People are no more interested here than they are on our side of the border; but it's got to come, for all that. What we need is a public opinion; and a public opinion can only be created by writing and talk. Thank the Lord, you and I can talk if we are not very strong on writing! and talk we must! Bigger streams have risen from smaller springs. The mustard seed is the least of all seeds; but it grows to be the greatest of herbs.
People are no more interested here than they are on our side of the border; but it's got to come, for all that. What we need is a public opinion; and a public opinion can only be created by writing and talk. Thank the Lord, you and I can talk if we are not very strong on writing! and talk we must! Bigger streams have risen from smaller springs. The mustard seed is the least of all seeds; but it grows to be the greatest of herbs.
It might have been easier to call forth a responsive spark had we realized that there was a war. But we hadn't—not in the way that the fact came to us afterward. In spite of the taking of Namur, Liège, Maubeuge, the advance on Paris, and the rolling back on the Marne, we had seen no more than chariots and horses of fire in the clouds. It was not only distant, it was phantom-like. We read the papers; we heard of horrors; American war refugees and English visitors alike piled up the agonies, to which we listened eagerly; we saw the moneyed magnates come and go in counsel with Mr. Brokenshire; we knitted and sewed and subscribed to funds; but, so far as vital participation went, Hugh was right in saying we were out of it.
And then a shot fell into our midst, smiting us with awe.
Cissie Boscobel, Hugh, another young man, and I had been playing tennis one September morning on Mrs. Rossiter's courts. The other young man having left for Bailey's Beach, the remaining three of us were sauntering back toward the house when a lad, whom Cissie recognized as belonging to the Burkes' establishment, came running up with a telegram. As it was for Cissie she stood still to read it, while Hugh and I strolled on. Once or twice I glanced back toward her; but she still held the brief lines up before her as if she couldn't make out their meaning.
When she rejoined us, as she presently did, I noticed that her color had died out, though there was otherwise no change in her unless it was in stillness. The question was as to whether we should go to Bailey's or not. I didn't want to go and Hugh declared he wouldn't go without me.
"We'll put it up to Cissie," he said, as we reached the house. "If she goes we'll all go."
"I think I won't go," she answered, quietly; adding, without much change of tone, "Leatherhead's been killed in action."
So there really was a war! Hugh's deep "Oh!" was in Itself like the distant rumble of guns.
There was nothing to be done for Lady Cecilia because she took her bereavement with so little fuss. She asked for no sympathy; so far as I ever saw, she shed no tears. If on that particular spot in the neighborhood of Ypres a man had had to fall for his country, she was proud that it had been a Boscobel. She put on a black frock and ordered her maid to take the jade-green plume out of a black hat; but, except that she declined invitations, she went about as usual. As the first person we knew to be touched by the strange new calamity of war, we made a kind of heroine of her, treating her with an almost romantic reverence; but she herself never seemed aware of it. It was my first glimpse of that unflinching British heroism of which I have since seen much, and it impressed me.
We began to dream together of being useful; our difficulty was that we didn't see the way. War had not yet made its definite claims on women and girls, and knitting till our muscles ached was not a sufficient outlet for our energies. Had I been in Cissie's place, I should have gone home at once; but I suspected that, in spite of all her brave words to me, she couldn't quite kill the hope that kept her lingering on.
My own ambitions being distasteful to Hugh, I was obliged to repress them, doing so with the greater regret because some of the courses I suggested would have done him good. They would have utilized the physical strength with which he was blessed, and delivered him from that material well-being to which he returned with the more child-like rejoicing because of having been without it.
"Hugh, dear," I said to him once, "couldn't we be married soon and go over to France or England? Then we should see whether there wasn't something we could do."
"Not on your life, little Alix!" was his laughing response. "Since as Americans we're out of it, out of it we shall stay."
Over replies like this, of which there were many, I was gnashing my teeth helplessly when, all at once, I was called on to see myself as others saw me, so getting a surprise.
The first note of warning came to me in a few words from Ethel Rossiter. I was scribbling her notes one morning as she lay in bed, when it occurred to me to say:
"If I'm going to be married, I suppose I ought to be doing something about clothes."
She murmured, listlessly:
"Oh, I wouldn't be in a hurry about that, if I were you."
I went on writing.
"I haven't been in a hurry, have I? But I shall certainly want some things I haven't got now."
"Then you can get them after you're married. When are you to be married, anyhow?"
As the question was much on my mind, I looked up from my task and said:
"Well—when?"
"Don't you know?"
"No. Do you?"
She shook her head.
"I didn't know but what father had said something about it."
"He hasn't—not a word." I resumed my scribbling. "It's a queer thing for him to have to settle, don't you think? One might have supposed it would have been left to me."
"Oh, you don't know father!" It was as if throwing off something of no importance that she added, "Of course, he can see that you're not in love with Hugh."
Amazed at this reading of my heart, I bent my head to hide my confusion.
"I don't know why you should say that," I stammered at last, "when you can't help seeing I'm quite true to him."
She shrugged her beautiful shoulders, of which one was bare.
"Oh, true! What's the good of that?" She went on, casually: "By the by, do call up Daisy Burke and tell her I sha'n't go to that luncheon of theirs. They're going to have old lady Billing, who's coming to stay at father's; and you don't catch me with that lot except when I can't help it." She reverted to the topic of a minute before. "I don't blame you, of course. I suppose, if I were in your place, it's what I should do myself. It's what I thought you'd try for—you remember, don't you?—as long ago as when we were in Halifax. But naturally enough other people don't—" I failed to learn, however, what other people didn't, because of a second reversion in theme: "Do make up something civil to say to Daisy, and tell her I won't come."
We dropped the subject, chiefly because I was afraid to go on with it; but when I met old Mrs. Billing I received a similar shock. Having gone to Mr. Brokenshire's to pay her my respects, I was told she was on the terrace. As a matter of fact, she was making her way toward the hall, and awkwardly carried a book, a sunshade, and the stump of a cigarette. Dutifully I went forward in the hope of offering my services.
"Get out of my sight!" was her response to my greetings. "I can't bear to look at you."
Brushing past me without further words, she entered the house.
"What did she mean?" I asked of Cissie Boscobel, to whom I heard that Mrs. Billing had given her own account of the incident.
Lady Cecilia was embarrassed.
"Oh, nothing! She's just so very odd."
But I insisted:
"She must have meant something. Had it anything to do with Hugh?"
Reluctantly Lady Cissie let it out. Mrs. Billing had got the idea that I was marrying Hugh for his money; and, though in the past she had not disapproved of this line of action, she had come to think it no road to happiness. Having taken the trouble to give me more than one hint that I should many the man I was in love with she was now disappointed in my character.
"You know how much truth there is in all that, don't you?" I said, evasively.
Lady Cissie did her best to support me, though between her words and her inflection there was a curious lack of correspondence.
"Oh yes—certainly!"
I got the reaction of her thought, however, some minutes later, when she said, apropos of nothing in our conversation:
"Since Janet can't be married this month, I needn't go home for a long time."
But knowing that this suggestion was in the air, I was the better able to interpret Mildred's oracular utterance the next time I sat at the foot of the couch, in the darkened room.
"One can't be true to another," she said, in reply to some feeler of my own, "unless one is true to oneself, and one can't be true to oneself unless one follows the highest of one's instincts."
I said, inwardly: "Ah! Now I know the reason for her distrust of me." Aloud I made it:
"But that throws us back on the question as to what one's highest instincts are."
There was the pause that preceded all her expressions of opinion.
"On the principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive, I suppose our highest promptings are those which urge us to give most of ourselves."
"And when one gives all of oneself that one can dispose of?"
"One has then to consider the importance or the unimportance of what one has to withhold."
Of all the things that had been said to me this was the most disturbing. It had seemed to me hitherto that the essence of my duty lay in marrying Hugh. If I married him, I argued, I should have done my best to make up to him for all he had undergone for my sake. I saw myself as owing him a debt. The refusal to pay it would have implied a kind of moral bankruptcy. Considering myself solvent, and also considering myself honest, I felt I had no choice. Since I could pay, I must pay. The reasoning was the more forcible because I liked Hugh and was grateful to him. I could be tolerably happy with him, and would make him a good wife.
To make him a good wife I had choked back everything I had ever felt for Larry Strangways; I had submitted to all the Brokenshire repressions; I had made myself humble and small before Hugh and his father, and accepted the status of a Libby Jaynes. My heart cried out like any other woman's heart—it cried out for my country in the hour of its stress; it cried out for my home in what I tried to make the hour of my happiness; when it caught me unawares it cried out for the man I loved. But all this I mastered as our Canadian men were mastering their longings and regrets on saying their good-bys. What was to be done was to be done, and done willingly. Willingly I meant to marry Hugh, not because he was the man I would have chosen before all others, but because, when no one else in the world was giving me a thought, he had had the astonishing goodness to choose me. And now—
With Mrs. Brokenshire the situation was different. She believed I was in love with Hugh and that the others were doing me a wrong. Moreover, she informed me one day that I was making my way in Newport. People who noticed me once noticed me again. The men beside whom I sat at the occasional lunches and dinners I attended often spoke of me to the hostess on going away, and there could be no better sign than that. They said that, though I "wasn't long on looks," I had ideas and knew how to express them. She ventured to hope that this kindly opinion might, in the end, soften Mr. Brokenshire.
"Do you mean that he isn't softened as it is?"
She answered, indirectly:
"He's not accustomed to be forced—and he feels I've forced him."
It was her first reference to what she had done for Hugh and me. In its way it gave me permission to say:
"But isn't it a question of thequid pro quo? If you granted him something for something he granted you in return—"
But the expression on her face forbade my going on. I have never seen such a parting to human lips, or so haunting, so lost a look in human eyes. It told me everything. It was a confession of all the things she never could have said. "Better is it," says the Book of Ecclesiastes, "that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay." She had vowed and not paid. She had got her price and hadn't fulfilled her bargain. She couldn't; she never would. It was beyond her. The big moneyed man who at that minute was helping to finance a good part of Europe, who was a power not only in a city or a country, but the world, had been tricked by a woman; and I in my poor little person was the symbol of his discomfiture.
No wonder he found it hard to forgive me! No wonder that whenever I came where he was he treated me to some kindly hint or correction which was no sufficient veil for his scorn! As I had never to my knowledge been hated by any one, it was terrible to feel myself an object of abhorrence to a man of such high standing in the world. Our eyes couldn't meet without my seeing that his passions were seething to the boiling-point. If he could have struck me dead with a look I think he would have done it. And I didn't hate him; I was too sorry for him. I could have liked him if he had let me.
I had, consequently, much to think about. I thought and I prayed. It was not a minute at which to do anything hurriedly. To a spirit so hot as mine it would have been a relief to lash out at them all; but, as I had checked myself hitherto, I checked myself again. I reasoned that if I kept close to right, right would take care of me. Not being a theologian, I felt free to make some closeness of identity between right and God. I might have defined right as God in action, or God as right in conjunction with omnipotence, intelligence, and love; but I had no need for exactness of terms. In keeping near to right I knew I must be near to God: and near to God I could let myself go so far that no power on earth would seem strong enough to save me—and yet I should be saved.
I went on then with a kind of fearlessness. If I was to marry Hugh I was convinced that I should be supported; if not, I was equally convinced that something would hold me back.
"If anything should happen," I said to Cissie Boscobel one day, "I want you to look after Hugh."
The dawn seemed to break over her, though she only said, tremulously:
"Happen—how?"
"I don't know. Perhaps nothing will. But if it does—"
She slipped away, doubtless so as not to hear more.
And then one evening, when I was not thinking especially about it, the Cloud came down on the Mountain; the voice spoke out of it, and my course was made plain.
But before that night I also had received a cablegram. It was from my sister Louise, to say that theKing Arthur, her husband's ship, had been blown up in the North Sea, and that he was among the lost.
So the call was coming to me more sharply than I had yet heard it. With Lady Cecilia's example in mind, I said little to those about me beyond mentioning the fact. I suppose they showed me as much sympathy as the sweeping away of a mere brother-in-law demanded. They certainly said they were sorry, and hinted that that was what nations let themselves in for when they were so rash as to go to war.
"Think we'd ever expose our fellows like that?" was Hugh's comment. "Not on your life!"
But they didn't make a heroine of me as they did with Lady Cissie; not that I cared about that. I only hoped that the fact that my brother-in-law's name was in all the American accounts of the incident would show them that I belonged to some one, and that some one belonged to me. If it did I never perceived it. Perhaps the loss of a mere captain in the navy was a less gallant occurrence than the death in action of a Lord Leatherhead; perhaps we were already getting used to the toll of war; but, whatever the reason, Lady Cissie was still, to all appearances, the only sufferer. Within a day or two a black dress was my sole reminder that theKing Arthurhad gone down; and, even to Hugh, I made no further reference to the catastrophe.
And then came the evening when, as Larry Strangways said on my telling him about it, "the fat was all in the fire."
It was the occasion of what had become the annual dinner at Mr. Brokenshire's in honor of Mrs. Billing—a splendid function. Nothing short of a splendid function would have satisfied the old lady, who had the gift of making even the great afraid of her. The event was the more magnificent for the reason that, in addition to the mother of the favorite, a number of brother princes of finance, in Newport for conference with our host, were included among the guests. Of these one was staying in the house, one with the Jack Brokenshires, and two at a hotel. I was seated between the two who were at the hotel because they were socially unimportant. Even Mr. Brokenshire had sometimes to extend his domestic hospitality to business friends for the sake of business, when perhaps he should have preferred to show his attentions in clubs.
The chief scene, if I may so call it, was played to the family alone in Mildred's sitting-room, after the guests had gone; but there was a curtain-raiser at the dinner-table before the assembled company. I give bits of the conversation, not because they were important, but because of what they led up to.
We were twenty-four, seated on great Italian chairs, which gave each of us the feeling of being a sovereign on a throne. It took all the men of the establishment, as well as those gathered in from the Jack Brokenshires' and Mrs. Rossiter's, to wait on us, a detail by which in the end I profited. The gold service had been sent down from the vaults in New York, so that the serving-plates were gold, as well as the plates for some of the other courses. Gold vases and bowls held the roses that adorned the table, and gold spoons and forks were under our hands. It was the first time I had ever been able to notice with my own eyes how nearly the rich American can rival the state of kings and emperors.
It goes without saying that all the women had put on their best, and that the jewels were as precious metals in the days of Solomon; they were "nothing accounted of." Diamonds flashed, rubies broke out in fire, and emeralds said unspeakable things all up and down the table; the rows and ropes and circlets of pearls made one think of the gates of Paradise. I was the only one not so bedecked, getting that contrast of simplicity which is the compensation of the poor. The ring Hugh had given me, a sapphire set in diamonds, was my only ornament; and yet the neat austerity of my black evening frock rendered me conspicuous.
It also goes without saying that I had no right to be conspicuous, being the person of least consequence at the board. Mr. Brokenshire not only felt that himself, but he liked me to feel it; and he not only liked me to feel it, but he liked others to see that his great, broad spirit admitted me among his family and friends from noble promptings of tolerance. I was expected to play up to this generosity and to present the foil of humility to the glory of the other guests and the beauty of the table decorations.
In general I did this, and had every intention of doing it again. Nothing but what perhaps were the solecisms of my immediate neighbors caused my efforts to miscarry. I had been informed by Mrs. Brokenshire beforehand that they were socially dull, that one of them was "awful," and that my powers would be taxed to keep them in conversation. My mettle being up, I therefore did my best.
The one who was awful proved to be a Mr. Samuel Russky, whose claim to be present sprang from the fact that he was a member of a house that had the power to lend a great deal of money. He was a big man, of a mingled Slavic and Oriental cast of countenance, and had nothing more awful about him than a tendency to overemphasis. On my right I had Mr. John G. Thorne, whose face at a glance was as guileless as his name till contemplation revealed to you depth beyond depth of that peculiar astuteness of which only the American is master. I am sure that when we sat down to table neither of these gentlemen had any intention of taking a hand in my concerns, and are probably ignorant to this day of ever having done so; but the fact remains.
It begins with my desire to oblige Mrs. Brokenshire by trying to make the dinner a success. Having to lift the heaviest corner, so to speak, I gave myself to the task first with one of my neighbors and then with the other. They responded so well that as early as when the terrapin was reached I was doing it with both. As there was much animation about the table, there was nothing at that time to call attention to our talk.
Naturally, it was about the war. From the war we passed to the attitude of the United States toward the struggle; and from that what could I do but glide to the topics as to which I felt myself a mouthpiece for Larry Strangways? It was a chance. Here were two men obviously of some influence in the country, and neither of them of very strong convictions, so far as I could judge, on any subject but that of floating foreign bonds. As the dust from a butterfly's wing might turn the scale with one or both of them, I endeavored to throw at least that much weight on the side of a British and American entente.
At something I said, Mr. Russky, with the slightest hint of a Yiddish pronunciation, complained that I spoke as if all Americans were "Anglo-Zaxons"; whereas it was well known that the "Anglo-Zaxon" element among them was but a percentage, which was destined to grow less.
"I'm not putting it on that ground," I argued, with some zeal, taking up a point as to which one of Larry Strangways's letters had enlightened me. "I see well enough that the American ideal isn't one of nationality, but of principle. When the federation of the States was completed it was on the basis not of a common Anglo-Saxon origin, but on that of the essential unity of mankind. Mere nationality was left out of the question. All nations were welcomed, with the idea of welding them into one."
"And England," Mr. Russky declared, somewhat more loudly than was necessary for my hearing him, "is still bound up in her Anglo-Zaxondon."
"Not a bit of it!" I returned. "Her spirit is exactly the same as that of this country. Except this country, where is there any other of which the gates and ports and homes and factories have been open to all nations as hers have been? They've landed on her shores in thousands and thousands, without passports and without restraint, welcomed and protected even when they've been taking the bread out of the born Englishman's mouth. Look at the number of foreigners they've been obliged to round up since the war began—for the simple reason that they'd become so many as to be a peril. It's the same not only in the British Islands, but in every part of the British Empire. Always the same reception for all, with liberty for all. My own country, in proportion to its population, is as full of citizens of foreign birth as this is. They've been fathered and mothered from the minute they landed at Halifax. Poles and Ruthenians and Slovaks and Icelanders have been given the same advantages as ourselves. I'm not boasting of this, Mr. Russky. I'm only saying that, though we've never defined the principle in a constitution, our instinct toward mankind is the same as yours."
It was here Mr. Thorne broke in, saying that sympathy in the United States was all for France.
"I can understand that," I said. "You often find in a family that the sympathy of each of the members is for some one outside. But that doesn't keep them from being a family, or from acting in important moments with a family's solidarity."
"And, personally," Mr. Thorne went on, "I don't care for England."
I laughed politely in his face.
"And do you, a business man, say that? I thought business was carried on independently of personal regard. You might conceivably not like Mr. Warren or Mr. Casemente"—I named the two other banker guests—"or even Mr. Brokenshire; but you do business with them as if you loved them, and quite successfully, too. In the same way the Briton and the American might put personal fancies out of the question and co-operate for great ends."
"Ah, but, young lady," Mr. Russky exclaimed, so noisily as to draw attention, "you forget that we're far from the scene of European disputes, and that our wisest course is to keep out of them!"
I fell back again on what I had learned from Larry Strangways.
"But you're not far from the past of mankind. You inherit that as much as any European; and it isn't an inheritance that can be limited geographically." I still quoted one of Larry Strangways's letters, knowing it by heart. "Every Russian and German and Jew and Italian and Scotchman who lands in New York brings a portion of it with him and binds the responsibility of the New World more closely to the sins of the Old. Oceans and continents will not separate us from sins. As we can never run away from our past, Americans must help to expiate what they and their ancestors have done in the countries from which they came. This isn't going to be a local war or a twentieth-century war. It's the struggle of all those who have had to bear the burdens of the world against those who have made them bear them."
"If that was the case," Mr. Russky said, doubtfully, "Americans would be all on one side."
"They will be all on one side—when they see it. The question is, Will they see it soon enough?"
Being so interested I didn't notice that our immediate neighbors were listening, nor did I observe, what Cissie Boscobel told me afterward, that Hugh was dividing disquieting looks between me and his father. I did try to divert Mr. Thorne to giving his attention to Mrs. Burke, who was his neighbor on the right, but I couldn't make him take the hint. It was, in fact, he who said:
"We've too many old grudges against England to keep step with her now."
I smiled engagingly.
"But you've no old grudges against the British Empire, have you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You've no old grudges against Canada, or Australia, or the West Indies, or New Zealand, or the Cape?"
"N-no."
"Nor even against Scotland or Wales or Ireland?"
"N-no."
"You recognize in all those countries a spirit more or less akin to your own, and one with which you can sympathize?"
"Y-yes."
"Then isn't that my point? You speak of England, and you see the southern end of an island between the North Sea and the Atlantic; but that's all you see. You forget Scotland and Ireland and Canada and Australia and South Africa. You think I'm talking of a country three thousand miles away, whereas it comes right up to your doors. It's on the borders of Maine and Michigan and Minnesota, and all along your line. That isn't Canada alone; it's the British Empire. It's the country with which you Americans have more to do than with any other in the world. It's the one you have to think of first. You may like some other better, but you can't get away from having it as your most pressing consideration the minute you pass your own frontiers. That," I declared, with a little laugh, "is what makes my entente important."
"Important for England or for America?" Mr. Russky, as a citizen of the country he thought had most to give, was on his guard.
"Important for the world!" I said, emphatically. "England and America—the British Empire and the United States—are both secondary in what I'm trying to say. I speak of them only as the two that can most easily line up together. When they've done that the rest will follow their lead. It's not to be an offensive and defensive alliance, or directed against any other power. It would be a starting-point, the beginning of world peace. It would also be an instance of what could be accomplished in the long run among all the nations of the world by mutual tolerance and common sense."
As I made a little mock oratorical flourish there was a laugh from our part of the table. Some one sitting opposite called out, "Good!" I distinctly heard Mrs. Billing's cackle of a "Brava!" I ought to say, too, that, afraid of even the appearance of "holding forth," I had kept my tone lowered, addressing myself to my left-hand companion. If others stopped talking and listened it was because of the compulsion of the theme. It was a burning theme. It was burning in hearts and minds that had never given it a conscious thought; and, now that for a minute it was out in the open, it claimed them. True, it was an occasion meant to be kept free from the serious; but even in Newport we were beginning to understand that occasions kept free from the serious were over—perhaps for the rest of our time.
After that the conversation in our neighborhood became general. With the exception of Hugh, who was not far away, every one joined in, aptly or inaptly, as the case might be, with pros and cons and speculations and anecdotes and flashes of wit, and a far deeper interest than I should have predicted. As Mrs. Brokenshire whispered after we regained the drawing-room, it had made the dinner go; and a number of women whom I hadn't known before came up and talked to me.
But all that was only the curtain-raiser. It was not till the family were assembled in Mildred's room up-stairs that the real play began.
Mildred's big, heavily furnished room was as softly lighted as usual. As usual, she herself, in white, with a rug across her feet, lay on her couch, withdrawn from the rest. She never liked to have any one near her, unless it was Hugh; she never entered into general talk. When others were present she remained silent, as she did on this evening. Whatever passed through her mind she gave out to individuals when she was alone with them.
The rest of the party were scattered about, standing or sitting. There were Jack and Pauline, Jim and Ethel Rossiter, Mrs. Billing, Mrs. Brokenshire, Cissie Boscobel, who was now staying with the Brokenshires, and Hugh. The two banker guests had gone back to the smoking-room. As I entered, Mr. Brokenshire was standing in his customary position of command, a little like a pasha in his seraglio, his back to the empty fireplace. With his handsome head and stately form, he would have been a truly imposing figure had it not been for his increased stoutness and the occasional working of his face.
I had come up-stairs with some elation. The evening might have been called mine. Most of the men, on rejoining us in the drawing-room, had sought a word with me, and those who didn't know me inquired who I was. I could hardly help the hope that Mr. Brokenshire might see I was worth my salt, and that on becoming a member of his family I should bring my contribution.
But on the way up-stairs Hugh gave me a hint that in that I might be mistaken.
"Well, little Alix, you certainly gave poor old dad a shock this time."
"A shock?" I asked, in not unnatural astonishment.
"Your fireworks."
"Fireworks! What on earth do you mean?"
"It's always a shock when fireworks go off too close to you; and especially when it's in church."
As we had reached the door of Mildred's room, I searched my conduct during dinner to see in what I had offended.
It is possible my entry might have passed unnoticed if Mrs. Brokenshire, with the kindest intentions, had not come forward to the threshold and taken me by the hand. As if making a presentation, she led me toward the august figure before the fireplace.
"Our little girl," she said, in the hope of doing me a good turn, "distinguished herself to-night, didn't she?"
He must have been stung to sudden madness by the sight of the two of us together. In general he controlled himself in public. He was often cruel, but with a quiet subtle cruelty to which even the victims often didn't know how to take exception. But to-night the long-gathering fury of passion was incapable of further restraint. Behind it there was all the explosive force of a lifetime of pride, complacence, and self-love. The exquisite creature—a vision of soft rose, with six strings of pearls—who was parading her bargain, as you might say, without having paid for it, excited him to the point of frenzy. I saw later, what I didn't understand at the time, that he was striking at her through me. He was willing enough to strike at me, since I was the nobody who had forced herself into his family; but she was his first aim.
Having looked at me disdainfully, he disdainfully looked away.
"She certainly gave us an exhibition!" he said, with his incisive, whip-lash quietude.
Mrs. Brokenshire dropped my hand.
"Oh, Howard!"
I think she backed away toward the nearest chair. I was vaguely conscious of curious eyes in the dimness about me as I stood alone before my critic.
"I'm sorry if I've done anything wrong, Mr. Brokenshire," I said, meekly. "I didn't mean to."
He looked over my head, speaking casually, as one who takes no interest in the subject.
"All the great stupidities have been committed by people who didn't mean to—but there they are!"
I continued to be meek.
"I didn't know I had been stupid."
"The stupid never do."
"And I don't think I have been," I added, with rising spirit.
Though there was consternation in the room behind me, Mr. Brokenshire merely said:
"Unfortunately, you must let others judge of that."
"But how?" I insisted. "If I have been, wouldn't it be a kindness on your part to tell me in what way?"
He pretended not merely indifference, but reluctance.
"Isn't that obvious?"
"Not to me—and I don't think to any one else."
"What do you call it when one—you compel me to speak frankly—what do you call it when one exposes one's ignorance of—of fundamental things before a roomful of people who've never set eyes on one before?"
Since no one, not even Hugh, was brave enough to stand up for me, I had to do it for myself.
"But I didn't know I had."
"Probably not. It's what I warned you of, if you'll take the trouble to remember. I said—or it amounted to that—that until you'd learned the ways of the people who are generally recognized ascomme il faut, you'd be wise in keeping yourself—unobtrusive."
"And may I ask whether one becomes obtrusive merely in talking of public affairs?"
"You'll pardon me for giving you a lesson before others; but, since you invite it—"
"Quite so, Mr. Brokenshire, I do invite it."
"Then I can only say that in what we call good society we become obtrusive in talking of things we know nothing about."
"But surely one can set an idea going, even if one hasn't sounded all its depths. And as for the relations between this country and the British Empire—"
"Well-bred women leave such subjects to statesmen."
"Yes; we've done so. We've left them to statesmen and"—I couldn't resist the temptation to say it—"and we've left them to financiers; but we can't look at Europe and be proud of the result. We women, well bred or otherwise, couldn't make things worse even if we were to take a hand; and we might make them better."
He was not moved from his air of slightly bored indifference.
"Then you must wait for women with some knowledge of the subject."
"But, Mr. Brokenshire, I have some knowledge of the subject! Though I'm neither English nor American, I'm both. I've only to shift from one side of my mind to the other to be either. Surely, when it comes to the question of a link between the two countries I love I'm qualified to put in a plea for it."
I think his nerves were set further on edge because I dared to argue the point, though he would probably have been furious if I had not. His tone was still that of a man deigning no more than to fling out an occasional stinging remark.
"As a future member of my family, you're not qualified to make yourself ridiculous before my friends. To take you humorously was the kindest thing they could do."
I saw an opportunity.
"Then wouldn't it be equally kind, sir, if you were to follow their example?"
Mrs. Billing's hen-like crow came out of the obscurity:
"She's got you there!"
The sound incited him. He became not more irritable, but cruder.
"Unhappily, that's beyond my power. I have to blush for my son Hugh."
Hugh spoke out of the darkness, his voice trembling with the fear of his own hardihood in once more braving Jove.
"Oh no, dad! You must take that back."
The father wheeled round in the new direction. He was losing command of the ironic courtesy he secured by his air of indifference, and growing coarser.
"My poor boy! I can't take it back. You're like myself—in that you can only be fooled when you put your trust in a woman."
It was Mrs. Brokenshire's turn:
"Howard—please!"
In the cry there was the confession of the woman who has vowed and not paid, and yet begs to be spared the blame.
Jack Brokenshire sprang to his feet and hurried forward, laying his hand on his father's arm.
"Say, dad—"
But Mr. Brokenshire shook off the hand, refusing to be placated. He looked at his wife, who had risen, confusedly, from her chair and was backing away from him to the other side of the room.
"I said poor Hugh was being fooled by a woman; and he is. He's marrying some one who doesn't care a hang about him and who's in love with another man. He may not be the first in the family to do that, but I merely make the statement that he's doing it."
Hugh leaped forward.
"She's not in love with another man!"
"Ask her."
He clutched me by the wrist.
"You're not, are you?" he pleaded. "Tell father you're not."
I was so sorry for Hugh that I hardly thought of myself. I was benumbed. The suddenness of the attack had been like a blow from behind that stuns you without taking away your consciousness. In any case Mr. Brokenshire gave me no time, for he laughed gratingly.
"She can't do that, my boy, because she is. Everybody knows it. I know it—and Ethel and Mildred and Cissie. They're all here and they can contradict me if I'm saying what isn't so."
"But she may not know it herself," Mrs. Billing croaked. "A girl is often the last to make that discovery."
"Ask her."
Hugh obeyed, still clutching my wrist.
"I'm asking you, little Alix. You're not, are you?"
I could say nothing. Apart from the fact that I didn't knew what to say, I was dumbfounded by the way in which it had all come upon me. The only words that occurred to me were:
"I think Mr. Brokenshire is ill."
Oddly enough. I was convinced of that. It was the one assuaging fact. He might hate me, but he wouldn't have made me the object of this mad-bull rush if he had been in his right mind. He was not in his right mind; he was merely a blood-blinded animal as he went on:
"Ask her again, Hugh. You're the only one she's been able to keep in the dark; but then"—his eyes followed his wife, who was still slowly retreating—"but then that's nothing new. She'll let you believe anything—till she gets you. That's always the game with women of the sort. But once you're fast in her clutches—then, my boy, look out!"
I heard Pauline whisper, "Jack, for Heaven's sake, do something!"
Once more Jack's hand was laid on his parent's arm, with his foolish "Say, dad—"
Once more the restraining hand was shaken off. The cutting tones were addressed to Hugh:
"You see what a hurry she's been in to be married, don't you? How many times has she asked you to do it up quick? She's been afraid that you'd slip through her fingers." He turned toward me. "Don't be alarmed, my dear. We shall keep our word. You've worked hard to capture the position, and I shall not deny that you've been clever in your attacks. You deserve what you've won, and you shall have it. But all in good time. Don't rush. The armies in Europe are showing us that you must intrench yourself where you are if you want, in the end, to push forward. You push a little too hard."
Poor Hugh had gone white. He was twisting my wrist as if he would wring it off, though I felt no pain till afterward.
"Tell me!" he whispered. "Tell me! You're—you're not marrying me for—for my money, are you?"
I could have laughed hysterically.
"Hugh, don't be an idiot!" came, scornfully, from Ethel Rossiter.
I could see her get up, cross the room, and sit down on the edge of Mildred's couch, where the two engaged in a whispered conversation. Jim Rossiter, too, got up and tiptoed his sleek, slim person out of the room. Cissie Boscobel followed him. They talked in low tones at the head of the stairs outside. I found voice at last:
"No, Hugh; I never thought of marrying you for that reason. I was doing it only because it seemed to me right."
Mr. Brokenshire emitted a sound, meant to be a laugh:
"Right! Oh, my God!"
Mrs. Brokenshire was now no more than a pale-rose shadow on the farther side of the room, but she came to my aid:
"She was, Howard. Please believe her. She was, really!"
"Thanks, darling, for the corroboration! It comes well from you. Where there's a question of right you're an authority."
Mrs. Billing's hoarse, prolonged "Ha-a!" implied every shade of comprehension. I saw the pale-rose shadow sink down on a sofa, all in a little heap, like something shot with smokeless powder.
Hugh was twisting my wrist again and whispering:
"Alix, tell me. Speak! What are you marrying me for? What about the other fellow? Is it Strangways? Speak!"
"I've given you the only answer I can, Hugh. If you can't believe in my doing right—"
"What were you in such a hurry for? Was that the reason—what dad says—that you were afraid you wouldn't—hook me?"
I looked him hard in the eye. Though we were speaking in the lowest possible tones, there was a sudden stillness in the room, as though every one was hanging on my answer.
"Have I ever given you cause to suspect me of that?" I asked, after thinking of what I ought to say.
Three words oozed themselves out like three drops of his own blood. They were the distillation of two years' uncertainty:
"Well—sometimes—yes."
Either he dropped my wrist or I released myself. I only remember that I was twisting the sapphire-and-diamond ring on my finger.
"What made you think so?" I asked, dully.
"A hundred things—everything!" He gave a great gasp. "Oh, little Alix!"
Turning away suddenly, he leaned his head against the mantelpiece, while his shoulders heaved.
It came to me that this was the moment to make an end of it all; but I saw Mrs. Rossiter get up from her conference with Mildred and come forward. She did it leisurely, pulling up one shoulder of her décolleté gown as she advanced.
"Hugh, don't be a baby!" she said, in passing. "Father, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!"
If the heavens had fallen my amazement might have been less. She went on in a purely colloquial tone, extricating the lace of her corsage from a spray of diamond flowers as she spoke:
"I'll tell you why she was marrying Hugh. It was for two or three reasons, every one of them to her credit. Any one who knows her and doesn't see that must be an idiot. She was marrying him, first, because he was kind to her. None of the rest of us was, unless it was Mrs. Brokenshire; and she was afraid to show it for fear you'd jump on her, father. The rest of us have treated Alix Adare like brutes. I know I have."
"Oh no!" I protested, though I could scarcely make myself audible.
"But Hugh was nice to her. He was nice to her from the start. And she couldn't forget it. No nice girl would. When he asked her to marry him she felt she had to. And then, when he put up his great big bluff of earning a living—"
"It wasn't a bluff," Hugh contradicted, his face still buried in his hands.
"Well, perhaps it wasn't," she admitted, imperturbably. "If you, father, hadn't driven him to it with your heroics—"
"If you call it heroics that I should express my will—"
"Oh your will! You seem to think that no one's got a will but you. Here we are, all grown up, two of us married, and you still try to keep us as if we were five years old. We're sick of it, and it's time some of us spoke. Jack's afraid to, and Mildred's too good; so it's up to me to say what I think."
Mr. Brokenshire's first shock having passed, he got back something of his lordly manner, into which he threw an infusion of the misunderstood.
"And you've said it sufficiently. When my children turn against me—"
"Nonsense, father! Your children don't do anything of the sort. We're perfect sheep. You drive us wherever you like. But, however much we can stand ourselves, we can't help kicking when you attack some one who doesn't quite belong to us and who's a great deal better than we are."
Mrs. Billing crowed again:
"Brava, Ethel! Never supposed you had the pluck."
Ethel turned her attention to the other side of her corsage.
"Oh, it isn't a question of pluck; it's one of exasperation. Injustice after a while gets on one's nerves. I've had a better chance of knowing Alix Adare than any one; and you can take it from me that, when it comes to a question of breeding, she's the genuine pearl and we're only imitations—all except Mildred."
Both of Mr. Brokenshire's handsome hands went up together. He took a step forward as if to save Mrs. Rossiter from a danger.
"My daughter!"
The pale-rose heap on the other side of the room raised its dainty head.
"It's true, Howard; it's true! Please believe it!"
Ethel went on in her easy way:
"If Alix Adare has made any mistake it's been in ignoring her own wishes—I may say her own heart—in order to be true to us. The Lord knows she can't have respected us much, or failed to see that, judged by her standards, we're as common as grass when you compare it to orchids. But because she is an orchid she couldn't do anything but want to give us back better than she ever got from us; and so—"
"Oh no; it wasn't that!" I tried to interpose.
"It's no dishonor to her not to be in love with Hugh," she pursued, evenly. "She may have thought she was once; but what girl hasn't thought she was in love a dozen times? A fine day in April will make any one think it's summer already; but when June comes they know the difference. It was April when Hugh asked her; and now it's June. I'll confess for her. She is in love with—"
"Please!" I broke in.
She gave me another surprise.
"Do run and get me my fan. It's over by Mildred. There's a love!"
I had to do her bidding. The picture of the room stamped itself on my brain, though I didn't think of it at the time. It seemed rather empty. Jack had retired to one window, where he was smoking a cigarette; Pauline was at another, looking out at the moonlight on the water. Mrs. Billing sat enthroned in the middle, taking a subordinate place for once. Mrs. Brokenshire was on the sofa by the wall. The murmur of Ethel's voice, but no words, reached me as I stooped beside Mildred's couch to pick up the fan.
The invalid took my hand. Her voice had the deep, low murmur of the sea.
"You must forgive my father."
"I do," I was able to say. "I—I like him in spite of everything—"
"And as for my brother, you'll remember what we agreed upon once—that where we can't give all, our first consideration must be the value of what we withhold."
I thanked her and went back with the fan. As I passed Mrs. Billing she snapped at me, with the enigmatic words:
"You're a puss!"
When I drew near to the group by the fireplace, Mrs. Rossiter was saying to Hugh:
"And as for her marrying you for your money—well, you're crazy! I suppose she likes money as well as anybody else; but she would have married you to be loyal. She would have married you two months ago if father had been willing; and if you'd been willing you could now have been in England or France together, trying to do some good. If a woman marries one man when she's in love with another the right or the wrong depends on her motives. Who knows but what I may have done it myself? I don't say I haven't. And so—"
But I had taken off the ring on my way across the room. Having returned the fan to Ethel, I went up to Hugh, who looked round at me over his shoulder.
"Hugh, darling," I said, very softly, "I feel that I ought to give you back this."
He put out his hand mechanically, not thinking of what I was about to offer. On seeing it he drew back his hand quickly, and the ring dropped on the floor. I can hear it still, rolling with a little rattle among the fire-irons.
In making my curtsy to Mr. Brokenshire I raised my eyes to his face. It seemed to me curiously stricken. After all her years of submission Mrs. Rossiter's rebellion must have made him feel like an autocrat dethroned. I repeated my curtsy to Mrs. Billing, who merely stared at me through her lorgnette—to Jack and Pauline, who took no notice, who perhaps didn't see me—to Mrs. Brokenshire, who was again a little rose-colored heap—and to Mildred, who raised her long, white hand.
In the hall outside Cissie Boscobel rose and came toward me.
"You must look after Hugh," I said to her, breathlessly, as I sped on my way.
She did. As I hurried down the stairs I heard her saying:
"No, Hugh, no! She wants to go alone."