The High Heart Part 51

He went to his point without introductory greeting.

"It's good of you to have come. Perhaps we could talk better if we walked up the street. There's no one to know us or to make it awkward for you."

Walking up the street he made his errand clear to me. I had partly guessed it before he said a word. I had guessed it from his pallor, from something indefinably humbled in the way he bore himself, and from the worried light in his romantic eyes. Being so much taller than I, he had to stoop toward me as he talked.

He knew, he said, what had happened on the train. Some of it he had wrung from his secretary, Strangways, and the rest had been written him by Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re. He had been so furious at first that he might have been called insane. In order to give himself the pleasure of kicking Strangways out he had refused to accept his resignation, and had I not been a woman he would have sought revenge on me. He had been the more frantic because until getting his first note from Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re he hadn't known where she was. To have the person dearest to him in the world swept off the face of the earth after she was actually under his protection was enough to drive a man mad.

Having acquiesced in this, I considered it no harm to add that if I had known the business on which I was setting out I should have hardly dared that day to take the train for Boston. Once on it, however, and in speech with Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re, it had seemed that there was no other course before me.

"Quite so," he agreed, somewhat to my surprise. "I see that now. He's not altogether an a.s.s, that fellow Strangways. I've kept him with me, and little by little--" He broke off abruptly to say: "And now the shoe's on the other foot. That's what I wanted to tell you."

I walked on a few paces before getting the force of this figure of speech.

"You mean that Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re--"

"Quite so. I see you get what I'd like you to know." He went on, brokenly: "It isn't that I don't want it myself as much as ever. I only see, as I didn't see before, what it would mean to her. If I were to take her at her word--as I must, of course, if she insists on it--"

I had to think hard while we continued to walk on beneath the leafing elms, and the village people watched us two as city folks.

"It's for to-morrow, isn't it?" I asked at last.

He nodded.

"How did you know that?"

"Near the Baptist church?"

"How the deuce do you know? I motored up here last week to spy out the land. That seemed to me the most practicable spot, where we should be least observed--"

We were still walking on when I said, without quite knowing why I did so:

"Why shouldn't you go away at once and leave it all to me?"

"Leave it all to you? And what would you do?"

"I don't know. I should have to think. I could do--something."

"But suppose she's counting on me to come?"

"Then you would have to fail her."

"I couldn't."

"Not even if it was for her good?"

He shook his head.

"Not even if it was for her good. No one who calls himself a gentleman--"

I couldn't help flinging him a scornful smile.

"Isn't it too late to think in terms like that? We've come to a place where such words don't apply. The best we can do is to get out of a difficult situation as wisely as possible, and if you'd just go away and leave it to me--"

"She'd never forgive me. That's what I'd be afraid of."

"There's nothing to be afraid of in doing right," I declared, a little sententiously. "You'll do right in going away. The rest will take care of itself."

We came to the edge of the town, where there was a gate leading into a pasture. Over this gate we leaned and looked down on a valley of orchards and farms. He was sufficiently at ease to take out a cigarette and ask my permission to smoke.

"What would you say of a man who treated you like that?" he asked, presently.

"It wouldn't matter what I said at first, so long as I lived to thank him. That's what she'd do, and she'd do it soon."

"And in the mean time?"

"I don't see that you need think of that. If you do right--"

He groaned aloud.

"Oh, right be hanged!"

"Yes, there you go. But so long as right is hanged wrong will have it all its own way and you'll both get into trouble. Do right now--"

"And leave her in the lurch?"

"You wouldn't be leaving her in the lurch, because you'd be leaving her with me. I know her and can take care of her. If you were just failing her and nothing else--that would be another thing. But I'm here. If you'll only do what's so obviously right, Mr. Grainger, you can trust me with the rest."

I said this firmly and with an air of competence, though, as a matter of fact, I had no idea of what I should have to do. What I wanted first was to get rid of him. Once alone with her, I knew I should get some kind of inspiration.

He diverted the argument to himself--he wanted her so much, he would have to suffer so cruelly.

"There's no question as to your suffering," I said. "You'll both have to suffer. That can be taken for granted. We're only thinking of the way in which you'll suffer least."

"That's true," he admitted, but slowly and reluctantly.

"I'm not a terribly rigorous moralist," I went on. "I've a lot of sympathy with Paolo and Francesca and with Pellas and Mlisande. But you can see for yourself that all such instances end unhappily, and when it's happiness you're primarily in search of--"

"Hers--especially," he interposed, with the same deliberation and some of the same unwillingness.

"Well, then, isn't your course clear? She'll never be happy with you if she kills the man she runs away from--"

He withdrew his cigarette and looked at me, wonderingly.

"Kills him? What in thunder do you mean?"

I explained my convictions. Howard Brokens.h.i.+re wouldn't survive his wife's desertion for a month; he might not survive it for a day. He was a doomed man, even if his wife did not desert him at all. He, Stacy Grainger, was young. Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re was young. Wouldn't it be better for them both to wait on life--and on the other possibilities that I didn't care to name more explicitly?

So he wrestled with himself, and incidentally with me, turning back at last toward the village inn--and his motor. While shaking my hand to say good-by he threw off, jerkily: