The High Heart Part 8

He released me at last, since there might be people in Newport as indifferent to weather as ourselves.

"What happened?" he asked then, with an eagerness which almost choked the question in its utterance. "Was it awful?"

I was too nearly hysterical to enter on anything like a recital. "It might have been worse," I half laughed and half sobbed, trying to recover my breath and dry my eyes.

His spirit seemed to leap at the answer. "Do you mean to say you got concessions from him--or anything like that?"

I couldn't help clinging to the edge of his raincoat. "Did you expect me to?"

"I didn't know but what, when he saw you--"

"Oh, but he didn't see me. That was part of the difficulty. He looked where I was--but he didn't find anything there."

He laughed, with a hint of disappointment. "I know what you mean; but you mustn't be surprised. He'll see you yet." He clasped me again. "I didn't see you at first, little girl; I swear I didn't. You're like that. A fellow must look at you twice before he knows that you're there; but when he begins to take notice--" I struggled out of his embrace, while he continued: "It's the same with all the great things--with pictures and mountains and cathedrals, and so on. Often thought about it when we've been abroad. See something once and pa.s.s it by. Next time you look at it a little. Third time it begins to grow on you. Fourth time you've found a wonder. You're a wonder, little Alix, do you know it?"

"Oh no, I'm not. I must warn you, Hugh darling, that I'm very prosaic and practical and ordinary. You mustn't put me on a pedestal--"

"Put you on a pedestal? You were born on a pedestal. You're the woman I've seen in hopes and dreams--"

We began to walk on, coming to a little hollow that dipped near enough to the sh.o.r.e to allow of our scrambling over the rocks to where we could sit down among them. As we were here below the thickest belt of the fog line, I could see him in a way that had been impossible on the bluff.

If he was good-looking it was only in the handsome-ugly sense. Mrs.

Rossiter often said he was the one member of the family who inherited from the Brews of Boston, a statement I could verify from the first Mrs.

Brokens.h.i.+re's portrait by Carolus-Duran. Hugh's features were not ill-formed so much as they were out of proportion to each other, becoming thus a mere jumble of organs. The blue eyes were too small and too wide apart; the forehead was too broad for its height; the nose, which started at the same fine angle as his father's, changed in mid-course to a k.n.o.b; the upper lip was intended to be long, but half-way in its descent took a notion to curve upward, making a hollow for a tender, youthful, fair mustache that didn't quite meet in the center and might have been applied with a camel's-hair brush; the lower lip turned outward with a little fullness that spilled over in a little fall, giving to the whole expression something lovably good-natured.

Because the sea boiled over the ledges and sc.r.a.ped on the pebbles with a screechy sound we were obliged to sit close together in order to make ourselves heard. His arm about me was amazingly protective. I felt safe.

The account of his interview with his father was too incoherent to give me more than the idea that they had talked somewhat at cross-purposes.

To Hugh's statement that he wished to marry Miss Adare, the little nursery governess at Ethel's, his father had responded by reading a letter from Lord Goldborough inviting Hugh to his place in Scotland for the shooting.

"It would be well for you to accept," the father commented, as he folded the letter. "I've cabled to Goldborough to say you'd sail on--"

"But, father, how can I sail when I've asked Miss Adare to marry me?"

To this the reply was the mention of the steamer and the date. He went on to say, however: "If you've asked any one to marry you it's absurd, of course. But I'll take care of that. If you go by that boat you'll reach London in plenty of time to fit out at your tailor's and still be at Strath-na-Cloid by the twelfth. In case you're short of money--"

Apparently they got no further than that. To Hugh's a.s.sertions and objections his father had but one response. It was a response, as I understood, which confronted the younger man like a wall he had neither the force to break down nor the agility to climb over, and left him staring at a blank.

Then followed another outburst which to my unaccustomed ear was as wild, sweet music. It wasn't merely that he loved me, he adored me; it wasn't merely that I was young and pretty and captivating with a sly, un.o.btrusive fascination that held you enchanted when it held you at all.

I was mistress of the wisdom of the ages. Among the nice expensively dressed young girls with whom he danced and rode and swam and flirted, Hugh had never seen any one who could "hold a candle" to me in knowledge of human nature and the world. It wasn't that I had seen more than they or done more than they; it was that I had a mind through which every impression filtered and came out as something of my own. It was what he had always been looking for in a woman, and had given up the hope of finding. He spoke as if he was forty. He was serious himself, he averred; he had reflected, and held original convictions. Though a rich man's son, with corresponding prospects, his heart was with the ma.s.ses and he labeled himself a Socialist.

It was not the same thing to be a Socialist now, he explained to me, as it had been twenty years before, since so many men of education and position had adopted this system of opinion. In fact, his own conversion had been partly due to young Lord Ernest Hayes, of the British Emba.s.sy, who had spent the preceding summer at Newport, though his inclinations had gone in this direction ever since he had begun to think. It was because I was so open-eyed and so sincere that he had been drawn to me as soon as he had started in to notice me. It was true that he had noticed me first of all because I was in a subordinate position and alone, but, having done so, he had found a queen disguised as a working girl. I was a queen of the vital things in life, a queen of intelligence, of sympathy, of the defiance of convention, of everything that was great. I was the woman a Socialist could love, of whom a Socialist could make his star.

"If father would only give me credit for being twenty-six and a man,"

the dear boy went on earnestly, "with a man's responsibility to society and the human race! But he doesn't. He thinks I ought to quit being a Socialist because he tells me to--or else he doesn't think at all. Nine times out of ten, when I begin to say what I believe, he talks of something else--just as he did last night in bringing up the Goldboroughs."

I found the opportunity for which I had been looking during his impa.s.sioned rhapsody. The mention of the Goldboroughs gave me that kind of chill about the heart which the mist imparted to the hands and face.

"You know them all very well," I said, when I found an opening in which I could speak.

"Oh yes," he admitted, indifferently. "Known them all my life. Father represented Meek & Brokens.h.i.+re in England till my grandfather died.

Goldborough used to be an impecunious chap, land poor, till he and father began to pull together. Father's been able to give him tips on the market, and he's given father-- Well, dad's always had a taste for English swells. Never could stand the Continental kind--gilt gingerbread he's called 'em--and so, well, you can see."

I admitted that I could see, going on to ask what the Goldborough family consisted of.

There was Lord Leatherhead, the eldest son; then there were two younger sons, one in the army and one preparing for the Church; and there were three girls.

"Any of the daughters married?" I ventured, timidly.

There was nothing forced in the indifference with which he made his explanations. Laura was married to a banker named Bell; Janet, he thought he had heard, was engaged to a chap in the Inverness Rangers; Cecilia--Cissie they usually called her--was to the best of his knowledge still wholly free, but the best of his knowledge did not go far.

I pumped up my courage again. "Is she--nice?"

"Oh, nice enough." He really didn't know much about her. She was generally away at school when he had been at Goldborough Castle. When she was there he hadn't seen more than a long-legged, gawky girl, rather good at tennis, with red hair hanging down her back.

Satisfied with these replies, I went on to tell him of my interview with his father an hour or two before. Of this he seized on one point with some ecstasy.

"So you told him you'd take me! Oh, Alix--gos.h.!.+"

The exclamation was a sigh of relief as well as of rapture. I could smile at it because it was so boyish and American, especially as he clasped me again and held me in a way that almost stopped my breath.

When I freed myself, however, I said, with a show of firmness:

"Yes, Hugh; it's what I said to him; but it's not what I'm going to repeat to you."

"Not what you're going to repeat to me? But if you said it to him--"

"I'm still not obliged to accept you--to-day."

"But if you mean to accept me at all--"

"Yes, I mean to accept you--if all goes well."

"But what do you mean by that?"

"I mean--if your family should want me."

I could feel his clasp relax as he said: "Oh, if you're going to wait for that!"

"Hugh, darling, how can I not wait for it? I told him I couldn't stop to consider a family; but--but I see I must."

"Oh, but why? We shall lose everything if you do that. To wait for my family to want you to marry me--"

I detached myself altogether from his embrace, pretending to arrange my skirts about my feet. He leaned forward, his fingers interlocked, his elbows on his knees, his kind young face disconsolate.

"When I talked to your father," I tried to explain, "I saw chiefly the individual's side of the question of marriage. There is that side; but there's another. Marriage doesn't concern a man and a woman alone; it concerns a family--sometimes two."

His cry came out with the explosive force of a slowly gathering groan.

"Oh, rot, Alix!" He went on to expostulate: "Can't you see? If we were to go now and buy a license--and be married by the first clergyman we met--the family couldn't say a word."