The High Heart Part 25

"And what do you mean by that--by consecration?"

He reflected before answering.

"I suppose I mean knowing what this country stands for, and being true to it oneself through thick and thin. There'll be thin and there'll be thick--plenty of them both--but it will be a question of the value of the individual. If there had been ten righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah, they wouldn't have been destroyed. I take that as a kind of figure. A handful of disinterested, whole-hearted, clean-hearted, and perhaps I ought to add stout-hearted Americans, who know what they believe and live by it, will hold the fort against all efforts, within and without, to pull it down." He paused in his walk, obliging me to do the same. "I've been thinking a good deal," he smiled, "during the past few weeks of your law of Right--with a capital. I laughed at it when you first spoke of it--"

"Oh, hardly that," I interposed.

"But I've come to believe that it will work."

"I'm so glad."

"In fact, it's the only thing that will work."

"Exactly," I exclaimed, enthusiastically.

"We must stand by it, we younger men, just as the younger men of the late fifties stood by the principles represented by Lincoln. I believe in my heart that the need is going to be greater for us than it was for them, and if we don't respond to it, then may the Lord have mercy on our souls."

I give this sc.r.a.p of conversation because it introduced a new note into my knowledge of Americans. I had not supposed that any Americans felt like that. In the Rossiter circle I never saw anything but an immense self-satisfaction. Money and what money could do was, I am sure, the only topic of their thought. Their ideas of position and privilege were all spuriously European. Nothing was indigenous. Except for their sense of money, their aims were as foreign to the soil as their pictures, their tapestries, their furniture, and their clothes. Even stranger I found the imitation of Europe in tastes which Europe was daily giving up. But in Larry Strangways, it seemed to me, I found something native, something that really lived and cared. It caused me to look at him with a new interest.

His jesting tone allowed me to take my cue in the same vein.

"I'm tremendously flattered, Mr. Strangways, that you should have found anything in my ideas that could be turned to good account."

He laughed shortly and rather hardly.

"Oh, if it was only that!"

It was another of the things I wished he hadn't said, but with the words he started on again, walking so fast for a few paces that I made no effort to keep up with him. When he waited till I rejoined him we fell again to talking of Stacy Grainger. At the first opportunity I asked the question that was chiefly on my mind.

"Wasn't there something at one time between him and Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re?"

He marched on with head erect.

"I believe so," he admitted, reluctantly, but not till some seconds had pa.s.sed.

"There was a big fight, wasn't there," I persisted, "between him and Mr.

Brokens.h.i.+re--over Editha Billing--on the Stock Exchange--or something like that?"

Again he allowed some seconds to go by.

"So I've heard."

I fished out of my memory such tag ends of gossip as had reached me, I could hardly tell from where.

"Didn't Mr. Brokens.h.i.+re attack his interests--railways and steel and things--and nearly ruin him?"

"I believe there was some such talk."

I admired the way in which he refused to lend himself to the spread of the legend; but I insisted on going on, because the idea of this conflict of modern giants, with a beautiful maiden as the prize, appealed to my imagination.

"And didn't old Mrs. Billing s.h.i.+ft round all of a sudden from the man who seemed to be going under to--?"

He cut the subject short by giving it another twist.

"Grainger's been unlucky. His whole family have been unlucky. It's an instance of tragedy haunting a race such as one reads of in mythology and now and then in modern history--the house of Atreus, for example, and the Stuarts, and the Hapsburgs, and so on."

I questioned him as to this, only to learn of a series of accidents, suicides, and sudden deaths, leaving Stacy as the last of his line, lonely and picturesque.

At the foot of the steps leading up to the Rossiter lawn Larry Strangways paused again. The children and dogs having preceded us and being safe on their own grounds, we could consider them off our minds.

"What do you know about old books?" he asked, suddenly.

The question took me so much by surprise that I could only say:

"What makes you think I know anything?"

"Didn't your father have a library full of them? And didn't you catalogue them and sell them in London?"

I admitted this, but added that even that undertaking had left me very ignorant of the subject.

"Yes; but it's a beginning. If you know the Greek or Russian alphabet it's a very good point from which to go on and learn the language."

"But why should I learn that language?"

"Because I know a man who's going to have a vacancy soon for a librarian. It's a private library, rather a famous one in New York, and the young lady at present in command is leaving to be married."

I smiled pleasantly.

"Yes; but what has that got to do with me?"

"Didn't I tell you I was going to look you up another job?"

"Oh! And so you've looked me up this!"

"No, I didn't. It looked me up. The owner of the library mentioned the fact as a great bore. It was his father who made the collection in the days of the first great American splurge. Stacy Grainger has added a rug or a Chinese jar from time to time, but he doesn't give a hang for the lot."

"Oh, so it's his."

"Yes; it's his. He says he feels inclined to shut the place up; but I told him it was a pity to do that since I knew the very young lady for the post."

I dropped the subject there, because of a new inspiration.

"If Mr. Grainger has places at his command, couldn't he do something for poor Hugh?"

"Why poor Hugh? I thought he was--"

I gave him a brief account of the fiasco in Boston, venturing to betray Hugh's confidence for the sake of some possible advantage. Mr.

Strangways only shrugged his shoulders.