The High Heart

by Basil King

CHAPTER XI

The steps by which I came to be Stacy Grainger's librarian could easily be traced, though to do so with much detail would be tedious.

After Hugh's departure for New York my position with Mrs. Rossiter soon became untenable. The reports that reached Newport of the young man's doings in the city were not merely galling to the family pride, but maddening to his father's sense of pre-eminence. Hugh was actually going from door to door, as you might say, in Wall Street and Broad Street, only to be turned away.

"He's making the most awful fool of himself," Mrs. Rossiter informed me one morning, "and papa's growing furious. Jim writes that every one is laughing at him, and, of course, they know it's all about some girl."

I held my tongue at this. That they should be laughing at poor Hugh was a new example of the world's falsity. His letters to me were only a record of half-promises and fair speeches, but he found every one of them encouraging. Nowhere had he met with the brutal treatment he had received at the hands of Cousin Andrew Brew. The minute his card went in to never so great a banker or broker, he was received with a welcome. If no one had just the right thing to offer him, no one had turned him down. It was explained to him that it was largely a matter of the off season—for his purpose August was the worst month in the year—and of the lack of an opening which it would be worth the while of a man of his quality to fill. Later, perhaps! The two words, courteously spoken, gave the gist of all his interviews. He had every reason to feel satisfied.

In the mean while he was comfortable at his club—his cash in hand would hold out to Christmas and beyond—and in the matter of energy, he wrote, not a mushroom was springing in his tracks. He was on the job early and late, day in and day out. The off season which was obviously a disadvantage in some respects had its merits in others, since it would be known, when things began to look up again, that he was available for any big house that could get him. That there would be competition in this respect every one had given him to understand. All this he told me in letters as full of love as they were of business, written in a great, sprawling, unformed, boyish hand, and with an occasional bit of phonetic spelling which made his protestations the more touching.

But Jim Rossiter's sources of information were of another kind.

"Get your father to do something to stop him," he wrote to his wife. "He's making the whole house of Meek & Brokenshire a laughing-stock."

There came, in fact, a Saturday when Mr. Rossiter actually appeared for the week-end.

"He wouldn't be doing that," Mrs. Rossiter almost sobbed to me, on receipt of the telegram announcing his approach, "unless things were pretty bad."

Though I dreaded his coming, I was speedily reassured. Whatever the object of Mr. Rossiter's visit, I, in my own person, had nothing to do with it. On the afternoon of his arrival he came out to where I was knocking the croquet balls about with Gladys on the lawn, and was as polite as he had been through the winter in New York. He was always polite even to the maids, to whom he scrupulously said good-morning. His wistful desire to be liked by every one was inspired by the same sort of impulse as the jovial bonhomie of Cousin Andrew Brew. He was a little, weazened man, with face and legs like a jockey, which I think he would gladly have been. Racin' and ridin', as he called them, were the amusements in which he found most pleasure, while his health was his chief preoccupation. He took pills before and after all his meals and a variety of medicinal waters. During the winter under his roof my own conversation with him had been entirely on the score of his complaints.

In just the same way he sauntered up now. He talked of his lack of appetite and the beastly cooking at clubs. Expecting him to broach the subject of Hugh, I got myself ready; but he did nothing of the kind. He was merely amiable and, as far as I could judge, indifferent. Within ten minutes he had sauntered away again, leading Gladys by the hand.

I saw then that in common with the other Brokenshires he considered that I didn't count. Hugh could be dealt with independently of me. So long as I was useful to his wife, there was no reason why I should be disturbed. I was too light a thing to be weighed in their balances.

Next day there was a grand family council and on Monday Jack Brokenshire accompanied his brother-in-law to New York. Hugh wrote me of their threats and flatteries, their beseechings and cajoleries. He was to come to his senses; he was to be decent to his father; he was to quit being a fool. I gathered that for forty-eight hours they had put him through most of the tortures known to fraternal inquisition; but he wrote me he would bear it all and more, for the sake of winning me.

Nor would he allow them to have everything their own way. That he wrote me, too. When it came to the question of marriage he bade them look at home. Each of them was an instance of what J. Howard could do in the matrimonial line, and what a mess he and they had made of it! He asked Jack in so many words how much he would have been in love with Pauline Gray if she hadn't had a big fortune, and, now that he had got her money and her, how true he was to his compact. Who were Trixie Delorme and Baby Bevan, he demanded, with a knowledge of Jack's affairs which compelled the elder brother to tell him to mind his own business.

Hugh laughed scornfully at that.

"I can mind my own business, Jack, and still keep an eye on yours, seeing that you and Pauline are the talk of the town. If she doesn't divorce you within the next five years, it will be because you've already divorced her. Even that won't be as big a scandal as your going on living together."

Mr. Rossiter intervened on this and did his best to calm the younger brother down:

"Ah, cut that out now, Hugh!"

But Hugh rounded on him, shaking off the hand that had been laid on his arm.

"You're a nice one, Jim, to come with your mealy-mouthed talk to me. Look at Ethel! If I'd married a woman as you married her—or if I'd been married as she married you—just because your father was a partner in Meek & Brokenshire and it was well to keep the money in the family—if I'd done that I'd shut up. I'd consider myself too low-down a cur to be kicked. What kind of a wife is Ethel to you? What kind of a husband are you to her? What kind of a father do you make to the children who hardly know you by sight? And now, just because I'm trying to be a man, and decent, and true to the girl I love, you come sneaking round to tell me she's not good enough. What do I care whether she's good enough or not, so long as she isn't like Ethel and Pauline? You can go back and tell them so."

Jack Brokenshire came back, but I think he kept this confidence to himself. What he told, however, was enough to produce a good deal of gloom in the family. Though Mrs. Rossiter didn't cease to be nice to me in her non-committal way, I began to reason that there were limits even to indifference. I had made up my mind to go and was working out some practical way of going, when an incident hastened my departure.

Doing an errand one day for Mrs. Rossiter in the shopping part of Bellevue Avenue, I saw old Mrs. Billing going by in an open motor landaulette. She signaled to me to stop, and, poking the chauffeur in the back through the open window, made him draw up at the curb.

"I've got something for you," she said, without other form of greeting. She began to stir things round in her bag. "I thought you'd like it. I've been carrying it about with me for the last three or four days—ever since Jack Brokenshire got back from New York. Where the dickens is the thing? Ah, here!" She handed me out a crumpled card. "That's all, Antoine," she continued to the man. "Drive on."

I was left with the card in my hand, finding it to be an advertisement for the Hotel Mary Chilton, a place of entertainment for women alone, in a central and reputable part of New York.

By the time I got back to Mrs. Rossiter's I had solved what had at first been a puzzle, and, having reported on my errand, I gave my resignation verbally. I saw then—what old Mrs. Billing had also seen—that it was time. Mrs. Rossiter expressed no relief, but she made no attempt to dissuade me. That she was sorry she allowed me to see. She didn't speak of Hugh; but on the morning when I went she gave up her engagements to stay at home with me. As I said good-by she threw her arms round my neck and kissed me. I could feel on my cheek tears of hers as well as tears of my own, as I drew down my veil.

Hugh met me at the station in New York, and we dined at a restaurant together. He came for me next morning, and we lunched and dined at restaurants again. When we did the same on the third day that sense of being in a false position which had been with me from the first, and which argument couldn't counteract, began to be disquieting. On the fourth day I tried to make excuses and remain at the hotel, but when he insisted I was obliged to let him take me out once more. The people at the Mary Chilton were kindly, but I was afraid they would regard me with suspicion. I was afraid of some other things, besides.

For one thing I was afraid of Hugh. He began again to plead with me to marry him. Even he admitted that we couldn't continue to "go round together like that." We went to the most expensive restaurants, he argued, where there were plenty of people who would know him. When they saw him every day with a girl they didn't know, they would draw their own conclusions. As in a situation similar to theirs I would have drawn my own, I brought my bit of Bohemianism to a speedy end.

There followed some days during which it seemed to me I was deprived of any outlook. I could hardly see what I was there for. I could hardly see what I was living for. Never till then had I realized how, in normal conditions, each day is linked to the day before as well as to the morrow. Here the link was gone. I left nothing undone when I went to bed; I had nothing to get up for in the morning. My reason for existing had suddenly been snuffed out.

It was a time for the testing of my faith. I was near the end of my cul-de-sac, and yet I saw no further development ahead. If the continuous unfolding of right on which, to use Larry Strangways's expression, I had banked, were to come to a stop, I should be left not only without a duty, but without a law. Of the two possibilities it was the latter I dreaded most. One can live if one has a motive theory within one; without it— And then, just as I was coming to the last stretches of what seemed a blind alley and no more, my confidence was justified. Larry Strangways called on me.

I have not said that on coming to New York I had decided to let my acquaintance with him end. He made me uneasy. I was terrified by the thought that he might be in love with me. Why I was terrified I didn't know; I only knew I was. I did not tell him, therefore, when I left Mrs. Rossiter; and in the whirlpool of New York I considered that I was swallowed up. But here was his card, and he himself waiting in the drawing-room below.

Naturally my first question was as to how he had found me out. This he laughed off, pretending to be annoyed with me for coming to the city without telling him. I could see, however, that he was in spirits much too high to allow of his being seriously annoyed with anything. Life promised well with him. He enjoyed his work, and for his employer he had that eager personal devotion which is always a herald of success. After having run away from him, as it were, I was now a little irritated at seeing that he hadn't missed me.

But he did not take his leave without a bit of information that puzzled me beyond expression. He was going out of Mr. Grainger's office that morning, he said, with a bundle of letters which he was to answer, when his master observed, casually:

"The young lady of whom you spoke to me as qualified to take Miss Davis's place is at the Hotel Mary Chilton. Go and see her and get her opinion as to accepting the job!"

I was what the French call atterrée—knocked flat.

"But how on earth could he know?"

Larry Strangways laughed.

"Oh, don't ask me. He knows anything he wants to know. He's got the flair of a detective. I don't try to fathom him. But the point is that the position is there for you to take or to leave."

I tried to bring my mind back from the fact that this important man, a total stranger to me, was in some way interested in my destiny.

"What can I do but leave it, when I know no more about it than I do of sailing a ship?"

"Oh yes, you do. You know what books are, and you know what rare books are. For the rest, all you'd have to do would be to consult the catalogue. I don't know what the duties are; but if Miss Davis is up to them I guess you would be, too. She's a sweet, pretty kitten of a thing—daughter of one of Stacy Grainger's old pals who came to grief—but I don't believe she knows much more about a book than the cover from the print. Anyhow, I've given you the message with neither more nor less than he said. Look here!" he exclaimed, suddenly. "Why shouldn't you put on your hat and walk down the street with me, so that I could show you where the library is? It's not ten minutes away. I've never been inside it, but every one knows what it looks like."

Consulting my wrist-watch, I objected that it was but twenty minutes to the time when Hugh was due to come and take me to walk in Central Park, returning to the hotel to tea.

"Oh, let him go to the deuce! We can be there and back in twenty minutes, and you can leave a message for him at the office."

So we started. The Mary Chilton is in one of the cross-streets between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. I discovered that Stacy Grainger's house was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and a corresponding cross-street a little farther down-town. It is a big brownstone house, in the eighteen-seventy style, of the type which all round it has been turned into offices and shops. All its many windows were blinded in a yellowish holland staff, giving to the whole building an aspect sealed and dead.

I shuddered.

"I hope I shouldn't have to work there."

"No. The house has been shut up for years." He named the hotel overlooking the Park at which Stacy Grainger actually lived. "Anybody else would have sold the place; but he has a lot of queer sentiment about him. Of the two or three devotions in his life one of the most intense is to his father's memory. I believe the old fellow committed suicide in that house, and the son hallows it as he would a grave."

"Cheerful!"

"Oh, cheerful isn't the word one would associate with him first—"

"Or last, apparently."

"No, or last; but he's got other qualities to which cheerfulness is as small change to gold. All I want you to see is that he keeps this property, which is worth half a million at the least, from motives which the immense majority wouldn't understand. It gives you a clue to the man."

"But what I want," I said, with nervous flippancy, for I was afraid of meeting Hugh, "is a clue to the library."

"There it is."

"That?"

He had pointed to a small, low, rectangular building I had seen a hundred times, without the curiosity to wonder what it was. It stood behind the house, in the center of a grass-plot, and was approached from the cross-street, through a small wrought-iron gate. Built of brownstone, without a window, and with no other ornament than a frieze in relief below the eave, it suggested a tomb. At the back was a kind of covered cloister connecting with the house.

"If I had to sit in there all day," I commented, as we turned back toward the hotel, "I should feel as if I were buried alive. I know that strange things would happen to me!"

"Oh no, they wouldn't. It's sure to be all right or a pretty little thing like Miss Davis couldn't have stood it for three years. It's lighted from the top, and there are a lot of fine things scattered about."

He gave me a brief history of how the collection had been formed. The elder Grainger on coming to New York had bought up the contents of two or three great European sales en bloc. He knew little about the objects he had thus acquired, and cared less. His motive was simply that of the rich American to play the nobleman.

He was still talking of this when Hugh passed us and turned round. Between the two men there was a stiff form of greeting. That is, it was stiff on Larry Strangways's side, while on Hugh's it was the nearest thing to no greeting at all. I could see he considered the tutor of his sister's son beneath him.

"What the devil were you walking with that fellow for?" he asked, after Mr. Strangways had left us and while we were continuing our way up-town. He spoke, wonderingly rather than impatiently.

"Because he had come from a gentleman who had offered me employment. I had just gone down with him to look at the outside of the house."

I could hardly be surprised that Hugh should stop abruptly, forcing the stream of foot-passengers to divide into two currents about us.

"The impertinent bounder! Offer employment—to you—my—my wife!"

I walked on with dignity.

"You mustn't call me that, Hugh. It's a word only to be used in its exact signification." He began to apologize, but I interrupted. "I'm not only not your wife, but as yet I haven't even promised to marry you. We must keep that fact unmistakably clear before us. It will prevent possible complications in the end."

He spoke humbly:

"What sort of complications?"

"I don't know; but I can see they might arise. And as for the matter of employment, I must have it for a lot of reasons."

"I don't see that. Give me two or three months, Alix!"

"But it's precisely during those two or three months, Hugh, that I should be left high and dry. Unless I have something to do I have no motive for staying here in New York."

"What about me?"

"I can't stay just to see you. That's the difference between a woman and a man. The situation is awkward enough as it is; but if I were to go on living here for two or three months, merely for the sake of having a few hours every day with you—"

Before we reached the Park he saw the justice of my argument. Remembering what Larry Strangways had once said as to Hugh's belief that he was stooping to pick his diamond out of the mire, I reasoned that since he was marrying a working-girl it would best preserve the decencies if the working-girl were working. For this procedure Hugh himself was able to establish precedent, since we were in sight of the very hotel where Libby Jaynes had rubbed men's nails up to within an hour or two of her marriage to Tracy Allen. He pointed it out as if it was an historic monument, and in the same spirit I gazed at it.

That matter settled, I attacked another as we advanced farther into the Park.

"And Mr. Strangways is not a bounder, Hugh, darling. I wish you wouldn't call him that."

His response was sufficiently good-natured, but it expressed that Brokenshire disdain for everything that didn't have money which specially enraged me.

"Well, I won't," he conceded. "I don't care a hang what he is."

"I do," I declared, with some tartness. "I care that he's a gentleman and that he's treated as one."

"Oh, every one's a gentleman."

"No, Hugh, every one isn't. I know men right here in New York who could buy and sell Mr. Strangways a thousand times, perhaps a million times over, and who wouldn't be worthy to valet him."

His small wide-apart blue eyes were turned on me questioningly.

"You don't know many men right here in New York. Who do you mean?"

I saw that he had me there and, not wishing to be driven into a corner, I beat a shuffling retreat.

"I don't mean any one in particular. I'm speaking in general." As we had reached an empty bench and the afternoon was hot, I suggested that we sit down.

We had been silent a little while, when he asked the question I had been expecting.

"Who was the person who offered you the—the—" I saw how he hated the word—"the employment?"

I had already decided to betray no knowledge of matters which didn't concern me.

"It's a Mr. Grainger," I said, as casually as I could.

As he sat close to me I could feel him start.

"Not Stacy Grainger?"

I maintained my tone of indifference.

"I think that is his name. Do you know him? He seems to be some one of importance."

"Oh, he is."

"Mr. Strangways has gone to him as secretary and, I suppose, knowing that I was out of a situation, he must have mentioned me."

"For what?"

"As I understand it, it's librarian. It seems that this Mr. Grainger has quite a collection—"

"Oh yes, I know." As he remained silent for some time I waited for him to raise objections, but he only said at last: "In that case you wouldn't have much to do with him. He's never there."

"No, I fancy not," I hastened to agree, and Hugh said no more.

He said no more, but I could see that it was because he was wrestling with a subject of which he couldn't perceive the bearings. As far as I was concerned he plainly considered it wise not to tell me that which, as a stranger and a foreigner, I wouldn't be likely to know. He consequently dropped the topic, and when he talked again it was of trivial things.

A half-hour later, as we were on our way homeward, he exclaimed, suddenly, and apropos of nothing at all:

"Little Alix, if you were to love anybody else I'd—I'd shoot myself."

His innocent, boyish, inexperienced face wore such a look of misery that I laughed. I laughed to conceal the fact that I was near to crying.

"Oh no, you wouldn't, Hugh. Besides, you don't see any likelihood of my doing it."

"I'm not so sure about that," he grumbled.

"Well, I am, Hugh, dear." I laughed again. "I've no intention of loving any one else—till I've settled my account with your father."