When Mr. Brett reached the house his steps became slower. The look on
his face was that of a man who foresees and dreads the weight of a task
which he has already experienced.
He was not going to evade it, but he halted to measure his strength
before he adjusted himself to the familiar yoke.
The large entrance hall of Mambles was a serene and sunny place.
It was filled with flowers and the still clear light of the retreating
sun. A flight of shallow steps led to the upper regions of the house.
Mr. Brett stood still for a moment, resting unseeing eyes upon his
collection of household treasures.
He had furnished Mambles to suit his taste and relinquished it to suit
the tastes of others. There was nothing in it that had not the personal
note of his selective mind, and there was nothing that he had regretted
relinquishing to Elise and John.
He walked up the shallow stairs slowly and with effort.
“What I _can_ take easy I will,” he said to himself reflectively.
Hermione had moved into Mr. Brett’s rooms in the left wing of the house.
The rooms were neither as large nor as luxuriously furnished as those
which had been prepared for her by Elise; but they had suited Mr. Brett.
Mr. Brett knocked at the sitting-room door, a rustle of starched
petticoats and the reproving face of Nurse Davies answered him.
“The Princess is resting, and must not be disturbed,” she said with
low-voiced emphasis.
Mr. Brett’s eyes narrowed a little and then became curiously fixed.
“You can go downstairs,” he said quietly, “and stay there until I send
for you.”
Nurse Davies was spoilt and authoritative, her profession had raised her
in the social scale with a jerk, and some of the jerk adhered to her
manners. She opened her lips to bring Mr. Brett to his senses, and then
shut them again with an impression that her own senses were suddenly
needed elsewhere.
Mr. Brett was only an old man dying of diabetes, but as she explained
afterwards downstairs to the housekeeper, his eyes were uncanny, and she
had never been able to stand against anything at all queer.
Mr. Brett stood aside until she had passed him and then walked into
Hermione’s sitting room.
Hermione lay on the sofa by the open window. She had had time to change
into a white satin dressing gown trimmed with swansdown, and to look
very ill. She was surrounded by smelling salts and heart tonics, her
eyes were closed, but she had heard what had taken place between her
father and Nurse Davies outside her door, and she would have recalled
the latter if she had not thought that it would be wiser to appear
beyond the power of speech.
Mr. Brett looked at her speculatively, pulled forward a chair, hitched
it backward, and picking up a yesterday’s “Times” proceeded to rustle
its leaves briskly.
Hermione’s eyelids trembled nervously.
“Please Papa,” she murmured faintly, “do not make that noise, my nerves
are too unstrung to bear it.”
“Very well, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett slowly and distinctly, “if you
want that I shall stop reading ‘The Times’ you can open your eyes and
sit up. If you’re too exhausted to speak I shall sit right here and
rustle.
“Nobody has ever been known to suffer physically from the rustling of a
newspaper and I’m going to see if maybe it won’t revive you.”
The Princess set her lips in a long thin line, which was unbecoming to
her, and there was a long pause during which Mr. Brett rustled
systematically, and Hermione was conscious of the afflicting sound in
every nerve of her body.
An unwonted flush came over her countenance, she drew her cushions a
little higher with a jerk, and opened her eyes.
“If you wish to speak to me, Papa,” she said with dignity, “I should not
dream of refusing to listen to you, however much pain it costs me.”
Mr. Brett laid down “The Times” with satisfaction.
“That’s the way I like to hear you talk, Hermione,” he observed
cheerfully, “because that’s exactly what I’ve come up here to do. I’ve
come up here to make things painful for you.”
Hermione raised incredulous and exasperating eyebrows, but she made no
comment on her father’s preposterous project.
“When I was a young man,” Mr. Brett continued in his slow unemotional
drawl, “I made quite a study of mules. I had to drive ’em, and if you
have to drive a mule you want to study it.
“Now the doggonest thing a mule can do to a human being is to baulk. You
can light out from a kicking mule and you can drag a rearing mule down,
but if a mule baulks, you want to revise the Catechism and put in a
special clause to permit swearing. But I got wise to the mule’s
temperament after a bit. I used to give ’em something they liked just
out of reach of their noses—say carrots—and if that didn’t do, I put
something behind them so unpleasant that it kinder induced them to
prance forward unexpectedly in the direction I was wanting them to go.
When I say unexpectedly, I mean unexpectedly to the mules.
“Can you think of anything you would like to have, Hermione?”
“Dear Papa,” said his daughter sweetly, “I have lived so long abroad
that I hardly understand your quaint way of putting things. I am sure
you mean to be funny, but American humour escapes me.”
Mr. Brett did not smile but his eyes lighted appreciatively.
“You don’t lose anything, Hermione,” he said gently. “I guess you have
quite a wit of your own.
“Don’t you think it’s time you went back to Paris? There hasn’t been an
air raid for some while.”
Hermione’s flush deepened.
“I don’t expect you to understand me,” she said pathetically. “You never
have, but I feel that my first duty is to Elise. I left Paris to come to
her, not to escape air raids.”
“If you want a house on the Champs Elysées,” said Mr. Brett
meditatively, “with a garden—say the word. I happen to know that I
could procure one by wire.”
“I should have thought you were clever enough not to offer me a bribe,”
said Hermione coldly. She had always wanted a house in the Champs
Elysées big enough for entertaining on a large scale.
“I should refuse a palace rather than neglect a duty.”
Mr. Brett pushed his chair back until the front legs of it waved
dangerously in the air.
“I have known calls,” he replied impressively, “to higher duties come
out of palaces. In fact they generally do. Duties dwindle with the rent.
I don’t mean a bribe, but I suggest an opening. You have remarkable
powers, Hermione, and there are opportunities in Europe just now which
may not occur again, and which, if you hanker after celebrity, would
pick and dry it for you while you waited. I might be able—if I saw the
point of it—to push some of these opportunities your way.”
Hermione looked at Mr. Brett. Something flashed into her eyes, and was
gone again in a moment. She was an ambitious woman and hitherto she had
had to practise her struggles in secret and alone.
No one had ever seen her struggle, but though she had retained an
outward and gracious passivity, Hermione had felt the strain of her
efforts, and there were heights to which, without assistance, she could
not, however gracefully, climb.
Mr. Brett had never backed his family’s social yearnings before. He had
markedly refrained from using his extraordinary powers for any personal
purposes.
He was making a great concession to his eldest daughter, and she knew
it. Her heart beat faster than if she had been assisting at the process
of a palpitation; then her innate violence of will reasserted itself. If
she accepted any concession from her father, she must lay down her will
as the price of it. Hermione shivered as if the room were cold. Her will
was her religion—she called it for the moment, her cross.
Hermione was of the stuff out of which persecutors are made. It is very
nearly the same stuff which creates martyrs, except that in the case of
martyrs vindictiveness does not appear essential.
Hermione could bear much to keep her will intact, even the relinquishing
of a life-long ambition; still she did not like relinquishing anything,
and she breathed quickly; then she said with her voice a trifle strained
and high,
“I daresay you do not believe me, but my desire to save and protect
Elise is stronger than any personal wish of my own.”
Mr. Brett let his chair descend slowly and carefully from its precarious
angle.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “if that is so, Hermione, carrots is
dead.”
Mr. Brett could talk perfectly good grammar when he chose, but he
avoided it in the presence of his eldest daughter. The perfection of her
own manner, he often observed, was distinction enough for any family.
“I don’t know what else you think you can do against me,” said Hermione
defensively, “but I warn you that if you attempt to drive me away from
here I shall appeal to Elise, both against you—and against John!
“You have apparently succeeded in poisoning his not very acute intellect
against me, but my poor darling little sister will stand by me—whatever
you may choose to say or do.”
“She might stand against me,” agreed Mr. Brett reflectively. “I don’t
remember that I’ve ever done a thing to hurt her since she was
born—still that don’t make any difference, but I don’t advise you to
calculate that Elise’ll stand against John. You’re her poor
broken-hearted sister all right, all right, but John’s her young
husband. If she sees John’s heart being cut into, yours won’t have much
of a chance.
“She knows she can’t make you happy.
“You’ve chosen your sorrows and sit on them with the clinch of a
domestic fowl, but Elise can make John happy, and I guess—take it by
and large—she will.
“But I don’t mind admitting to you, Hermione, that I don’t want this tug
of war to come off. Tugs of war suit some people—a frail,
broken-hearted, high-brow like yourself finds nourishment in a tug of
war; but normal people don’t; and while the dust and the yells are
heartening you all up, an unselfish, sensitive girl like Elise gets cut
as thin as a wood shaving. I’d take some trouble to keep Elise happy.
“Say, Hermione, have you ever been happy? I don’t mean top-dog
happy—but _real_ happy, like a field of buttercups in the sun?”
Hermione’s lips quivered.
“Happiness,” she said, “is not for me.”
“Sunshine is for everybody,” said Mr. Brett gently, “who’ll let the sun
alone, and like it.
“Before you came Elise was happy. She was just like a little open cup
filled with gold; you never saw the child so gay; and John was happy; he
is the quiet kind that has to hide itself to feel at home, but he sure
_was_ at home. They didn’t need any saving—then.
“I used to take a power of comfort sitting out under the old yew tree,
thinking of those two children off somewhere—with their happiness.”
“It wouldn’t have lasted,” said Hermione hurriedly. “Unthinking
happiness is the shutting out of life—it leads to selfishness and
satiety.”
“Don’t you believe it, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett impressively. “It’s
decayed teeth give us the toothache, not sweets. Happiness and
unhappiness ain’t selfish or unselfish, it depends on who’s got them.
“Marie Antoinette was just as unhappy as she could live, but she kicked
her throne over and got the guillotine into the family for a necklace of
diamonds. You couldn’t make Elise and John selfish, not if you set out
and offered them Bond Street.
“I don’t know much about religion, what with one thing and another I
guess it’s kept me dodging; but I remember being told that by their
fruits ye shall know them. Fruits Hermione—that sounds like good sense
don’t it, and good sense ought to make good religion. Well, how about
your fruits?”
“I don’t know what you mean—” said Hermione icily. She would have
tossed her head if the pillows had not been too low for it.
“I do not think you can find that I have done anything wrong.”
Mr. Brett ignored Hermione’s negative standard.
“I don’t say much about your childhood,” he began impartially. “You took
credit for what was given you in the way of looks and wit, you practised
them up a lot, and then fought your mother with them, to take away from
her what she’d been given, along the same lines. Maybe it was your
fault, maybe it was hers. All I know is you fought.
“Later you fought me to get hold of Arnold, and make a pink sugar pet
lamb of him. Well, you had me there; for quite a time you took the bones
out of Arnold. I daresay you would have ruined him, but you had other
fish to fry, and then the war came along, and Arnold headed right, and
got his quittance.
“You fought your mother for Elise too, and you know what happens when
two dogs get on to a bone? Well, that’s what happened to Elise. Then I
consented for you to go to Europe. It struck me people in Europe had
always liked fighting, and you were getting wasted in a civilised
country like America.
“You made a mistake in marrying a European, because European men expect
to have a life of their own, but by gosh—Prince Girla made a greater
mistake in marrying you!
“Hermione Brett, if that young man is put into a low place in the next
world, make no mistake about it—you’ll foot the bill! You’ve driven him
towards vice more surely than any poor girl who gets a hardly earned
living by it—and it wasn’t your profession. You had money. Then you
brought a child into the world and left it. There may be a shabbier
trick to play on the universe than that, but I don’t know it. I guess
speculating with trust funds is a kind action compared with leaving a
little child to grow up motherless.”
“I did not leave my child!” cried Hermione passionately. “He was taken
from me!”
“No, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett inexorably. “Your husband said he wanted
the child to grow up in his own country, but he would _not_ separate it
from you if you would live there, and let him come into the house for
three months of the year, so that he could be with the child part of the
time. You could have kept it. He offered to draw up a deed of separation
on those lines—and you refused.”
“I couldn’t live in Roumania,” said Hermione sharply. “The climate would
have killed me, and Girla’s word was not to be trusted.”
“His deed was,” said Mr. Brett imperturbably. “Very large financial
interests hung on his keeping his word. I drew it up myself, and I had
guaranties.”
There was a long silence. Mr. Brett sighed heavily. The dark pockets
under his eyes looked deeper than ever.
“I think I’ll die before you,” he said, as if he were speaking to
himself.
“I think I’ll die pretty quick. I’d rather. There’s lots of mistakes
I’ve made; some of them lie on me pretty heavy at times, but I’ve come
short of blasphemy. I haven’t called what I wanted ‘the will of God.’
But what’s going to pull you through when you come to the other side,
Hermione, I don’t know. You’ve lied to yourself so thick and bad, there
isn’t anything in you that ain’t what you don’t expect; and you’ve
deceived a crowd of people! Your wits helped you, and your looks; and
all the people who depended on you, or ought to have depended on you,
you’ve let down.
“Well, I’m your father. Seeing what you are don’t let me out of that.
But I’ve told you the truth, and it don’t let you out either.
“If you want to try to get the better of me now—start trying. I don’t
say you won’t be able to do a cruel bit of harm before I down you, but I
guess I’m going to down you, if that Viennese doctor was worth what I
gave him to stiffen me up.”
Mr. Brett rose wearily, as he spoke, and wandered to the south window;
from it he could see Elise and John upon the lawn. John was reading out
loud to her. John read out loud with great monotony, but no elocution
could have sounded more impressive to Elise.
“I don’t know, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett unexpectedly, “that the person
I’m not sorriest for after all, isn’t yourself.”
Hermione made no answer to this statement. She lay as still as a statue
with her face turned to the wall.
Mr. Brett saw that the sun was in her eyes and he pulled the blind down
gently to shield her face before he left the room.