The High Heart Part 56

"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 finis.h.i.+ng; "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.

CHAPTER XXI

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 pa.s.sed 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 Brokens.h.i.+res 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 Brokens.h.i.+res 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 s.h.i.+bboleths I didn't understand and among whom I was lost.

As far as I went into general society it was so un.o.btrusively that I might be said not to have gone at all. I made no sensation as the affianced bride of Hugh Brokens.h.i.+re. 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 nonent.i.ty. 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. Brokens.h.i.+re 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 Was.h.i.+ngton--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 gra.s.s to me. She moved with the splendid careless freedom of women who pa.s.s 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.

s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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. Brokens.h.i.+re 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."