The High Heart Part 27

I have not said that on coming to New York I had decided to let my acquaintance with him end. He made me uneasy. I was terrified by the thought that he might be in love with me. Why I was terrified I didn't know; I only knew I was. I did not tell him, therefore, when I left Mrs.

Rossiter; and in the whirlpool of New York I considered that I was swallowed up. But here was his card, and he himself waiting in the drawing-room below.

Naturally my first question was as to how he had found me out. This he laughed off, pretending to be annoyed with me for coming to the city without telling him. I could see, however, that he was in spirits much too high to allow of his being seriously annoyed with anything. Life promised well with him. He enjoyed his work, and for his employer he had that eager personal devotion which is always a herald of success.

After having run away from him, as it were, I was now a little irritated at seeing that he hadn't missed me.

But he did not take his leave without a bit of information that puzzled me beyond expression. He was going out of Mr. Grainger's office that morning, he said, with a bundle of letters which he was to answer, when his master observed, casually:

"The young lady of whom you spoke to me as qualified to take Miss Davis's place is at the Hotel Mary Chilton. Go and see her and get her opinion as to accepting the job!"

I was what the French call _atterre_--knocked flat.

"But how on earth could he know?"

Larry Strangways laughed.

"Oh, don't ask me. He knows anything he wants to know. He's got the flair of a detective. I don't try to fathom him. But the point is that the position is there for you to take or to leave."

I tried to bring my mind back from the fact that this important man, a total stranger to me, was in some way interested in my destiny.

"What can I do but leave it, when I know no more about it than I do of sailing a s.h.i.+p?"

"Oh yes, you do. You know what books are, and you know what rare books are. For the rest, all you'd have to do would be to consult the catalogue. I don't know what the duties are; but if Miss Davis is up to them I guess you would be, too. She's a sweet, pretty kitten of a thing--daughter of one of Stacy Grainger's old pals who came to grief--but I don't believe she knows much more about a book than the cover from the print. Anyhow, I've given you the message with neither more nor less than he said. Look here!" he exclaimed, suddenly. "Why shouldn't you put on your hat and walk down the street with me, so that I could show you where the library is? It's not ten minutes away. I've never been inside it, but every one knows what it looks like."

Consulting my wrist-watch, I objected that it was but twenty minutes to the time when Hugh was due to come and take me to walk in Central Park, returning to the hotel to tea.

"Oh, let him go to the deuce! We can be there and back in twenty minutes, and you can leave a message for him at the office."

So we started. The Mary Chilton is in one of the cross-streets between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. I discovered that Stacy Grainger's house was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and a corresponding cross-street a little farther down-town. It is a big brownstone house, in the eighteen-seventy style, of the type which all round it has been turned into offices and shops. All its many windows were blinded in a yellowish holland staff, giving to the whole building an aspect sealed and dead.

I shuddered.

"I hope I shouldn't have to work there."

"No. The house has been shut up for years." He named the hotel overlooking the Park at which Stacy Grainger actually lived. "Anybody else would have sold the place; but he has a lot of queer sentiment about him. Of the two or three devotions in his life one of the most intense is to his father's memory. I believe the old fellow committed suicide in that house, and the son hallows it as he would a grave."

"Cheerful!"

"Oh, cheerful isn't the word one would a.s.sociate with him first--"

"Or last, apparently."

"No, or last; but he's got other qualities to which cheerfulness is as small change to gold. All I want you to see is that he keeps this property, which is worth half a million at the least, from motives which the immense majority wouldn't understand. It gives you a clue to the man."

"But what I want," I said, with nervous flippancy, for I was afraid of meeting Hugh, "is a clue to the library."

"There it is."

"That?"

He had pointed to a small, low, rectangular building I had seen a hundred times, without the curiosity to wonder what it was. It stood behind the house, in the center of a gra.s.s-plot, and was approached from the cross-street, through a small wrought-iron gate. Built of brownstone, without a window, and with no other ornament than a frieze in relief below the eave, it suggested a tomb. At the back was a kind of covered cloister connecting with the house.

"If I had to sit in there all day," I commented, as we turned back toward the hotel, "I should feel as if I were buried alive. I know that strange things would happen to me!"

"Oh no, they wouldn't. It's sure to be all right or a pretty little thing like Miss Davis couldn't have stood it for three years. It's lighted from the top, and there are a lot of fine things scattered about."

He gave me a brief history of how the collection had been formed. The elder Grainger on coming to New York had bought up the contents of two or three great European sales _en bloc_. He knew little about the objects he had thus acquired, and cared less. His motive was simply that of the rich American to play the n.o.bleman.

He was still talking of this when Hugh pa.s.sed us and turned round.

Between the two men there was a stiff form of greeting. That is, it was stiff on Larry Strangways's side, while on Hugh's it was the nearest thing to no greeting at all. I could see he considered the tutor of his sister's son beneath him.

"What the devil were you walking with that fellow for?" he asked, after Mr. Strangways had left us and while we were continuing our way up-town.

He spoke, wonderingly rather than impatiently.

"Because he had come from a gentleman who had offered me employment. I had just gone down with him to look at the outside of the house."

I could hardly be surprised that Hugh should stop abruptly, forcing the stream of foot-pa.s.sengers to divide into two currents about us.

"The impertinent bounder! Offer employment--to you--my--my wife!"

I walked on with dignity.

"You mustn't call me that, Hugh. It's a word only to be used in its exact signification." He began to apologize, but I interrupted. "I'm not only not your wife, but as yet I haven't even promised to marry you. We must keep that fact unmistakably clear before us. It will prevent possible complications in the end."

He spoke humbly:

"What sort of complications?"

"I don't know; but I can see they might arise. And as for the matter of employment, I must have it for a lot of reasons."

"I don't see that. Give me two or three months, Alix!"

"But it's precisely during those two or three months, Hugh, that I should be left high and dry. Unless I have something to do I have no motive for staying here in New York."

"What about me?"

"I can't stay just to see you. That's the difference between a woman and a man. The situation is awkward enough as it is; but if I were to go on living here for two or three months, merely for the sake of having a few hours every day with you--"

Before we reached the Park he saw the justice of my argument.

Remembering what Larry Strangways had once said as to Hugh's belief that he was stooping to pick his diamond out of the mire, I reasoned that since he was marrying a working-girl it would best preserve the decencies if the working-girl were working. For this procedure Hugh himself was able to establish precedent, since we were in sight of the very hotel where Libby Jaynes had rubbed men's nails up to within an hour or two of her marriage to Tracy Allen. He pointed it out as if it was an historic monument, and in the same spirit I gazed at it.

That matter settled, I attacked another as we advanced farther into the Park.

"And Mr. Strangways is not a bounder, Hugh, darling. I wish you wouldn't call him that."

His response was sufficiently good-natured, but it expressed that Brokens.h.i.+re disdain for everything that didn't have money which specially enraged me.

"Well, I won't," he conceded. "I don't care a hang what he is."