On that first morning I got no more than the gist of what had happened during Hugh's visit to his cousin Andrew Brew. Hugh announced it in fact by a metaphor as soon as we had exchanged greetings and he had sat down at the table with his arm over Gladys's shoulder.
"Well, little Alix, I got it where the chicken got the ax."
"Where was that?" I asked, innocently, for the figure of speech was new to me.
"In the neck."
Neither of us laughed. His tone was so lugubrious as to preclude laughing. But I understood. I may say that by the time he had given me the outline of what he had to say I understood more than he. I might have seen poor Hugh's limitations before; but I never had. During the old life in Halifax I had known plenty of young men brought up in comfort who couldn't earn a living when the time came to do it. If I had never classed Hugh among the number, it was because the Brokenshires were all so rich that I supposed they must have some secret prescription for wringing money from the air. Besides, Hugh was an American; and American and money were words I was accustomed to pronounce together. I never questioned his ability to have any reasonable income he named—till now. Now I began to see him as he must have seen himself during those first few minutes after turning his back on the parental haven, alone and in the dark.
I cannot say that for the moment I had any of the qualms of fear. My yearning over him was too motherly for that. I wanted to comfort and, as far as possible, to encourage him. Something within me whispered, too, the words, "It's going to be up to me." I meant—or that which spoke in me meant—that the whole position was reversed. I had been taking my ease hitherto, believing that the strong young man who had asked me to marry him would do the necessary work. It was to be up to him. My part was to be the passive bliss of having some one to love me and maintain me. That Hugh loved me I knew; that in one way or another he would be able to maintain me I took for granted. With a Brokenshire, I assumed, that would be the last of cares. And now I saw in a flash that I was wrong; that I who was nothing but a parasite by nature would somehow have to give my strong young man support.
When all was said that he could say at the moment I took the responsibility of sending Gladys indoors with the maid who was waiting on the table, after which I asked Hugh to walk down the lawn with me. A stone balustrade ran above the Cliff Walk, and here was a bit of shrubbery where no one could observe us from the house, while passers on the Cliff Walk could see us only by looking upward. At that hour in the morning even they were likely to be rare.
"Hugh, darling," I said, "this is becoming very, very serious. You're throwing yourself out of house and home and your father's good-will for my sake. We must think about it, Hugh—"
His answer was to seize me in his arms—we were sufficiently screened from view—and crush his lips against mine in a way that made speech impossible.
Again I must make a confession. It was his doing that sort of thing that paralyzed my judgment. You will blame me, perhaps, but, oh, reader, have you any idea of what it is never to have had a man wild to kiss you before? Never before to have had any one adore you? Never before to have been the greatest of all blessings to so much as the least among his brethren? The experience was new to me. I had no rule of thumb by which to measure it. I could only think that the man who wanted me with so mad a desire must have me, no matter what reserves I might have preferred to make on my own account.
I struggled, however, and with some success. For the first time I clearly perceived that occasions might arise in which, between love and marriage, one might have to make a distinction. Ethel Rossiter's dictum came back to me: "People can't go about marrying every one they love, now can they?" It came to me as a terrible possibility that I might be doomed to love Hugh all my life, and equally doomed to refuse him. If I didn't, the responsibilities would be "up to me." If besides loving him I were to accept him and marry him, it would be for me to see that the one possible condition was fulfilled. I should have to bring J. Howard to his knees.
When he got breath to say anything it was with a mere hot muttering into my face, as he held me with my head thrown back:
"I know what I'm doing, little Alix. You mustn't ask me to count the cost. The cost only makes you the more precious. Since I have to suffer for you I'll suffer, but I'll never give you up. Do you take me for a fellow who'd weigh money or comfort in the balances with you?"
"No, Hugh," I whispered. His embrace was enough to strangle me.
"Well, then, never ask me to think about this thing again, I've thought all I'm going to. As I mean to get you anyhow, little Alix, you may as well promise now, this very minute, that whatever happens you'll be my wife."
But I didn't promise. First I got him to release me on the ground that some bathers, after a dip at Eastons Beach, were going by, with their heads on a level with our feet. Then I asked the natural question:
"What do you think of doing now?"
He said he was going to let no mushrooms spring in his footsteps, and that he was taking a morning train for New York. He talked about bankers and brokers and moneyed things in general in a way I couldn't follow, though I could see that in spite of Cousin Andrew Brew's rejection he still expected great things of himself. Like me, he seemed to feel that there was a faculty for conjuring money in the very name of Brokenshire. Never having known what it was to be without as much money as he wanted, never having been given to suppose that such an eventuality could come to pass, it was perhaps not strange that he should consider his power of commanding a large income to be in the nature of things. Bankers and brokers would be glad to have him as their associate from the mere fact that he was his father's son.
I endeavored to throw a cup of cold water on too much certainty, by saying:
"But, Hugh, dear, won't you have to begin at the beginning? Wasn't that what your cousin Andrew Brew—?"
"Cousin Andrew Brew is an ass. He's one great big Boston stick-in-the-mud. He wouldn't know which side his bread was buttered on, not if it was buttered on both."
"Still," I persisted, "you'll have to begin at the beginning."
"Well, I shouldn't be the first."
"No, but you might be the first to do it with a clog round his feet in the shape of a person like me. How many years did your cousin say—twenty or thirty, wasn't it?"
"R-rot, little Alix!" He brought out the interjection with a contemptuous roll. "It might be twenty or thirty years for a numskull like Duffers, but for me! There are ways by which a man who's in the business already, as you might say, goes skimming over the ground the common herd have to tramp. Look at the gentlemen-rankers in your own army. They enlist as privates, and in two or three years they're in the officers' mess with a commission. That comes of their education and—"
"That's often true, I admit. I've known of several cases in my own experience. But even two or three years—"
"Wouldn't you wait for me?"
He asked the question with a sharpness that gave me something like a stab.
"Yes, of course, Hugh, if I promised you. And yet to bind you by such a promise doesn't seem to me fair."
"I'll take care of that," he declared, manfully. "As a matter of fact, when father sees how determined I am, he'll only be too happy to do the handsome thing and come down with the brass."
"You think he's bluffing then?" I threw some conviction into my tone as I added, "I don't."
"He's not bluffing to his own knowledge; but he is—"
"To yours. But isn't it his knowledge that we've got to go by? We must expect the worst, even if we hope for the best."
"And what it all comes to is—"
"Is that you're facing a very hard time, Hugh, and I don't feel that I can accept the responsibility of encouraging you to do it."
"But, good Lord, Alix, you're not encouraging me. It's the other way round. You're a perfect wet blanket; you're an ice-water shower. I'm doing this thing on my own—"
"You know, Hugh, I've seen your father since you went away."
His face brightened.
"Good! And did he show any signs of tacking to the wind?"
"Not a bit. He said you would be ruined, and that I should ruin you."
"The deuce you will! That's where he's got the wrong number, poor old dad! I hope you told him you would marry me—and let him have it straight."
I made no reply to that, going on to tell him all that was said as to bringing J. Howard to his knees.
He roared with ironic laughter.
"You did have the gall!"
"Then you think they'll never, never accept me?"
"Not that way; not beforehand."
Hot rage rose within me, against him and them and this scorn of my personality.
"I think they will."
"Not on your life! Dad wouldn't do it, not if I was on my death-bed and needed you to come and raise me up. Milly is the only one; and even she thinks I'm the craziest idiot—"
"Very well, then, Hugh," I said, quickly; "I'm afraid we must consider it all—"
He gathered me into his arms as he had done before, and once more stopped my protests. Once more, too, I yielded to this masculine argument.
"For you and me there's nothing but love," he murmured, with his cheek pressed close against mine.
"Oh no, Hugh," I managed to say, when I had struggled free. "There's honor—and perhaps there's pride." It gave some relief to what I conceived of as the humiliation he unconsciously heaped on me to be able to add: "As a matter of fact, pride and honor, in me, are as inseparable as the oxygen and hydrogen that go to make up water."
He was obliged to leave it there, since he had no more than the time to catch his train for New York. It was, however, the sense of pride and honor that calmed my nerves when Mrs. Rossiter asked me to take little Gladys to see her grandfather in the afternoon. I had done it from time to time all through the summer, but not since Hugh had declared his love for me. If I went now, I reasoned, it would have to be on a new footing; and if it was on a new footing something might come of the visit in spite of my fears.
We started a little after three, as Gladys had to be back in time for her early supper and bed. Chips, the wire-haired terrier, was nominally at our heels, but actually nosing the shrubbery in front of us, or scouring the lawns on our right with a challenging bark to any of his kind who might be within earshot to come down and contest our passage.
"Qu'il est drôle, ce Chips! N'est-ce-pas, mademoiselle?" Gladys would exclaim from time to time, to which I would make some suitable and instructive rejoinder.
Her hand was in mine; her eyes as they laughed up at me were of the color of the blue convolvulus. In her little smocked liberty silk, with a leghorn hat trimmed with a wreath of tiny roses, she made me yearn for that bassinet between which and myself there were such stormy seas to cross. Everything was to be up to me. That was the great solemnity from which my mind couldn't get away. I was to be the David to confront Goliath, without so much as a sling or a stone. What I was to do, and how I was to do it, I knew no more than I knew of commanding an army. I could only take my stand on the maxim of which I was making a foundation-stone. I went so far as to believe that if I did right more right would unfold itself. It would be like following a trail through a difficult wood, a trail of which you observe all the notches and steps and signs, sometimes with misgivings, often with the fear that you're astray, but on which a moment arrives when you see with delight that you're coming out to the clearing. So I argued as I prattled with Gladys of such things as were in sight, of ships and lobster-pots and little dogs, giving her a new word as occasion served, and trying to keep my mind from terrors and remote anticipations.
If you know Newport at all you know J. Howard Brokenshire's place in the neighborhood of Ochre Point. Anyone would name it as you passed by. J. Howard didn't build the house; he bought it from some people who, it seemed, hadn't found in Newport the hospitality of which they were in search. It is gloomy and fortress-like, as if the architect had planned a Palazzo Strozzi which he hadn't the courage to carry out. That it is incongruous with its surroundings goes without saying; but then it is not more incongruous than anything else. I had been long enough in America to see that for the man who could build on American soil a house which would have some relation to its site—as they can do in Mexico, and as we do to a lesser degree in Canada—fame and fortune would be in store.
The entrance hall was baronial and richly Italianate. One's first impressions were of gilding and red damask. When one's eye lighted on a chest or settle, one could smell the stale incense in a Sienese or Pisan sacristy. At the foot of the great stairway ebony slaves held gilded torches in which were electric lights.
Both the greyhounds came sniffing to meet Chips, and J. Howard, who had seen our approach across the lawn as we came from the Cliff Walk, emerged from the library to welcome his grandchild. He wore a suit of light-gray check, and was as imposingly handsome as usual. Gladys ran to greet him with a childish cry. On seizing her he tossed her into the air and kissed her.
I stood in the middle of the hall, waiting. On previous occasions I had done the same thing; but then I had not been, as one might say, "introduced." I wondered if he would acknowledge the introduction now or give me a glance. But he didn't. Setting Gladys down, he took her by the hand and returned to the library.
There was nothing new in this. It had happened to me before. Left like an empty motor-car till there was need for me again, I had sometimes seated myself in one of the huge ecclesiastical hall chairs, and sometimes, if the door chanced to be open, had wandered out to the veranda. As it was open this afternoon, I strolled toward the glimpse of green lawn, and the sparkle of blue sea which gleamed at the end of the hall.
It was a possibility I had foreseen. Mrs. Brokenshire might be there. I might get into further touch with the mystery of her heart.
Mrs. Brokenshire was not on the veranda, but Mrs. Billing was. She was seated in a low easy-chair, reading a French novel, and had been smoking cigarettes. An inlaid Oriental taboret, on which were a gold cigarette-case and ash-tray, stood beside her on the red-tiled floor.
I had forgotten all about her, as seemingly she had forgotten about me. Her surprise in seeing me appear was not greater than mine at finding her. Instinctively she took up her lorgnette, which was lying in her lap, but put it down without using it.
"So it's you," was her greeting.
"I beg your pardon, madam," I stammered, respectfully. "I didn't know there was anybody here."
I was about to withdraw when she said, commandingly:
"Wait." I waited, while she went on: "You're a little spitfire. Did you know it?"
The voice was harsh, with the Quaker drawl I have noticed in the older generation of Philadelphians; but the tone wasn't hostile. On the contrary, there was something in it that invited me to play up. I played up, demurely, however, saying, with a more emphatic respectfulness:
"No, madam; I didn't."
"Well, you can know it now. Who are you?" She made the quaint little gesture with which I have seen English princesses summon those they wished to talk to. "Come over here where I can get a look at you."
I moved nearer, but she didn't ask me to sit down. In answer to her question I said, simply, "I'm a Canadian."
"Oh, a Canadian! That's neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. It's nothing."
"No, madam, nothing but a point of view."
"What do you mean by that?"
I repeated something of my father's:
"The point of view of the Englishman who understands America or of the American who understands England, as one chooses to put it. The Canadian is the only person who does both."
"Oh, indeed? I'm not a Canadian—and yet I flatter myself I know my England pretty well."
I made so bold as to smile dimly.
"Knowing and understanding are different things, madam, aren't they? The Canadian understands America because he is an American; he understands England because he is an Englishman. It's only of him that that can be said. You're quite right when you label him a point of view rather than a citizen or a subject."
"I didn't label him anything of the kind. I don't know anything about him, and I don't care. What are you besides being a Canadian?"
"Nothing, madam," I said, humbly.
"Nothing? What do you mean?"
"I mean that there's nothing about me, that I have or am, that I don't owe to my country."
"Oh, stuff! That's the way we used to talk in the United States forty years ago."
"That's the way we talk in Canada still, madam—and feel."
"Oh, well, you'll get over it as we did—when you're more of a people."
"Most of us would prefer to be less of a people, and not get over it."
She put up her lorgnette.
"Who was your father? What sort of people do you come from?"
I tried to bring out my small store of personal facts, but she paid them no attention. When I said that my father had been a judge of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia I might have been calling him a voivode of Montenegro or the president of a zemstvo. It was too remote from herself for her mind to take in. I could see her, however, examining my features, my hands, my dress, with the shrewd, sharp eyes of a connoisseur in feminine appearance.
She broke into the midst of my recital with the words:
"You can't be in love with Hugh Brokenshire."
Fearing attack from an unexpected quarter, I clasped my hands with some emotion.
"Oh, but, madam, why not?"
The reply nearly knocked me down.
"Because you're too sensible a girl. He's as stupid as an owl."
"He's very good and kind," was all I could find to say.
"Yes; but what's that? A girl like you needs more than a man who's only good and kind. Heavens above, you'll want some spice in your life!"
I maintained my meek air as I said:
"I could do without the spice if I could be sure of bread and butter."
"Oh, if you're marrying for a home let me tell you you won't get it. Hugh'll never be able to offer you one, and his father wouldn't let him if he was."
I decided to be bold.
"But you heard what I said the other day, madam. I expect his father to come round."
She uttered the queer cackle that was like a hen when it crows.
"Oh, you do, do you? You don't know Howard Brokenshire. You could break him more easily than you could bend him—and you can't break him. Good Lord, girl, I've tried!"
"But I haven't," I returned, quietly. "Now I'm going to."
"How? What with? You can't try if you've nothing to try on."
"I have."
"For Heaven's sake—what?"
I was going to say, "Right"; but I knew it would sound sententious. I had been sententious enough in talking about my country. Now I only smiled.
"You must let me keep that as a secret," I answered, mildly.
She gave herself what I can only call a hitch in her chair.
"Then may I be there to see."
"I hope you may be, madam."
"Oh, I'll come," she cackled. "Don't worry about that. Just let me know. You'll have to fight like the devil. I suppose you know that."
I replied that I did.
"And when it's all over you'll have got nothing for your pains."
"I shall have had the fight."
She looked hard at me before speaking.
"Good girl!" The tone was that of a spectator who calls out, "Good hit!" or, "Good shot!" at a game. "If that's all you want—"
"No; I want Hugh."
"Then I hope you won't get him. He's as big a dolt as his father, and that's saying a great deal." Terrified, I glanced over my shoulder at the house, but she went on imperturbably: "Oh, I know he's in there; but what do I care? I'm not saying anything behind his back that I haven't said to his face. He doesn't bear me any malice, either, I'll say that for him."
"Nobody could—" I began, deferentially.
"Nobody had better. But that's neither here nor there. All I'm telling you is to have nothing to do with Hugh Brokenshire. Never mind the money; what you need is a husband with brains. Don't I know? Haven't I been through it? My husband was kind and good, just like Hugh Brokenshire—and, O Lord! The sins of the father are visited on the children, too. Look at my daughter—pretty as a picture and not the brains of a white mouse." She nodded at me fiercely, "You're my kind. I can see that. Mind what I say—and be off."
She turned abruptly to her book, hitching her chair a little away from me. Accepting my dismissal, I said in the third person, as though I was speaking to a royalty:
"Madam flatters me too much; but I'm glad I intruded, for the minute, just to hear her say that."
I had made my courtesy and reached the door leading inward when she called after me:
"You're a puss. Do you know it?"
Not feeling it necessary to respond in words, I merely smiled over my shoulder and entered the house.
In one of the big chairs I waited a half-hour before J. Howard came out of the library with his grandchild. He had given her a doll which she hugged in her left arm, while her right hand was in his. The farewell scene was pretty, and took place in the middle of the hall.
"Now run away," he said, genially, after much kissing and petting, "and give my love to mamma."
He might have been shooing the sweet thing off into the air. There was no reference whatever to any one to take care of her. His eyes rested on me, but only as they rested on the wall behind me. I must say it was well done—if one has to do that sort of thing at all. Feeling myself, as his regard swept me, no more than a part of the carved ecclesiastical chair to which I stood clinging, I wondered how I was ever to bring this man to seeing me.
I debated the question inwardly while I chatted with Gladys on the way homeward. I was obliged, in fact, to brace myself, to reason it out again that right was self-propagating and wrong necessarily sterile. Right I figured as a way which seemed to finish in a blind alley or cul-de-sac, but which, as one neared what seemed to be its end, led off in a new direction. Nearing the end of that there would be still a new lead, and so one would go on.
And, sure enough, the new lead came within the next half-hour, though I didn't recognize it for what it was till afterward.
As we passed the Jack Brokenshire cottage, Larry Strangways and Broke, with Noble, the collie, bounding beside them, came racing down the lawn to overtake us. It was natural then that for the rest of the way Chips and Noble should form one company, Broke and his sister another, while we two elders strolled along behind them.
It was the hour of the day for strolling. The mellow afternoon light was of the kind that brings something new into life, something we should be glad to keep if we knew how to catch it. It was not merely that grass and leaf and sea had a shimmer of gold on them. There was a sweet enchantment in the atmosphere, a poignant wizardry, a suggestion of emotions both higher and lower than those of our poor mortal scale. They made one reluctant to hurry one's footsteps, and slow in the return to that sheerly human shelter we call home. All along the path, down among the rocks, out in the water, up on the lawns, there were people, gentle and simple alike, who lingered and idled and paused to steep themselves in this magic.
I have to admit that we followed their example. Anything served as an excuse for it, the dogs and the children doing the same from a similar instinct. I got the impression, too, that my companion was less in the throes of the discretion we had imposed upon ourselves, for the reason that his term as a mere educational lackey was drawing to a close. It had, in fact, only two more days to run. Then August would come and he would desert us.
As it might be my last opportunity to surprise him into looking at me in the way Mrs. Rossiter had observed, I kept my eye on him pretty closely. I cannot say that I detected any change that flattered me. Tall and straight and splendidly poised, he was as smilingly impenetrable as ever. Like Howard Brokenshire, he betrayed no wound, even if I had inflicted one. It was a little exasperating. I was more than piqued.
I told him I hadn't heard of his return from New York and asked how he had fared. His reply was enthusiastic. He had seen Stacy Grainger and was eager to be his henchman.
"He's got that about him," he declared, "that would make anybody glad to work for him."
He described his personal appearance, brawny and spare with the attributes of race. It was an odd comment on the laws of heredity that his grandfather was said to have begun life as a peddler, and yet there he was agrand seigneurto the finger-tips. I said that Howard Brokenshire was also agrand seigneur, to which he replied that Howard Brokenshire was a monument. American conditions had raised him, and on those conditions he stood as a statue on its pedestal. His position was so secure that all he had to do was stand. It was for this reason that he could be so dictatorial. He was safely fastened to his base; nothing short of seismic convulsion of the whole economic world was likely to knock him off. In the course of that conversation I learned more of the origin of the Brokenshire fortunes than I had ever before heard.
It was the great-grandfather of J. Howard who apparently had laid the foundation-stone on which later generations built so well. That patriarch, so I understood, had been a farmer in the Connecticut Valley. His method of finance was no more esoteric than that of lending out small sums of money at a high rate of interest. Occasionally he took mortgages on his neighbors' farms, with the result that he became in time something of a landed proprietor. When the suburbs of a city had spread over one of the possessions thus acquired, the foundation-stone to which I have referred might have been considered well and truly laid.
About the year 1830, his son migrated to New York. The firm of Meek & Brokenshire, of which the fame was to go through two continents, was founded when Van Buren was in the presidential seat and Victoria just coming to the throne. It seems there was a Meek in those days, though at the time of which I am writing nothing remained of him but a syllable.
It was after the Civil War, however, when the grandson of the Connecticut Valley veteran was in power, that the house of Meek & Brokenshire forged to the front rank among financial agencies. It formed European affiliations. It became the financial representative of a great European power. John H. Brokenshire, whose name was distinguished from that of his more famous son only by a distribution of initials, had a house at Hyde Park Corner as well as one in New York. He was the first American banker to become something of an international magnate. The development of his country made him so. With the vexed questions of slavery and secession settled, with the phenomenal expansion of the West, with the freer uses of steam and electricity, with the tightening of bonds between the two hemispheres, that pedestal was being raised on which J. Howard was to pose with such decorative effectiveness.
His posing began on his father's death in the year 1898. Up to that time he had represented the house in England, the post being occupied now by his younger brother James. Polished manners, a splendid appearance, and an authoritative air imported to New York a touch of the Court of St. James's. Mrs. Billing had called him a dolt. Perhaps he was one. If so he was a dolt raised up and sustained by all that was powerful in the United States. It was with these vast influences rather than with the man himself that, as Larry Strangways talked, I began to see I was in conflict.
In Stacy Grainger, I gathered, the contemporaneous development of the country had produced something different, just as the same piece of ground will grow an oak or a rose-bush, according to the seed. People with a taste for social antithesis called him the grandson of a peddler. Mr. Strangways considered this description below the level of the ancestral Grainger's occupation. In the days of scattered farms and difficult communications throughout Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota he might better have been termed an itinerant merchant. He was the traveling salesman who delivered the goods. His journeys being made by river boats and ox-teams, he began to see the necessity of steam. He was of the group who projected the system of railways, some of which failed and some of which succeeded, through the regions west of Lake Superior. Later he forsook the highways for a more feverish life in the incipient Chicago. His wandering years having given him an idea of the value of this focal point, he put his savings into land. The phoenix rise of the city after the great fire made him a man of some wealth. Out of the financial crash of 1873 he became richer. His son grew richer still on the panic of 1893, when he, too, descended on New York. It was he who became a power on the Stock Exchange and bought the big house with which parts of my narrative will have to do.
All I want to say now is that as I strolled with Larry Strangways along that sunny walk, and as he ran on about Brokenshires and Graingers, I got my first bit of insight into the immense American romance which the nineteenth century unfolded. I saw it was romance, gigantic, race-wide. For the first time in my life I realized that there were other tales to make men proud besides the story of the British Empire.
I could see that Larry Strangways was proud—proud and anxious. I had never seen this side of him before. Pride was in the way in which he held his fine young head; there was anxiety in his tone, and now and then in the flash of his eye, in spite of his efforts not to be too serious.
It was about the country that he talked—its growth, its vastness. Even as recently as when he was a boy it was still a manageable thing, with a population reckoned at no more than seventy or eighty millions. It had been homogeneous in spirit if not in blood, and those who had come from other lands, and been welcomed and adopted, accepted their new situation with some gratitude. Patriotism was still a word with a meaning, and if it now and then became spread-eagleism it was only as the waves when thrown too far inland become froth. The wave was the thing and it hadn't ebbed.
"And do you think it has ebbed now?" I asked.
He didn't answer this question directly.
"We're becoming colossal. We shall soon count our people by the hundred million and more. Of these relatively few will have got our ideals. Some will reject them. There are mutterings already of other standards to which we must be taught to conform. Some of our own best people of pure Anglo-Saxon descent are losing heart and renouncing and denouncing the democratic tradition, though they've nothing to put in its place. And we're growing so huge—with a hugeness that threatens to make us lethargic."
I tried to be encouraging.
"You seem to me anything but that."
"National lethargy can easily exist side by side with individual energy. Take China, for instance. There are few peoples in the world more individually diligent than the Chinese; and yet when it comes to national stirring it's a country as difficult to move as an unwieldy overfed giant. It's flabby and nerveless and inert. It's spread half over Asia, and it has the largest and most industrious population in the world; and yet it's a congeries of inner weaknesses, and a prey to any one who chooses to attack it."
"And you think this country is on the way to being the China of the west?"
"I don't say on the way. There's danger of it. In proportion as we too become unwieldy and overfed, the circulation of that national impulse which is like blood grows slower. The elephant is a heavily moving beast in comparison with the lion."
"But it's the more intelligent," I argued, still with a disposition to be encouraging.
"Intelligence won't save it when the lion leaps on its back."
"Then what will?"
"That's what we want to find out."
"And how are you going to do it?"
"By men. We've come to a time when the country is going to need stronger men than it ever had, and more of them."
I suppose it is because I am a woman that I have to bring all questions to the personal.
"And is your Stacy Grainger going to be one?"
He walked on a few paces without replying, his head in the air.
"No," he said, at last, "I don't think so. He's got a weakness."
"What kind of weakness?"
"I'm not going to tell you," he laughed. "It's enough to say that it's one which I think will put him out of commission for the job." He gave me some inkling, however, of what he meant when he added: "The country's coming to a place where it will need disinterested men, and whole-hearted men, and clean-hearted men, if it's going to pull through. It's extraordinary how deficient we've been in leaders who've had any of these characteristics, to say nothing of all three."
"Is the United States singular in that?"
He spoke in a half-jesting tone probably to hide the fact that he was so much in earnest.
"No; perhaps not. But it's got to have them if it's going to be saved. Moreover," he went on, "it must find them among the young men. The older men are all steeped and branded and tarred and feathered with the materialism of the nineteenth century. They're perfectly sodden. They see no patriotism except in loyalty to a political machine; and no loyalty to a political machine except for what they can get out of it. From our Presidents down most of them will sacrifice any law of right to the good of a party. They don't realize that nine times out of ten the good of a party is the evil of the common weal; and our older men will never learn the fact. If we can't wake the younger men, we're done for."
"And are you going to wake them?"
"I'm going to be awake myself. That's all I can be responsible for. If I can find another fellow who's awake I'll follow him."
"Why not lead him? I should think you could."
He turned around on me. I shall never forget the gleam in his eye.
"No one is ever going to get away with this thing who thinks of leadership. There are times in the history of countries when men are called on to give up everything and be true to an ideal. I believe that time is approaching. It may come into Europe in one way and to America in another; but it's coming to us all. There'll be a call for—for—" he hesitated at the word, uttering it only with an apologetic laugh—"for consecration."
I was curious.
"And what do you mean by that—by consecration?"
He reflected before answering.
"I suppose I mean knowing what this country stands for, and being true to it oneself through thick and thin. There'll be thin and there'll be thick—plenty of them both—but it will be a question of the value of the individual. If there had been ten righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah, they wouldn't have been destroyed. I take that as a kind of figure. A handful of disinterested, whole-hearted, clean-hearted, and perhaps I ought to add stout-hearted Americans, who know what they believe and live by it, will hold the fort against all efforts, within and without, to pull it down." He paused in his walk, obliging me to do the same. "I've been thinking a good deal," he smiled, "during the past few weeks of your law of Right—with a capital. I laughed at it when you first spoke of it—"
"Oh, hardly that," I interposed.
"But I've come to believe that it will work."
"I'm so glad."
"In fact, it's the only thing that will work."
"Exactly," I exclaimed, enthusiastically.
"We must stand by it, we younger men, just as the younger men of the late fifties stood by the principles represented by Lincoln. I believe in my heart that the need is going to be greater for us than it was for them, and if we don't respond to it, then may the Lord have mercy on our souls."
I give this scrap of conversation because it introduced a new note into my knowledge of Americans. I had not supposed that any Americans felt like that. In the Rossiter circle I never saw anything but an immense self-satisfaction. Money and what money could do was, I am sure, the only topic of their thought. Their ideas of position and privilege were all spuriously European. Nothing was indigenous. Except for their sense of money, their aims were as foreign to the soil as their pictures, their tapestries, their furniture, and their clothes. Even stranger I found the imitation of Europe in tastes which Europe was daily giving up. But in Larry Strangways, it seemed to me, I found something native, something that really lived and cared. It caused me to look at him with a new interest.
His jesting tone allowed me to take my cue in the same vein.
"I'm tremendously flattered, Mr. Strangways, that you should have found anything in my ideas that could be turned to good account."
He laughed shortly and rather hardly.
"Oh, if it was only that!"
It was another of the things I wished he hadn't said, but with the words he started on again, walking so fast for a few paces that I made no effort to keep up with him. When he waited till I rejoined him we fell again to talking of Stacy Grainger. At the first opportunity I asked the question that was chiefly on my mind.
"Wasn't there something at one time between him and Mrs. Brokenshire?"
He marched on with head erect.
"I believe so," he admitted, reluctantly, but not till some seconds had passed.
"There was a big fight, wasn't there," I persisted, "between him and Mr. Brokenshire—over Editha Billing—on the Stock Exchange—or something like that?"
Again he allowed some seconds to go by.
"So I've heard."
I fished out of my memory such tag ends of gossip as had reached me, I could hardly tell from where.
"Didn't Mr. Brokenshire attack his interests—railways and steel and things—and nearly ruin him?"
"I believe there was some such talk."
I admired the way in which he refused to lend himself to the spread of the legend; but I insisted on going on, because the idea of this conflict of modern giants, with a beautiful maiden as the prize, appealed to my imagination.
"And didn't old Mrs. Billing shift round all of a sudden from the man who seemed to be going under to—?"
He cut the subject short by giving it another twist.
"Grainger's been unlucky. His whole family have been unlucky. It's an instance of tragedy haunting a race such as one reads of in mythology and now and then in modern history—the house of Atreus, for example, and the Stuarts, and the Hapsburgs, and so on."
I questioned him as to this, only to learn of a series of accidents, suicides, and sudden deaths, leaving Stacy as the last of his line, lonely and picturesque.
At the foot of the steps leading up to the Rossiter lawn Larry Strangways paused again. The children and dogs having preceded us and being safe on their own grounds, we could consider them off our minds.
"What do you know about old books?" he asked, suddenly.
The question took me so much by surprise that I could only say:
"What makes you think I know anything?"
"Didn't your father have a library full of them? And didn't you catalogue them and sell them in London?"
I admitted this, but added that even that undertaking had left me very ignorant of the subject.
"Yes; but it's a beginning. If you know the Greek or Russian alphabet it's a very good point from which to go on and learn the language."
"But why should I learn that language?"
"Because I know a man who's going to have a vacancy soon for a librarian. It's a private library, rather a famous one in New York, and the young lady at present in command is leaving to be married."
I smiled pleasantly.
"Yes; but what has that got to do with me?"
"Didn't I tell you I was going to look you up another job?"
"Oh! And so you've looked me up this!"
"No, I didn't. It looked me up. The owner of the library mentioned the fact as a great bore. It was his father who made the collection in the days of the first great American splurge. Stacy Grainger has added a rug or a Chinese jar from time to time, but he doesn't give a hang for the lot."
"Oh, so it's his."
"Yes; it's his. He says he feels inclined to shut the place up; but I told him it was a pity to do that since I knew the very young lady for the post."
I dropped the subject there, because of a new inspiration.
"If Mr. Grainger has places at his command, couldn't he do something for poor Hugh?"
"Why poor Hugh? I thought he was—"
I gave him a brief account of the fiasco in Boston, venturing to betray Hugh's confidence for the sake of some possible advantage. Mr. Strangways only shrugged his shoulders.
"Of course," he said. "What could you expect?" I was sure he was looking down on me with the expression Mrs. Rossiter had detected, though I didn't dare to lift an eye to catch him in the act. "You really mean to marry him?"
"Mean to marry him is not the term," I answered, with the decision which I felt the situation called for. "I mean to marry him only—on conditions."
"Oh, on conditions! What kind of conditions?"
I named them to him as I had named them to others. First that Hugh should become independent.
He repeated his short, hard laugh.
"I don't believe you had better bank on that."
"Perhaps not," I admitted. "But I've another string to my bow. His family may come and ask me."
He almost shouted.
"Never!"
It was the tone they all took, and which especially enraged me. I kept my voice steady, however, as I said, "That remains to be seen."
"It doesn't remain to be seen, because I can tell you now that they won't."
"And I can tell you now that they will," I said, with an assurance that, on the surface at least, was quite as strong as his own.
He laughed again, more shortly, more hardly.
"Oh, well!"
The laugh ended in a kind of sigh. I noted the sigh as I noted the laugh, and their relation to each other. Both reached me, touching something within me that had never yet been stirred. Physically it was like the prick of the spur to a spirited animal, it sent me bounding up the steps. I was off as from a danger; and though I would have given much to see the expression with which he stood gazing after me, I would not permit myself so much as to glance back.