Of all the things that had been said to me this was the most disturbing.
It had seemed to me hitherto that the essence of my duty lay in marrying Hugh. If I married him, I argued, I should have done my best to make up to him for all he had undergone for my sake. I saw myself as owing him a debt. The refusal to pay it would have implied a kind of moral bankruptcy. Considering myself solvent, and also considering myself honest, I felt I had no choice. Since I could pay, I must pay. The reasoning was the more forcible because I liked Hugh and was grateful to him. I could be tolerably happy with him, and would make him a good wife.
To make him a good wife I had choked back everything I had ever felt for Larry Strangways; I had submitted to all the Brokenshire repressions; I had made myself humble and small before Hugh and his father, and accepted the status of a Libby Jaynes. My heart cried out like any other woman"s heart--it cried out for my country in the hour of its stress; it cried out for my home in what I tried to make the hour of my happiness; when it caught me unawares it cried out for the man I loved. But all this I mastered as our Canadian men were mastering their longings and regrets on saying their good-bys. What was to be done was to be done, and done willingly. Willingly I meant to marry Hugh, not because he was the man I would have chosen before all others, but because, when no one else in the world was giving me a thought, he had had the astonishing goodness to choose me. And now--
With Mrs. Brokenshire the situation was different. She believed I was in love with Hugh and that the others were doing me a wrong. Moreover, she informed me one day that I was making my way in Newport. People who noticed me once noticed me again. The men beside whom I sat at the occasional lunches and dinners I attended often spoke of me to the hostess on going away, and there could be no better sign than that. They said that, though I "wasn"t long on looks," I had ideas and knew how to express them. She ventured to hope that this kindly opinion might, in the end, soften Mr. Brokenshire.
"Do you mean that he isn"t softened as it is?"
She answered, indirectly:
"He"s not accustomed to be forced--and he feels I"ve forced him."
It was her first reference to what she had done for Hugh and me. In its way it gave me permission to say:
"But isn"t it a question of the _quid pro quo_? If you granted him something for something he granted you in return--"
But the expression on her face forbade my going on. I have never seen such a parting to human lips, or so haunting, so lost a look in human eyes. It told me everything. It was a confession of all the things she never could have said. "Better is it," says the Book of Ecclesiastes, "that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay."
She had vowed and not paid. She had got her price and hadn"t fulfilled her bargain. She couldn"t; she never would. It was beyond her. The big moneyed man who at that minute was helping to finance a good part of Europe, who was a power not only in a city or a country, but the world, had been tricked by a woman; and I in my poor little person was the symbol of his discomfiture.
No wonder he found it hard to forgive me! No wonder that whenever I came where he was he treated me to some kindly hint or correction which was no sufficient veil for his scorn! As I had never to my knowledge been hated by any one, it was terrible to feel myself an object of abhorrence to a man of such high standing in the world. Our eyes couldn"t meet without my seeing that his pa.s.sions were seething to the boiling-point.
If he could have struck me dead with a look I think he would have done it. And I didn"t hate him; I was too sorry for him. I could have liked him if he had let me.
I had, consequently, much to think about. I thought and I prayed. It was not a minute at which to do anything hurriedly. To a spirit so hot as mine it would have been a relief to lash out at them all; but, as I had checked myself hitherto, I checked myself again. I reasoned that if I kept close to right, right would take care of me. Not being a theologian, I felt free to make some closeness of ident.i.ty between right and G.o.d. I might have defined right as G.o.d in action, or G.o.d as right in conjunction with omnipotence, intelligence, and love; but I had no need for exactness of terms. In keeping near to right I knew I must be near to G.o.d: and near to G.o.d I could let myself go so far that no power on earth would seem strong enough to save me--and yet I should be saved.
I went on then with a kind of fearlessness. If I was to marry Hugh I was convinced that I should be supported; if not, I was equally convinced that something would hold me back.
"If anything should happen," I said to Cissie Boscobel one day, "I want you to look after Hugh."
The dawn seemed to break over her, though she only said, tremulously:
"Happen--how?"
"I don"t know. Perhaps nothing will. But if it does--"
She slipped away, doubtless so as not to hear more.
And then one evening, when I was not thinking especially about it, the Cloud came down on the Mountain; the voice spoke out of it, and my course was made plain.
But before that night I also had received a cablegram. It was from my sister Louise, to say that the _King Arthur_, her husband"s ship, had been blown up in the North Sea, and that he was among the lost.
So the call was coming to me more sharply than I had yet heard it. With Lady Cecilia"s example in mind, I said little to those about me beyond mentioning the fact. I suppose they showed me as much sympathy as the sweeping away of a mere brother-in-law demanded. They certainly said they were sorry, and hinted that that was what nations let themselves in for when they were so rash as to go to war.
"Think we"d ever expose our fellows like that?" was Hugh"s comment. "Not on your life!"
But they didn"t make a heroine of me as they did with Lady Cissie; not that I cared about that. I only hoped that the fact that my brother-in-law"s name was in all the American accounts of the incident would show them that I belonged to some one, and that some one belonged to me. If it did I never perceived it. Perhaps the loss of a mere captain in the navy was a less gallant occurrence than the death in action of a Lord Leatherhead; perhaps we were already getting used to the toll of war; but, whatever the reason, Lady Cissie was still, to all appearances, the only sufferer. Within a day or two a black dress was my sole reminder that the _King Arthur_ had gone down; and, even to Hugh, I made no further reference to the catastrophe.
And then came the evening when, as Larry Strangways said on my telling him about it, "the fat was all in the fire."
It was the occasion of what had become the annual dinner at Mr.
Brokenshire"s in honor of Mrs. Billing--a splendid function. Nothing short of a splendid function would have satisfied the old lady, who had the gift of making even the great afraid of her. The event was the more magnificent for the reason that, in addition to the mother of the favorite, a number of brother princes of finance, in Newport for conference with our host, were included among the guests. Of these one was staying in the house, one with the Jack Brokenshires, and two at a hotel. I was seated between the two who were at the hotel because they were socially unimportant. Even Mr. Brokenshire had sometimes to extend his domestic hospitality to business friends for the sake of business, when perhaps he should have preferred to show his attentions in clubs.
The chief scene, if I may so call it, was played to the family alone in Mildred"s sitting-room, after the guests had gone; but there was a curtain-raiser at the dinner-table before the a.s.sembled company. I give bits of the conversation, not because they were important, but because of what they led up to.
We were twenty-four, seated on great Italian chairs, which gave each of us the feeling of being a sovereign on a throne. It took all the men of the establishment, as well as those gathered in from the Jack Brokenshires" and Mrs. Rossiter"s, to wait on us, a detail by which in the end I profited. The gold service had been sent down from the vaults in New York, so that the serving-plates were gold, as well as the plates for some of the other courses. Gold vases and bowls held the roses that adorned the table, and gold spoons and forks were under our hands. It was the first time I had ever been able to notice with my own eyes how nearly the rich American can rival the state of kings and emperors.
It goes without saying that all the women had put on their best, and that the jewels were as precious metals in the days of Solomon; they were "nothing accounted of." Diamonds flashed, rubies broke out in fire, and emeralds said unspeakable things all up and down the table; the rows and ropes and circlets of pearls made one think of the gates of Paradise. I was the only one not so bedecked, getting that contrast of simplicity which is the compensation of the poor. The ring Hugh had given me, a sapphire set in diamonds, was my only ornament; and yet the neat austerity of my black evening frock rendered me conspicuous.
It also goes without saying that I had no right to be conspicuous, being the person of least consequence at the board. Mr. Brokenshire not only felt that himself, but he liked me to feel it; and he not only liked me to feel it, but he liked others to see that his great, broad spirit admitted me among his family and friends from n.o.ble promptings of tolerance. I was expected to play up to this generosity and to present the foil of humility to the glory of the other guests and the beauty of the table decorations.
In general I did this, and had every intention of doing it again.
Nothing but what perhaps were the solecisms of my immediate neighbors caused my efforts to miscarry. I had been informed by Mrs. Brokenshire beforehand that they were socially dull, that one of them was "awful,"
and that my powers would be taxed to keep them in conversation. My mettle being up, I therefore did my best.
The one who was awful proved to be a Mr. Samuel Russky, whose claim to be present sprang from the fact that he was a member of a house that had the power to lend a great deal of money. He was a big man, of a mingled Slavic and Oriental cast of countenance, and had nothing more awful about him than a tendency to overemphasis. On my right I had Mr. John G.
Thorne, whose face at a glance was as guileless as his name till contemplation revealed to you depth beyond depth of that peculiar astuteness of which only the American is master. I am sure that when we sat down to table neither of these gentlemen had any intention of taking a hand in my concerns, and are probably ignorant to this day of ever having done so; but the fact remains.
It begins with my desire to oblige Mrs. Brokenshire by trying to make the dinner a success. Having to lift the heaviest corner, so to speak, I gave myself to the task first with one of my neighbors and then with the other. They responded so well that as early as when the terrapin was reached I was doing it with both. As there was much animation about the table, there was nothing at that time to call attention to our talk.
Naturally, it was about the war. From the war we pa.s.sed to the att.i.tude of the United States toward the struggle; and from that what could I do but glide to the topics as to which I felt myself a mouthpiece for Larry Strangways? It was a chance. Here were two men obviously of some influence in the country, and neither of them of very strong convictions, so far as I could judge, on any subject but that of floating foreign bonds. As the dust from a b.u.t.terfly"s wing might turn the scale with one or both of them, I endeavored to throw at least that much weight on the side of a British and American entente.
At something I said, Mr. Russky, with the slightest hint of a Yiddish p.r.o.nunciation, complained that I spoke as if all Americans were "Anglo-Zaxons"; whereas it was well known that the "Anglo-Zaxon" element among them was but a percentage, which was destined to grow less.
"I"m not putting it on that ground," I argued, with some zeal, taking up a point as to which one of Larry Strangways"s letters had enlightened me. "I see well enough that the American ideal isn"t one of nationality, but of principle. When the federation of the States was completed it was on the basis not of a common Anglo-Saxon origin, but on that of the essential unity of mankind. Mere nationality was left out of the question. All nations were welcomed, with the idea of welding them into one."
"And England," Mr. Russky declared, somewhat more loudly than was necessary for my hearing him, "is still bound up in her Anglo-Zaxondon."
"Not a bit of it!" I returned. "Her spirit is exactly the same as that of this country. Except this country, where is there any other of which the gates and ports and homes and factories have been open to all nations as hers have been? They"ve landed on her sh.o.r.es in thousands and thousands, without pa.s.sports and without restraint, welcomed and protected even when they"ve been taking the bread out of the born Englishman"s mouth. Look at the number of foreigners they"ve been obliged to round up since the war began--for the simple reason that they"d become so many as to be a peril. It"s the same not only in the British Islands, but in every part of the British Empire. Always the same reception for all, with liberty for all. My own country, in proportion to its population, is as full of citizens of foreign birth as this is. They"ve been fathered and mothered from the minute they landed at Halifax. Poles and Ruthenians and Slovaks and Icelanders have been given the same advantages as ourselves. I"m not boasting of this, Mr.
Russky. I"m only saying that, though we"ve never defined the principle in a const.i.tution, our instinct toward mankind is the same as yours."
It was here Mr. Thorne broke in, saying that sympathy in the United States was all for France.
"I can understand that," I said. "You often find in a family that the sympathy of each of the members is for some one outside. But that doesn"t keep them from being a family, or from acting in important moments with a family"s solidarity."
"And, personally," Mr. Thorne went on, "I don"t care for England."
I laughed politely in his face.
"And do you, a business man, say that? I thought business was carried on independently of personal regard. You might conceivably not like Mr.
Warren or Mr. Cas.e.m.e.nte"--I named the two other banker guests--"or even Mr. Brokenshire; but you do business with them as if you loved them, and quite successfully, too. In the same way the Briton and the American might put personal fancies out of the question and co-operate for great ends."
"Ah, but, young lady," Mr. Russky exclaimed, so noisily as to draw attention, "you forget that we"re far from the scene of European disputes, and that our wisest course is to keep out of them!"
I fell back again on what I had learned from Larry Strangways.
"But you"re not far from the past of mankind. You inherit that as much as any European; and it isn"t an inheritance that can be limited geographically." I still quoted one of Larry Strangways"s letters, knowing it by heart. "Every Russian and German and Jew and Italian and Scotchman who lands in New York brings a portion of it with him and binds the responsibility of the New World more closely to the sins of the Old. Oceans and continents will not separate us from sins. As we can never run away from our past, Americans must help to expiate what they and their ancestors have done in the countries from which they came.
This isn"t going to be a local war or a twentieth-century war. It"s the struggle of all those who have had to bear the burdens of the world against those who have made them bear them."
"If that was the case," Mr. Russky said, doubtfully, "Americans would be all on one side."