The High Heart Part 7

His smile underwent a change. It grew frozen and steely instead of being bright with a continuous play suggesting summer lightning, which had been its usual quality.

"My time is up at the end of the month--and I've asked Mr. Rossiter not to expect me to go on."

I was looking for something of the sort sooner or later, but now that it had come I saw how lonely I should be.

"Oh! Where are you going? Have you got anything in particular?"

"I'm going as secretary to Stacy Grainger."

"I've some connection with that name," I said, absently, "though I can't remember what it is."

"You've probably heard of him. He's a good deal in the public eye."

"Have you known him long?" I asked, for the sake of speaking, though I was only thinking of myself.

"Never knew him at all." He came nearer to me. "I've a confession to make, though it won't be of interest to you. All the while I've been here, playing with little Broke Rossiter, I've been--don't laugh--I've been contributing to the press--_moi qui vous parle_!"

"What about?"

"Oh, politics and finance and foreign policy and public things in general. Always had a taste that way. Now it seems that something I wrote for the _Providence Express_--people read it a good deal--has attracted the attention of the great Stacy. Yes, he's great, too--J.

Howard's big rival for--"

I began to recall something I had heard. "Wasn't there a story about him and Mr. Brokens.h.i.+re and Mrs. Brokens.h.i.+re?"

"That's the man. Well, he's noticed my stuff, and written to the editor--and to me, and I'm to go to him."

I was still thinking of myself and the loss of his _camaraderie_. "I hope he's going to pay you well."

"Oh, for me it will be wealth."

"It will probably be more than that. It will be the first long step up."

He nodded confidently. "I hope so."

I had again begun to move away when he stopped me the second time.

"Miss Adare, what's your first name? Mine's Lawrence, as you know."

If I laughed a little it was to conceal my discomfort at this abrupt approach to the intimate.

"I'm rather sorry for my name," I said, apologetically. "You see my father was one of those poetically loyal Canadians who rather overdo the thing. My eldest sister should have been Victoria, because Victoria was the queen. But the d.u.c.h.ess of Argyll was in Canada at that time--and very nice to father and mother--and so the first of us had to be Louise.

He couldn't begin on the queens till there was a second one. That's poor Vic; while I'm--I know you'll shout--I'm Alexandra. If there'd been a fourth she'd have been a Mary; but poor mother died and the series stopped."

He shook hands rather gravely. "Then I shall think of you as Alexandra."

"If you are going to think of me at all," I managed to say, with a little _moue_, "put me down as Alix. That's what I've always been called."

[Footnote 1: This was said before the Great War. It is now supposed that when peace is made there will be a change in English opinion. With my knowledge of my country--the British Empire--I permit myself to doubt it. There is a proverb which begins, "When the devil was sick." I shall, however, be glad if I am proved wrong.--Alexandra Adare.]

CHAPTER IV

I was glad of the fog. It was cool and refres.h.i.+ng; it was also concealing. I could tramp along under its protection with little or no fear of being seen. Wearing tweeds, thick boots, and a felt hat, I was prepared for wet, and as a Canadian girl I was used to open air in all weathers. The few stragglers generally to be seen on the Cliff Walk having rushed to their houses for shelter, I had the rocks and the breakers, the honeysuckle and the patches of dog-roses, to myself. In the back of my mind I was fortified, too, by the knowledge that dampness curls my hair into pretty little tendrils, so that if I did meet any one I should be looking at my best.

The path is like no other in the world. I have often wondered why the American writer-up of picturesque bits didn't make more of it. Trouville has its _Plage_, and Brighton its King's Road, and Nice its Promenade des Anglais, but in no other kingdom of leisure that I know anything about will you find the combination of qualities, wild and subdued, that mark this ocean-front of the island of Aquidneck. Neither will you easily come elsewhere so near to a sense of the primitive human struggle, of the crude social clash, of the war of the rights of man--Fisherman's Rights, as this coast historically knows them--against encroachment, privilege, and seclusion. As you crunch the gravel, and press the well-rolled turf, and sniff the scent of the white and red clover and Queen Anne's lace that fringe the precipice leaning over the sea, you feel in the air those elements of conflict that make drama.

In clinging to the edge of the cliff, in twisting round every curve of the sh.o.r.e line, in running up hill and down dale, under crags and over them, the path is, of course, not the only one of its kind. You will find the same thing anywhere on the south coast of England or the north coast of France. But in the sum of human interest it sucks into the three miles of its course I can think of nothing else that resembles it.

As guaranteeing the rights of the fisherman it is, so I believe, inalienable public property. The fisherman can walk on it, sit on it, fish from it, right into eternity. So much he has secured from the past history of colony and state; but he has done it at the cost of making himself offensive to the gentlemen whose lawns he hems as a seamstress hems a skirt.

It is a hem like a serpent, with a serpent's sinuosity and grace, but also with a serpent's hatefulness to those who can do nothing but accept it as a fact. Since, as a fact, it cannot be abolished it has to be put up with; and since it has to be put up with the means must needs be found to deal with it effectively. Effectively it has been dealt with.

Money, skill, and imagination have been spent on it, to adorn it, or disguise it, or sink it out of sight. The architect, the landscape gardener, and the engineer have all been called into counsel. On Fisherman's Rights the smile and the frown are exercised by turns, each with its phase of ingenuity. Along one stretch of a hundred yards bland recognition borders the way with roses or spans the miniature chasms with decorative bridges; along the next shuddering refinement grows a hedge or digs a trench behind which the obtrusive wayfarer may pa.s.s unseen. But shuddering refinement and bland recognition alike withdraw into themselves as far as broad lawns and lofty terraces permit them to retire, leaving to the owner of Fisherman's Rights the enjoyment of ocher and umber rocks and sea and sky and grain-fields yellowing on far headlands.

It gave me the nearest thing to glee I ever felt in Newport. It was bracing and open and free. It suggested comparisons with scrambles along Nova-Scotian sh.o.r.es or tramps on the moors in Scotland. I often hated the fine weather; it was oppressive; it was strangling. But a day like this, with its whiffs of wild wind and its handfuls of salt slas.h.i.+ng against eyes and mouth and nostrils, was not only exhilarating, it was glorious. I was glad, too, that the prim villas and pretentious chteaux, most of them out of proportion to any scale of housekeeping of which America is capable, could only be descried like castles in a dream through the swirling, diaphanous drift. I could be alone to rage and fume--or fly onward with a speed that was in itself a relief.

I could be alone till, on climbing the slope of a shorn and wind-swept bluff, I saw a square-shouldered figure looming on the crest. It was no more than a deepening of the texture of the fog, but I knew its lines.

Skimming up the ascent with a little cry, I was in Hugh's arms, my head on his burly breast.

I think it was his burliness that made the most definite appeal to me.

He was so st.u.r.dy and strong, and I was so small and desolate. From the beginning, when he first used to come near me, I felt his presence, as the Bible says, like the shadow of a rock in a thirsty land. That was in my early homesick time, before I had seized the new way of living and the new national point of view. The fact, too, that, as I expressed it to myself, I was in the second cabin when I had always been accustomed to the first, inspired a discomfort for which unwittingly I sought consolation. n.o.body thought of me as other than Mrs. Rossiter's retainer, but this one kindly man.

I noticed his kindliness almost before I noticed him, just as, I think, he noticed my loneliness almost before he noticed me. He opened doors for me when I went in or out; he served me with things if he happened to be there at tea; he dropped into a chair beside me when I was the only member of a group whom no one spoke to. If Gladys was of the company I was of it too, with a nominal footing but a virtual exclusion. The men in the Rossiter circle were of the four hundred and ninety-nine to whom I wasn't attractive; the women were all civil--from a distance.

Occasionally some nice old lady would ask me where I came from and if I liked my work, or talk to me of new educational methods in a way which, with my bringing up, was to me as so much Greek; but I never got any other sign of friendliness. Only this short, stockily built young fellow, with the small, blue eyes, ever recognized me as a human being with the average yearning for human intercourse.

During the winter in New York he never went further than that. I remembered Mrs. Rossiter's recommendation and "let him alone." I knew how to do it. He was not the first man I had ever had to deal with, even if no one had asked me to marry him. I accepted his small, kindly acts with that shade of discretion which defined the distance between us. As far as I could observe, he himself had no disposition to cross the lines I set--not till we moved to Newport.

There was a fortnight between our going there and his--a fortnight which seemed to work a change in him. The Hugh Brokens.h.i.+re I met on one of my first rambles along the cliffs was not the Hugh Brokens.h.i.+re I had last seen in Fifth Avenue. Perhaps I was not the same myself. In the new surroundings I had missed him--a little. I will not say that his absence had meant an aching void to me; but where I had had a friend, now I had none--since I was unable to count Larry Strangways. Had it not been for this solitude I should have been less receptive to his comings when he suddenly began to pursue me.

Pursuit is the only word I can use. I found him everywhere, quiet, deliberate, persistent. If he had been ten or even five years older I could have taken his advances without uneasiness. But he was only twenty-six and a dependent. He had no work; apart from his allowance from his father he had no means. And yet when, on the day before my chronicle begins, he stole upon me as I sat in a sheltered nook below the cliffs to which I was fond of retreating when I had time--when he stole upon me there, and kissed me and kissed me and kissed me, I couldn't help confessing that I loved him.

I must leave to some woman who has had to fend for herself the task of telling what it means when a man comes to offer her his heart and his protection. It goes without saying that it means more to her than to the sheltered woman, for it means things different and more wonderful. It is the expected unexpected come to pa.s.s; it is the impossible achieved. It is not only success; it is success with an aureole of glory.

I suppose I must be parasitical by nature, for I never have conceived of life as other than dependent on some man who would love me and take care of me. Even when no such man appeared and I was forced out to earn my bread, I looked upon the need as temporary only. In the loneliest of times at Mrs. Rossiter's, at periods when I didn't see a man for weeks, the hero never seemed farther away than just behind the scenes. I confess to minutes when I thought he tarried unnecessarily long; I confess to terrified questionings as to what would happen were he never to come at all; I confess to solitary watches of the night in company with fears and tears; but I cannot confess to anything more than a low burning of that lamp of hope which never went out entirely.

When, therefore, Hugh Brokens.h.i.+re offered me what he had to offer me I felt for a few minutes--ten, fifteen, twenty perhaps--that sense of the fruition of the being which I am sure comes to us but rarely in this life, and perhaps is a foretaste of eternity. I was like a creature that has long been struggling up to some higher state--and has reached it.

I am ashamed to say, too, that my first consciousness came in pictures to which the dear young man himself was only incidental. Two scenes in particular that for ten years past had been only a little below the threshold of my consciousness came out boldly, like developed photographs. I was the center of both. In one I saw a dainty little dining-room, where the table was laid. The damask was beautiful; the silver rich; the gla.s.ses crystalline. Wearing an inexpensive but extremely chic little gown, I was seating the guests. The other picture was more dim, but only in the sense that the room was deliciously darkened. It had white furnis.h.i.+ngs, a little white cot, and toys. In its very center was a ba.s.sinet, and I was leaning over it, wearing a delicate lace peignoir.

Ought I to blush to say that while Hugh stammered out his impa.s.sioned declarations I was seeing these two tableaux emerging from the state of only half-acknowledged dreams into real possibility? I dare say. I merely affirm that it was so. Since the dominant craving of my nature was to have a home and a baby, I saw the baby and the home before I could realize a husband or a father, or bring my mind to the definite proposals faltered by poor Hugh.

But I did bring my mind to them, with the result of which I have already given a sufficient indication. Even in admitting that I loved him I thrust and parried and postponed. The whole idea was too big for me to grapple with on the spur of a sudden moment. I suggested his talking the matter over with his father chiefly to gain time.

But to rest in his arms had only a subordinate connection with the great issue I had to face. It was a joy in itself. It was a pledge of the future, even if I were never to take anything but the pledge. After my s.h.i.+fts and struggles and anxieties I could feel the satisfaction of knowing it was in my power to let them all roll off. If I were never to do it, if I were to go back to my uncertainties, this minute would mitigate the trial in advance. I might fight for existence during all the rest of my life, and yet I should still have the bliss of remembering that some one was willing to fight for me.