I was relieved of some of my embarrassment by the fact that Mr. Grainger
took command.
Having bowed over Mrs. Brokenshire's hand with an empressement he made
no attempt to conceal, he murmured the words, "I'm delighted to see you
again." After this greeting, which might have been commonplace and was
not, he turned to me. "Perhaps Miss Adare will give me some tea."
I could carry out this request, listen to their scraps of conversation,
and think my own thoughts all at the same time.
Thinking my own thoughts was the least easy of the three, for the reason
that thought stunned me. The facts knocked me on the head. Since before
my engagement as Mr. Grainger's librarian this situation had been
planned! Mrs. Brokenshire had chosen me for my part in it! She had given
Mr. Grainger my address, which she could have learned from her mother,
and recommended me as one with whom they would be safe!
Their talk was only of superficial things; but it was not the clue to
their emotions. That was in the way they talked--haltingly, falteringly,
with glances that met and shifted and fell, or that rested on each other
with long, mute looks, and then turned away hurriedly, as if something
in the spirit reeled. As she gave him bits of information concerning
the summer at Newport, she stumbled in her words, because there was no
correlation between the sentences she formed and her fundamental
thought. The same was true of his account of yachting on the coast of
Maine, of Gloucester, Islesboro, and Bar Harbor. He stuttered and
stammered and repeated himself. It was like one of those old Italian
duets in which stupid words are sung to a passionate, heartbreaking
melody. Nevertheless, I had enough sympathy with love, even with a
guilty love, to have some mercy in my judgments.
Not that I believed it to be a guilty love--as yet. That, too, I was
obliged to think over and form my opinion about it. It was not a guilty
love as yet; but it might easily become a guilty love. I remembered that
Larry Strangways, with all his admiration for his employer, had refused
him a place in his list of whole-hearted, clean-hearted men because he
had a weakness; and I reflected that on the part of Mrs. Billing's
daughter there might be no rigorous concept of the moralities. What I
saw, therefore, was a man and a woman so consumed with longing for each
other that guilt would be chiefly a matter of opportunity. To create
that opportunity I had been brought upon the scene.
[Illustration: I SAW A MAN AND A WOMAN CONSUMED WITH LONGING FOR EACH
OTHER]
I could see, of course, how admirably I was suited to the purpose I was
meant to serve. In the first place, I was young, and might but dimly
perceive--might not perceive at all--what was being done with me. In the
next place, I was presumably too inexperienced to take a line of my own
even if I suspected what was not for me to know. Then, I was poor and a
stranger, and too glad of the easy work for which I was liberally paid
not to be willing to take its bitter with its sweet. Lastly, I, too,
was in love; and I, too, was a victim of Howard Brokenshire. If I
couldn't approve of what I might see and hear, at least I might be
reckoned on not to speak of it. Once more I was made to feel that,
though I might play a subordinate role of some importance, my own wishes
and personality didn't count.
It was obviously a minute at which to bring my maxim into operation. I
had to do what was Right--with a capital. For that I must wait for
inspiration, and presently I got it.
That is, I got it by degrees. I got it first by noting in a puzzled way
the glances which both my companions sent in my direction. They were
sidelong glances, singularly alike, whether they came from Stacy
Grainger's melancholy brown eyes or Mrs. Brokenshire's sweet, misty
ones. They were timid glances, pleading, uneasy. They asked what words
wouldn't dare to ask, and what I was too dense to understand. I sat
sipping my tea, running hot and cold as the odiousness of my position
struck me from the various points of view; but I made no attempt to
move.
They were still talking of people of whom I knew nothing, but talking
brokenly, futilely, for the sake of hearing each other's voice, and yet
stifling the things which it would have been fatal to them both to say,
when Mr. Grainger got up and brought me his cup.
"May I have another?"
I looked up to take the cup, but he held it in his hands. He held it in
his hands and gazed down at me. He gazed down at me with an expression
such as I have never seen in any eyes but a dog's. As I write I blush to
remember that, with such a mingling of hints and entreaties and
commands, I didn't know what he was trying to convey to me. I took the
cup, poured out his tea, handed the cup back to him--and sat.
But after he had reached his seat the truth flashed on me. I was in the
way; I was _de trop_. I had done part of my work in being the pretext
for Mrs. Brokenshire's visit; now I ought, tactfully, to absent myself.
I needn't go far; I needn't go for long. There was an alcove at the end
of the room where one could be out of sight; there was also the corridor
leading to the house. I could easily make an excuse; I could get up and
move without an excuse of any kind. But I sat.
I hated myself; I despised myself; but I sat. I drank my tea without
knowing it; I ate my cake without tasting it--and I sat.
The talk between my companions grew more fitful. Silence was easier for
them--silence and that dumb interchange of looks which had the sympathy
of something within myself. I knew that in their eyes I was a nuisance,
a thing to be got rid of. I was so in my own--but I went on eating and
drinking stolidly--and sat.
It was in my mind that this was my chance to be avenged on Howard
Brokenshire; but I didn't want my vengeance that way. I have to confess
that I was so poor-spirited as to have little or no animosity against
him. I could see how easy it was for him to think of me as an
adventuress. I wanted to convince and convert him, but not to make him
suffer. If in any sense I could be called the guardian of his interests
I would rather have been true to the trust than not. As I sat,
therefore, gulping down my tea as if I relished it, it was partly
because of my protective instinct toward the exquisite creature before
me who might not know how to protect herself--and partly because I
couldn't help it. Mr. Grainger could order me to go, but until he did I
meant to go on eating.
Probably because of the insistence of my presence Mrs. Brokenshire felt
obliged to begin to talk again. I did my best not to listen, but
fragments of her sentences came to me.
"My mother spent a few weeks with us in August. I--I don't think she
and--and Mr. Brokenshire get on so well."
Almost for the first time he was interested in what she said rather than
in her.
"What's the trouble?"
"Oh, I don't know--the whole thing." A long pause ensued, during which
their eyes rested on each other in mute questioning. "She's changed,
mamma is."
"Changed in what way?"
"Oh, I don't know. I--I suppose she sees that she--she--miscalculated."
It was his turn to ruminate silently, and when he spoke at last it was
as if throwing up to the surface but one of a deep undercurrent of
thoughts.
"After the pounding I got three years ago she didn't believe I'd come
back."
She accepted this without comment. Before speaking again she sent me
another of her frightened, pleading looks.
"She always liked you better than any one else."
He seconded the glance in my direction as he said, with a grim smile:
"Which didn't prevent her going to the highest bidder."
She colored and sighed.
"You wouldn't be so hard on her if you knew what a fight she had to make
during papa's lifetime. We were always in debt. You knew that, didn't
you? Poor mamma used to say she'd save me from that if she never--"
I lost the rest of the sentence by deliberately rattling the tea things
in pouring myself a third or a fourth cup of tea. Nothing but
disconnected words reached me after that, but I caught the name of
Madeline Pyne. I knew who she was, having heard her story day by day as
it unfolded itself during my first weeks with Mrs. Rossiter. It was a
simple tale as tales go in the twentieth century. Mrs. Pyre had been
Mrs. Grimshaw. While she was Mrs. Grimshaw she had spent three days at a
seaside resort with Mr. Pyne. The law having been invoked, she had
changed her residence from the house of Mr. Grimshaw in Seventy-fifth
Street to that of Mr. Pyne in Seventy-seventh Street, and likewise
changed her name. Only a very discerning eye could now have told that in
the opinion of society there was a difference between her and Caesar's
wife. The drama was sufficiently recent to make the topic a natural one
for an interchange of confidences. That confidences were being
interchanged I could see; that from those confidences certain
terrifying, passionate deductions were being drawn silently I could also
see. I could see without hearing; I didn't need to hear. I could tell by
her pallor and his embarrassment how each read the mind of the other,
how each was tempted and how each recoiled. I knew that neither pointed
the moral of the parable, for the reason that it stared them in the
face.
Because that subject, too, was exhausted, or because they had come to a
place where they could say no more, they sat silent again. They looked
at each other; they looked at me; neither would take the responsibility
of giving me a further hint to go. Much as they desired my going, I was
sure they were both afraid of it. I might be a nuisance and yet I was a
safeguard. They were too near the brink of danger not to feel that,
after all, there was something in having the safeguard there.
A few minutes later Mrs. Brokenshire flew to shelter herself behind this
protection. She fluttered softly to my side, beginning again to talk of
Hugh. Knowing by this time that her interest in him was only a blind for
her frightened essays in passion, I took up the subject but
half-heartedly.
"I've the money here," she confided to me, "if you'll only take charge
of it."
When I had declined to do this, for the reasons I had already given, her
face brightened.
"Then we can talk it over again." She rose as she spoke. "I can't stay
any longer now--but we'll talk it over again. Let me see! This is
Tuesday. If I came--"
"I'm always at the Hotel Mary Chilton after six," I said, significantly.
I smiled inwardly at the way in which she took this information.
"Oh, I'll come before that--and I sha'n't keep you--just to talk about
Hugh--and see he won't take the money--perhaps on--on Thursday."
As nominally she had come to see me, nominally it was my place to
accompany her to the door. In this at least I got my cue, walking the
few paces with her, while she held my hand. I gathered that, the minutes
of temptation being past, she bore me some gratitude for having helped
her over them. At any rate, she pressed my fingers and gave me wistful,
teary smiles, till at last she was out in the lighted street and I had
closed the door behind her.
It was only half past five, and I had still thirty minutes to fill in.
As I turned back into the room I found Mr. Grainger walking aimlessly up
and down, inspecting a bit of lustrous faience or the backs of a row of
books, and making me feel that there was something he wished to say. His
movements were exactly those of a man screwing up his courage or trying
to find words.
The simplest thing I could do was to sit down at my desk and make a
feint at writing. I seemed to be ignoring my employer's presence, but in
reality, as I watched him from under my lids, I was getting a better
impression of him than on any previous occasion.
There was nothing Olympian about him as there was about Howard
Brokenshire. He was too young to be Olympian, being not more than
thirty-eight. He struck me, indeed, as just a big, sinewy man of the
type which fights and hunts and races and loves, and has dumb,
uncomprehended longings which none of these pursuits can satisfy. In
this he was English more than American, and Scottish more than English.
He was certainly not the American business man as seen in hotel lobbies
and on the stage. He might have been classed as the American
romantic--an explorer, a missionary, or a shooter of big game, according
to taste and income. Larry Strangways said that among Americans you most
frequently met his like in East Africa, Manchuria, or Brazil. That he
was in business in New York was an accident of tradition and
inheritance. Just as an Englishman who might have been a soldier or a
solicitor is a country gentleman because his father has left him landed
estates, so Stacy Grainger had become a financier.
As a financier, I understood he helped to furnish the money in
undertakings in which other men did the work. In this respect the
direction his interests took was what might have been expected of so
virile a character--steel, iron, gunpowder, shells, the founding of
cannon, the building of war-ships; the forceful, the destructive. I
gathered from Mr. Strangways that he was forever making journeys to
Washington, to Pittsburg, to Cape Breton, wherever money could be
invested in mighty conquering things. It was these projects that Howard
Brokenshire had attacked so savagely as almost to bring him to ruin,
though he had now re-established himself as strongly as before.
Being as terrified of him as of his rival, I prayed inwardly that he
would go away. Once or twice in marching up and down he paused before my
desk, and the pen almost dropped from my hand. I knew he was trying to
formulate a hint that when Mrs. Brokenshire came again--But even on my
part the thought would not go into words. Words made it gross, and it
was what he must have discovered each time he approached me. Each time
he approached me I fancied that his poetic eye grew apologetic, that his
shoulders sagged, and that his hard, strong mouth became weak before
syllables that would not pass the lips. Then he would veer away,
searching doubtless some easier phrase, some more delicate suggestion,
only to fail again.
It was a relief when, after a last attempt, he passed into the corridor
leading to the house. I could breathe, I could think; I could look back
over the last half-hour and examine my conduct. I was not satisfied with
it, because I had frustrated love--even that kind of love; and yet I
asked myself how I could have acted differently.
In substance I asked the same of Larry Strangways when he came to dine
with me next day. Hugh being in Philadelphia on one of his pathetic
cruises after work, I had invited Mr. Strangways by telephone, begging
him to come on the ground that, having got me into this trouble, he must
advise me as to getting out.
"I didn't get you into the trouble," he smiled across the table. "I only
helped to get you the job."
"But when you got me the job, as you call it--"
"I knew you would be able to do the work."
"And did you think the work would be--this?"
"I couldn't tell anything about that. I simply knew you could do the
work--from all the points of view."
"And do you think I've done it?"
"I know you've done it. You couldn't do anything else. I won't go back
of that."
If my heart gave a sudden leap at these words it was because of the
tone. It betrayed that quality behind the tone to which I had been
responding, and of which I had been afraid, ever since I knew the man.
By a great effort I kept my words on the casual, friendly plane, as I
said:
"Your confidence is flattering, but it doesn't help me. What I want to
know is this: Assuming that they love each other, should I allow myself
to be used as the pretext for their meetings?"
"Does it do you any harm?"
"Does it do them any good?"
"Couldn't you let that be their affair?"
"How can I, when I'm dragged into it?"
"If you're only dragged into it to the extent of this afternoon--"
"Only! You can use that word of a situation--"
"In which you played propriety."
"Oh, it wasn't playing."
"Yes, it was; it was playing the game--as they only play it who aren't
quitters but real sports."
"But I'm not a sport. I've the quitter in me. I'm even thinking of
flinging up the position--"
"And leaving them to their fate."
I smiled.
"Couldn't I let that be their affair?"
He, too, smiled, his head thrown back, his white teeth gleaming.
"You think you've caught me, don't you? But you've got the shoe on the
wrong foot. I said just now that it might be their affair as to whether
or not it did them any good to have you as the pretext of their
meetings; but it's surely your affair when you say they sha'n't. Their
meetings will be one thing so long as they have you; whereas without
you--"
"Then you think they'll keep meeting in any case?"
"I've nothing to say about that. I limit myself to believing that in any
situation that requires skilful handling your first name is
resourcefulness."
I shifted my ground.
"Oh, but when it's such an odious situation!"
"No situation is odious in which you're a participant, just as no view
is ugly where there's a garden full of flowers."
He went on with his dinner as complacently as if he had not thrown me
into a state of violent inward confusion. All I could do was to summon
Hugh's image from the shades of memory into which it had withdrawn, and
beg it to keep me true to him. The thought of being false to the man to
whom I had actually owned my love outraged in me every sentiment akin to
single-heartedness. In a kind of desperation I dragged Hugh's name into
the conversation, and yet in doing so I merely laid myself open to
another shock.
"You can't be in love with him!"
The words were the same as Mrs. Billing's; the emphasis was similar.
"I am," I declared, bluntly, not so much to contradict the speaker as to
fortify myself.
"You may think you are--"
"Well, if I think I am, isn't it the same thing as--"
"Lord, no! not with love! Love is the most deceptive of the emotions--to
people who haven't had much experience of its tricks."
"Have you?"
He met this frankly.
"No; nor you. That's why you can so easily take yourself in."
I grew cold and dignified.
"If you think I'm taking myself in when I say that I'm in love with Hugh
Brokenshire--"
"That's certainly it."
Though I knew my cheeks were flaming a dahlia red, I forced myself to
look him in the eyes.
"Then I'm afraid it would be useless to try to convince you--"
He nodded.
"Quite!"
"So that we can only let the subject drop."
He looked at me with mock gravity.
"I don't see that. It's an interesting topic."
"Possibly; but as it doesn't lead us any further--"
"But it does. It leads us to where we see straighter."
"Yes, but if I don't need to see straighter than I do?"
"We all need to see as straight as we can."
"I'm seeing as straight as I can when I say--"
"Oh, but not as straight as I can! I can see that a noble character
doesn't always distinguish clearly between love and kindness, or between
kindness and loyalty, or between loyalty and self-sacrifice, and that
the higher the heart, the more likely it is to impose on itself. No one
is so easily deceived as to love and loving as the man or the woman
who's truly generous."
"If I was truly generous--"
"I know what you are," he said, shortly.
"Then if you know what I am you must know, too, that I couldn't do other
than care for a man who's given up so much for my sake."
"You couldn't do other than admire him. You couldn't do other than be
grateful to him. You probably couldn't do other than want to stand by
him through thick and thin--"
"Well, then?"
"But that's not love."
"If it isn't love it's so near to it--"
"Exactly--which is what I'm saying. It's so near it that you don't know
the difference, and won't know the difference till--till the real thing
affords you the contrast."
I did my best to be scornful.
"Really! You speak like an expert."
"Yes; an expert by intuition."
I was still scornful.
"Only that?"
"Only that. You see," he smiled, "the expert by experience has learnt a
little; but the expert by intuition knows it all."
"Then, when I need information on the subject, I'll come to you."
"And I'll promise to give it to you frankly."
"Thanks," I said, sweetly. "But you'll wait till I come, won't you? And
in the mean time, you'll not say any more about it."
"Does that mean that I'm not to say any more about it ever--or only for
to-night?"
I knew, suddenly, what the question meant to me. I took time to see that
I was shutting a door which my heart cried out to have left open. But I
answered, still sweetly and with a smile:
"Suppose we make it that you won't say any more about it--ever?"
He gazed at me; I gazed at him. A long half-minute went by before he
uttered the words, very slowly and deliberately:
"I won't say any more about it--for to-night."