CHAPTER VII

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.