"My daughter!"
The pale-rose heap on the other side of the room raised its dainty head.
"It"s true, Howard; it"s true! Please believe it!"
Ethel went on in her easy way:
"If Alix Adare has made any mistake it"s been in ignoring her own wishes--I may say her own heart--in order to be true to us. The Lord knows she can"t have respected us much, or failed to see that, judged by her standards, we"re as common as gra.s.s when you compare it to orchids.
But because she is an orchid she couldn"t do anything but want to give us back better than she ever got from us; and so--"
"Oh no; it wasn"t that!" I tried to interpose.
"It"s no dishonor to her not to be in love with Hugh," she pursued, evenly. "She may have thought she was once; but what girl hasn"t thought she was in love a dozen times? A fine day in April will make any one think it"s summer already; but when June comes they know the difference.
It was April when Hugh asked her; and now it"s June. I"ll confess for her. She is in love with--"
"Please!" I broke in.
She gave me another surprise.
"Do run and get me my fan. It"s over by Mildred. There"s a love!"
I had to do her bidding. The picture of the room stamped itself on my brain, though I didn"t think of it at the time. It seemed rather empty.
Jack had retired to one window, where he was smoking a cigarette; Pauline was at another, looking out at the moonlight on the water. Mrs.
Billing sat enthroned in the middle, taking a subordinate place for once. Mrs. Brokenshire was on the sofa by the wall. The murmur of Ethel"s voice, but no words, reached me as I stooped beside Mildred"s couch to pick up the fan.
The invalid took my hand. Her voice had the deep, low murmur of the sea.
"You must forgive my father."
"I do," I was able to say. "I--I like him in spite of everything--"
"And as for my brother, you"ll remember what we agreed upon once--that where we can"t give all, our first consideration must be the value of what we withhold."
I thanked her and went back with the fan. As I pa.s.sed Mrs. Billing she snapped at me, with the enigmatic words:
"You"re a puss!"
When I drew near to the group by the fireplace, Mrs. Rossiter was saying to Hugh:
"And as for her marrying you for your money--well, you"re crazy! I suppose she likes money as well as anybody else; but she would have married you to be loyal. She would have married you two months ago if father had been willing; and if you"d been willing you could now have been in England or France together, trying to do some good. If a woman marries one man when she"s in love with another the right or the wrong depends on her motives. Who knows but what I may have done it myself? I don"t say I haven"t. And so--"
But I had taken off the ring on my way across the room. Having returned the fan to Ethel, I went up to Hugh, who looked round at me over his shoulder.
"Hugh, darling," I said, very softly, "I feel that I ought to give you back this."
He put out his hand mechanically, not thinking of what I was about to offer. On seeing it he drew back his hand quickly, and the ring dropped on the floor. I can hear it still, rolling with a little rattle among the fire-irons.
In making my curtsy to Mr. Brokenshire I raised my eyes to his face. It seemed to me curiously stricken. After all her years of submission Mrs.
Rossiter"s rebellion must have made him feel like an autocrat dethroned.
I repeated my curtsy to Mrs. Billing, who merely stared at me through her lorgnette--to Jack and Pauline, who took no notice, who perhaps didn"t see me--to Mrs. Brokenshire, who was again a little rose-colored heap--and to Mildred, who raised her long, white hand.
In the hall outside Cissie Boscobel rose and came toward me.
"You must look after Hugh," I said to her, breathlessly, as I sped on my way.
She did. As I hurried down the stairs I heard her saying:
"No, Hugh, no! She wants to go alone."
POSTSCRIPT
I am writing in the dawn of a May morning in 1917.
Before me lies a sickle of white beach some four or five miles in curve.
Beyond that is the Atlantic, a mirror of leaden gray. Woods and fields bank themselves inland; here a dewy pasture, there a stretch of plowed earth recently sown and harrowed; elsewhere a grove of fir or maple or a hazel copse. From a little wooden house on the other side of the crescent of white sand a pillar of pale smoke is going straight up into the windless air. In the woods round me the birds, which have only just arrived from Florida, from the West Indies, from Brazil, are chirruping sleepily. They will doze again presently, to awake with the sunrise into the chorus of full song. Halifax lies some ten or twelve miles to the westward. This house is my uncle"s summer residence, which he has lent to my husband and me for the latter"s after-cure.
I am used to being up at this hour, or at any hour, owing to my experience in nursing. As a matter of fact, I am restless with the beginning of day, fearing lest my husband may need me. He is in the next room. If he stirs I can hear him. In this room my baby is sleeping in his little ba.s.sinet. It is not the ba.s.sinet of my dreams, nor is this the white-enameled nursery, nor am I wearing a delicate lace peignoir.
It is all much more beautiful than that, because it is as it is. My baby"s name is John Howard Brokenshire Strangways, though we shorten it to Broke, which, in the English fashion, we p.r.o.nounce Brook.
You will see why I wanted to call him by this name; but for that I must hark back to the night when I returned the ring to dear Hugh Brokenshire and fled. It is like a dream to me now, that night; but a dream still vivid enough to recall.
On escaping Hugh and making my way down-stairs I was lucky enough to find Thomas, my rosebud footman knight. Poor lad! The judgment trumpet was sounding for him, as for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek and the rest of us. He went back to England shortly after that and was killed the next year at the Dardanelles. But there he was for the moment, standing with the wraps of the Rossiter party.
"Thomas, call the motor," I said, hurriedly. "Be quick! I"m going home, alone, and you must come with me. I"ve things for you to do. Mr. Jack Brokenshire will bring Mrs. Rossiter."
On the way I explained my program to him through the window. I had been called suddenly to New York. There was a train from Boston to that city which would stop at Providence at two. I thought there was one from Newport to Providence about twelve-thirty, and it was now a quarter past eleven. If there was such a train I must take it; if there wasn"t, the motor must run me up to Providence, for which there was still time. I should delay only long enough to pack a suit-case. For the use I was making of him and the chauffeur, as well as of the vehicle, I should be responsible to my hosts.
Both the men being my tacitly sworn friends, there was no questioning of my authority. I fell back, therefore, into the depths of the limousine with the first sense of relief I had had since the day I accepted my position with Mrs. Rossiter. Something seemed to roll off me. I realized all at once that I had never, during the whole of the two years, been free from that necessity of picking my steps which one must have in walking on a tight-rope. Now it was delicious. I could have wished that the drive along Ochre Point Avenue had been thirty times as long.
For Hugh I had no feeling of compunction. It was so blissful to be free.
Cissie Boscobel, I knew, would make up to him for all I had failed to give, and would give more. Let me say at once that when, a few weeks later, the man Lady Janet Boscobel was engaged to had also been killed at the front, and her parents had begged Cissie to go home, Hugh was her escort on the journey. It was the beginning of an end which I think is in sight, of a healing which no one wishes so eagerly as I.
For the last two years Cissie has been mothering Belgian children somewhere in the neighborhood of Poperinghe, and Hugh has been in the American Ambulance Corps before Verdun. That was Cissie"s work, made easier, perhaps, by some recollection he retained of me. When he has a few days" leave--so Ethel Rossiter writes me--he spends it at Goldborough Castle or Strath-na-Cloid. I ran across Cissie when for a time I was helping in first-aid work not far behind the lines at Neuve Chapelle.
I had been taking care of her brother Rowan--Lord Ovingdean, he calls himself now, hesitating to follow his brother as Lord Leatherhead, and using one of his father"s other secondary t.i.tles--and she had come to see him. I hadn"t supposed till then that we were such friends. We talked and talked and talked, and still would have gone on talking. I can understand what she sees in Hugh, though I could never feel it for him with her intensity. I hope her devotion will be rewarded soon, and I think it will.
I had a premonition of this as I drove along Ochre Point Avenue that night. It helped me to the joy of liberty, to rightness of heart. As I threw the things into my suit-case I could have sung. Sraphine, who was up, waiting for her mistress, being also my friend, promised to finish my packing after I had gone, so that Mrs. Rossiter would have nothing to do but send my boxes after me. It couldn"t have been half an hour after my arrival at the house before I was ready to drive away again.
I was in the down-stairs hall, going out to the motor, when a great black form appeared in the doorway. My knees shook under me; my happiness came down like a shot bird. Mr. Brokenshire advanced and stood under the many-colored Oriental hall lantern. I clung for support to the pilaster that finished the bal.u.s.trade of the stairway.
There was gentleness in his voice, in spite of its whip-lash abruptness.
"Where are you going?"