The High Heart Part 9

"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 gra.s.s, 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 a.s.set--yes; but you do it alone. No one else pays it any attention."

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