The High Heart Part 10

"It's not a bit more cruel than the fact. Take your case and mine as an ill.u.s.tration. As the estimate of birth goes in this country, I'm as well born as the majority. My ancestors were New-Englanders, country doctors and lawyers and ministers--especially the ministers. But as long as I haven't the cash I'm only a tutor, and eat at the second table. Jim Rossiter's forebears were much the same as mine; but the fact that he has a hundred thousand dollars a year and I've hardly got two is the only thing that would be taken into consideration, by any one in either the United Kingdom or the United States. It would be the same if I descended from Crusaders. If I've got nothing but that and my character to recommend me--" He raised his hand and snapped his fingers with a scornful laugh. "Take your case," he hurried on as I was about to speak.

"You're probably like me, sprung of a line of professional men--"

"And soldiers," I interrupted, proudly. "The first of my family to settle in Canada was a General Adare in the middle of the seventeen hundreds. He'd been in the garrison at Halifax and chose to remain in Nova Scotia." Perhaps there was some boastfulness in my tone as I added, "He came of the famous Fighting Adares of the County Limerick."

"And all that isn't worth a row of pins--except to yourself. If you were the daughter of a miner who'd struck it rich you'd be a candidate for the British peerage. You'd be received in the best houses in London; you could marry a duke and no one would say you nay. As it is--"

"As it is," I said, tremulously, "I'm just a nursery governess, and there's no getting away from the fact."

"Not until you get away from the condition."

"So that when I told Hugh Brokens.h.i.+re the other day that in point of family I was his equal--"

"He probably didn't believe you."

The memory of Hugh's look still rankled in me. "No, I don't think he did."

"Of course he didn't. As the world counts--as we all count--no poor family, however n.o.ble, is the equal of any rich family, however base."

There was that transformation of his smile from something sunny to something hard which I had noticed once before, as he went on to add, "If you want to marry Hugh Brokens.h.i.+re--"

"Which I do," I interposed, defiantly.

"Then you must enter into his game as he enters into it himself. He thinks of himself as doing the big romantic thing. He's marrying a poor girl who has nothing but herself as guaranty. That your great-grandfather was a general and one of the--what did you call them?--Fighting Adares of the County Cork would mean no more to him than if you said you were descended from the Lacedmonians and the dragon's teeth. As far as that goes, you might as well be an immigrant girl from Sweden; you might as well be a cook. He's stooping to pick up his diamond from the mire, instead of buying it from a jeweler's window.

Very well, then, you must let him stoop. You mustn't try to underestimate his condescension. You mustn't tell him you were once in a jeweler's window, and only fell into the mire by chance--"

"Because," I smiled, "the mire is where I belong, until I'm taken out of it."

"We belong," he stated, judicially, "where the world puts us. If we're wise we'll stay there--till we can meet the world's own terms for getting out."

CHAPTER V

I come at last to Hugh's defiance of his father. It took place not only without my incitement, but without my knowledge. No one could have been more sick with misgiving than I when I learned that the boy had left his father's house and gone to a hotel. If I was to blame at all it was in mentioning from time to time his condition of dependence.

"You haven't the right to defy your father's wishes," I said to him. "so long as you're living on his money. What it comes to is that he pays you to do as he tells you. If you don't do as he tells you, you're not earning your allowance honestly."

The point of view was new to him. "But if I was making a living of my own?"

"Ah, that would be different."

"You'd marry me then?"

I considered this. "It would still have to depend," I was obliged to say at last.

"Depend on what?"

"On the degree to which you made yourself your own master."

"I should be my own master if I earned a good income."

I admitted this.

"Very well," he declared, with decision. "I shall earn it."

I didn't question his power to do that. I had heard so much of the American man's ability to make money that I took it for granted, as I did a bird's capacity for flight. As far as Hugh was concerned, it seemed to me more a matter of intention than of opportunity. I reasoned that if he made up his mind to be independent, independent he would be.

It would rest with him. It was not of the future I was thinking so much as of the present; and in the present I was chiefly dodging his plea that we settle the matter by taking the law into our own hands.

"It won't be as bad as you think," he kept urging. "Father would be sure to come round to you if you were my wife. He never quarrels with the accomplished fact. That's been part of the secret of his success. He'll fight a thing as long as he can; but when it's carried over his head no one knows better than he how to make the best of it."

"But, Hugh, I don't want to have him make the best of it that way--at least, so long as you're not your own master."

One day at the Casino he pointed out Libby Jaynes to me. I was there in charge of the children, and he managed to slip over from the tennis he was playing for a word:

"There she is--that girl with the orange-silk sweater."

The point of his remark was that Libby Jaynes was one of a group of half a dozen people, and was apparently received at Newport like anybody else. The men were in flannels; the women in the short skirts and easy att.i.tudes developed by a sporting life. The silk sweater in its brilliant hues was to the Casino grounds as the parrot to Brazilian woods. Libby Jaynes wasn't pretty; her lips were too widely parted and her teeth too big; but her figure was adapted to the costume of the day, and her head to the slouching panama. She wore both with a decided _chic_. She was the orange spot where there was another of purple and another of pink and another of bright emerald-green. As far as I could see no one remembered that she had ever rubbed men's finger-nails in the barber's room of a hotel, and she certainly betrayed no sign of it. It was what Hugh begged me to observe. If I liked I could within a year be a member of this privileged troop instead of an outsider looking on.

"You'd be just as good as she is," he declared with a navet I couldn't help taking with a smile.

I was about to say, "But I don't feel inferior to her as it is," when I recalled the queer look of incredulity he had given me on the beach.

And then one morning I heard he had quarreled with his father. It was Hugh who told me first, but Mrs. Rossiter gave me all the details within an hour afterward.

It appeared that they had had a dinner-party in honor of old Mrs.

Billing which had gone off with some success. The guests having left, the family had gathered in Mildred's sitting-room to give the invalid an account of the entertainment. It was one of those domestic reunions on which the household G.o.d insisted from time to time, so that his wife should seem to have that support from his children which both he and she knew she didn't have. The Jack Brokens.h.i.+res were there, and Hugh, and Ethel Rossiter.

It was exactly the scene for a tragi-comedy, and had the kind of setting theatrical producers liked before the new scene-painters set the note of allegorical simplicity. Mildred had the best corner room up-stairs, though, like the rest of the house, her surroundings suffered from her father's taste for the Italianate and over-rich. Heavy dark cabinets, heavy dark chairs, gilt candelabra, and splendidly brocaded stuffs threw the girl's wan face and weak figure into prominence. I think she often sighed for pretty papers and cretonnes, for Svres and colored prints, but she took her tapestries and old masters and majolica as decreed by a power she couldn't question. When everything was done for her comfort the poor thing had nothing to do for herself.

The room had the further resemblance to a scene on the stage since, as I was given to understand, no one felt the reality of the friendliness enacted. To all J. Howard's children it was odious that he should wors.h.i.+p a woman who was younger than Mildred and very little older than Ethel. They had loved their mother, who had been plain. They resented the fact that their father had got hold of her money for himself, had made her unhappy, and had forgotten her. That he should have become infatuated with a girl who was their own contemporary would have been a humiliation to them in any case; but when the story of his fight for her became public property, when it was the joke of the Stock Exchange and the subject of leading articles in the press, they could only hold their heads high and carry the situation with bravado. It was a proof of his grip on New York that he could put Editha Billing where he wished to see her, and find no authority, social or financial, bold enough to question him; it was equally a proof of his dominance in his family that neither son nor daughter could treat his new wife with anything but deference.

She was the _matresse en ttre_ to whom even the princes and princesses had to bow.

They were bowing on this evening by treating old Mrs. Billing as if they liked her and counted her one of themselves. As the mother of the favorite she could reasonably claim this homage, and no one refused it but poor Hugh. He turned his back on it. Mildred being obliged to lie on a couch, he put himself at her feet, refusing thus to be witness of what he called a flattering hypocrisy that sickened him. That went on in the dimly, richly lighted room behind him, where the others sat about, pretending to be gay.

Then the match went into the gunpowder all at once.

"I'm the more glad the evening has been pleasant," J. Howard observed, blandly, "since we may consider it a farewell to Hugh. He's sailing on--"

Hugh merely said over his shoulder, "No, father; I'm not."

The startled silence was just long enough to be noticed before the father went on, as if he had not been interrupted:

"He's sailing on--"

"No, father; I'm not."

There was no change in Hugh's tone any more than in his parent's. I gathered from Mrs. Rossiter that all present held their breaths as if in expectation that this blasphemer would be struck dead. Mentally they stood off, too, like the chorus in an opera, to see the great tragedy acted to the end without interference of their own. Jack Brokens.h.i.+re, who was fingering an extinct cigar, twiddled it nervously at his lips.

Pauline clasped her hands and leaned forward in excitement. Mrs.

Brokens.h.i.+re affected to hear nothing and arranged her five rows of pearls. Mrs. Billing, whom Mrs. Rossiter described as a condor with lace on her head and diamonds round her shrunken neck, looked from one to another through her lorgnette, which she fixed at last on her son-in-law. Ethel Rossiter kept herself detached. Knowing that Hugh had been riding for a fall, she expected him now to come his cropper.