The High Heart Part 54

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. Brokens.h.i.+re. 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.

Brokens.h.i.+re 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 Brokens.h.i.+re 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 pa.s.sed 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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. Brokens.h.i.+re 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.

Brokens.h.i.+re's protection.

With a comic inward grimace I swallowed all my pride and thanked him.

As for Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re'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 of _Les 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. Brokens.h.i.+re 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 p.r.o.nouncing 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. Brokens.h.i.+re 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. Brokens.h.i.+re 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--an _ide fixe_ of 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 circ.u.mvention, denying the fruits of victory after they had been won. Serbia had been the poor little b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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.