I was glad of the fog. It was cool and refreshing; 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 shore 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 pass
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 shores 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 slashing
against eyes and mouth and nostrils, was not only exhilarating, it was
glorious. I was glad, too, that the prim villas and pretentious
chateaux, 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 sturdy 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. Nobody 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 Brokenshire I met on one of my
first rambles along the cliffs was not the Hugh Brokenshire 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 pass; 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 Brokenshire 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 glasses 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 furnishings, a little white cot, and toys. In its
very center was a bassinet, and I was leaning over it, wearing a
delicate lace peignoir.
Ought I to blush to say that while Hugh stammered out his impassioned
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
shifts 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.
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 pass 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 shore 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.
Brokenshire'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 knob; 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 scraped 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 assertions 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,
unobtrusive 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 masses
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 Embassy,
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
impassioned 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 & Brokenshire 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--gosh!"
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."
"Exactly; it's just what I do see. Since you want it I could force
myself on them--the word is your father's--and they'd have no choice but
to accept me."
"Well, then?"
"Hugh, dear, I--I can't do it that way."
"Then what way could you do it?"
"I'm not sure yet. I haven't thought of it. I only know in advance that
even if I told you I'd marry you against--against all their wishes, I
couldn't keep my promise in the end."
"That is," he said, bitterly, "you think more of them than you do of
me."
I put my hand on his clasped fingers. "Nonsense. I--I love you. Don't
you see I do? How could I help loving you when you've been so kind to
me? But marriage is always a serious thing to a woman; and when it comes
to marriage into a family that would look on me as a great
misfortune--Hugh, darling, I don't see how I could ever face it."
"I do," he declared, promptly. "It isn't so bad as you think. Families
come round. There was Tracy Allen. Married a manicure. The Allens kicked
up a row at first--wouldn't see Tracy and all that; but now--"
"Yes, but, Hugh, I'm not a manicure."
"You're a nursery governess."
"By accident--and a little by misfortune. I wasn't a nursery governess
when I first knew your sister."
"But what difference does that make?"
"It makes this difference: that a manicure would probably not think of
herself as your equal. She'd expect coldness at first, and be prepared
for it."
"Well, couldn't you?"
"No, because, you see, I'm your equal."
He hunched his big shoulders impatiently. "Oh, Alix, I don't go into
that. I'm a Socialist. I don't care what you are."
"But you see I do. I don't want to expose myself to being looked down
upon, and perhaps despised, for the rest of my life, because my family
is quite as good as your own."
He turned slowly from peering into the fog-bank to fix on me a look of
which the tenderness and pity and incredulity seemed to stab me. I felt
the helplessness of a sane person insisting on his sanity to some one
who believes him mad.
"Don't let us talk about those things, darling little Alix," he begged,
gently. "Let's do the thing in style, like Tracy Allen, without any
flummery or fluff. What's family--once you get away from the idea? When
I sink it I should think that you could afford to do it too. If I take
you as Tracy Allen took Libby Jaynes--that was her name, I remember
now--not a very pretty girl--but if I take you as he took her, and you
take me as she took him--"
"But, Hugh, I can't. If I were Libby Jaynes, it's possible I could; but
as it is--"
And in the end he came round to my point of view. That is to say, he
appreciated my unwillingness to reward Mrs. Rossiter's kindness to me by
creating a scandal, and he was not without some admiration for what he
called my "magnanimity toward his old man" in hesitating to drive him to
extremes.
And yet it was Hugh himself who drove him to extremes, over questions
which I hardly raised. That was some ten days later, when Hugh refused
point-blank to sail on the steamer his father had selected to take him
on the way to Strath-na-Cloid. I was, of course, not present at the
interview, but having heard of it from Hugh, and got his account
corroborated by Ethel Rossiter, I can describe it much as it took place.
I may say here, perhaps, that I still remained with Mrs. Rossiter. My
marching orders, expected from hour to hour, didn't come. Mrs. Rossiter
herself explained this delay to me some four days after that scene in
the breakfast loggia which had left me in a state of curiosity and
suspense.
"Father seems to think that if he insisted on your leaving it would make
Hugh's asking you to marry him too much a matter of importance."
"And doesn't he himself consider it a matter of importance?"
Mrs. Rossiter patted a tress of her brown hair into place. "No, I don't
think he does."
Perhaps nothing from the beginning had made me more inwardly indignant
than the simplicity of this reply. I had imagined him raging against me
in his heart and forming deep, dark plans to destroy me.
"It would be a matter of importance to most people," I said, trying not
to betray my feeling of offense.
"Most people aren't father," Mrs. Rossiter contented herself with
replying, still occupied with her tress of hair.
It was the confidential hour of the morning in her big chintzy room. The
maid having departed, I had been answering notes and was still sitting
at the desk. It was the first time she had broached the subject in the
four days which had been to me a period of so much restlessness.
Wondering at this detachment, I had the boldness to question her.
"Doesn't it seem important to you?"
She threw me a glance over her shoulder, turning back to the mirror at
once. "What have I got to do with it? It's father's affair--and Hugh's."
"And mine, too, I suppose?" I hazarded, interrogatively.
To this she said nothing. Her silence gave me to understand what so many
other little things impressed upon me--that I didn't count. What Hugh
did or didn't do was a matter for the Brokenshires to feel and for J.
Howard Brokenshire to deal with. Ethel Rossiter herself was neither for
me nor against me. I was her nursery governess, and useful as an
unofficial companion-secretary. As long as it was not forbidden she
would keep me in that capacity; when the order came she would send me
away. As for anything I had to suffer, that was my own lookout. Hugh
would be managed by his father, and from that fate there was no appeal.
There was nothing, therefore, to worry Mrs. Rossiter. She could dismiss
the whole matter, as she presently did, to discuss her troubles over the
rival attentions of Mr. Millinger and Mr. Scott, and to protest against
their making her so conspicuous. She had the kindness to say, however,
just as she was leaving the house for Bailey's Beach:
"I don't talk to you about this affair of Hugh's because I really don't
see much of father. It's his business, you see, and nothing for me to
interfere with. With that woman there I hardly ever go to their house,
and he doesn't often come here. Her mother's with them, too, just
now--that's old Mrs. Billing--a harpy if ever there was one--and with
all the things people are saying! If father only knew! But, of course,
he'll be the last one to hear it."
She was getting into her car by this time and I seized no more; but at
lunch I had a few minutes in which to bring my searchings of heart
before Larry Strangways.
It was not often we took this repast alone with the children, but it had
to happen sometimes. Mrs. Rossiter had telephoned from Bailey's that she
had accepted the invitation of some friends and we were not to expect
her. We should lunch, however, she informed me, in the breakfast loggia,
where the open air would act as chaperon and insure the necessary
measure of propriety.
So long as Broke and Gladys were present we were as demure as if we had
met by chance in the restaurant car of a train. With the coffee the
children begged to be allowed to play with the dogs on the grass, which
left us for a few minutes as man and woman.
"How is everything?" he asked at once, taking on that smile which seemed
to put him outside the sphere of my interests.
I shrugged my shoulders and looked down at the spoon with which I was
dabbling in my cup. "Oh, just the same," I glanced up to say. "Tell me.
Have people in this country no other measure of your standing but that
of money?"
"Have they any such measure in any country?"
I was beginning with the words, "Why, yes," when he interrupted me.
"Think."
"I am thinking," I insisted. "In England and Canada and the British
Empire generally--"
"You attach some importance to birth. Yes; so do we here--when it goes
with money. Without the basis of that support neither you nor we give
what is so deliciously called birth the honor of a second thought."
"Oh yes, we do--"
"When it's your only asset--yes; but you do it alone. No one else pays
it any attention."
I colored. "That's rather cruel--"
"It's not a bit more cruel than the fact. Take your case and mine as an
illustration. As the estimate of birth goes in this country, I'm as well
born as the majority. My ancestors were New-Englanders, country doctors
and lawyers and ministers--especially the ministers. But as long as I
haven't the cash I'm only a tutor, and eat at the second table. Jim
Rossiter's forebears were much the same as mine; but the fact that he
has a hundred thousand dollars a year and I've hardly got two is the
only thing that would be taken into consideration, by any one in either
the United Kingdom or the United States. It would be the same if I
descended from Crusaders. If I've got nothing but that and my character
to recommend me--" He raised his hand and snapped his fingers with a
scornful laugh. "Take your case," he hurried on as I was about to speak.
"You're probably like me, sprung of a line of professional men--"
"And soldiers," I interrupted, proudly. "The first of my family to
settle in Canada was a General Adare in the middle of the seventeen
hundreds. He'd been in the garrison at Halifax and chose to remain in
Nova Scotia." Perhaps there was some boastfulness in my tone as I added,
"He came of the famous Fighting Adares of the County Limerick."
"And all that isn't worth a row of pins--except to yourself. If you
were the daughter of a miner who'd struck it rich you'd be a candidate
for the British peerage. You'd be received in the best houses in London;
you could marry a duke and no one would say you nay. As it is--"
"As it is," I said, tremulously, "I'm just a nursery governess, and
there's no getting away from the fact."
"Not until you get away from the condition."
"So that when I told Hugh Brokenshire the other day that in point of
family I was his equal--"
"He probably didn't believe you."
The memory of Hugh's look still rankled in me. "No, I don't think he
did."
"Of course he didn't. As the world counts--as we all count--no poor
family, however noble, is the equal of any rich family, however base."
There was that transformation of his smile from something sunny to
something hard which I had noticed once before, as he went on to add,
"If you want to marry Hugh Brokenshire--"
"Which I do," I interposed, defiantly.
"Then you must enter into his game as he enters into it himself. He
thinks of himself as doing the big romantic thing. He's marrying a poor
girl who has nothing but herself as guaranty. That your
great-grandfather was a general and one of the--what did you call
them?--Fighting Adares of the County Cork would mean no more to him than
if you said you were descended from the Lacedaemonians and the dragon's
teeth. As far as that goes, you might as well be an immigrant girl from
Sweden; you might as well be a cook. He's stooping to pick up his
diamond from the mire, instead of buying it from a jeweler's window.
Very well, then, you must let him stoop. You mustn't try to
underestimate his condescension. You mustn't tell him you were once in
a jeweler's window, and only fell into the mire by chance--"
"Because," I smiled, "the mire is where I belong, until I'm taken out of
it."
"We belong," he stated, judicially, "where the world puts us. If we're
wise we'll stay there--till we can meet the world's own terms for
getting out."