The High Heart

by Basil King

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 naïve 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 Prætorium.

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.