Mr. Brokenshire arrived on the 26th of June, thus giving us a few days' grace. In the interval Mrs. Brokenshire remained in bed, neither tired nor ill, but white, silent, and withdrawn. Her soul's tragedy had plainly not ended with her skimming retreat through Clover Lane. In the new phase on which it had entered it was creating a woman, possibly a wife, where there had been only a lovely child of arrested development. Slipping in and out of her room, attending quietly to her wants, I was able to note, as never in my life before, the beneficent action of suffering.
Because she was in bed, I folded my tent like the Arab and silently vacated my room in favor of Mr. Brokenshire. I looked for some objection on telling her of this, but she merely bit her lip and said nothing. I had asked the manager to put me in the most distant part of the most distant wing of the hotel, and would have stolen away altogether had it not been for fear that my poor, dear little lady might need me.
As it was, I kept out of sight when Mr. Brokenshire drove up with secretary, valet, and chauffeur, and I contrived to take my meals at hours when there could be no encounter between me and the great personage. If I was wanted I knew I could be sent for; but the 27th passed and no command came.
Once or twice I got a distant view of my enemy, as I began to call him—majestic, noble, stouter, too, and walking with a slight waddle of the hips, which had always marked his carriage and became more noticeable as he increased in bulk. Not having seen him for nearly three months, I observed that his hair and beard were grayer. During those first few days I was never near enough to be able to tell whether or not there was a change for the better or the worse in his facial affliction.
From a chance word with the cadaverous Spellman on the 28th I learned that a sitting-room had been arranged in connection with the two bedrooms Mrs. Brokenshire and I had occupied, and that husband and wife were now taking their repasts in private. Later that day I saw them drive out together, Mrs. Brokenshire no more than a silhouette in the shadows of the limousine. I drew the inference that, however the soul's tragedy was working, it was with some reconciling grace that did what love had never been able to accomplish. Perhaps for her, as for me, there was an appeal in this vain, fatuous, suffering magnate of a coarse world's making that, in spite of everything, touched the springs of pity.
In any case, I was content not to be sent for—and to rest. After a tranquil day or two my own nerves had calmed down and I enjoyed the delight of having nothing on my mind. It was extraordinary how remote I could keep myself while under the same roof with my superiors, especially when they kept themselves remote on their side. I had decided on the 1st of July as the date to which I should remain. If there was no demand for my services by that time I meant to consider myself free to go.
But events were preparing, had long been preparing, which changed my life as, I suppose, they changed to a greater or less degree the majority of lives in the world. It was curious, too, how they arranged themselves, with a neatness of coincidence which weaves my own small drama as a visible thread—visible to me, that is—in the vast tapestry of human history begun so far back as to be time out of mind.
It was the afternoon of Monday the 29th of June, 1914. Having secured a Boston morning paper, I had carried it off to the back veranda, which was my favorite retreat, because nobody else liked it. It was just outside my room, and looked up into a hillside wood, where there were birds and squirrels, and straight bronze pine-trunks wherever the sunlight fell aslant on them. At long intervals, too, a partridge hen came down with her little brood, clucking her low wooden cluck and pecking at tender shoots invisible to me, till she wandered off once more into the hidden depths of the stillness.
But I wasn't watching for the partridge hen that afternoon. I was thrilled by the tale of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg, which had taken place at Sarajevo on the previous day. Millions of other readers, who, no more than I, felt their own destinies involved were being thrilled at the same moment. The judgment trumpet was sounding—only not as we had expected it. There was no blast from the sky—no sudden troop of angels. There was only the soundless vibration of the wire and of the Hertzian waves; there was only the casting of type and the rattling of innumerable reams of paper; and, as the Bible says, the dead could hear the voice, and they that heard it stood still; and the nations were summoned before the Throne "that was set in the midst." I was summoned, with my own people—though I didn't know it was a summons till afterward.
The paper had fallen to my knee when I was startled to see Mr. Brokenshire come round the corner of my retreat. Dressed entirely in white, with no color in his costume save the lavender stripe in his shirt and collar, and the violet of his socks, handkerchief, and tie, he would have been the perfect type of the middle-aged exquisite had it not been for the pitiless distortion of his eye the minute he caught sight of me. That he had not stumbled on me accidentally I judged by the way in which he lifted a Panama of the kind that is said to be made under water and is costlier than the costliest feminine confection by Caroline Ledoux.
I was struggling out of my wicker chair when the uplifted hand forbade me.
"Be good enough to stay where you are," he commanded, but more gently than he had ever spoken to me. "I've some things to say to you."
Too frightened to make a further attempt to move, I looked at him as he drew up a chair similar to my own, which creaked under his weight when he sat down in it. The afternoon being hot, and my veranda lacking air, which was one of the reasons why it was left to me, he mopped his brow with the violet handkerchief, on which an enormous monogram was embroidered in white. I divined his reluctance to begin not only from his long hesitation, but from the renewed contortion of his face. His hand went up to the left cheek as if to hold it in place, though with no success in the effort. When, at last, he spoke there was a stillness in his utterance suggestive of an affection extending now to the lips or the tongue.
"I want you to know how much I appreciate the help you've given to Mrs. Brokenshire during her—her"—he had a difficulty in finding the right word—"during her indisposition," he finished, rather weakly.
"I did no more than I was glad to do," I responded, as weakly as he.
"Exactly; and yet I can't allow such timely aid to go unrewarded."
I was alarmed. Grasping the arms of the chair, I braced myself.
"If you mean money, sir—"
"No; I mean more than money." He, too, braced himself. "I—I withdraw my opposition to your marriage with my son."
The immediate change in my consciousness was in the nature of a dissolving view. The veranda faded away, and the hillside wood. Once more I saw the imaginary dining-room, and myself in a smart little dinner gown seating the guests; once more I saw the white-enameled nursery, and myself in a lace peignoir leaning over the bassinet. As in previous visions of the kind, Hugh was a mere shadow in the background, secondary to the home and the baby.
Secondary to the home and the baby was the fact that my object was accomplished and that my enemy had come to his knees. Indeed, I felt no particular elation from that element in the case; no special sense of victory. Like so many realized ambitions, it seemed a matter of course, now that it had come. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that for my own sake and for the sake of the future I must have a more definite expression of surrender than he had yet given me.
I remembered that Mrs. Brokenshire had said she would help me, and could imagine how. I summoned up everything within me that would rank as force of character, speaking quietly.
"I should be sorry, sir, to have you come to this decision against your better judgment."
"If you'll be kind enough to accept the fact," he said, sharply, "we can leave my manner of reaching it out of the discussion."
In spite of the tone I rallied my resources.
"I don't want to be presumptuous, sir; but if I'm to enter your family I should like to feel sure that you'll receive me whole-heartedly."
"My dear young lady, isn't it assurance enough that I receive you at all? When I bring myself to that—"
"Oh, please don't think I can't appreciate the sacrifice."
"Then what more is to be said?"
"But the sacrifice is the point. No girl wants to become one of a family which has to make such an effort to take her."
There was already a whisper of insecurity in his tone.
"Even so, I can't see why you shouldn't let the effort be our affair. Since we make it on our own responsibility—"
"I don't care anything about the responsibility, sir. All I'm thinking of is that the effort must be made."
"But what did you expect?"
"I haven't said that I expected anything. If I've been of the slightest help to Mrs. Brokenshire I'm happy to let the service be its own reward."
"But I'm not. It isn't my habit to remain under an obligation to any one."
"Nor mine," I said, demurely.
He stared.
"What does that mean? I don't follow you."
"Perhaps not, sir; but I quite follow you. You wish me to understand that, in spite of my deficiencies, you accept me as your son's wife—for the reason that you can't help yourself."
Two sharp hectic spots came out on each cheek-bone.
"Well, what if I do?"
"I'm far too generous to put you in that position. I couldn't take you at a disadvantage, not even for the sake of marrying Hugh."
I was not sure whether he was frightened or angry, but it was the one or the other.
"Do you mean to say that, now—now that I'm ready—"
"That I'm not? Yes, sir. That's what I do mean to say. I told you once that if I loved a man I shouldn't stop to consider the wishes of his relatives; but I've repented of that. I see now that marriage has a wider application than merely to individuals; and I'm not ready to enter any family that doesn't want me."
I looked off into the golden dimnesses of the hillside wood in order not to be a witness of the struggle he was making.
"And suppose"—it was almost a groan—"and suppose I said we—wanted you?"
It was like bending an iron bar; but I gave my strength to it.
"You'd have to say it differently from that, sir."
He spoke hoarsely.
"Differently—in what sense?"
I knew I had him, as Hugh would have expressed it, where I had been trying to get him.
"In the sense that if you want me you must ask me."
He mopped his brow once more.
"I—I have asked you."
"You've said you withdrew your opposition. That's not enough."
Beads or perspiration were again standing on his forehead.
"Then what—what would be—enough?"
"A woman can't marry any one unless she does it as something of a favor."
He drew himself up.
"Do you remember that you're talking to me?"
"Yes, sir; and it's because I do remember it that I have to insist. With anybody else I shouldn't have to be so crude."
Again he put up a struggle, and this time I watched him. If his wife had made the conditions I guessed at, I had nothing to do but sit still. Grasping the arms of his chair, he half rose as if to continue the interview no further, but immediately saw, as I inferred, what that would mean to him. He fell back again into the creaking depths of the chair.
"What do you wish me to say?"
But his stricken aspect touched me. Now that he was prepared to come to his knees, I had no heart to force him down on them. Since I had gained my point, it was foolish to battle on, or try to make the Ethiopian change his skin.
"Oh, sir, you've said it!" I cried, with sudden emotion. I leaned toward him, clasping my hands. "I see you do want me; and since you do I'll—I'll come."
Having made this concession, I became humble and thankful and tactful. I appeased him by saying I was sensible of the honor he did me, that I was happy in the thought that he was to be reconciled with Hugh; and I inquired for Mrs. Brokenshire. Leading up to this question with an air of guilelessness, I got the answer I was watching for in the ashen shade that settled on his face.
I forget what he replied; I was really not listening. I was calling up the scene in which she must have fulfilled her promise of helping Hugh and me. From the something crushed in him, as in the case of a man who knows the worst at last, I gathered that she had made a clean breast of it. It was awesome to think that behind this immaculate white suit with its violet details, behind this pink of the old beau, behind this moneyed authority and this power of dictation to which even the mighty sometimes had to bow, there was a broken heart.
He knew now that the bird he had captured was nothing but a captured bird, and always longing for the forest. That his wife was willing to bear his name and live in his house and submit to his embraces was largely because I had induced her. Whether or not, in spite of his pompousness, he was grateful to me I didn't know; but I guessed that he was not. He could accept such benefits as I had secured him and yet be resentful toward the curious providence that had chosen me in particular as its instrument.
I came out of my meditations in time to hear him say that, Mrs. Brokenshire being as well rested as she was, there would be no further hindrance to their proceeding soon to Newport.
"And I suppose I might go back to my home," I observed, with no other than the best intentions.
He made an attempt to regain the authority he had just forfeited.
"What for?"
"To be married," I explained—"since I am to be married."
"But why should you be married there?"
"Wouldn't it be the most natural thing?"
"It wouldn't be the most natural thing for Hugh."
"A man can be married anywhere; whereas a woman, at such a turning-point in her life, needs a certain backing. I've an uncle and aunt and a great many friends—"
The effort at a faint smile drew up the corner of his mouth and set his face awry.
"You'll excuse me, my dear"—the epithet made me jump—"if I correct you on a point of taste. In being willing that Hugh should marry you I think I must draw the line at anything like parade."
I know my eyebrows went up.
"Parade? Parade—how?"
The painful little smile persisted.
"The ancient Romans, when they went to war, had a custom of bringing back the most conspicuous of their captives and showing them in triumph in the streets—"
I, too, smiled.
"Oh! I understand. But you see, sir, the comparison doesn't hold in this case, because none of my friends would know anything more about Hugh than the fact that he was an American."
The crooked features went back into repose.
"They'd know he was my son."
I continued to smile, but sweetly.
"They'd take it for granted that he was somebody's son—but they wouldn't know anything about you, sir. You'd be quite safe so far as that went. Though I don't live many hundreds of miles from New York, and we're fairly civilized, I had never so much as heard the name of Brokenshire till Mrs. Rossiter told me it was hers before she was married. You see, then, that there'd be no danger of my leading a captive in triumph. No one I know would give Hugh a second thought beyond being nice to the man I was marrying."
That he was pleased with this explanation I cannot affirm, but he passed it over.
"I think," was his way of responding, "that it will be better if we consider that you belong to us. Till your marriage to Hugh, which I suppose will take place in the autumn, you'll come back with us to Newport. There will be a whole new—how shall I put it?—a whole new phase of life for you to get used to. Hugh will stay with us, and I shall ask my daughter, Mrs. Rossiter, to be your hostess till—"
As, without finishing his sentence, he rose I followed his example. Though knowing in advance how futile would be the attempt to present myself as an equal, I couldn't submit to this calm disposition of my liberty and person without putting up a fight.
"I've a great preference, sir—if you'll allow me—for being married in my own home, among my own people, and in the old parish church in which I was baptized. I really have people and a background; and it's possible that my sisters might come over—"
The hand went up; his tone put an end to discussion.
"I think, my dear Alexandra, that we shall do best in considering that you belong to us. You'll need time to grow accustomed to your new situation. A step backward now might be perilous."
My fight was ended. What could I do? I listened and submitted, while he went on to tell me that Mrs. Brokenshire would wish to see me during the day, that Hugh would be sent for and would probably arrive the next afternoon, and that by the end of the week we should all be settled in Newport. There, whenever I felt I needed instruction, I was not to be ashamed to ask for it. Mrs. Rossiter would explain anything of a social nature that I didn't understand, and he knew I could count on Mrs. Brokenshire's protection.
With a comic inward grimace I swallowed all my pride and thanked him.
As for Mrs. Brokenshire's protection, that was settled when, later in the afternoon, we sat on her balcony and laughed and cried together, and held each other's hands, as young women do when their emotions outrun their power of expression. She called me Alix and begged me to invent a name for her that would combine the dignity of Hugh's stepmother with our standing as friends. I chose Miladi, out ofLes Trois Mousquetaires, with which she was delighted.
I begged off from dining with them that evening, nominally because I was too upset by all I had lived through in the afternoon, but really for the reason that I couldn't bear the thought of Mr. Brokenshire calling me his dear Alexandra twice in the same day. Once had made my blood run cold. His method of shriveling up a name by merely pronouncing it is something that transcends my power to describe. He had ruined that of Adare with me forever, and now he was completing my confusion at being called after so lovely a creature as our queen. I have always admitted that, with its stately, regal suggestions, Alexandra is no symbol for a plain little body like me; but when Mr. Brokenshire took it on his lips and called me his dear I could have cried out for mercy. So I had my dinner by myself, munching slowly and meditating on what Mr. Brokenshire described as "my new situation."
I was meditating on it still when, in the course of the following afternoon, I was sitting in a retired grove of the hillside wood waiting for Hugh to come and find me. He was to arrive about three and Miladi was to tell him where I was. In our crowded little inn, with its crowded grounds, nooks of privacy were rare.
I had taken the Boston paper with me in order to get further details of the tragedy of Sarajevo. These I found absorbing. They wove themselves in with my thoughts of Hugh and my dreams of our life together. An article on Serbia, which I had found in an old magazine that morning, had given me, too, an understanding of the situation I hadn't had before. Up to that day Serbia had been but a name to me; now I began to see its significance. The story of this brave, patient little people, with its one idea—anidée fixeof liberty—began to move me.
Of all the races of Europe the Serbian impressed me as the one that had been most constantly thwarted in its natural ambitions—struck down whenever it attempted to rise. Its patriotic hopes had always been inconvenient to some other nation's patriotic hopes, and so had to be blasted systematically. England, France, Austria, Turkey, Italy, and Russia had taken part at various times in this circumvention, denying the fruits of victory after they had been won. Serbia had been the poor little bastard brother of Europe, kept out of the inheritance of justice and freedom and commerce when others were admitted to a share. For some of them there might have been no great share; but for little Serbia there was none.
It was terrible to me that such wrong could go on, generation after generation, and that there should be no Nemesis. In a measure it contradicted my theory of right. I didn't want any one to suffer, but I asked why there had been no suffering. Of the nations that had knocked Serbia about, hedged her in by restrictions, dismembered her and kept her dismembered, most were prosperous. From Serbia's point of view I couldn't help sympathizing with the hand that had struck down at least one member of the House of Hapsburg; and yet in that tragic act there could be no adequate revenge for centuries of repression. What I wanted I didn't know; I suppose I didn't want anything. I was only wondering—wondering why, if individuals couldn't sin without paying for the sin they had committed, nations should sin and be immune.
Strangely enough, these reflections did not shut out the thought of the lover who was coming up the hill; they blended with it; they made it larger and more vital. I could thank God I was marrying a man whose hand would always be lifted on behalf of right. I didn't know how it could be lifted in the cause of Serbia against the influences represented by Franz Ferdinand; but when one is dreaming one doesn't pause to direct the logical course of one's dreams. Perhaps I was only clutching at whatever I could say for Hugh; and at least I could say that. He was not a strong man in the sense of being fertile in ideas; but he was brave and generous, and where there was injustice his spirit would be among the first to be stirred by it. That conviction made me welcome him when, at last, I saw his stocky figure moving lower down among the pine trunks.
I caught sight of him long before he discovered me, and could make my notes upon him. I could even make my notes upon myself, not wholly with my own approval. I was too business-like, too cool. There was nothing I possessed in the world that I would not have given for a single quickened heart-throb. I would have given it the more when I saw Hugh's pinched face and the furbished-up spring suit he had worn the year before.
It was not the fact that he had worn it the year before that gave me a pang; it was that he must have worn it pretty steadily. I am not observant of men's clothes. Except that I like to see them neat, they are too much alike to be worth noticing. But anything not plainly opulent in Hugh smote me with a sense of guilt. It could so easily be attributed to my fault. I could so easily take it so myself. I did take it so myself. I said as he approached: "This man has suffered. He has suffered on my account. All my life must be given to making it up to him."
I make no attempt to tell how we met. It was much as we had met after other separations, except that when he slipped to the low boulder and took me in his arms it was with a certainty of possession which had never hitherto belonged to him. There was nothing for me but to let myself go, and lie back in his embrace.
I came to myself, as it were, on hearing him whisper, with his face close to mine:
"You witch! You witch! How did you ever manage it?"
I made the necessity for giving him an explanation the excuse for working myself free.
"I didn't manage it. It was Mrs. Brokenshire."
He cried out, incredulously:
"Oh no! Not the madam!"
"Yes, Hugh. It was she. She asked him. She must have begged him. That's all I can tell you about it."
He was even more incredulous.
"Then it must have been on your account rather than on mine; you can bet your sweet life on that!"
"Hugh, darling, she's fond of you. She's fond of you all. If you could only have—"
"We couldn't." For the first time he showed signs of admitting me into the family sense of disgrace. "Did you ever hear how dad came to marry her?"
I said that something had reached me, but one couldn't put the blame for that on her.
"And she's had more pull with him than we've had," he declared, resentfully. "You can see that by the way he's given in to her on this—"
I soothed him on this point, however, and we talked of a general reconciliation. From that we went on to the subject of our married life, of which his father, in the hasty interview of half an hour before, had briefly sketched the conditions. A place was to be found for Hugh in the house of Meek & Brokenshire; his allowance was to be raised to twelve or fifteen thousand a year; we were to have a modest house, or apartment in New York. No date had been fixed for the wedding, so far as Hugh could learn; but it might be in October. We should be granted perhaps a three months' trip abroad, with a return to New York before Christmas.
He gave me these details with an excitement bespeaking intense satisfaction. It was easy to see that, after his ten months' rebellion, he was eager to put his head under the Brokenshire yoke again. His instinct in this was similar to Ethel's and Jack's—only that they had never declared themselves free. I could best compare him to a horse who for one glorious half-hour kicks up his heels and runs away, and yet returns to the stable and the harness as the safest sphere of blessedness. Under the Brokenshire yoke he could live, move, have his being, and enjoy his twelve or fifteen thousand a year, without that onerous responsibility which comes with the exercise of choice. Under the Brokenshire yoke I, too, should be provided for. I should be raised from my lowly estate, be given a position in the world, and, though for a while the fact of themésalliancemight tell against me, it would be overcome in my case as in that of Libby Jaynes. His talk was a pæan on our luck.
"All we'll have to do for the rest of our lives, little Alix, will be to get away with our thousand dollars a month. I guess we can do that—what? We sha'n't even have to save, because in the natural course of events—" He left this reference to his father's demise to go on with his hymn of self-congratulation. "But we've pulled it off, haven't we? We've done the trick. Lord! what a relief it is! What do you think I've been living on for the last six weeks? Chocolate and crackers for the most part. Lost thirty pounds in two months. But it's all right now, little Alix. I've got you and I mean to keep you." He asked, suddenly: "How did you come to know the madam so well? I'd never had a hint of it. You do keep some things awful close!"
I made my answer as truthful as I could.
"This was nothing I could tell you, Hugh. Mrs. Brokenshire was sorry for me ever since last year in Newport. She never dared to say anything about it, because she was afraid of your father and the rest of you; but she did pity me—"
"Well, I'll be blowed! I didn't suppose she had it in her. She's always seemed to me like a woman walking in her sleep—"
"She's waking up now. She's beginning to understand that perhaps she hasn't taken the right attitude toward your father; and I think she'd like to begin. It was to work that problem out that she decided to come away with me and live simply for a while. . . . She wanted to escape from every one, and I was the nearest to no one she could find to take with her; and so— If your sisters or your brother ask you any questions I wish you would tell them that."
We discussed this theme in its various aspects while the afternoon light turned the pine trunks round us into columns of red-gold, and a soft wind soothed us with balsamic smells. Birds flitted and fluted overhead, and now and then a squirrel darted up to challenge us with the peak of its inquisitive sharp little nose. I chose what I thought a favorable moment to bring before Hugh the matter that had been so summarily shelved by his father. I wanted so much to be married among my own people and from what I could call my own home.
His child-like, wide-apart, small blue eyes regarded me with growing astonishment as I made my point clear.
"For Heaven's sake, my sweet little Alix, what do you want that for? Why, we can be married in Newport!"
His emphasis on the word Newport was as if he had said Heaven.
"Yes; but you see, Hugh, darling, Newport means nothing to me—"
"It will jolly well have to if—"
"And my home means such a lot. If you were marrying Lady Cissie Boscobel you'd certainly go to Goldborough for the occasion."
"Ah, but that would be different!"
"Different in what way?"
He colored, and grew confused.
"Well, don't you see?"
"No; I'm afraid I don't."
"Oh yes, you do, little Alix," he smiled, cajolingly. "Don't try to pull my leg. We can't have one of these bang-up weddings, as it is. Of course we can't—and we don't want it. But they'll do the decent thing by us, now that dad has come round at all, and let people see that they stand behind us. If we were to go down there to where you came from—Halifax, or wherever it is—it would put us back ten years with the people we want to keep up with."
I submitted again, because I didn't know what else to do. I submitted, and yet with a rage which was the hotter for being impotent. These people took it so easily for granted that I had no pride, and was entitled to none. They allowed me no more in the way of antecedents than if I had been a new creation on the day when I first met Mrs. Rossiter. They believed in the principle of inequality of birth as firmly as if they had been minor German royalties. My marriage to Hugh might be valid in the eyes of the law, but to them it would always be more or less morganatic. I could only be Duchess of Hohenberg to this young prince; and perhaps not even that. She was noble—adel, as they call it—at the least; while I was merely a nursemaid.
But I made another grimace—and swallowed it. I could have broken out with some vicious remark, which would have bewildered poor Hugh beyond expression and made no change in his point of view. Even if it relieved my pent-up bitterness, it would have left me nothing but a nursemaid; and, since I was to marry him, why disturb the peace? And I owed him too much not to marry him; of that I was convinced. He had been kind to me from the first day he knew me; he had been true to me in ways in which few men would have been true. To go back on him now would not be simply a change of mind; it would be an act of cruel treachery. No, I argued; I could do nothing but go on with it. My debt could not be paid in any other way. Besides, I declared to myself, with a catch in the throat, I—I loved him. I had said it so many times that it must be true.
When the minute came to go down the hill and prepare for the little dinner at which I was to be included in the family, my thoughts reverted to the event that had startled the world.
"Isn't this terrible?" I said to Hugh, indicating the paper I carried in my hand.
He looked at me with the mild wondering which always made his expression vacuous.
"Isn't what terrible?"
"Why, the assassinations in Bosnia."
"Oh! I saw there had been something."
"Something!" I cried. "It's one of the most momentous things that have ever happened in history."
"What makes you say that?" he inquired, turning on me the innocent stare of his baby-blue eyes as we sauntered between the pine trunks.
I had to admit that I didn't know, I only felt it in my bones.
"Aren't they always doing something of the sort down there—killing kings and queens, or something?"
"Oh, not like this!" I paused. "You know, Hugh, Serbia is a wonderful little country when you've heard a bit of its story."
"Is it?" He took out a cigarette and lit it.
In the ardor of my sympathy I poured out on him some of the information I had just acquired.
"And we're all responsible," I was finishing; "English, French, Russians, Austrians—"
"We're not responsible—we Americans," he broke in, quietly.
"Oh, I'm not so sure about that. If you inherit the civilization of the races from which you spring you inherit some of their crimes; and you've got to pay for them."
"Not on your life!" he laughed, easily; but in the laugh there was something that cut me more deeply than he knew.
But once we were settled in Newport, I almost forgot the tragedy of Sarajevo. The world, it seemed to me, had forgotten it, too; it had passed into history. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek being dead and buried, we had gone on to something else.
Personally I had gone on to the readjustment of my life. I was with Ethel Rossiter as a guest. Guest or retainer, however, made little difference. She treated me just as before—with the same detached, live-and-let-live kindliness that dropped into the old habit of making use of me. I liked that. It kept us on a simple, natural footing. I could see myself writing her notes and answering her telephone calls as long as I lived. Except that now and then, when she thought of it, she called me Alix, instead of Miss Adare, she might still have been paying me so much a month.
"Well, I can't get over father," was the burden of her congratulations to me. "I knew that woman could turn him around her finger; but I didn't suppose she could do it like that. You played your cards well in getting hold of her."
"I didn't play my cards," was my usual defense, "because I had none to play.'"
"Then what on earth brought her over to your side?"
"Life."
"Life—fiddlesticks! It was life with a good deal of help from Alix Adare." She added, on one occasion: "Why didn't you take that young Strangways—frankly, now?"
"Because," I smiled, "I don't believe in polyandry."
"But you're fond of him. That's what beats me! You're fond of one man and you're marrying another; and yet—"
I don't know what color I turned outwardly, but within I was fire. It was the fire of confusion and not of indignation. I felt it safest to let her go on, hazarding no remarks of my own.
"And yet—what?"
"And yet you don't seem like a girl who'd marry for money—you really don't. That's one thing about you."
I screwed up a wan smile.
"Thanks."
"So that I'm all in the dark. What you can see in Hugh—"
"What I can see in Hugh is the kindest of men. That's a good deal to say of any one."
"Well, I'll be hanged if I'd marry even the kindest of men if it was for nothing but his kindness."
The Jack Brokenshires were jovially non-committal, letting it go at that. In offering the necessary good wishes Jack contented himself with calling me a sly one; while Pauline, who was mannish and horsey, wrung my hand till she almost pulled it off, remarking that in a family like the Brokenshires the natural principle was, The more, the merrier. Acting, doubtless, on a hint from higher up, they included Hugh and me in a luncheon to some twenty of their cronies, whose shibboleths I didn't understand and among whom I was lost.
As far as I went into general society it was so unobtrusively that I might be said not to have gone at all. I made no sensation as the affianced bride of Hugh Brokenshire. To the great fact of my engagement few people paid any attention, and those who referred to it did so with the air of forgetting it the minute afterward. It came to me with some pain that in his own circle Hugh was regarded more or less as a nonentity. I was a "queer Canadian." Newport presented to me a hard, polished exterior, like a porcelain wall. It was too high to climb over and it afforded no nooks or crevices in which I might find a niche. No one ever offered me the slightest hint of incivility—or of interest.
"It's because they've too much to do and to think of," Mrs. Brokenshire explained to me. "They know too many people already. Their lives are too full. Money means nothing to them, because they've all got so much of it. Quiet good breeding isn't striking enough. Cleverness they don't care anything about—and not even for scandals outside their own close corporation. All the same"—I waited while she formulated her opinion—"all the same, a great deal could be done in Newport—in New York—in Washington—in America at large—if we had the right sort of women."
"And haven't you?"
"No. Our women are—how shall I say?—too small—too parochial—too provincial. They've no national outlook; they've no authority. Few of them know how to use money or to hold high positions. Our men hardly ever turn to them for advice on important things, because they've rarely any to give."
Her remarks showed so much more of the reflecting spirit than I had ever seen in her before, that I was emboldened to ask:
"Then, couldn't you show them how?"
She shook her head.
"No; I'm an American, like the rest. It isn't in me. It's both personal and national. Cissie Boscobel could do it—not because she's clever or has had experience, but because the tradition is there. We've no tradition."
The tradition in Cissie Boscobel became evident on a day in July when she came to sit beside me in the grounds of the Casino. I had gone with Mrs. Rossiter, with whom I had been watching the tennis. When she drifted away with a group of her friends I was left alone. It was then that Lady Cecilia, in tennis things, with her racket in her hand, came across the grass to me. She moved with the splendid careless freedom of women who pass their lives outdoors and yet are trained to drawing-rooms.
She didn't go to her point at once; she was, in fact, a mistress of the introductory. The visits she had made and the people she had met since our last meeting were the theme of her remarks; and now she was staying with the Burkes. She would remain with them for a month, after which she had two or three places to go to on Long Island and in the Catskills. She would have to be at Strath-na-Cloid in September, for the wedding of her sister Janet and the young man in the Inverness Rangers, who would then have got home from India. She would be sorry to leave. She adored America. Americans were such fun. Their houses were so fresh and new. She doted on the multiplicity of bathrooms. It would be so horrid to live at Strath-na-Cloid or Dillingham Hall after the cheeriness of Mrs. Burke's or Mrs. Rossiter's.
Screwing up her greenish cat-like eyes till they were no more than tiny slits with a laugh in them, she said, with her deliciously incisive utterance:
"So you've done it, haven't you?"
"You mean that Mr. Brokenshire has come round."
"You know, that seems to me the most wonderful thing I ever heard of! It's like a miracle isn't it? You've hardly lifted a finger—and yet here it is." She leaned forward, her firm hands grasping the racket that lay across her knees. "I want to tell you how much I admire you. You're splendid! You're not a bit like a Colonial, are you?"
Since she meant well, I mastered my indignation.
"Oh yes, I am. I'm exactly like a Colonial, and very proud of the fact."
"Fancy! And are all Colonials like you?"
"All that aren't a great deal cleverer and better."
"Fancy!" she breathed again. "I must tell them when I go home. They don't know it, you know." She added, in a slight change of key: "I'm so glad Hugh is going to have a wife like you."
It was on my tongue to say, "He'd be much better off with a wife like you"; but I made it:
"What do you think it will do for him?"
"It will bring him out. Hugh is splendid in his way—just as you are—only he needs bringing out, don't you think?"
"He hasn't needed bringing out in the last ten months," I declared, with some emphasis. "See what he's done—"
"And yet he didn't pull it off, did he? You managed that. You'll manage a lot of other things for him, too. I must go back to the others," she continued, getting up. "They're waiting for me to make up the set. But I wanted to tell you I'm—I'm glad—without—without any—any reserves."
I think there were tears in her narrow eyes, as I know there were in my own; but she beat such a hasty retreat that I could not be very sure of it.
Mildred Brokenshire was a surprise to me. I had hardly ever seen her till she sent for me in order to talk about Hugh. I found her lying on a couch in a dim corner of her big, massively furnished room, her face no more than a white pain-pinched spot in the obscurity. After having kissed me she made me sit at a distance, nominally to get the breeze through an open window, but really that I might not have to look at her.
In an unnaturally hollow, tragic voice she said it was a pleasure to her that Hugh should have got at last the woman he loved, especially after having made such a fight for her. Though she didn't know me, she was sure I had fine qualities; otherwise Hugh would not have cared for me as he did. He was a dear boy, and a good wife could make much of him. He lacked initiative in the way that was unfortunately common among rich men's sons, especially in America; but the past winter had shown that he was not deficient in doggedness. She wondered if I loved him as much as he loved me.
There was that in this suffering woman, so far withdrawn from our struggles in the world outside, which prompted me to be as truthful as the circumstances rendered possible.
"I love him enough, dear Miss Brokenshire," I said, with some emotion, "to be eager to give my life to the object of making him happy."
She accepted this in silence. At least it was silence for a time, after which she said, in measured, organ-like tones:
"We can't make other people happy, you know. We can only do our duty—and let their happiness take care of itself. They must make themselves happy! It's a mistake for any of us to feel responsible for more than doing right. "When we do right other people must make the best they can of it."
"I believe that, too," I responded, earnestly—"only that it's sometimes so hard to tell what is right."
There was again an interval of silence. The voice, when it came out of the dimness, might have been that of the Pythian virgin oracle. The utterances I give were not delivered consecutively, but in answer to questions and observations of my own.
"Right, on the whole, is what we've been impelled to do when we've been conscientiously seeking the best way. . . . Forces catch us, often contradictory and bewildering forces, and carry us to a certain act, or to a certain line of action. Very well, then; be satisfied. Don't go back. Don't torture yourself with questionings. Don't dig up what has already been done. That's done! Nothing can undo it. Accept it as it is. If there's a wrong or a mistake in it life will take care of it. . . . Life is not a blind impulse, working blindly. It's a beneficent, rectifying power. It's dynamic. It's a perpetual unfolding. It's a fire that utilizes as fuel everything that's cast into it. . . ."
And yet when I kissed her to say good-by I got the impression that she didn't like me or that she didn't trust me. I was not always liked, but I was generally trusted. The idea that this Brokenshire seeress, this suffering priestess whose whole life was to lie on a couch and think, and think, and think, had reserves in her consciousness on my account was painful. I said so to Hugh that evening.
"Oh, you mustn't take Mildred's gassing too seriously," he advised. "Gets a lot of ideas in her head: but—poor thing—what else can she do? Since she doesn't know anything about real life, she just spins theories on the subject. Whatever you want to know, little Alix, I'll tell you."
"Thanks," I said, dryly, explaining the shiver which ran through me by the fact that we were sitting in the loggia, in the open air.
"Then we'll go in."
"No, no!" I protested. "I like it much better out here."
But he was on his feet.
"We'll go in. I can't have my sweet little Alix taking cold. I'm here to protect her. She must do what I tell her. We'll go in."
And we went in. It was one of the things I was learning, that my kind Hugh would kill me with kindness. It was part of his way of taking possession. If he could help it he wouldn't leave me for an hour unwatched; nor would he let me lift a hand.
"There are servants to do that," he would say. "It's one of the things little Alix will have to get accustomed to."
"I can't get accustomed to doing nothing, Hugh."
"You'll have plenty to do in having a good time."
"Oh, but I must have more than that in life."
"In your old life, perhaps; but everything is to be different now. Don't be afraid, little Alix; you'll learn."
"Learn what? It seems to me you're taking the possibility of ever learning anything away."
This was a joke. Over it he laughed heartily.
"You won't know yourself, little Alix, when I've had you for a year."
Mr. Brokenshire's compliments to me were in a similar vein. He seemed always to be in search of the superior position he had lost on the day we sat looking up into the hillside wood. His dear Alexandra must never forget her social inexperience. In being raised to a higher level I was to watch the manners of those about me. I was to copy them, as people learning French or Italian try to catch an accent which is not that of their mother tongue. They probably do it badly; but that is better than not doing it at all. I could never be an Ethel Rossiter or a Daisy Burke, but I could become an imitation. Imitations being to the house of Brokenshire like paste diamonds or fish-glue pearls, my gratitude for the effort they made in accepting me had to be the more humble.
And yet on occasions I tried to get justice for myself.
"I'm not altogether without knowledge of the world, Mr. Brokenshire," I said, after one of his kindly, condescending lectures. "Not only in Canada, but in England, and to some slight extent abroad, I've had opportunities—"
"Yes, yes; but this is different. You've had opportunities, as you say. But there you were looking on from the outside, while here you'll be living from within."
"Oh, but I wasn't looking on from the outside—"
His hand went up; his pitiful crooked smile was meant to express tolerance. "You'll pardon me, my dear; but we gain nothing by discussing that point. You'll see it yourself when you've been one of us a little longer. Meantime, if you watch the women about you and study them—"
We left it there. I always left it there. But I did begin to see that there was a difference between me and the women whom Hugh and his father wished me to take as my models. I had hitherto not observed this variation in type—I might possibly call it this distinction between national ideals—during my two years under the Stars and Stripes; and I find a difficulty in expressing it, for the reason that to anything I say so many exceptions can be made. The immense class of wage-earning women would be exceptions; mothers and housekeepers would again be exceptions; exceptions would be all women engaged in political or social or philanthropic service to the country; but when this allowance has been made there still remain a multitude of American women economically independent, satisfied to be an incubus on the land. They dress, they entertain, they go to entertainments, they live gracefully. When they can't help it they bear children; but they bear as few as possible. Otherwise they are not much more than pleasing forms of vegetation, idle of body and mind; and the American man, as a rule, loves to have it so.
"The American man," Mrs. Rossiter had said to me once, "likes figurines." Hugh was a rebel to that doctrine, she had added then; but his rebellion had been short-lived. He had come back to the standard of his countrymen. He had chosen me, he used to say, because I was a woman of whom a Socialist might make his star; and now I was to be put in a vitrine.
Canadian women, as a class, are not made for the vitrine. Their instinct is to be workers in the world and mates for men. They have no very high opinion of their privileges; they are not self-analytical. They rarely think of themselves as the birds and flowers of the human race, or as other than creatures to put their shoulders to the wheel in the ways of which God made them mistresses. Not ashamed to know how to bake and brew and mend and sew, they rule the house with a practically French economy. I was brought up in that way; not ignorant of books or of social amenities, but with the assumption that I was in this world to contribute something to it by my usefulness. I hadn't contributed much, Heaven only knows; but the impulse to work was instinctive.
And as Hugh's wife I began to see that I should be lifted high and dry into a sphere where there was nothing to be done. I should dress and I should amuse myself; I should amuse myself and I should dress. It was all Mrs. Rossiter did; it was all Mrs. Brokenshire did—except that to her, poor soul, amusement had become but gall and bitterness. Still, with the large exceptions which I cheerfully concede, it was the American ideal, so far as I could get hold of it; and I began to feel that, in the long run, it would stifle me.
It was a kind of feminine Nirvana. It offered me nothing to strive for, nothing to wait for in hope, nothing to win gloriously. The wife of Larry Strangways, whoever she turned out to be, would have a goal before her, high up and far ahead, with the incentive of lifelong striving. Hugh Brokenshire's wife would have everything done for her, as it was done for Mildred. Like Mildred she would have nothing to do but think and think and think—or train herself to not thinking at all. Little by little I saw myself being steered toward this fate; and, like St. Peter, when I thought thereon I wept.
I had taken to weeping all alone in my pretty room, which looked out on shrubberies and gardens. I should probably have shrubberies and gardens like them some day; so that weeping was the more foolish. Every one considered me fortunate. All my Canadian and English friends spoke of me as a lucky girl, and, in their downright, practical way, said I was "doing very well for myself."
Of course I was—which made it criminal on my part not to take the Brokenshire view of things with equanimity. I tried to. I bent my will to it. I bent my spirit to it. In the end I might have succeeded if the heavenly trumpet had not sounded again, with another blast from Sarajevo.