The High Heart

by Basil King

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 à la Louis Quinze, she made me think of that Jeanne Bécu 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."