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Books by the
AUTHOR OF "THE INNER SHRINE"
[BASIL KING]
THE HIGH HEART. Illustrated.
THE LIFTED VEIL. Illustrated.
THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS. Illustrated.
THE LETTER OF THE CONTRACT. Illustrated.
THE WAY HOME. Illustrated.
THE WILD OLIVE. Illustrated.
THE INNER SHRINE. Illustrated.
THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT. Illustrated.
LET NOT MAN PUT ASUNDER. Post 8vo.
IN THE GARDEN OF CHARITY. Post 8vo.
THE STEPS OF HONOR. Post 8vo.
THE GIANT'S STRENGTH. Post 8vo.
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
Established 1817
[Illustration: "I've been thinking a good deal during the past few weeks
of your law of Right"]
THE HIGH HEART
BY
BASIL KING
AUTHOR OF
"_The Inner Shrine_" "_The Lifted Veil_" _Etc._
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The High Heart
Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1917
ILLUSTRATIONS
"I've Been Thinking a Good Deal During the
Past Few Weeks of Your Law of Right" _Frontispiece_
The Marriage She Had Missed Was on Her Mind.
It Created an Obsession or a Broken Heart,
I Wasn't Quite Sure Which _Facing p._ 118
I Saw a Man and a Woman Consumed with Longing
for Each Other " 192
"I've Had Great Trials . . . I've Always Been
Misjudged. . . . They've Put Me Down as
Hard and Proud" " 410
THE HIGH HEART
CHAPTER I
I could not have lived in the Brokenshire circle for nearly a year
without recognizing the fact that in the eyes of his family J. Howard,
as he was commonly called by the world, was the Great Dispenser; but my
first intimation that he meant to act in that capacity toward me came
from Larry Strangways, on a bright July morning during the summer of
1913, when we were at Newport.
I was crossing the lawn, going toward the sea, with little Gladys
Rossiter, to whom I acted as companion in the hours when she was out of
the nursery, with a specific duty to speak French. Larry Strangways was
tutor to the Rossiter boy, and in our relative positions we were bound
to exercise toward each other a good deal of discretion. We fraternized
with constraint. We fraternized because--well, chiefly because we
couldn't help it. In the mocking flare of his eye, which contradicted
the assumed young gravity of his manner, I read an opinion of the
Rossiter household and of the Brokenshire family in general similar to
my own. That would have been enough for mutual comprehension had there
been no instinctive sympathies between us; but there were. Allowing for
the fact that we were of different nationalities, we had the same kind
of antecedents; we spoke the same kind of social language; we had the
same kind of aims in life. Neither of us regarded the position in the
Rossiter establishment as a permanent status. He was a tutor merely for
the minute, while feeling his way to that first rung of the ladder which
I was convinced would lead him to some high place in American life. I
was a nursery governess only on the way to getting married. Matrimony
was the continent toward which more or less consciously I had been
traveling for five or six years, without having actually descried a
port. In this connection I may relate a little incident which had taken
place between myself and Mrs. Rossiter after I had accepted my situation
in her family. It will retard my meeting with Larry Strangways on the
lawn, but it will throw light on it when it comes.
I had met Mrs. Rossiter, who was J. Howard Brokenshire's daughter, in
the way that is known as socially. I never understood why she should
have taken a house for the summer in our quiet old town of Halifax,
unless she was urged to it by the vague restlessness which was one of
her characteristics. But there she was in a roomy old brick mansion I
had known all my life, with gardens and conservatories and lawns running
down to the fiord or back-harbor which we call the Northwest Arm, and a
fine English air of seclusion. In our easy, neighborly way she was well
received, and made herself agreeable. She flirted with the officers of
both Army and Navy enough to create talk without raising scandal; and
she was sufficiently good-natured to be civil to us girls, among whom
she singled me out for attentions. I attributed this kindness to our
recent bereavement and financial crash, which had left me poor after
twenty-four years of comfort, and was proportionately grateful. It was
partly gratitude, and partly a natural love of children, and partly a
special affection for the exquisite thing herself, that drew me to
little Gladys Rossiter, to playing with her on the lawns, and rowing her
on the Arm, and--as I had been for three or four years at school in
Paris--dropping into a habit of lisping French to her. As the child
liked me the mother left her more and more to my care, gaining thus the
greater scope for her innocuous flirtations.
It was toward the end of the summer that Mrs. Rossiter began to sigh, "I
don't know how I shall ever tear Gladys away from you," and, "I do wish
you were coming with us."
I wished it in a way myself, since I was rather at a loss as to what to
do. I had never expected to have to earn a living; I had expected to get
married. My two elder sisters, Louise and Victoria, had married easily
enough, the one in the Navy, the other in the Army; but with me suitors
seemed to lag. They came and saw--but they never went far enough for
conquest. I couldn't understand it. I was not stupid; I was not ugly;
and I was generally spoken of as having charm. But there was the fact
that I was twenty-four, with scarcely a penny, and drawing nearer and
nearer to the end of my expedients. I was not without some social
experience, having kept house in a generous way for my widowed father,
till his death, some two years before the summer when I met Mrs.
Rossiter, brought with it our financial collapse. If he hadn't left a
lot of old books--_Canadiana_, the pamphlets were called--and rare first
editions of all kinds, which I took over to London and sold at
Sothbey's, I shouldn't have had enough on which to dress. This business
being settled, I stayed as long as I decently could with Louise at
Southsea and Victoria at Gibraltar; but no man asked me to marry him
during the course of either visit. Had there been a sign of any such
possibility the sisters would have put themselves out to keep me; but as
nothing warranted them in doing so they let me go. An uncle and aunt
having offered to give me shelter for a time at Halifax, there was
nothing left for it but to go back and renew the search for my fortunes
in my native town.
When, therefore, Mrs. Rossiter, in her pretty, helpless way said to me
one day, "Why shouldn't you come with me, dear Miss Adare?" I jumped
inwardly at the opportunity, though I smiled and replied in an offhand
manner, "Oh, that would have to be discussed."
Mrs. Rossiter admitted the truth of this observation somewhat pensively.
I know now that I took her up with too much promptitude.
"Yes, of course," she returned, absently, and the subject was dropped.
It was taken up again, however, and our bargain made. On Mrs. Rossiter's
part it was made astutely, not in the matter of money, but in the way in
which she shifted me from the position of a friend into that of a
retainer. It was done with the most perfect tact, but it was done. I had
no complaint to make. What she wanted was a nursery governess. My own
first preoccupations were food and shelter for which I should not be
dependent on my kin. We came to the incident I am about to relate very
gradually; but when we did come to it I had no difficulty in seeing that
it had been in the back of Mrs. Rossiter's mind from the first. It had
been the cause of that second thought on the day when I had taken her up
too readily.
She began by telling me about her father. Beyond the fact that some man
who seemed to be specially well informed would occasionally say with
awe, "She's J. Howard Brokenshire's daughter," I knew nothing whatever
about him. But I began to see him now as the central sun round whom all
the Brokenshires revolved. They revolved round him, not so much from
adoration or even from natural affection as from some tremendous rotary
force to which there was no resistance.
Up to this time I had heard no more of American life than American life
had heard of me. The great country south of our border was scarcely on
my map. The Halifax in which I was born and grew up was not the bustling
Canadian port, dependent on its hinterland, it is to-day; it was an
outpost of England, with its face always turned to the Atlantic and the
east. My own face had been turned the same way. My home had been
literally a jumping-off place, in that when we left it we never expected
to go in any but the one direction. I had known Americans when they came
into our midst as summer visitors, but only in the way one knows the
stars which dawn and fade and leave no trace of their passage on actual
happenings.
In the course of Mrs. Rossiter's confidences I began to see a vast
cosmogony beyond my own personal sun, with J. Howard Brokenshire as the
pivot of the new universe. With a curious little shock of surprise I
discovered that there could be other solar systems besides the one to
which I was accustomed, and that Canada was not the whole of North
America. It was like looking through a telescope which Mrs. Rossiter
held to my eye, a telescope through which I saw the nebular evidence of
an immense society, wealthy, confused, more intellectual than our own,
but more provincial too, perhaps; more isolated, more timid, more
conservative, less instinct with the great throb of national and
international impulse which all of us feel who live on the imperial red
line and, therefore, less daring, but interesting all the same. I began
to glow with the spirit of adventure. My position as a nursery governess
presented the opportunities not merely of a Livingstone or a Stanley,
but of a Galileo or a Copernicus.
I learned that Mrs. Rossiter's mother had been a Miss Brew, and that the
Brews were a great family in Boston. She was the mother of all Mr.
Brokenshire's children. By looks and hints and sighs I gathered from
Mrs. Rossiter that her father's second marriage had been a trial to his
family. Not that there had been any social descent. On the contrary, the
present Mrs. Brokenshire had been Editha Billing, of Philadelphia, and
there could be nothing better than that. It was a question of fitness,
of necessity, of age. "There was no need for him to marry again at all,"
Mrs. Rossiter complained. "If she'd only been a middle-aged woman," she
said to me later, "we might not have felt. . . . But she's younger than
Mildred and only a year or two older than I am." "Oh yes," was another
remark, "she's pretty; very pretty . . . but I often--wonder."
She described her brothers and her sister by degrees. One day she told
me about Mildred, another about Jack, so coming toward her point.
Mildred was the eldest of the family, a great invalid. She had been
thrown from her horse years before while hunting in England, and had
injured her spine. Jack had just gone into business with his father, and
had married Pauline Gray, of Baltimore. Though she didn't say it in so
many words I judged that it was not a happy marriage in the highest
sense--that Jack was somewhat light of love, while Pauline "went her own
way" to a degree that made her talked about. It was not till the day
before her departure for New York that Mrs. Rossiter mentioned her
younger brother, Hugh.
I was helping her to pack--that is, I was helping the maid while Mrs.
Rossiter directed. Just at that minute, however, she was standing up,
shaking out the folds of an evening dress. She seemed to peep at me
round its garnishings as she said, apropos of nothing:
"There's my brother Hugh. He's the youngest of us all--just twenty-six.
He has no occupation as yet--he's just studying languages and things. My
father wants him to go into diplomacy." As I caught her eye there was a
smile in it, but a special kind of smile. It was the smile to go with
the sensible, kindly, coaxing inflection with which she said, "You'll
leave him alone, won't you?"
I took the dress out of her hand to carry it to the maid in the next
room.
"Leave him alone--how?"
She flushed to a lovely pink.
"Oh, you know what I mean. I don't have to explain."
"You mean that in my position in the household it will be for me to--to
keep out of his way?"
"It's you who put it like that, dear Miss Adare--"
"But it's the way you want me to put it?"
"Well, if I admit that it is?"
"Then I don't think I care for the place."
"What?"
I stated my position more simply.
"If I'm to have nothing to do with your brother, Mrs. Rossiter, I don't
want to go."
In the audacity of this response she saw something that amused her, for,
snatching the dress from my hand, she ran with it into the next room,
laughing.
During the following winter in New York and the early summer of the next
year in Newport I saw a good deal of Mr. Hugh Brokenshire, but never
with any violent restriction on the part of Mrs. Rossiter. I say
violent with intention, for she did intervene when she could do so. Only
once did I hear that she knew he was kind to me, and that was from Larry
Strangways. It was an observation he had overheard as it passed from
Mrs. Rossiter to her husband, and which, in the spirit of our silent
_camaraderie_, he thought it right to hand along.
"I can't be responsible for Hugh!" Mrs. Rossiter had said. "He's old
enough to look after himself. If he wants a row with father he must have
it; and he seems to me in a fair way to get it. If he does it will be
his own fault; it won't be Miss Adare's."
Fortified by this acquittal, I went on my way as quietly as I could,
though I cannot say I was free from perturbation.
Perturbation caught me like a whiff of wind as I saw Larry Strangways
deflect from his course across the lawn and come in my direction. I knew
he wouldn't have done that unless he felt himself authorized; and
nothing could give him the authorization but something in the way of a
message or command. To all observers we were strangers. We should have
been strangers even to each other had it not been for that freemasonry
of caste, that secret mutual comprehension, which transcends speech and
opportunities of meeting, and which, on our part, at least, had little
expression beyond smiles and flying glances.
Of course he was good-looking. It has often seemed to me the privilege
of ineligible men to be tall and slim and straight, with just such a
flash in the eye and just such a beam about the mouth as belonged to
Larry Strangways. Instinct had told me from the first that it would be
wise for me to avoid him, while prudence, as I have hinted, gave him the
same indication to keep at a distance from me. Luckily he didn't live
in the house, but in lodgings in the town. We hardly ever met face to
face, and then only under the eye of Mrs. Rossiter when each of us
marshaled a pupil to lunch or to tea.
As the collie at his heels and the wire-haired terrier at ours made a
bee-line for each other the children kept them company, which gave us
space for those few minutes of privacy the occasion apparently demanded.
Though he lifted his hat formally, and did his best to preserve the
decorum of our official situations, the prank in his eye flung out that
signal to which I could never do anything but respond.
"I've a message for you, Miss Adare."
I managed to stammer out the word "Indeed?" I couldn't be surprised, and
yet I could hardly stand erect from fear.
He glanced at the children to make sure they were out of earshot.
"It's from the great man himself--indirectly."
I was so near to collapse that I could only say, "Indeed?" again, though
I rallied sufficiently to add, "I didn't know he was aware of my
existence."
"Apparently he wasn't--but he is now. He desires you--I give you the
verb as Spellman, the secretary, passed it on to me--he desires you to
be in the breakfast loggia here at three this afternoon."
I could barely squeak the words out:
"Does he mean that he's coming to see me?"
"That, it seems, isn't necessary for you to know. Your business is to be
there. There's quite a subtle point in the limitation. Being there,
you'll see what will happen next. It isn't good for you to be told too
much at a time."
My spirit began to revive.
"I'm not his servant. I'm Mrs. Rossiter's. If he wants anything of me
why doesn't he say so through her?"
"'Sh, 'sh, Miss Adare! You mustn't dictate to God, or say he should act
in this way or in that."
"But he's not God."
"Oh, as to that--well, you'll see." He added, with his light laugh,
"What will you bet that I don't know what it's all about?"
"Oh, I bet you do."
"Then," he warned, "you're up against it."
I was getting on my mettle.
"Perhaps I am--but I sha'n't be alone."
"No; but you'll be made to feel alone."
"Even so--"
As I was anxious to keep from boasting beforehand, I left the sentence
there.
"Yes?" he jogged. "Even so--what?"
"Oh, nothing. I only mean that I'm not afraid of him--that is," I
corrected, "I'm not afraid of him fundamentally."
He laughed again. "Not afraid of him fundamentally! That's fine!"
Something in his glance seemed to approve of me. "No, I don't believe
you are; but I wonder a little why not."
I reflected, gazing beyond his shoulder, down the velvety slopes of the
lawn, and across the dancing blue sea to the islets that were mere
specks on the horizon. In the end I decided to speak soberly. "I'm not
afraid of him," I said at last, "because I've got a sure thing."
"You mean him?"
I knew the reference was to Hugh Brokenshire. "If I mean him," I
replied, after a minute's thinking, "it's only as the greater includes
the less, or as the universal includes everything."
He whistled under his breath.
"Does that mean anything? Or is it just big talk?"
Half shy and half ashamed of going on with what I had to say, I was
obliged to smile ruefully.
"It's big talk because it's a big principle. I don't know how to manage
it with anything small." I tried to explain further, knowing that my
dark skin flushed to a kind of dahlia-red while I was doing so. "I don't
know whether I've read it--or whether I heard it--or whether I've just
evolved it--but I seem to have got hold of--of--don't laugh too hard,
please--of the secret of success."
"Good for you! I hope you're not going to be stingy with it."
"No; I'll tell you--partly because I want to talk about it to some one,
and just at present there's no one else."
"Thanks!"
"The secret of success, as I reason it out, must be something that will
protect a weak person against a strong one--me, for instance, against J.
Howard Brokenshire--and work everything out all right. There," I cried,
"I've said the word."
"You've said a number. Which is the one?"
Anxiety not to seem either young or didactic or a prig made my tone
apologetic.
"There's such a thing as Right, written with a capital. If I persist in
doing Right--still with a capital--then nothing but right can come of
it."
"Oh, can't it!"
"I know it sounds like a platitude--"
"No, it doesn't," he interrupted, rudely, "because a platitude is
something obviously true; and this isn't."
I felt some relief.
"Oh, isn't it? Then I'm glad. I thought it must be."
"You won't go on thinking it. Suppose you do right and somebody else
does wrong?"
"Then I should be willing to back my way against his. Don't you see?
That's the point. That's the secret I'm telling you about. Right works;
wrong doesn't."
"That's all very fine--"
"It's all very fine because it's so. Right is--what's the word William
James put into the dictionary?"
He suggested pragmatism.
"That's it. Right is pragmatic, which I suppose is the same thing as
practical. Wrong must be impractical; it must be--"
"I shouldn't bank too confidently on that in dealing with the great J.
Howard."
"But I'm going to bank on it. It's where I'm to have him at a
disadvantage. If he does wrong while I do right, why, then I'll get him
on the hip."
"How do you know he's going to do wrong?"
"I don't. I merely surmise it. If he does right--"
"He'll get you on the hip."
"No, because there can't be a right for him which isn't a right for me.
There can't be two rights, each contrary to the other. That's not in
common sense. If he does right then I shall be safe--whichever way I
have to take it. Don't you see? That's where the success comes in as
well as the secret. It can't be any other way. Please don't think I'm
talking in what H. G. Wells calls the tin-pot style--but one must
express oneself somehow. I'm not afraid, because I feel as if I'd got
something that would hang about me like a magic cloak. Of course for
you--a man--a magic cloak may not be necessary; but I assure you that
for a girl like me, out in the world on her own--"
He, too, sobered down from his chaffing mood.
"But in this case what is going to be Right--written with a capital?"
I had just time to reply, "Oh, that I shall have to see!" when the
children and dogs came scampering up and our conversation was over.
On returning from my walk with Gladys I informed Mrs. Rossiter of the
order I had received. I could see her distressed look in the mirror
before which she sat doing something to her hair.
"Oh, dear!" she sighed, "it's just what I was afraid of. Now I suppose
he'll want you to leave."
"That is, he'll want you to send me away."
"It's the same thing," she said, fretfully, and sat with hands lying
idly in her lap.
She stared out of the window. It was a large bow window, with a
window-seat cushioned in flowered chintz. Couch, curtains, and
easy-chairs reproduced this Enchanted Garden effect, forming a
paradisiacal background for her intensely modern and somewhat neurotic
prettiness. I had seen her sit by the half-hour like this, gazing over
the shrubberies, lawns, and waves, with a yearning in her eyes like that
of some twentieth-century Blessed Damozel.
It was her unhappy hour of the day. Between getting up at nine or ten
and descending languidly to lunch, life was always a great load to her.
It pressed on one too weak to bear its weight and yet too conscientious
to throw it off, though, as a matter of fact, this melancholy was only
the reaction of her nerves from the mild excitements of the night
before. I was generally with her during some portion of this forenoon
time, reading her notes and answering them, speaking for her at the
telephone, or keeping her company and listening to her confidences while
she nibbled without appetite at a bit of toast and sipped her tea.
To put matters on the common footing I said:
"Is there anything you'd like me to do, Mrs. Rossiter?"
She ignored this question, murmuring in a way she had, through
half-closed lips, as if mere speech was more than she was equal to: "And
just when we were getting on so well--and the way Gladys adores you--"
"And the way I adore Gladys."
"Oh, well, you don't spoil the child, like that Miss Phips. I suppose
it's your sensible English bringing up."
"Not English," I interrupted.
"Canadian then. It's almost the same thing." She went on without
transition of tone: "Mr. Millinger was there again last night. He was on
my left. I do wish they wouldn't keep putting him next to me. It makes
everything look so pointed--especially with Harry Scott glowering at me
from the other end of the table. He hardly spoke to Daisy Burke, whom
he'd taken in. I must say she was a fright. And Mr. Millinger so
imprudent! I'm really terrified that Jim will hear gossip when he comes
down from New York--or notice something." There was the slightest
dropping of the soft fluting voice as she continued: "I've never
pretended to love Jim Rossiter more than any man I've ever seen. That
was one of papa's matches. He's a born match-maker, you know, just as
he's a born everything else. I suppose you didn't think of that. But
since I am Jim's wife--"
As I was the confidante of what she called her affairs--a role for which
I was qualified by residence in British garrison towns--I interposed
diplomatically, "But so long as Mr. Millinger hasn't said anything, not
any more than Mr. Scott--"
"Oh, if I were to allow men to say things, where should I be? You can go
far with a man without letting him come to that. It's something I should
think you'd have known--with your sensible bringing up--and the heaps of
men you had there in Halifax--and I suppose at Southsea and Gibraltar,
too." It was with a hint of helpless complaint that she added, "You
remember that I asked you to leave him alone, now don't you?"
"Oh, I remember--quite. And suppose I did--and he didn't leave me
alone?"
"Of course there's that, though it won't have any effect on papa. You
are unusual, you know. Only one man in five hundred would notice it; but
there always is that man. It's what I was afraid of about Hugh from the
first. You're different--and it's the sort of thing he'd see."
"Different from what?" I asked, with natural curiosity.
Her reply was indirect.
"Oh, well, we Americans have specialized too much on the girl. You're
not half as good-looking as plenty of other girls in Newport, and when
it comes to dress--"
"Oh, I'm not in their class, I know."
"No; it's what you seem not to know. You aren't in their class--but it
doesn't seem to matter. If it does matter, it's rather to your
advantage."
"I'm afraid I don't see that."
"No, you wouldn't. You're not sufficiently subtle. You're really not
subtle at all, in the way an American girl would be." She picked up the
thread she had dropped. "The fact is we've specialized so much on the
girl that our girls are too aware of themselves to be wholly human.
They're like things wound up to talk well and dress well and exhibit
themselves to advantage and calculate their effects--and lack character.
We've developed the very highest thing in exquisite girl-mechanics--a
work of art that has everything but a soul." She turned half round to
where I stood respectfully, my hands resting on the back of an
easy-chair. She was lovely and pathetic and judicial all at once. "The
difference about you is that you seem to spring right up out of the soil
where you're standing--just like an English country house. You belong to
your background. Our girls don't. They're too beautiful for their
background, too expensive, too produced. Take any group of girls here in
Newport--they're no more in place in this down-at-the-heel old town than
a flock of parrakeets in a New England wood. It's really inartistic,
though we don't know it. You're more of a woman and less of a lovely
figurine. But that won't appeal to papa. He likes figurines. Most
American men do. Hugh is an exception, and I was afraid he'd see in you
just what I've seen myself. But it won't go down with papa."
"If it goes down with Hugh--" I began, meekly.
"Papa is a born match-maker, which I don't suppose you know. He made my
match and he made Jack's. Oh, we're--we're satisfied now--in a way; and
I suppose Hugh will be, too, in the long run." I wanted to speak, but
she tinkled gently on: "Papa has his designs for him, which I may as
well tell you at once. He means him to marry Lady Cissie Boscobel. She's
Lord Goldborough's daughter, and papa and he are very intimate. Papa
knew him when we lived in England before grandpapa died. Papa has done
things for him in the American money-market, and when we're in England
he does things for us. Two or three of our men have married earls'
daughters during the last few years, and it hasn't turned out so badly.
Papa doesn't want not to be in the swim."
"Does"--I couldn't pronounce Hugh's name again--"does your brother know
of Mr. Brokenshire's intentions?"
"Yes. I told him so. I told him when I began to see that he was noticing
you."
"And may I ask what he said?"
"It would be no use telling you that, because, whatever he said, he'd
have to do as papa told him in the end."
"But suppose he doesn't?"
"You can't suppose he doesn't. He will. That's all that can be said
about it." She turned fully round on me, gazing at me with the largest
and sweetest and tenderest eyes. "As for you, dear Miss Adare," she
murmured, sympathetically, "when papa comes to see you this afternoon,
as apparently he means to do, he'll grind you to powder. If there's
anything smaller than powder he'll grind you to that. After he's gone we
sha'n't be able to find you. You'll be dust."