The High Heart.
by Basil King.
CHAPTER I
I could not have lived in the Brokenshire circle for nearly a year without recognizing the fact that in the eyes of his family J. Howard, as he was commonly called by the world, was the Great Dispenser; but my first intimation that he meant to act in that capacity toward me came from Larry Strangways, on a bright July morning during the summer of 1913, when we were at Newport.
I was crossing the lawn, going toward the sea, with little Gladys Rossiter, to whom I acted as companion in the hours when she was out of the nursery, with a specific duty to speak French. Larry Strangways was tutor to the Rossiter boy, and in our relative positions we were bound to exercise toward each other a good deal of discretion. We fraternized with constraint. We fraternized because--well, chiefly because we couldn"t help it. In the mocking flare of his eye, which contradicted the a.s.sumed young gravity of his manner, I read an opinion of the Rossiter household and of the Brokenshire family in general similar to my own. That would have been enough for mutual comprehension had there been no instinctive sympathies between us; but there were. Allowing for the fact that we were of different nationalities, we had the same kind of antecedents; we spoke the same kind of social language; we had the same kind of aims in life. Neither of us regarded the position in the Rossiter establishment as a permanent status. He was a tutor merely for the minute, while feeling his way to that first rung of the ladder which I was convinced would lead him to some high place in American life. I was a nursery governess only on the way to getting married. Matrimony was the continent toward which more or less consciously I had been traveling for five or six years, without having actually descried a port. In this connection I may relate a little incident which had taken place between myself and Mrs. Rossiter after I had accepted my situation in her family. It will r.e.t.a.r.d my meeting with Larry Strangways on the lawn, but it will throw light on it when it comes.
I had met Mrs. Rossiter, who was J. Howard Brokenshire"s daughter, in the way that is known as socially. I never understood why she should have taken a house for the summer in our quiet old town of Halifax, unless she was urged to it by the vague restlessness which was one of her characteristics. But there she was in a roomy old brick mansion I had known all my life, with gardens and conservatories and lawns running down to the fiord or back-harbor which we call the Northwest Arm, and a fine English air of seclusion. In our easy, neighborly way she was well received, and made herself agreeable. She flirted with the officers of both Army and Navy enough to create talk without raising scandal; and she was sufficiently good-natured to be civil to us girls, among whom she singled me out for attentions. I attributed this kindness to our recent bereavement and financial crash, which had left me poor after twenty-four years of comfort, and was proportionately grateful. It was partly grat.i.tude, and partly a natural love of children, and partly a special affection for the exquisite thing herself, that drew me to little Gladys Rossiter, to playing with her on the lawns, and rowing her on the Arm, and--as I had been for three or four years at school in Paris--dropping into a habit of lisping French to her. As the child liked me the mother left her more and more to my care, gaining thus the greater scope for her innocuous flirtations.
It was toward the end of the summer that Mrs. Rossiter began to sigh, "I don"t know how I shall ever tear Gladys away from you," and, "I do wish you were coming with us."
I wished it in a way myself, since I was rather at a loss as to what to do. I had never expected to have to earn a living; I had expected to get married. My two elder sisters, Louise and Victoria, had married easily enough, the one in the Navy, the other in the Army; but with me suitors seemed to lag. They came and saw--but they never went far enough for conquest. I couldn"t understand it. I was not stupid; I was not ugly; and I was generally spoken of as having charm. But there was the fact that I was twenty-four, with scarcely a penny, and drawing nearer and nearer to the end of my expedients. I was not without some social experience, having kept house in a generous way for my widowed father, till his death, some two years before the summer when I met Mrs.
Rossiter, brought with it our financial collapse. If he hadn"t left a lot of old books--_Canadiana_, the pamphlets were called--and rare first editions of all kinds, which I took over to London and sold at Sothbey"s, I shouldn"t have had enough on which to dress. This business being settled, I stayed as long as I decently could with Louise at Southsea and Victoria at Gibraltar; but no man asked me to marry him during the course of either visit. Had there been a sign of any such possibility the sisters would have put themselves out to keep me; but as nothing warranted them in doing so they let me go. An uncle and aunt having offered to give me shelter for a time at Halifax, there was nothing left for it but to go back and renew the search for my fortunes in my native town.
When, therefore, Mrs. Rossiter, in her pretty, helpless way said to me one day, "Why shouldn"t you come with me, dear Miss Adare?" I jumped inwardly at the opportunity, though I smiled and replied in an offhand manner, "Oh, that would have to be discussed."
Mrs. Rossiter admitted the truth of this observation somewhat pensively.
I know now that I took her up with too much prompt.i.tude.
"Yes, of course," she returned, absently, and the subject was dropped.
It was taken up again, however, and our bargain made. On Mrs. Rossiter"s part it was made astutely, not in the matter of money, but in the way in which she shifted me from the position of a friend into that of a retainer. It was done with the most perfect tact, but it was done. I had no complaint to make. What she wanted was a nursery governess. My own first preoccupations were food and shelter for which I should not be dependent on my kin. We came to the incident I am about to relate very gradually; but when we did come to it I had no difficulty in seeing that it had been in the back of Mrs. Rossiter"s mind from the first. It had been the cause of that second thought on the day when I had taken her up too readily.
She began by telling me about her father. Beyond the fact that some man who seemed to be specially well informed would occasionally say with awe, "She"s J. Howard Brokenshire"s daughter," I knew nothing whatever about him. But I began to see him now as the central sun round whom all the Brokenshires revolved. They revolved round him, not so much from adoration or even from natural affection as from some tremendous rotary force to which there was no resistance.
Up to this time I had heard no more of American life than American life had heard of me. The great country south of our border was scarcely on my map. The Halifax in which I was born and grew up was not the bustling Canadian port, dependent on its hinterland, it is to-day; it was an outpost of England, with its face always turned to the Atlantic and the east. My own face had been turned the same way. My home had been literally a jumping-off place, in that when we left it we never expected to go in any but the one direction. I had known Americans when they came into our midst as summer visitors, but only in the way one knows the stars which dawn and fade and leave no trace of their pa.s.sage on actual happenings.
In the course of Mrs. Rossiter"s confidences I began to see a vast cosmogony beyond my own personal sun, with J. Howard Brokenshire as the pivot of the new universe. With a curious little shock of surprise I discovered that there could be other solar systems besides the one to which I was accustomed, and that Canada was not the whole of North America. It was like looking through a telescope which Mrs. Rossiter held to my eye, a telescope through which I saw the nebular evidence of an immense society, wealthy, confused, more intellectual than our own, but more provincial too, perhaps; more isolated, more timid, more conservative, less instinct with the great throb of national and international impulse which all of us feel who live on the imperial red line and, therefore, less daring, but interesting all the same. I began to glow with the spirit of adventure. My position as a nursery governess presented the opportunities not merely of a Livingstone or a Stanley, but of a Galileo or a Copernicus.
I learned that Mrs. Rossiter"s mother had been a Miss Brew, and that the Brews were a great family in Boston. She was the mother of all Mr.
Brokenshire"s children. By looks and hints and sighs I gathered from Mrs. Rossiter that her father"s second marriage had been a trial to his family. Not that there had been any social descent. On the contrary, the present Mrs. Brokenshire had been Editha Billing, of Philadelphia, and there could be nothing better than that. It was a question of fitness, of necessity, of age. "There was no need for him to marry again at all,"
Mrs. Rossiter complained. "If she"d only been a middle-aged woman," she said to me later, "we might not have felt. . . . But she"s younger than Mildred and only a year or two older than I am." "Oh yes," was another remark, "she"s pretty; very pretty . . . but I often--wonder."
She described her brothers and her sister by degrees. One day she told me about Mildred, another about Jack, so coming toward her point.
Mildred was the eldest of the family, a great invalid. She had been thrown from her horse years before while hunting in England, and had injured her spine. Jack had just gone into business with his father, and had married Pauline Gray, of Baltimore. Though she didn"t say it in so many words I judged that it was not a happy marriage in the highest sense--that Jack was somewhat light of love, while Pauline "went her own way" to a degree that made her talked about. It was not till the day before her departure for New York that Mrs. Rossiter mentioned her younger brother, Hugh.
I was helping her to pack--that is, I was helping the maid while Mrs.
Rossiter directed. Just at that minute, however, she was standing up, shaking out the folds of an evening dress. She seemed to peep at me round its garnishings as she said, apropos of nothing:
"There"s my brother Hugh. He"s the youngest of us all--just twenty-six.
He has no occupation as yet--he"s just studying languages and things. My father wants him to go into diplomacy." As I caught her eye there was a smile in it, but a special kind of smile. It was the smile to go with the sensible, kindly, coaxing inflection with which she said, "You"ll leave him alone, won"t you?"
I took the dress out of her hand to carry it to the maid in the next room.
"Leave him alone--how?"
She flushed to a lovely pink.
"Oh, you know what I mean. I don"t have to explain."
"You mean that in my position in the household it will be for me to--to keep out of his way?"
"It"s you who put it like that, dear Miss Adare--"
"But it"s the way you want me to put it?"
"Well, if I admit that it is?"
"Then I don"t think I care for the place."
"What?"
I stated my position more simply.
"If I"m to have nothing to do with your brother, Mrs. Rossiter, I don"t want to go."
In the audacity of this response she saw something that amused her, for, s.n.a.t.c.hing the dress from my hand, she ran with it into the next room, laughing.
During the following winter in New York and the early summer of the next year in Newport I saw a good deal of Mr. Hugh Brokenshire, but never with any violent restriction on the part of Mrs. Rossiter. I say violent with intention, for she did intervene when she could do so. Only once did I hear that she knew he was kind to me, and that was from Larry Strangways. It was an observation he had overheard as it pa.s.sed from Mrs. Rossiter to her husband, and which, in the spirit of our silent _camaraderie_, he thought it right to hand along.
"I can"t be responsible for Hugh!" Mrs. Rossiter had said. "He"s old enough to look after himself. If he wants a row with father he must have it; and he seems to me in a fair way to get it. If he does it will be his own fault; it won"t be Miss Adare"s."
Fortified by this acquittal, I went on my way as quietly as I could, though I cannot say I was free from perturbation.
Perturbation caught me like a whiff of wind as I saw Larry Strangways deflect from his course across the lawn and come in my direction. I knew he wouldn"t have done that unless he felt himself authorized; and nothing could give him the authorization but something in the way of a message or command. To all observers we were strangers. We should have been strangers even to each other had it not been for that freemasonry of caste, that secret mutual comprehension, which transcends speech and opportunities of meeting, and which, on our part, at least, had little expression beyond smiles and flying glances.
Of course he was good-looking. It has often seemed to me the privilege of ineligible men to be tall and slim and straight, with just such a flash in the eye and just such a beam about the mouth as belonged to Larry Strangways. Instinct had told me from the first that it would be wise for me to avoid him, while prudence, as I have hinted, gave him the same indication to keep at a distance from me. Luckily he didn"t live in the house, but in lodgings in the town. We hardly ever met face to face, and then only under the eye of Mrs. Rossiter when each of us marshaled a pupil to lunch or to tea.
As the collie at his heels and the wire-haired terrier at ours made a bee-line for each other the children kept them company, which gave us s.p.a.ce for those few minutes of privacy the occasion apparently demanded.
Though he lifted his hat formally, and did his best to preserve the decorum of our official situations, the prank in his eye flung out that signal to which I could never do anything but respond.
"I"ve a message for you, Miss Adare."
I managed to stammer out the word "Indeed?" I couldn"t be surprised, and yet I could hardly stand erect from fear.
He glanced at the children to make sure they were out of earshot.
"It"s from the great man himself--indirectly."
I was so near to collapse that I could only say, "Indeed?" again, though I rallied sufficiently to add, "I didn"t know he was aware of my existence."
"Apparently he wasn"t--but he is now. He desires you--I give you the verb as Spellman, the secretary, pa.s.sed it on to me--he desires you to be in the breakfast loggia here at three this afternoon."
I could barely squeak the words out: