The High Heart Part 15

"She doesn't go about with me, nor with some others I know, I can tell you that. If she did it would queer us."

In the hope of drawing out some such repudiation as that which I felt myself, I said, dryly: "Hugh tells me that if I married him I could be as good as she is--by this time next year."

I got nothing for my pains.

"That wouldn't help you much--not among the people who count."

There was white anger underneath my meekness.

"But perhaps I could get along with the people who don't count."

"Yes, you might--but Hugh wouldn't."

She dismissed the subject as one in which she took only a secondary interest to say that old Mrs. Billing was coming to lunch, and that Gladys and I should have to take that repast up-stairs. She was never direct in her denunciations of her father's second marriage. She brought them in by reference and innuendo, like a prisoner who keeps in mind the fact that walls have ears. She gave me to understand, however, that she considered Mrs. Billing a witch out of "Macbeth" or a wicked old vulture--I could take my choice of comparisons--and she hated having her in the house. She wouldn't do it only that, in ways she could hardly understand, Mrs. Billing was the power behind the throne. She didn't loathe her stepmother, she said in effect, so much as she loathed her father's att.i.tude toward her. I have never forgotten the words she used in this connection, dropping her voice and glancing about her, afraid she might be overheard. "It's as if G.o.d himself had become the slave of some silly human woman just because she had a pretty face." The sentence not only betrayed the Brokens.h.i.+re att.i.tude of mind toward J. Howard, but sent a chill down my back.

Having finished my notes and addressed them I rose to return to Gladys; but there was still an unanswered question in my mind. I asked it, standing for a minute beside the bed:

"Then you don't want me to go away?"

She arched her lovely eyebrows. "Go away? What for?"

"Because of the danger of my marrying Hugh."

She gave a little laugh. "Oh, there's no danger of that."

"But there is," I insisted. "He's asked me a number of times to go with him to the nearest clergyman, and settle the question once for all."

"Only you don't do it. There you are! What father doesn't want doesn't happen; and what he does want does. That's all there is to be said."

CHAPTER VII

As a matter of fact, that was all Mrs. Rossiter and I did say. I was so relieved at not being thrown out of house and home on the instant that I went back to Gladys and her lisping in French almost cheerily. You will think me pusillanimous--and I was. I didn't want to go to Mrs. Applegate and the Home for Working-Girls. As far as food and shelter were concerned I liked them well enough where I was. I liked Mrs. Rossiter too. I should be sorry to give the impression that she was supercilious or unkind. She was neither the one nor the other. If she betrayed little sentiment or sympathy toward me, it was because of admitting me into that feminine freemasonry in which the emotional is not called for. I might suffer while she remained indifferent; I might be killed on the spot while she wouldn't shed a tear; and yet there was a heartless, good-natured, live-and-let-live detachment about her which left me with nothing but good-will.

Then, too, I knew that when I married Hugh she would do nothing of her own free will against me. She would not brave her father's decree, but she wouldn't be intolerant; she might think Hugh had been a fool, but when she could do so surrept.i.tiously she would invite him and me to dinner.

As this was a kind of recognition in advance, I could not be otherwise than grateful.

It made waiting for Hugh the easier. I calculated that if he entered into some sort of partners.h.i.+p with his cousin Andrew Brew--I didn't in the least know what--we might be married within a month or two. At furthest it might be about the time when Mrs. Rossiter removed to New York, which would make it October or November. I could then slip quietly back to Halifax, be quietly married, and quietly settle with Hugh in Boston. In the mean time I was glad not to be disturbed.

I spent, therefore, a pleasant morning with my pupil, and ate a pleasant lunch, watching from the gable window of the school-room the great people a.s.semble in the breakfast loggia in honor of the Marquise de Pompadour's mother. I am not sure that old Madame Poisson ever went to court; but if she did I know the courtiers must have shown her just such deference as that which Mrs. Rossiter's guests exhibited to this withered old lady with the hooked nose and the lorgnette.

I was curious about the whole entertainment. It was not the only one of the kind I had seen from a distance since coming to Mrs. Rossiter, and I couldn't help comparisons with the same kind of thing as done in the ways with which I was familiar. Here it was less a luncheon than it was an exquisite thing on the stage, rehea.r.s.ed to the last point. In England, in Canada, luncheon would be something of a friendly haphazard, primarily for the sake of getting food, secondly as a means to a scrambling, jolly sort of social intercourse, and hardly at all a ceremonial. Here the ceremonial came first. Hostess and guests seemed alike to be taking part in a rite of seeing and being seen. The food, which was probably excellent, was a matter of slight importance. The social intercourse amounted to nothing, since they all knew one another but too well, and had no urgent vitality of interests in any case. The rite was the thing. Every detail was prepared for that. Silver, porcelain, flowers, doilies, were of the most expensive and the most correct. The guests were dressed to perfection--a little too well, according to the English standard, but not too well for a function. As a function it was beautiful, an occasion of privilege, a proof of attainment. It was the best thing of its kind America could show. Those who had money could alone present the pa.s.sport that would give the right of admission.

If I had a criticism to make, it was that the guests were too much alike. They were all business men, and the wives or widows of business men. The two or three who did nothing but live on inherited incomes were business men in heart and in blood. Granted that in the New World the business man must be dominant, it was possible to have too much of him.

Having too much of him lowered the standard of interest, narrowed the circle of taste. In the countries I knew the business man might be present at such a festivity, but there would be something to give him color, to throw him into relief. There would be a touch of the creative or the intellectual, of the spiritual or the picturesque. The company wouldn't be all of a gilded drab. There would be a writer or a painter or a politician or an actor or a soldier or a priest. There would be something that wasn't money before it was anything else. Here there was nothing. Birds of a feather were flocking together, and they were all parrots or parrakeets. They had plumage, but no song. They drove out the thrushes and the larks and the wild swans. Their shrill screeches and hoa.r.s.e shouts came up in a not wholly pleasant babel to the open window where I sat looking down and Gladys hovered and hopped, wondering if Thomas, the rosy-cheeked footman, would remember to bring us some of the left-over ice-cream.

I thought it was a pity. With elements as good as could be found anywhere to form a Society--that fusion of all varieties of achievement to which alone the word written with a capital can be applied--there was no one to form it. It was a woman's business; and for the rle of hostess in the big sense the American woman, as far as I could judge, had little or no apt.i.tude. She was too timid, too distrustful of herself, too much afraid of doing the wrong thing or of knowing the wrong people. She was so little sure of her standing that, as Mrs.

Rossiter expressed it, she could be "queered" by shaking hands with Libby Jaynes. She lacked authority. She could stand out in a throng by her dress or her grace, but she couldn't lead or combine or co-ordinate.

She could lend a charming hand where some one else was the Lady Holland or the Madame de Stal, but she couldn't take the seemingly heterogeneous types represented by the writer, the painter, the politician, the actor, the soldier, the priest, and the business man and weld them into the delightful, promiscuous, entertaining whole to be found, in its greater or lesser degree, according to size or importance of place, almost anywhere within the borders of the British Empire. I came to the conclusion that this was why there were few "great houses"

in America and fewer women of importance.

It was why, too, the guests were subordinated to the ceremonial. It couldn't be any other way. With flint and steel you can get a spark; but where you have nothing but flint or nothing but steel, friction produces no light. The American hostess, in so far as she exists, rarely hopes for anything from the clash of minds, and therefore centers her attention on her doilies. It must be admitted that she has the most tasteful doilies in the world. There is a pathos in the way in which, for want of the courage to get interesting human specimens together, she spends her strength on the details of her rite. It is like the instinct of women who in default of babies lavish their pa.s.sion on little dogs.

One can say that it is _faute de mieux_. _Faute de mieux_ was, I am sure, the reason why Ethel Rossiter took her table appointments with what seemed to me such extraordinary seriousness. When all was said and done it was the only real thing to care about.

I repeat that I thought it was a pity. I had dreams, as I looked down, of what I could do with the same use of money, the same position of command. I had dreams that the Brokens.h.i.+res accepted me, that Hugh came into the means that would be his in the ordinary course. I saw myself standing at the head of the stairway of a fine big house in Was.h.i.+ngton or New York. People were streaming upward, and I was shaking hands with a delightful, smiling _dsinvolture_. I saw men and women of all the ranks and orders of conspicuous accomplishment, each contributing a gift--some nothing but beauty, some nothing but wit, some nothing but money, some nothing but position, some nothing but fame, some nothing but national importance. The Brokens.h.i.+re clan was there, and the Billings and the Grays and the Burkes; but statesmen and diplomatists, too, were there, and those leaders in the world of the pen and the brush and the buskin of whom, oddly enough, I saw Larry Strangways, with his eternal defensive smile, emerging from the crowd as chief. I was wearing diamonds, black velvet, and a train, waving in my disengaged hand a spangled fan.

From these visions I was roused by Gladys, who came prancing from the stair-head.

"_V'l, Mademoiselle! V'l Thomas et le ice-cream!_"

Having consumed this dainty, we watched the company wander about the terraces and lawns and finally drift away. I was getting Gladys ready for her walk when Thomas, with a pitying expression on his boyish face, came back to say that Mr. Brokens.h.i.+re would like to speak with me down-stairs.

I was never so near fainting in my life. I had barely the strength to gasp, "Very well, Thomas, I'll come," and to send Gladys to her nurse.

Thomas watched me with his good, kind, sympathetic eyes. Like the other servants, he must have known something of my secret and was on my side.

I called him the _bouton de rose_, partly because his clean, pink cheeks suggested a Killarney breaking into flower, and partly because in his waiting on Gladys and me he had the yearning, care-taking air of a fatherly little boy. Just now he could only march down the pa.s.sage ahead of me, throw open the door of my bedroom as if he was lord chamberlain to a queen, and give me a look which seemed to say, "If I can be your liege knight against this giant, pray, dear lady, command me." I threw him my thanks in a trumped-up smile, which he returned with such sweet encouragement as to nearly unman me.

I stayed in my room only long enough to be sure that I was neat, smoothing my hair and picking one or two threads from my white-linen suit. The suit had scarlet cuffs and a scarlet belt, and as there was a scarlet flush beneath my summer tan, like the color under the glaze of a Chinese jar, I could see for myself that my appearance was not ineffective.

The _bouton de rose_ was in waiting at the foot of the stairs as I came down. Through the hall and the dining-room he ushered me royally; but as I came out on the breakfast loggia my royalty stopped with what I can only describe as a b.u.mp.

The guests had gone, but the family remained. The last phase of the details of the rite were also on the table. All the doilies were there, and the magnificent lace centerpiece which Mrs. Rossiter had at various times called on me to admire. The old Spode dessert service was the more dimly, anciently brilliant because of the old polished oak, and so were the gla.s.ses and finger-bowls picked out in gold.

Mr. Brokens.h.i.+re, whom I had seen from my window strolling with some ladies on the lawn, had returned to the foot of the table, opposite to the door by which I came out, where he now sat in a careless, sidewise att.i.tude, fingering his cigar. Old Mrs. Billing, who was beside him on his right, put up her lorgnette immediately I appeared in the entrance.

Mrs. Rossiter had dropped into a chance chair half-way down the table on the left; but Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re, oddly enough, was in that same seat in the far corner to which she had retreated on the occasion of my summoning ten days before. I wondered whether this was by intention or by chance, though I was presently to know.

Terrified though I was, I felt salvation to lie in keeping a certain dignity. I made, therefore, something between a bow and a courtesy, first to Mr. Brokens.h.i.+re, then to Mrs. Billing, then to Mrs. Rossiter, and lastly to Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re, to whom I raised my eyes and looked all the way diagonally across the loggia. I took my time in making these four distinct salutations, though in response I was only stared at.

After that there was a s.p.a.ce of some seconds in which I merely stood, in my pose of _Ecce Femina_!

"Sit down!"

The command came, of course, from J. Howard. The chair to which I had once before been banished being still in its corner, I slipped into it.

"I wished to speak to you, Miss--a--Miss--"

He glanced helplessly toward his daughter, who supplied the name.

"Ah yes. I wished to speak to you, Miss Adare, because my son has been acting very foolishly."

I made my tone as meek as I could, scarcely daring to lift my eyes from the floor. "Wouldn't it be well, sir, to talk to him about that?"

Mrs. Billing's lorgnette came down. She glanced toward her son-in-law as though finding the point well taken.

He went on imperturbably. "I've said all I mean to say to him. My present appeal is to you."