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