The High Heart Part 14

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 embarra.s.sment 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 apt.i.tudes, 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 _ la_ Louis Quinze, she made me think of that Jeanne Bcu 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 pa.s.sions 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?"