eyes were bent on me--fine eyes they were!--as if in kindly
amusement.

"My good girl," he said, in his most pitying voice, "I wish I could tell
you how sorry for you I am. Neither of these dreams can possibly come
true--"

My blood being up, I interrupted with some force. "Then in that case,
Mr. Brokenshire, you can be quite easy in your mind, for I should never
marry your son." Having made this statement, I followed it up by saying,
"Since that is understood, I presume there's no object in my staying any
longer." I was half rising when his hand went up.

"Wait. We'll tell you when to go. You haven't yet got my point. Perhaps
I haven't made it clear. I'm not interested in your hopes--"

"No, sir; of course not; nor I in yours."

"I haven't inquired as to that--but we'll let it pass. We're both
apparently interested in my son."

I gave a little bow of assent.

"I said I wished to make an appeal to you."

I made another little bow of assent.

"It's on his behalf. You could do him a great kindness. You could make
him understand--I gather that he's under your influence to some degree;
you're a clever girl, I can see that--but you could make him understand
that in fancying he'll marry you he's starting out on a task in which
there's no hope whatever."

"But there is."

"Pardon me, there isn't. By your own showing there isn't. You've laid
down conditions that will never be fulfilled."

"What makes you say that?"

"My knowledge of the world."

"Oh, but would you call that knowledge of the world?" I was swept along
by the force of an inner indignation which had become reckless.
"Knowledge of the world," I hurried on, "implies knowledge of the human
heart, and you've none of that at all." I could see him flush.

"My good girl, we're here to speak of you, not of me--"

"Surely we're here to speak of us both, since at any minute I choose I
can marry your son. If I don't marry him it's because I don't choose;
but when I do choose--"

Again the hand went up. "Yes, of course; but that's not what we want
specially to hear. Let us assume, as you say, that you can marry my son
at any time you choose. You don't choose, for the reason that you're
astute enough to see that your last state would be worse than the first.
To enter a family that would disown you at once--"

I kept down my tone, though I couldn't master my excitement. "That's not
my reason. If I don't marry him it's precisely because I have the power.
There are people--cowards they are at heart, as a rule--who because they
have the power use it to be insolent, especially to those who are
weaker. I'm not one of those. There's a _noblesse oblige_ that compels
one in spite of everything. In dealing with an elderly man, who I
suppose loves his son, and with a lady who's been so kind to me as Mrs.
Rossiter--"

"You've been hired, and you're paid. There's no special call for
gratitude."

"Gratitude is in the person who feels it; but that isn't what I
specially want to say."

"What you specially want to say apparently is--"

"That I'm not afraid of you, sir; I'm not afraid of your family or your
money or your position or anything or any one you can control. If I
don't marry Hugh, it's for the reason that I've given, and for no other.
As long as he's dependent on your money I shall not marry him till you
come and beg me to do it--and that I shall expect of you."

He smiled tolerantly. "That is, till you've brought us to our knees."

I could barely pipe, but I stood to my guns. "If you like the
expression, sir--yes. I shall not marry Hugh--so long as you support
him--till I've brought you to your knees."

If I expected the heavens to fall at this I was disappointed. All J.
Howard did was to lean on his arm toward Mrs. Billing and talk to her
privately. Mrs. Rossiter got up and went to her father, entering also
into a whispered colloquy. Once or twice he glanced backward to his
wife, but she was now gazing sidewise in the direction of the house and
over the lines of flowers that edged the terraces.

When Mrs. Rossiter had gone back to her seat, and J. Howard had raised
himself from his conversation with Mrs. Billing, he began again to
address me tranquilly:

"I hoped you might have sympathized with my hopes for Hugh, and have
helped to convince him how useless his plans for a marriage between him
and you must be."

I answered with decision: "No; I can't do that."

"I should have appreciated it--"

"That I can quite understand."

"And some day have shown you that I'm acting for your good."

"Oh, sir," I cried, "whatever else you do, you'll let my good be my own
affair, will you not?"

I thought I heard Mrs. Billing say, "Brava!" At any rate, she tapped her
fingers together as if in applause. I began to feel a more lenient
spirit toward her.

"I'm quite willing to do that," my opponent said, in a moderate,
long-suffering tone, "now that I see that you refuse to take Hugh's good
into consideration. So long as you encourage him in his present
madness--"

"I'm not doing that."

He took no notice of the interruption. "--I'm obliged to regard him as
nothing to me."

"That must be between you and your son."

"It is. I'm only asking you to note that you--ruin him."

"No, no," I began to protest, but he silenced me with a movement of his
hand.

"I'm not a hard man naturally," he went on, in his tranquil voice, "but
I have to be obeyed."

"Why?" I demanded. "Why should you be obeyed more than any one else?"

"Because I mean to be. That must be enough--"

"But it isn't," I insisted. "I've no intention of obeying you--"

He broke in with some haste: "Oh, there's no question of you, my dear
young lady. I've nothing to do with you. I'm speaking of my son. He must
obey me, or take the consequences. And the consequences will last as
long as he lives. I'm not one to speak rashly, or to speak twice. So
that's what I'm putting to you. Do you think--do you honestly
think--that you're improving your position by ruining a man who sooner
or later--sooner rather than later--will lay his ruin at your door and
loathe you? Come now! You're a clever girl. The case is by no means
beyond you. Think, and think straight."

"I am thinking, sir. I'm thinking so straight that I see right through
you. My father used to say--"

"No reminiscence, please."

"Very well, then; we'll let the reminiscence go. But you're thinking of
committing a crime, a crime against Hugh, a crime against yourself, a
crime against love, every kind of love--and that's the worst crime of
all--and you haven't the moral courage to shoulder the guilt yourself;
you're trying to shuffle it off on me."

"My good woman--"

But nothing could silence me now. I leaned forward, with hands clasped
in my lap, and merely looked at him. My voice was low, but I spoke
rapidly:

"You're talking to bewilder me, to throw dust in my eyes, to snare me
into taking the blame for what you're doing of your own free act. It's a
kind of reasoning which some girls would be caught by, but I'm not one
of them. If Hugh is ruined in the sense you mean, it's his father who
will ruin him--but even that is not the worst. What's worst, what's
dastardly, what's not merely unworthy of a man like you but unworthy of
any man--of anything that calls itself a male--is that you, with all
your resources of every kind, should try to foist your responsibilities
off on a woman who has no resources whatever. That I shouldn't have
believed of any of your sex--if it hadn't happened to myself."

But my eloquence left him as unmoved as before. He whispered with Mrs.
Billing. The old lady was animated, making beats and lunges with her
lorgnette.

"So that what it comes to," he said to me at last, lifting himself up
and speaking in a tired voice, "is that you really mean to pit yourself
against me."

"No, sir; but that you mean to pit yourself against me." Something
compelled me to add: "And I can tell you now that you'll be beaten in
the end."

Perhaps he didn't hear me, for he rose and, stooping, carried on his
discussion with Mrs. Billing. There was a long period in which no one
paid any further attention to my presence; in fact, no one paid any
attention to me any more. To my last words I expected some retort, but
none came. Ethel Rossiter joined her father at the end of the table, and
when Mrs. Billing also rose the conversation went on _a trois_. Mrs.
Brokenshire alone remained seated and aloof.

But the moment came when her husband turned toward her. Not having been
dismissed, I merely stood and looked on. What I saw then passed quickly,
so quickly that it took a minute of reflection before I could put two
and two together.

Having taken one step toward his wife, Howard Brokenshire stood still,
abruptly, putting his hand suddenly to the left side of his face. His
wife, too, put up her hand, but palm outward and as if to wave him back.
At the same time she averted her face--and I knew it was his eye.

It was over before either of the other two women perceived anything.
Presently, all four were out on the grass, strolling along in a little
chattering group together. My dismissal having come automatically, as
you might say, I was free to go.




  CHAPTER VIII


An hour later I had what up to then I must call the greatest surprise of
my life.

I was crying by myself on the shore, in that secluded corner among the
rocks where Hugh had first told me that he loved me. As a rule, I don't
cry easily. I did it now chiefly from being overwrought. I was desolate.
I missed Hugh. The few days or few weeks that must pass before I could
see him again stretched before me like a century. All whom I could call
my own were so far away. Even had they been near, they would probably,
with the individualism of our race, have left me to shift for myself.
Louise and Victoria had always given me to understand that, though they
didn't mind lending me an occasional sisterly hand, my life was my own
affair. It would have been a relief to talk the whole thing out
philosophically with Larry Strangways. As I came from the house I tried,
for the first time since knowing him, to throw myself in his path; but,
as usual when one needs a friend, he was nowhere to be seen.

I could, therefore, only scramble down to my favorite corner among the
rocks. Not that it was really a scramble. As a matter of fact, the path
was easy if you knew where to find it; but it was hidden from the
ordinary passer on the Cliff Walk, first by a boulder, round which you
had to slip, and then by a tangle of wild rosebines, wild raspberries,
and Queen Anne's lace. It was something like a secret door, known only
to the Rossiter household, their servants, and their friends. Once you
had passed it you had a measure of the public privacy you get in a box
at the theater or the opera. You had space and ease and a wide outlook,
with no fear of intrusion.

I cannot say that I was unhappy. I was rather in that state of mind
which the American people, with its gift for the happy, unexpected word,
have long spoken of as "mad." I was certainly mad. I was mad with J.
Howard Brokenshire first of all; I was mad with his family for having
got up and left me without so much as a nod; I was mad with Hugh for
having made me fall in love with him; I was mad with Larry Strangways
for not having been on the spot; and I was most of all mad with myself.
I had been boastful and bumptious; I had been disrespectful and absurd.
It was foolish to make worse enemies than I had already. Mrs. Rossiter
wouldn't keep me now. There would be no escape from Mrs. Applegate and
the Home for Working-Girls.

The still summer beauty of the afternoon added to my wretchedness. All
round and before me there was luxury and joyousness and sport. The very
sea was in a playful mood, lapping at my feet like a tamed, affectionate
leviathan, and curling round the ledges in the offing with delicate
lace-like spouts of spume. Sea-gulls swooped and hovered with hoarse
cries and a lovely effect of silvery wings. Here and there was a sail on
the blue, or the smoke of a steamer or a war-ship. Eastons Point, some
two or three miles away, was a long, burnished line of ripening wheat.
To right and to left of me were broken crags, red-yellow, red-brown,
red-green, where lovers and happy groups could perch or nestle
carelessly, thrusting trouble for the moment to a distance. I had to
bring my trouble with me. If it had not been for trouble I shouldn't
have been there. There wasn't a soul in the world who would fight to
take my part but Hugh, and I was, in all my primary instincts, a
clinging, parasitic thing that hated to stand alone.

There was nothing for it then but crying, and I did that to the best of
my ability; not loudly, of course, or vulgarly, but gently and
sentimentally, with an immense pity for myself. I cried for what had
happened that day and for what had happened yesterday. I cried for
things long past, which I had omitted to cry for at the time. When I had
finished with these I went further back to dig up other ignominies, and
I cried for them. I cried for my father and mother and my orphaned
condition; I cried for the way in which my father--who was a good, kind
man, _du reste_--had lived on his principal, and left me with scarcely a
penny to my name; I cried for my various disappointments in love, and
for the girl friends who had predeceased me. I massed all these motives
together and cried for them in bulk. I cried for Hugh and the brilliant
future we should have on the money he would make. I cried for Larry
Strangways and the loneliness his absence would entail on me. I cried
for the future as well as for the past and if I could have thought of a
future beyond the future I should have cried for that. It was delicious
and sad and consoling all at once; and when I had no more tears I felt
almost as if Hugh's strong arm had been about me, and I was comforted.

I was just wiping my eyes and wondering whether at the moment of going
homeward my nose would be too red, when I heard a quiet step. I thought
I must be mistaken. It was so unlikely that any one would be there at
this hour of the day--the servants generally came down at night--that
for a minute I didn't turn. It was the uncomfortable sense that some one
was behind me that made me look back at last, when I caught the flutter
of lace and the shimmer of pale-rose taffeta. Mrs. Brokenshire had worn
lace and pale-rose taffeta at the lunch.

Fear and amazement wrestled in my soul together. Struggling to my feet,
I turned round as slowly as I could.

"Don't get up," she said in a sweet, quiet voice. "I'll come and sit
down beside you, if I may." She had already seated herself on a low flat
rock as she said, "I saw you were crying, so I waited."

I am not usually at a loss for words, but I was then. I stuttered and
stammered and babbled, without being able to say anything articulate.
Indeed, I had nothing articulate to say. The mind had suspended its
action.

My impressions were all subconscious, but registered exactly. She was
the most exquisite production I had ever seen in human guise. Her
perfection was that of some lovely little bird in which no color fails
to shade harmoniously into some other color, in which no single feather
is out of place. The word I used of her was _soignee_--that which is
smoothed and curled and polished and caressed till there is not an
eyelash which hasn't received its measure of attention. I don't mean
that she was artificial, or that her effects were too thought out. She
was no more artificial than a highly cultivated flower is artificial, or
a many-faceted diamond, or a King Charles spaniel, or anything else that
is carefully bred or cut or shaped. She was the work of some specialist
in beauty, who had no aim in view but to give to the world the loveliest
thing possible.

When I had mastered my confusion sufficiently I sat down with the words,
rather lamely spoken:

"I didn't know any one was here. I hope I haven't kept you standing
long."

"No; but I was watching you. I came down only a few minutes after you
did. You see, I was afraid--when we came away from Mrs. Rossiter's--that
you might be unhappy."

"I'm not as unhappy as I was," I faltered, without knowing what I said,
and was rewarded to see her smile.

It was an innocent smile, without glee, a little sad in fact, but full
of unutterable things like a very young child's. I had never seen such
teeth, so white, so small, so regular.

"I'm glad of that," she said, simply. "I thought if some--some other
woman was near you, you mightn't feel so--so much alone. That's why I
watched round and followed you."

I could have fallen at her feet, but I restricted myself to saying:

"Thank you very much. It does make a difference." I got courage to add,
however, with a smile of my own, "I see you know."

"Yes, I know. I've thought about you a good deal since that day about a
fortnight ago--you remember?"

"Oh yes, I remember. I'm not likely to forget, am I? Only, you see, I
had no idea--if I had, I mightn't have felt so--so awfully forlorn."

Her eyes rested upon me. I can only say of them that they were sweet and
lovely, which is saying nothing at all. Sweet and lovely are the words
that come to me when I think of her, and they are so lamentably
overworked. She seemed to study me with a child-like unconsciousness.

"Yes," she said at last, "I suppose you do feel forlorn. I didn't think
of that or--or I might have managed to come to you before."

"That you should have come now," I said, warmly, "is the kindest thing
one human being ever did for another."

Again there was the smile, a little to one side of the mouth, wistful,
wan.

"Oh no, it isn't. I've really come on my own account." I waited for some
explanation of this, but she only went on: "Tell me about yourself. How
did you come here? Ethel Rossiter has never really said anything about
you. I should like to know."

Her manner had the gentle command that queens and princesses and very
rich women unconsciously acquire. I tried to obey her, but found little
to say. Uttered to her my facts were so meager. I told her of my father
and mother, of my father's mania for old books, of Louise and Victoria
and their husbands, of my visits abroad; but I felt her attention
wandering. That is, I felt she was interested not in my data, but in me.
Halifax and Canada and British army and navy life and rare first
editions were outside the range of her ken. Paris she knew; and London
she knew; but not from any point of view from which I could speak of
them. I could see she was the well-placed American who knows some of the
great English houses and all of the great English hotels, but nothing of
that Britannic backbone of which I might have been called a rib. She
broke in presently, not apropos of anything I was saying, with the
words:

"How old are you?"

I told her I was twenty-four.

"I'm twenty-nine."

I said I had understood as much from Mrs. Rossiter, but that I could
easily have supposed her no older than myself. This was true. Had there
not been that something mournful in her face which simulates maturity I
could have thought of her as nothing but a girl. If I stood in awe of
her it was only of what I guessed at as a sorrow.

She went on to give me two or three details of her life, with nearly all
of which I was familiar through hints from Hugh and Ethel Rossiter.

"We're really Philadelphians, my mother and I. We've lived a good deal
in New York, of course, and abroad. I was at school in Paris, too, at
the Convent des Abeilles." She wandered on, somewhat inconsequentially,
with facts of this sort, when she added, suddenly: "I was to have
married some one else."

I knew then that I had the clue to her thought. The marriage she had
missed was on her mind. It created an obsession or a broken heart, I
wasn't quite sure which. It was what she wanted to talk about, though
her glance fell before the spark of intelligence in mine.

[Illustration: THE MARRIAGE SHE HAD MISSED WAS ON HER MIND. IT CREATED
AN OBSESSION OR A BROKEN HEART, I WASN'T QUITE SURE WHICH]

Since there was nothing I could say in actual words, I merely murmured
sympathetically. At the same time there came to me, like the slow
breaking of a dawn, an illuminating glimpse of the great J. Howard's
life. I seemed to be admitted into its secret, into a perception of its
weak spot, more fully than his wife had any notion of. She would never,
I was sure, see what she was betraying to me from my point of view. She
would never see how she was giving him away. She wouldn't even see how
she was giving away herself--she was so sweet, and gentle, and
child-like, and unsuspecting.

I don't know for how many seconds her quiet, inconsequential speech
trickled on without my being able to follow it. I came to myself again,
as it were, on hearing her say:

"And if you do love him, oh, don't give him up!"

I grasped the fact then that I had lost something about Hugh, and did my
best to catch up with it.

"I don't mean to, if either of my conditions is fulfilled. You heard
what they were."

"Oh, but if I were you I wouldn't make them. That's where I think you're
wrong. If you love him--"

"I couldn't steal him from his family, even if I loved him."

"Oh, but it wouldn't be stealing. When two people love each other
there's nothing else to think about."

"And yet that might sometimes be dangerous doctrine."

"If there was never any danger there'd never be any courage. And courage
is one of the finest things in life."

"Yes, of course; but even courage can carry one very far."

"Nothing can carry us so far as love. I see that now. It's why I'm
anxious about poor Hugh. I--I know a man who--who loves a woman whom
he--he couldn't marry, and--" She caught herself up. "I'm fond of Hugh,
you see, even though he doesn't like me. I wish he understood, that they
all understood--that--that it isn't my fault. If I could have had my
way--" She righted herself here with a slight change of tense. "If I
could have my way, Hugh would marry the woman he's in love with and
who's in love with him."

I tried to enroll her decisively on my side.

"So that you don't agree with Mr. Brokenshire."

Her immediate response was to color with a soft, suffused rose-pink like
that of the inside of shells. Her eyes grew misty with a kind of
helplessness. She looked at me imploringly, and looked away. One might
have supposed that she was pleading with me to be let off answering.
Nevertheless, when she spoke at last, her words brought me to a new
phase of her self-revelation.

"Why aren't you afraid of him?"

"Oh, but I am."

"Yes, but not like--" Again she saved herself. "Yes, but not like--so
many people. You may be afraid of him inside, but you fight."

"Any one fights for right."

There was a repetition of the wistful smile, a little to the left corner
of the mouth.

"Oh, do they? I wish I did. Or rather I wish I had."

"It's never too late," I declared, with what was meant to be
encouragement.

There was a queer little gleam in her eye, like that which comes into
the pupil of a startled bird.

"So I've heard some one else say. I suppose it's true--but it frightens
me."

I was quite strangely uneasy. Hints of her story came back to me, but I
had never heard it completely enough to be able to piece the fragments
together. It was new for me to imagine myself called on to protect any
one--I needed protection so much for myself!--but I was moved with a
protective instinct toward her. It was rather ridiculous, and yet it was
so.

"Only one must be sure one is right before one fights, mustn't one?" was
all I could think of saying.

She responded dreamily, looking seaward.

"Don't you think there may be worse things than wrong?"

This being so contrary to my pet principles, I answered, emphatically,
that I didn't think so at all. I brought out my maxim that if you did
right nothing but right could come of it; but she surprised me by
saying, simply, "I don't believe that."

I was a little indignant.

"But it's not a matter of believing; it's one of proving, of
demonstration."

"I've done right, and wrong came of it."

"Oh, but it couldn't--not in the long run."

"Well, then I did wrong. That's what I've been afraid of, and what--what
some one else tells me." If a pet bird could look at you with a
challenging expression it was the thing she did. "Now what do you say?"

I really didn't know what to say. I spoke from instinct, and some common
sense.

"If one's done wrong, or made a mistake, I suppose the only way one can
rectify it is to begin again to do right. Right must have a rectifying
power."

"But if you've made a mistake the mistake is there, unless you go back
and unmake it. If you don't, isn't it what they call building on a bad
foundation?"

"I dare say it is; and yet you can't push a material comparison too far
when you're thinking of spiritual things. This is spiritual, isn't it? I
suppose one can't really do evil and expect good to come of it; but one
can overcome evil with good."

She looked at me with a sweet mistiness.

"I've no doubt that's true, but it's very deep. It's too deep for me."
She rose with an air of dismissing the subject, though she continued to
speak of it allusively. "You know so much about it. I could see you did
from the first. If I was to tell you the whole story--but, of course, I
can't do that. No, don't get up. I have to run away, because we're
expecting people to tea; but I should have liked staying to talk with
you. You're awfully clever, aren't you? I suppose it must be living
round in those queer places--Gibraltar, didn't you say? I've seen
Gibraltar, but only from the steamer, on the way to Naples. I felt that
I was with you from that very first time I saw you. I'd seen you before,
of course, with little Gladys, but not to notice you. I never noticed
you till I heard that Hugh was in love with you. That was just before
Mr. Brokenshire took me over--you remember!--that day. He wanted me to
see how easily he could deal with people who opposed him; but I didn't
think he succeeded very well. He made you go and sit at a distance. That
was to show you he had the power. Did you notice what I did? Oh, I'm
glad. I wanted you to understand that if it was a question of love I
was--I was with you. You saw that, didn't you? Oh, I'm glad. I must run
away now. We've people to tea; but some time, if I can manage it, I'll
come again."

She had begun slipping up the path, like a great rose-colored moth in
the greenery, when she turned to say:

"I can never do anything for you, I'm too afraid of him; but I'm on your
side."

After she had gone I began putting two and two together. What her visit
did for me especially was to distract my mind. I got a better
perspective on my own small drama in seeing it as incidental to a larger
one. That there was a large one here I had no doubt, though I could
neither seize nor outline its proportions. As far as I could judge of my
visitor I found her dazed by the magnitude of the thing that had
happened to her, whatever that was. She was good and kind; she hadn't a
thought that wasn't tender; normally she would have been the devoted,
clinging type of wife I longed to be myself; and yet some one's passion,
or some one's ambition, or both in collusion, had caught her like a bird
in a net.

It was perhaps because she was a woman and I was a woman and J. Howard
was a man that my reactions concerned themselves chiefly with him. I
thought of him throughout the afternoon. I began to get new views of
him. I wondered if he knew of himself what I knew. I supposed he did. I
supposed he must. He couldn't have been married two or three years to
this sweet stricken creature without seeing that her heart wasn't his.
Furthermore, he couldn't have beheld, as he and I had beheld that
afternoon, the hand that went up palm outward, without divining a horror
of his person that was more than a shrinking from his poor contorted
eye. For love the contorted eye would have meant more love, since it
would have been love with its cognate of pity; but not so that uplifted
hand and that instinctive waving of him back. There was more than an
involuntary repulsion in that, more than an instant of abhorrence. What
there was he must have discovered, he must have tasted, from the minute
he first took her in his arms.

I was sorry for him. I could throw enough of the masculine into my
imagination to know how he must adore a creature of such perfected
charm. She was the sort of woman men would adore, especially the men
whose ideal lies first of all in the physical. For them it would mean
nothing that she lacked mentality, that the pendulum of her nature had
only a limited swing; that she was as good as she looked would be
enough, seeing that she looked like an angel straight out of heaven. In
spite of poor J. Howard's kingly suavity I knew he must have minutes of
sheer animal despair, of fierce and bitter suffering.

Mrs. Rossiter spoke to me that evening with a suggestion of reprimand,
which was letting me off easily. I was so sure of my dismissal, that
when I returned to the house from the shore I expected some sort of
_lettre de conge_; but I found nothing. I had had supper with Gladys and
put her to bed when the maid brought me a message to say that Mrs.
Rossiter would like me to come down and see her dress, as she was going
out to dinner.

I was admiring the dress, which was a new one, when she said, rather
fretfully:

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that to father. It upsets him so."

I was adjusting a slight fullness at the back, which made it the easier
for me to answer.

"I wouldn't if he didn't talk like that to me. What can I do? I have to
say something."

She was peering into the cheval glass over her shoulder, giving her
attention to two things at once.

"I mean your saying you expected both of those preposterous things to
happen. Of course, you don't--nor either of them--and it only rubs him
up the wrong way."

I was too meek now to argue the point. Besides, I was preoccupied with
the widening interests in which I found myself involved. To probe the
security of my position once more, I said:

"I wonder you stand it--that you don't send me away."

She was still twisting in front of the cheval glass.

"Don't you think that shoulder-strap is loose? It really looks as if the
whole thing would slip off me. If he can stand it I can," she added, as
a matter of secondary concern.

"Oh, then he can stand it." I felt the shoulder-strap. "No, I think it's
all right, if you don't wriggle too much."

"I'm sure it's going to come down--and there I shall be. He has to stand
it, don't you see, or let you think that you wound him?"

I was frankly curious.

"Do 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/35463