I. THE WEAVING OF THE
SHUTTLE. . . . . . . . . 1
II. A LACK OF
PERCEPTION. . . . . . . . . . . .12
III. YOUNG LADY
ANSTRUTHERS. . . . . . . . . . .19
IV. A MISTAKE OF THE
POSTBOY'S. . . . . . . . .35
V. ON BOTH SIDES OF THE
ATLANTIC . . . . . . .51
VI. AN UNFAIR ENDOWMENT
. . . . . . . . . . . .67
VII. ON BOARD THE
"MERIDIANA". . . . . . . . .75
VIII. THE SECOND-CLASS
PASSENGER. . . . . . . . .83
IX. LADY JANE GREY. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .92
X. "IS LADY
ANSTRUTHERS AT HOME?". . . . . .99
XI. "I THOUGHT YOU
HAD ALL FORGOTTEN" . . . 106
XII. UGHTRED . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 111
XIII. ONE OF THE NEW
YORK DRESSES . . . . . . . 121
XIV. IN THE GARDENS. .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 128
XV. THE FIRST MAN . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . 132
XVI. THE PARTICULAR
INCIDENT . . . . . . . . . 146
XVII. TOWNLINSON &
SHEPPARD . . . . . . . . . . 164
XVIII. THE FIFTEENTH
EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN . . . 177
XIX. SPRING IN BOND
STREET . . . . . . . . . . 190
XX. THINGS OCCUR IN
STORNHAM VILLAGE. . . . . 201
XXI. KEDGERS . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 208
XXII. ONE OF MR.
VANDERPOEL'S LETTERS . . . . . 213
XXIII. INTRODUCING G.
SELDEN . . . . . . . . . . 223
XXIV. THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF STORNHAM . . . . 242
XXV. "WE BEGAN TO
MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!"251
XXVI. "WHAT IT
MUST BE TO BE YOU--JUST YOU!". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
XXVII. LIFE. . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
XXVIII. SETTING THEM
THINKING . . . . . . . . . . 280 XXIX. THE
THREAD OF G. SELDEN . .
. . . . . . . 286
XXX. A RETURN. . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 291
XXXI. NO, SHE WOULD NOT
. . . . . . . . . . . . 303
XXXII. A GREAT BALL. .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
XXXIII. FOR LADY JANE .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
XXXIV. RED GODWYN. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
XXXV. THE TIDAL WAVE. .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 352
XXXVI. BY THE ROADSIDE
EVERYWHERE. . . . . . . . 360
XXXVII. CLOSED
CORRIDORS. . . . . . . . . . . . . 370
XXXVIII. AT SHANDY'S .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37S
XXXIX. ON THE MARSHES.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 398
XL. "DON'T GO ON
WITH THIS" . . . . . . . . 407
XLI. SHE WOULD DO
SOMETHING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
XLII. IN THE BALLROOM .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 424
XLIII. HIS CHANCE. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
XLIV. A FOOTSTEP. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 440
XLV. THE PASSING BELL.
. . . . . . . . . . . . 447
XLVI. LISTENING . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 458
XLVII. "I HAVE NO
WORD OR LOOK TO REMEMBER". . 468
XLVIII. THE MOMENT. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
XLIX. AT STORNHAM AND
AT BROADMORLANDS. . . . . 496
L. THE PRIMEVAL THING.
. . . . . . . . . . . 506
NO man knew when the
Shuttle began its slow and heavy weaving from shore to shore, that it was held
and guided by the great hand of Fate. Fate alone saw the meaning of the web it
wove, the might of it, and its place in the making of a world's history. Men
thought but little of either web or weaving, calling them by other names and
lighter ones, for the time unconscious of the strength of the thread thrown
across thousands of miles of leaping, heaving, grey or blue ocean.
Fate and Life planned
the weaving, and it seemed mere circumstance which guided the Shuttle to and
fro between two worlds divided by a gulf broader and deeper than the thousands
of miles of salt, fierce sea--the gulf of a bitter quarrel deepened by hatred
and the shedding of brothers' blood. Between the two worlds of East and West
there was no will to draw nearer. Each held apart. Those who had rebelled
against that which their souls called tyranny, having struggled madly and shed
blood in tearing themselves free, turned stern backs upon their unconquered
enemies, broke all cords that bound them to the past, flinging off ties of
name, kinship and rank, beginning with fierce disdain a new life.
Those who, being
rebelled against, found the rebels too passionate in their determination and
too desperate in their defence of their strongholds to be less than
unconquerable, sailed back haughtily to the world which seemed so far the
greater power. Plunging into new battles, they added new conquests and
splendour to their land, looking back with something of contempt to the
half-savage West left to build its own civilisation without other aid than the
strength of its own strong right hand and strong uncultured brain.
But while the two
worlds held apart, the Shuttle, weaving slowly in the great hand of Fate, drew
them closer and held them firm, each of them all unknowing for many a year,
that what had at first been mere threads of gossamer, was forming a web whose
strength in time none could compute, whose severance could be accomplished but
by tragedy and convulsion.
The weaving was but in
its early and slow-moving years when this story opens. Steamers crossed and
recrossed the Atlantic, but they accomplished the journey at leisure and with
heavy rollings and all such discomforts as small craft can afford. Their
staterooms and decks were not crowded with people to whom the voyage was a mere
incident--in many cases a yearly one. "A crossing" in those days was
an event. It was planned seriously, long thought of, discussed and rediscussed,
with and among the various members of the family to which the voyager belonged.
A certain boldness, bordering on recklessness, was almost to be presupposed in
the individual who, turning his back upon New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and
like cities, turned his face towards "Europe." In those days when the
Shuttle wove at leisure, a man did not lightly run over to London, or Paris, or
Berlin, he gravely went to "Europe."
The journey being
likely to be made once in a lifetime, the traveller's intention was to see as
much as possible, to visit as many cities cathedrals, ruins, galleries, as his
time and purse would allow. People who could speak with any degree of familiarity
of Hyde Park, the Champs Élysées, the Pincio, had gained a certain dignity. The
ability to touch with an intimate bearing upon such localities was a raison de
plus for being asked out to tea or to dinner. To possess photographs and relics
was to be of interest, to have seen European celebrities even at a distance, to
have wandered about the outside of poets' gardens and philosophers' houses, was
to be entitled to respect. The period was a far cry from the time when the
Shuttle, having shot to and fro, faster and faster, week by week, month by
month, weaving new threads into its web each year, has woven warp and woof
until they bind far shore to shore.
It was in comparatively
early days that the first thread we follow was woven into the web. Many such
have been woven since and have added greater strength than any others, twining
the cord of sex and home-building and race-founding. But this was a slight and
weak one, being only the thread of the life of one of Reuben Vanderpoel's
daughters--the pretty little simple one whose name was Rosalie.
They were--the
Vanderpoels--of the Americans whose fortunes were a portion of the history of
their country. The building of these fortunes had been a part of, or had
created epochs and crises. Their millions could scarcely be regarded as private
property. Newspapers bandied them about, so to speak, employing them as factors
in argument, using them as figures of speech, incorporating them into methods
of calculation. Literature touched upon them, moral systems considered them,
stories for the young treated them gravely as illustrative.
The first Reuben
Vanderpoel, who in early days of danger had traded with savages for the pelts
of wild animals, was the lauded hero of stories of thrift and enterprise.
Throughout his hard-working life he had been irresistibly impelled to action by
an absolute genius of commerce, expressing itself at the outset by the
exhibition of courage in mere exchange and barter. An alert power to perceive
the potential value of things and the possible malleability of men and
circumstances, had stood him in marvellous good stead. He had bought at low
prices things which in the eyes of the less discerning were worthless, but,
having obtained possession of such things, the less discerning had almost
invariably awakened to the fact that, in his hands, values increased, and
methods of remunerative disposition, being sought, were found. Nothing remained
unutilisable. The practical, sordid, uneducated little man developed the power
to create demand for his own supplies. If he was betrayed into an error, he
quickly retrieved it. He could live upon nothing and consequently could travel
anywhere in search of such things as he desired. He could barely read and
write, and could not spell, but he was daring and astute. His untaught brain
was that of a financier, his blood burned with the fever of but one desire--the
desire to accumulate. Money expressed to his nature, not expenditure, but
investment in such small or large properties as could be resold at profit in
the near or far future. The future held fascinations for him. He bought nothing
for his own pleasure or comfort, nothing which could not be sold or bartered
again. He married a woman who was a trader's daughter and shared his passion
for gain. She was of North of England blood, her father having been a
hard-fisted small tradesman in an unimportant town, who had been daring enough
to emigrate when emigration meant the facing of unknown dangers in a
half-savage land. She had excited Reuben Vanderpoel's admiration by taking off
her petticoat one bitter winter's day to sell it to a squaw in exchange for an
ornament for which she chanced to know another squaw would pay with a skin of
value. The first Mrs. Vanderpoel was as wonderful as her husband. They were both
wonderful. They were the founders of the fortune which a century and a half
later was the delight--in fact the pièce de resistance--of New York society
reporters, its enormity being restated in round figures when a blank space must
be filled up. The method of statement lent itself to infinite variety and was
always interesting to a particular class, some elements of which felt it
encouraging to be assured that so much money could be a personal possession,
some elements feeling the fact an additional argument to be used against the
infamy of monopoly.
The first Reuben
Vanderpoel transmitted to his son his accumulations and his fever for gain. He
had but one child. The second Reuben built upon the foundations this afforded
him, a fortune as much larger than the first as the rapid growth and increasing
capabilities of the country gave him enlarging opportunities to acquire. It was
no longer necessary to deal with savages: his powers were called upon to cope
with those of white men who came to a new country to struggle for livelihood
and fortune. Some were shrewd, some were desperate, some were dishonest. But
shrewdness never outwitted, desperation never overcame, dishonesty never
deceived the second Reuben Vanderpoel. Each characteristic ended by adapting itself
to his own purposes and qualities, and as a result of each it was he who in any
business transaction was the gainer. It was the common saying that the
Vanderpoels were possessed of a money-making spell. Their spell lay in their
entire mental and physical absorption in one idea. Their peculiarity was not so
much that they wished to be rich as that Nature itself impelled them to collect
wealth as the load-stone draws towards it iron. Having possessed nothing, they
became rich, having become rich they became richer, having founded their
fortunes on small schemes, they increased them by enormous ones. In time they
attained that omnipotence of wealth which it would seem no circumstance can
control or limit. The first Reuben Vanderpoel could not spell, the second
could, the third was as well educated as a man could be whose sole profession
is money-making. His children were taught all that expensive teachers and
expensive opportunities could teach them. After the second generation the
meagre and mercantile physical type of the Vanderpoels improved upon itself.
Feminine good looks appeared and were made the most of. The Vanderpoel element
invested even good looks to an advantage. The fourth Reuben Vanderpoel had no
son and two daughters. They were brought up in a brown-stone mansion built upon
a fashionable New York thoroughfare roaring with traffic. To the farthest point
of the Rocky Mountains the number of dollars this "mansion" (it was
always called so) had cost, was known. There may have existed Pueblo Indians
who had heard rumours of the price of it. All the shop-keepers and farmers in
the United States had read newspaper descriptions of its furnishings and knew
the value of the brocade which hung in the bedrooms and boudoirs of the Misses
Vanderpoel. It was a fact much cherished that Miss Rosalie's bath was of
Carrara marble, and to good souls actively engaged in doing their own washing
in small New England or Western towns, it was a distinct luxury to be aware
that the water in the Carrara marble bath was perfumed with Florentine Iris.
Circumstances such as these seemed to become personal possessions and even to
lighten somewhat the burden of toil.
Rosalie Vanderpoel
married an Englishman of title, and part of the story of her married life forms
my prologue. Hers was of the early international marriages, and the republican
mind had not yet adjusted itself to all that such alliances might imply. It was
yet ingenuous, imaginative and confiding in such matters. A baronetcy and a
manor house reigning over an old English village and over villagers in possible
smock frocks, presented elements of picturesque dignity to people whose
intimacy with such allurements had been limited by the novels of Mrs. Oliphant
and other writers. The most ordinary little anecdotes in which vicarages,
gamekeepers, and dowagers figured, were exciting in these early days. "Sir
Nigel Anstruthers," when engraved upon a visiting card, wore an air of
distinction almost startling. Sir Nigel himself was not as picturesque as his name,
though he was not entirely without attraction, when for reasons of his own he
chose to aim at agreeableness of bearing. He was a man with a good figure and a
good voice, and but for a heaviness of feature the result of objectionable
living, might have given the impression of being better looking than he really
was. New York laid amused and at the same time, charmed stress upon the fact
that he spoke with an "English accent." His enunciation was in fact
clear cut and treated its vowels well. He was a man who observed with an air of
accustomed punctiliousness such social rules and courtesies as he deemed it
expedient to consider. An astute worldling had remarked that he was at once
more ceremonious and more casual in his manner than men bred in America.
"If you invite him
to dinner," the wordling said, "or if you die, or marry, or meet with
an accident, his notes of condolence or congratulation are prompt and civil,
but the actual truth is that he cares nothing whatever about you or your
relations, and if you don't please him he does not hesitate to sulk or be
astonishingly rude, which last an American does not allow himself to be, as a
rule."
By many people Sir
Nigel was not analysed, but accepted. He was of the early English who came to
New York, and was a novelty of interest, with his background of Manor House and
village and old family name. He was very much talked of at vivacious ladies'
luncheon parties, he was very much talked to at equally vivacious afternoon
teas. At dinner parties he was furtively watched a good deal, but after dinner
when he sat with the men over their wine, he was not popular. He was not
perhaps exactly disliked, but men whose chief interest at that period lay in
stocks and railroads, did not find conversation easy with a man whose sole occupation
had been the shooting of birds and the hunting of foxes, when he was not
absolutely loitering about London, with his time on his hands. The stories he
told--and they were few--were chiefly anecdotes whose points gained their
humour by the fact that a man was a comically bad shot or bad rider and either
peppered a gamekeeper or was thrown into a ditch when his horse went over a
hedge, and such relations did not increase in the poignancy of their interest
by being filtered through brains accustomed to applying their powers to
problems of speculation and commerce. He was not so dull but that he perceived
this at an early stage of his visit to New York, which was probably the reason
of the infrequency of his stories.
He on his side was
naturally not quick to rise to the humour of a "big deal" or a big
blunder made on Wall Street--or to the wit of jokes concerning them. Upon the
whole he would have been glad to have understood such matters more clearly. His
circumstances were such as had at last forced him to contemplate the world of
money-makers with something of an annoyed respect. "These fellows"
who had neither titles nor estates to keep up could make money. He, as he
acknowledged disgustedly to himself, was much worse than a beggar. There was
Stornham Court in a state of ruin-- the estate going to the dogs, the
farmhouses tumbling to pieces and he, so to speak, without a sixpence to bless
himself with, and head over heels in debt. Englishmen of the rank which in
bygone times had not associated itself with trade had begun at least to trifle
with it--to consider its potentialities as factors possibly to be made useful
by the aristocracy. Countesses had not yet spiritedly opened milliners' shops,
nor belted Earls adorned the stage, but certain noblemen had dallied with beer
and coquetted with stocks. One of the first commercial developments had been
the discovery of America--particularly of New York--as a place where if one
could make up one's mind to the plunge, one might marry one's sons profitably. At
the outset it presented a field so promising as to lead to rashness and
indiscretion on the part of persons not given to analysis of character and in
consequence relying too serenely upon an ingenuousness which rather speedily
revealed that it had its limits. Ingenuousness combining itself with remarkable
alertness of perception on occasion, is rather American than English, and is,
therefore, to the English mind, misleading.
At first younger sons,
who "gave trouble" to their families, were sent out. Their names,
their backgrounds of castles or manors, relatives of distinction, London
seasons, fox hunting, Buckingham Palace and Goodwood Races, formed a
picturesque allurement. That the castles and manors would belong to their elder
brothers, that the relatives of distinction did not encourage intimacy with
swarms of the younger branches of their families; that London seasons, hunting,
and racing were for their elders and betters, were facts not realised in all
their importance by the republican mind. In the course of time they were
realised to the full, but in Rosalie Vanderpoel's nineteenth year they covered
what was at that time almost unknown territory. One may rest assured Sir Nigel
Anstruthers said nothing whatsoever in New York of an interview he had had
before sailing with an intensely disagreeable great-aunt, who was the wife of a
Bishop. She was a horrible old woman with a broad face, blunt features and a
raucous voice, whose tones added acridity to her observations when she was
indulging in her favourite pastime of interfering with the business of her
acquaintances and relations.
"I do not know
what you are going chasing off to America for, Nigel," she commented.
"You can't afford it and it is perfectly ridiculous of you to take it upon
yourself to travel for pleasure as if you were a man of means instead of being
in such a state of pocket that Maria tells me you cannot pay your tailor.
Neither the Bishop nor I can do anything for you and I hope you don't expect
it. All I can hope is that you know yourself what you are going to America in
search of, and that it is something more practical than buffaloes. You had
better stop in New York. Those big shopkeepers' daughters are enormously rich,
they say, and they are immensely pleased by attentions from men of your class.
They say they'll marry anything if it has an aunt or a grandmother with a
title. You can mention the Marchioness, you know. You need not refer to the
fact that she thought your father a blackguard and your mother an interloper,
and that you have never been invited to Broadmere since you were born. You can
refer casually to me and to the Bishop and to the Palace, too. A Palace--even a
Bishop's--ought to go a long way with Americans. They will think it is
something royal." She ended her remarks with one of her most insulting
snorts of laughter, and Sir Nigel became dark red and looked as if he would
like to knock her down.
It was not, however,
her sentiments which were particularly revolting to him. If she had expressed
them in a manner more flattering to himself he would have felt that there was a
good deal to be said for them. In fact, he had put the same thing to himself
some time previously, and, in summing up the American matter, had reached
certain thrifty decisions. The impulse to knock her down surged within him
solely because he had a brutally bad temper when his vanity was insulted, and
he was furious at her impudence in speaking to him as if he were a villager out
of work whom she was at liberty to bully and lecture.
"For a woman who
is supposed to have been born of gentle people," he said to his mother
afterwards, "Aunt Marian is the most vulgar old beast I have ever beheld.
She has the taste of a female costermonger." Which was entirely true, but
it might be added that his own was no better and his points of view and morals
wholly coincided with his taste.
Naturally Rosalie
Vanderpoel knew nothing of this side of the matter. She had been a petted,
butterfly child, who had been pretty and admired and indulged from her infancy;
she had grown up into a petted, butterfly girl, pretty and admired and
surrounded by inordinate luxury. Her world had been made up of good-natured,
lavish friends and relations, who enjoyed themselves and felt a delight in her
girlish toilettes and triumphs. She had spent her one season of belledom in
being whirled from festivity to festivity, in dancing in rooms festooned with
thousands of dollars' worth of flowers, in lunching or dining at tables loaded
with roses and violets and orchids, from which ballrooms or feasts she had
borne away wonderful "favours" and gifts, whose prices, being
recorded in the newspapers, caused a thrill of delight or envy to pass over the
land. She was a slim little creature, with quantities of light feathery hair
like a French doll's. She had small hands and small feet and a small waist--a
small brain also, it must be admitted, but she was an innocent, sweet-tempered
girl with a childlike simpleness of mind. In fine, she was exactly the girl to
find Sir Nigel's domineering temperament at once imposing and attractive, so
long as it was cloaked by the ceremonies of external good breeding.
Her sister Bettina, who
was still a child, was of a stronger and less susceptible nature. Betty--at
eight--had long legs and a square but delicate small face. Her well-opened
steel-blue eyes were noticeable for rather extravagant ink-black lashes and a
straight young stare which seemed to accuse if not to condemn. She was being
educated at a ruinously expensive school with a number of other inordinately
rich little girls, who were all too wonderfully dressed and too lavishly
supplied with pocket money. The school considered itself especially refined and
select, but was in fact interestingly vulgar.
The inordinately rich
little girls, who had most of them pretty and spiritual or pretty and piquant
faces, ate a great many bon bons and chattered a great deal in high unmodulated
voices about the parties their sisters and other relatives went to and the
dresses they wore. Some of them were nice little souls, who in the future would
emerge from their chrysalis state enchanting women, but they used
colloquialisms freely, and had an ingenuous habit of referring to the prices of
things. Bettina Vanderpoel, who was the richest and cleverest and most promisingly
handsome among them, was colloquial to slanginess, but she had a deep, mellow,
child voice and an amazing carriage.
She could not endure
Sir Nigel Anstruthers, and, being an American child, did not hesitate to
express herself with force, if with some crudeness. "He's a hateful
thing," she said, "I loathe him. He's stuck up and he thinks you are
afraid of him and he likes it."
Sir Nigel had known
only English children, little girls who lived in that discreet corner of their
parents' town or country houses known as "the schoolroom," apparently
emerging only for daily walks with governesses; girls with long hair and boys
in little high hats and with faces which seemed curiously made to match them.
Both boys and girls were decently kept out of the way and not in the least
dwelt on except when brought out for inspection during the holidays and taken
to the pantomime.
Sir Nigel had not
realised that an American child was an absolute factor to be counted with, and
a "youngster" who entered the drawing-room when she chose and joined
fearlessly in adult conversation was an element he considered annoying. It was
quite true that Bettina talked too much and too readily at times, but it had
not been explained to her that the opinions of eight years are not always of
absorbing interest to the mature. It was also true that Sir Nigel was a great
fool for interfering with what was clearly no affair of his in such a manner as
would have made him an enemy even had not the child's instinct arrayed her
against him at the outset.
"You American
youngsters are too cheeky," he said on one of the occasions when Betty had
talked too much. "If you were my sister and lived at Stornham Court, you
would be learning lessons in the schoolroom and wearing a pinafore. Nobody ever
saw my sister Emily when she was your age."
"Well, I'm not
your sister Emily," retorted Betty, "and I guess I'm glad of
it."
It was rather impudent
of her, but it must be confessed that she was not infrequently rather impudent
in a rude little-girl way, but she was serenely unconscious of the fact.
Sir Nigel flushed
darkly and laughed a short, unpleasant laugh. If she had been his sister Emily
she would have fared ill at the moment, for his villianous temper would have
got the better of him.
"I 'guess' that I
may be congratulated too," he sneered.
"If I was going to
be anybody's sister Emily," said Betty, excited a little by the sense of
the fray, "I shouldn't want to be yours."
"Now Betty, don't
be hateful," interposed Rosalie, laughing, and her laugh was nervous.
"There's Mina Thalberg coming up the front steps. Go and meet her."
Rosalie, poor girl,
always found herself nervous when Sir Nigel and Betty were in the room
together. She instinctively recognised their antagonism and was afraid Betty
would do something an English baronet would think vulgar. Her simple brain
could not have explained to her why it was that she knew Sir Nigel often
thought New Yorkers vulgar. She was, however, quite aware of this but
imperfectly concealed fact, and felt a timid desire to be explanatory.
When Bettina marched
out of the room with her extraordinary carriage finely manifest, Rosy's little
laugh was propitiatory.
"You mustn't mind
her," she said. "She's a real splendid little thing, but she's got a
quick temper. It's all over in a minute."
"They wouldn't
stand that sort of thing in England," said Sir Nigel. "She's deucedly
spoiled, you know."
He detested the child.
He disliked all children, but this one awakened in him more than mere dislike.
The fact was that though Betty herself was wholly unconscious of the subtle
truth, the as yet undeveloped intellect which later made her a brilliant and
captivating personality, vaguely saw him as he was, an unscrupulous, sordid
brute, as remorseless an adventurer and swindler in his special line, as if he
had been engaged in drawing false cheques and arranging huge jewel robberies,
instead of planning to entrap into a disadvantageous marriage a girl whose
gentleness and fortune could be used by a blackguard of reputable name. The man
was cold-blooded enough to see that her gentle weakness was of value because it
could be bullied, her money was to be counted on because it could be spent on
himself and his degenerate vices and on his racked and ruined name and estate,
which must be rebuilt and restocked at an early date by someone or other, lest
they tumbled into ignominious collapse which could not be concealed. Bettina of
the accusing eyes did not know that in the depth of her yet crude young being,
instinct was summing up for her the potentialities of an unusually fine
specimen of the British blackguard, but this was nevertheless the interesting
truth. When later she was told that her sister had become engaged to Sir Nigel
Anstruthers, a flame of colour flashed over her face, she stared silently a
moment, then bit her lip and burst into tears.
"Well, Bett,"
exclaimed Rosalie, "you are the queerest thing I ever saw."
Bettina's tears were an
outburst, not a flow. She swept them away passionately with her small
handkerchief.
"He'll do
something awful to you," she said. "He'll nearly kill you. I know he
will. I'd rather be dead myself."
She dashed out of the
room, and could never be induced to say a word further about the matter. She
would indeed have found it impossible to express her intense antipathy and
sense of impending calamity. She had not the phrases to make herself clear even
to herself, and after all what controlling effort can one produce when one is
only eight years old?
MERCANTILE as Americans
were proclaimed to be, the opinion of Sir Nigel Anstruthers was that they were,
on some points, singularly unbusinesslike. In the perfectly obvious and simple
matter of the settlement of his daughter's fortune, he had felt that Reuben
Vanderpoel was obtuse to the point of idiocy. He seemed to have none of the
ordinary points of view. Naturally there was to Anstruthers' mind but one point
of view to take. A man of birth and rank, he argued, does not career across the
Atlantic to marry a New York millionaire's daughter unless he anticipates
deriving some advantage from the alliance. Such a man--being of Anstruthers'
type--would not have married a rich woman even in his own country with out
making sure that advantages were to accrue to himself as a result of the union.
"In England," to use his own words, "there was no nonsense about
it." Women's fortunes as well as themselves belonged to their husbands,
and a man who was master in his own house could make his wife do as he chose.
He had seen girls with money managed very satisfactorily by fellows who held a
tight rein, and were not moved by tears, and did not allow talking to
relations. If he had been desirous of marrying and could have afforded to take
a penniless wife, there were hundreds of portionless girls ready to thank God
for a decent chance to settle themselves for life, and one need not stir out of
one's native land to find them.
But Sir Nigel had not
in the least desired to saddle himself with a domestic encumbrance, in fact
nothing would have induced him to consider the step if he had not been driven
hard by circumstances. His fortunes had reached a stage where money must be
forthcoming somehow--from somewhere. He and his mother had been living from
hand to mouth, so to speak, for years, and they had also been obliged to keep
up appearances, which is sometimes embittering even to persons of amiable
tempers. Lady Anstruthers, it is true, had lived in the country in as niggardly
a manner as possible. She had narrowed her existence to absolute privation,
presenting at the same time a stern, bold front to the persons who saw her, to
the insufficient staff of servants, to the village to the vicar and his wife,
and the few far-distant neighbours who perhaps once a year drove miles to call
or leave a card. She was an old woman sufficiently unattractive to find no
difficulty in the way of limiting her acquaintances. The unprepossessing
wardrobe she had gathered in the passing years was remade again and again by
the village dressmaker. She wore dingy old silk gowns and appalling bonnets,
and mantles dripping with rusty fringes and bugle beads, but these mitigated
not in the least the unflinching arrogance of her bearing, or the simple,
intolerant rudeness which she considered proper and becoming in persons like
herself. She did not of course allow that there existed many persons like
herself. That society rejoiced in this fact was but the stamp of its
inferiority and folly. While she pinched herself and harried her few hirelings at
Stornham it was necessary for Sir Nigel to show himself in town and present as
decent an appearance as possible. His vanity was far too arrogant to allow of
his permitting himself to drop out of the world to which he could not afford to
belong. That he should have been forgotten or ignored would have been
intolerable to him. For a few years he was invited to dine at good houses, and
got shooting and hunting as part of the hospitality of his acquaintances. But a
man who cannot afford to return hospitalities will find that he need not expect
to avail himself of those of his acquaintances to the end of his career unless
he is an extremely engaging person. Sir Nigel Anstruthers was not an engaging
person. He never gave a thought to the comfort or interest of any other human
being than himself. He was also dominated by the kind of nasty temper which so
reveals itself when let loose that its owner cannot control it even when it
would be distinctly to his advantage to do so.
Finding that he had
nothing to give in return for what he took as if it were his right, society
gradually began to cease to retain any lively recollection of his existence.
The trades-people he had borne himself loftily towards awakened to the fact
that he was the kind of man it was at once safe and wise to dun, and therefore
proceeded to make his life a burden to him. At his clubs he had never been a
member surrounded and rejoiced over when he made his appearance. The time came
when he began to fancy that he was rather edged away from, and he endeavoured
to sustain his dignity by being sulky and making caustic speeches when he was
approached. Driven occasionally down to Stornham by actual pressure of
circumstances, he found the outlook there more embittering still. Lady
Anstruthers laid the bareness of the land before him without any effort to
palliate unpleasantness. If he chose to stalk about and look glum, she could
sit still and call his attention to revolting truths which he could not deny.
She could point out to him that he had no money, and that tenants would not
stay in houses which were tumbling to pieces, and work land which had been
starved. She could tell him just how long a time had elapsed since wages had
been paid and accounts cleared off. And she had an engaging, unbiassed way of
seeming to drive these maddening details home by the mere manner of her
statement.
"You make the
whole thing as damned disagreeable as you can," Nigel would snarl.
"I merely state
facts," she would reply with acrid serenity.
A man who cannot keep up
his estate, pay his tailor or the rent of his lodgings in town, is in a strait
which may drive him to desperation. Sir Nigel Anstruthers borrowed some money,
went to New York and made his suit to nice little silly Rosalie Vanderpoel.
But the whole thing was
unexpectedly disappointing and surrounded by irritating circumstances. He found
himself face to face with a state of affairs such as he had not contemplated.
In England when a man married, certain practical matters could be inquired into
and arranged by solicitors, the amount of the prospective bride's fortune, the
allowances and settlements to be made, the position of the bridegroom with
regard to pecuniary matters. To put it simply, a man found out where he stood
and what he was to gain. But, at first to his sardonic entertainment and later
to his disgusted annoyance, Sir Nigel gradually discovered that in the matter
of marriage, Americans had an ingenuous tendency to believe in the sentimental
feelings of the parties concerned. The general impression seemed to be that a
man married purely for love, and that delicacy would make it impossible for him
to ask questions as to what his bride's parents were in a position to hand over
to him as a sort of indemnity for the loss of his bachelor freedom. Anstruthers
began to discover this fact before he had been many weeks in New York. He
reached the realisation of its existence by processes of exclusion and
inclusion, by hearing casual remarks people let drop, by asking roundabout and
careful questions, by leading both men and women to the innocent expounding of
certain points of view. Millionaires, it appeared, did not expect to make
allowances to men who married their daughters; young women, it transpired, did
not in the least realise that a man should be liberally endowed in payment for
assuming the duties of a husband. If rich fathers made allowances, they made
them to their daughters themselves, who disposed of them as they pleased. In
this case, of course, Sir Nigel privately argued with fine acumen, it became
the husband's business to see that what his wife pleased should be what most
agreeably coincided with his own views and conveniences.
His most illuminating
experience had been the hearing of some men, hard-headed, rich stockbrokers
with a vulgar sense of humour, enjoying themselves quite uproariously one night
at a club, over a story one of them was relating of an unsatisfactory German
son-in-law who had demanded an income. He was a man of small title, who had
married the narrator's daughter, and after some months spent in his
father-in-law's house, had felt it but proper that his financial position
should be put on a practical footing.
"He brought her
back after the bridal tour to make us a visit," said the storyteller, a
sharp-featured man with a quaint wry mouth, which seemed to express a
perpetual, repressed appreciation of passing events. "I had nothing to say
against that, because we were all glad to see her home and her mother had been
missing her. But weeks passed and months passed and there was no mention made
of them going over to settle in the Slosh we'd heard so much of, and in time it
came out that the Slosh thing"--Anstruthers realised with gall in his soul
that the "brute," as he called him, meant "Schloss," and
that his mispronunciation was at once a matter of humour and
derision--"wasn't his at all. It was his elder brother's. The whole lot of
them were counts and not one of them seemed to own a dime. The Slosh count
hadn't more than twenty-five cents and he wasn't the kind to deal any of it out
to his family. So Lily's count would have to go clerking in a dry goods store,
if he promised to support himself. But he didn't propose to do it. He thought
he'd got on to a soft thing. Of course we're an easy-going lot and we should
have stood him if he'd been a nice fellow. But he wasn't. Lily's mother used to
find her crying in her bedroom and it came out by degrees that it was because
Adolf had been quarrelling with her and saying sneering things about her
family. When her mother talked to him he was insulting. Then bills began to
come in and Lily was expected to get me to pay them. And they were not the kind
of bills a decent fellow calls on another man to pay. But I did it five or six
times to make it easy for her. I didn't tell her that they gave an older chap
than himself sidelights on the situation. But that didn't work well. He thought
I did it because I had to, and he began to feel free and easy about it, and
didn't try to cover up his tracks so much when he sent in a new lot. He was always
working Lily. He began to consider himself master of the house. He intimated
that a private carriage ought to be kept for them. He said it was beggarly that
he should have to consider the rest of the family when he wanted to go out.
When I got on to the situation, I began to enjoy it. I let him spread himself
for a while just to see what he would do. Good Lord! I couldn't have believed
that any fellow could have thought any other fellow could be such a fool as he
thought I was. He went perfectly crazy after a month or so and ordered me about
and patronised me as if I was a bootblack he meant to teach something to. So at
last I had a talk with Lily and told her I was going to put an end to it. Of
course she cried and was half frightened to death, but by that time he had
ill-used her so that she only wanted to get rid of him. So I sent for him and
had a talk with him in my office. I led him on to saying all he had on his
mind. He explained to me what a condescension it was for a man like himself to
marry a girl like Lily. He made a dignified, touching picture of all the
disadvantages of such an alliance and all the advantages they ought to bring in
exchange to the man who bore up under them. I rubbed my head and looked worried
every now and then and cleared my throat apologetically just to warm him up. I
can tell you that fellow felt happy, downright happy when he saw how humbly I
listened to him. He positively swelled up with hope and comfort. He thought I
was going to turn out well, real well. I was going to pay up just as a vulgar
New York father-in-law ought to do, and thank God for the blessed privilege.
Why, he was real eloquent about his blood and his ancestors and the
hoary-headed Slosh. So when he'd finished, I cleared my throat in a nervous,
ingratiating kind of way again and I asked him kind of anxiously what he
thought would be the proper thing for a base-born New York millionaire to do
under the circumstances--what he would approve of himself."
Sir Nigel was disgusted
to see the narrator twist his mouth into a sweet, shrewd, repressed grin even
as he expectorated into the nearest receptacle. The grin was greeted by a shout
of laughter from his companions.
"What did he say,
Stebbins?" someone cried.
"He said,"
explained Mr. Stebbins deliberately, "he said that an allowance was the
proper thing. He said that a man of his rank must have resources, and that it
wasn't dignified for him to have to ask his wife or his wife's father for money
when he wanted it. He said an allowance was what he felt he had a right to
expect. And then he twisted his moustache and said, 'what proposition' did I
make--what would I allow him?"
The storyteller's
hearers evidently knew him well. Their laughter was louder than before.
"Let's hear the
rest, Joe! Let's hear it! "
"Well,"
replied Mr. Stebbins almost thoughtfully, "I just got up and said, 'Well,
it won't take long for me to answer that. I've always been fond of my children,
and Lily is rather my pet. She's always had everything she wanted, and she
always shall. She's a good girl and she deserves it. I'll allow you----"
The significant deliberation of his drawl could scarcely be described.
"I'll allow you just five minutes to get out of this room, before I kick you
out, and if I kick you out of the room, I'll kick you down the stairs, and if I
kick you down the stairs, I shall have got my blood comfortably warmed up and
I'll kick you down the street and round the block and down to Hoboken, because
you're going to take the Steamer there and go back to the place you came from,
to the Slosh thing or whatever you call it. We haven't a damned bit of use for
you here.' And believe it or not, gentlemen----" looking round with the
wry-mouthed smile, "he took that passage and back he went. And Lily's
living with her mother and I mean to hold on to her."
Sir Nigel got up and
left the club when the story was finished. He took a long walk down Broadway,
gnawing his lip and holding his head in the air. He used blasphemous language
at intervals in a low voice. Some of it was addressed to his fate and some of
it to the vulgar mercantile coarseness and obtuseness of other people.
"They don't know
what they are talking of," he said. "It is unheard of. What do they
expect? I never thought of this. Damn it! I'm like a rat in a trap."
It was plain enough
that he could not arrange his fortune as he had anticipated when he decided to
begin to make love to little pink and white, doll-faced Rosy Vanderpoel. If he
began to demand monetary advantages in his dealing with his future wife's
people in their settlement of her fortune, he might arouse suspicion and
inquiry. He did not want inquiry either in connection with his own means or his
past manner of living. People who hated him would be sure to crop up with
stories of things better left alone. There were always meddling fools ready to
interfere.
His walk was long and
full of savage thinking. Once or twice as he realised what the
disinterestedness of his sentiments was supposed to be, a short laugh broke
from him which was rather like the snort of the Bishopess.
"I am supposed to
be moonstruck over a simpering American chit--moonstruck! Damn!" But when
he returned to his hotel he had made up his mind and was beginning to look over
the situation in evil cold blood. Matters must be settled without delay and he
was shrewd enough to realise that with his temper and its varied resources a
timid girl would not be difficult to manage. He had seen at an early stage of
their acquaintance that Rosy was greatly impressed by the superiority of his
bearing, that he could make her blush with embarassment when he conveyed to her
that she had made a mistake, that he could chill her miserably when he chose to
assume a lofty stiffness. A man's domestic armoury was filled with weapons if
he could make a woman feel gauche, inexperienced, in the wrong. When he was
safely married, he could pave the way to what he felt was the only practical
and feasible end. If he had been marrying a woman with more brains, she would be
more difficult to subdue, but with Rosalie Vanderpoel, processes were not
necessary. If you shocked, bewildered or frightened her with accusations,
sulks, or sneers, her light, innocent head was set in such a whirl that the
rest was easy. It was possible, upon the whole, that the thing might not turn
out so infernally ill after all. Supposing that it had been Bettina who had
been the marriageable one! Appreciating to the full the many reasons for
rejoicing that she had not been, he walked in gloomy reflection home.
WHEN the marriage took
place the event was accompanied by an ingenuously elate flourish of trumpets.
Miss Vanderpoel's frocks were multitudinous and wonderful, as also her jewels
purchased at Tiffany's. She carried a thousand trunks--more or less--across the
Atlantic. When the ship steamed away from the dock, the wharf was like a flower
garden in the blaze of brilliant and delicate attire worn by the bevy of
relatives and intimates who stood waving their handkerchiefs and laughingly
calling out farewell good wishes.
Sir Nigel's mental
attitude was not a sympathetic or admiring one as he stood by his bride's side
looking back. If Rosy's half happy, half tearful excitement had left her the
leisure to reflect on his expression, she would not have felt it encouraging.
"What a deuce of a
row Americans make," he said even before they were out of hearing of the
voices. "It will be a positive rest to be in a country where the women do
not cackle and shriek with laughter."
He said it with that
simple rudeness which at times professed to be almost impersonal, and which
Rosalie had usually tried to believe was the outcome of a kind of cool British
humour. But this time she started a little at his words.
"I suppose we do
make more noise than English people," she admitted a second or so later.
"I wonder why?" And without waiting for an answer--somewhat as if she
had not expected or quite wanted one--she leaned a little farther over the side
to look back, waving her small, fluttering handkerchief to the many still in
tumult on the wharf. She was not perceptive or quick enough to take offence, to
realise that the remark was significant and that Sir Nigel had already begun as
he meant to go on. It was far from being his intention to play the part of an
American husband, who was plainly a creature in whom no authority vested
itself. Americans let their women say and do anything, and were capable of
fetching and carrying for them. He had seen a man run upstairs for his wife's
wrap, cheerfully, without the least apparent sense that the service was the
part of a footman if there was one in the house, a parlour maid if there was
not. Sir Nigel had been brought up in the good Early Victorian days when
"a nice little woman to fetch your slippers for you" figured in
certain circles as domestic bliss. Girls were educated to fetch slippers as
retrievers were trained to go into the water after sticks, and terriers to
bring back balls thrown for them.
The new Lady
Anstruthers had, it supervened, several opportunities to obtain a new view of
her bridegroom's character before their voyage across the Atlantic was over. At
this period of the slower and more cumbrous weaving of the Shuttle, the world
had not yet awakened even to the possibilities of the ocean greyhound. An
Atlantic voyage at times was capable of offering to a bride and bridegroom days
enough to begin to glance into their future with a premonition of the waning of
the honeymoon, at least, and especially if they were not sea-proof, to wish
wearily that the first half of it were over. Rosalie was not weary, but she
began to be bewildered. As she had never been a clever girl or quick to
perceive, and had spent her life among women-indulging American men, she was
not prepared with any precedent which made her situation clear. The first time
Sir Nigel showed his temper to her she simply stared at him, her eyes looking
like those of a puzzled, questioning child. Then she broke into her nervous
little laugh, because she did not know what else to do. At his second outbreak
her stare was rather startled and she did not laugh.
Her first awakening was
to an anxious wonderment concerning certain moods of gloom, or what seemed to
be gloom, to which he seemed prone. As she lay in her steamer chair he would at
times march stiffly up and down the deck, apparently aware of no other
existence than his own, his features expressing a certain clouded resentment of
whose very unexplainableness she secretly stood in awe. She was not astute
enough, poor girl, to leave him alone, and when with innocent questionings she
endeavoured to discover his trouble, the greatest mystification she encountered
was that he had the power to make her feel that she was in some way taking a
liberty, and showing her lack of tact and perspicuity.
"Is anything the
matter, Nigel?" she asked at first, wondering if she were guilty of
silliness in trying to slip her hand into his. She was sure she had been when
he answered her.
"No," he said
chillingly.
"I don't believe you
are happy," she returned. "Somehow you seem so--so different."
"I have reasons
for being depressed," he replied, and it was with a stiff finality which
struck a note of warning to her, signifying that it would be better taste in
her to put an end to her simple efforts.
She vaguely felt
herself put in the wrong, and he preferred that it should be so. It was the
best form of preparation for any mood he might see that it might pay him to
show her in the future. He was, in fact, confronting disdainfully his position.
He had her on his hands and he was returning to his relations with no definite
advantage to exhibit as the result of having married her. She had been supplied
with an income but he had no control over it. It would not have been so if he
had not been in such straits that he had been afraid to risk his chance by
making a stand. To have a wife with money, a silly, sweet temper and no will of
her own, was of course better than to be penniless, head over heels in debt and
hemmed in by difficulties on every side. He had seen women trained to give in
to anything rather than be bullied in public, to accede in the end to any
demand rather than endure the shame of a certain kind of scene made before
servants, and a certain kind of insolence used to relatives and guests. The
quality he found most maddeningly irritating in Rosalie was her obviously
absolute unconsciousness of the fact that it was entirely natural and proper
that her resources should be in her husband's hands. He had, indeed, even in
these early days, made a tentative effort or so in the form of a suggestive
speech; he had given her openings to give him an opening to put things on a
practical basis, but she had never had the intelligence to see what he was
aiming at, and he had found himself almost floundering ungracefully in his
remarks, while she had looked at him without a sign of comprehension in her
simple, anxious blue eyes. The creature was actually trying to understand him
and could not. That was the worst of it, the blank wall of her unconsciousness,
her childlike belief that he was far too grand a personage to require anything.
These were the things he was thinking over when he walked up and down the deck
in unamiable solitariness. Rosy awakened to the amazed consciousness of the fact
that, instead of being pleased with the luxury and prettiness of her wardrobe
and appointments, he seemed to dislike and disdain them.
"You American
women change your clothes too much and think too much of them," was one of
his first amiable criticisms. "You spend more than well-bred women should
spend on mere dresses and bonnets. In New York it always strikes an Englishman
that the women look endimanché at whatever time of day you come across
them."
"Oh, Nigel!"
cried Rosy wofully. She could not think of anything more to say than, "Oh,
Nigel!"
"I am sorry to say
it is true," he replied loftily. That she was an American and a New Yorker
was being impressed upon poor little Lady Anstruthers in a new way--somehow as
if the mere cold statement of the fact put a fine edge of sarcasm to any
remark. She was of too innocent a loyalty to wish that she was neither the one
nor the other, but she did wish that Nigel was not so prejudiced against the
places and people she cared for so much.
She was sitting in her
stateroom enfolded in a dressing gown covered with cascades of lace, tied with
knots of embroidered ribbon, and her maid, Hannah, who admired her greatly, was
brushing her fair long hair with a gold-backed brush, ornamented with a
monogram of jewels.
If she had been a
French duchess of a piquant type, or an English one with an aquiline nose, she
would have been beyond criticism; if she had been a plump, over-fed woman, or
an ugly, ill-natured, gross one, she would have looked vulgar, but she was a
little, thin, fair New Yorker, and though she was not beyond criticism--if one
demanded high distinction-- she was pretty and nice to look at. But Nigel
Anstruthers would not allow this to her. His own tailors' bills being far in
arrears and his pocket disgustingly empty, the sight of her ingenuous
sumptuousness and the gay, accustomed simpleness of outlook with which she
accepted it as her natural right, irritated him and roused his venom. Bills
would remain unpaid if she was permitted to spend her money on this sort of
thing without any consideration for the requirements of other people.
He inhaled the air and
made a gesture of distaste.
"This sachet
business is rather overpowering," he said. "It is the sort of thing a
woman should be particularly discreet about."
"Oh, Nigel!"
cried the poor girl agitatedly. "Hannah, do go and call the steward to
open the windows. Is it really strong?" she implored as Hannah went out.
"How dreadful. It's only orris and I didn't know Hannah had put it in the
trunks."
"My dear
Rosalie," with a wave of the hand taking in both herself and her dressing
case, "it is all too strong."
"All--wh--what?"
gaspingly.
"The whole thing.
All that lace and love knot arrangement, the gold-backed brushes and scent
bottles with diamonds and rubies sticking in them."
"They--they were
wedding presents. They came from Tiffany's. Everyone thought them lovely."
"They look as if
they belonged to the dressing table of a French woman of the demi-monde. I feel
as if I had actually walked into the apartment of some notorious Parisian
soubrette."
Rosalie Vonderpoel was
a clean-minded little person, her people were of the clean-minded type,
therefore she did not understand all that this ironic speech implied, but she
gathered enough of its significance to cause her to turn first red and then
pale and then to burst into tears. She was crying and trying to conceal the
fact when Hannah returned. She bent her head and touched her eyes furtively
while her toilette was completed.
Sir Nigel had retired
from the scene, but he had done so feeling that he had planted a seed and
bestowed a practical lesson. He had, it is true, bestowed one, but again she
had not understood its significance and was only left bewildered and unhappy.
She began to be nervous and uncertain about herself and about his moods and
points of view. She had never been made to feel so at home. Everyone had been
kind to her and lenient to her lack of brilliancy. No one had expected her to
be brilliant, and she had been quite sweet-temperedly resigned to the fact that
she was not the kind of girl who shone either in society or elsewhere. She did
not resent the fact that she knew people said of her, "She isn't in the
least bit bright, Rosy Vanderpoel, but she's a nice, sweet little thing."
She had tried to be nice and sweet and had aspired to nothing higher.
But now that seemed so
much less than enough. Perhaps Nigel ought to have married one of the clever
ones, someone who would have known how to understand him and who would have
been more entertaining than she could be. Perhaps she was beginning to bore
him, perhaps he was finding her out and beginning to get tired. At this point
the always too ready tears would rise to her eyes and she would be overwhelmed
by a sense of homesickness. Often she cried herself silently to sleep, longing
for her mother--her nice, comfortable, ordinary mother, whom she had several
times felt Nigel had some difficulty in being unreservedly polite to--though he
had been polite on the surface.
By the time they landed
she had been living under so much strain in her effort to seem quite unchanged,
that she had lost her nerve. She did not feel well and was sometimes afraid
that she might do something silly and hysterical in spite of herself, begin to
cry for instance when there was really no explanation for her doing it. But
when she reached London the novelty of everything so excited her that she
thought she was going to be better, and then she said to herself it would be
proved to her that all her fears had been nonsense. This return of hope made
her quite light-spirited, and she was almost gay in her little outbursts of
delight and admiration as she drove about the streets with her husband. She did
not know that her ingenuous ignorance of things he had known all his life, her
rapture over common monuments of history, led him to say to himself that he
felt rather as if he were taking a housemaid to see a Lord Mayor's Show.
Before going to
Stornham Court they spent a few days in town. There had been no intention of
proclaiming their presence to the world, and they did not do so, but unluckily
certain tradesmen discovered the fact that Sir Nigel Anstruthers had returned
to England with the bride he had secured in New York. The conclusion to be
deduced from this circumstance was that the particular moment was a good one at
which to send in bills for "acct. rendered." The tradesmen quite
shared Anstruthers' point of view. Their reasoning was delightfully simple and
they were wholly unaware that it might have been called gross. A man over his
head and ears in debt naturally expected his creditors would be paid by the
young woman who had married him. America had in these days been so little
explored by the thrifty impecunious well-born that its ingenuous sentimentality
in certain matters was by no means comprehended.
By each post Sir Nigel
received numerous bills. Sometimes letters accompanied them, and once or twice
respectful but firm male persons brought them by hand and demanded interviews
which irritated Sir Nigel extremely. Given time to arrange matters with
Rosalie, to train her to some sense of her duty, he believed that the
"acct. rendered" could be wiped off, but he saw he must have time.
She was such a little fool. Again and again he was furious at the fate which
had forced him to take her.
The truth was that
Rosalie knew nothing whatever about unpaid bills. Reuben Vanderpoel's daughters
had never encountered an indignant tradesman in their lives. When they went
into "stores" they were received with unfeigned rapture. Everything
was dragged forth to be displayed to them, attendants waited to leap forth to
supply their smallest behest. They knew no other phase of existence than the
one in which one could buy anything one wanted and pay any price demanded for it.
Consequently Rosalie
did not recognise signs which would have been obviously recognisable by the
initiated. If Sir Nigel Anstruthers had been a nice young fellow who had loved
her, and he had been honest enough to make a clean breast of his difficulties,
she would have thrown herself into his arms and implored him effusively to make
use of all her available funds, and if the supply had been insufficient, would
have immediately written to her father for further donations, knowing that her
appeal would be responded to at once. But Sir Nigel Anstruthers cherished no
sentiment for any other individual than himself, and he had no intention of
explaining that his mere vanity had caused him to mislead her, that his rank
and estate counted for nothing and that he was in fact a pauper loaded with
dishonest debts. He wanted money, but he wanted it to be given to him as if he
conferred a favour by receiving it. It must be transferred to him as though it
were his by right. What did a man marry for? Therefore his wife's
unconsciousness that she was inflicting outrage upon him by her mere mental
attitude filled his being with slowly rising gall.
Poor Rosalie went
joyfully forth shopping after the manner of all newly arrived Americans. She
bought new toilettes and gewgaws and presents for her friends and relations in
New York, and each package which was delivered at the hotel added to Sir
Nigel's rage.
That the little
blockhead should be allowed to do what she liked with her money and that he
should not be able to forbid her! This he said to himself at intervals of five
minutes through the day--which led to another small episode.
"You are spending
a great deal of money," he said one morning in his condemnatory manner.
Rosalie looked up from the lace flounce which had just been delivered and gave
the little nervous laugh, which was becoming entirely uncertain of
propitiating.
"Am I?" she
answered. "They say all Americans spend a good deal."
"Your money ought
to be in proper hands and properly managed," he went on with cold
precision. "If you were an English woman, your husband would control
it."
"Would he?"
The simple, sweet-tempered obtuseness of her tone was an infuriating thing to
him. There was the usual shade of troubled surprise in her eyes as they met his.
I don't think men in
America ever do that. I don't believe the nice ones want to. You see they have
such a pride about always giving things to women, and taking care of them. I
believe a nice American man would break stones in the street rather than take
money from a woman--even his wife. I mean while he could work. Of course if he
was ill or had ill luck or anything like that, he wouldn't be so proud as not
to take it from the person who loved him most and wanted to help him. You do
sometimes hear of a man who won't work and lets his wife support him, but it's
very seldom, and they are always the low kind that other men look down on.
"Wanted to help
him." Sir Nigel selected the phrase and quoted it between puffs of the
cigar he held in his fine, rather cruel-looking hands, and his voice expressed
a not too subtle sneer. "A woman is not 'helping' her husband when she
gives him control of her fortune. She is only doing her duty and accepting her
proper position with regard to him. The law used to settle the thing
definitely."
"Did-did it?"
Rosy faltered weakly. She knew he was offended again and that she was once more
somehow in the wrong. So many things about her seemed to displease him, and
when he was displeased he always reminded her that she was stupidly,
objectionably guilty of not being an English woman.
Whatsoever it happened
to be, the fault she had committed out of her depth of ignorance, he did not
forget it. It was no habit of his to endeavour to dismiss offences. He
preferred to hold them in possession as if they were treasures and to turn them
over and over, in the mental seclusion which nourishes the growth of injuries,
since within its barriers there is no chance of their being palliated by the
apologies or explanations of the offender.
During their journey to
Stornham Court the next day he was in one of his black moods. Once in the
railway carriage he paid small attention to his wife, but sat rigidly reading
his Times, until about midway to their destination he descended at a station and
paid a visit to the buffet in the small refreshment room, after which he
settled himself to doze in an exceedingly unbecoming attitude, his travelling
cap pulled down, his rather heavy face congested with the dark flush Rosalie
had not yet learned was due to the fact that he had hastily tossed off two or
three whiskies and sodas. Though he was never either thick of utterance or
unsteady on his feet, whisky and soda formed an important factor in his
existence. When he was annoyed or dull he at once took the necessary
precautions against being overcome by these feelings, and the effect upon a
constitutionally evil temper was to transform it into an infernal one. The
night had been a bad one for Rosy. Such floods of homesick longing had
overpowered her that she had not been able to sleep. She had risen feeling
shaky and hysterical and her nervousness had been added to by her fear that
Nigel might observe her and make comment. Of course she told herself it was
natural that he should not wish her to appear at Stornham Court looking a pale,
pink-nosed little fright. Her efforts to be cheerful had indeed been somewhat
touching, but they had met with small encouragement.
She thought the
green-clothed country lovely as the train sped through it, and a lump rose in
her small throat because she knew she might have been so happy if she had not
been so frightened and miserable. The thing which had been dawning upon her
took clearer, more awful form. Incidents she had tried to explain and excuse to
herself, upon all sorts of futile, simple grounds, began to loom up before her
in something like their actual proportions. She had heard of men who had
changed their manner towards girls after they had married them, but she did not
know they had begun to change so soon. This was so early in the honeymoon to be
sitting in a railway carriage, in a corner remote from that occupied by a
bridegroom, who read his paper in what was obviously intentional, resentful
solitude. Emily Soame's father, she remembered it against her will, had been
obliged to get a divorce for Emily after her two years of wretched married
life. But Alfred Soames had been quite nice for six months at least. It seemed
as if all this must be a dream, one of those nightmare things, in which you
suddenly find yourself married to someone you cannot bear, and you don't know
how it happened, because you yourself have had nothing to do with the matter.
She felt that presently she must waken with a start and find herself breathing
fast, and panting out, half laughing, half crying, "Oh, I am so glad it's
not true! I am so glad it's not true!"
But this was true, and
there was Nigel. And she was in a new, unexplored world. Her little trembling
hands clutched each other. The happy, light girlish days full of ease and
friendliness and decency seemed gone forever. It was not Rosalie Vanderpoel who
pressed her colourless face against the glass of the window, looking out at the
flying trees; it was the wife of Nigel Anstruthers, and suddenly, by some
hideous magic, she had been snatched from the world to which she belonged and
was being dragged by a gaoler to a prison from which she did not know how to
escape. Already Nigel had managed to convey to her that in England a woman who
was married could do nothing to defend herself against her husband, and that to
endeavour to do anything was the last impossible touch of vulgar ignominy.
The vivid realisation
of the situation seized upon her like a possession as she glanced sideways at
her bridegroom and hurriedly glanced away again with a little hysterical
shudder. New York, good-tempered, lenient, free New York, was millions of miles
away and Nigel was so loathly near and--and so ugly. She had never known before
that he was so ugly, that his face was so heavy, his skin so thick and coarse
and his expression so evilly ill-tempered. She was not sufficiently analytical
to be conscious that she had with one bound leaped to the apalling point of
feeling uncontrollable physical abhorrence of the creature to whom she was
chained for life. She was terrified at finding herself forced to combat the
realisation that there were certain expressions of his countenance which made
her feel sick with repulsion. Her self-reproach also was as great as her
terror. He was her husband--her husband--and she was a wicked girl. She
repeated the words to herself again and again, but remotely she knew that when
she said, "He is my husband," that was the worst thing of all.
This inward struggle
was a bad preparation for any added misery, and when their railroad journey
terminated at Stornham Station she was met by new bewilderment.
The station itself was
a rustic place where wild roses climbed down a bank to meet the very train
itself. The station master's cottage had roses and clusters of lilies waving in
its tiny garden. The station master, a good-natured, red-faced man, came forward,
baring his head, to open the railroad carriage door with his own hand. Rosy
thought him delightful and bowed and smiled sweet-temperedly to him and to his
wife and little girls, who were curtseying at the garden gate. She was
sufficiently homesick to be actually grateful to them for their air of
welcoming her. But as she smiled she glanced furtively at Nigel to see if she
was doing exactly the right thing.
He himself was not
smiling and did not unbend even when the station master, who had known him from
his boyhood, felt at liberty to offer a deferential welcome.
"Happy to see you
home with her ladyship, Sir Nigel," he said; "very happy, if I may
say so."
Sir Nigel responded to
the respectful amiability with a half-military lifting of his right hand,
accompanied by a grunt.
"D'ye do,
Wells," he said, and strode past him to speak to the footman who had come
from Stornham Court with the carriage.
The new and nervous
little Lady Anstruthers, who was left to trot after her husband, smiled again
at the ruddy, kind-looking fellow, this time in conscious deprecation. In the
simplicity of her republican sympathy with a well-meaning fellow creature who
might feel himself snubbed, she could have shaken him by the hand. She had even
parted her lips to venture a word of civility when she was startled by hearing
Sir Nigel's voice raised in angry rating.
"Damned bad
management not to bring something else," she heard. "Kind of thing
you fellows are always doing."
She made her way to the
carriage, flurried again by not knowing whether she was doing right or wrong.
Sir Nigel had given her no instructions and she had not yet learned that when
he was in a certain humour there was equal fault in obeying or disobeying such
orders as he gave.
The carriage from the
Court--not in the least a new or smart equipage--was drawn up before the
entrance of the station and Sir Nigel was in a rage because the vehicle brought
for the luggage was too small to carry it all.
"Very sorry, Sir
Nigel," said the coachman, touching his hat two or three times in his
agitation. "Very sorry. The omnibus was a little out of order--the
springs, Sir Nigel--and I thought----"
"You
thought!" was the heated interruption. "What right had you to think,
damn it! You are not paid to think, you are paid to do your work properly. Here
are a lot of damned boxes which ought to go with us and--where's your
maid?" wheeling round upon his wife.
Rosalie turned towards
the woman, who was approaching from the waiting room.
"Hannah," she
said timorously.
"Drop those
confounded bundles," ordered Sir Nigel, "and show James the boxes her
ladyship is obliged to have this evening. Be quick about it and don't pick out
half a dozen. The cart can't take them."
Hannah looked
frightened. This sort of thing was new to her, too. She shuffled her packages
on to a seat and followed the footman to the luggage. Sir Nigel continued
rating the coachman. Any form of violent self-assertion was welcome to him at
any time, and when he was irritated he found it a distinct luxury to kick a dog
or throw a boot at a cat. The springs of the omnibus, he argued, had no right
to be broken when it was known that he was coming home. His anger was only
added to by the coachman's halting endeavours in his excuses to veil a fact he
knew his master was aware of, that everything at Stornham was more or less out
of order, and that dilapidations were the inevitable result of there being no
money to pay for repairs. The man leaned forward on his box and spoke at last
in a low tone.
"The bus has been
broken some time," he said. "It's--it's an expensive job, Sir Nigel.
Her ladyship thought it better to----" Sir Nigel turned white about the
mouth.
"Hold your
tongue," he commanded, and the coachman got red in the face, saluted,
biting his lips, and sat very stiff and upright on his box.
The station master
edged away uneasily and tried to look as if he were not listening. But Rosalie
could see that he could not help hearing, nor could the country people who had
been passengers by the train and who were collecting their belongings and
getting into their traps.
Lady Anstruthers was
ignored and remained standing while the scene went on. She could not help
recalling the manner in which she had been invariably received in New York on
her return from any journey, how she was met by comfortable, merry people and
taken care of at once. This was so strange, it was so queer, so different.
"Oh, never mind,
Nigel dear," she said at last, with innocent indiscretion. "It
doesn't really matter, you know."
Sir Nigel turned upon
her a blaze of haughty indignation.
"If you'll pardon
my saying so, it does matter," he said. "It matters confoundedly. Be
good enough to take your place in the carriage."
He moved to the
carriage door, and not too civilly put her in. She gasped a little for breath
as she sat down. He had spoken to her as if she had been an impertinent servant
who had taken a liberty. The poor girl was bewildered to the verge of panic.
When he had ended his tirade and took his place beside her he wore his most
haughtily intolerant air.
"May I request
that in future you will be good enough not to interfere when I am reproving my
servants," he remarked.
"I didn't mean to
interfere," she apologised tremulously.
"I don't know what
you meant. I only know what you did," was his response. "You American
women are too fond of cutting in. An Englishman can think for himself without
his wife's assistance."
The tears rose to her
eyes. The introduction of the international question overpowered her as always.
"Don't begin to be
hysterical," was the ameliorating tenderness with which he observed the
two hot salt drops which fell despite her. "I should scarcely wish to
present you to my mother bathed in tears."
She wiped the salt
drops hastily away and sat for a moment silent in the corner of the carriage.
Being wholly primitive and unanalytical, she was ashamed and began to blame
herself. He was right. She must not be silly because she was unused to things.
She ought not to be disturbed by trifles. She must try to be nice and look
cheerful. She made an effort and did no speak for a few minutes. When she had
recovered herself she tried again.
"English country
is so pretty," she said, when she thought she was quite sure that her
voice would not tremble. "I do so like the hedges and the darling little
red-roofed cottages."
It was an innocent
tentative at saying something agreeable which might propitiate him. She was
beginning to realise that she was continually making efforts to propitiate him.
But one of the forms of unpleasantness most enjoyable to him was the snubbing
of any gentle effort at palliating his mood. He condescended in this case no
response whatever, but merely continued staring contemptuously before him.
"It is so
picturesque, and so unlike America," was the pathetic little commonplace
she ventured next. "Ain't it, Nigel?"
He turned his head
slowly towards her, as if she had taken a new liberty in disturbing his
meditations.
"Wha--at?" he
drawled.
It was almost too much
for her to sustain herself under. Her courage collapsed.
"I was only saying
how pretty the cottages were," she faltered. "And that there's
nothing like this in America."
"You ended your
remark by adding, 'ain't it,' " her husband condescended. "There is
nothing like that in England. I shall ask you to do me the favour of leaving
Americanisms out of your conversation when you are in the society of English ladies
and gentlemen. It won't do."
"I didn't know I
said it," Rosy answered feebly.
"That is the
difficulty," was his response. "You never know, but educated people
do."
There was nothing more
to be said, at least for a girl who had never known what it was to be bullied.
This one felt like a beggar or a scullery maid, who, being rated by her master,
had not the refuge of being able to "give warning." She could never
give warning. The Atlantic Ocean was between her and those who had loved and
protected her all her short life, and the carriage was bearing her onwards to
the home in which she was to live alone as this man's companion to the end of
her existence.
She made no further
propitiatory efforts, but sat and stared in simple blankness at the country,
which seemed to increase in loveliness at each new point of view. Sometimes she
saw sweet wooded, rolling lands made lovelier by the homely farmhouses and
cottages enclosed and sheltered by thick hedges and trees; once or twice they
drove past a park enfolding a great house guarded by its huge sentinel oaks and
beeches; once the carriage passed through an adorable little village, where
children played on the green and a square-towered grey church seemed to watch
over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage. If she had been a
happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable friends, she
would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of admiration every five
minutes, but it had been driven home to her that to her present companion, to
whom nothing was new, her rapture would merely represent the crudeness which
had existed in contentment in a brown-stone house on a noisy thoroughfare,
through a life which had been passed tramping up and down numbered streets and
avenues.
They approached at last
a second village with a green, a grass-grown street and the irregular red-tiled
cottages, which to the unaccustomed eye seemed rather to represent studies for
sketches than absolute realities. The bells in the church tower broke forth
into a chime and people appeared at the doors of the cottages. The men touched
their foreheads as the carriage passed, and the children made bobbing curtsies.
Sir Nigel condescended to straighten himself a trifle in his seat, and
recognised the greetings with the stiff, half-military salute. The poor girl at
his side felt that he put as little feeling as possible into the movement, and
that if she herself had been a bowing villager she would almost have preferred
to be wholly ignored. She looked at him questioningly.
"Are they--must
I?" she began.
"Make some civil
recognition," answered Sir Nigel, as if he were instructing an ignorant
child. "It is customary."
So she bowed and tried
to smile, and the joyous clamour of the bells brought the awful lump into her
throat again. It reminded her of the ringing of the chimes at the New York
church on that day of her marriage, which had been so full of gay, luxurious
bustle, so crowded with wedding presents, and flowers, and warm-hearted,
affectionate congratulations, and good wishes uttered in merry American voices.
The park at Stornham
Court was large and beautiful and old. The trees were magnificent, and the
broad sweep of sward and rich dip of ferny dell all that the imagination could
desire. The Court itself was old, and many-gabled and mellow-red and fine.
Rosalie had learned from no precedent as yet that houses of its kind may
represent the apotheosis of discomfort and dilapidation within, and only become
more beautiful without. Tumbled-down chimneys and broken tiles, being clambered
over by tossing ivy, are pictures to delight the soul.
As she descended from
the carriage the girl was tremulous and uncertain of herself and much
overpowered by the unbending air of the man-servant who received her as if she
were a parcel in which it was no part of his duty to take the smallest
interest. As she mounted the stone steps she caught a glimpse of broad gloom
within the threshold, a big, square, dingy hall where some other servants were
drawn up in a row. She had read of something of the sort in English novels, and
she was suddenly embarrassed afresh by her realisation of the fact that she did
not know what to do and that if she made a mistake Nigel would never forgive
her.
An elderly woman came
out of a room opening into the hall. She was an ugly woman of a rigid carriage,
which, with the obvious intention of being severely majestic, was only
antagonistic. She had a flaccid chin, and was curiously like Nigel. She had
also his expression when he intended to be disagreeable. She was the Dowager
Lady Anstruthers, and being an entirely revolting old person at her best, she
objected extremely to the transatlantic bride who had made her a dowager,
though she was determinedly prepared to profit by any practical benefit likely
to accrue.
"Well,
Nigel," she said in a deep voice. "Here you are at last."
This was of course a
statement not to be refuted. She held out a leathern cheek, and as Sir Nigel
also presented his, their caress of greeting was a singular and not effusive
one.
"Is this your
wife?" she asked, giving Rosalie a bony hand. And as he did not
indignantly deny this to be the fact, she added, "How do you do?"
Rosalie murmured a
reply and tried to control herself by making another effort to swallow the lump
in her throat. But she could not swallow it. She had been keeping a desperate
hold on herself too long. The bewildered misery of her awakening, the
awkwardness of the public row at the station, the sulks which had filled the
carriage to repletion through all the long drive, and finally the jangling
bells which had so recalled that last joyous day at home--at home--had brought
her to a point where this meeting between mother and son--these two stony,
unpleasant creatures exchanging a reluctant rub of uninviting cheeks--as two
savages might have rubbed noses--proved the finishing impetus to hysteria. They
were so hideous, these two, and so ghastly comic and fantastic in their
unresponsive glumness, that the poor girl lost all hold upon herself and broke
into a trembling shriek of laughter.
"Oh!" she
gasped in terror at what she felt to be her indecent madness. "Oh!
how--how----" And then seeing Nigel's furious start, his mother's glare
and all the servants' alarmed stare at her, she rushed staggering to the only
creature she felt she knew--her maid Hannah, clutched her and broke down into
wild sobbing.
"Oh, take me
away!" she cried. "Oh, do! Oh, do! Oh, Hannah! Oh,
mother--mother!"
"Take your
mistress to her room," commanded Sir Nigel. "Go downstairs," he
called out to the servants. "Take her upstairs at once and throw water in
her face," to the excited Hannah.
And as the new Lady
Anstruthers was half led, half dragged, in humiliated hysteric disorder up the
staircase, he took his mother by the elbow, marched her into the nearest room
and shut the door. There they stood and stared at each other, breathing quick,
enraged breaths and looking particularly alike with their heavy-featured,
thick-skinned, infuriated faces.
It was the Dowager who
spoke first, and her whole voice and manner expressed all she intended that
they should, all the derision, dislike and scathing resignment to a grotesque
fate.
"Well," said
her ladyship. "So this is what you have brought home from America!"
AS the weeks passed at
Stornham Court the Atlantic Ocean seemed to Rosalie Anstruthers to widen
endlessly, and gay, happy, noisy New York to recede until it was as far away as
some memory of heaven. The girl had been born in the midst of the rattling,
rumbling bustle, and it had never struck her as assuming the character of
noise; she had only thought of it as being the cheerful confusion inseparable
from town. She had been secretly offended and hurt when strangers said that New
York was noisy and dirty; when they called it vulgar, she never wholly forgave
them. She was of the New Yorkers who adore their New York as Parisians adore
Paris and who feel that only within its beloved boundaries can the breath of
life be breathed. People were often too hot or too cold there, but there was
usually plenty of bright glaring sun, and the extremes of the weather had at
least something rather dramatic about them. There were dramatic incidents
connected with them, at any rate. People fell dead of sunstroke or were frozen
to death, and the newspapers were full of anecdotes during a "cold
snap" or a "torrid wave," which all made for excitement and
conversation.
But at Stornham the
rain seemed to young Lady Anstruthers to descend ceaselessly. The season was a
wet one, and when she rose in the morning and looked out over the huge stretch
of trees and sward she thought she always saw the rain falling either in
hopeless sheets or more hopeless drizzle. The occasions upon which this was a
dreary truth blotted out or blurred the exceptions, when in liquid ultramarine
deeps of sky, floated islands and mountains of snow-white fleece, of a beauty
of which she had before had no conception
In the English novels
she had read, places such as Stornham Court were always filled with "house
parties," made up of wonderful town wits and beauties, who provided
endless entertainment for each other, who played games, who hunted and shot
pheasants and shone in dazzling amateur theatricals. There were, however, no
visitors at Stornham, and there were in fact, no accommodations for any. There
were numberless bedrooms, but none really fit for guests to occupy. Carpets and
curtains were ancient and ragged, furniture was dilapidated, chimneys would not
draw, beds were falling to pieces. The Dowager Lady Anstruthers had never
either attracted desired, or been able to afford company. Her son's wife
suffered from the resulting boredom and unpopularity without being able to
comprehend the significance of the situation.
As the weeks dragged by
a few heavy carriages deposited at the Court a few callers. Some of the
visitors bore imposing titles, which made Rosalie very nervous and caused her
hastily to array herself to receive them in toilettes much too pretty and
delicate for the occasion. Her innocent idea was that she must do her husband
credit by appearing as "stylish" as possible. As a result she was
stared at, either with open disfavour, or with well-bred, furtive criticism,
and was described afterwards as being either "very American" or
"very over-dressed." When she had lived in huge rooms in Fifth
Avenue, Rosalie had changed her attire as many times a day as she had changed
her fancy; every hour had been filled with engagements and amusements; the
Vanderpoel carriages had driven up to the door and driven away again and again
through the mornings and afternoons and until midnight and later. Someone was
always going out or coming in. There had been in the big handsome house not
much more of an air of repose than one might expect to find at a railway
station; but the flurry, the coming and going, the calling and chatting had all
been cheery, amiable. At Stornham, Rosalie sat at breakfast before unchanging
boiled eggs, unfailing toast and unalterable broiled bacon, morning after
morning. Sir Nigel sat and munched over the newspapers, his mother, with an air
of relentless disapproval from a lofty height of both her food and companions,
disposed of her eggs and her rasher at Rosalie's right hand. She had
transferred to her daughter-in-law her previously occupied seat at the head of
the table. This had been done with a carefully prepared scene of intense though
correct disagreeableness, in which she had managed to convey all the rancour of
her dethroned spirit and her disapproval and disdain of international
alliances.
"It is of course
proper that you should sit at the head of your husband's table," she had
said, among other agreeable things." A woman having devoted her life to
her son must relinquish her position to the person he chooses to marry. If you
should have a son you will give up your position to his wife. Since Nigel has
married you, he has, of course, a right to expect that you will at least make
an effort to learn something of what is required of women of your position."
"Sit down,
Rosalie," said Nigel. "Of course you take the head of the table, and
naturally you must learn what is expected of my wife, but don't talk confounded
rubbish, mother, about devoting your life to your son. We have seen about as little
of each other as we could help. We never agreed." They were both bullies
and each made occasional efforts at bullying the other without any particular
result. But each could at least bully the other into intensified
unpleasantness.
The vicar's wife having
made her call of ceremony upon the new Lady Anstruthers, followed up the
acquaintance, and found her quite exotically unlike her mother-in-law, whose
charities one may be sure had neither been lavish nor dispensed by any hand
less impressive than her own. The younger woman was of wholly malleable
material. Her sympathies were easily awakened and her purse was well filled and
readily opened. Small families or large ones, newly born infants or newly
buried ones, old women with "bad legs" and old men who needed comforts,
equally touched her heart. She innocently bestowed sovereigns where an
Englishwoman would have known that half-crowns would have been sufficient. As
the vicaress was her almoner that lady felt her importance rapidly on the
increase. When she left a cottage saying, "I'll speak to young Lady
Anstruthers about you," the good woman of the house curtsied low and her
husband touched his forehead respectfully.
But this did not
advance the fortunes of Sir Nigel, who personally required of her very
different things. Two weeks after her arrival at Stornham, Rosalie began to see
that somehow she was regarded as a person almost impudently in the wrong. It
appeared that if she had been an English girl she would have been quite
different, that she would have been an advantage instead of a detriment. As an
American she was a detriment. That seemed to go without saying. She tried to do
everything she was told, and learn something from each cold insinuation. She
did not know that her very amenability and timidity were her undoing. Sir Nigel
and his mother thoroughly enjoyed themselves at her expense. They knew they
could say anything they chose, and that at the most she would only break down
into crying and afterwards apologise for being so badly behaved. If some practical,
strong-minded person had been near to defend her she might have been rescued
promptly and her tyrants routed. But she was a young girl, tender of heart and
weak of nature. She used to cry a great deal when she was alone, and when she
wrote to her mother she was too frightened to tell the truth concerning her
unhappiness.
"Oh, if I could
just see some of them!" she would wail to herself. "If I could just
see mother or father or anybody from New York! Oh, I know I shall never see New
York again, or Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Central Park--I never --never--never
shall!" And she would grovel among her pillows, burying her face and half
stifling herself lest her sobs should be heard. Her feeling for her husband had
become one of terror and repulsion. She was almost more afraid of his
patronising, affectionate moments than she was of his temper. His conjugal
condescensions made her feel vaguely-- without knowing why--as if she were some
lower order of little animal.
American women, he
said, had no conception of wifely duties and affection. He had a great deal to
say on the subject of wifely duty. It was part of her duty as a wife to be
entirely satisfied with his society, and to be completely happy in the pleasure
it afforded her. It was her wifely duty not to talk about her own family and
palpitatingly expect letters by every American mail. He objected intensely to
this letter writing and receiving, and his mother shared his prejudices.
"You have married
an Englishman," her ladyship said. "You have put it out of his power
to marry an Englishwoman, and the least consideration you can show is to let
New York and Nine-hundredth street remain upon the other side of the Atlantic
and not insist on dragging them into Stornham Court."
The Dowager Lady
Anstruthers was very fine in her picture of her mental condition, when she
realised, as she seemed periodically to do, that it was no longer possible for
her son to make a respectable marriage with a woman of his own nation. The
unadorned fact was that both she and Sir Nigel were infuriated by the
simplicity which made Rosalie slow in comprehending that it was proper that the
money her father allowed her should be placed in her husband's hands, and left
there with no indelicate questioning. If she had been an English girl matters
would have been made plain to her from the first and arranged satisfactorily
before her marriage. Sir Nigel's mother considered that he had played the fool,
and would not believe that New York fathers were such touchy, sentimental
idiots as not to know what was expected of them.
They wasted no time,
however, in coming to the point, and in a measure it was the vicaress who aided
them. Not she entirely, however.
Since her
mother-in-law's first mention of a possible son whose wife would eventually
thrust her from her seat at the head of the table, Rosalie had several times
heard this son referred to. It struck her that in England such things seemed
discussed with more freedom than in America. She had never heard a young
woman's possible family arranged for and made the subject of conversation in
the more crude atmosphere of New York. It made her feel rather awkward at
first. Then she began to realise that the son was part of her wifely duty also;
that she was expected to provide one, and that he was in some way expected to
provide for the estate--to rehabilitate it--and that this was because her
father, being a rich man, would provide for him. It had also struck her that in
England there was a tendency to expectation that someone would "provide"
for someone else, that relatives even by marriage were supposed to "make
allowances" on which it was quite proper for other persons to live.
Rosalie had been accustomed to a community in which even rich men worked, and
in which young and able-bodied men would have felt rather indignant if aunts or
uncles had thought it necessary to pension them off as if they had been
impotent paupers. It was Rosalie's son who was to be "provided for"
in this case, and who was to "provide for" his father.
"When you have a
son," her mother-in-law had remarked severely, "I suppose something
will be done for Nigel and the estate."
This had been said
before she had been ten days in the house, and had set her not-too-quick brain
working. She had already begun to see that life at Stornham Court was not the
luxurious affair it was in the house in Fifth Avenue. Things were shabby and
queer and not at all comfortable. Fires were not lighted because a day was
chilly and gloomy. She had once asked for one in her bedroom and her mother-in-law
had reproved her for indecent extravagance in a manner which took her breath
away.
"I suppose in
America you have your house at furnace heat in July," she said. "Mere
wastefulness and self-indulgence! That is why Americans are old women at twenty.
They are shrivelled and withered by the unhealthy lives they lead. Stuffing
themselves with sweets and hot bread and never breathing the fresh air."
Rosalie could not at
the moment recall any withered and shrivelled old women of twenty, but she blushed
and stammered as usual.
"It is never cold
enough for fires in July," she answered, "but we--we never think
fires extravagant when we are not comfortable without them."
"Coal must be
cheaper than it is in England," said her ladyship. "When you have a
daughter, I hope you do not expect to bring her up as girls are brought up in
New York."
This was the first time
Rosalie had heard of her daughter, and she was not ready enough to reply. She
naturally went into her room and cried again, wondering what her father and
mother would say if they knew that bedroom fires were considered vulgarly
extravagant by an impressive member of the British aristocracy.
She was not at all
strong at the time and was given to feeling chilly and miserable on wet, windy
days. She used to cry more than ever and was so desolate that there were days
when she used to go to the vicarage for companionship. On such days the vicar's
wife would entertain her with stories of the villagers' catastrophes, and she
would empty her purse upon the tea table and feel a little consoled because she
was the means of consoling someone else.
"I suppose it
gratifies your vanity to play the Lady Bountiful," Sir Nigel sneered one
evening, having heard in the village what she was doing.
"I--never thought
of such a thing," she stammered feebly. "Mrs. Brent said they were so
poor."
"You throw your
money about as if you were a child," said her mother-in-law. "It is a
pity it is not put in the hands of some person with discretion."
It had begun to dawn
upon Rosalie that her ladyship was deeply convinced that either herself or her
son would be admirably discreet custodians of the money referred to. And even
the dawning of this idea had frightened the girl. She was so inexperienced and
ignorant that she felt it might be possible that in England one's husband and
one's mother-in-law could do what they liked. It might be that they could take
possession of one's money as they seemed to take possession of one's self and
one's very soul. She would have been very glad to give them money, and had
indeed wondered frequently if she might dare to offer it to them, if they would
be outraged and insulted and slay her in their wrath at her purse-proud daring.
She had tried to invent ways in which she could approach the subject, but had
not been able to screw up her courage to any sticking point. She was so
overpowered by her consciousness that they seemed continually to intimate that
Americans with money were ostentatious and always laying stress upon the amount
of their possessions. She had no conception of the primeval simpleness of their
attitude in such matters, and that no ceremonies were necessary save the
process of transferring sufficiently large sums as though they were the mere
right of the recipients. She was taught to understand this later. In the
meantime, however, ready as she would have been to give large sums if she had
known how, she was terrified by the thought that it might be possible that she
could be deprived of her bank account and reduced to the condition of a sort of
dependent upon the humours of her lately acquired relations. She thought over
this a good deal, and would have found immense relief if she dared have
consulted anyone. But she could not make up her mind to reveal her unhappiness to
her people. She had been married so recently, everybody had thought her
marriage so delightful, she could not bear that her father and mother should be
distressed by knowing that she was wretched. She also reflected with misery
that New York would talk the matter over excitedly and that finally the
newspapers would get hold of the gossip. She could even imagine interviewers
calling at the house in Fifth Avenue and endeavouring to obtain particulars of
the situation. Her father would be angry and refuse to give them, but that
would make no difference; the newspapers would give them and everybody would
read what they said, whether it was true or not. She could not possibly write
facts, she thought, so her poor little letters were restrained and unlike herself,
and to the warm-hearted souls in New York, even appearing stiff and
unaffectionate, as if her aristocratic surroundings had chilled her love for
them. In fact, it became far from easy for her to write at all, since Sir Nigel
so disapproved of her interest in the American mail. His objections had indeed
taken the form of his feeling himself quite within his rights when he
occasionally intercepted letters from her relations, with a view of finding out
whether they contained criticisms of himself, which would betray that she had
been guilty of indiscreet confidences. He discovered that she had not
apparently been so guilty, but it was evident that there were moments when Mrs.
Vanderpoel was uneasy and disposed to ask anxious questions. When this occurred
he destroyed the letters, and as a result of this precaution on his part her
motherly queries seemed to be ignored, and she several times shed tears in the
belief that Rosy had grown so patrician that she was capable of snubbing her
mother in her resentment at feeling her privacy intruded upon and an unrefined
effusiveness shown.
"I just feel as if
she was beginning not to care about us at all, Betty," she said. "I
couldn't have believed it of Rosy. She was always such an affectionate
girl."
"I don't believe
it now," replied Betty sharply. "Rosy couldn't grow hateful and stuck
up. It's that nasty Nigel I know it is."
Sir Nigel's intention
was that there should be as little intercourse between Fifth Avenue and
Stornham Court as was possible. Among other things, he did not intend that a
lot of American relations should come tumbling in when they chose to cross the
Atlantic. He would not have it, and took discreet steps to prevent any accident
of the sort. He wrote to America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to
make himself civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law as to
discourage in them more than once their half-formed plan of paying a visit to
their child in her new home. He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to and
from New York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find that Rosalie
never condescended to make any response to her tentatives concerning her
possible visit, Rosalie herself was mystified by the fact that the journey
"to Europe" was never spoken of.
"I don't see why
they never seem to think of coming over," she said plaintively one day.
"They used to talk so much about it."
"They?"
ejaculated the Dowager Lady Anstruthers. "Whom may you mean?"
"Mother and father
and Betty and some of the others."
Her mother-in-law put
up her eye-glasses to stare at her.
"The whole
family?" she inquired.
"There are not so
many of them," Rosalie answered.
"A family is
always too many to descend upon a young woman when she is married,"
observed her ladyship unmovedly. Nigel glanced over the top of his Times.
"I may as well
tell you that it would not do at all," he put in.
"Why--why
not?" exclaimed Rosalie, aghast.
"Americans don't
do in English society," slightingly.
"But they are
coming over so much. They like London so-- all Americans like London."
"Do they?"
with a drawl which made Rosalie blush until the tears started to her eyes.
"I am afraid the sentiment is scarcely mutual."
Rosalie turned and fled
from the room. She turned and fled because she realised that she should burst
out crying if she waited to hear another word, and she realised that of late
she seemed always to be bursting out crying before one or the other of those
two. She could not help it. They always seemed to be implying something
slighting or scathing. They were always putting her in the wrong and hurting
her feelings.
The day was damp and
chill, but she put on her hat and ran out into the park. She went down the
avenue and turned into a coppice. There, among the wet bracken, she sank down
on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree and huddled herself in a small heap, her
head on her arms, actually wailing.
"Oh, mother! Oh,
mother!" she cried hysterically. "Oh, I do wish you would come. I'm
so cold, mother; I'm so ill! I cant bear it! It seems as if you'd forgotten all
about me! You're all so happy in New York that perhaps you have forgotten--
perhaps you have! Oh, don't, mother--don't! "
It was a month later
that through the vicar's wife she reached a discovery and a climax. She had
heard one morning from this lady of a misfortune which had befallen a small
farmer. It was a misfortune which was an actual catastrophe to a man in his
position. His house had caught fire during a gale of wind and the fire had
spread to the outbuildings and rickyard and swept away all his belongings, his
house, his furniture, his hayricks, and stored grain, and even his few cows and
horses. He had been a poor, hard-working fellow, and his small insurance had
lapsed the day before the fire. He was absolutely ruined, and with his wife and
six children stood face to face with beggary and starvation.
Rosalie Anstruthers
entered the vicarage to find the poor woman who was his companion in calamity
sobbing in the hall. A child of a few weeks was in her arms, and two small
creatures clung crying to her skirts.
"We've worked
hard," she wept; "we have, ma'am. Father, he's always been steady,
an' up early an' late. P'r'aps it's the Lord's 'and, as you say, ma'am, but
we've been decent people an' never missed church when we could 'elp it--father
didn't deserve it--that he didn't."
She was heartbroken in
her downtrodden hopelessness. Rosalie literally quaked with sympathy. She
poured forth her pity in such words as the poor woman had never heard spoken by
a great lady to a humble creature like herself. The villagers found the new
Lady Anstruthers' interviews with them curiously simple and suggestive of an
equality they could not understand. Stornham was a conservative old village,
where the distinction between the gentry and the peasants was clearly marked.
The cottagers were puzzled by Sir Nigel's wife, but they decided that she was
kind, if unusual.
As Rosalie talked to
the farmer's wife she longed for her father's presence. She had remembered a
time when a man in his employ had lost his all by fire, the small house he had
just made his last payment upon having been burned to the ground. He had lost
one of his children in the fire, and the details had been heartrending. The
entire Vanderpoel household had wept on hearing them, and Mr. Vanderpoel had
drawn a cheque which had seemed like a fortune to the sufferer. A new house had
been bought, and Mrs. Vanderpoel and her daughters and friends had bestowed
furniture and clothing enough to make the family comfortable to the verge of
luxury.
"See, you poor
thing," said Rosalie, glowing with memories of this incident, her homesick
young soul comforted by the mere likeness in the two calamities. "I
brought my cheque book with me because I meant to help you. A man worked for my
father had his house burned, just as yours was, and my father made everything
all right for him again. I'll make it all right for you; I'll make you a cheque
for a hundred pounds now, and then when your husband begins to build I'll give
him some more."
The woman gasped for
breath and turned pale. She was frightened. It really seemed as if her ladyship
must have lost her wits a little. She could not mean this. The vicaress turned
pale also.
"Lady
Anstruthers," she said, "Lady Anstruthers, it--it is too much. Sir
Nigel----"
"Too much!"
exclaimed Rosalie. "They have lost everything, you know; their hayricks
and cattle as well as their house; I guess it won't be half enough."
Mrs. Brent dragged her
into the vicar's study and talked to her. She tried to explain that in English
villages such things were not done in a manner so casual, as if they were the
mere result of unconsidered feeling, as if they were quite natural things, such
as any human person might do. When Rosalie cried: "But why not--why not?
They ought to be." Mrs. Brent could not seem to make herself quite clear.
Rosalie only gathered in a bewildered way that there ought to be more ceremony,
more deliberation, more holding off, before a person of rank indulged in such
munificence. The recipient ought to be made to feel it more, to understand
fully what a great thing was being done.
"They will think
you will do anything for them."
"So I will,"
said young Lady Anstruthers, "if I have the money when they are in such
awful trouble. Suppose we lost everything in the world and there were people
who could easily help us and wouldn't?"
"You and Sir
Nigel--that is quite different," said Mrs. Brent. "I am afraid that
if you do not discuss the matter and ask advice from your husband and
mother-in-law they will be very much offended."
"If I were doing
it with their money they would have the right to be," replied Rosalie,
with entire ingenuousness. "I wouldn't presume to do such a thing as that.
That wouldn't be right, of course."
"They will be
angry with me," said the vicaress awkwardly. This queer, silly girl, who
seemed to see nothing in the right light, frequently made her feel awkward.
Mrs. Brent told her husband that she appeared to have no sense of dignity or
proper appreciation of her position.
The wife of the farmer,
John Wilson, carried away the cheque, quite stunned. She was breathless with
amazement and turned rather faint with excitement, bewilderment and her sense
of relief. She had to sit down in the vicarage kitchen for a few minutes and
drink a glass of the thin vicarage beer.
Rosalie promised that
she would discuss the matter and ask advice when she returned to the Court.
Just as she left the house Mrs. Brent suddenly remembered something she had
forgotten.
"The Wilson
trouble completely drove it out of my mind," she said. "It was a
stupid mistake of the postboy's. He left a letter of yours among mine when he
came this morning. It was most careless. I shall speak to his father about it.
It might have been important that you should receive it early."
When she saw the letter
Rosalie uttered an exclamation. It was addressed in her father's handwriting.
"Oh!" she
cried. "It's from father! And the postmark is Havre. What does it
mean?"
She was so excited that
she almost forgot to express her thanks. Her heart leaped up in her throat.
Could they have come over from America--could they? Why was it written from
Havre? Could they be near her?
She walked along the
road choked with ecstatic, laughing sobs. Her hand shook so that she could
scarcely tear open the envelope; she tore a corner of the letter, and when the
sheet was spread open her eyes were full of wild, delighted tears, which made
it impossible for her to see for the moment. But she swept the tears away and
read this:
DEAR DAUGHTER:
It seems as if we had
had pretty bad luck in not seeing you. We had counted on it very much, and your
mother feels it all the more because she is weak after her illness. We don't
quite understand why you did not seem to know about her having had diphtheria
in Paris. You did not answer Betty's letter. Perhaps it missed you in some way.
Things do sometimes go wrong in the mail, and several times your mother has
thought a letter has been lost. She thought so because you seemed to forget to
refer to things. We came over to leave Betty at a French school and we had
expected to visit you later. But your mother fell ill of diphtheria and not
hearing from you seemed to make her homesick, so we decided to return to New
York by the next steamer. I ran over to London, however, to make some inquiries
about you, and on the first day I arrived I met your husband in Bond Street. He
at once explained to me that you had gone to a house party at some castle in
Scotland, and said you were well and enjoying yourself very much, and he was on
his way to join you. I am sorry, daughter, that it has turned out that we could
not see each other. It seems a long time since you left us. But I am very glad,
however, that you are so well and really like English life. If we had time for
it I am sure it would be delightful. Your mother sends her love and wants very
much to hear of all you are doing and enjoying. Hoping that we may have better
luck the next time we cross--
Your affectionate father,
REUBEN L. VANDERPOEL. Rosalie
found herself running breathlessly up the avenue. She was clutching the letter
still in her hand, and staggering from side to side. Now and then she uttered
horrible little short cries, like an animal's. She ran and ran, seeing nothing,
and now and then with the clenched hand in which the letter was crushed
striking a sharp blow at her breast.
She stumbled up the big
stone steps she had mounted on the day she was brought home as a bride. Her
dress caught her feet and she fell on her knees and scrambled up again,
gasping; she dashed across the huge dark hall, and, hurling herself against the
door of the morning room, appeared, dishevelled, haggard-eyed, and with scarlet
patches on her wild, white face, before the Dowager, who started angrily to her
feet:
"Where is Nigel?
Where is Nigel?" she cried out frenziedly.
"What in heaven's
name do you mean by such manners?" demanded her ladyship. "Apologise
at once!"
"Where is Nigel?
Nigel! Nigel!" the girl raved. "I will see him--I will--I will see
him!"
She who had been the
mildest of sweet-tempered creatures all her life had suddenly gone almost
insane with heartbroken, hysteric grief and rage. She did not know what she was
saying and doing; she only realised in an agony of despair that she was a thing
caught in a trap; that these people had her in their power, and that they had
tricked and lied to her and kept her apart from what her girl's heart so cried
out to and longed for. Her father, her mother, her little sister; they had been
near her and had been lied to and sent away
"You are quite
mad, you violent, uncontrolled creature!" cried the Dowager furiously.
"You ought to be put in a straitjacket and drenched with cold water."
Then the door opened
again and Nigel strode in. He was in riding dress and was breathless and livid
with anger. He was in a nice mood to confront a wife on the verge of screaming
hysterics. After a bad half hour with his steward, who had been talking of
impending disasters, he had heard by chance of Wilson's conflagration and the
hundred-pound cheque. He had galloped home at the top of his horse's speed.
"Here is your wife
raving mad," cried out his mother.
Rosalie staggered
across the room to him. She held up her hand clenching the letter and shook it
at him.
"My mother and
father have been here," she shrieked. My mother has been ill. They wanted
to come to see me. You knew and you kept it from me. You told my father lies
--lies--hideous lies! You said I was away in Scotland-- enjoying myself--when I
was here and dying with homesickness. You made them think I did not care for
them--or for New York! You have killed me! Why did you do such a wicked thing!
He looked at her with
glaring eyes. If a man born a gentleman is ever in the mood to kick his wife to
death, as costermongers do, he was in that mood. He had lost control over
himself as completely as she had, and while she was only a desperate, hysteric
girl, he was a violent man.
"I did it because
I did not mean to have them here," he said. "I did it because I won't
have them here."
"They shall
come," she quavered shrilly in her wildness. "They shall come to see
me. They are my own father and mother, and I will have them."
He caught her arm in
such a grip that she must have thought he would break it, if she could have
thought or felt anything.
"No, you will not
have them," he ground forth between his teeth. "You will do as I
order you and learn to behave yourself as a decent married woman should. You
will learn to obey your husband and respect his wishes and control your
devilish American temper."
"They have
gone--gone!" wailed Rosalie. "You sent them away! My father, my
mother, my sister!"
"Stop your
indecent ravings!" ordered Sir Nigel, shaking her. "I will not submit
to be disgraced before the servants."
"Put your hand
over her mouth, Nigel," cried his mother. "The very scullery maids
will hear."
She was as infuriated
as her son. And, indeed, to behold civilised human beings in the state of
uncontrolled violence these three had reached was a sight to shudder at.
"I won't
stop," cried the girl. "Why did you take me away from everything--I
was quite happy. Everybody was kind to me. I loved people, I had everything. No
one ever-- ever--ever ill-used anyone----"
Sir Nigel clutched her
arm more brutally still and shook her with absolute violence. Her hair broke
loose and fell about her awful little distorted, sobbing face.
"I did not take
you to give you an opportunity to display your vulgar ostentation by throwing
away hundred-pound cheques to villagers," he said. "I didn't take you
to give you the position of a lady and be made a fool of by you."
"You have ruined
him," burst forth his mother. "You have put it out of his power to
marry an Englishwoman who would have known it was her duty to give something in
return for his name and protection."
Her ladyship had begun
to rave also, and as mother and son were of equal violence when they had ceased
to control themselves, Rosalie began to find herself enlightened unsparingly.
She and her people were vulgar sharpers. They had trapped a gentleman into a
low American marriage and had not the decency to pay for what they had got. If
she had been an Englishwoman, well born, and of decent breeding, all her
fortune would have been properly transferred to her husband and he would have
had the dispensing of it. Her husband would have been in the position to
control her expenditure and see that she did not make a fool of herself. As it
was she was the derision of all decent people, of all people who had been
properly brought up and knew what was in good taste and of good morality.
First it was the
Dowager who poured forth, and then it was Sir Nigel. They broke in on each
other, they interrupted one another with exclamations and interpolations. They
had so far lost themselves that they did not know they became grotesque in the
violence of their fury. Rosalie's brain whirled. Her hysteria mounted and mounted.
She stared first at one and then at the other, gasping and sobbing by turns;
she swayed on her feet and clutched at a chair.
"I did not
know," she broke forth at last, trying to make her voice heard in the
storm. "I never understood. I knew something made you hate me, but I
didn't know you were angry about money." She laughed tremulously and
wildly. "I would have given it to you--father would have given you
some--if you had been good to me." The laugh became hysterical beyond her
management. Peal after peal broke from her, she shook all over with her ghastly
merriment, sobbing at one and the same time.
"Oh! oh! oh!"
she shrieked. "You see, I thought you were so aristocratic. I wouldn't
have dared to think of such a thing. I thought an English gentleman--an English
gentleman-- oh! oh! to think it was all because I did not give you money--just
common dollars and cents that--that I daren't offer to a decent American who
could work for himself."
Sir Nigel sprang at
her. He struck her with his open hand upon the cheek, and as she reeled she
held up her small, feverish, shaking hand, laughing more wildly than before.
"You ought not to
strike me," she cried. "You oughtn't! You don't know how valuable I
am. Perhaps----" with a little, crazy scream--"perhaps I might have a
son."
She fell in a
shuddering heap, and as she dropped she struck heavily against the protruding
end of an oak chest and lay upon the floor, her arms flung out and limp, as if
she were a dead thing.
IN the course of twelve
years the Shuttle had woven steadily and--its movements lubricated by time and
custom--with increasing rapidity. Threads of commerce it caught up and shot to
and fro, with threads of literature and art, threads of life drawn from one
shore to the other and back again, until they were bound in the fabric of its
weaving. Coldness there had been between both lands, broad divergence of taste
and thought, argument across seas, sometimes resentment, but the web in Fate's
hands broadened and strengthened and held fast. Coldness faintly warmed despite
itself, taste and thought drawn into nearer contact, reflecting upon their
divergences, grew into tolerance and the knowledge that the diverging, seen
more clearly, was not so broad; argument coming within speaking distance
reasoned itself to logical and practical conclusions. Problems which had
stirred anger began to find solutions. Books, in the first place, did perhaps
more than all else. Cheap, pirated editions of English works, much quarrelled
over by authors and publishers, being scattered over the land, brought before
American eyes soft, home-like pictures of places which were, after all was said
and done, the homes of those who read of them, at least in the sense of having
been the birthplaces of fathers or grandfathers. Some subtle, far-reaching
power of nature caused a stirring of the blood, a vague, unexpressed yearning
and lingering over pages which depicted sweet, green lanes, broad acres rich
with centuries of nourishment and care; grey church towers, red roofs, and
village children playing before cottage doors. None of these things were new to
those who pondered over them, kinsmen had dwelt on memories of them in their
fireside talk, and their children had seen them in fancy and in dreams. Old
grievances having had time to fade away and take on less poignant colour, the
stirring of the blood stirred also imaginations, and wakened something akin to
homesickness, though no man called the feeling by its name. And this, perhaps,
was the strongest cord the Shuttle wove and was the true meaning of its power.
Being drawn by it, Americans in increasing numbers turned their faces towards
the older land. Gradually it was discovered that it was the simplest affair in
the world to drive down to the wharves and take a steamer which landed one,
after a more or less interesting voyage, in Liverpool, or at some other
convenient port. From there one went to London, or Paris, or Rome; in fact,
whithersoever one's fancy guided, but first or last it always led the traveller
to the treading of green, velvet English turf. And once standing on such
velvet, both men and women, looking about them, felt, despite themselves, the
strange old thrill which some of them half resented and some warmly loved.
In the course of twelve
years, a length of time which will transform a little girl wearing a short
frock into a young woman wearing a long one, the pace of life and the ordering
of society may become so altered as to appear amazing when one finds time to
reflect on the subject. But one does not often find time. Changes occur so
gradually that one scarcely observes them, or so swiftly that they take the
form of a kind of amazed shock which one gets over as quickly as one
experiences it and realises that its cause is already a fixed fact.
In the United States of
America, which have not yet acquired the serene sense of conservative
self-satisfaction and repose which centuries of age may bestow, the spirit of
life itself is the aspiration for change. Ambition itself only means the
insistence on change. Each day is to be better than yesterday fuller of plans,
of briskness, of initiative. Each to-day demands of to-morrow new men, new
minds, new work. A to-day which has not launched new ships, explored new countries,
constructed new buildings, added stories to old ones, may consider itself a
failure, unworthy even of being consigned to the limbo of respectable
yesterdays. Such a country lives by leaps and bounds, and the ten years which
followed the marriage of Reuben Vanderpoel's eldest daughter made many such
bounds and leaps. They were years which initiated and established international
social relations in a manner which caused them to incorporate themselves with
the history of both countries. As America discovered Europe, that continent
discovered America. American beauties began to appear in English drawing-rooms
and Continental salons. They were presented at court and commented upon in the
Row and the Bois. Their little transatlantic tricks of speech and their mots
were repeated with gusto. It became understood that they were amusing and
amazing. Americans "came in" as the heroes and heroines of novels and
stories. Punch delighted in them vastly. Shopkeepers and hotel proprietors
stocked, furnished, and provisioned for them. They spent money enormously and
were singularly indifferent (at the outset) under imposition. They "came
over" in a manner as epoch-making, though less war-like than that of
William the Conqueror.
International marriages
ceased to be a novelty. As Bettina Vanderpoel grew up, she grew up, so to
speak, in the midst of them. She saw her country, its people, its newspapers,
its literature, innocently rejoiced by the alliances its charming young women
contracted with foreign rank. She saw it affectionately, gleefully, rubbing its
hands over its duchesses, its countesses, its miladies. The American Eagle
spread its wings and flapped them sometimes a trifle, over this new but so
natural and inevitable triumph of its virgins. It was of course only
"American" that such things should happen. America ruled the
universe, and its women ruled America, bullying it a little, prettily, perhaps.
What could be more a matter of course than that American women, being aided by
adoring fathers, brothers and husbands, sumptuously to ship themselves to other
lands, should begin to rule these lands also? Betty, in her growing up, heard
all this intimated. At twelve years old, though she had detested Rosalie's
marriage, she had rather liked to hear people talk of the picturesqueness of
places like Stornham Court, and of the life led by women of rank in their
houses in town and country. Such talk nearly always involved the description of
things and people, whose colour and tone had only reached her through the
medium of books, most frequently fiction.
She was, however, of an
unusually observing mind, even as a child, and the time came when she realised
that the national bird spread its wings less proudly when the subject of
international matches was touched upon, and even at such times showed signs of
restlessness. Now and then things had not turned out as they appeared to
promise; two or three seemingly brilliant unions had resulted in disaster. She
had not understood all the details the newspapers cheerfully provided, but it
was clear to her that more than one previously envied young woman had had
practical reasons for discovering that she had made an astonishingly bad
bargain. This being the case, she used frequently to ponder over the case of
Rosy--Rosy! who had been swept away from them and swallowed up, as it seemed,
by that other and older world. She was in certain ways a silent child, and no
one but herself knew how little she had forgotten Rosy, how often she pondered
over her, how sometimes she had lain awake in the night and puzzled out lines
of argument concerning her and things which might be true.
The one grief of poor
Mrs. Vanderpoel's life had been the apparent estrangement of her eldest child.
After her first six months in England Lady Anstruthers' letters had become
fewer and farther between, and had given so little information connected with
herself that affectionate curiosity became discouraged. Sir Nigel's brief and
rare epistles revealed so little desire for any relationship with his wife's
family that gradually Rosy's image seemed to fade into far distance and become
fainter with the passing of each month. It seemed almost an incredible thing,
when they allowed themselves to think of it, but no member of the family had
ever been to Stornham Court. Two or three efforts to arrange a visit had been
made, but on each occasion had failed through some apparently accidental cause.
Once Lady Anstruthers had been away, once a letter had seemingly failed to
reach her, once her children had had scarlet fever and the orders of the
physicians in attendance had been stringent in regard to visitors, even
relatives who did not fear contagion.
If she had been living
in New York and her children had been ill I should have been with her all the
time," poor Mrs. Vanderpoel had said with tears. "Rosy's changed
awfully, somehow. Her letters don't sound a bit like she used to be. It seems
as if she just doesn't care to see her mother and father.
Betty had frowned a
good deal and thought intensely in secret. She did not believe that Rosy was
ashamed of her relations. She remembered, however, it is true, that Clara
Newell (who had been a schoolmate) had become very super-fine and indifferent
to her family after her marriage to an aristocratic and learned German. Hers
had been one of the successful alliances, and after living a few years in
Berlin she had quite looked down upon New Yorkers, and had made herself
exceedingly unpopular during her one brief visit to her relatives. She seemed
to think her father and mother undignified and uncultivated, and she
disapproved entirely of her sisters dress and bearing. She said that they had
no distinction of manner and that all their interests were frivolous and
unenlightened.
"But Clara always
was a conceited girl," thought Betty. "She was always patronising
people, and Rosy was only pretty and sweet. She always said herself that she
had no brains. But she had a heart."
After the lapse of a
few years there had been no further discussion of plans for visiting Stornham.
Rosalie had become so remote as to appear almost unreachable. She had been
presented at Court, she had had three children, the Dowager Lady Anstruthers
had died. Once she had written to her father to ask for a large sum of money,
which he had sent to her, because she seemed to want it very much. She required
it to pay off certain debts on the estate and spoke touchingly of her boy who
would inherit.
"He is a delicate
boy, father," she wrote, "and I don't want the estate to come to him
burdened."
When she received the
money she wrote gratefully of the generosity shown her, but she spoke very
vaguely of the prospect of their seeing each other in the future. It was as if
she felt her own remoteness even more than they felt it themselves.
In the meantime Bettina
had been taken to France and placed at school there. The resulting experience
was an enlightening one, far more illuminating to the quick-witted American
child than it would have been to an English, French, or German one, who would
not have had so much to learn, and probably would not have been so quick at the
learning.
Betty Vanderpoel knew
nothing which was not American, and only vaguely a few things which were not of
New York. She had lived in Fifth Avenue, attended school in a numbered street
near her own home, played in and been driven round Central Park. She had spent
the hot months of the summer in places up the Hudson, or on Long Island, and
such resorts of pleasure. She had believed implicitly in all she saw and knew.
She had been surrounded by wealth and decent good nature throughout her
existence, and had enjoyed her life far too much to admit of any doubt that
America was the most perfect country in the world, Americans the cleverest and
most amusing people, and that other nations were a little out of it, and
consequently sufficiently scant of resource to render pity without condemnation
a natural sentiment in connection with one's occasional thoughts of them.
But hers was a
mentality by no means ordinary. Inheritance in her nature had combined with
circumstances, as it has a habit of doing in all human beings. But in her case
the combinations were unusual and produced a result somewhat remarkable. The
quality of brains which, in the first Reuben Vanderpoel had expressed itself in
the marvellously successful planning and carrying to their ends of commercial
and financial schemes, the absolute genius of penetration and calculation of
the sordid and uneducated little trader in skins and barterer of goods, having
filtered through two generations of gradual education and refinement of
existence, which was no longer that of the mere trader, had been transformed in
the great-granddaughter into keen, clear sight, level-headed perceptiveness and
a logical sense of values. As the first Reuben had known by instinct the values
of pelts and lands, Bettina knew by instinct the values of qualities, of
brains, of hearts, of circumstances, and the incidents which affect them. She
was as unaware of the significance of her great possession as were those around
her. Nevertheless it was an unerring thing. As a mere child, unformed and
uneducated by life, she had not been one of the small creatures to be deceived
or flattered.
"She's an awfully
smart little thing, that Betty," her New York aunts and cousins often
remarked. "She seems to see what people mean, it doesn't matter what they
say. She likes people you would not expect her to like, and then again she
sometimes doesn't care the least for people who are thought awfully
attractive."
As has been already
intimated, the child was crude enough and not particularly well bred, but her
small brain had always been at work, and each day of her life recorded for her
valuable impressions. The page of her young mind had ceased to be a blank much
earlier than is usual.
The comparing of these
impressions with such as she received when her life in the French school was
new afforded her active mental exercise
She began with natural,
secret indignation and rebellion. There was no other American pupil in the establishment
besides herself. But for the fact that the name of Vanderpoel represented
wealth so enormous as to amount to a sort of rank in itself, Bettina would not
have been received. The proprietress of the institution had gravely disquieting
doubts of the propriety of America. Her pupils were not accustomed to freedom
of opinions and customs. An American child might either consciously or
unconsciously introduce them. As this must be guarded against, Betty's first
few months at the school were not agreeable to her. She was supervised and
expurgated, as it were. Special Sisters were told off to converse and walk with
her, and she soon perceived that conversations were not only French lessons in
disguise, but were lectures on ethics, morals, and good manners, imperfectly
concealed by the mask and domino of amiable entertainment. She translated into
English after the following manner the facts her swift young perceptions
gathered. There were things it was so inelegant to say that only the most
impossible persons said them; there were things it was so inexcusable to do
that when done their inexcusability assumed the proportions of a crime. There
were movements, expressions, points of view, which one must avoid as one would
avoid the plague. And they were all things, acts, expressions, attitudes of
mind which Bettina had been familiar with from her infancy, and which she was
well aware were considered almost entirely harmless and unobjectionable in New
York, in her beloved New York, which was the centre of the world, which was
bigger, richer, gayer, more admirable than any other city known upon the earth.
If she had not so loved
it, if she had ever dreamed of the existence of any other place as being
absolutely necessary, she would not have felt the thing so bitterly. But it
seemed to her that all these amiable diatribes in exquisite French were
directed at her New York, and it must be admitted that she was humiliated and
enraged. It was a personal, indeed, a family matter. Her father, her mother,
her relatives, and friends were all in some degree exactly the kind of persons
whose speech, habits, and opinions she must conscientiously avoid. But for the
instinct of summing up values, circumstances, and intentions, it is probable
that she would have lost her head, let loose her temper and her tongue, and
have become insubordinate. But the quickness of perception which had revealed
practical potentialities to old Reuben Vanderpoel, revealed to her the value of
French which was perfectly fluent, a voice which was musical, movements which
were grace, manners which had a still beauty, and comparing these things with
others less charming she listened and restrained herself, learning, marking,
and inwardly digesting with a cleverness most enviable.
Among her fellow
pensionnaires she met with discomforting illuminations, which were fine
discipline also, though if she herself had been a less intellectual creature
they might have been embittering. Without doubt Betty, even at twelve years,
was intellectual. Hers was the practical working intellect which begins duty at
birth and does not lay down its tools because the sun sets. The little and big
girls who wrote their exercises at her side did not deliberately enlighten her,
but she learned from them in vague ways that it was not New York which was the
centre of the earth, but Paris, or Berlin, Madrid, London, or Rome. Paris and
London were perhaps more calmly positive of themselves than other capitals, and
were a little inclined to smile at the lack of seriousness in other claims. But
one strange fact was more predominant than any other, and this was that New
York was not counted as a civilised centre at all; it had no particular
existence. Nobody expressed this rudely; in fact, it did not acquire the form
of actual statement at any time. It was merely revealed by amiable and
ingenuous unconsciousness of the circumstance that such a part of the world
expected to be regarded or referred to at all. Betty began early to realise
that as her companions did not talk of Timbuctoo or Zanzibar, so they did not
talk of New York. Stockholm or Amsterdam seemed, despite their smallness, to be
considered. No one denied the presence of Zanzibar on the map, but as it
conveyed nothing more than the impression of being a mere geographical fact,
there was no reason why one should dwell on it in conversation. Remembering all
she had left behind, the crowded streets, the brilliant shop windows, the buzz
of individual people, there were moments when Betty ground her strong little
teeth. She wanted to express all these things, to call out, to explain, and
command recognition for them. But her cleverness showed to her that argument or
protestation would be useless. She could not make such hearers understand.
There were girls whose interest in America was founded on their impression that
magnificent Indian chieftains in blankets and feathers stalked about the
streets of the towns, and that Betty's own thick black hair had been handed
down to her by some beautiful Minnehaha or Pocahontas. When first she was approached
by timid, tentative questionings revealing this point of view, Betty felt hot
and answered with unamiable curtness. No, there were no red Indians in New
York. There had been no red Indians in her family. She had neither grandmothers
nor aunts who were squaws, if they meant that.
She felt so scornfully,
so disgustedly indignant at their benighted ignorance, that she knew she
behaved very well in saying so little in reply. She could have said so much,
but whatsoever she had said would have conveyed nothing to them, so she thought
it all out alone. She went over the whole ground and little realised how much
she was teaching herself as she turned and tossed in her narrow, spotlessly
white bed at night, arguing, comparing, drawing deductions from what she knew
and did not know of the two continents. Her childish anger, combining itself
with the practical, alert brain of Reuben Vanderpoel the first, developed in
her a logical reasoning power which led her to arrive at many an excellent and
curiously mature conclusion. The result was finely educational. All the more so
that in her fevered desire for justification of the things she loved, she began
to read books such as little girls do not usually take interest in. She found
some difficulty in obtaining them at first, but a letter or two written to her
father obtained for her permission to read what she chose. The third Reuben
Vanderpoel was deeply fond of his younger daughter, and felt in secret a
profound admiration for her, which was saved from becoming too obvious by the
ever present American sense of humour.
"Betty seems to be
going in for politics," he said after reading the letter containing her
request and her first list of books. "She's about as mad as she can be at
the ignorance of the French girls about America and Americans. She wants to
fill up on solid facts, so that she can come out strong in argument. She's got
an understanding of the power of solid facts that would be a fortune to her if
she were a man."
It was no doubt her
understanding of the power of facts which led her to learn everything well and
to develop in many directions. She began to dip into political and historical
volumes because she was furious, and wished to be able to refute idiocy, but
she found herself continuing to read because she was interested in a way she
had not expected. She began to see things. Once she made a remark which was
prophetic. She made it in answer to a guileless observation concerning the gold
mines with which Boston was supposed to be enriched.
"You don't know
anything about America, you others," she said. "But you will
know!"
"Do you think it
will become the fashion to travel in America?" asked a German girl.
"Perhaps,"
said Betty. "But--it isn't so much that you will go to America. I believe
it will come to you. It's like that--America. It doesn't stand still. It goes
and gets what it wants."
She laughed as she
ended, and so did the other girls. But in ten years' time, when they were young
women, some of them married, some of them court beauties, one of them recalled
this speech to another, whom she encountered in an important house in St.
Petersburg, the wife of the celebrated diplomat who was its owner being an
American woman.
Bettina Vanderpoel's
education was a rather fine thing. She herself had more to do with it than
girls usually have to do with their own training. In a few months' time those
in authority in the French school found that it was not necessary to supervise
and expurgate her. She learned with an interested rapacity which was at once
unusual and amazing. And she evidently did not learn from books alone. Her
voice, as an organ, had been musical and full from babyhood. It began to
modulate itself and to express things most voices are incapable of expressing.
She had been so built by nature that the carriage of her head and limbs was
good to behold. She acquired a harmony of movement which caused her to lose no
shade of grace and spirit. Her eyes were full of thought, of speculation, and
intentness.
"She thinks a
great deal for one so young," was said of her frequently by one or the
other of her teachers. One finally went further and added, "She has
genius."
This was true. She had
genius, but it was not specialised. It was not genius which expressed itself
through any one art. It was a genius for life, for living herself, for aiding
others to live, for vivifying mere existence. She herself was, however, aware
only of an eagerness of temperament, a passion for seeing, doing, and gaining
knowledge. Everything interested her, everybody was suggestive and more or less
enlightening.
Her relatives thought
her original in her fancies. They called them fancies because she was so young.
Fortunately for her, there was no reason why she should not be gratified. Most
girls preferred to spend their holidays on the Continent. She elected to return
to America every alternate year. She enjoyed the voyage and she liked the
entire change of atmosphere and people.
"It makes me like
both places more," she said to her father when she was thirteen. "It
makes me see things."
Her father discovered
that she saw everything. She was the pleasure of his life. He was attracted
greatly by the interest she exhibited in all orders of things. He saw her make
bold, ingenuous plunges into all waters, without any apparent consciousness
that the scraps of knowledge she brought to the surface were unusual
possessions for a schoolgirl. She had young views on the politics and commerce
of different countries, as she had views on their literature. When Reuben
Vanderpoel swooped across the American continent on journeys of thousands of
miles, taking her as a companion, he discovered that he actually placed a sort
of confidence in her summing up of men and schemes. He took her to see mines
and railroads and those who worked them, and he talked them over with her
afterward, half with a sense of humour, half with a sense of finding comfort in
her intelligent comprehension of all he said.
She enjoyed herself
immensely and gained a strong picturesqueness of character. After an American
holiday she used to return to France, Germany, or Italy, with a renewed zest of
feeling for all things romantic and antique. After a few years in the French
convent she asked that she might be sent to Germany.
"I am gradually
changing into a French girl," she wrote to her father. "One morning I
found I was thinking it would be nice to go into a convent, and another day I
almost entirely agreed with one of the girls who was declaiming against her
brother who had fallen in love with a Californian. You had better take me away
and send me to Germany.
Reuben Vanderpoel
laughed. He understood Betty much better than most of her relations did. He
knew when seriousness underlay her jests and his respect for her seriousness
was great. He sent her to school in Germany. During the early years of her
schooldays Betty had observed that America appeared upon the whole to be
regarded by her schoolfellows principally as a place to which the more
unfortunate among the peasantry emigrated as steerage passengers when things
could become no worse for them in their own country. The United States was not
mentally detached from any other portion of the huge Western Continent. Quite
well-educated persons spoke casually of individuals having "gone to
America," as if there were no particular difference between Brazil and
Massachusetts.
"I wonder if you
ever saw my cousin Gaston," a French girl once asked her as they sat at
their desks. "He became very poor through ill living. He was quite without
money and he went to America."
"To New
York?" inquired Bettina.
"I am not sure.
The town is called Concepcion."
"That is not in
the United States," Betty answered disdainfully. "It is in
Chili."
She dragged her atlas
towards her and found the place.
"See," she
said. "It is thousands of miles from New York." Her companion was a
near-sighted, rather slow girl. She peered at the map, drawing a line with her
finger from New York to Concepcion.
"Yes, they are at
a great distance from one another," she admitted, "but they are both
in America."
"But not both in
the United States," cried Betty. "French girls always seem to think
that North and South America are the same, that they are both the United
States."
"Yes," said
the slow girl with deliberation. "We do make odd mistakes sometimes."
To which she added with entire innocence of any ironic intention. "But you
Americans, you seem to feel the United States, your New York, to be all
America.
Betty started a little
and flushed. During a few minutes of rapid reflection she sat bolt upright at
her desk and looked straight before her. Her mentality was of the order which
is capable of making discoveries concerning itself as well as concerning
others. She had never thought of this view of the matter before, but it was
quite true. To passionate young patriots such as herself at least, that portion
of the map covered by the United States was America. She suddenly saw also that
to her New York had been America. Fifth Avenue Broadway, Central Park, even
Tiffany's had been "America." She laughed and reddened a shade as she
put the atlas aside having recorded a new idea. She had found out that it was
not only Europeans who were local, which was a discovery of some importance to
her fervid youth.
Because she thought so
often of Rosalie, her attention was, during the passing years, naturally
attracted by the many things she heard of such marriages as were made by
Americans with men of other countries than their own. She discovered that
notwithstanding certain commercial views of matrimony, all foreigners who
united themselves with American heiresses were not the entire brutes primitive
prejudice might lead one to imagine. There were rather one-sided alliances
which proved themselves far from happy. The Cousin Gaston, for instance,
brought home a bride whose fortune rebuilt and refurnished his dilapidated château
and who ended by making of him a well-behaved and cheery country gentleman not
at all to be despised in his amiable, if light-minded good nature and good
spirits. His wife, fortunately, was not a young woman who yearned for
sentiment. She was a nice-tempered, practical American girl, who adored French
country life and knew how to amuse and manage her husband. It was a genial sort
of ménage and yet though this was an undeniable fact, Bettina observed that
when the union was spoken of it was always referred to with a certain tone
which conveyed that though one did not exactly complain of its having been
undesirable, it was not quite what Gaston might have expected. His wife had
money and was good-natured, but there were limitations to one's appreciation of
a marriage in which husband and wife were not on the same plane.
"She is an
excellent person, and it has been good for Gaston," said Bettina's friend.
"We like her, but she is not--she is not----" She paused there,
evidently seeing that the remark was unlucky. Bettina, who was still in short
frocks, took her up.
"What is she
not?" she asked.
"Ah!--it is
difficult to explain--to Americans. It is really not exactly a fault. But she
is not of his world."
"But if he does
not like that," said Bettina coolly, "why did he let her buy him and
pay for him?"
It was young and
brutal, but there were times when the business perspicuity of the first Reuben
Vanderpoel, combining with the fiery, wounded spirit of his young descendant,
rendered Bettina brutal. She saw certain unadorned facts with unsparing young
eyes and wanted to state them. After her frocks were lengthened, she learned
how to state them with more fineness of phrase, but even then she was sometimes
still rather unsparing.
In this case her
companion, who was not fiery of temperament, only coloured slightly.
"It was not quite
that," she answered. "Gaston really is fond of her. She amuses him,
and he says she is far cleverer than he is."
But there were unions
less satisfactory, and Bettina had opportunities to reflect upon these also.
The English and Continental papers did not give enthusiastic, detailed
descriptions of the marriages New York journals dwelt upon with such delight.
They were passed over with a paragraph. When Betty heard them spoken of in
France, Germany or Italy, she observed that they were not, as a rule, spoken of
respectfully. It seemed to her that the bridegrooms were, in conversation,
treated by their equals with scant respect. It appeared that there had always
been some extremely practical reason for the passion which had led them to the
altar. One generally gathered that they or their estates were very much out at
elbow, and frequently their characters were not considered admirable by their
relatives and acquaintances. Some had been rather cold shouldered in certain
capitals on account of embarrassing little, or big, stories. Some had spent
their patrimonies in riotous living. Those who had merely begun by coming into
impoverished estates, and had later attenuated their resources by comparatively
decent follies, were of the more desirable order. By the time she was nineteen,
Bettina had felt the blood surge in her veins more than once when she heard
some comments on alliances over which she had seen her compatriots glow with
affectionate delight.
It was time Ludlow
married some girl with money," she heard said of one such union. "He
had been playing the fool ever since he came into the estate. Horses and a lot
of stupid women. He had come some awful croppers during the last ten years.
Good-enough looking girl, they tell me--the American he has married--tremendous
lot of money. Couldn't have picked it up on this side. English young women of
fortune are not looking for that kind of thing. Poor old Billy wasn't good
enough.'
Bettina told the story
to her father when they next met. She had grown into a tall young creature by
this time. Her low, full voice was like a bell and was capable of ringing forth
some fine, mellow tones of irony
"And in America we
are pleased," she said, "and flatter ourselves that we are receiving
the proper tribute of adoration of our American wit and beauty. We plume
ourselves on our conquests.
"No, Betty,"
said her father, and his reflective deliberation had meaning. "There are a
lot of us who don't plume ourselves particularly in these days. We are not as
innocent as we were when this sort of thing began. We are not as innocent as we
were when Rosy was married." And he sighed and rubbed his forehead with
the handle of his pen. "Not as innocent as we were when Rosy was
married," he repeated.
Bettina went to him and
slid her fine young arm round his neck. It was a long, slim, round arm with a
wonderful power to caress in its curves. She kissed Vanderpoel's lined cheek.
"Have you had time
to think much about Rosy?" she said.
"I've not had
time, but I've done it," he answered. "Anything that hurts your
mother hurts me. Sometimes she begins to cry in her sleep, and when I wake her
she tells me she has been dreaming that she has seen Rosy."
"I have had time
to think of her," said Bettina. "I have heard so much of these
things. I was at school in Germany when Annie Butterfield and Baron von
Steindahl were married. I heard it talked about there, and then my mother sent
me some American papers."
She laughed a little,
and for a moment her laugh did not sound like a girl's.
"Well, it's turned
out badly enough," her father commented. "The papers had plenty to say
about it later. There wasn't much he was too good to do to his wife,
apparently."
"There was nothing
too bad for him to do before he had a wife," said Bettina. "He was
black. It was an insolence that he should have dared to speak to Annie
Butterfield. Somebody ought to have beaten him."
"He beat her
instead."
"Yes, and I think
his family thought it quite natural. They said that she was so vulgar and
American that she exasperated Frederick beyond endurance. She was not geboren,
that was it." She laughed her severe little laugh again. "Perhaps we
shall get tired in time," she added. "I think we are learning. If it
is made a matter of business quite open and aboveboard, it will be fair. You
know, father, you always said that I was businesslike."
There was interested
curiosity in Vanderpoel's steady look at her. There were times when he felt
that Betty's summing up of things was well worth listening to. He saw that now
she was in one of her moods when it would pay one to hear her out. She held her
chin up a little, and her face took on a fine stillness at once sweet and
unrelenting. She was very good to look at in such moments.
"Yes," he
answered, "you have a particularly level head for a girl."
"Well," she
went on. "What I see is that these things are not business, and they ought
to be. If a man comes to a rich American girl and says, 'I and my title are for
sale. Will you buy us?' If the girl is--is that kind of a girl and wants that
kind of man, she can look them both over and say, 'Yes, I will buy you,' and it
can be arranged. He will not return the money if he is unsatisfactory, but she
cannot complain that she has been deceived. She can only complain of that when
he pretends that he asks her to marry him because he wants her for his wife, because
he would want her for his wife if she were as poor as himself. Let it be
understood that he is property for sale, let her make sure that he is the kind
of property she wants to buy. Then, if, when they are married, he is brutal or
impudent, or his people are brutal or impudent, she can say, 'I will forfeit
the purchase money, but I will not forfeit myself. I will not stay with you.'
"
"They would not
like to hear you say that, Betty," said her father, rubbing his chin
reflectively.
"No," she
answered. "Neither the girl nor the man would like it, and it is their
business, not mine. But it is practical and would prevent silly mistakes. It
would prevent the girls being laughed at. It is when they are flattered by the
choice made of them that they are laughed at. No one can sneer at a man or
woman for buying what they think they want, and throwing it aside if it turns
out a bad bargain."
She had seated herself
near her father. She rested her elbow slightly on the table and her chin in the
hollow of her hand. She was a beautiful young creature. She had a soft curving
mouth, and a soft curving cheek which was warm rose. Taken in conjunction with
those young charms, her next words had an air of incongruity.
"You think I am
hard," she said. "When I think of these things I am hard--as hard as
nails. That is an Americanism, but it is a good expression. I am angry for
America. If we are sordid and undignified, let us get what we pay for and make
the others acknowledge that we have paid."
She did not smile, nor
did her father. Mr. Vanderpoel, on the contrary, sighed. He had a dreary
suspicion that Rosy, at least, had not received what she had paid for, and he
knew she had not been in the least aware that she had paid or that she was
expected to do so. Several times during the last few years he had thought that
if he had not been so hard worked, if he had had time, he would have seriously
investigated the case of Rosy. But who is not aware that the profession of
multimillionaire does not allow of any swerving from duty or of any interests
requiring leisure?
"I wonder,
Betty," he said quite deliberately, "if you know how handsome you
are?"
"Yes,"
answered Bettina. "I think so. And I am tall. It is the fashion to be tall
now. It was Early Victorian to be little. The Queen brought in the 'dear little
woman,' and now the type has gone out."
"They will come to
look at you pretty soon," said Vanderpoel. "What shall you say
then?"
"I?" said
Bettina, and her voice sounded particularly low and mellow. "I have a little
monomania, father. Some people have a monomania for one thing and some for
another. Mine is for not taking a bargain from the ducal remnant counter."
TO Bettina Vanderpoel
had been given, to an extraordinary extent, the extraordinary thing which is
called beauty--which is a thing entirely set apart from mere good looks or
prettiness. This thing is extraordinary because, if statistics were taken, the
result would probably be the discovery that not three human beings in a million
really possess it. That it should be bestowed at all--since it is so
rare--seems as unfair a thing as appears to the mere mortal mind the bestowal
of unbounded wealth, since it quite as inevitably places the life of its owner
upon an abnormal plane. There are millions of pretty women, and billions of
personable men, but the man or woman of entire physical beauty may cross one's
pathway only once in a lifetime-- or not at all. In the latter case it is
natural to doubt the absolute truth of the rumours that the thing exists. The
abnormal creature seems a mere freak of nature and may chance to be angel,
criminal, total insipidity, virago or enchanter, but let such an one enter a
room or appear in the street, and heads must turn, eyes light and follow, souls
yearn or envy, or sink under the discouragement of comparison. With the
complete harmony and perfect balance of the singular thing, it would be folly
for the rest of the world to compete. A human being who had lived in poverty
for half a lifetime, might, if suddenly endowed with limitless fortune, retain,
to a certain extent, balance of mind; but the same creature having lived the
same number of years a wholly unlovely thing, suddenly awakening to the
possession of entire physical beauty, might find the strain upon pure sanity
greater and the balance less easy to preserve. The relief from the conscious or
unconscious tension bred by the sense of imperfection, the calm surety of the fearlessness
of meeting in any eye a look not lighted by pleasure, would be less normal than
the knowledge that no wish need remain unfulfilled, no fancy ungratified. Even
at sixteen Betty was a long-limbed young nymph whose small head, set high on a
fine slim column of throat, might well have been crowned with the garland of
some goddess of health and the joy of life. She was light and swift, and being
a creature of long lines and tender curves, there was pleasure in the mere
seeing her move. The cut of her spirited lip, and delicate nostril, made for a
profile at which one turned to look more than once, despite one's self. Her
hair was soft and black and repeated its colour in the extravagant lashes of
her childhood, which made mysterious the changeful dense blue of her eyes. They
were eyes with laughter in them and pride, and a suggestion of many deep things
yet unstirred. She was rather unusually tall, and her body had the suppleness
of a young bamboo. The deep corners of her red mouth curled generously, and the
chin, melting into the fine line of the lovely throat, was at once strong and
soft and lovely. She was a creature of harmony, warm richness of colour, and
brilliantly alluring life.
When her school days
were over she returned to New York and gave herself into her mother's hands.
Her mother's kindness of heart and sweet-tempered lovingness were touching
things to Bettina. In the midst of her millions Mrs. Vanderpoel was wholly
unworldly. Bettina knew that she felt a perpetual homesickness when she allowed
herself to think of the daughter who seemed lost to her, and the girl's
realisation of this caused her to wish to be especially affectionate and
amenable. She was glad that she was tall and beautiful, not merely because such
physical gifts added to the colour and agreeableness of life, but because hers
gave comfort and happiness to her mother. To Mrs. Vanderpoel, to introduce to
the world the loveliest débutante of many years was to be launched into a new
future. To concern one's self about her exquisite wardrobe was to have an
enlivening occupation. To see her surrounded, to watch eyes as they followed
her, to hear her praised, was to feel something of the happiness she had known
in those younger days when New York had been less advanced in its news and
methods, and slim little blonde Rosalie had come out in white tulle and waltzed
like a fairy with a hundred partners.
"I wonder what
Rosy looks like now," the poor woman said involuntarily one day. Bettina
was not a fairy. When her mother uttered her exclamation Bettina was on the
point of going out, and as she stood near her, wrapped in splendid furs, she
had the air of a Russian princess.
"She could not
have worn the things you do, Betty, said the affectionate maternal creature.
"She was such a little, slight thing. But she was very pretty. I wonder if
twelve years have changed her much?"
Betty turned towards
her rather suddenly.
"Mother," she
said, "sometime, before very long, I am going to see."
"To see!"
exclaimed Mrs. Vanderpoel. "To see Rosy!"
"Yes," Betty
answered. "I have a plan. I have never told you of it, but I have been
thinking over it ever since I was fifteen years old."
She went to her mother
and kissed her. She wore a becoming but resolute expression.
"We will not talk
about it now," she said. "There are some things I must find
out."
When she had left the
room, which she did almost immediately, Mrs. Vanderpoel sat down and cried. She
nearly always shed a few tears when anyone touched upon the subject of Rosy. On
her desk were some photographs. One was of Rosy as a little girl with long
hair, one was of Lady Anstruthers in her wedding dress, and one was of Sir
Nigel.
"I never felt as
if I quite liked him," she said, looking at this last, "but I suppose
she does, or she would not be so happy that she could forget her mother and
sister.
There was another
picture she looked at. Rosalie had sent it with the letter she wrote to her
father after he had forwarded the money she asked for. It was a little study in
water colours of the head of her boy. It was nothing but a head, the shoulders
being fancifully draped, but the face was a peculiar one. It was over-mature,
and unlovely, but for a mouth at once pathetic and sweet.
"He is not a
pretty child," sighed Mrs. Vanderpoel. "I should have thought Rosy
would have had pretty babies. Ughtred is more like his father than his
mother."
She spoke to her
husband later, of what Betty had said.
"What do you think
she has in her mind, Reuben?" she asked.
"What Betty has in
her mind is usually good sense," was his response. "She will begin to
talk to me about it presently. I shall not ask questions yet. She is probably
thinking: things over.
She was, in truth,
thinking things over, as she had been doing for some time. She had asked
questions on several occasions of English people she had met abroad. But a
schoolgirl cannot ask many questions, and though she had once met someone who
knew Sir Nigel Anstruthers, it was a person who did not know him well, for the
reason that she had not desired to increase her slight acquaintance. This lady
was the aunt of one of Bettina's fellow pupils, and she was not aware of the
girl's relationship to Sir Nigel. What Betty gathered was that her
brother-in-law was regarded as a decidedly bad lot, that since his marriage to
some American girl he had seemed to have money which he spent in riotous
living, and that the wife, who was said to be a silly creature, was kept in the
country, either because her husband did not want her in London, or because she
preferred to stay at Stornham. About the wife no one appeared to know anything,
in fact.
"She is rather a
fool, I believe, and Sir Nigel Anstruthers is the kind of man a simpleton would
be obliged to submit to," Bettina had heard the lady say.
Her own reflections
upon these comments had led her through various paths of thought. She could
recall Rosalie's girlhood, and what she herself, as an unconsciously observing
child, had known of her character. She remembered the simple impressionability
of her mind. She had been the most amenable little creature in the world. Her
yielding amiability could always be counted upon as a factor by the
calculating; sweet-tempered to weakness, she could be beguiled or distressed
into any course the desires of others dictated. An ill-tempered or self-pitying
person could alter any line of conduct she herself wished to pursue.
"She was neither
clever nor strong-minded," Betty said to herself. A man like Sir Nigel
Anstruthers could make what he chose of her. I wonder what he has done to
her?"
Of one thing she
thought she was sure. This was that Rosalie's aloofness from her family was the
result of his design. She comprehended, in her maturer years, the dislike of
her childhood. She remembered a certain look in his face which she had
detested. She had not known then that it was the look of a rather clever brute,
who was malignant, but she knew now.
"He used to hate
us all," she said to herself. "He did not mean to know us when he had
taken Rosalie away, and he did not intend that she should know us."
She had heard rumours
of cases somewhat parallel, cases in which girls' lives had become swamped in
those of their husbands, and their husbands' families. And she had also heard
unpleasant details of the means employed to reach the desired results. Annie
Butterfield's husband had forbidden her to correspond with her American
relatives. He had argued that such correspondence was disturbing to her mind,
and to the domestic duties which should be every decent woman's religion. One
of the occasions of his beating her had been in consequence of his finding her
writing to her mother a letter blotted with tears. Husbands frequently objected
to their wives' relatives, but there was a special order of European husband
who opposed violently any intimacy with American relations on the practical
ground that their views of a wife's position, with regard to her husband, were
of a revolutionary nature.
Mrs. Vanderpoel had in
her possession every letter Rosalie or her husband had ever written. Bettina
asked to be allowed to read them, and one morning seated herself in her own
room before a blazing fire, with the collection on a table at her side. She
read them in order. Nigel's began as they went on. They were all in one tone,
formal, uninteresting, and requiring no answers. There was not a suggestion of
human feeling in one of them.
"He wrote
them," said Betty, "so that we could not say that he had never
written."
Rosalie's first
epistles were affectionate, but timid. At the outset she was evidently trying
to conceal the fact that she was homesick. Gradually she became briefer and
more constrained. In one she said pathetically, "I am such a bad letter
writer. I always feel as if I want to tear up what I have written, because I
never say half that is in my heart.
Mrs. Vanderpoel had
kissed that letter many a time. She was sure that a mark on the paper near this
particular sentence was where a tear had fallen. Bettina was sure of this, too,
and sat and looked at the fire for some time.
That night she went to
a ball, and when she returned home, she persuaded her mother to go to bed.
"I want to have a
talk with father," she exclaimed. "I am going to ask him
something."
She went to the great
man's private room, where he sat at work, even after the hours when less
seriously engaged people come home from balls. The room he sat in was one of
the apartments newspapers had with much detail described. It was luxuriously
comfortable, and its effect was sober and rich and fine.
When Bettina came in,
Vanderpoel, looking up to smile at her in welcome, was struck by the fact that
as a background to an entering figure of tall, splendid girlhood in a ball
dress it was admirable, throwing up all its whiteness and grace and sweep of
line. He was always glad to see Betty. The rich strength of the life radiating
from her, the reality and glow of her were good for him and had the power of
detaching him from work of which he was tired.
She smiled back at him,
and, coming forward took her place in a big armchair close to him, her
lace-frilled cloak slipping from her shoulders with a soft rustling sound which
seemed to convey her intention to stay.
"Are you too busy
to be interrupted?" she asked, her mellow voice caressing him. "I want
to talk to you about something I am going to do." She put out her hand and
laid it on his with a clinging firmness which meant strong feeling. "At
least, I am going to do it if you will help me," she ended.
"What is it,
Betty?" he inquired, his usual interest in her accentuated by her manner.
She laid her other hand
on his and he clasped both with his own.
"When the
Worthingtons sail for England next month," she explained, "I want to
go with them. Mrs. Worthington is very kind and will be good enough to take
care of me until I reach London."
Mr. Vanderpoel moved
slightly in his chair. Then their eyes met comprehendingly. He saw what hers
held.
"From there you
are going to Stornham Court!" he exclaimed.
"To see
Rosy," she answered, leaning a little forward. "To see her.
"You believe that
what has happened has not been her fault?" he said. There was a look in
her face which warmed his blood.
"I have always
been sure that Nigel Anstruthers arranged it."
"Do you think he
has been unkind to her?"
"I am going to
see," she answered.
"Betty," he
said, "tell me all about it."
He knew that this was
no suddenly-formed plan, and he knew it would be well worth while to hear the
details of its growth. It was so interestingly like her to have remained silent
through the process of thinking a thing out, evolving her final idea without
having disturbed him by bringing to him any chaotic uncertainties.
"It's a sort of
confession," she answered. "Father, I have been thinking about it for
years. I said nothing because for so long I knew I was only a child, and a
child's judgment might be worth so little. But through all those years I was
learning things and gathering evidence. When I was at school, first in one
country and then another, I used to tell myself that I was growing up and
preparing myself to do a particular thing--to go to rescue Rosy."
"I used to guess
you thought of her in a way of your own," Vanderpoel said, "but I did
not guess you were thinking that much. You were always a solid, loyal little
thing, and there was business capacity in your keeping your scheme to yourself.
Let us look the matter in the face. Suppose she does not need rescuing.
Suppose, after all, she is a comfortable, fine lady and adores her husband.
What then?"
"If I should find
that to be true, I will behave myself very well--as if we had expected nothing
else. I will make her a short visit and come away. Lady Cecilia Orme, whom I
knew in Florence, has asked me to stay with her in London. I will go to her.
She is a charming woman. But I must first see Rosy--see her."
Mr. Vanderpoel thought
the matter over during a few moments of silence.
"You do not wish
your mother to go with you?" he said presently.
"I believe it will
be better that she should not," she answered. "If there are
difficulties or disappointments she would be too unhappy."
"Yes," he
said slowly, "and she could not control her feelings. She would give the
whole thing away, poor girl."
He had been looking at
the carpet reflectively, and now he looked at Bettina.
"What are you
expecting to find, at the worst?" he asked her. "The kind of thing
which will need management while it is being looked into?"
"I do not know
what I am expecting to find," was her reply. "We know absolutely
nothing; but that Rosy was fond of us, and that her marriage has seemed to make
her cease to care. She was not like that; she was not like that! Was she,
father?"
"No, she
wasn't," he exclaimed. The memory of her in her short-frocked and early
girlish days, a pretty, smiling, effusive thing, given to lavish caresses and
affectionate little surprises for them all, came back to him vividly. "She
was the most affectionate girl I ever knew," he said. "She was more
affectionate than you, Betty," with a smile.
Bettina smiled in
return and bent her head to put a kiss on his hand, a warm, lovely,
comprehending kiss.
"If she had been
different I should not have thought so much of the change," she said.
"I believe that people are always more or less like themselves as long as
they live. What has seemed to happen has been so unlike Rosy that there must be
some reason for it."
"You think that
she has been prevented from seeing us?"
"I think it so
possible that I am not going to announce my visit beforehand."
"You have a good
head, Betty," her father said.
"If Sir Nigel has
put obstacles in our way before, he will do it again. I shall try to find out,
when I reach London, if Rosalie is at Stornham. When I am sure she is there, I
shall go and present myself. If Sir Nigel meets me at the park gates and orders
his gamekeepers to drive me off the premises, we shall at least know that he
has some reason for not wishing to regard the usual social and domestic amenities.
I feel rather like a detective. It entertains me and excites me a little."
The deep blue of her
eyes shone under the shadow of the extravagant lashes as she laughed.
"Are you willing
that I should go, father?" she said next.
"Yes," he
answered. "I am willing to trust you, Betty, to do things I would not
trust other girls to try at. If you were not my girl at all, if you were a man
on Wall Street, I should know you would be pretty safe to come out a little
more than even in any venture you made. You know how to keep cool."
Bettina picked up her
fallen cloak and laid it over her arm. It was made of billowy frills of Malines
lace, such as only Vanderpoels could buy. She looked down at the amazing thing
and touched up the frills with her fingers as she whimsically smiled.
"There are a good
many girls who can he trusted to do things in these days," she said.
"Women have found out so much. Perhaps it is because the heroines of
novels have informed them. Heroines and heroes always bring in the new fashions
in character. I believe it is years since a heroine 'burst into a flood of
tears.' It has been discovered, really, that nothing is to be gained by it.
Whatsoever I find at Stornham Court, I shall neither weep nor be helpless.
There is the Atlantic cable, you know. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why
heroines have changed. When they could not escape from their persecutors except
in a stage coach, and could not send telegrams, they were more or less in
everyone's hands. It is different now. Thank you, father, you are very good to
believe in me."
A LARGE transatlantic
steamer lying at the wharf on a brilliant, sunny morning just before its
departure is an interesting and suggestive object to those who are fond of
following suggestion to its end. One sometimes wonders if it is possible that
the excitement in the dock atmosphere could ever become a thing to which one
was sufficiently accustomed to be able to regard it as among things
commonplace. The rumbling and rattling of waggons and carts, the loading and
unloading of boxes and bales, the people who are late, and the people who are
early, the faces which are excited, and the faces which are sad, the trunks and
bales, and cranes which creak and groan, the shouts and cries, the hurry and
confusion of movement, notwithstanding that every day has seen them all for
years, have a sort of perennial interest to the looker-on.
This is, perhaps, more
especially the case when the looker-on is to be a passenger on the outgoing
ship; and the exhilaration of his point of view may greatly depend upon the
reason for his voyage and the class by which he travels. Gaiety and youth usually
appear upon the promenade deck, having taken saloon passage. Dulness, commerce,
and eld mingling with them, it is true, but with a discretion which does not
seem to dominate. Second-class passengers wear a more practical aspect, and
youth among them is rarer and more grave. People who must travel second and
third class make voyages for utilitarian reasons. Their object is usually to
better themselves in one way or another. When they are going from Liverpool to
New York, it is usually to enter upon new efforts and new labours. When they
are returning from New York to Liverpool, it is often because the new life has
proved less to be depended upon than the old, and they are bearing back with
them bitterness of soul and discouragement of spirit.
On the brilliant spring
morning when the huge liner Meridiana was to sail for England a young man, who
was a second-class passenger, leaned upon the ship's rail and watched the
turmoil on the wharf with a detached and not at all buoyant air.
His air was detached
because he had other things in his mind than those merely passing before him,
and he was not buoyant because they were not cheerful or encouraging subjects
for reflection. He was a big young man, well hung together, and carrying
himself well; his face was square-jawed and rugged, and he had dark red hair
restrained by its close cut from waving strongly on his forehead. His eyes were
red brown, and a few dark freckles marked his clear skin. He was of the order
of man one looks at twice, having looked at him once, though one does not in
the least know why, unless one finally reaches some degree of intimacy.
He watched the
vehicles, heavy and light, roll into the big shed-like building and deposit
their freight; he heard the voices and caught the sentences of instruction and
comment; he saw boxes and bales hauled from the dock side to the deck and swung
below with the rattling of machinery and chains. But these formed merely a
noisy background to his mood, which was self-centred and gloomy. He was one of
those who go back to their native land knowing themselves conquered. He had
left England two years before, feeling obstinately determined to accomplish a
certain difficult thing, but forces of nature combining with the circumstances
of previous education and living had beaten him. He had lost two years and all
the money he had ventured. He was going back to the place he had come from, and
he was carrying with him a sense of having been used hardly by fortune, and in
a way he had not deserved.
He had gone out to the
West with the intention of working hard and using his hands as well as his
brains; he had not been squeamish; he had, in fact, laboured like a ploughman;
and to be obliged to give in had been galling and bitter. There are human
beings into whose consciousness of themselves the possibility of being beaten
does not enter. This man was one of them.
The ship was of the
huge and luxuriously-fitted class by which the rich and fortunate are
transported from one continent to another. Passengers could indulge themselves
in suites of rooms and live sumptuously. As the man leaning on the rail looked
on, he saw messengers bearing baskets and boxes of fruit and flowers with cards
and notes attached, hurrying up the gangway to deliver them to waiting
stewards. These were the farewell offerings to be placed in staterooms, or to
await their owners on the saloon tables. Salter--the second-class passenger's
name was Salter--had seen a few such offerings before on the first crossing.
But there had not been such lavishness at Liverpool. It was the New Yorkers who
were sumptuous in such matters, as he had been told. He had also heard casually
that the passenger list on this voyage was to record important names, the names
of multi-millionaire people who were going over for the London season.
Two stewards talking
near him, earlier in the morning, had been exulting over the probable largesse
such a list would result in at the end of the passage.
"The Worthingtons
and the Hirams and the John William Spayters," said one. "They travel
all right. They know what they want and they want a good deal, and they're
willing to pay for it."
"Yes. They're not
school teachers going over to improve their minds and contriving to cross in a
big ship by economising in everything else. Miss Vanderpoel's sailing with the
Worthingtons. She's got the best suite all to herself. She'll bring back a duke
or one of those prince fellows, How many millions has Vanderpoel?"
"How many
millions. How many hundred millions!" said his companion, gloating cheerfully
over the vastness of unknown possibilities. "I've crossed with Miss
Vanderpoel often, two or three times when she was in short frocks. She's the
kind of girl you read about. And she's got money enough to buy in half a dozen
princes."
"There are New
Yorkers who won't like it if she does," returned the other. "There's
been too much money going out of the country. Her suite is crammed full of Jack
roses, now, and there are boxes waiting outside."
Salter moved away and
heard no more. He moved away, in fact, because he was conscious that to a man
in his case, this dwelling upon millions, this plethora of wealth, was a little
revolting. He had walked down Broadway and seen the price of Jacqueminot roses,
and he was not soothed or allured at this particular moment by the picture of a
girl whose half-dozen cabins were crowded with them.
"Oh, the
devil!" he said. "It sounds vulgar." And he walked up and down
fast, squaring his shoulders, with his hands in the pockets of his rough,
well-worn coat. He had seen in England something of the American young woman
with millionaire relatives. He had been scarcely more than a boy when the
American flood first began to rise. He had been old enough, however, to hear
people talk. As he had grown older, Salter had observed its advance. Englishmen
had married American beauties. American fortunes had built up English houses,
which otherwise threatened to fall into decay. Then the American faculty of
adaptability came into play. Anglo-American wives became sometimes more English
than their husbands. They proceeded to Anglicise their relations, their
relations' clothes, even, in time, their speech. They carried or sent English
conventions to the States, their brothers ordered their clothes from West End
tailors, their sisters began to wear walking dresses, to play out-of-door games
and take active exercise. Their mothers tentatively took houses in London or
Paris, there came a period when their fathers or uncles, serious or anxious
business men, the most unsporting of human beings, rented castles or manors
with huge moors and covers attached and entertained large parties of shooters
or fishers who could be lured to any quarter by the promise of the particular
form of slaughter for which they burned.
"Sheer American
business perspicacity, that," said Salter, as he marched up and down,
thinking of a particular case of this order. "There's something admirable
in the practical way they make for what they want. They want to amalgamate with
English people, not for their own sake, but because their women like it, and so
they offer the men thousands of acres full of things to kill. They can get them
by paying for them, and they know how to pay." He laughed a little,
lifting his square shoulders. "Balthamor's six thousand acres of grouse
moor and Elsty's salmon fishing are rented by the Chicago man. He doesn't care
twopence for them, and does not know a pheasant from a caper-cailzie, but his
wife wants to know men who do."
It must be confessed
that Salter was of the English who were not pleased with the American Invasion.
In some of his views of the matter he was a little prehistoric and savage, but
the modern side of his character was too intelligent to lack reason. He was by
no means entirely modern, however; a large part of his nature belonged to the
age in which men had fought fiercely for what they wanted to get or keep, and
when the amenities of commerce had not become powerful factors in existence.
"They're not a bad
lot," he was thinking at this moment. "They are rather fine in a way.
They are clever and powerful and interesting--more so than they know
themselves. But it is all commerce. They don't come and fight with us and get
possession of us by force. They come and buy us. They buy our land and our
homes, and our landowners, for that matter-- when they don't buy them, they
send their women to marry them, confound it! "
He took half a dozen
more strides and lifted his shoulders again.
"Beggarly lot as I
am," he said, "unlikely as it seems that I can marry at all, I'm hanged
if I don't marry an Englishwoman, if I give my life to a woman at all."
But, in fact, he was of
the opinion that he should never give his life to any woman, and this was
because he was, at this period, also of the opinion that there was small
prospect of its ever being worth the giving or taking. It had been one of those
lives which begin untowardly and are ruled by unfair circumstances.
He had a particularly
well-cut and expressive mouth, and, as he went back to the ship's side and
leaned on his folded arms on the rail again, its curves concealed a good deal
of strong feeling.
The wharf was busier
than before. In less than half an hour the ship was to sail. The bustle and
confusion had increased. There were people hurrying about looking for friends,
and there were people scribbling off excited farewell messages at the telegraph
office. The situation was working up to its climax. An observing looker-on
might catch glimpses of emotional scenes. Many of the passengers were already
on board, parties of them accompanied by their friends were making their way up
the gangplank.
Salter had just been
watching a luxuriously cared-for little invalid woman being carried on deck in
a reclining chair, when his attention was attracted by the sound of trampling
hoofs and rolling wheels. Two noticeably big and smart carriages had driven up
to the stopping-place for vehicles. They were gorgeously of the latest mode,
and their tall, satin-skinned horses jangled silver chains and stepped up to
their noses.
"Here come the
Worthingtons, whosoever they may be," thought Salter. "The fine
up-standing young woman is, no doubt, the multi-millionairess."
The fine, up-standing
young woman was the multi-millionairess. Bettina walked up the gangway in the
sunshine, and the passengers upon the upper deck craned their necks to look at
her. Her carriage of her head and shoulders invariably made people turn to
look.
"My, ain't she
fine-looking!" exclaimed an excited lady beholder above. "I guess
that must be Miss Vanderpoel, the multi-millionaire's daughter. Jane told me
she'd heard she was crossing this trip."
Bettina heard her. She
sometimes wondered if she was ever pointed out, if her name was ever mentioned
without the addition of the explanatory statement that she was the multi-millionaire's
daughter. As a child she had thought it ridiculous and tiresome, as she had
grown older she had felt that only a remarkable individuality could surmount a
fact so ever present. It was like a tremendous quality which overshadowed
everything else.
"It wounds my
vanity, I have no doubt," she had said to her father. "Nobody ever
sees me, they only see you and your millions and millions of dollars."
Salter watched her pass
up the gangway. The phase through which he was living was not of the order
which leads a man to dwell upon the beautiful and inspiriting as expressed by
the female image. Success and the hopefulness which engender warmth of soul and
quickness of heart are required for the development of such allurements. He
thought of the Vanderpoel millions as the lady on the deck had thought of them,
and in his mind somehow the girl herself appeared to express them. The rich
up-springing sweep of her abundant hair, her height, her colouring, the
remarkable shade and length of her lashes, the full curve of her mouth, all, he
told himself, looked expensive, as if even nature herself had been given carte
blanche, and the best possible articles procured for the money.
"She moves,"
he thought sardonically, "as if she were perfectly aware that she could
pay for anything. An unlimited income, no doubt, establishes in the owner the
equivalent to a sense of rank."
He changed his position
for one in which he could command a view of the promenade deck where the
arriving passengers were gradually appearing. He did this from the idle and
careless curiosity which, though it is not a matter of absolute interest, does
not object to being entertained by passing objects. He saw the Worthington
party reappear. It struck Salter that they looked not so much like persons
coming on board a ship, as like people who were returning to a hotel to which
they were accustomed, and which was also accustomed to them. He argued that
they had probably crossed the Atlantic innumerable times in this particular
steamer. The deck stewards knew them and made obeisance with empressement. Miss
Vanderpoel nodded to the steward Salter had heard discussing her. She gave him
a smile of recognition and paused a moment to speak to him. Salter saw her
sweep the deck with her glance and then designate a sequestered corner, such as
the experienced voyager would recognise as being desirably sheltered. She was evidently
giving an order concerning the placing of her deck chair, which was presently
brought. An elegantly neat and decorous person in black, who was evidently her
maid, appeared later, followed by a steward who carried cushions and sumptuous
fur rugs. These being arranged, a delightful corner was left alluringly
prepared. Miss Vanderpoel, after her instructions to the deck steward, had
joined her party and seemed to be awaiting some arrival anxiously.
"She knows how to
do herself well," Salter commented, "and she realises that
forethought is a practical factor. Millions have been productive of composure.
It is not unnatural, either."
It was but a short time
later that the warning bell was rung. Stewards passed through the crowds
calling out, "All ashore, if you please--all ashore." Final embraces
were in order on all sides. People shook hands with fervour and laughed a
little nervously. Women kissed each other and poured forth hurried messages to
be delivered on the other side of the Atlantic. Having kissed and parted, some
of them rushed back and indulged in little clutches again. Notwithstanding that
the tide of humanity surges across the Atlantic almost as regularly as the
daily tide surges in on its shores, a wave of emotion sweeps through every ship
at such partings.
Salter stood on deck
and watched the crowd dispersing. Some of the people were laughing and some had
red eyes. Groups collected on the wharf and tried to say still more last words
to their friends crowding against the rail.
The Worthingtons kept
their places and were still looking out, by this time disappointedly. It seemed
that the friend or friends they expected were not coming. Salter saw that Miss
Vanderpoel looked more disappointed than the rest. She leaned forward and
strained her eyes to see. Just at the last moment there was the sound of
trampling horses and rolling wheels again. From the arriving carriage descended
hastily an elderly woman, who lifted out a little boy excited almost to tears.
He was a dear, chubby little person in flapping sailor trousers, and he carried
a splendidly-caparisoned toy donkey in his arms. Salter could not help feeling
slightly excited himself as they rushed forward. He wondered if they were
passengers who would be left behind.
They were not passengers,
but the arrivals Miss Vanderpoel had been expecting so ardently. They had come
to say good-bye to her and were too late for that, at least, as the gangway was
just about to be withdrawn.
Miss Vanderpoel leaned
forward with an amazingly fervid expression on her face.
"Tommy!
Tommy!" she cried to the little boy. "Here I am, Tommy. We can say
good-bye from here."
The little boy, looking
up, broke into a wail of despair.
"Betty! Betty!
Betty!" he cried. "I wanted to kiss you, Betty."
Betty held out her
arms. She did it with entire forgetfulness of the existence of any lookers-on,
and with such outreaching love on her face that it seemed as if the child must
feel her touch. She made a beautiful, warm, consoling bud of her mouth.
"We'll kiss each
other from here, Tommy," she said. "See, we can. Kiss me, and I will
kiss you."
Tommy held out his arms
and the magnificent donkey. "Betty," he cried, "I brought you my
donkey. I wanted to give it to you for a present, because you liked it."
Miss Vanderpoel bent
further forward and addressed the elderly woman.
"Matilda,"
she said, "please pack Master Tommy's present and send it to me! I want it
very much."
Tender smiles
irradiated the small face. The gangway was withdrawn, and, amid the familiar
sounds of a big craft's first struggle, the ship began to move. Miss Vanderpoel
still bent forward and held out her arms.
"I will soon come
back, Tommy," she cried, "and we are always friends."
The child held out his
short blue serge arms also, and Salter watching him could not but be touched
for all his gloom of mind.
"I wanted to kiss
you, Betty," he heard in farewell. "I did so want to kiss you."
And so they steamed
away upon the blue.
UP to a certain point
the voyage was like all other voyages. During the first two days there were
passengers who did not appear on deck, but as the weather was fair for the
season of the year, there were fewer absentees than is usual. Indeed, on the
third day the deck chairs were all filled, people who were given to tramping
during their voyages had begun to walk their customary quota of
carefully-measured miles the day. There were a few pale faces dozing here and
there, but the general aspect of things had begun to be sprightly. Shuffleboard
players and quoit enthusiasts began to bestir themselves, the deck steward
appeared regularly with light repasts of beef tea and biscuits, and the
brilliant hues of red, blue, or yellow novels made frequent spots of colour
upon the promenade. Persons of some initiative went to the length of making
tentative observations to their next-chair neighbours. The second-cabin
passengers were cheerful, and the steerage passengers, having tumbled up,
formed friendly groups and began to joke with each other.
The Worthingtons had
plainly the good fortune to be respectable sailors. They reappeared on the
second day and established regular habits, after the manner of accustomed
travellers. Miss Vanderpoel's habits were regular from the first, and when
Salter saw her he was impressed even more at the outset with her air of being
at home instead of on board ship. Her practically well-chosen corner was an
agreeable place to look at. Her chair was built for ease of angle and width,
her cushions were of dark rich colours, her travelling rugs were of black fox
fur, and she owned an adjustable table for books and accompaniments. She
appeared early in the morning and walked until the sea air crimsoned her
cheeks, she sat and read with evident enjoyment, she talked to her companions
and plainly entertained them.
Salter, being bored and
in bad spirits, found himself watching her rather often, but he knew that but
for the small, comic episode of Tommy, he would have definitely disliked her.
The dislike would not have been fair, but it would have existed in spite of
himself. It would not have been fair because it would have been founded simply
upon the ignoble resentment of envy, upon the poor truth that he was not in the
state of mind to avoid resenting the injustice of fate in bestowing
multi-millions upon one person and his offspring. He resented his own
resentment, but was obliged to acknowledge its existence in his humour. He
himself, especially and peculiarly, had always known the bitterness of poverty,
the humiliation of seeing where money could be well used, indeed, ought to be
used, and at the same time having ground into him the fact that there was no
money to lay one's hand on. He had hated it even as a boy, because in his case,
and that of his people, the whole thing was undignified and unbecoming. It was
humiliating to him now to bring home to himself the fact that the thing for
which he was inclined to dislike this tall, up-standing girl was her
unconscious (he realised the unconsciousness of it) air of having always lived
in the atmosphere of millions, of never having known a reason why she should
not have anything she had a desire for. Perhaps, upon the whole, he said to
himself, it was his own ill luck and sense of defeat which made her corner, with
its cushions and comforts, her properly attentive maid, and her cold weather
sables expressive of a fortune too colossal to be decent.
The episode of the
plump, despairing Tommy he had liked, however. There had been a fine
naturalness about it and a fine practicalness in her prompt order to the
elderly nurse that the richly-caparisoned donkey should be sent to her. This
had at once made it clear to the donor that his gift was too valuable to be
left behind.
"She did not care
twopence for the lot of us," was his summing up. "She might have been
nothing but the nicest possible warm-hearted nursemaid or a cottage woman who
loved the child."
He was quite aware that
though he had found himself more than once observing her, she herself had
probably not recognised the trivial fact of his existing upon that other side
of the barrier which separated the higher grade of passenger from the lower.
There was, indeed, no reason why she should have singled him out for
observation, and she was, in fact, too frequently absorbed in her own
reflections to be in the frame of mind to remark her fellow passengers to the
extent which was generally customary with her. During her crossings of the
Atlantic she usually made mental observation of the people on board. This time,
when she was not talking to the Worthingtons, or reading, she was thinking of
the possibilities of her visit to Stornham. She used to walk about the deck
thinking of them and, sitting in her chair, sum them up as her eyes rested on
the rolling and breaking waves.
There were many things
to be considered, and one of the first was the perfectly sane suggestion her
father had made.
"Suppose she does
not want to be rescued? Suppose you find her a comfortable fine lady who adores
her husband."
Such a thing was
possible, though Bettina did not think it probable. She intended, however, to
prepare herself even for this. If she found Lady Anstruthers plump and roseate,
pleased with herself and her position, she was quite equal to making her visit appear
a casual and conventional affair.
"I ought to wish
it to be so," she thought, "and, yet, how disappointingly I should
feel she had changed. Still, even ethical reasons would not excuse one for
wishing her to be miserable." She was a creature with a number of
passionate ideals which warred frequently with the practical side of her
mentality. Often she used to walk up and down the deck or lean upon the ship's
side, her eyes stormy with emotions.
"I do not want to
find Rosy a heartless woman, and I do not want to find her wretched. What do I
want? Only the usual thing--that what cannot be undone had never been done.
People are always wishing that."
She was standing near
the second-cabin barrier thinking this, the first time she saw the passenger
with the red hair. She had paused by mere chance, and while her eyes were
stormy with her thought, she suddenly became conscious that she was looking
directly into other eyes as darkling as her own. They were those of a man on
the wrong side of the barrier. He had a troubled, brooding face, and, as their
gaze met, each of them started slightly and turned away with the sense of
having unconsciously intruded and having been intruded upon.
"That
rough-looking man," she commented to herself, "is as anxious and disturbed
as I am."
Salter did look rough,
it was true. His well-worn clothes had suffered somewhat from the restrictions
of a second-class cabin shared with two other men. But the aspect which had
presented itself to her brief glance had been not so much roughness of clothing
as of mood expressing itself in his countenance. He was thinking harshly and
angrily of the life ahead of him.
These looks of theirs
which had so inadvertently encountered each other were of that order which
sometimes startles one when in passing a stranger one finds one's eyes
entangled for a second in his or hers, as the case may be. At such times it
seems for that instant difficult to disentangle one's gaze. But neither of
these two thought of the other much, after hurrying away. Each was too fully
mastered by personal mood.
There would, indeed,
have been no reason for their encountering each other further but for "the
accident," as it was called when spoken of afterwards, the accident which
might so easily have been a catastrophe. It occurred that night. This was two
nights before they were to land.
Everybody had begun to
come under the influence of that cheerfulness of humour, the sense of relief
bordering on gaiety, which generally elates people when a voyage is drawing to
a close. If one has been dull, one begins to gather one's self together,
rejoiced that the boredom is over. In any case, there are plans to be made,
thought of, or discussed.
"You wish to go to
Stornham at once?" Mrs. Worthington said to Bettina. "How pleased
Lady Anstruthers and Sir Nigel must be at the idea of seeing you with them
after so long."
"I can scarcely
tell you how I am looking forward to it," Betty answered.
She sat in her corner
among her cushions looking at the dark water which seemed to sweep past the
ship, and listening to the throb of the engines. She was not gay. She was
wondering how far the plans she had made would prove feasible. Mrs. Worthington
was not aware that her visit to Stornham Court was to be unannounced. It had
not been necessary to explain the matter. The whole affair was simple and
decorous enough. Miss Vanderpoel was to bid good-bye to her friends and go at
once to her sister, Lady Anstruthers, whose husband's country seat was but a
short journey from London. Bettina and her father had arranged that the fact
should be kept from the society paragraphist. This had required some adroit
management, but had actually been accomplished.
As the waves swished
past her, Bettina was saying to herself, "What will Rosy say when she sees
me! What shall I say when I see Rosy? We are drawing nearer to each other with
every wave that passes."
A fog which swept up
suddenly sent them all below rather early. The Worthingtons laughed and talked
a little in their staterooms, but presently became quiet and had evidently gone
to bed. Bettina was restless and moved about her room alone after she had sent
away her maid. She at last sat down and finished a letter she had been writing
to her father.
"As I near the
land," she wrote, "I feel a sort of excitement. Several times to-day
I have recalled so distinctly the picture of Rosy as I saw her last, when we
all stood crowded upon the wharf at New York to see her off. She and Nigel were
leaning upon the rail of the upper deck. She looked such a delicate, airy
little creature, quite like a pretty schoolgirl with tears in her eyes. She was
laughing and crying at the same time, and kissing both her hands to us again
and again. I was crying passionately myself, though I tried to conceal the
fact, and I remember that each time I looked from Rosy to Nigel's heavy face
the poignancy of my anguish made me break forth again. I wonder if it was
because I was a child, that he looked such a contemptuous brute, even when he
pretended to smile. It is twelve years since then. I wonder--how I wonder, what
I shall find."
She stopped writing and
sat a few moments, her chin upon her hand, thinking. Suddenly she sprang to her
feet in alarm. The stillness of the night was broken by wild shouts, a running
of feet outside, a tumult of mingled sounds and motion, a dash and rush of
surging water, a strange thumping and straining of engines, and a moment later
she was hurled from one side of her stateroom to the other by a crashing shock
which seemed to heave the ship out of the sea, shuddering as if the end of all
things had come.
It was so sudden and
horrible a thing that, though she had only been flung upon a pile of rugs and
cushions and was unhurt, she felt as if she had been struck on the head and
plunged into wild delirium. Above the sound of the dashing and rocking waves,
the straining and roaring of hacking engines and the pandemonium of voices rose
from one end of the ship to the other, one wild, despairing, long-drawn shriek
of women and children. Bettina turned sick at the mad terror in it-- the
insensate, awful horror.
"Something has run
into us!" she gasped, getting up with her heart leaping in her throat.
She could hear the
Worthingtons' tempest of terrified confusion through the partitions between
them, and she remembered afterwards that in the space of two or three seconds,
and in the midst of their clamour, a hundred incongruous thoughts leaped
through her brain. Perhaps they were this moment going down. Now she knew what
it was like! This thing she had read of in newspapers! Now she was going down
in mid-ocean, she, Betty Vanderpoel! And, as she sprang to clutch her fur coat,
there flashed before her mental vision a gruesome picture of the headlines in
the newspapers and the inevitable reference to the millions she represented.
"I must keep
calm," she heard herself say, as she fastened the long coat, clenching her
teeth to keep them from chattering. "Poor Daddy--poor Daddy!"
Maddening new sounds
were all about her, sounds of water dashing and churning, sounds of voices
bellowing out commands, straining and leaping sounds of the engines. What was
it--what was it? She must at least find out. Everybody was going mad in the
staterooms, the stewards were rushing about, trying to quiet people, their own
voices shaking and breaking into cracked notes. If the worst had happened,
everyone would be fighting for life in a few minutes. Out on deck she must get
and find out for herself what the worst was.
She was the first woman
outside, though the wails and shrieks swelled below, and half-dressed, ghastly
creatures tumbled gasping up the companion-way.
"What is it?"
she heard. "My God! what's happened? Where's the Captain! Are we going
down! The boats! The boats!"
It was useless to speak
to the seamen rushing by. They did not see, much less hear! She caught sight of
a man who could not be a sailor, since he was standing still. She made her way
to him, thankful that she had managed to stop her teeth chattering.
"What has happened
to us?" she said.
He turned and looked at
her straitly. He was the second-cabin passenger with the red hair.
"A tramp steamer
has run into us in the fog," he answered.
"How much harm is
done?"
"They are trying
to find out. I am standing here on the chance of hearing something. It is
madness to ask any man questions."
They spoke to each
other in short, sharp sentences, knowing there was no time to lose.
"Are you horribly
frightened?" he asked.
She stamped her foot.
"I hate it--I hate
it!" she said, flinging out her hand towards the black, heaving water.
"The plunge--the choking! No one could hate it more. But I want to do
something!"
She was turning away
when he caught her hand and held her.
"Wait a
second," he said. "I hate it as much as you do, but I believe we two
can keep our heads. Those who can do that may help, perhaps. Let us try to
quiet the people. As soon as I find out anything I will come to your friends'
stateroom. You are near the boats there. Then I shall go back to the second
cabin. You work on your side and I'll work on mine. That's all."
"Thank you. Tell
the Worthingtons. I'm going to the saloon deck." She was off as she spoke.
Upon the stairway she
found herself in the midst of a struggling panic-stricken mob, tripping over
each other on the steps, and clutching at any garment nearest, to drag
themselves up as they fell, or were on the point of falling. Everyone was
crying out in question and appeal.
Bettina stood still, a
firm, tall obstacle, and clutched at the hysteric woman who was hurled against
her.
"I've been on
deck," she said. "A tramp steamer has run into us. No one has time to
answer questions. The first thing to do is to put on warm clothes and secure
the life belts in case you need them."
At once everyone turned
upon her as if she was an authority. She replied with almost fierce
determination to the torrent of words poured forth.
"I know nothing
further--only that if one is not a fool one must make sure of clothes and
belts."
"Quite right, Miss
Vanderpoel," said one young man, touching his cap in nervous propitiation.
"Stop
screaming," Betty said mercilessly to the woman. "It's idiotic--the
more noise you make the less chance you have. How can men keep their wits among
a mob of shrieking, mad women?"
That the remote Miss
Vanderpoel should have emerged from her luxurious corner to frankly bully the
lot of them was an excellent shock for the crowd. Men, who had been in danger
of losing their heads and becoming as uncontrolled as the women, suddenly
realised the fact and pulled themselves together. Bettina made her way at once
to the Worthingtons' staterooms.
There she found frenzy
reigning. Blanche and Marie Worthington were darting to and fro, dragging about
first one thing and then another. They were silly with fright, and dashed at,
and dropped alternately, life belts, shoes, jewel cases, and wraps, while they
sobbed and cried out hysterically. "Oh, what shall we do with mother! What
shall we do!"
The manners of Betty
Vanderpoel's sharp schoolgirl days returned to her in full force. She seized
Blanche by the shoulder and shook her.
"What a donkey you
are!" she said. "Put on your clothes. There they are," pushing
her to the place where they hung. "Marie--dress yourself this moment. We
may be in no real danger at all."
"Do you think not!
Oh, Betty!" they wailed in concert. "Oh, what shall we do with
mother!"
"Where is your
mother?"
"She
fainted--Louise----"
Betty was in Mrs.
Worthington's cabin before they had finished speaking. The poor woman had
fainted, and struck her cheek against a chair. She lay on the floor in her
nightgown, with blood trickling from a cut on her face. Her maid, Louise, was
wringing her hands, and doing nothing whatever.
"If you don't
bring the brandy this minute," said the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel,
"I'll box your ears. Believe me, my girl." She looked so capable of
doing it that the woman was startled and actually offended into a return of her
senses. Miss Vanderpoel had usually the best possible manners in dealing with
her inferiors.
Betty poured brandy
down Mrs. Worthington's throat and applied strong smelling salts until she
gasped back to consciousness. She had just burst into frightened sobs, when
Betty heard confusion and exclamations in the adjoining room. Blanche and Marie
had cried out, and a man's voice was speaking. Betty went to them. They were in
various stages of undress, and the red-haired second-cabin passenger was
standing at the door.
"I promised Miss
Vanderpoel----" he was saying, when Betty came forward. He turned to her
promptly.
"I come to tell
you that it seems absolutely to be relied on that there is no immediate danger.
The tramp is more injured than we are."
"Oh, are you sure?
Are you sure?" panted Blanche, catching at his sleeve.
"Yes," he
answered. "Can I do anything for you?" he said to Bettina, who was on
the point of speaking.
"Will you be good
enough to help me to assist Mrs. Worthington into her berth, and then try to
find the doctor."
He went into the next
room without speaking. To Mrs. Worthington he spoke briefly a few words of
reassurance. He was a powerful man, and laid her on her berth without dragging
her about uncomfortably, or making her feel that her weight was greater than
even in her most desponding moments she had suspected. Even her helplessly
hysteric mood was illuminated by a ray of grateful appreciation.
"Oh, thank
you--thank you," she murmured. "And you are quite sure there is no
actual danger, Mr.----?"
"Salter," he
terminated for her. "You may feel safe. The damage is really only slight,
after all."
"It is so good of
you to come and tell us," said the poor lady, still tremulous. "The
shock was awful. Our introduction has been an alarming one. I--I don't think we
have met during the voyage."
"No," replied
Salter. "I am in the second cabin."
"Oh! thank you.
It's so good of you," she faltered amiably, for want of inspiration. As he
went out of the stateroom, Salter spoke to Bettina.
"I will send the
doctor, if I can find him," he said. "I think, perhaps, you had
better take some brandy yourself. I shall."
"It's queer how
little one seems to realise even that there are second-cabin passengers,"
commented Mrs. Worthington feebly. "That was a nice man, and perfectly
respectable. He even had a kind of--of manner."
IT seemed upon the
whole even absurd that after a shock so awful and a panic wild enough to cause
people to expose their very souls--for there were, of course, endless anecdotes
to be related afterwards, illustrative of grotesque terror, cowardice, and
utter abandonment of all shadows of convention-- that all should end in an
anticlimax of trifling danger, upon which, in a day or two, jokes might be
made. Even the tramp steamer had not been seriously injured, though its
injuries were likely to be less easy of repair than those of the Meridiana.
"Still," as a
passenger remarked, when she steamed into the dock at Liverpool, "we might
all be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean this morning. Just think what
columns there would have been in the newspapers. Imagine Miss Vanderpoel's
being drowned."
"I was very rude
to Louise, when I found her wringing her hands over you, and I was rude to
Blanche," Bettina said to Mrs. Worthington. "In fact I believe I was
rude to a number of people that night. I am rather ashamed."
"You called me a
donkey," said Blanche, "but it was the best thing you could have
done. You frightened me into putting on my shoes, instead of trying to comb my
hair with them. It was startling to see you march into the stateroom, the only
person who had not been turned into a gibbering idiot. I know I was gibbering,
and I know Marie was."
"We both gibbered
at the red-haired man when he came in," said Marie. "We clutched at
him and gibbered together. Where is the red-haired man, Betty? Perhaps we made
him ill. I've not seen him since that moment."
"He is in the
second cabin, I suppose," Bettina answered, "but I have not seen him,
either."
"We ought to get
up a testimonial and give it to him, because he did not gibber," said
Blanche. "He was as rude and as sensible as you were, Betty."
They did not see him
again, in fact, at that time. He had reasons of his own for preferring to
remain unseen. The truth was that the nearer his approach to his native shores,
the nastier, he was perfectly conscious, his temper became, and he did not wish
to expose himself by any incident which might cause him stupidly and obviously
to lose it.
The maid, Louise,
however, recognised him among her companions in the third-class carriage in
which she travelled to town. To her mind, whose opinions were regulated by
neatly arranged standards, he looked morose and shabbily dressed. Some of the
other second-cabin passengers had made themselves quite smart in various, not
too distinguished ways. He had not changed his dress at all, and the large
valise upon the luggage rack was worn and battered as if with long and rough
usage. The woman wondered a little if he would address her, and inquire after
the health of her mistress. But, being an astute creature, she only wondered
this for an instant, the next she realised that, for one reason or another, it
was clear that he was not of the tribe of second-rate persons who pursue an
accidental acquaintance with their superiors in fortune, through sociable
interchange with their footmen or maids.
When the train
slackened its speed at the platform of the station, he got up, reaching down
his valise and leaving the carriage, strode to the nearest hansom cab, waving
the porter aside.
"Charing
Cross," he called out to the driver, jumped in, and was rattled away. . .
. . .
During the years which
had passed since Rosalie Vanderpoel first came to London as Lady Anstruthers,
numbers of huge luxurious hotels had grown up, principally, as it seemed, that
Americans should swarm into them and live at an expense which reminded them of
their native land. Such establishments would never have been built for English
people, whose habit it is merely to "stop" at hotels, not to live in
them. The tendency of the American is to live in his hotel, even though his
intention may be only to remain in it two days. He is accustomed to doing
himself extremely well in proportion to his resources, whether they be great or
small, and the comforts, as also the luxuries, he allows himself and his
domestic appendages are in a proportion much higher in its relation to these
resources than it would be were he English, French, German, or Italians As a
consequence, he expects, when he goes forth, whether holiday-making or on
business, that his hostelry shall surround him, either with holiday luxuries
and gaiety, or with such lavishness of comfort as shall alleviate the wear and
tear of business cares and fatigues. The rich man demands something almost as
good as he has left at home, the man of moderate means something much better.
Certain persons given to regarding public wants and desires as foundations for
the fortune of business schemes having discovered this, the enormous and
sumptuous hotel evolved itself from their astute knowledge of common facts. At
the entrances of these hotels, omnibuses and cabs, laden with trunks and packages
frequently bearing labels marked with red letters "S. S. So-and-So,
Stateroom--Hold--Baggageroom," drew up and deposited their contents and
burdens at regular intervals. Then men with keen, and often humorous faces or
almost painfully anxious ones, their exceedingly well-dressed wives, and more
or less attractive and vivacious-looking daughters, their eager little girls,
and un-English-looking little boys, passed through the corridors in flocks and
took possession of suites of rooms, sometimes for twenty-four hours, sometimes
for six weeks.
The Worthingtons took
possession of such a suite in such a hotel. Bettina Vanderpoel's apartments
faced the Embankment. From her windows she could look out at the broad
splendid, muddy Thames, slowly rolling in its grave, stately way beneath its
bridges, bearing with it heavy lumbering barges, excited tooting little penny
steamers and craft of various shapes and sizes, the errand or burden of each
meaning a different story.
It had been to Bettina
one of her pleasures of the finest epicurean flavour to reflect that she had
never had any brief and superficial knowledge of England, as she had never been
to the country at all in those earlier years, when her knowledge of places must
necessarily have been always the incomplete one of either a schoolgirl
traveller or a schoolgirl resident, whose views were limited by the walls of
restriction built around her.
If relations of the
usual ease and friendliness had existed between Lady Anstruthers and her
family, Bettina would, doubtless, have known her sister's adopted country well.
It would have been a thing so natural as to be almost inevitable, that she
would have crossed the Channel to spend her holidays at Stornham. As matters
had stood, however, the child herself, in the days when she had been a child,
had had most definite private views on the subject of visits to England. She
had made up her young mind absolutely that she would not, if it were decently
possible to avoid it, set her foot upon English soil until she was old enough
and strong enough to carry out what had been at first her passionately romantic
plans for discovering and facing the truth of the reason for the apparent
change in Rosy. When she went to England, she would go to Rosy. As she had
grown older, having in the course of education and travel seen most Continental
countries, she had liked to think that she had saved, put aside for less hasty
consumption and more delicate appreciation of flavours, as it were, the country
she was conscious she cared for most.
"It is England we
love, we Americans," she had said to her father. "What could be more
natural? We belong to it--it belongs to us. I could never be convinced that the
old tie of blood does not count. All nationalities have come to us since we became
a nation, but most of us in the beginning came from England. We are touching
about it, too. We trifle with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalise
over Italy and ecstacise over Spain--but England we love. How it moves us when
we go to it, how we gush if we are simple and effusive, how we are stirred
imaginatively if we are of the perceptive class. I have heard the commonest
little half-educated woman say the prettiest, clumsy, emotional things about
what she has seen there. A New England schoolma'am, who has made a Cook's tour,
will almost have tears in her voice as she wanders on with her commonplaces
about hawthorn hedges and thatched cottages and white or red farms. Why are we
not unconsciously pathetic about German cottages and Italian villas? Because we
have not, in centuries past, had the habit of being born in them. It is only an
English cottage and an English lane, whether white with hawthorn blossoms or
bare with winter, that wakes in us that little yearning, grovelling tenderness
that is so sweet. It is only nature calling us home."
Mrs. Worthington came
in during the course of the morning to find her standing before her window
looking out at the Thames, the Embankment, the hansom cabs themselves, with an
absolutely serious absorption. This changed to a smile as she turned to greet her.
"I am
delighted," she said. "I could scarcely tell you how much. The
impression is all new and I am excited a little by everything. I am so
intensely glad that I have saved it so long and that I have known it only as
part of literature. I am even charmed that it rains, and that the cabmen's
mackintoshes are shining and wet." She drew forward a chair, and Mrs.
Worthington sat down, looking at her with involuntary admiration.
"You look as if
you were delighted," she said. "Your eyes--you have amazing eyes,
Betty! I am trying to picture to myself what Lady Anstruthers will feel when
she sees you. What were you like when she married?"
Bettina sat down,
smiling and looking, indeed, quite incredibly lovely. She was capable of a
warmth and a sweetness which were as embracing as other qualities she possessed
were powerful.
"I was eight years
old," she said. "I was a rude little girl, with long legs and a high,
determined voice. I know I was rude. I remember answering back."
"I seem to have
heard that you did not like your brother-in-law, and that you were opposed to
the marriage."
"Imagine the
undisciplined audacity of a child of eight 'opposing' the marriage of her
grown-up sister. I was quite capable of it. You see in those days we had not
been trained at all (one had only been allowed tremendous liberty), and
interfered conversationally with one's elders and betters at any moment. I was
an American little girl, and American little girls were really--they really
were!" with a laugh, whose musical sound was after all wholly
non-committal.
"You did not treat
Sir Nigel Anstruthers as one of your betters."
"He was one of my
elders, at all events, and becomingness of bearing should have taught me to
hold my little tongue. I am giving some thought now to the kind of thing I must
invent as a suitable apology when I find him a really delightful person, full
of virtues and accomplishments. Perhaps he has a horror of me."
"I should like to
be present at your first meeting," Mrs. Worthington reflected. "You are
going down to Stornham to-morrow?"
"That is my plan.
When I write to you on my arrival, I will tell you if I encountered the
horror." Then, with a swift change of subject and a lifting of her
slender, velvet line of eyebrow, "I am only deploring that I have not time
to visit the Tower."
Mrs. Worthington was
betrayed into a momentary glance of uncertainty, almost verging in its
significance on a gasp.
"The Tower? Of
London? Dear Betty!"
Bettina's laugh was
mellow with revelation.
"Ah!" she
said. "You don't know my point of view; it's plain enough. You see, when I
delight in these things, I think I delight most in my delight in them. It means
that I am almost having the kind of feeling the fresh American souls had who
landed here thirty years ago and revelled in the resemblance to Dickens's
characters they met with in the streets, and were historically thrilled by the
places where people's heads were chopped off. Imagine their reflections on
Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that
poor last word was uttered--'Remember.' And think of their joy when each
crossing sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones
in the slightest disguise."
"You don't mean to
say----" Mrs. Worthington was vaguely awakening to the situation.
"That the charm of
my visit, to myself, is that I realise that I am rather like that. I have
positively preserved something because I have kept away. You have been here so
often and know things so well, and you were even so sophisticated when you
began, that you have never really had the flavours and emotions. I am
sophisticated, too, sophisticated enough to have cherished my flavours as a
gourmet tries to save the bouquet of old wine. You think that the Tower is the
pleasure of housemaids on a Bank Holiday. But it quite makes me quiver to think
of it," laughing again. "That I laugh, is the sign that I am not as
beautifully, freshly capable of enjoyment as those genuine first Americans
were, and in a way I am sorry for it."
Mrs. Worthington
laughed also, and with an enjoyment.
"You are very
clever, Betty," she said.
"No, no,"
answered Bettina, "or, if I am, almost everybody is clever in these days.
We are nearly all of us comparatively intelligent."
"You are very
interesting at all events, and the Anstruthers will exult in you. If they are
dull in the country, you will save them."
"I am very
interested, at all events," said Bettina, "and interest like mine is
quite passé. A clever American who lives in England, and is the pet of
duchesses, once said to me (he always speaks of Americans as if they were a
distant and recently discovered species), 'When they first came over they were
a novelty. Their enthusiasm amused people, but now, you see, it has become
vieux jeu. Young women, whose specialty was to be excited by the Tower of
London and Westminster Abbey, are not novelties any longer. In fact, it's been
done, and it's done for as a specialty.' And I am excited about the Tower of
London. I may be able to restrain my feelings at the sight of the Beef Eaters,
but they will upset me a little, and I must brace myself, I must indeed."
"Truly,
Betty?" said Mrs. Worthington, regarding her with curiosity, arising from
a faint doubt of her entire seriousness, mingled with a fainter doubt of her
entire levity.
Betty flung out her
hands in a slight, but very involuntary-looking, gesture, and shook her head.
"Ah!" she
said, "it was all true, you know. They were all horribly real--the things
that were shuddered over and sentimentalised about. Sophistication, combined
with imagination, makes them materialise again, to me, at least, now I am here.
The gulf between a historical figure and a man or woman who could bleed and cry
out in human words was broad when one was at school. Lady Jane Grey, for
instance, how nebulous she was and how little one cared. She seemed invented
merely to add a detail to one's lesson in English history. But, as we drove
across Waterloo Bridge, I caught a glimpse of the Tower, and what do you
suppose I began to think of? It was monstrous. I saw a door in the Tower and
the stone steps, and the square space, and in the chill clear, early morning a
little slender, helpless girl led out, a little, fair, real thing like Rosy,
all alone--everyone she belonged to far away, not a man near who dared utter a
word of pity when she turned her awful, meek, young, desperate eyes upon him.
She was a pious child, and, no doubt, she lifted her eyes to the sky. I wonder
if it was blue and its blueness broke her heart, because it looked as if it
might have pitied such a young, patient girl thing led out in the fair morning
to walk to the hacked block and give her trembling pardon to the black-visored
man with the axe, and then 'commending her soul to God' to stretch her sweet slim
neck out upon it."
"Oh, Betty,
dear!" Mrs. Worthington expostulated.
Bettina sprang to her
and took her hand in pretty appeal.
"I beg pardon! I
beg pardon, I really do," she exclaimed. "I did not intend
deliberately to be painful. But that-- beneath the sophistication--is something
of what I bring to England."
ALL that she had
brought with her to England, combined with what she had called
"sophistication," but which was rather her exquisite appreciation of
values and effects, she took with her when she went the next day to Charing
Cross Station and arranged herself at her ease in the railway carriage, while
her maid bought their tickets for Stornham.
What the people in the
station saw, the guards and porters, the men in the book stalls, the travellers
hurrying past, was a striking-looking girl, whose colouring and carriage made
one turn to glance after her, and who, having bought some periodicals and
papers, took her place in a first-class compartment and watched the passersby
interestedly through the open window. Having been looked at and remarked on
during her whole life, Bettina did not find it disturbing that more than one
corduroy-clothed porter and fresh-coloured, elderly gentleman, or freshly
attired young one, having caught a glimpse of her through her window, made it
convenient to saunter past or hover round. She looked at them much more frankly
than they looked at her. To her they were all specimens of the types she was at
present interested in. For practical reasons she was summing up English
character with more deliberate intention than she had felt in the years when
she had gradually learned to know Continental types and differentiate such
peculiarities as were significant of their ranks and nations. As the first
Reuben Vanderpoel had studied the countenances and indicative methods of the
inhabitants of the new parts of the country in which it was his intention to do
business, so the modernity of his descendant applied itself to observation for
reasons parallel in nature though not in actual kind. As he had brought beads
and firewater to bear as agents upon savages who would barter for them skins
and products which might be turned into money, so she brought her
nineteenth-century beauty, steadfastness of purpose and alertness of brain to
bear upon the matter the practical dealing with which was the end she held in
view. To bear herself in this matter with as practical a control of situations
as that with which her great-grandfather would have borne himself in making a
trade with a previously unknown tribe of Indians was quite her intention,
though it had not occurred to her to put it to herself in any such form. Still,
whether she was aware of the fact or not, her point of view was exactly what
the first Reuben Vanderpoel's had been on many very different occasions. She
had before her the task of dealing with facts and factors of which at present
she knew but little. Astuteness of perception, self-command, and adaptability
were her chief resources. She was ready, either for calm, bold approach, or
equally calm and wholly non-committal retreat.
The perceptions she had
brought with her filled her journey into Kent with delicious things, delicious
recognition of beauties she had before known the existence of only through the
reading of books, and the dwelling upon their charms as reproduced, more or
less perfectly, on canvas. She saw roll by her, with the passing of the train,
the loveliness of land and picturesqueness of living which she had saved for
herself with epicurean intention for years. Her fancy, when detached from her
thoughts of her sister, had been epicurean, and she had been quite aware that
it was so. When she had left the suburbs and those villages already touched
with suburbanity behind, she felt herself settle into a glow of luxurious
enjoyment in the freshness of her pleasure in the familiar, and yet unfamiliar,
objects in the thick-hedged fields, whose broad-branched, thick-foliaged oaks
and beeches were more embowering in their shade, and sweeter in their green
than anything she remembered that other countries had offered her, even at their
best. Within the fields the hawthorn hedges beautifully enclosed were groups of
resigned mother sheep with their young lambs about them. The curious pointed
tops of the red hopkilns, piercing the trees near the farmhouses, wore an
almost intentional air of adding picturesque detail. There were clusters of old
buildings and dots of cottages and cottage gardens which made her now and then
utter exclamations of delight. Little inarticulate Rosy had seen and felt it
all twelve years before on her hopeless bridal home-coming when Nigel had sat
huddled unbecomingly in the corner of the railway carriage. Her power of
expression had been limited to little joyful gasps and obvious laudatory
adjectives, smothered in their birth by her first glance at her bridegroom. Betty,
in seeing it, knew all the exquisiteness of her own pleasure, and all the
meanings of it.
Yes, it was
England--England. It was the England of Constable and Morland, of Miss Mitford
and Miss Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot. The land which softly rolled and
clothed itself in the rich verdure of many trees, sometimes in lovely clusters,
sometimes in covering copse, was Constable's; the ripe young woman with the
fat-legged children and the farmyard beasts about her, as she fed the hens from
the wooden piggin under her arm, was Morland's own. The village street might be
Miss Mitford's, the well-to-do house Jane Austen's own fancy, in its warm brick
and comfortable decorum. She laughed a little as she thought it.
"That is
American," she said, "the habit of comparing every stick and stone
and breathing thing to some literary parallel. We almost invariably say that
things remind us of pictures or books--most usually books. It seems a little
crude, but perhaps it means that we are an intensely literary and artistic
people."
She continued to find
comparisons revealing to her their appositeness, until her journey had ended by
the train's slackening speed and coming to a standstill before the
rural-looking little station which had presented its quaint aspect to Lady
Anstruthers on her home-coming of years before.
It had not, during the
years which certainly had given time for change, altered in the least. The
station master had grown stouter and more rosy, and came forward with his
respectful, hospitable air, to attend to the unusual-looking young lady, who
was the only first-class passenger. He thought she must be a visitor expected
at some country house, but none of the carriages, whose coachmen were his
familiar acquaintances, were in waiting. That such a fine young lady should be
paying a visit at any house whose owners did not send an equipage to attend her
coming, struck him as unusual. The brougham from the "Crown," though
a decent country town vehicle, seemed inadequate. Yet, there it stood drawn up
outside the station, and she went to it with the manner of a young lady who had
ordered its attendance and knew it would be there.
Wells felt a good deal
of interest. Among the many young ladies who descended from the first-class
compartments and passed through the little waiting-room on their way to the
carriages of the gentry they were going to visit, he did not know when a young
lady had "caught his eye," so to speak, as this one did. She was not
exactly the kind of young lady one would immediately class mentally as "a
foreigner," but the blue of her eyes was so deep. and her hair and
eyelashes so dark, that these things, combining themselves with a certain
"way" she had, made him feel her to be of a type unfamiliar to the
region, at least.
He was struck, also, by
the fact that the young lady had no maid with her. The truth was that Bettina
had purposely left her maid in town. If awkward things occurred, the presence
of an attendant would be a sort of complication. It was better, on the first
approach, to be wholly unencumbered.
"How far are we
from Stornham Court?" she inquired.
"Five miles, my
lady," he answered, touching his cap. She expressed something which to the
rural and ingenuous, whose standards were defined, demanded a recognition of probable
rank.
"I'd like to
know," was his comment to his wife when he went home to dinner, "who
has gone to Stornham Court to-day. There's few enough visitors go there, and
none such as her, for certain. She don't live anywhere on the line above here,
either, for I've never seen her face before. She was a tall, handsome one--she
was, but it isn't just that made you look after her. She was a clever one with
a spirit, I'll be bound. I was wondering what her ladyship would have to say to
her."
"Perhaps she was
one of his fine ladies?" suggestively.
"That she wasn't,
either. And, as for that, I wonder what he'd have to say to such as she
is."
There was complexity of
element enough in the thing she was on her way to do, Bettina was thinking, as
she was driven over the white ribbon of country road that unrolled over rise
and hollow, between the sheep-dotted greenness of fields and the scented
hedges. The soft beauty enclosing her was a little shut out from her by her
mental attitude. She brought forward for her own decisions upon suitable action
a number of possible situations she might find herself called upon to confront.
The one thing necessary was that she should be prepared for anything whatever,
even for Rosy's not being pleased to see her, or for finding Sir Nigel a
thoroughly reformed and amiable character
"It is the thing
which seemingly cannot happen which one is most likely to find one's self face
to face with. It will be a little awkward to arrange, if he has developed every
domestic virtue, and is delighted to see me."
Under such rather
confusing conditions her plan would be to present to them, as an affectionate
surprise, the unheralded visit, which might appear a trifle uncalled for. She
felt happily sure of herself under any circumstances not partaking of the
nature of collisions at sea. Yet she had not behaved absolutely ill at the time
of the threatened catastrophe in the Meridiana. Her remembrance, an oddly
sudden one, of the definite manner of the red-haired second-class passenger,
assured her of that. He had certainly had all his senses about him, and he had
spoken to her as a person to be counted on.
Her pulse beat a little
more hurriedly as the brougham entered Stornham village. It was picturesque,
but struck her as looking neglected. Many of the cottages had an air of
dilapidation. There were many broken windows and unmended garden palings. A
suggested lack of whitewash in several cases was not cheerful.
"I know nothing of
the duties of English landlords," she said, looking through her carriage
window, "but I should do it myself, if I were Rosy."
She saw, as she was
taken through the park gateway, that that structure was out of order, and that
damaged diamond panes peered out from under the thickness of the ivy massing
itself over the lodge.
"Ah!" was her
thought, "it does not promise as it should. Happy people do not let things
fall to pieces."
Even winding avenue,
and spreading sward, and gorse, and broom, and bracken, enfolding all the earth
beneath huge trees, were not fair enough to remove a sudden remote fear which
arose in her rapidly reasoning mind. It suggested to her a point of view so new
that, while she was amazed at herself for not having contemplated it before,
she found herself wishing that the coachman would drive rather more slowly,
actually that she might have more time to reflect.
They were nearing a dip
in the park, where there was a lonely looking pool. The bracken was thick and
high there, and the sun, which had just broken through a cloud, had pierced the
trees with a golden gleam.
A little withdrawn from
this shaft of brightness stood two figures, a dowdy little woman and a
hunchbacked boy. The woman held some ferns in her hand, and the boy was sitting
down and resting his chin on his hands, which were folded on the top of a
stick.
"Stop here for a
moment," Bettina said to the coachman. "I want to ask that woman a
question."
She had thought that
she might discover if her sister was at the Court. She realised that to know
would be a point of advantage. She leaned forward and spoke.
"I beg your
pardon," she said, "I wonder if you can tell me----"
The woman came forward
a little. She had a listless step and a faded, listless face.
"What did you
ask?" she said.
Betty leaned still
further forward.
"Can you tell
me----" she began and stopped. A sense of stricture in the throat stopped
her, as her eyes took in the washed-out colour of the thin face, the washed-out
colour of the thin hair--thin drab hair, dragged in straight, hard unbecomingness
from the forehead and cheeks.
Was it true that her
heart was thumping, as she had heard it said that agitation made hearts thump?
She began again.
"Can you--tell me
if--Lady Anstruthers is at home?" she inquired. As she said it she felt
the blood surge up from the furious heart, and the hand she had laid on the
handle of the door of the brougham clutched it involuntarily.
The dowdy little woman
answered her indifferently, staring at her a little.
"I am Lady
Anstruthers," she said.
Bettina opened the carriage
door and stood upon the ground.
"Go on to the
house," she gave order to the coachman, and, with a somewhat startled
look, he drove away.
"Rosy!"
Bettina's voice was a hushed, almost awed, thing. "You are Rosy?"
The faded little wreck
of a creature began to look frightened.
"Rosy!" she
repeated, with a small, wry, painful smile.
She was the next moment
held in the folding of strong, young arms, against a quickly beating heart. She
was being wildly kissed, and the very air seemed rich with warmth and life.
"I am Betty,"
she heard. "Look at me, Rosy! I am Betty. Look at me and remember!"
Lady Anstruthers
gasped, and broke into a faint, hysteric laugh. She suddenly clutched at
Bettina's arm. For a minute her gaze was wild as she looked up.
"Betty," she
cried out. "No! No! No! I can't believe it! I can't! I can't!"
That just this thing
could have taken place in her, Bettina had never thought. As she had reflected
on her way from the station, the impossible is what one finds one's self face
to face with. Twelve years should not have changed a pretty blonde thing of
nineteen to a worn, unintelligent-looking dowdy of the order of dowdiness which
seems to have lived beyond age and sex. She looked even stupid, or at least
stupefied. At this moment she was a silly, middle-aged woman, who did not know
what to do. For a few seconds Bettina wondered if she was glad to see her, or
only felt awkward and unequal to the situation.
"I can't believe
you," she cried out again, and began to shiver. "Betty! Little Betty?
No! No! it isn't!"
She turned to the boy,
who had lifted his chin from his stick, and was staring.
"Ughtred!
Ughtred!" she called to him. "Come! She says--she says----"
She sat down upon a
clump of heather and began to cry. She hid her face in her spare hands and
broke into sobbing.
"Oh, Betty!
No!" she gasped. "It's so long ago--it's so far away. You never
came--no one--no one--came!"
The hunchbacked boy
drew near. He had limped up on his stick. He spoke like an elderly, affectionate
gnome, not like a child.
"Don't do that,
mother," he said. "Don't let it upset you so, whatever it is."
"It's so long ago;
it's so far away!" she wept, with catches in her breath and voice.
"You never came!"
Betty knelt down and
enfolded her again. Her bell-like voice was firm and clear.
"I have come
now," she said. "And it is not far away. A cable will reach father in
two hours."
Pursuing a certain
vivid thought in her mind, she looked at her watch.
"If you spoke to
mother by cable this moment," she added, with accustomed coolness, and she
felt her sister actually start as she spoke, "she could answer you by five
o'clock."
Lady Anstruther's start
ended in a laugh and gasp more hysteric than her first. There was even a kind
of wan awakening in her face, as she lifted it to look at the wonderful
newcomer. She caught her hand and held it, trembling, as she weakly laughed.
"It must be
Betty," she cried. "That little stern way! It is so like her. Betty--Betty--dear!"
She fell into a sobbing, shaken heap upon the heather. The harrowing thought
passed through Betty's mind that she looked almost like a limp bundle of shabby
clothes. She was so helpless in her pathetic, apologetic hysteria.
"I shall--be better,"
she gasped. "It's nothing. Ughtred, tell her."
"She's very weak,
really," said the boy Ughtred, in his mature way. "She can't help it
sometimes. I'll get some water from the pool."
"Let me go,"
said Betty, and she darted down to the water. She was back in a moment. The boy
was rubbing and patting his mother's hands tenderly.
"At any
rate," he remarked, as one consoled by a reflection, "father is not
at home."
As, after a singular
half hour spent among the bracken under the trees, they began their return to
the house, Bettina felt that her sense of adventure had altered its character.
She was still in the midst of a remarkable sort of exploit, which might end
anywhere or in anything, but it had become at once more prosaic in detail and
more intense in its significance. What its significance might prove likely to
be when she faced it, she had not known, it is true. But this was different
from-- from anything. As they walked up the sun-dappled avenue she kept
glancing aside at Rosy, and endeavouring to draw useful conclusions. The poor
girl's air of being a plain, insignificant frump, long past youth, struck an
extraordinary and, for the time, unexplainable note. Her ill-cut, out-of-date
dress, the cheap suit of the hunchbacked boy, who limped patiently along,
helped by his crutch, suggested possible explanations which were without doubt
connected with the thought which had risen in Bettina's mind, as she had been
driven through the broken-hinged entrance gate. What extraordinary disposal was
being made of Rosy's money? But her each glance at her sister also suggested
complication upon complication.
The singular half hour
under the trees by the pool, spent, after the first hysteric moments were over,
in vague exclaimings and questions, which seemed half frightened and all at
sea, had gradually shown her that she was talking to a creature wholly other
than the Rosalie who had so well known and loved them all, and whom they had so
well loved and known. They did not know this one, and she did not know them,
she was even a little afraid of the stir and movement of their life and being.
The Rosy they had known seemed to be imprisoned within the wall the years of
her separated life had built about her. At each breath she drew Bettina saw how
long the years had been to her, and how far her home had seemed to lie away, so
far that it could not touch her, and was only a sort of dream, the recalling of
which made her suddenly begin to cry again every few minutes. To Bettina's
sensitively alert mind it was plain that it would not do in the least to drag
her suddenly out of her prison, or cloister, whichsoever it might be. To do so
would be like forcing a creature accustomed only to darkness, to stare at the
blazing sun. To have burst upon her with the old impetuous, candid fondness
would have been to frighten and shock her as if with something bordering on
indecency. She could not have stood it; perhaps such fondness was so remote
from her in these days that she had even ceased to be able to understand it.
"Where are your
little girls?" Bettina asked, remembering that there had been notice given
of the advent of two girl babies.
"They died,"
Lady Anstruthers answered unemotionally. "They both died before they were
a year old. There is only Ughtred."
Betty glanced at the
boy and saw a small flame of red creep up on his cheek. Instinctively she knew
what it meant, and she put out her hand and lightly touched his shoulder.
"I hope you'll
like me, Ughtred," she said.
He almost started at
the sound of her voice, but when he turned his face towards her he only grew
redder, and looked awkward without answering. His manner was that of a boy who
was unused to the amenities of polite society, and who was only made shy by
them.
Without warning, a
moment or so later, Bettina stopped in the middle of the avenue, and looked up
at the arching giant branches of the trees which had reached out from one side
to the other, as if to clasp hands or encompass an interlacing embrace. As far
as the eye reached, they did this, and the beholder stood as in a high stately
pergola, with breaks of deep azure sky between. Several mellow, cawing rooks
were floating solemnly beneath or above the branches, now wand then settling in
some highest one or disappearing in the thick greenness.
Lady Anstruthers
stopped when her sister did so, and glanced at her in vague inquiry. It was
plain that she had outlived even her sense of the beauty surrounding her.
"What are you
looking at, Betty?" she asked.
"At all of
it," Betty answered. "It is so wonderful."
"She likes
it," said Ughtred, and then rather slunk a step behind his mother, as if
he were ashamed of himself.
"The house is just
beyond those trees," said Lady Anstruthers.
They came in full view
of it three minutes later. When she saw it, Betty uttered an exclamation and
stopped again to enjoy effects.
"She likes that,
too," said Ughtred, and, although he said it sheepishly, there was
imperfectly concealed beneath the awkwardness a pleasure in the fact.
"Do you?"
asked Rosalie, with her small, painful smile.
Betty laughed.
"It is too
picturesque, in its special way, to be quite credible," she said.
"I thought that
when I first saw it," said Rosy.
"Don't you think
so, now?"
"Well," was
the rather uncertain reply, "as Nigel says, there's not much good in a
place that is falling to pieces."
"Why let it fall
to pieces?" Betty put it to her with impartial promptness.
"We haven't money
enough to hold it together," resignedly.
As they climbed the
low, broad, lichen-blotched steps, whose broken stone balustrades were almost
hidden in clutching, untrimmed ivy, Betty felt them to be almost incredible,
too. The uneven stones of the terrace the steps mounted to were lichen-blotched
and broken also. Tufts of green growths had forced themselves between the
flags, and added an untidy beauty. The ivy tossed in branches over the red roof
and walls of the house. It had been left unclipped, until it was rather an
endlessly clambering tree than a creeper. The hall they entered had the beauty
of spacious form and good, old oaken panelling. There were deep window seats
and an ancient high-backed settle or so, and a massive table by the fireless
hearth. But there were no pictures in places where pictures had evidently once
hung, and the only coverings on the stone floor were the faded remnants of a
central rug and a worn tiger skin, the head almost bald and a glass eye knocked
out.
Bettina took in the
unpromising details without a quiver of the extravagant lashes. These, indeed,
and the eyes pertaining to them, seemed rather to sweep the fine roof, and a
certain minstrel's gallery and staircase, than which nothing could have been
much finer, with the look of an appreciative admirer of architectural features
and old oak. She had not journeyed to Stornham Court with the intention of
disturbing Rosy, or of being herself obviously disturbed. She had come to
observe situations and rearrange them with that intelligence of which
unconsidered emotion or exclamation form no part.
"It is the first
old English house I have seen," she said, with a sigh of pleasure. "I
am so glad, Rosy--I am so glad that it is yours."
She put a hand on each
of Rosy's thin shoulders--she felt sharply defined bones as she did so--and
bent to kiss her. It was the natural affectionate expression of her feeling,
but tears started to Rosy's eyes, and the boy Ughtred, who had sat down in a
window seat, turned red again, and shifted in his place.
"Oh, Betty!"
was Rosy's faint nervous exclamation, "you seem so beautiful and--so--so
strange--that you frighten me."
Betty laughed with the
softest possible cheerfulness, shaking her a little.
"I shall not seem
strange long," she said, "after I have stayed with you a few weeks,
if you will let me stay with you.
"Let you! Let
you!" in a sort of gasp.
Poor little Lady
Anstruthers sank on to a settle and began to cry again. It was plain that she
always cried when things occurred. Ughtred's speech from his window seat
testified at once to that.
"Don't cry,
mother," he said. "You know how we've talked that over together. It's
her nerves," he explained to Bettina. "We know it only makes things
worse, but she can't stop it."
Bettina sat on the
settle, too. She herself was not then aware of the wonderful feeling the poor
little spare figure experienced, as her softly strong young arms curved about
it. She was only aware that she herself felt that this was a heart-breaking
thing, and that she must not--must not let it be seen how much she recognised
its wofulness. This was pretty, fair Rosy, who had never done a harm in her
happy life--this forlorn thing was her Rosy.
"Never mind,"
she said, half laughing again. "I rather want to cry myself, and I am
stronger than she is. I am immensely strong."
"Yes! Yes!"
said Lady Anstruthers, wiping her eyes, and making a tremendous effort at
self-respecting composure. "You are strong. I have grown so weak in--well,
in every way. Betty, I'm afraid this is a poor welcome. You see--I'm afraid you'll
find it all so different from--from New York."
"I wanted to find
it different," said Betty.
"But--but--I
mean--you know----" Lady Anstruthers turned helplessly to the boy. Bettina
was struck with the painful truth that she looked even silly as she turned to
him. "Ughtred--tell her," she ended, and hung her head.
Ughtred had got down at
once from his seat and limped forward. His unprepossessing face looked as if he
pulled his childishness together with an unchildish effort.
"She means,"
he said, in his awkward way, "that she doesn't know how to make you
comfortable. The rooms are all so shabby--everything is so shabby. Perhaps you
won't stay when you see."
Bettina perceptibly
increased the firmness of her hold on her sister's body. It was as if she drew
it nearer to her side in a kind of taking possession. She knew that the moment
had come when she might go this far, at least, without expressing alarming
things.
"You cannot show
me anything that will frighten me," was the answer she made. "I have
come to stay, Rosy. We can make things right if they require it. Why not?"
Lady Anstruthers
started a little, and stared at her. She knew ten thousand reasons why things
had not been made right, and the casual inference that such reasons could be
lightly swept away as if by the mere wave of a hand, implied a power
appertaining to a time seeming so lost forever that it was too much for her.
"Oh, Betty,
Betty!" she cried, "you talk as if--you are so----!"
The fact, so simple to
the members of the abnormal class to which she of a truth belonged, the class
which heaped up its millions, the absolute knowledge that there was a great
deal of money in the world and that she was of those who were among its chief
owners, had ceased to seem a fact, and had vanished into the region of fairy
stories.
That she could not
believe it a reality revealed itself to Bettina, as by a flash, which was also
a revelation of many things. There would be unpleasing truths to be learned,
and she had not made her pilgrimage for nothing. But--in any event--there were
advantages without doubt in the circumstance which subjected one to being
perpetually pointed out as a daughter of a multi-millionaire. As this argued
itself out for her with rapid lucidity, she bent and kissed Rosy once more. She
even tried to do it lightly, and not to allow the rush of love and pity in her
soul to betray her.
"I talk as if--as
if I were Betty," she said. "You have forgotten. I have not. I have
been looking forward to this for years. I have been planning to come to you
since I was eleven years old. And here we sit."
"You didn't
forget? You didn't?" faltered the poor wreck of Rosy. "Oh! Oh! I
thought you had all forgotten me--quite--quite!"
And her face went down
in her spare, small hands, and she began to cry again.
BETTINA stood alone in
her bedroom a couple of hours later. Lady Anstruthers had taken her to it,
preparing her for its limitations by explaining that she would find it quite
different from her room in New York. She had been pathetically nervous and
flushed about it, and Bettina had also been aware that the apartment itself had
been hastily, and with much moving of objects from one chamber to another, made
ready for her.
The room was large and
square and low. It was panelled in small squares of white wood. The panels were
old enough to be cracked here and there, and the paint was stained and yellow
with time, where it was not knocked or worn off. There was a small paned,
leaded window which filled a large part of one side of the room, and its deep
seat was an agreeable feature. Sitting in it, one looked out over several
red-walled gardens, and through breaks in the trees of the park to a fair
beyond. Bettina stood before this window for a few moments, and then took a
seat in the embrasure, that she might gaze out and reflect at leisure.
Her genius, as has
before been mentioned, was the genius for living, for being vital. Many people
merely exist, are kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the
persistent action of normal functions will allow of their doing no less.
Bettina Vanderpoel had lived vividly, and in the midst of a self-created
atmosphere of action from her first hour. It was not possible for her to be one
of the horde of mere spectators. Wheresoever she moved there was some occult
stirring of the mental, and even physical, air. Her pulses beat too strongly,
her blood ran too fast to allow of inaction of mind or body. When, in passing
through the village, she had seen the broken windows and the hanging palings of
the cottages, it had been inevitable that, at once, she should, in thought,
repair them, set them straight. Disorder filled her with a sort of impatience
which was akin to physical distress. If she had been born a poor woman she
would have worked hard for her living, and found an interest, almost an
exhilaration, in her labour. Such gifts as she had would have been applied to
the tasks she undertook. It had frequently given her pleasure to imagine
herself earning her livelihood as a seamstress, a housemaid, a nurse. She knew
what she could have put into her service, and how she could have found it
absorbing. Imagination and initiative could make any service absorbing. The
actual truth was that if she had been a housemaid, the room she set in order
would have taken a character under her touch; if she had been a seamstress, her
work would have been swiftly done, her imagination would have invented for her
combinations of form and colour; if she had been a nursemaid, the children
under her care would never have been sufficiently bored to become tiresome or
intractable, and they also would have gained character to which would have been
added an undeniable vividness of outlook. She could not have left them alone,
so to speak. In obeying the mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated
them. Unconsciously she had stimulated her fellow pupils at school; when she
was his companion, her father had always felt himself stirred to interest and
enterprise.
"You ought to have
been a man, Betty," he used to say to her sometimes.
But Betty had not
agreed with him.
"You say
that," she once replied to him, "because you see I am inclined to do
things, to change them, if they need changing. Well, one is either born like
that, or one is not. Sometimes I think that perhaps the people who must act are
of a distinct race. A kind of vigorous restlessness drives them. I remember
that when I was a child I could not see a pin lying upon the ground without
picking it up, or pass a drawer which needed closing, without giving it a push.
But there has always been as much for women to do as for men."
There was much to be
done here of one sort of thing and another. That was certain. As she gazed
through the small panes of her large windows, she found herself overlooking
part of a wilderness of garden, which revealed itself through an arch in an
overgrown laurel hedge. She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped
topiary work which had lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the
heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park
beyond a cuckoo was calling.
She was conscious both
of the forlorn beauty and significance of the neglected garden, and of the clear
quaintness of the cuckoo call, as she thought of other things.
"Her spirit and
her health are broken," was her summing up. "Her prettiness has faded
to a rag. She is as nervous as an ill-treated child. She has lost her wits. I
do not know where to begin with her. I must let her tell me things as gradually
as she chooses. Until I see Nigel I shall not know what his method with her has
been. She looks as if she had ceased to care for things, even for herself. What
shall I write to mother?"
She knew what she
should write to her father. With him she could be explicit. She could record
what she had found and what it suggested to her. She could also make clear her
reason for hesitance and deliberation. His discretion and affection would
comprehend the thing which she herself felt and which affection not combined
with discretion might not take in. He would understand, when she told him that
one of the first things which had struck her, had been that Rosy herself, her
helplessness and timidity, might, for a period at least, form obstacles in
their path of action. He not only loved Rosy, but realised how slight a sweet
thing she had always been, and he would know how far a slight creature's
gentleness might be overpowered and beaten down.
There was so much that
her mother must be spared, there was indeed so little that it would be wise to
tell her, that Bettina sat gently rubbing her forehead as she thought of it.
The truth was that she must tell her nothing, until all was over, accomplished,
decided. Whatsoever there was to be "over," whatsoever the action
finally taken, must be a matter lying as far as possible between her father and
herself. Mrs. Vanderpoel's trouble would be too keen, her anxiety too great to
keep to herself, even if she were not overwhelmed by them. She must be told of
the beauties and dimensions of Stornham, all relatable details of Rosy's life
must be generously dwelt on. Above all Rosy must be made to write letters, and
with an air of freedom however specious.
A knock on the door
broke the thread of her reflection. It was a low-sounding knock, and she
answered the summons herself, because she thought it might be Rosy's.
It was not Lady
Anstruthers who stood outside, but Ughtred, who balanced himself on his
crutches, and lifted his small, too mature, face.
"May I come
in?" he asked.
Here was the unexpected
again, but she did not allow him to see her surprise.
"Yes," she
said. "Certainly you may."
He swung in and then
turned to speak to her.
"Please shut the
door and lock it," he said.
There was sudden
illumination in this, but of an order almost whimsical. That modern people in
modern days should feel bolts and bars a necessity of ordinary intercourse was
suggestive. She was plainly about to receive enlightenment. She turned the key
and followed the halting figure across the room.
"What are you
afraid of?" she asked.
"When mother and I
talk things over," he said, "we always do it where no one can see or
hear. It's the only way to be safe."
"Safe from
what?"
His eyes fixed
themselves on her as he answered her almost sullenly.
"Safe from people
who might listen and go and tell that we had been talking."
In his
thwarted-looking, odd child-face there was a shade of appeal not wholly hidden
by his evident wish not to be boylike. Betty felt a desire to kneel down
suddenly and embrace him, but she knew he was not prepared for such a
demonstration. He looked like a creature who had lived continually at bay, and
had learned to adjust himself to any situation with caution and restraint.
"Sit down,
Ughtred," she said, and when he did so she herself sat down, but not too
near him.
Resting his chin on the
handle of a crutch, he gazed at her almost protestingly.
"I always have to
do these things," he said, "and I am not clever enough, or old
enough. I am only eleven."
The mention of the
number of his years was plainly not apologetic, but was a mere statement of his
limitations. There the fact was, and he must make the best of it he could.
"What things do
you mean?"
"Trying to make
things easier--explaining things when she cannot think of excuses. To-day it is
telling you what she is too frightened to tell you herself. I said to her that
you must be told. It made her nervous and miserable, but I knew you must."
"Yes, I
must," Betty answered. "I am glad she has you to depend on,
Ughtred."
His crutch grated on
the floor and his boy eyes forbade her to believe that their sudden lustre was
in any way connected with restrained emotion.
"I know I seem
queer and like a little old man," he said. "Mother cries about it
sometimes. But it can't be helped. It is because she has never had anyone but
me to help her. When I was very little, I found out how frightened and
miserable she was. After his rages," he used no name, "she used to
run into my nursery and snatch me up in her arms and hide her face in my
pinafore. Sometimes she stuffed it into her mouth and bit it to keep herself from
screaming. Once-- before I was seven--I ran into their room and shouted out,
and tried to fight for her. He was going out, and had his riding whip in his
hand, and he caught hold of me and struck me with it--until he was tired."
Betty stood upright.
"What! What!
What!" she cried out.
He merely nodded his
head shortly. She saw what the thing had been by the way his face lost colour.
"Of course he said
it was because I was impudent, and needed punishment," he said. "He
said she had encouraged me in American impudence. It was worse for her than for
me. She kneeled down and screamed out as if she was crazy, that she would give
him what he wanted if he would stop."
"Wait," said
Betty, drawing in her breath sharply. " 'He,' is Sir Nigel? And he wanted
something."
He nodded again
"Tell me,"
she demanded, "has he ever struck her?"
"Once," he
answered slowly, "before I was born--he struck her and she fell against
something. That is why I am like this." And he touched his shoulder.
The feeling which
surged through Betty Vanderpoel's being forced her to go and stand with her
face turned towards the windows, her hands holding each other tightly behind
her back.
"I must keep
still," she said. "I must make myself keep still."
She spoke unconsciously
half aloud, and Ughtred heard her and replied hurriedly.
"Yes," he
said, "you must make yourself keep still. That is what we have to do
whatever happens. That is one of the things mother wanted you to know. She is
afraid. She daren't let you----"
She turned from the
window, standing at her full height and looking very tall for a girl.
"She is afraid?
She daren't? See--that will come to an end now. There are things which can be
done."
He flushed nervously.
"That is what she
was afraid you would say," he spoke fast and his hands trembled. "She
is nearly wild about it, because she knows he will try to do something that
will make you feel as if she does not want you."
"She is afraid of
that?" Betty exclaimed.
"He'd do it! He'd
do it--if you did not know beforehand."
"Oh!" said
Betty, with unflinching clearness. "He is a liar, is he?"
The helpless rage in
the unchildish eyes, the shaking voice, as he cried out in answer, were a
shock. It was as if he wildly rejoiced that she had spoken the word.
"Yes, he's a
liar--a liar!" he shrilled. "He's a liar and a bully and a coward.
He'd--he'd be a murderer if he dared --but he daren't." And his face
dropped on his arms folded on his crutch, and he broke into a passion of
crying. Then Betty knew she might go to him. She went and knelt down and put
her arm round him.
"Ughtred,"
she said, "cry, if you like, I should do it, if I were you. But I tell you
it can all be altered--and it shall be."
He seemed quite like a
little boy when he put out his hand to hers and spoke sobbingly:
"She--she
says--that because you have only just come from America--and in America
people--can do things--you will think you can do things here--and you don't
know. He will tell lies about you lies you can't bear. She sat wringing her
hands when she thought of it. She won't let you be hurt because you want to
help her." He stopped abruptly and clutched her shoulder.
"Aunt Betty! Aunt
Betty--whatever happens--whatever he makes her seem like--you are to know that
it is not true. Now you have come--now she has seen you it would kill her if
you were driven away and thought she wanted you to go."
"I shall not think
that," she answered, slowly, because she realised that it was well that
she had been warned in time. "Ughtred, are you trying to tell me that
above all things I must not let him think that I came here to help you, because
if he is angry he will make us all suffer--and your mother most of all?"
"He'll find a way.
We always know he will. He would either be so rude that you would not stay
here--or he would make mother seem rude--or he would write lies to grandfather.
Aunt Betty, she scarcely believes you are real yet. If she won't tell you
things at first, please don't mind." He looked quite like a child again in
his appeal to her, to try to understand a state of affairs so complicated.
"Could you-- could you wait until you have let her get--get used to
you?"
"Used to thinking
that there may be someone in the world to help her?" slowly. "Yes, I
will. Has anyone ever tried to help her?"
"Once or twice
people found out and were sorry at first, but it only made it worse, because he
made them believe things."
"I shall not try,
Ughtred," said Betty, a remote spark kindling in the deeps of the pupils
of her steel-blue eyes. "I shall not try. Now I am going to ask you some
questions."
Before he left her she
had asked many questions which were pertinent and searching, and she had
learned things she realised she could have learned in no other way and from no
other person. But for his uncanny sense of the responsibility he clearly had
assumed in the days when he wore pinafores, and which had brought him to her
room to prepare her mind for what she would find herself confronted with in the
way of apparently unexplainable obstacles, there was a strong likelihood that
at the outset she might have found herself more than once dangerously at a
loss. Yes, she would have been at a loss, puzzled, perhaps greatly discouraged.
She was face to face with a complication so extraordinary.
That one man, through
mere persistent steadiness in evil temper and domestic tyranny, should have so
broken the creatures of his household into abject submission and hopelessness,
seemed too incredible. Such a power appeared as remote from civilised existence
in London and New York as did that which had inflicted tortures in the dungeons
of castles of old. Prisoners in such dungeons could utter no cry which could
reach the outside world; the prisoners at Stornham Court, not four hours from
Hyde Park Corner, could utter none the world could hear, or comprehend if it
heard it. Sheer lack of power to resist bound them hand and foot. And she,
Betty Vanderpoel, was here upon the spot, and, as far as she could understand,
was being implored to take no steps, to do nothing. The atmosphere in which she
had spent her life, the world she had been born into, had not made for
fearfulness that one would be at any time defenceless against circumstances and
be obliged to submit to outrage. To be a Vanderpoel was, it was true, to be a
shining mark for envy as for admiration, but the fact removed obstacles as a
rule, and to find one's self standing before a situation with one's hands,
figuratively speaking, tied, was new enough to arouse unusual sensations. She
recalled, with an ironic sense of bewilderment, as a sort of material evidence
of her own reality, the fact that not a week ago she had stepped on to English
soil from the gangway of a solid Atlantic liner. It aided her to resist the
feeling that she had been swept back into the Middle Ages.
"When he is
angry," was one of the first questions she put to Ughtred, "what does
he give as his reason? He must profess to have a reason."
"When he gets in a
rage he says it is because mother is silly and common, and I am badly brought
up. But we always know he wants money, and it makes him furious. He could kill
us with rage."
"Oh!" said
Betty. "I see."
"It began that
time when he struck her. He said then that it was not decent that a woman who
was married should keep her own money. He made her give him almost everything
she had, but she wants to keep some for me. He tries to make her get more from
grandfather, but she will not write begging letters, and she won't give him
what she is saving for me."
It was a simple and
sordid enough explanation in one sense, and it was one of which Bettina had
known, not one parallel, but several. Having married to ensure himself power
over unquestioned resources, the man had felt himself disgustingly taken in,
and avenged himself accordingly. In him had been born the makings of a domestic
tyrant who, even had he been favoured by fortune, would have wreaked his
humours upon the defenceless things made his property by ties of blood and
marriage, and who, being unfavoured, would do worse. Betty could see what the
years had held for Rosy, and how her weakness and timidity had been considered
as positive assets. A woman who will cry when she is bullied, may be counted
upon to submit after she has cried. Rosy had submitted up to a certain point
and then, with the stubbornness of a weak creature, had stood at timid bay for
her young.
What Betty gathered was
that, after the long and terrible illness which had followed Ughtred's birth,
she had risen from what had been so nearly her deathbed, prostrated in both
mind and body. Ughtred did not know all that he revealed when he touched upon
the time which he said his mother could not quite remember--when she had sat
for months staring vacantly out of her window, trying to recall something
terrible which had happened, and which she wanted to tell her mother, if the
day ever came when she could write to her again. She had never remembered
clearly the details of the thing she had wanted to tell, and Nigel had insisted
that her fancy was part of her past delirium. He had said that at the beginning
of her delirium she had attacked and insulted his mother and himself but they
had excused her because they realised afterwards what the cause of her
excitement had been. For a long time she had been too brokenly weak to question
or disbelieve, but, later she had vaguely known that he had been lying to her,
though she could not refute what he said. She recalled, in course of time, a
horrible scene in which all three of them had raved at each other, and she
herself had shrieked and laughed and hurled wild words at Nigel, and he had
struck her. That she knew and never forgot. She had been ill a year, her hair
had fallen out, her skin had faded and she had begun to feel like a nervous,
tired old woman instead of a girl. Girlhood, with all the past, had become
unreal and too far away to be more than a dream. Nothing had remained real but
Stornham and Nigel and the little hunchbacked baby. She was glad when the
Dowager died and when Nigel spent his time in London or on the Continent and
left her with Ughtred. When he said that he must spend her money on the estate,
she had acquiesced without comment, because that insured his going away. She
saw that no improvement or repairs were made, but she could do nothing and was
too listless to make the attempt. She only wanted to be left alone with
Ughtred, and she exhibited willpower only in defence of her child and in her
obstinacy with regard to asking money of her father.
"She thought,
somehow, that grandfather and grandmother did not care for her any more--that
they had forgotten her and only cared for you," Ughtred explained.
"She used to talk to me about you. She said you must be so clever and so
handsome that no one could remember her. Sometimes she cried and said she did not
want any of you to see her again, because she was only a hideous, little, thin,
yellow old woman. When I was very little she told me stories about New York and
Fifth Avenue. I thought they were not real places--I though they were places in
fairyland."
Betty patted his
shoulder and looked away for a moment when he said this. In her remote and
helpless loneliness, to Rosy's homesick, yearning soul, noisy, rattling New
York, Fifth Avenue with its traffic and people, its brown-stone houses and
ricketty stages, had seemed like that--so splendid and bright and
heart-filling, that she had painted them in colours which could belong only to
fairyland. It said so much.
The thing she had
suspected as she had talked to her sister was, before the interview ended, made
curiously clear. The first obstacle in her pathway would be the shrinking of a
creature who had been so long under dominion that the mere thought of seeing
any steps taken towards her rescue filled her with alarm. One might be prepared
for her almost praying to be let alone, because she felt that the process of
her salvation would bring about such shocks and torments as she could not
endure the facing of.
"She will have to
get used to you," Ughtred kept saying. "She will have to get used to
thinking things."
"I will be
careful," Bettina answered. "She shall not be troubled. I did not
come to trouble her,"
AS she went down the
staircase later, on her way to dinner, Miss Vanderpoel saw on all sides signs
of the extent of the nakedness of the land. She was in a fine old house,
stripped of most of its saleable belongings, uncared for, deteriorating year by
year, gradually going to ruin. One need not possess particular keenness of
sight to observe this, and she had chanced to see old houses in like condition
in other countries than England. A man-servant, in a shabby livery, opened the
drawingroom door for her. He was not a picturesque servitor of fallen fortunes,
but an awkward person who was not accustomed to his duties. Betty wondered if
he had been called in from the gardens to meet the necessities of the moment.
His furtive glance at the tall young woman who passed him, took in with sudden
embarrassment the fact that she plainly did not belong to the dispirited world bounded
by Stornham Court. Without sparkling gems or trailing richness in her wake, she
was suggestively splendid. He did not know whether it was her hair or the build
of her neck and shoulders that did it, but it was revealed to him that tiaras
and collars of stones which blazed belonged without doubt to her equipment. He
recalled that there was a legend to the effect that the present Lady
Anstruthers, who looked like a rag doll, had been the daughter of a rich
American, and that better things might have been expected of her if she had not
been such a poor-spirited creature. If this was her sister, she perhaps was a
young woman of fortune, and that she was not of poor spirit was plain.
The large drawing-room
presented but another aspect of the bareness of the rest of the house. In times
probably long past, possibly in the Dowager Lady Anstruthers' early years of
marriage, the walls had been hung with white and gold paper of a pattern which
dominated the scene, and had been furnished with gilded chairs, tables, and
ottomans. Some of these last had evidently been removed as they became too much
out of repair for use or ornament. Such as remained, tarnished as to gilding
and worn in the matter of upholstery, stood sparsely scattered on a desert of
carpet, whose huge, flowered medallions had faded almost from view.
Lady Anstruthers,
looking shy and awkward as she fingered an ornament on a small table, seemed
singularly a part of her background. Her evening dress, slipping off her thin
shoulders, was as faded and out of date as her carpet. It had once been
delicately blue and gauzy, but its gauziness hung in crushed folds and its blue
was almost grey. It was also the dress of a girl, not that of a colourless,
worn woman, and her consciousness of its unfitness showed in her small-featured
face as she came forward.
"Do you--recognise
it, Betty?" she asked hesitatingly. "It was one of my New York
dresses. I put it on because-- because----" and her stammering ended
helplessly.
"Because you
wanted to remind me," Betty said. If she felt it easier to begin with an
excuse she should be provided with one.
Perhaps but for this
readiness to fall into any tone she chose to adopt Rosy might have endeavoured
to carry her poor farce on, but as it was she suddenly gave it up.
"I put it on
because I have no other," she said. "We never have visitors and I
haven't dressed for dinner for so long that I seem to have nothing left that is
fit to wear. I dragged this out because it was better than anything else. It
was pretty once----" she gave a little laugh, "twelve years ago. How
long years seem! Was I--was I pretty, Betty--twelve years ago?"
"Twelve years is
not such a long time." Betty took her hand and drew her to a sofa.
"Let us sit down and talk about it."
"There is nothing
much to talk about. This is it----" taking in the room with a wave of her
hand. "I am it. Ughtred is it."
"Then let us talk
about England," was Bettina's light skim over the thin ice.
A red spot grew on each
of Lady Anstruthers' cheek bones and made her faded eyes look intense.
"Let us talk about
America," her little birdclaw of a hand clinging feverishly. "Is New
York still--still----"
"It is still
there," Betty answered with one of the adorable smiles which showed a deep
dimple near her lip. "But it is much nearer England than it used to
be."
"Nearer!" The
hand tightened as Rosy caught her breath.
Betty bent rather
suddenly and kissed her. It was the easiest way of hiding the look she knew had
risen to her eyes. She began to talk gaily, half laughingly.
"It is quite
near," she said. "Don't you realise it? Americans swoop over here by
thousands every year. They come for business, they come for pleasure, they come
for rest. They cannot keep away. They come to buy and sell--pictures and books
and luxuries and lands. They come to give and take. They are building a bridge
from shore to shore of their work, and their thoughts, and their plannings, out
of the lives and souls of them. It will be a great bridge and great things will
pass over it." She kissed the faded cheek again. She wanted to sweep Rosy
away from the dreariness of "it." Lady Anstruthers looked at her with
faintly smiling eyes. She did not follow all this quite readily, but she felt
pleased and vaguely comforted.
"I know how they
come here and marry," she said. "The new Duchess of Downes is an
American. She had a fortune of two million pounds."
"If she chooses to
rebuild a great house and a great name," said Betty, lifting her shoulders
lightly, "why not--if it is an honest bargain? I suppose it is part of the
building of the bridge."
Little Lady
Anstruthers, trying to pull up the sleeves of the gauzy bodice slipping off her
small, sharp bones, stared at her half in wondering adoration, half in alarm.
"Betty--you--you
are so handsome--and so clever and strange," she fluttered. "Oh,
Betty, stand up so that I can see how tall and handsome you are!"
Betty did as she was
told, and upon her feet she was a young woman of long lines, and fine curves so
inspiring to behold that Lady Anstruthers clasped her hands together on her
knees in an excited gesture.
"Oh, yes! Oh,
yes!" she cried. "You are just as wonderful as you looked when I
turned and saw you under the trees. You almost make me afraid."
"Because I am
wonderful?" said Betty. "Then I will not be wonderful any more."
"It is not because
I think you wonderful, but because other people will. Would you rebuild a great
house?" hesitatingly.
The fine line of
Betty's black brows drew itself slightly together.
"No," she
said.
"Wouldn't
you?"
"How could the man
who owned it persuade me that he was in earnest if he said he loved me? How
could I persuade him that I was worth caring for and not a mere ambitious fool?
There would be too much against us."
"Against
you?" repeated Lady Anstruthers.
"I don't say I am
fair," said Betty. "People who are proud are often not fair. But we
should both of us have seen and known too much."
"You have seen me
now," said Lady Anstruthers in her listless voice, and at the same moment
dinner was announced and she got up from the sofa, so that, luckily, there was
no time for the impersonal answer it would have been difficult to invent at a
moment's notice. As they went into the dining-room Betty was thinking
restlessly. She remembered all the material she had collected during her
education in France and Germany, and there was added to it the fact that she
had seen Rosy, and having her before her eyes she felt that there was small
prospect of her contemplating the rebuilding of any great house requiring
reconstruction.
There was fine
panelling in the dining-room and a great fireplace and a few family portraits.
The service upon the table was shabby and the dinner was not a bounteous meal.
Lady Anstruthers in her girlish, gauzy dress and looking too small for her big,
high-backed chair tried to talk rapidly, and every few minutes forgot herself
and sank into silence, with her eyes unconsciously fixed upon her sister's
face. Ughtred watched Betty also, and with a hungry questioning. The
man-servant in the worn livery was not a sufficiently well-trained and
experienced domestic to make any effort to keep his eyes from her. He was young
enough to be excited by an innovation so unusual as the presence of a young and
beautiful person surrounded by an unmistakable atmosphere of ease and
fearlessness. He had been talking of her below stairs and felt that he had
failed in describing her. He had found himself barely supported by the
suggestion of a housemaid that sometimes these dresses that looked plain had
been made in Paris at expensive places and had cost "a lot." He
furtively examined the dress which looked plain, and while he admitted that for
some mysterious reason it might represent expensiveness, it was not the dress
which was the secret of the effect, but a something, not altogether mere good
looks, expressed by the wearer. It was, in fact, the thing which the
second-class passenger, Salter, had been at once attracted and stirred to
rebellion by when Miss Vanderpoel came on board the Meridiana.
Betty did not look too
small for her high-backed chair, and she did not forget herself when she
talked. In spite of all she had found, her imagination was stirred by the
surroundings. Her sense of the fine spaces and possibilities of dignity in the
barren house, her knowledge that outside the windows there lay stretched broad
views of the park and its heavy-branched trees, and that outside the gates
stood the neglected picturesqueness of the village and all the rural and--to
her-- interesting life it slowly lived--this pleased and attracted her. If she
had been as helpless and discouraged as Rosalie she could see that it would all
have meant a totally different and depressing thing, but, strong and spirited,
and with the power of full hands, she was remotely rejoicing in what might be done
with it all. As she talked she was gradually learning detail. Sir Nigel was on
the Continent. Apparently he often went there; also it revealed itself that no
one knew at what moment he might return, for what reason he would return, or if
he would return at all during the summer. It was evident that no one had been
at any time encouraged to ask questions as to his intentions, or to feel that
they had a right to do so.
This she knew, and a
number of other things, before they left the table. When they did so they went
out to stroll upon the moss-grown stone terrace and listened to the
nightingales throwing into the air silver fountains of trilling song. When
Bettina paused, leaning against the balustrade of the terrace that she might
hear all the beauty of it, and feel all the beauty of the warm spring night,
Rosy went on making her effort to talk.
"It is not much of
a neighbourhood, Betty," she said. "You are too accustomed to
livelier places to like it."
"That is my reason
for feeling that I shall like it. I don't think I could be called a lively
person, and I rather hate lively places."
"But you are
accustomed--accustomed----" Rosy harked back uncertainly.
"I have been
accustomed to wishing that I could come to you," said Betty. "And now
I am here."
Lady Anstruthers laid a
hand on her dress.
"I can't believe
it! I can't believe it!" she breathed.
"You will believe
it," said Betty, drawing the hand around her waist and enclosing in her
own arm the narrow shoulders. "Tell me about the neighbourhood."
"There isn't any,
really," said Lady Anstruthers. "The houses are so far away from each
other. The nearest is six miles from here, and it is one that doesn't count.
"Why?"
"There is no
family, and the man who owns it is so poor. It is a big place, but it is
falling to pieces as this is.
"What is it
called?"
"Mount Dunstan.
The present earl only succeeded about three years ago. Nigel doesn't know him.
He is queer and not liked. He has been away."
"Where?"
"No one knows. To
Australia or somewhere. He has odd ideas. The Mount Dunstans have been awful
people for two generations. This man's father was almost mad with wickedness.
So was the elder son. This is a second son, and he came into nothing but debt.
Perhaps he feels the disgrace and it makes him rude and ill-tempered. His
father and elder brother had been in such scandals that people did not invite
them.
"Do they invite
this man?"
"No. He probably
would not go to their houses if they did. And he went away soon after he came
into the title."
"Is the place
beautiful?"
"There is a fine
deer park, and the gardens were wonderful a long time ago. The house is worth
looking at--outside."
"I will go and
look at it," said Betty.
"The carriage is
out of order. There is only Ughtred's cart."
"I am a good
walker," said Betty.
"Are you? It would
be twelve miles--there and back. When I was in New York people didn't walk
much, particularly girls."
"They do
now," Betty answered. "They have learned to do it in England. They
live out of doors and play games. They have grown athletic and tall."
As they talked the
nightingales sang, sometimes near, sometimes in the distance, and scents of
dewy grass and leaves and earth were wafted towards them. Sometimes they
strolled up and down the terrace, sometimes they paused and leaned against the
stone balustrade. Betty allowed Rosy to talk as she chose. She herself asked no
obviously leading questions and passed over trying moments with lightness. Her
desire was to place herself in a position where she might hear the things which
would aid her to draw conclusions. Lady Anstruthers gradually grew less nervous
and afraid of her subjects. In the wonder of the luxury of talking to someone
who listened with sympathy, she once or twice almost forgot herself and made
revelations she had not intended to make. She had often the manner of a person
who was afraid of being overheard; sometimes, even when she was making speeches
quite simple in themselves, her voice dropped and she glanced furtively aside
as if there were chances that something she dreaded might step out of the
shadow.
When they went upstairs
together and parted for the night, the clinging of Rosy's embrace was for a
moment almost convulsive. But she tried to laugh off its suggestion of intensity.
I held you tight so
that I could feel sure that you were real and would not melt away," she
said. "I hope you will be here in the morning."
"I shall never
really go quite away again, now I have come," Betty answered. "It is
not only your house I have come into. I have come back into your life."
After she had entered
her room and locked the door she sat down and wrote a letter to her father. It
was a long letter, but a clear one. She painted a definite and detailed picture
and made distinct her chief point.
"She is afraid of
me," she wrote. "That is the first and worst obstacle. She is
actually afraid that I will do something which will only add to her trouble.
She has lived under dominion so long that she has forgotten that there are
people who have no reason for fear. Her old life seems nothing but a dream. The
first thing I must teach her is that I am to be trusted not to do futile things,
and that she need neither be afraid of nor for me."
After writing these
sentences she found herself leaving her desk and walking up and down the room
to relieve herself. She could not sit still, because suddenly the blood ran
fast and hot through her veins. She put her hands against her cheeks and
laughed a little, low laugh.
"I feel
violent," she said. "I feel violent and I must get over it. This is
rage. Rage is worth nothing."
It was rage--the rage
of splendid hot blood which surged in answer to leaping hot thoughts. There
would have been a sort of luxury in giving way to the sway of it. But the
self-indulgence would have been no aid to future action. Rage was worth
nothing. She said it as the first Reuben Vanderpoel might have said of a
useless but glittering weapon. "This gun is worth nothing," and cast
it aside.
SHE came out upon the
stone terrace again rather early in the morning. She wanted to wander about in
the first freshness of the day, which was always an uplifting thing to her. She
wanted to see the dew on the grass and on the ragged flower borders and to hear
the tender, broken fluting of birds in the trees. One cuckoo was calling to
another in the park, and she stopped and listened intently. Until yesterday she
had never heard a cuckoo call, and its hollow mellowness gave her delight. It
meant the spring in England, and nowhere else.
There was space enough
to ramble about in the gardens. Paths and beds were alike overgrown with weeds,
but some strong, early-blooming things were fighting for life, refusing to be
strangled. Against the beautiful old red walls, over which age had stolen with
a wonderful grey bloom, venerable fruit trees were spread and nailed, and here
and there showed bloom, clumps of low-growing things sturdily advanced their
yellowness or whiteness, as if defying neglect. In one place a wall slanted and
threatened to fall, bearing its nectarine trees with it; in another there was a
gap so evidently not of to-day that the heap of its masonry upon the border bed
was already covered with greenery, and the roots of the fruit tree it had
supported had sent up strong, insistent shoots.
She passed down broad
paths and narrow ones, sometimes walking under trees, sometimes pushing her way
between encroaching shrubs; she descended delightful mossy and broken steps and
came upon dilapidated urns, in which weeds grew instead of flowers, and over
which rampant but lovely, savage little creepers clambered and clung.
In one of the walled
kitchen gardens she came upon an elderly gardener at work. At the sound of her
approaching steps he glanced round and then stood up, touching his forelock in
respectful but startled salute. He was so plainly amazed at the sight of her
that she explained herself.
"Good-morning,"
she said. "I am her ladyship's sister, Miss Vanderpoel. I came yesterday
evening. I am looking over your gardens."
He touched his forehead
again and looked round him. His manner was not cheerful. He cast a troubled eye
about him.
"They're not much
to see, miss," he said. "They'd ought to be, but they're not. Growing
things has to be fed and took care of. A man and a boy can't do it--nor yet
four or five of 'em."
"How many ought
there to be?" Betty inquired, with business-like directness. It was not
only the dew on the grass she had come out to see.
"If there was
eight or ten of us we might put it in order and keep it that way. It's a big
place, miss."
Betty looked about her
as he had done, but with a less discouraged eye.
"It is a beautiful
place, as well as a large one," she said. "I can see that there ought
to be more workers."
"There's no
one," said the gardener, "as has as many enemies as a gardener, an'
as many things to fight. There's grubs an' there's greenfly, an' there's drout',
an' wet an' cold, an' mildew, an' there's what the soil wants and starves
without, an' if you haven't got it nor yet hands an' feet an' tools enough,
how's things to feed, an' fight an' live--let alone bloom an' bear?"
"I don't know much
about gardens," said Miss Vanderpoel, "but I can understand
that."
The scent of fresh
bedewed things was in the air. It was true that she had not known much about
gardens, but here standing in the midst of one she began to awaken to a new,
practical interest. A creature of initiative could not let such a place as this
alone. It was beauty being slowly slain. One could not pass it by and do
nothing.
"What is your
name?" she asked
"Kedgers, miss.
I've only been here about a twelve-month. I was took on because I'm getting on
in years an' can't ask much wage."
"Can you spare
time to take me through the gardens and show me things?"
Yes, he could do it. In
truth, he privately welcomed an opportunity offering a prospect of excitement
so novel. He had shown more flourishing gardens to other young ladies in his
past years of service, but young ladies did not come to Stornham, and that one
having, with such extraordinary unexpectedness arrived, should want to look
over the desolation of these, was curious enough to rouse anyone to a sense of
a break in accustomed monotony. The young lady herself mystified him by her
difference from such others as he had seen. What the man in the shabby livery
had felt, he felt also, and added to this was a sense of the practicalness of the
questions she asked and the interest she showed and a way she had of seeming
singularly to suggest by the look in her eyes and the tone of her voice that
nothing was necessarily without remedy. When her ladyship walked through the
place and looked at things, a pale resignation expressed itself in the very
droop of her figure. When this one walked through the tumbled-down
grape-houses, potting-sheds and conservatories, she saw where glass was broken,
where benches had fallen and where roofs sagged and leaked. She inquired about
the heating apparatus and asked that she might see it. She asked about the
village and its resources, about labourers and their wages.
"As if,"
commented Kedgers mentally, "she was what Sir Nigel is--leastways what
he'd ought to be an' ain't."
She led the way back to
the fallen wall and stood and looked at it.
"It's a beautiful
old wall," she said. "It should be rebuilt with the old brick. New
would spoil it."
"Some of this is
broken and crumbled away," said Kedgers, picking up a piece to show it to
her.
"Perhaps old brick
could be bought somewhere," replied the young lady speculatively.
"One ought to be able to buy old brick in England, if one is willing to pay
for it."
Kedgers scratched his
head and gazed at her in respectful wonder which was almost trouble. Who was
going to pay for things, and who was going to look for things which were not on
the spot? Enterprise like this was not to be explained.
When she left him he
stood and watched her upright figure disappear through the ivy-grown door of
the kitchen gardens with a disturbed but elated expression on his countenance.
He did not know why he felt elated, but he was conscious of elation. Something
new had walked into the place. He stopped his work and grinned and scratched
his head several times after he went back to his pottering among the cabbage
plants.
"My word," he
muttered. "She's a fine, straight young woman. If she was her ladyship
things 'ud be different. Sir Nigel 'ud be different, too--or there'd be some
fine upsets."
There was a huge stable
yard, and Betty passed through that on her way back. The door of the carriage
house was open and she saw two or three tumbled-down vehicles. One was a landau
with a wheel off, one was a shabby, old-fashioned, low phaeton. She caught
sight of a patently venerable cob in one of the stables. The stalls near him
were empty.
"I suppose that is
all they have to depend upon," she thought. "And the stables are like
the gardens."
She found Lady
Anstruthers and Ughtred waiting for her upon the terrace, each of them
regarding her with an expression suggestive of repressed curiosity as she
approached. Lady Anstruthers flushed a little and went to meet her with an
eager kiss.
"You look like--I
don't know quite what you look like, Betty!" she exclaimed.
The girl's dimple
deepened and her eyes said smiling things.
"It is the
morning--and your gardens," she answered. "I have been round your
gardens."
"They were
beautiful once, I suppose," said Rosy deprecatingly.
"They are
beautiful now. There is nothing like them in America at least."
"I don't remember
any gardens in America," Lady Anstruthers owned reluctantly, "but
everything seemed so cheerful and well cared for and--and new. Don't laugh,
Betty. I have begun to like new things. You would if you had watched old ones
tumbling to pieces for twelve years."
"They ought not to
be allowed to tumble to pieces," said Betty. She added her next words with
simple directness. She could only discover how any advancing steps would be
taken by taking them. "Why do you allow them to do it?"
Lady Anstruthers looked
away, but as she looked her eyes passed Ughtred's.
"I!" she
said. "There are so many other things to do. It would cost so much--such
an enormity to keep it all in order."
"But it ought to
be done--for Ughtred's sake."
"I know
that," faltered Rosy, "but I can't help it."
"You can,"
answered Betty, and she put her arm round her as they turned to enter the
house. "When you have become more used to me and my driving American ways
I will show you how."
The lightness with
which she said it had an odd effect on Lady Anstruthers. Such casual readiness
was so full of the suggestion of unheard of possibilities that it was a kind of
shock.
"I have been
twelve years in getting un-used to you--I feel as if it would take twelve years
more to get used again," she said.
"It won't take
twelve weeks," said Betty.
THE mystery of the apparently
occult methods of communication among the natives of India, between whom, it is
said, news flies by means too strange and subtle to be humanly explainable, is
no more difficult a problem to solve than that of the lightning rapidity with
which a knowledge of the transpiring of any new local event darts through the
slowest, and, as far as outward signs go, the least communicative English
village slumbering drowsily among its pastures and trees. That which the Hall
or Manor House believed last night, known only to the four walls of its
drawing-room, is discussed over the cottage breakfast tables as though
presented in detail through the columns of the Morning Post. The vicarage, the
smithy, the post office, the little provision shop, are instantaneously
informed as by magic of such incidents of interest as occur, and are prepared
to assist vicariously at any future developments. Through what agency
information is given no one can tell, and, indeed, the agency is of small
moment. Facts of interest are perhaps like flights of swallows and dart
chattering from one red roof to another, proclaiming themselves aloud. Nothing
is so true as that in such villages they are the property and innocent
playthings of man, woman, and child, providing conversation and drama otherwise
likely to be lacked.
When Miss Vanderpoel
walked through Stornham village street she became aware that she was an
exciting object of interest. Faces appeared at cottage windows, women sauntered
to doors, men in the taproom of the Clock Inn left beer mugs to cast an eye on
her; children pushed open gates and stared as they bobbed their curtsies; the
young woman who kept the shop left her counter and came out upon her door step
to pick up her straying baby and glance over its shoulder at the face with the
red mouth, and the mass of black hair rolled upward under a rough blue straw
hat. Everyone knew who this exotic-looking young lady was. She had arrived
yesterday from London, and a week ago by means of a ship from far-away America,
from the country in connection with which the rural mind curiously mixed up
large wages, great fortunes and Indians. "Gaarge" Lunsden, having
spent five years of his youth labouring heavily for sixteen shillings a week,
had gone to "Meriker" and had earned there eight shillings a day.
This was a well-known and much-talked over fact, and had elevated the western
continent to a position of trust and importance it had seriously lacked before
the emigration of Lunsden. A place where a man could earn eight shillings a day
inspired interest as well as confidence. When Sir Nigel's wife had arrived
twelve years ago as the new Lady Austruthers, the story that she herself
"had money" had been verified by her fine clothes and her way of
handing out sovereigns in cases where the rest of the gentry, if they gave at
all, would have bestowed tea and flannel or shillings. There had been for a few
months a period of unheard of well-being in Stornham village; everyone
remembered the hundred pounds the bride had given to poor Wilson when his place
had burned down, but the village had of course learned, by its occult means,
that Sir Nigel and the Dowager had been angry and that there had been a
quarrel. Afterwards her ladyship had been dangerously ill, the baby had been
born a hunchback, and a year had passed before its mother had been seen again.
Since then she had been a changed creature; she had lost her looks and seemed
to care for nothing but the child. Stornham village saw next to nothing of her,
and it certainly was not she who had the dispensing of her fortune. Rumour said
Sir Nigel lived high in London and foreign parts, but there was no high living
at the Court. Her ladyship's family had never been near her, and belief in them
and their wealth almost ceased to exist. If they were rich, Stornham felt that
it was their business to mend roofs and windows and not allow chimneys and
kitchen boilers to fall into ruin, the simple, leading article of faith being
that even American money belonged properly to England.
As Miss Vanderpoel
walked at a light, swinging pace through the one village street the gazers felt
with Kedgers that something new was passing and stirring the atmosphere. She
looked straight, and with a friendliness somehow dominating, at the curious women;
her handsome eyes met those of the men in a human questioning; she smiled and
nodded to the bobbing children. One of these, young enough to be uncertain on
its feet, in running to join some others stumbled and fell on the path before
her. Opening its mouth in the inevitable resultant roar, it was shocked almost
into silence by the tall young lady stooping at once, picking it up, and
cheerfully dusting its pinafore.
"Don't cry,"
she said; "you are not hurt, you know."
The deep dimple near
her mouth showed itself, and the laugh in her eyes was so reassuring that the
penny she put into the grubby hand was less productive of effect than her mere
self. She walked on, leaving the group staring after her breathless, because of
a sense of having met with a wonderful adventure. The grand young lady with the
black hair and the blue hat and tall, straight body was the adventure. She left
the same sense of event with the village itself. They talked of her all day
over their garden palings, on their doorsteps, in the street; of her looks, of
her height, of the black rim of lashes round her eyes, of the chance that she
might be rich and ready to give half-crowns and sovereigns, of the
"Meriker" she had come from, and above all of the reason for her
coming.
Betty swung with the
light, firm step of a good walker out on to the highway. To walk upon the fine,
smooth old Roman road was a pleasure in itself, but she soon struck away from
it and went through lanes and by-ways, following sign-posts because she knew
where she was going. Her walk was to take her to Mount Dunstan and home again
by another road. In walking, an objective point forms an interest, and what she
had heard of the estate from Rosalie was a vague reason for her caring to see
it. It was another place like Stornham, once dignified and nobly representative
of fine things, now losing their meanings and values. Values and meanings,
other than mere signs of wealth and power, there had been. Centuries ago strong
creatures had planned and built it for such reasons as strength has for its
planning and building. In Bettina Vanderpoel's imagination the First Man held
powerful and moving sway. It was he whom she always saw. In history, as a child
at school, she had understood and drawn close to him. There was always a First
Man behind all that one saw or was told, one who was the fighter, the human
thing who snatched weapons and tools from stones and trees and wielded them in
the carrying out of the thought which was his possession and his strength. He
was the God made human; others waited, without knowledge of their waiting, for
the signal he gave. A man like others--with man's body, hands, and limbs, and
eyes-- the moving of a whole world was subtly altered by his birth. One could
not always trace him, but with stone axe and spear point he had won savage
lands in savage ways, and so ruled them that, leaving them to other hands,
their march towards less savage life could not stay itself, but must sweep on;
others of his kind, striking rude harps, had so sung that the loud clearness of
their wild songs had rung through the ages, and echo still in strains which are
theirs, though voices of to-day repeat the note of them. The First Man, a
Briton stained with woad and hung with skins, had tilled the luscious greenness
of the lands richly rolling now within hedge boundaries. The square church
towers rose, holding their slender corner spires above the trees, as a result
of the First Man, Norman William. The thought which held its place, the work
which did not pass away, had paid its First Man wages; but beauties crumbling,
homes falling to waste, were bitter things. The First Man, who, having won his
splendid acres, had built his home upon them and reared his young and passed
his possession on with a proud heart, seemed but ill treated. Through centuries
the home had enriched itself, its acres had borne harvests, its trees had grown
and spread huge branches, full lives had been lived within the embrace of the
massive walls, there had been loves and lives and marriages and births, the
breathings of them made warm and full the very air. To Betty it seemed that the
land itself would have worn another face if it had not been trodden by so many
springing feet, if so many harvests had not waved above it, if so many eyes had
not looked upon and loved it.
She passed through
variations of the rural loveliness she had seen on her way from the station to
the Court, and felt them grow in beauty as she saw them again. She came at last
to a village somewhat larger than Stornham and marked by the signs of the lack
of money-spending care which Stornham showed. Just beyond its limits a big park
gate opened on to an avenue of massive trees. She stopped and looked down it,
but could see nothing but its curves and, under the branches, glimpses of a spacious
sweep of park with other trees standing in groups or alone in the sward. The
avenue was unswept and untended, and here and there boughs broken off by wind
storms lay upon it. She turned to the road again and followed it, because it
enclosed the park and she wanted to see more of its evident beauty. It was very
beautiful. As she walked on she saw it rolled into woods and deeps filled with
bracken; she saw stretches of hillocky, fine-grassed rabbit warren, and hollows
holding shadowy pools; she caught the gleam of a lake with swans sailing slowly
upon it with curved necks; there were wonderful lights and wonderful shadows,
and brooding stillness, which made her footfall upon the road a too material
thing.
Suddenly she heard a
stirring in the bracken a yard or two away from her. Something was moving
slowly among the waving masses of huge fronds and caused them to sway to and
fro. It was an antlered stag who rose from his bed in the midst of them, and
with majestic deliberation got upon his feet and stood gazing at her with a
calmness of pose so splendid, and a liquid darkness and lustre of eye so stilly
and fearlessly beautiful, that she caught her breath. He simply gazed as her as
a great king might gaze at an intruder, scarcely deigning wonder.
As she had passed on
her way, Betty had seen that the enclosing park palings were decaying, covered
with lichen and falling at intervals. It had even passed through her mind that
here was one of the demands for expenditure on a large estate, which limited resources
could not confront with composure. The deer fence itself, a thing of wire ten
feet high, to form an obstacle to leaps, she had marked to be in such condition
as to threaten to become shortly a useless thing. Until this moment she had
seen no deer, but looking beyond the stag and across the sward she now saw
groups near each other, stags cropping or looking towards her with lifted
heads, does at a respectful but affectionate distance from them, some caring
for their fawns. The stag who had risen near her had merely walked through a
gap in the boundary and now stood free to go where he would.
"He will get
away," said Betty, knitting her black brows. Ah! what a shame!
Even with the best
intentions one could not give chase to a stag. She looked up and down the road,
but no one was within sight. Her brows continued to knit themselves and her
eyes ranged over the park itself in the hope that some labourer on the estate,
some woodman or game-keeper, might be about.
"It is no affair
of mine," she said, "but it would be too bad to let him get away,
though what happens to stray stags one doesn't exactly know."
As she said it she
caught sight of someone, a man in leggings and shabby clothes and with a gun
over his shoulder, evidently an under keeper. He was a big, rather
rough-looking fellow, but as he lurched out into the open from a wood Betty saw
that she could reach him if she passed through a narrow gate a few yards away
and walked quickly.
He was slouching along,
his head drooping and his broad shoulders expressing the definite antipodes of
good spirits. Betty studied his back as she strode after him, her conclusion
being that he was perhaps not a good-humoured man to approach at any time, and
that this was by ill luck one of his less fortunate hours.
"Wait a moment, if
you please," her clear, mellow voice flung out after him when she was
within hearing distance. "I want to speak to you, keeper."
He turned with an air
of far from pleased surprise. The afternoon sun was in his eyes and made him
scowl. For a moment he did not see distinctly who was approaching him, but he
had at once recognised a certain cool tone of command in the voice whose
suddenness had roused him from a black mood. A few steps brought them to close
quarters, and when he found himself looking into the eyes of his pursuer he
made a movement as if to lift his cap, then checking himself, touched it,
keeper fashion.
"Oh!" he said
shortly. "Miss Vanderpoel! Beg pardon."
Bettina stood still a
second. She had her surprise also. Here was the unexpected again. The under
keeper was the red-haired second-class passenger of the Meridiana.
He did not look pleased
to see her, and the suddenness of his appearance excluded the possibility of
her realising that upon the whole she was at least not displeased to see him.
"How do you
do?" she said, feeling the remark fantastically conventional, but not
being inspired by any alternative. "I came to tell you that one of the
stags has got through a gap in the fence."
"Damn!" she
heard him say under his breath. Aloud he said, "Thank you."
"He is a splendid
creature," she said. "I did not know what to do. I was glad to see a
keeper coming."
"Thank you,"
he said again, and strode towards the place where the stag still stood gazing
up the road, as if reflecting as to whether it allured him or not.
Betty walked back more
slowly, watching him with interest. She wondered what he would find it
necessary to do. She heard him begin a low, flute-like whistling, and then saw
the antlered head turn towards him. The woodland creature moved, but it was in
his direction. It had without doubt answered his call before and knew its
meaning to be friendly. It went towards him, stretching out a tender sniffing
nose, and he put his hand in the pocket of his rough coat and gave it something
to eat. Afterwards he went to the gap in the fence and drew the wires together,
fastening them with other wire, which he also took out of the coat pocket.
"He is not afraid
of making himself useful," thought Betty. "And the animals know him.
He is not as bad as he looks."
She lingered a moment
watching him, and then walked towards the gate through which she had entered.
He glanced up as she neared him.
"I don't see your
carriage," he said. "Your man is probably round the trees."
"I walked,"
answered Betty. "I had heard of this place and wanted to see it."
He stood up, putting
his wire back into his pocket.
"There is not much
to be seen from the road," he said. "Would you like to see more of
it?"
His manner was civil enough,
but not the correct one for a servant. He did not say "miss" or touch
his cap in making the suggestion. Betty hesitated a moment.
"Is the family at
home?" she inquired.
"There is no
family but--his lordship. He is off the place."
"Does he object to
trespassers?"
"Not if they are
respectable and take no liberties."
"I am respectable,
and I shall not take liberties," said Miss Vanderpoel, with a touch of
hauteur. The truth was that she had spent a sufficient number of years on the
Continent to have become familiar with conventions which led her not to approve
wholly of his bearing. Perhaps he had lived long enough in America to forget
such conventions and to lack something which centuries of custom had decided
should belong to his class. A certain suggestion of rough force in the man
rather attracted her, and her slight distaste for his manner arose from the
realisation that a gentleman's servant who did not address his superiors as was
required by custom was not doing his work in a finished way. In his place she
knew her own demeanour would have been finished.
"If you are sure
that Lord Mount Dunstan would not object to my walking about, I should like
very much to see the gardens and the house," she said. "If you show
them to me, shall I be interfering with your duties?"
"No," he
answered, and then for the first time rather glumly added, "miss."
"I am
interested," she said, as they crossed the grass together, "because
places like this are quite new to me. I have never been in England
before."
"There are not
many places like this," he answered, "not many as old and fine, and
not many as nearly gone to ruin. Even Stornham is not quite as far gone."
"It is far
gone," said Miss Vanderpoel. "I am staying there--with my sister, Lady
Anstruthers."
"Beg
pardon--miss," he said. This time he touched his cap in apology.
Enormous as the gulf
between their positions was, he knew that he had offered to take her over the
place because he was in a sense glad to see her again. Why he was glad he did
not profess to know or even to ask himself. Coarsely speaking, it might be
because she was one of the handsomest young women he had ever chanced to meet
with, and while her youth was apparent in the rich red of her mouth, the mass
of her thick, soft hair and the splendid blue of her eyes, there spoke in every
line of face and pose something intensely more interesting and compelling than
girlhood. Also, since the night they had come together on the ship's deck for
an appalling moment, he had liked her better and rebelled less against the
unnatural wealth she represented. He led her first to the wood from which she
had seen him emerge.
"I will show you
this first," he explained. "Keep your eyes on the ground until I tell
you to raise them."
Odd as this was, she
obeyed, and her lowered glance showed her that she was being guided along a
narrow path between trees. The light was mellow golden-green, and birds were
singing in the boughs above her. In a few minutes he stopped.
"Now look
up," he said.
She uttered an
exclamation when she did so. She was in a fairy dell thick with ferns, and at
beautiful distances from each other incredibly splendid oaks spread and almost
trailed their lovely giant branches. The glow shining through and between them,
the shadows beneath them, their great boles and moss-covered roots, and the
stately, mellow distances revealed under their branches, the ancient wildness
and richness, which meant, after all, centuries of cultivation, made a picture
in this exact, perfect moment of ripening afternoon sun of an almost
unbelievable beauty.
"There is nothing
lovelier," he said in a low voice, "in all England."
Bettina turned to look
at him, because his tone was a curious one for a man like himself. He was
standing resting on his gun and taking in the loveliness with a strange look in
his rugged face.
"You--you love
it!" she said.
"Yes," but
with a suggestion of stubborn reluctance in the admission.
She was rather moved.
"Have you been
keeper here long?" she asked.
"No--only a few
years. But I have known the place all my life."
"Does Lord Mount
Dunstan love it?"
"In his
way--yes."
He was plainly not
disposed to talk of his master. He was perhaps not on particularly good terms
with him. He led her away and volunteered no further information. He was, upon
the whole, uncommunicative. He did not once refer to the circumstance of their
having met before. It was plain that he had no intention of presuming upon the
fact that he, as a second-class passenger on a ship, had once been forced by
accident across the barriers between himself and the saloon deck. He was
stubbornly resolved to keep his place; so stubbornly that Bettina felt that to
broach the subject herself would verge upon offence.
But the golden ways through
which he led her made the afternoon one she knew she should never forget. They
wandered through moss walks and alleys, through tangled shrubberies bursting
into bloom, beneath avenues of blossoming horse-chestnuts and scented limes,
between thickets of budding red and white may, and jungles of neglected
rhododendrons; through sunken gardens and walled ones, past terraces with
broken balustrades of stone, and fallen Floras and Dianas, past moss-grown
fountains splashing in lovely corners. Arches, overgrown with yet unblooming
roses, crumbled in their time stained beauty. Stillness brooded over it all,
and they met no one. They scarcely broke the silence themselves. The man led
the way as one who knew it by heart, and Bettina followed, not caring for speech
herself, because the stillness seemed to add a spell of enchantment. What could
one say, to a stranger, of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin and
decay.
"But, oh!"
she murmured once, standing still, with indrawn breath, "if it were
mine!--if it were mine!" And she said the thing forgetting that her guide
was a living creature and stood near.
Afterwards her memories
of it all seemed to her like the memories of a dream. The lack of speech
between herself and the man who led her, his often averted face, her own sense
of the desertedness of each beauteous spot she passed through, the mossy paths
which gave back no sound of footfalls as they walked, suggested, one and all,
unreality. When at last they passed through a door half hidden in an ivied wall,
and crossing a grassed bowling green, mounted a short flight of broken steps
which led them to a point through which they saw the house through a break in
the trees, this last was the final touch of all. It was a great place, stately
in its masses of grey stone to which thick ivy clung. To Bettina it seemed that
a hundred windows stared at her with closed, blind eyes. All were shuttered but
two or three on the lower floors. Not one showed signs of life. The silent
stone thing stood sightless among all of which it was dead master--rolling
acres, great trees, lost gardens and deserted groves.
"Oh!" she
sighed, "Oh!"
Her companion stood
still and leaned upon his gun again, looking as he had looked before.
"Some of it,"
he said, "was here before the Conquest. It belonged to Mount Dunstans
then."
"And only one of
them is left," she cried, "and it is like this!"
"They have been a
bad lot, the last hundred years," was the surly liberty of speech he took,
"a bad lot."
It was not his place to
speak in such manner of those of his master's house, and it was not the part of
Miss Vanderpoel to encourage him by response. She remained silent, standing
perhaps a trifle more lightly erect as she gazed at the rows of blind windows
in silence.
Neither of them uttered
a word for some time, but at length Bettina roused herself. She had a six-mile
walk before her and must go.
"I am very much
obliged to you," she began, and then paused a second. A curious hesitance
came upon her, though she knew that under ordinary circumstances such
hesitation would have been totally out of place. She had occupied the man's
time for an hour or more, he was of the working class, and one must not be
guilty of the error of imagining that a man who has work to do can justly spend
his time in one's service for the mere pleasure of it. She knew what custom
demanded. Why should she hesitate before this man, with his not too courteous,
surly face. She felt slightly irritated by her own unpractical embarrassment as
she put her hand into the small, latched bag at her belt.
"I am very much
obliged, keeper," she said. "You have given me a great deal of your
time. You know the place so well that it has been a pleasure to be taken about
by you. I have never seen anything so beautiful--and so sad. Thank you --thank
you." And she put a goldpiece in his palm.
His fingers closed over
it quietly. Why it was to her great relief she did not know--because something
in the simple act annoyed her, even while she congratulated herself that her
hesitance had been absurd. The next moment she wondered if it could be possible
that he had expected a larger fee. He opened his hand and looked at the money
with a grim steadiness.
"Thank you,
miss," he said, and touched his cap in the proper manner.
He did not look
gracious or grateful, but he began to put it in a small pocket in the breast of
his worn corduroy shooting jacket. Suddenly he stopped, as if with abrupt
resolve. He handed the coin back without any change of his glum look.
"Hang it
all," he said, "I can't take this, you know. I suppose I ought to
have told you. It would have been less awkward for us both. I am that
unfortunate beggar, Mount Dunstan, myself."
A pause was inevitable.
It was a rather long one. After it, Betty took back her half-sovereign and
returned it to her bag, but she pleased a certain perversity in him by looking
more annoyed than confused.
"Yes," she
said. "You ought to have told me, Lord Mount Dunstan."
He slightly shrugged
his big shoulders.
"Why shouldn't you
take me for a keeper? You crossed the Atlantic with a fourth-rate looking
fellow separated from you by barriers of wood and iron. You came upon him
tramping over a nobleman's estate in shabby corduroys and gaiters, with a gun
over his shoulder and a scowl on his ugly face. Why should you leap to the
conclusion that he is the belted Earl himself? There is no cause for
embarrassment."
"I am not
embarrassed," said Bettina.
"That is what I
like," gruffly.
"I am
pleased," in her mellowest velvet voice, "that you like it."
Their eyes met with a
singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark passed which was not
afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its
kindling, and Mount Dunstan slightly frowned.
"I beg pardon,"
he said. "You are quite right. It had a deucedly patronising sound."
As he stood before her
Betty was given her opportunity to see him as she had not seen him before, to
confront the sum total of his physique. His red-brown eyes looked out from rather
fine heavy brows, his features were strong and clear, though ruggedly cut, his
build showed weight of bone, not of flesh, and his limbs were big and long. He
would have wielded a battle-axe with power in centuries in which men hewed
their way with them. Also it occurred to her he would have looked well in a
coat of mail. He did not look ill in his corduroys and gaiters.
"I am a
self-absorbed beggar," he went on. "I had been slouching about the
place, almost driven mad by my thoughts, and when I saw you took me for a
servant my fancy was for letting the thing go on. If I had been a rich man
instead of a pauper I would have kept your half-sovereign."
"I should not have
enjoyed that when I found out the truth," said Miss Vanderpoel
"No, I suppose you
wouldn't. But I should not have cared.
He was looking at her
straightly and summing her up as she had summed him up. A man and young, he did
not miss a line or a tint of her chin or cheek, shoulder, or brow, or dense,
lifted hair. He had already, even in his guise of keeper, noticed one thing,
which was that while at times her eyes were the blue of steel, sometimes they
melted to the colour of bluebells under water. They had been of this last hue
when she had stood in the sunken garden, forgetting him and crying low:
"Oh, if it were
mine! If it were mine!"
He did not like
American women with millions, but while he would not have said that he liked
her, he did not wish her yet to move away. And she, too, did not wish, just
yet, to move away. There was something dramatic and absorbing in the situation.
She looked over the softly stirring grass and saw the sunshine was deepening
its gold and the shadows were growing long. It was not a habit of hers to ask
questions, but she asked one.
"Did you not like
America?" was what she said.
"Hated it! Hated
it! I went there lured by a belief that a man like myself, with muscle and
will, even without experience, could make a fortune out of small capital on a
sheep ranch. Wind and weather and disease played the devil with me. I lost the
little I had and came back to begin over again-- on nothing--here!" And he
waved his hand over the park with its sward and coppice and bracken and the
deer cropping in the late afternoon gold.
"To begin what
again?" said Betty. It was an extraordinary enough thing, seen in the
light of conventions, that they should stand and talk like this. But the spark
had kindled between eye and eye, and because of it they suddenly had forgotten
that they were strangers.
"You are an
American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it would to others. To begin to
build up again, in one man's life, what has taken centuries to grow--and fall
into this."
"It would be a
splendid thing to do," she said slowly, and as she said it her eyes took
on their colour of bluebells, because what she had seen had moved her. She had
not looked at him, but at the cropping deer as she spoke, but at her next
sentence she turned to him again.
"Where should you
begin?" she asked, and in saying it thought of Stornham.
He laughed shortly.
"That is American
enough," he said. "Your people have not finished their beginnings yet
and live in the spirit of them. I tell you of a wild fancy, and you accept it
as a possibility and turn on me with, 'Where should you begin?' "
"That is one way
of beginning," said Bettina. "In fact, it is the only way."
He did not tell her
that he liked that, but he knew that he did like it and that her mere words
touched him like a spur. It was, of course, her lifelong breathing of the
atmosphere of millions which made for this fashion of moving at once in the
direction of obstacles presenting to the rest of the world barriers seemingly
insurmountable. And yet there was something else in it, some quality of nature
which did not alone suggest the omnipotence of wealth, but another thing which
might be even stronger and therefore carried conviction. He who had raged and
clenched his hands in the face of his knowledge of the aspect his dream would
have presented if he had revealed it to the ordinary practical mind, felt that
a point of view like this was good for him. There was in it stimulus for a
fleeting moment at least.
"That is a good
idea," he answered. "Where should you begin?"
She replied quite
seriously, though he could have imagined some girls rather simpering over the
question as a casual joke.
"One would begin
at the fences," she said. "Don't you think so?"
"That is
practical."
"That is where I
shall begin at Stornham," reflectively.
"You are going to
begin at Stornham?"
"How could one
help it? It is not as large or as splendid as this has been, but it is like it
in a way. And it will belong to my sister's son. No, I could not help it."
"I suppose you
could not." There was a hint of wholly unconscious resentment in his tone.
He was thinking that the effect produced by their boundless wealth was to make
these people feel as a race of giants might--even their women unknowingly
revealed it.
"No, I could
not," was her reply. "I suppose I am on the whole a sort of
commercial working person. I have no doubt it is commercial, that instinct
which makes one resent seeing things lose their value."
"Shall you begin
it for that reason?"
"Partly for that
one--partly for another." She held out her hand to him. "Look at the
length of the shadows. I must go. Thank you, Lord Mount Dunstan, for showing me
the place, and thank you for undeceiving me."
He held the side gate
open for her and lifted his cap as she passed through. He admitted to himself,
with some reluctance, that he was not content that she should go even yet, but,
of course, she must go. There passed through his mind a remote wonder why he
had suddenly unbosomed himself to her in a way so extraordinarily unlike
himself. It was, he thought next, because as he had taken her about from one
place to another he had known that she had seen in things what he had seen in
them so long--the melancholy loneliness, the significance of it, the lost hopes
that lay behind it, the touching pain of the stateliness wrecked. She had shown
it in the way in which she tenderly looked from side to side, in the very
lightness of her footfall, in the bluebell softening of her eyes. Oh, yes, she
had understood and cared, American as she was! She had felt it all, even with
her hideous background of Fifth Avenue behind her.
When he had spoken it
had been in involuntary response to an emotion in herself.
So he stood, thinking,
as he for some time watched her walking up the sunset-glowing road.
BETTY VANDERPOEL'S walk
back to Stornham did not, long though it was, give her time to follow to its
end the thread of her thoughts. Mentally she walked again with her
uncommunicative guide, through woodpaths and gardens, and stood gazing at the
great blind-faced house. She had not given the man more than an occasional
glance until he had told her his name. She had been too much absorbed, too much
moved, by what she had been seeing. She wondered, if she had been more aware of
him, whether his face would have revealed a great deal. She believed it would
not. He had made himself outwardly stolid. But the thing must have been bitter.
To him the whole story of the splendid past was familiar even if through his
own life he had looked on only at gradual decay. There must be stories enough
of men and women who had lived in the place, of what they had done, of how they
had loved, of what they had counted for in their country's wars and
peacemakings, great functions and law-building. To be able to look back through
centuries and know of one's blood that sometimes it had been shed in the doing
of great deeds, must be a thing to remember. To realise that the courage and
honour had been lost in ignoble modern vices, which no sense of dignity and
reverence for race and name had restrained-- must be bitter--bitter! And in the
rôle of a servant to lead a stranger about among the ruins of what had
been--that must have been bitter, too. For a moment Betty felt the bitterness
of it herself and her red mouth took upon itself a grim line. The worst of it
for him was that he was not of that strain of his race who had been the
"bad lot." The "bad lot" had been the weak lot, the
vicious, the self-degrading. Scandals which had shut men out from their class
and kind were usually of an ugly type. This man had a strong jaw, a powerful,
healthy body, and clean, though perhaps hard, eyes. The First Man of them, who
hewed his way to the front, who stood fierce in the face of things, who won the
first lands and laid the first stones, might have been like him in build and
look.
"It's a disgusting
thing," she said to herself, "to think of the corrupt weaklings the
strong ones dwindled down to. I hate them. So does he."
There had been many
such of late years, she knew. She had seen them in Paris, in Rome, even in New
York. Things with thin or over-thick bodies and receding chins and foreheads;
things haunting places of amusement and finding inordinate entertainment in strange
jokes and horseplay. She herself had hot blood and a fierce strength of
rebellion, and she was wondering how, if the father and elder brother had been
the "bad lot," he had managed to stand still, looking on, and keeping
his hands off them.
The last gold of the
sun was mellowing the grey stone of the terrace and enriching the green of the
weeds thrusting themselves into life between the uneven flags when she reached
Stornham, and passing through the house found Lady Anstruthers sitting there.
In sustenance of her effort to keep up appearances, she had put on a weird
little muslin dress and had elaborated the dressing of her thin hair. It was no
longer dragged back straight from her face, and she looked a trifle less
abject, even a shade prettier. Bettina sat upon the edge of the balustrade and
touched the hair with light fingers, ruffling it a little becomingly.
"If you had worn
it like this yesterday," she said, "I should have known you."
"Should you,
Betty? I never look into a mirror if I can help it, but when I do I never know
myself. The thing that stares back at me with its pale eyes is not Rosy. But,
of course, everyone grows old."
"Not now! People
are just discovering how to grow young instead."
Lady Anstruthers looked
into the clear courage of her laughing eyes.
"Somehow,"
she said, "you say strange things in such a way that one feels as if they
must be true, however--however unlike anything else they are."
"They are not as
new as they seem," said Betty. "Ancient philosophers said things like
them centuries ago, but people did not believe them. We are just beginning to
drag them out of the dust and furbish them up and pretend they are ours, just
as people rub up and adorn themselves with jewels dug out of excavations."
"In America people
think so many new things," said poor little Lady Anstruthers with yearning
humbleness.
"The whole
civilised world is thinking what you call new things," said Betty.
"The old ones won't do. They have been tried, and though they have helped
us to the place we have reached, they cannot help us any farther. We must begin
again."
"It is such a long
time since I began," said Rosy, "such a long time."
"Then there must
be another beginning for you, too. The hour has struck."
Lady Anstruthers rose
with as involuntary a movement as if a strong hand had drawn her to her feet.
She stood facing Betty, a pathetic little figure in her washed-out muslin frock
and with her washed-out face and eyes and being, though on her faded cheeks a
flush was rising.
"Oh, Betty!"
she said, "I don't know what there is about you, but there is something
which makes one feel as if you believed everything and could do everything, and
as if one believes you. Whatever you were to say, you would make it seem true.
If you said the wildest thing in the world I should believe you."
Betty got up, too, and
there was an extraordinary steadiness in her eyes.
"You may,"
she answered. "I shall never say one thing to you which is not a truth,
not one single thing."
"I believe
that," said Rosy Anstruthers, with a quivering mouth. "I do believe
it so."
"I walked to Mount
Dunstan," Betty said later.
"Really?"
said Rosy. "There and back?"
"Yes, and all
round the park and the gardens."
Rosy looked rather
uncertain.
"Weren't you a little
afraid of meeting someone?"
"I did meet
someone. At first I took him for a gamekeeper. But he turned out to be Lord
Mount Dunstan."
Lady Anstruthers
gasped.
"What did he
do?" she exclaimed. "Did he look angry at seeing a stranger? They say
he is so ill-tempered and rude."
"I should feel
ill-tempered if I were in his place," said Betty. "He has enough to
rouse his evil passions and make him savage. What a fate for a man with any
sense and decency of feeling! What fools and criminals the last generation of
his house must have produced! I wonder how such things evolve themselves. But
he is different--different. One can see it. If he had a chance--just half a
chance--he would build it all up again. And I don't mean merely the place, but
all that one means when one says 'his house.' "
"He would need a
great deal of money," sighed Lady Anstruthers.
Betty nodded slowly as
she looked out, reflecting, into the park.
"Yes, it would
require money," was her admission.
"And he has
none," Lady Anstruthers added. "None whatever."
"He will get
some," said Betty, still reflecting. "He will make it, or dig it up,
or someone will leave it to him. There is a great deal of money in the world,
and when a strong creature ought to have some of it he gets it."
"Oh, Betty!"
said Rosy. "Oh, Betty! "
"Watch that
man," said Betty; "you will see. It will come."
Lady Anstruthers' mind,
working at no time on complex lines, presented her with a simple modern
solution.
"Perhaps he will
marry an American," she said, and saying it, sighed again.
"He will not do it
on purpose." Bettina answered slowly and with such an air of absence of
mind that Rosy laughed a little.
"Will he do it
accidentally, or against his will?" she said.
Betty herself smiled.
"Perhaps he
will," she said. "There are Englishmen who rather dislike Americans.
I think he is one of them."
It apparently became
necessary for Lady Anstruthers, a moment later, to lean upon the stone
balustrade and pick off a young leaf or so, for no reason whatever, unless that
in doing so she averted her look from her sister as she made her next remark.
"Are you--when are
you going to write to father and mother?"
"I have
written," with unembarrassed evenness of tone. "Mother will be
counting the days."
"Mother!"
Rosy breathed, with a soft little gasp. "Mother!" and turned her face
farther away. "What did you tell her?"
Betty moved over to her
and stood close at her side. The power of her personality enveloped the
tremulous creature as if it had been a sense of warmth.
"I told her how
beautiful the place was, and how Ughtred adored you--and how you loved us all,
and longed to see New York again.
The relief in the poor
little face was so immense that Betty's heart shook before it. Lady Anstruthers
looked up at her with adoring eyes.
"I might have
known," she said; "I might have known that--that you would only say
the right thing. You couldn't say the wrong thing, Betty."
Betty bent over her and
spoke almost yearningly.
"Whatever
happens," she said, "we will take care that mother is not hurt. She's
too kind--she's too good--she's too tender."
"That is what I
have remembered," said Lady Anstruthers brokenly. "She used to hold
me on her lap when I was quite grown up. Oh! her soft, warm arms--her warm
shoulder! I have so wanted her."
"She has wanted
you," Betty answered. "She thinks of you just as she did when she
held you on her lap."
"But if she saw me
now--looking like this! If she saw me! Sometimes I have even been glad to think
she never would."
"She will."
Betty's tone was cool and clear. "But before she does I shall have made
you look like yourself."
Lady Anstruthers' thin
hand closed on her plucked leaves convulsively, and then opening let them drop
upon the stone of the terrace.
"We shall never
see each other. It wouldn't be possible," she said. "And there is no
magic in the world now, Betty. You can't bring back----"
"Yes, you
can," said Bettina. "And what used to be called magic is only the
controlled working of the law and order of things in these days. We must talk
it all over."
Lady Anstruthers became
a little pale.
"What?" she
asked, low and nervously, and Betty saw her glance sideways at the windows of
the room which opened on to the terrace.
Betty took her hand and
drew her down into a chair. She sat near her and looked her straight in the
face.
"Don't be
frightened," she said. "I tell you there is no need to be frightened.
We are not living in the Middle Ages. There is a policeman even in Stornham
village, and we are within four hours of London, where there are
thousands."
Lady Anstruthers tried
to laugh, but did not succeed very well, and her forehead flushed.
"I don't quite
know why I seem so nervous," she said. "It's very silly of me."
She was still timid
enough to cling to some rag of pretence, but Betty knew that it would fall
away. She did the wisest possible thing, which was to make an apparently
impersonal remark.
"I want you to go
over the place with me and show me everything. Walls and fences and greenhouses
and outbuildings must not be allowed to crumble away."
"What?" cried
Rosy. "Have you seen all that already?" She actually stared at her.
"How practical and--and American!"
"To see that a
wall has fallen when you find yourself obliged to walk round a pile of
grass-grown brickwork?" said Betty.
Lady Anstruthers still
softly stared.
"What--what are
you thinking of?" she asked.
"Thinking that it
is all too beautiful----" Betty's look swept the loveliness spread about
her, "too beautiful and too valuable to be allowed to lose its value and
its beauty." She turned her eyes back to Rosy and the deep dimple near her
mouth showed itself delightfully. "It is a throwing away of capital,"
she added.
"Oh!" cried
Lady Anstruthers, "how clever you are! And you look so different,
Betty."
"Do I look
stupid?" the dimple deepening. "I must try to alter that."
"Don't try to
alter your looks," said Rosy. "It is your looks that make you so--so
wonderful. But usually women-- girls----" Rosy paused.
"Oh, I have been
trained," laughed Betty. "I am the spoiled daughter of a business man
of genius. His business is an art and a science. I have had advantages. He has
let me hear him talk. I even know some trifling things about stocks. Not enough
to do me vital injury--but something. What I know best of all,"--her laugh
ended and her eyes changed their look,--"is that it is a blunder to think
that beauty is not capital--that happiness is not--and that both are not the
greatest assets in the scheme. This," with a wave of her hand, taking in
all they saw, "is beauty, and it ought to be happiness, and it must be
taken care of. It is your home and Ughtred's----"
"It is
Nigel's," put in Rosy.
"It is entailed,
isn't it?" turning quickly. "He cannot sell it?"
"If he could we
should not be sitting here," ruefully.
"Then he cannot
object to its being rescued from ruin."
"He will object
to--to money being spent on things he does not care for." Lady
Anstruthers' voice lowered itself, as it always did when she spoke of her
husband, and she indulged in the involuntary hasty glance about her.
"I am going to my
room to take off my hat," Betty said. "Will you come with me?"
She went into the
house, talking quietly of ordinary things, and in this way they mounted the
stairway together and passed along the gallery which led to her room. When they
entered it she closed the door, locked it, and, taking off her hat, laid it
aside. After doing which she sat.
"No one can hear
and no one can come in," she said. "And if they could, you are afraid
of things you need not be afraid of now. Tell me what happened when you were so
ill after Ughtred was born."
"You guessed that
it happened then," gasped Lady Anstruthers.
"It was a good
time to make anything happen," replied Bettina. "You were prostrated,
you were a child, and felt yourself cast off hopelessly from the people who
loved you."
"Forever!
Forever!" Lady Antruthers' voice was a sharp little moan. "That was
what I felt--that nothing could ever help me. I dared not write things. He told
me he would not have it--that he would stop any hysterical complaints--that his
mother could testify that he behaved perfectly to me. She was the only person
in the room with us when-- when----"
"When?" said
Betty.
Lady Anstruthers
shuddered. She leaned forward and caught Betty's hand between her own shaking
ones.
"He struck me! He
struck me! He said it never happened-- but it did--it did! Betty, it did! That
was the one thing that came back to me clearest. He said that I was in
delirious hysterics, and that I had struggled with his mother and himself,
because they tried to keep me quiet, and prevent the servants hearing. One
awful day he brought Lady Anstruthers into the room, and they stood over me, as
I lay in bed, and she fixed her eyes on me and said that she--being an
Englishwoman, and a person whose word would be believed, could tell people the
truth--my father and mother, if necessary, that my spoiled, hysterical American
tempers had created unhappiness for me--merely because I was bored by life in
the country and wanted excitement. I tried to answer, but they would not let
me, and when I began to shake all over, they said that I was throwing myself
into hysterics again. And they told the doctor so, and he believed it."
The possibilities of
the situation were plainly to be seen. Fate, in the form of temperament itself,
had been against her. It was clear enough to Betty as she patted and stroked
the thin hands. "I understand. Tell me the rest," she said.
Lady Anstruthers' head
dropped.
"When I was
loneliest, and dying of homesickness, and so weak that I could not speak
without sobbing, he came to me--it was one morning after I had been lying awake
all night--and he began to seem kinder. He had not been near me for two days,
and I had thought I was going to be left to die alone--and mother would never
know. He said he had been reflecting and that he was afraid that we had
misunderstood each other--because we belonged to different countries, and had
been brought up in different ways----" she paused.
"And that if you
understood his position and considered it, you might both be quite happy,"
Betty gave in quiet termination.
Lady Anstruthers
started.
"Oh, you know it
all!" she exclaimed
"Only because I
have heard it before. It is an old trick. And because he seemed kind and
relenting, you tried to understand--and signed something."
"I wanted to
understand. I wanted to believe. What did it matter which of us had the money,
if we liked each other and were happy? He told me things about the estate, and
about the enormous cost of it, and his bad luck, and debts he could not help.
And I said that I would do anything if--if we could only be like mother and
father. And he kissed me and I signed the paper."
"And then?"
"He went to London
the next day, and then to Paris. He said he was obliged to go on business. He
was away a month. And after a week had passed, Lady Anstruthers began to be
restless and angry, and once she flew into a rage, and told me I was a fool,
and that if I had been an Englishwoman, I should have had some decent control
over my husband, because he would have respected me. In time I found out what I
had done. It did not take long."
"The paper you
signed," said Betty, "gave him control over your money?"
A forlorn nod was the
answer.
"And since then he
has done as he chose, and he has not chosen to care for Stornham. And once he
made you write to father, to ask for more money?"
"I did it once. I
never would do it again. He has tried to make me. He always says it is to save
Stornham for Ughtred."
"Nothing can take
Stornham from Ughtred. It may come to him a ruin, but it will come to
him."
"He says there are
legal points I cannot understand. And he says he is spending money on it."
"Where?"
"He--doesn't go
into that. If I were to ask questions, he would make me know that I had better
stop. He says I know nothing about things. And he is right. He has never
allowed me to know and--and I am not like you, Betty."
"When you signed
the paper, you did not realise that you were doing something you could never
undo and that you would be forced to submit to the consequences?"
"I--I didn't
realise anything but that it would kill me to live as I had been
living--feeling as if they hated me. And I was so glad and thankful that he
seemed kinder. It was as if I had been on the rack, and he turned the screws
back, and I was ready to do anything--anything--if I might be taken off. Oh,
Betty! you know, don't you, that--that if he would only have been a little kind--just
a little--I would have obeyed him always, and given him everything."
Betty sat and looked at
her, with deeply pondering eyes. She was confronting the fact that it seemed
possible that one must build a new soul for her as well as a new body. In these
days of science and growing sanity of thought, one did not stand helpless
before the problem of physical rebuilding, and--and perhaps, if one could pour
life into a creature, the soul of it would respond, and wake again, and grow.
"You do not know where
he is?" she said aloud. "You absolutely do not know?"
"I never know
exactly," Lady Anstruthers answered. "He was here for a few days the
week before you came. He said he was going abroad. He might appear to-morrow, I
might not hear of him for six months. I can't help hoping now that it will be
the six months."
"Why particularly
now?" inquired Betty.
Lady Anstruthers
flushed and looked shy and awkward.
"Because of--you.
I don't know what he would say. I don't know what he would do."
"To me?" said
Betty.
"It would be sure
to be something unreasonable and wicked," said Lady Anstruthers. "It
would, Betty."
"I wonder what it
would be?" Betty said musingly.
"He has told lies
for years to keep you all from me. If he came now, he would know that he had
been found out. He would say that I had told you things. He would be furious
because you have seen what there is to see. He would know that you could not help
but realise that the money he made me ask for had not been spent on the estate.
He,-- Betty, he would try to force you to go away."
"I wonder what he
would do?" Betty said again musingly. She felt interested, not afraid.
"It would be
something cunning," Rosy protested. "It would be something no one
could expect. He might be so rude that you could not remain in the room with
him, or he might be quite polite, and pretend he was rather glad to see you. If
he was only frightfully rude we should be safer, because that would not be an
unexpected thing, but if he was polite, it would be because he was arranging
something hideous, which you could not defend yourself against."
"Can you tell
me," said Betty quite slowly, because, as she looked down at the carpet, she
was thinking very hard, "the kind of unexpected thing he has done to
you?" Lifting her eyes, she saw that a troubled flush was creeping over
Lady Anstruthers' face.
"There--have
been--so many queer things," she faltered. Then Betty knew there was some
special thing she was afraid to talk about, and that if she desired to obtain
illuminating information it would be well to go into the matter.
"Try," she
said, "to remember some particular incident."
Lady Anstruthers looked
nervous.
"Rosy," in
the level voice, "there has been a particular incident--and I would rather
hear of it from you than from him.
Rosy's lap held little
shaking hands.
"He has held it
over me for years," she said breathlessly. "He said he would write
about it to father and mother. He says he could use it against me as evidence
in--in the divorce court. He says that divorce courts in America are for women,
but in England they are for men, and--he could defend himself against me."
The incongruity of the
picture of the small, faded creature arraigned in a divorce court on charges of
misbehaviour would have made Betty smile if she had been in smiling mood.
"What did he
accuse you of?"
"That was the--the
unexpected thing," miserably.
Betty took the unsteady
hands firmly in her own.
"Don't be afraid
to tell me," she said. "He knew you so well that he understood what
would terrify you the most. I know you so well that I understand how he does
it. Did he do this unexpected thing just before you wrote to father for the money?"
As she quite suddenly presented the question, Rosy exclaimed aloud.
"How did you
know?" she said. "You--you are like a lawyer. How could you
know?"
How simple she was! How
obviously an easy prey! She had been unconsciously giving evidence with every
word.
"I have been
thinking him over," Betty said. "He interests me. I have begun to
guess that he always wants something when he professes that he has a
grievance."
Then with drooping
head, Rosy told the story.
"Yes, it happened
before he made me write to father for so much money. The vicar was ill and was
obliged to go away for six months. The clergyman who came to take his place was
a young man. He was kind and gentle, and wanted to help people. His mother was
with him and she was like him. They loved each other, and they were quite poor.
His name was Ffolliott. I liked to hear him preach. He said things that
comforted me. Nigel found out that he comforted me, and--when he called here,
he was more polite to him than he had ever been to Mr. Brent. He seemed almost
as if he liked him. He actually asked him to dinner two or three times. After
dinner, he would go out of the room and leave us together. Oh, Betty!"
clinging to her hands, "I was so wretched then, that sometimes I thought I
was going out of my mind. I think I looked wild. I used to kneel down and try
to pray, and I could not."
"Yes, yes,"
said Betty.
"I used to feel
that if I could only have one friend, just one, I could bear it better. Once I
said something like that to Nigel. He only shrugged his shoulders and sneered
when I said it. But afterwards I knew he had remembered. One evening, when he
had asked Mr. Ffolliott to dinner, he led him to talk about religion. Oh,
Betty! It made my blood turn cold when he began. I knew he was doing it for
some wicked reason. I knew the look in his eyes and the awful, agreeable smile
on his mouth. When he said at last, 'If you could help my poor wife to find
comfort in such things,' I began to see. I could not explain to anyone how he
did it, but with just a sentence, dropped here and there, he seemed to tell the
whole story of a silly, selfish, American girl, thwarted in her vulgar little
ambitions, and posing as a martyr, because she could not have her own way in
everything. He said once, quite casually, 'I'm afraid American women are rather
spoiled.' And then he said, in the same tolerant way-- 'A poor man is a
disappointment to an American girl. America does not believe in rank combined
with lack of fortune.' I dared not defend myself. I am not clever enough to
think of the right things to say. He meant Mr. Ffolliott to understand that I
had married him because I thought he was grand and rich, and that I was a
disappointed little spiteful shrew. I tried to act as if he was not hurting me,
but my hands trembled, and a lump kept rising in my throat. When we returned to
the drawing-room, and at last he left us together, I was praying and praying
that I might be able to keep from breaking down.
She stopped and
swallowed hard. Betty held her hands firmly until she went on.
"For a few
minutes, I sat still, and tried to think of some new subject--something about
the church or the village. But I could not begin to speak because of the lump
in my throat. And then, suddenly, but quietly, Mr. Ffolliott got up. And though
I dared not lift my eyes, I knew he was standing before the fire, quite near
me. And, oh! what do you think he said, as low and gently as if his voice was a
woman's. I did not know that people ever said such things now, or even thought
them. But never, never shall I forget that strange minute. He said just this:
" 'God will help
you. He will. He will.'
"As if it was
true, Betty! As if there was a God--and-- He had not forgotten me. I did not
know what I was doing, but I put out my hand and caught at his sleeve, and when
I looked up into his face, I saw in his kind, good eyes, that he knew--that
somehow--God knows how--he understood and that I need not utter a word to
explain to him that he had been listening to lies."
"Did you talk to
him?" Betty asked quietly.
"He talked to me.
We did not even speak of Nigel. He talked to me as I had never heard anyone
talk before. Somehow he filled the room with something real, which was hope and
comfort and like warmth, which kept my soul from shivering. The tears poured
from my eyes at first, but the lump in my throat went away, and when Nigel came
back I actually did not feel frightened, though he looked at me and sneered
quietly."
"Did he say
anything afterwards?"
"He laughed a
little cold laugh and said, 'I see you have been seeking the consolation of
religion. Neurotic women like confessors. I do not object to your confessing,
if you confess your own backslidings and not mine.' "
"That was the
beginning," said Betty speculatively. "The unexpected thing was the
end. Tell me the rest?"
"No one could have
dreamed of it," Rosy broke forth. "For weeks he was almost like other
people. He stayed at Stornham and spent his days in shooting. He professed that
he was rather enjoying himself in a dull way. He encouraged me to go to the
vicarage, he invited the Ffolliotts here. He said Mrs. Ffolliott was a
gentlewoman and good for me. He said it was proper that I should interest
myself in parish work. Once or twice he even brought some little message to me
from Mr. Ffolliott."
It was a pitiably
simple story. Betty saw, through its relation, the unconsciousness of the
easily allured victim, the adroit leading on from step to step, the ordinary,
natural, seeming method which arranged opportunities. The two had been thrown
together at the Court, at the vicarage, the church and in the village, and the
hawk had looked on and bided his time. For the first time in her years of
exile, Rosy had begun to feel that she might be allowed a friend--though she
lived in secret tremor lest the normal liberty permitted her should suddenly be
snatched away.
"We never talked
of Nigel," she said, twisting her hands. "But he made me begin to
live again. He talked to me of Something that watched and would not leave
me--would never leave me. I was learning to believe it. Sometimes when I walked
through the wood to the village, I used to stop among the trees and look up at
the bits of sky between the branches, and listen to the sound in the leaves--the
sound that never stops--and it seemed as if it was saying something to me. And
I would clasp my hands and whisper, 'Yes, yes,' 'I will,' 'I will.' I used to
see Nigel looking at me at table with a queer smile in his eyes and once he
said to me--'You are growing young and lovely, my dear. Your colour is
improving. The counsels of our friend are of a salutary nature.' It would have
made me nervous, but he said it almost good-naturedly, and I was silly enough
even to wonder if it could be possible that he was pleased to see me looking
less ill. It was true, Betty, that I was growing stronger. But it did not last
long."
"I was afraid
not," said Betty.
"An old woman in
the lane near Bartyon Wood was ill. Mr. Ffolliott had asked me to go to see
her, and I used to go. She suffered a great deal and clung to us both. He
comforted her, as he comforted me. Sometimes when he was called away he would
send a note to me, asking me to go to her. One day he wrote hastily, saying
that she was dying, and asked if I would go with him to her cottage at once. I
knew it would save time if I met him in the path which was a short cut. So I
wrote a few words and gave them to the messenger. I said, 'Do not come to the
house. I will meet you in Bartyon Wood.' "
Betty made a slight
movement, and in her face there was a dawning of mingled amazement and
incredulity. The thought which had come to her seemed--as Ughtred's locking of
the door had seemed--too wild for modern days.
Lady Anstruthers saw
her expression and understood it. She made a hopeless gesture with her small,
bony hand.
"Yes," she
said, "it is just like that. No one would believe it. The worst cleverness
of the things he does, is that when one tells of them, they sound like lies. I
have a bewildered feeling that I should not believe them myself if I had not
seen them. He met the boy in the park and took the note from him. He came back
to the house and up to my room, where I was dressing quickly to go to Mr.
Ffolliott."
She stopped for quite a
minute, rather as if to recover breath.
"He closed the
door behind him and came towards me with the note in his hand. And I saw in a
second the look that always terrifies me, in his face. He had opened the note
and he smoothed out the paper quietly and said, 'What is this. I could not help
it--I turned cold and began to shiver. I could not imagine what was
coming."
" 'Is it my note
to Mr. Ffolliott?' I asked.
" 'Yes, it is your
note to Mr. Ffolliott,' and he read it aloud. ' "Do not come to the house.
I will meet you in Bartyon Wood." That is a nice note for a man's wife to
have written, to be picked up and read by a stranger, if your confessor is not
cautious in the matter of letters from women----'
"When he begins a
thing in that way, you may always know that he has planned everything--that you
can do nothing--I always know. I knew then, and I knew I was quite white when I
answered him:
" 'I wrote it in a
great hurry, Mrs. Farne is worse. We are going together to her. I said I would
meet him--to save time.'
"He laughed, his
awful little laugh, and touched the paper
" 'I have no
doubt. And I have no doubt that if other persons saw this, they would believe
it. It is very likely.
" 'But you believe
it,' I said. 'You know it is true. No one would be so silly--so silly and
wicked as to----' Then I broke down and cried out. 'What do you mean? What
could anyone think it meant?' I was so wild that I felt as if I was going
crazy. He clenched my wrist and shook me.
" 'Don't think you
can play the fool with me,' he said. 'I have been watching this thing from the
first. The first time I leave you alone with the fellow, I come back to find
you have been giving him an emotional scene. Do you suppose your simpering good
spirits and your imbecile pink cheeks told me nothing? They told me exactly
this. I have waited to come upon it, and here it is. "Do not come to the
house--I will meet you in the wood."
"That was the
unexpected thing. It was no use to argue and try to explain. I knew he did not
believe what he was saying, but he worked himself into a rage, he accused me of
awful things, and called me awful names in a loud voice, so that he could be
heard, until I was dumb and staggering. All the time, I knew there was a
reason, but I could not tell then what it was. He said at last, that he was
going to Mr. Ffolliott. He said, 'I will meet him in the wood and I will take
your note with me.'
"Betty, it was so
shameful that I fell down on my knees. 'Oh, don't--don't--do that,' I said. 'I
beg of you, Nigel. He is a gentleman and a clergyman. I beg and beg of you. If
you will not, I will do anything--anything.' And at that minute I remembered
how he had tried to make me write to father for money. And I cried
out--catching at his coat, and holding him back. 'I will write to father as you
asked me. I will do anything. I can't bear it.' "
"That was the
whole meaning of the whole thing," said Betty with eyes ablaze. "That
was the beginning, the middle and the end. What did he say?"
"He pretended to
be made more angry. He said, 'Don't insult me by trying to bribe me with your
vulgar money. Don't insult me.' But he gradually grew sulky instead of raging,
and though he put the note in his pocket, he did not go to Mr. Ffolliott.
And--I wrote to father."
"I remember
that," Betty answered. "Did you ever speak to Mr. Ffolliott
again?"
"He guessed--he
knew--I saw it in his kind, brown eyes when he passed me without speaking, in
the village. I daresay the villagers were told about the awful thing by some
servant, who heard Nigel's voice. Villagers always know what is happening. He
went away a few weeks later. The day before he went, I had walked through the
wood, and just outside it, I met him. He stopped for one minute--just one--he
lifted his hat and said, just as he had spoken them that first night--just the
same words, 'God will help you. He will. He will.' "
A strange, almost
unearthly joy suddenly flashed across her face.
"It must be
true," she said. "It must be true. He has sent you, Betty. It has
been a long time--it has been so long that sometimes I have forgotten his
words. But you have come!"
"Yes, I have
come," Betty answered. And she bent forward and kissed her gently, as if
she had been soothing a child.
There were other
questions to ask. She was obliged to ask them. "The unexpected thing"
had been used as an instrument for years. It was always efficacious. Over the
yearningly homesick creature had hung the threat that her father and mother, those
she ached and longed for, could be told the story in such a manner as would
brand her as a woman with a shameful secret. How could she explain herself?
There were the awful, written words. He was her husband. He was remorseless,
plausible. She dared not write freely. She had no witnesses to call upon. She
had discovered that he had planned with composed steadiness that misleading
impressions should be given to servants and village people. When the Brents
returned to the vicarage, she had observed, with terror, that for some reason
they stiffened, and looked askance when the Ffolliotts were mentioned.
"I am afraid, Lady
Anstruthers, that Mr. Ffolliott was a great mistake," Mrs. Brent said
once.
Lady Anstruthers had
not dared to ask any questions. She had felt the awkward colour rising in her
face and had known that she looked guilty. But if she had protested against the
injustice of the remark, Sir Nigel would have heard of her words before the day
had passed, and she shuddered to think of the result. He had by that time
reached the point of referring to Ffolliott with sneering lightness, as Your
lover."
"Do you defend
your lover to me," he had said on one occasion, when she had entered a
timid protest. And her white face and wild helpless eyes had been such evidence
as to the effect the word had produced, that he had seen the expediency of
making a point of using it.
The blood beat in Betty
Vanderpoel's veins.
"Rosy," she
said, looking steadily in the faded face, "tell me this. Did you never
think of getting away from him, of going somewhere, and trying to reach father,
by cable, or letter, by some means?"
Lady Anstruthers' weary
and wrinkled little smile was a pitiably illuminating thing.
"My dear" she
said, "if you are strong and beautiful and rich and well dressed, so that
people care to look at you, and listen to what you say, you can do things. But
who, in England, will listen to a shabby, dowdy, frightened woman, when she
runs away from her husband, if he follows her and tells people she is hysterical
or mad or bad? It is the shabby, dowdy woman who is in the wrong. At first, I
thought of nothing else but trying to get away. And once I went to Stornham
station. I walked all the way, on a hot day. And just as I was getting into a
third-class carriage, Nigel marched in and caught my arm, and held me back. I
fainted and when I came to myself I was in the carriage, being driven back to
the Court, and he was sitting opposite to me. He said, 'You fool! It would take
a cleverer woman than you to carry that out.' And I knew it was the awful
truth."
"It is not the
awful truth now," said Betty, and she rose to her feet and stood looking
before her, but with a look which did not rest on chairs and tables. She
remained so, standing for a few moments of dead silence.
"What a fool he
was!" she said at last. "And what a villian! But a villain is always
a fool."
She bent, and taking
Rosy's face between her hands, kissed it with a kiss which seemed like a seal.
"That will do," she said. "Now I know. One must know what is in
one's hands and what is not. Then one need not waste time in talking of
miserable things. One can save one's strength for doing what can be done."
"I believe you
would always think about doing things," said Lady Anstruthers. "That
is American, too."
"It is a quality
Americans inherited from England," lightly; "one of the results of it
is that England covers a rather large share of the map of the world. It is a
practical quality. You and I might spend hours in talking to each other of what
Nigel has done and what you have done, of what he has said, and of what you
have said. We might give some hours, I daresay, to what the Dowager did and
said. But wiser people than we are have found out that thinking of black things
past is living them again, and it is like poisoning one's blood. It is
deterioration of property."
She said the last words
as if she had ended with a jest. But she knew what she was doing.
"You were tricked
into giving up what was yours, to a person who could not be trusted. What has
been done with it, scarcely matters. It is not yours, but Sir Nigel's. But we
are not helpless, because we have in our hands the most powerful material agent
in the world.
"Come, Rosy, and
let us walk over the house. We will begin with that."
DURING the whole course
of her interesting life--and she had always found life interesting--Betty
Vanderpoel decided that she had known no experience more absorbing than this
morning spent in going over the long-closed and deserted portions of the
neglected house. She had never seen anything like the place, or as full of
suggestion. The greater part of it had simply been shut up and left to time and
weather, both of which had had their effects. The fine old red roof, having lost
tiles, had fallen into leaks that let in rain, which had stained and rotted
walls, plaster, and woodwork; wind and storm had beaten through broken window
panes and done their worst with such furniture and hangings as they found to
whip and toss and leave damp and spotted with mould. They passed through
corridors, and up and down short or long stairways, with stained or faded
walls, and sometimes with cracked or fallen plastering and wainscotting. Here
and there the oak flooring itself was uncertain. The rooms, whether large or
small, all presented a like aspect of potential beauty and comfort, utterly
uncared for and forlorn. There were many rooms, but none more than scantily
furnished, and a number of them were stripped bare. Betty found herself wondering
how long a time it had taken the belongings of the big place to dwindle and
melt away into such bareness.
"There was a time,
I suppose, when it was all furnished," she said.
"All these rooms
were shut up when I came here," Rosy answered. "I suppose things
worth selling have been sold. When pieces of furniture were broken in one part
of the house, they were replaced by things brought from another. No one cared.
Nigel hates it all. He calls it a rathole. He detests the country everywhere,
but particularly this part of it. After the first year I had learned better
than to speak to him of spending money on repairs."
"A good deal of
money should be spent on repairs," reflected Betty, looking about her.
She was standing in the
middle of a room whose walls were hung with the remains of what had been
chintz, covered with a pattern of loose clusters of moss rosebuds. The dampness
had rotted it until, in some places, it had fallen away in strips from its
fastenings. A quaint, embroidered couch stood in one corner, and as Betty
looked at it, a mouse crept from under the tattered valance, stared at her in
alarm and suddenly darted back again, in terror of intrusion so unusual. A
casement window swung open, on a broken hinge, and a strong branch of ivy,
having forced its way inside, had thrown a covering of leaves over the deep
ledge, and was beginning to climb the inner woodwork. Through the casement was
to be seen a heavenly spread of country, whose rolling lands were clad softly
in green pastures and thick-branched trees.
"This is the
Rosebud Boudoir," said Lady Anstruthers, smiling faintly. "All the
rooms have names. I thought them so delightful, when I first heard them. The
Damask Room-- the Tapestry Room--the White Wainscot Room--My Lady's Chamber. It
almost broke my heart when I saw what they looked like."
"It would be very
interesting," Betty commented slowly, "to make them look as they
ought to look."
A remote fear rose to
the surface of the expression in Lady Anstruthers' eyes. She could not detach
herself from certain recollections of Nigel--of his opinions of her family--of
his determination not to allow it to enter as a factor in either his life or
hers. And Betty had come to Stornham--Betty whom he had detested as a
child--and in the course of two days, she had seemed to become a new part of
the atmosphere, and to make the dead despair of the place begin to stir with
life. What other thing than this was happening as she spoke of making such
rooms as the Rosebud Boudoir "look as they ought to look," and said
the words not as if they were part of a fantastic vision, but as if they
expressed a perfectly possible thing?
Betty saw the doubt in
her eyes, and in a measure, guessed at its meaning. The time to pause for
argument had, however not arrived. There was too much to be investigated, too
much to be seen. She swept her on her way. They wandered on through some forty
rooms, more or less; they opened doors and closed them; they unbarred shutters
and let the sun stream in on dust and dampness and cobwebs. The comprehension
of the situation which Betty gained was as valuable as it was enlightening.
The descent into the
lower part of the house was a new experience. Betty had not before seen huge,
flagged kitchens, vaulted servants' halls, stone passages, butteries and
dairies. The substantial masonry of the walls and arched ceilings, the stone
stairway, and the seemingly endless offices, were interestingly remote in idea
from such domestic modernities as chance views of up-to-date American household
workings had provided her.
In the huge kitchen
itself, an elderly woman, rolling pastry, paused to curtsy to them, with stolid
curiosity in her heavy-featured face. In her character as
"single-handed" cook, Mrs. Noakes had sent up uninviting meals to
Lady Anstruthers for several years, but she had not seen her ladyship below
stairs before. And this was the unexpected arrival--the young lady there had
been "talk of" from the moment of her appearance. Mrs. Noakes
admitted with the grudgingness of a person of uncheerful temperament, that
looks like that always would make talk. A certain degree of vague mental
illumination led her to agree with Robert, the footman, that the stranger's
effectiveness was, perhaps, also, not altogether a matter of good looks, and
certainly it was not an affair of clothes. Her brightish blue dress, of rough
cloth, was nothing particular, notwithstanding the fit of it. There was
"something else about her." She looked round the place, not with the
casual indifference of a fine young lady, carelessly curious to see what she
had not seen before, but with an alert, questioning interest.
"What a big
place," she said to her ladyship. What substantial walls! What huge joints
must have been roasted before such a fireplace."
She drew near to the
enormous, antiquated cooking place.
"People were not
very practical when this was built, she said. "It looks as if it must
waste a great deal of coal. Is it----?" she looked at Mrs. Noakes.
"Do you like it?"
There was a practical
directness in the question for which Mrs. Noakes was not prepared. Until this
moment, it had apparently mattered little whether she liked things or not. The
condition of her implements of trade was one of her grievances--the ancient
fireplace and ovens the bitterest.
"It's out of
order, miss," she answered. "And they don't use 'em like this in
these days."
"I thought
not," said Miss Vanderpoel.
She made other
inquiries as direct and significant of the observing eye, and her passage
through the lower part of the establishment left Mrs. Noakes and her companions
in a strange but not unpleasurable state of ferment.
"Think of a young
lady that's never had nothing to do with kitchens, going straight to that
shameful old fireplace, and seeing what it meant to the woman that's got to use
it. 'Do you like it?' she says. If she'd been a cook herself, she couldn't have
put it straighter. She's got eyes."
"She's been using
them all over the place, said Robert. "Her and her ladyship's been into
rooms that's not been opened for years."
"More shame to them
that should have opened 'em," remarked Mrs. Noakes. "Her ladyship's a
poor, listless thing-- but her spirit was broken long ago.
"This one will
mend it for her, perhaps," said the man servant. "I wonder what's
going to happen."
"Well, she's got a
look with her--the new one--as if where she was things would be likely to
happen. You look out. The place won't seem so dead and alive if we've got
something to think of and expect."
"Who are the
solicitors Sir Nigel employs?" Betty had asked her sister, when their
pilgrimage through the house had been completed.
Messrs. Townlinson
& Sheppard, a firm which for several generations had transacted the legal
business of much more important estates than Stornham, held its affairs in
hand. Lady Anstruthers knew nothing of them, but that they evidently did not
approve of the conduct of their client. Nigel was frequently angry when he
spoke of them. It could be gathered that they had refused to allow him to do
things he wished to do--sell things, or borrow money on them.
"I think we must
go to London and see them," Betty suggested.
Rosy was agitated. Why
should one see them? What was there to be spoken of? Their going, Betty
explained would be a sort of visit of ceremony--in a measure a precaution.
Since Sir Nigel was apparently not to be reached, having given no clue as to
where he intended to go, it might be discreet to consult Messrs. Townlinson
& Sheppard with regard to the things it might be well to do--the repairs it
appeared necessary to make at once. If Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard
approved of the doing of such work, Sir Nigel could not resent their action,
and say that in his absence liberties had been taken. Such a course seemed
businesslike and dignified. It was what Betty felt that her father would do.
Nothing could be complained of, which was done with the knowledge and under the
sanction of the family solicitors.
"Then there are
other things we must do. We must go to shops and theatres. It will be good for
you to go to shops and theatres, Rosy."
"I have nothing
but rags to wear," answered Lady Anstruthers, reddening.
"Then before we go
we will have things sent down. People can be sent from the shops to arrange
what we want."
The magic of the name,
standing for great wealth, could, it was true, bring to them, not only the
contents of shops, but the people who showed them, and were ready to carry out
any orders. The name of Vanderpoel already stood, in London, for inexhaustible
resource. Yes, it was simple enough to send for politely subservient saleswomen
to bring what one wanted.
The being reminded in
every-day matters of the still real existence of the power of this magic was
the first step in the rebuilding of Lady Anstruthers. To realise that the
wonderful and yet simple necromancy was gradually encircling her again, had its
parallel in the taking of a tonic, whose effect was cumulative. She herself did
not realise the working of it. But Betty regarded it with interest. She saw it
was good for her, merely to look on at the unpacking of the New York boxes,
which the maid, sent for from London, brought down with her.
As the woman removed,
from tray after tray, the tissue-paper-enfolded layers of garments, Lady
Anstruthers sat and watched her with normal, simply feminine interest growing
in her eyes. The things were made with the absence of any limit in expenditure,
the freedom with delicate stuffs and priceless laces which belonged only to her
faint memories of a lost past.
Nothing had limited the
time spent in the embroidering of this apparently simple linen frock and coat;
nothing had restrained the hand holding the scissors which had cut into the
lace which adorned in appliques and filmy frills this exquisitely charming ball
dress.
"It is looking
back so far," she said, waving her hand towards them with an odd gesture.
"To think that it was once all like--like that."
She got up and went to
the things, turning them over, and touching them with a softness, almost
expressing a caress. The names of the makers stamped on bands and collars, the
names of the streets in which their shops stood, moved her. She heard again the
once familiar rattle of wheels, and the rush and roar of New York traffic.
Betty carried on the
whole matter with lightness. She talked easily and casually, giving local
colour to what she said. She described the abnormally rapid growth of the
places her sister had known in her teens, the new buildings, new theatres, new
shops, new people, the later mode of living, much of it learned from England,
through the unceasing weaving of the Shuttle.
"Changing--changing--changing.
That is what it is always doing--America. We have not reached repose yet. One
wonders how long it will be before we shall. Now we are always hurrying
breathlessly after the next thing--the new one--which we always think will be
the better one. Other countries built themselves slowly. In the days of their
building, the pace of life was a march. When America was born, the march had
already begun to hasten, and as a nation we began, in our first hour, at the
quickening speed. Now the pace is a race. New York is a kaleidoscope. I myself
can remember it a wholly different thing. One passes down a street one day, and
the next there is a great gap where some building is being torn down--a few
days later, a tall structure of some sort is touching the sky. It is wonderful,
but it does not tend to calm the mind. That is why we cross the Atlantic so
much. The sober, quiet-loving blood our forbears brought from older countries
goes in search of rest. Mixed with other things, I feel in my own being a
resentment against newness and disorder, and an insistence on the atmosphere of
long-established things."
But for years Lady
Anstruthers had been living in the atmosphere of long-established things, and
felt no insistence upon it. She yearned to hear of the great, changing Western
world--of the great, changing city. Betty must tell her what the changes were.
What were the differences in the streets-- where had the new buildings been
placed? How had Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and Broadway altered? Were not
Gramercy Park and Madison Square still green with grass and trees? Was it all
different? Would she not know the old places herself? Though it seemed a
lifetime since she had seen them, the years which had passed were really not so
many.
It was good for her to
talk and be talked to in this manner Betty saw. Still handling her subject
lightly, she presented picture after picture. Some of them were of the
wonderful, feverish city itself--the place quite passionately loved by some, as
passionately disliked by others. She herself had fallen into the habit, as she
left childhood behind her, of looking at it with interested wonder--at its riot
of life and power, of huge schemes, and almost superhuman labours, of fortunes
so colossal that they seemed monstrosities in their relation to the world.
People who in Rosalie's girlhood had lived in big ugly brownstone fronts,"
had built for themselves or for their children, houses such as, in other
countries, would have belonged to nobles and princes, spending fortunes upon
their building, filling them with treasures brought from foreign lands, from
palaces, from art galleries, from collectors. Sometimes strange people built
such houses and lived strange lavish, ostentatious lives in them, forming an
overstrained, abnormal, pleasure-chasing world of their own. The passing of
even ten years in New York counted itself almost as a generation; the fashions,
customs, belongings of twenty years ago wore an air of almost picturesque
antiquity.
"It does not take
long to make an 'old New Yorker,' " she said. "Each day brings so
many new ones."
There were, indeed,
many new ones, Lady Anstruthers found. People who had been poor had become
hugely rich, a few who had been rich had become poor, possessions which had been
large had swelled to unnatural proportions. Out of the West had risen fortunes
more monstrous than all others. As she told one story after another, Bettina
realised, as she had done often before, that it was impossible to enter into
description of the life and movements of the place, without its curiously
involving some connection with the huge wealth of it--with its influence, its
rise, its swelling, or waning.
"Somehow one
cannot free one's self from it. This is the age of wealth and invention--but of
wealth before all else. Sometimes one is tired--tired of it."
"You would not be
tired of it if--well, if you were I, said Lady Anstruthers rather pathetically.
"Perhaps
not," Betty answered. "Perhaps not."
She herself had seen
people who were not tired of it in the sense in which she was--the men and
women, with worn or intently anxious faces, hastening with the crowds upon the
pavements, all hastening somewhere, in chase of that small portion of the
wealth which they earned by their labour as their daily share; the same men and
women surging towards elevated railroad stations, to seize on places in the
homeward-bound trains; or standing in tired-looking groups, waiting for the
approach of an already overfull street car, in which they must be packed together,
and swing to the hanging straps, to keep upon their feet. Their way of being
weary of it would be different from hers, they would be weary only of hearing
of the mountains of it which rolled themselves up, as it seemed, in obedience
to some irresistible, occult force.
On the day after
Stornham village had learned that her ladyship and Miss Vanderpoel had actually
gone to London, the dignified firm of Townlinson & Sheppard received a
visit which created some slight sensation in their establishment, though it had
not been entirely unexpected. It had, indeed, been heralded by a note from Miss
Vanderpoel herself, who had asked that the appointment be made. Men of Messrs.
Townlinson & Sheppard's indubitable rank in their profession could not fail
to know the significance of the Vanderpoel name. They knew and understood its
weight perfectly well. When their client had married one of Reuben Vanderpoel's
daughters, they had felt that extraordinary good fortune had befallen him and
his estate. Their private opinion had been that Mr. Vanderpoel's knowledge of
his son-in-law must have been limited, or that he had curiously lax American
views of paternal duty. The firm was highly reputable, long established
strictly conservative, and somewhat insular in its point of view. It did not
understand, or seek to understand, America. It had excellent reasons for
thoroughly understanding Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Its opinions of him it reserved
to itself. If Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard had been asked to give a daughter
into their client's keeping, they would have flatly refused to accept the
honour proposed. Mr. Townlinson had, indeed, at the time of the marriage,
admitted in strict confidence to his partner that for his part he would have
somewhat preferred to follow a daughter of his own to her tomb. After the
marriage the firm had found the situation confusing and un-English. There had
been trouble with Sir Nigel, who had plainly been disappointed. At first it had
appeared that the American magnate had shown astuteness in refraining from
leaving his son-in-law a free hand. Lady Anstruthers' fortune was her own and
not her husband's. Mr. Townlinson, paying a visit to Stornham and finding the
bride a gentle, childish-looking girl, whose most marked expression was one of growing
timorousness, had returned with a grave face. He foresaw the result, if her
family did not stand by her with firmness, which he also foresaw her husband
would prevent if possible. It became apparent that the family did not stand by
her--or were cleverly kept at a distance. There was a long illness, which
seemed to end in the seclusion from the world, brought about by broken health.
Then it was certain that what Mr. Townlinson had foreseen had occurred. The
inexperienced girl had been bullied into submission. Sir Nigel had gained the
free hand, whatever the means he had chosen to employ. Most improper--most
improper, the whole affair. He had a great deal of money, but none of it was
used for the benefit of the estate--his deformed boy's estate. Advice, dignified
remonstrance, resulted only in most disagreeable scenes. Messrs. Townlinson
& Sheppard could not exceed certain limits. The manner in which the money
was spent was discreditable. There were avenues a respectable firm knew only by
rumour, there were insane gambling speculations, which could only end in
disaster, there were things one could not decently concern one's self with.
Lady Anstruthers' family had doubtless become indignant and disgusted, and had
dropped the whole affair. Sad for the poor woman, but not unnatural.
And now appears a Miss
Vanderpoel, who wishes to appoint an interview with Messrs. Townlinson &
Sheppard. What does she wish to say? The family is apparently taking the matter
up. Is this lady an elder or a younger sister of Lady Anstruthers? Is she an
older woman of that strong and rather trying American type one hears of, or is
she younger than her ladyship, a pretty, indignant, totally unpractical girl,
outraged by the state of affairs she has discovered, foolishly coming to demand
of Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard an explanation of things they are not
responsible for? Will she, perhaps, lose her temper, and accuse and reproach,
or even--most unpleasant to contemplate--shed hysterical tears?
It fell to Mr.
Townlinson to receive her in the absence of Mr. Sheppard, who had been called
to Northamptonshire to attend to great affairs. He was a stout, grave man with
a heavy, well-cut face, and, when Bettina entered his room, his courteous
reception of her reserved his view of the situation entirely.
She was not of the
mature and rather alarming American type he had imagined possible, he felt some
relief in marking at once. She was also not the pretty, fashionable young lady
who might have come to scold him, and ask silly, irrational questions.
His ordinarily rather
unillumined countenance changed somewhat in expression when she sat down and
began to speak. Mr. Townlinson was impressed by the fact that it was at once
unmistakably evident that whatsoever her reason for coming, she had not
presented herself to ask irrelevant or unreasonable questions. Lady
Anstruthers, she explained without superfluous phrase, had no definite
knowledge of her husband's whereabouts, and it had seemed possible that Messrs.
Townlinson & Sheppard might have received some information more recent that
her own. The impersonal framing of this inquiry struck Mr. Townlinson as being
in remarkably good taste, since it conveyed no condemnation of Sir Nigel, and
no desire to involve Mr. Townlinson in expressing any. It refrained even from
implying that the situation was an unusual one, which might be open to
criticism. Excellent reserve and great cleverness, Mr. Townlinson commented
inwardly. There were certainly few young ladies who would have clearly realised
that a solicitor cannot be called upon to commit himself, until he has had time
to weigh matters and decide upon them. His long and varied experience had
included interviews in which charming, emotional women had expected him at once
to "take sides." Miss Vanderpoel exhibited no signs of expecting
anything of this kind, even when she went on with what she had come to say.
Stornham Court and its surroundings were depreciating seriously in value
through need of radical repairs etc. Her sister's comfort was naturally
involved, and, as Mr. Townlinson would fully understand, her nephew's future.
The sooner the process of dilapidation was arrested, the better and with the
less difficulty. The present time was without doubt better than an indefinite
future. Miss Vanderpoel, having fortunately been able to come to Stornham, was
greatly interested, and naturally desirous of seeing the work begun. Her father
also would be interested. Since it was not possible to consult Sir Nigel, it
had seemed proper to consult his solicitors in whose hands the estate had been
for so long a time. She was aware, it seemed, that not only Mr. Townlinson, but
Mr. Townlinson's father, and also his grandfather, had legally represented the
Anstruthers, as well as many other families. As there seemed no necessity for
any structural changes, and the work done was such as could only rescue and
increase the value of the estate, could there be any objection to its being
begun without delay?
Certainly an unusual
young lady. It would be interesting to discover how well she knew Sir Nigel,
since it seemed that only a knowledge of him--his temper, his bitter, irritable
vanity, could have revealed to her the necessity of the precaution she was
taking without even intimating that it was a precaution. Extraordinarily clever
girl.
Mr. Townlinson wore an
air of quiet, business-like reflection.
"You are aware,
Miss Vanderpoel, that the present income from the estate is not such as would
justify anything approaching the required expenditure?"
"Yes, I am aware
of that. The expense would be provided for by my father."
"Most generous on
Mr. Vanderpoel's part," Mr. Townlinson commented. "The estate would,
of course, increase greatly in value."
Circumstances had
prevented her father from visiting Stornham, Miss Vanderpoel explained, and
this had led to his being ignorant of a condition of things which he might have
remedied. She did not explain what the particular circumstances which had
separated the families had been, but Mr. Townlinson thought he understood. The
condition existing could be remedied now, if Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard
saw no obstacles other than scarcity of money.
Mr. Townlinson's
summing up of the matter expressed in effect that he saw none. The estate had
been a fine one in its day. During the last sixty years it had become much
impoverished. With conservative decorum of manner, he admitted that there had
not been, since Sir Nigel's marriage, sufficient reason for the neglect of
dilapidations. The firm had strongly represented to Sir Nigel that certain
resources should not be diverted from the proper object of restoring the
property, which was entailed upon his son. The son's future should beyond all
have been considered in the dispensing of his mother's fortune.
He, by this time,
comprehended fully that he need restrain no dignified expression of opinion in
his speech with this young lady. She had come to consult with him with as clear
a view of the proprieties and discretions demanded by his position as he had
himself. And yet each, before the close of the interview, understood the point
of view of the other. What he recognised was that, though she had not seen Sir
Nigel since her childhood, she had in some astonishing way obtained an
extraordinary insight into his character, and it was this which had led her to
take her present step. She might not realise all she might have to contend
with, but her conservative and formal action had surrounded her and her sister
with a certain barrier of conventional protection, at once self-controlled, dignified,
and astutely intelligent.
"Since, as you
say, no structural changes are proposed, such as an owner might resent, and as
Lady Anstruthers is the mother of the heir, and as Lady Anstruthers' father
undertakes to defray all expenditure, no sane man could object to the
restoration of the property. To do so would be to cause public opinion to
express itself strongly against him. Such action would place him grossly in the
wrong." Then he added with deliberation, realising that he was committing
himself, and feeling firmly willing to do so for reasons of his own, "Sir
Nigel is a man who objects strongly to putting himself --publicly--in the
wrong."
"Thank you,"
said Miss Vanderpoel.
He had said this of
intention for her enlightenment, and she was aware that he had done so.
"This will not be
the first time that American fortunes have restored English estates," Mr.
Townlinson continued amiably. "There have been many notable cases of late
years. We shall be happy to place ourselves at your disposal at all times, Miss
Vanderpoel. We are obliged to you for your consideration in the matter."
"Thank you,"
said Miss Vanderpoel again. "I wished to be sure that I should not be
infringing any English rule I had no knowledge of."
"You will be
infringing none. You have been most correct and courteous."
Before she went away
Mr. Townlinson felt that he had been greatly enlightened as to what a young
lady might know and be. She gave him singularly clear details as to what was
proposed. There was so much to be done that he found himself opening his eyes
slightly once or twice. But, of course, if Mr. Vanderpoel was prepared to spend
money in a lavish manner, it was all to the good so far as the estate was
concerned. They were stupendous, these people, and after all the heir was his
grandson. And how striking it was that with all this power and readiness to use
it, was evidently combined, even in this beautiful young person, the clearest
business sense of the situation. What was done would be for the comfort of Lady
Anstruthers and the future of her son. Sir Nigel, being unable to sell either
house or lands, could not undo it.
When Mr. Townlinson
accompanied his visitor to her carriage with dignified politeness he felt
somewhat like an elderly solicitor who had found himself drawn into the
atmosphere of a sort of intensely modern fairy tale. He saw two of his under
clerks, with the impropriety of middle-class youth, looking out of an office
window at the dark blue brougham and the tall young lady, whose beauty bloomed
in the sunshine. He did not, on the whole, wonder at, though he deplored, the
conduct of the young men. But they, of course, saw only what they colloquially
described to each other as a "rippin' handsome girl." They knew
nothing of the interesting interview.
He himself returned to
his private room in a musing mood and thought it all over, his mind dwelling on
various features of the international situation, and more than once he said
aloud:
"Most remarkable.
Very remarkable, indeed."
JAMES HUBERT JOHN
FERGUS SALTYRE--fifteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan, "Jem Salter," as his
neighbours on the Western ranches had called him, the red-haired, second-class
passenger of the Meridiana, sat in the great library of his desolate great
house, and stared fixedly through the open window at the lovely land spread out
before him. From this particular window was to be seen one of the greatest
views in England. From the upper nurseries he had lived in as a child he had
seen it every day from morning until night, and it had seemed to his young
fancy to cover all the plains of the earth. Surely the rest of the world, he
had thought, could be but small-- though somewhere he knew there was London
where the Queen lived, and in London were Buckingham Palace and St. James
Palace and Kensington and the Tower, where heads had been chopped off; and the
Horse Guards, where splendid, plumed soldiers rode forth glittering, with
thrilling trumpets sounding as they moved. These last he always remembered,
because he had seen them, and once when he had walked in the park with his
nurse there had been an excited stir in the Row, and people had crowded about a
certain gate, through which an escorted carriage had been driven, and he had been
made at once to take off his hat and stand bareheaded until it passed, because
it was the Queen. Somehow from that afternoon he dated the first presentation
of certain vaguely miserable ideas. Inquiries made of his attendant, when the
cortège had swept by, had elicited the fact that the Royal Lady herself had
children--little boys who were princes and little girls who were princesses.
What curious and persistent child cross-examination on his part had drawn forth
the fact that almost all the people who drove about and looked so happy and
brilliant, were the fathers or mothers of little boys like, yet--in some
mysterious way--unlike himself? And in what manner had he gathered that he was
different from them? His nurse, it is true, was not a pleasant person, and had
an injured and resentful bearing. In later years he realised that it had been
the bearing of an irregularly paid menial, who rebelled against the fact that
her place was not among people who were of distinction and high repute, and
whose households bestowed a certain social status upon their servitors. She was
a tall woman with a sour face and a bearing which conveyed a glum endurance of
a position beneath her. Yes, it had been from her--Brough her name was --that
he had mysteriously gathered that he was not a desirable charge, as regarded
from the point of the servants' hall --or, in fact, from any other point. His
people were not the people whose patronage was sought with anxious eagerness.
For some reason their town house was objectionable, and Mount Dunstan was
without attractions. Other big houses were, in some marked way, different. The
town house he objected to himself as being gloomy and ugly, and possessing only
a bare and battered nursery, from whose windows one could not even obtain a satisfactory
view of the Mews, where at least, there were horses and grooms who hissed
cheerfully while they curried and brushed them. He hated the town house and
was, in fact, very glad that he was scarcely ever taken to it. People, it
seemed, did not care to come either to the town house or to Mount Dunstan. That
was why he did not know other little boys. Again--for the mysterious reason
--people did not care that their children should associate with him. How did he
discover this? He never knew exactly. He realised, however, that without
distinct statements, he seemed to have gathered it through various disconnected
talks with Brough. She had not remained with him long, having "bettered
herself" greatly and gone away in glum satisfaction, but she had stayed long
enough to convey to him things which became part of his existence, and
smouldered in his little soul until they became part of himself. The ancestors
who had hewn their way through their enemies with battle-axes, who had been
fierce and cruel and unconquerable in their savage pride, had handed down to
him a burning and unsubmissive soul. At six years old, walking with Brough in
Kensington Gardens, and seeing other children playing under the care of nurses,
who, he learned, were not inclined to make advances to his attendant, he
dragged Brough away with a fierce little hand and stood apart with her,
scowling haughtily, his head in the air, pretending that he disdained all
childish gambols, and would have declined to join in them, even if he had been
besought to so far unbend. Bitterness had been planted in him then, though he
had not understood, and the sourness of Brough had been connected with no
intelligence which might have caused her to suspect his feelings, and no one
had noticed, and if anyone had noticed, no one would have cared in the very
least.
When Brough had gone
away to her far superior place, and she had been succeeded by one variety of
objectionable or incompetent person after another, he had still continued to
learn. In different ways he silently collected information, and all of it was
unpleasant, and, as he grew older, it took for some years one form. Lack of
resources, which should of right belong to persons of rank, was the radical
objection to his people. At the town house there was no money, at Mount Dunstan
there was no money. There had been so little money even in his grandfather's
time that his father had inherited comparative beggary. The fourteenth Earl of
Mount Dunstan did not call it "comparative" beggary, he called it
beggary pure and simple, and cursed his progenitors with engaging frankness. He
never referred to the fact that in his personable youth he had married a wife
whose fortune, if it had not been squandered, might have restored his own. The
fortune had been squandered in the course of a few years of riotous living, the
wife had died when her third son was born, which event took place ten years
after the birth of her second, whom she had lost through scarlet fever. James
Hubert John Fergus Saltyre never heard much of her, and barely knew of her past
existence because in the picture gallery he had seen a portrait of a tall,
thin, fretful-looking young lady, with light ringlets, and pearls round her
neck. She had not attracted him as a child, and the fact that he gathered that
she had been his mother left him entirely unmoved. She was not a
loveable-looking person, and, indeed, had been at once empty-headed, irritable,
and worldly. He would probably have been no less lonely if she had lived.
Lonely he was. His father was engaged in a career much too lively and
interesting to himself to admit of his allowing himself to be bored by an
unwanted and entirely superfluous child. The elder son, who was Lord Tenham,
had reached a premature and degenerate maturity by the time the younger one
made his belated appearance, and regarded him with unconcealed dislike. The
worst thing which could have befallen the younger boy would have been intimate
association with this degenerate youth.
As Saltyre left nursery
days behind, he learned by degrees that the objection to himself and his
people, which had at first endeavoured to explain itself as being the result of
an unseemly lack of money, combined with that unpleasant feature, an uglier
one--namely, lack of decent reputation. Angry duns, beggarliness of income,
scarcity of the necessaries and luxuries which dignity of rank demanded, the
indifference and slights of one's equals, and the ignoring of one's existence
by exalted persons, were all hideous enough to Lord Mount Dunstan and his elder
son--but they were not so hideous as was, to his younger son, the childish,
shamed frenzy of awakening to the truth that he was one of a bad lot--a
disgraceful lot, from whom nothing was expected but shifty ways, low vices, and
scandals, which in the end could not even be kept out of the newspapers. The
day came, in fact, when the worst of these was seized upon by them and filled
their sheets with matter which for a whole season decent London avoided
reading, and the fast and indecent element laughed, derided, or gloated over.
The memory of the fever
of the monstrous weeks which had passed at this time was not one it was wise
for a man to recall. But it was not to be forgotten--the hasty midnight arrival
at Mount Dunstan of father and son, their haggard, nervous faces, their
terrified discussions, and argumentative raging when they were shut up together
behind locked doors, the appearance of legal advisers who looked as anxious as
themselves, but failed to conceal the disgust with which they were battling,
the knowledge that tongues were clacking almost hysterically in the village,
and that curious faces hurried to the windows when even a menial from the great
house passed, the atmosphere of below-stairs whispers, and jogged elbows, and
winks, and giggles; the final desperate, excited preparations for flight, which
might be ignominously stopped at any moment by the intervention of the law, the
huddling away at night time, the hot-throated fear that the shameful,
self-branding move might be too late--the burning humiliation of knowing the
inevitable result of public contempt or laughter when the world next day heard
that the fugitives had put the English Channel between themselves and their
country's laws.
Lord Tenham had died a
few years later at Port Said, after descending into all the hells of degenerate
debauch. His father had lived longer--long enough to make of himself something
horribly near an imbecile, before he died suddenly in Paris. The Mount Dunstan
who succeeded him, having spent his childhood and boyhood under the shadow of
the "bad lot," had the character of being a big, surly, unattractive
young fellow, whose eccentricity presented itself to those who knew his stock,
as being of a kind which might develop at any time into any objectionable tendency.
His bearing was not such as allured, and his fortune was not of the order which
placed a man in the view of the world. He had no money to expend, no
hospitalities to offer and apparently no disposition to connect himself with
society. His wild-goose chase to America had, when it had been considered worth
while discussing at all, been regarded as being very much the kind of thing a
Mount Dunstan might do with some secret and disreputable end in view. No one
had heard the exact truth, and no one would have been inclined to believe if
they had heard it. That he had lived as plain Jem Salter, and laboured as any
hind might have done, in desperate effort and mad hope, would not have been
regarded as a fact to be credited. He had gone away, he had squandered money,
he had returned, he was at Mount Dunstan again, living the life of an
objectionable recluse--objectionable, because the owner of a place like Mount
Dunstan should be a power and an influence in the county, should be counted
upon as a dispenser of hospitalities, as a supporter of charities, as a
dignitary of weight. He was none of these--living no one knew how, slouching
about with his gun, riding or walking sullenly over the roads and marshland.
Just one man knew him
intimately, and this one had been from his fifteenth year the sole friend of
his life. He had come, then--the Reverend Lewis Penzance--a poor and unhealthy
scholar, to be vicar of the parish of Dunstan. Only a poor and book-absorbed
man would have accepted the position. What this man wanted was no more than
quiet, pure country air to fill frail lungs, a roof over his head, and a place
to pore over books and manuscripts. He was a born monk and celibate--in by-gone
centuries he would have lived peacefully in some monastery, spending his years
in the reading and writing of black letter and the illuminating of missals. At
the vicarage he could lead an existence which was almost the same thing.
At Mount Dunstan there
remained still the large remnant of a great library. A huge room whose neglected
and half emptied shelves contained some strange things and wonderful ones,
though all were in disorder, and given up to dust and natural dilapidation.
Inevitably the Reverend Lewis Penzance had found his way there, inevitably he
had gained indifferently bestowed permission to entertain himself by
endeavouring to reduce to order and to make an attempt at cataloguing.
Inevitably, also, the hours he spent in the place became the chief sustenance
of his being.
There, one day, he had
come upon an uncouth-looking boy with deep eyes and a shaggy crop of red hair.
The boy was poring over an old volume, and was plainly not disposed to leave
it. He rose, not too graciously, and replied to the elder man's greeting, and
the friendly questions which followed. Yes, he was the youngest son of the
house. He had nothing to do, and he liked the library. He often came there and
sat and read things. There were some queer old books and a lot of stupid ones.
The book he was reading now? Oh, that (with a slight reddening of his skin and
a little awkwardness at the admission) was one of those he liked best. It was
one of the queer ones, but interesting for all that. It was about their own
people--the generations of Mount Dunstans who had lived in the centuries past.
He supposed he liked it because there were a lot of odd stories and exciting
things in it. Plenty of fighting and adventure. There had been some splendid
fellows among them. (He was beginning to forget himself a little by this time.)
They were afraid of nothing. They were rather like savages in the earliest
days, but at that time all the rest of the world was savage. But they were
brave, and it was odd how decent they were very often. What he meant was--what
he liked was, that they were men-- even when they were barbarians. You couldn't
be ashamed of them. Things they did then could not be done now, because the
world was different, but if--well, the kind of men they were might do England a
lot of good if they were alive to-day. They would be different themselves, of
course, in one way--but they must be the same men in others. Perhaps Mr.
Penzance (reddening again) understood what he meant. He knew himself very well,
because he had thought it all out, he was always thinking about it, but he was
no good at explaining.
Mr. Penzance was
interested. His outlook on the past and the present had always been that of a
bookworm, but he understood enough to see that he had come upon a temperament
novel enough to awaken curiosity. The apparently entirely neglected boy, of a
type singularly unlike that of his father and elder brother, living his life
virtually alone in the big place, and finding food to his taste in stories of
those of his blood whose dust had mingled with the earth centuries ago,
provided him with a new subject for reflection.
That had been the
beginning of an unusual friendship. Gradually Penzance had reached a clear
understanding of all the building of the young life, of its rankling
humiliation, and the qualities of mind and body which made for rebellion. It
sometimes thrilled him to see in the big frame and powerful muscles, in the
strong nature and unconquerable spirit, a revival of what had burned and
stirred through lives lived in a dim, almost mythical, past. There were legends
of men with big bodies, fierce faces, and red hair, who had done big deeds, and
conquered in dark and barbarous days, even Fate's self, as it had seemed. None
could overthrow them, none could stand before their determination to attain
that which they chose to claim. Students of heredity knew that there were
curious instances of revival of type. There had been a certain Red Godwyn who
had ruled his piece of England before the Conqueror came, and who had defied
the interloper with such splendid arrogance and superhuman lack of fear that he
had won in the end, strangely enough, the admiration and friendship of the
royal savage himself, who saw, in his, a kindred savagery, a power to be well
ranged, through love, if not through fear, upon his own side. This Godwyn had a
deep attraction for his descendant, who knew the whole story of his fierce
life--as told in one yellow manuscript and another--by heart. Why might not one
fancy--Penzance was drawn by the imagining--this strong thing reborn, even as
the offspring of a poorer effete type. Red Godwyn springing into being again,
had been stronger than all else, and had swept weakness before him as he had
done in other and far-off days.
In the old library it
fell out in time that Penzance and the boy spent the greater part of their
days. The man was a bookworm and a scholar, young Saltyre had a passion for
knowledge. Among the old books and manuscripts he gained a singular education.
Without a guide he could not have gathered and assimilated all he did gather
and assimilate. Together the two rummaged forgotten shelves and chests, and
found forgotten things. That which had drawn the boy from the first always drew
and absorbed him--the annals of his own people. Many a long winter evening the
pair turned over the pages of volumes and of parchment, and followed with eager
interest and curiosity the records of wild lives--stories of warriors and
abbots and bards, of feudal lords at ruthless war with each other, of
besiegings and battles and captives and torments. Legends there were of small
kingdoms torn asunder, of the slaughter of their kings, the mad fightings of
their barons, and the faith or unfaith of their serfs. Here and there the
eternal power revealed itself in some story of lawful or unlawful love--for
dame or damsel, royal lady, abbess, or high-born nun--ending in the welding of
two lives or in rapine, violence, and death. There were annals of early
England, and of marauders, monks, and Danes. And, through all these, some
thing, some man or woman, place, or strife linked by some tie with Mount
Dunstan blood. In past generations, it seemed plain, there had been certain of
the line who had had pride in these records, and had sought and collected them;
then had been born others who had not cared. Sometimes the relations were
inadequate, sometimes they wore an unauthentic air, but most of them seemed,
even after the passing of centuries, human documents, and together built a
marvellous great drama of life and power, wickedness and passion and daring
deeds.
When the shameful
scandal burst forth young Saltyre was seen by neither his father nor his
brother. Neither of them had any desire to see him; in fact, each detested the
idea of confronting by any chance his hot, intolerant eyes. "The
Brat," his father had called him in his childhood, "The Lout,"
when he had grown big-limbed and clumsy. Both he and Tenham were sick enough,
without being called upon to contemplate "The Lout," whose opinion,
in any case, they preferred not to hear.
Saltyre, during the
hideous days, shut himself up in the library. He did not leave the house, even
for exercise, until after the pair had fled. His exercise he took in walking up
and down from one end of the long room to another. Devils were let loose in
him. When Penzance came to him, he saw their fury in his eyes, and heard it in
the savagery of his laugh.
He kicked an ancient
volume out of his way as he strode to and fro.
"There has been
plenty of the blood of the beast in us in bygone times," he said,
"but it was not like this. Savagery in savage days had its excuse. This is
the beast sunk into the gibbering, degenerate ape."
Penzance came and spent
hours of each day with him. Part of his rage was the rage of a man, but he was
a boy still, and the boyishness of his bitterly hurt youth was a thing to move
to pity. With young blood, and young pride, and young expectancy rising within
him, he was at an hour when he should have felt himself standing upon the
threshold of the world, gazing out at the splendid joys and promises and
powerful deeds of it--waiting only the fit moment to step forth and win his
place.
"But we are done
for," he shouted once. "We are done for. And I am as much done for as
they are. Decent people won't touch us. That is where the last Mount Dunstan
stands." And Penzance heard in his voice an absolute break. He stopped and
marched to the window at the end of the long room, and stood in dead stillness,
staring out at the down-sweeping lines of heavy rain.
The older man thought
many things, as he looked at his big back and body. He stood with his legs
astride, and Penzance noted that his right hand was clenched on his hip, as a
man's might be as he clenched the hilt of his sword --his one mate who might
avenge him even when, standing at bay, he knew that the end had come, and he
must fall. Primeval Force--the thin-faced, narrow-chested, slightly bald
clergyman of the Church of England was thinking--never loses its way, or fails
to sweep a path before it. The sun rises and sets, the seasons come and go,
Primeval Force is of them, and as unchangeable. Much of it stood before him
embodied in this strongly sentient thing. In this way the Reverend Lewis found
his thoughts leading him, and he--being moved to the depths of a fine
soul--felt them profoundly interesting, and even sustaining.
He sat in a high-backed
chair, holding its arms with long thin hands, and looking for some time at
James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre. He said, at last, in a sane level voice:
"Lord Tenham is
not the last Mount Dunstan."
After which the
stillness remained unbroken again for some minutes. Saltyre did not move or
make any response, and, when he left his place at the window, he took up a
book, and they spoke of other things.
When the fourteenth
Earl died in Paris, and his younger son succeeded, there came a time when the
two companions sat together in the library again. It was the evening of a long
day spent in discouraging hard work. In the morning they had ridden side by
side over the estate, in the afternoon they had sat and pored over accounts,
leases, maps, plans. By nightfall both were fagged and neither in sanguine
mood.
Mount Dunstan had sat
silent for some time. The pair often sat silent. This pause was ended by the
young man's rising and standing up, stretching his limbs.
"It was a queer
thing you said to me in this room a few years ago," he said. "It has
just come back to me."
Singularly enough--or
perhaps naturally enough--it had also just arisen again from the depths of
Penzance's subconsciousness.
"Yes," he
answered, "I remember. To-night it suggests premonition. Your brother was
not the last Mount Dunstan."
"In one sense he
never was Mount Dunstan at all," answered the other man. Then he suddenly
threw out his arms in a gesture whose whole significance it would have been
difficult to describe. There was a kind of passion in it. "I am the last
Mount Dunstan," he harshly laughed. "Moi qui vous parle! The
last."
Penzance's eyes resting
on him took upon themselves the far-seeing look of a man who watches the world
of life without living in it. He presently shook his head.
"No," he
said. "I don't see that. No--not the last. Believe me.
And singularly, in
truth, Mount Dunstan stood still and gazed at him without speaking. The eyes of
each rested in the eyes of the other. And, as had happened before, they
followed the subject no further. From that moment it dropped.
Only Penzance had known
of his reasons for going to America. Even the family solicitors, gravely
holding interviews with him and restraining expression of their absolute
disapproval of such employment of his inadequate resources, knew no more than
that this Mount Dunstan, instead of wasting his beggarly income at Cairo, or
Monte Carlo, or in Paris as the last one had done, prefers to waste it in newer
places. The head of the firm, when he bids him good-morning and leaves him
alone, merely shrugs his shoulders and returns to his letter writing with the
corners of his elderly mouth hard set.
Penzance saw him
off--and met him upon his return. In the library they sat and talked it over,
and, having done so, closed the book of the episode. . . . . .
He sat at the table,
his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness of the landscape, but his thought
elsewhere. It wandered over the years already lived through, wandering
backwards even to the days when existence, opening before the child eyes, was a
baffling and vaguely unhappy thing.
When the door opened
and Penzance was ushered in by a servant, his face wore the look his friend
would have been rejoiced to see swept away to return no more.
Then let us take our
old accustomed seat and begin some casual talk, which will draw him out of the
shadows, and make him forget such things as it is not good to remember. That is
what we have done many times in the past, and may find it well to do many a
time again.
He begins with talk of
the village and the country-side. Village stories are often quaint, and stories
of the country-side are sometimes--not always--interesting. Tom Benson's wife
has presented him with triplets, and there is great excitement in the village,
as to the steps to be taken to secure the three guineas given by the Queen as a
reward for this feat. Old Benny Bates has announced his intention of taking a
fifth wife at the age of ninety, and is indignant that it has been suggested
that the parochial authorities in charge of the "Union," in which he
must inevitably shortly take refuge, may interfere with his rights as a
citizen. The Reverend Lewis has been to talk seriously with him, and finds him
at once irate and obdurate.
"Vicar," says
old Benny, "he can't refuse to marry no man. Law won't let him." Such
refusal, he intimates, might drive him to wild and riotous living. Remembering
his ast view of old Benny tottering down the village street in his white smock,
his nut-cracker face like a withered rosy apple, his gnarled hand grasping the
knotted staff his bent body leaned on, Mount Dunstan grinned a little. He did
not smile when Penzance passed to the restoration of the ancient church at
Mellowdene. "Restoration" usually meant the tearing away of ancient
oaken, high-backed pews, and the instalment of smug new benches, suggesting
suburban Dissenting chapels, such as the feudal soul revolts at. Neither did he
smile at a reference to the gathering at Dunholm Castle, which was twelve miles
away. Dunholm was the possession of a man who stood for all that was first and
highest in the land, dignity, learning, exalted character, generosity, honour.
He and the late Lord Mount Dunstan had been born in the same year, and had
succeeded to their titles almost at the same time. There had arrived a period
when they had ceased to know each other. All that the one man intrinsically
was, the other man was not. All that the one estate, its castle, its village,
its tenantry, represented, was the antipodes of that which the other stood for.
The one possession held its place a silent, and perhaps, unconscious reproach
to the other. Among the guests, forming the large house party which London
social news had already recorded in its columns, were great and honourable
persons, and interesting ones, men and women who counted as factors in all good
and dignified things accomplished. Even in the present Mount Dunstan's
childhood, people of their world had ceased to cross his father's threshold. As
one or two of the most noticeable names were mentioned, mentally he recalled
this, and Penzance, quick to see the thought in his eyes, changed the subject.
"At Stornham
village an unexpected thing has happened," he said. "One of the
relatives of Lady Anstruthers has suddenly appeared--a sister. You may remember
that the poor woman was said to be the daughter of some rich American, and it
seemed unexplainable that none of her family ever appeared, and things were
allowed to go from bad to worse. As it was understood that there was so much
money people were mystified by the condition of things."
"Anstruthers has
had money to squander," said Mount Dunstan. "Tenham and he were
intimates. The money he spends is no doubt his wife's. As her family deserted
her she has no one to defend her."
"Certainly her
family has seemed to neglect her for years. Perhaps they were disappointed in
his position. Many Americans are extremely ambitious. These international
marriages are often singular things. Now--apparently without having been
expected--the sister appears. Vanderpoel is the name-- Miss Vanderpoel."
"I crossed the
Atlantic with her in the Meridiana," said Mount Dunstan.
"Indeed! That is
interesting. You did not, of course, know that she was coming here."
"I knew nothing of
her but that she was a saloon passenger with a suite of staterooms, and I was
in the second cabin. Nothing? That is not quite true, perhaps. Stewards and
passengers gossip, and one cannot close one's ears. Of course one heard
constant reiteration of the number of millions her father possessed, and the
number of cabins she managed to occupy. During the confusion and alarm of the
collision, we spoke to each other."
He did not mention the
other occasion on which he had seen her. There seemed, on the whole, no special
reason why he should.
"Then you would
recognise her, if you saw her. I heard to-day that she seems an unusual young
woman, and has beauty."
"Her eyes and
lashes are remarkable. She is tall. The Americans are setting up a new
type."
"Yes, they used to
send over slender, fragile little women. Lady Anstruthers was the type. I
confess to an interest in the sister."
"Why?"
"She has made a
curious impression. She has begun to do things. Stornham village has lost its
breath." He laughed a little. "She has been going over the place and
discussing repairs."
Mount Dunstan laughed
also. He remembered what she had said. And she had actually begun.
"That is
practical," he commented.
"It is really interesting.
Why should a young woman turn her attention to repairs? If it had been her
father--the omnipotent Mr. Vanderpoel--who had appeared, one would not have
wondered at such practical activity. But a young lady--with remarkable
eyelashes!"
His elbows were on the
arm of his chair, and he had placed the tips of his fingers together, wearing
an expression of such absorbed contemplation that Mount Dunstan laughed again.
"You look quite
dreamy over it," he said.
"It allures me.
Unknown quantities in character always allure me. I should like to know her. A
community like this is made up of the absolutely known quantity--of types
repeating themselves through centuries. A new one is almost a startling thing.
Gossip over teacups is not usually entertaining to me, but I found myself
listening to little Miss Laura Brunel this afternoon with rather marked
attention. I confess to having gone so far as to make an inquiry or so. Sir
Nigel Anstruthers is not often at Stornham. He is away now. It is plainly not
he who is interested in repairs."
"He is on the
Riviera, in retreat, in a place he is fond of," Mount Dunstan said drily.
"He took a companion with him. A new infatuation. He will not return
soon."
THE visit to London was
part of an evolution of both body and mind to Rosalie Anstruthers. In one of
the wonderful modern hotels a suite of rooms was engaged for them. The luxury
which surrounded them was not of the order Rosalie had vaguely connected with
hotels. Hotel-keepers had apparently learned many things during the years of
her seclusion. Vanderpoels, at least, could so establish themselves as not to
greatly feel the hotel atmosphere. Carefully chosen colours textures, and appointments
formed the background of their days, the food they ate was a thing produced by
art, the servants who attended them were completely-trained mechanisms. To sit
by a window and watch the kaleidoscopic human tide passing by on its way to its
pleasure, to reach its work, to spend its money in unending shops, to show
itself and its equipage in the park, was a wonderful thing to Lady Anstruthers.
It all seemed to be a part of the life and quality of Betty, little Betty, whom
she had remembered only as a child, and who had come to her a tall, strong
young beauty, who had--it was resplendently clear--never known a fear in her
life, and whose mere personality had the effect of making fears seem unreal.
She was taken out in a
luxurious little brougham to shops whose varied allurements were placed eagerly
at her disposal. Respectful persons, obedient to her most faintly-expressed
desire, displayed garments as wonderful as those the New York trunks had
revealed. She was besought to consider the fitness of articles whose
exquisiteness she was almost afraid to look at. Her thin little body was
wonderfully fitted, managed, encouraged to make the most of its long-ignored
outlines.
Her ladyships
slenderness is a great advantage," said the wisely inciting ones. There is
no such advantage as delicacy of line."
Summing up the
character of their customer with the saleswoman's eye, they realised the
discretion of turning to Miss Vanderpoel for encouragement, though she was the
younger of the two, and bore no title. They were aware of the existence of
persons of rank who were not lavish patrons, but the name of Vanderpoel held
most promising suggestions. To an English shopkeeper the American has, of late
years, represented the spender--the type which, whatsoever its rank and
resources, has, mysteriously, always money to hand over counters in exchange
for things it chances to desire to possess. Each year surges across the
Atlantic a horde of these fortunate persons, who, to the sober, commercial
British mind, appear to be free to devote their existences to travel and
expenditure. This contingent appears shopping in the various shopping
thoroughfares; it buys clothes, jewels, miscellaneous attractive things, making
its purchases of articles useful or decorative with a freedom from anxiety in
its enjoyment which does not mark the mood of the ordinary shopper. In the
everyday purchaser one is accustomed to take for granted, as a factor in his
expenditure, a certain deliberation and uncertainty; to the travelling American
in Europe, shopping appears to be part of the holiday which is being made the
most of. Surely, all the neat, smart young persons who buy frocks and blouses,
hats and coats, hosiery and chains, cannot be the possessors of large incomes;
there must be, even in America, a middle class of middle-class resources, yet
these young persons, male and female, and most frequently unaccompanied by
older persons--seeing what they want, greet it with expressions of pleasure,
waste no time in appropriating and paying for it, and go away as in relief and
triumph--not as in that sober joy which is clouded by afterthought. The
salespeople are sometimes even vaguely cheered by their gay lack of any doubt
as to the wisdom of their getting what they admire, and rejoicing in it. If
America always buys in this holiday mood, it must be an enviable thing to be a
shopkeeper in their New York or Boston or San Francisco. Who would not make a
fortune among them? They want what they want, and not something which seems to
them less desirable, but they open their purses and--frequently with some
amused uncertainty as to the differences between sovereigns and
half-sovereigns, florins and half-crowns--they pay their bills with something
almost like glee. They are remarkably prompt about bills --which is an
excellent thing, as they are nearly always just going somewhere else, to France
or Germany or Italy or Scotland or Siberia. Those of us who are shopkeepers, or
their salesmen, do not dream that some of them have incomes no larger than our
own, that they work for their livings, that they are teachers journalists,
small writers or illustrators of papers or magazines that they are unimportant
soldiers of fortune, but, with their queer American insistence on exploration,
and the ignoring of limitations, they have, somehow, managed to make this
exultant dash for a few daring weeks or months of freedom and new experience.
If we knew this, we should regard them from our conservative standpoint of
provident decorum as improvident lunatics, being ourselves unable to calculate
with their odd courage and their cheerful belief in themselves. What we do know
is that they spend, and we are far from disdaining their patronage, though most
of them have an odd little familiarity of address and are not stamped with that
distinction which causes us to realise the enormous difference between the
patron and the tradesman, and makes us feel the worm we remotely like to feel
ourselves, though we would not for worlds acknowledge the fact. Mentally, and
in our speech, both among our equals and our superiors, we condescend to and
patronise them a little, though that, of course, is the fine old insular
attitude it would be un-British to discourage. But, if we are not in the least
definite concerning the position and resources of these spenders as a mass, we
are quite sure of a select number. There is mention of them in the newspapers,
of the town houses, the castles, moors, and salmon fishings they rent, of their
yachts, their presentations actually at our own courts, of their presence at
great balls, at Ascot and Goodwood, at the opera on gala nights. One staggers
sometimes before the public summing-up of the amount of their fortunes. These
people who have neither blood nor rank, these men who labour in their business
offices, are richer than our great dukes, at the realising of whose wealth and
possessions we have at times almost turned pale.
"Them!"
chaffed a costermonger over his barrow. "Blimme, if some o' them blokes
won't buy Buckin'am Pallis an' the 'ole R'yal Fambly some mornin' when they're
out shoppin'."
The subservient
attendants in more than one fashionable shop Betty and her sister visit, know
that Miss Vanderpoel is of the circle, though her father has not as yet bought
or hired any great estate, and his daughter has not been seen in London.
"Its queer we've
never heard of her being presented," one shopgirl says to another.
"Just you look at her."
She evidently knows
what her ladyship ought to buy--what can be trusted not to overpower her faded
fragility. The saleswomen, even if they had not been devoured by alert
curiosity, could not have avoided seeing that her ladyship did not seem to know
what should be bought, and that Miss Vanderpoel did, though she did not direct
her sister's selection, but merely seemed to suggest with delicate restraint.
Her taste was wonderfully perceptive. The things bought were exquisite, but a
little colourless woman could wear them all with advantage to her restrictions
of type.
As the brougham drove
down Bond Street, Betty called Lady Anstruthers' attention to more than one
passer-by.
"Look, Rosy,"
she said. "There is Mrs. Treat Hilyar in the second carriage to the right.
You remember Josie Treat Hilyar married Lord Varick's son."
In the landau
designated an elderly woman with wonderfully-dressed white hair sat smiling and
bowing to friends who were walking. Lady Anstruthers, despite her eagerness,
shrank back a little, hoping to escape being seen.
"Oh, it is the
Lows she is speaking to--Tom and Alice--I did not know they had sailed
yet."
The tall, well-groomed
young man, with the nice, ugly face, was showing white teeth in a gay smile of
recognition, and his pretty wife was lightly waving a slim hand in a grey suede
glove.
"How cheerful and
nice-tempered they look," said Rosy. "Tom was only twenty when I saw
him last. Whom did he marry?"
"An English girl.
Such a love. A Devonshire gentleman's daughter. In New York his friends called
her Devonshire Cream and Roses. She is one of the pretty, flushy, pink
ones."
"How nice Bond
Street is on a spring morning like this," said Lady Anstruthers. "You
may laugh at me for saying it, Betty, but somehow it seems to me more
spring-like than the country."
"How clever of
you!" laughed Betty. "There is so much truth in it." The people
walking in the sunshine were all full of spring thoughts and plans. The colours
they wore, the flowers in the women's hats and the men's buttonholes belonged
to the season. The cheerful crowds of people and carriages had a sort of
rushing stir of movement which suggested freshness. Later in the year
everything looks more tired. Now things were beginning and everyone was rather
inclined to believe that this year would be better than last. "Look at the
shop windows, said Betty, "full of whites and pinks and yellows and
blues--the colours of hyacinth and daffodil beds. It seems as if they insist
that there never has been a winter and never will be one. They insist that
there never was and never will be anything but spring."
"It's in the
air." Lady Anstruthers' sigh was actually a happy one. "It is just
what I used to feel in April when we drove down Fifth Avenue."
Among the crowds of
freshly-dressed passers-by, women with flowery hats and light frocks and
parasols, men with touches of flower-colour on the lapels of their coats, and
the holiday look in their faces, she noted so many of a familiar type that she
began to look for and try to pick them out with quite excited interest.
"I believe that
woman is an American," she would say. "That girl looks as if she were
a New Yorker," again. "That man's face looks as if it belonged to
Broadway. Oh, Betty! do you think I am right? I should say those girls getting
out of the hansom to go into Burnham & Staples' came from out West and are
going to buy thousands of things. Don't they look like it?"
She began to lean
forward and look on at things with an interest so unlike her Stornham
listlessness that Betty's heart was moved. Her face looked alive, and little
waves of colour rose under her skin. Several times she laughed the natural
little laugh of her girlhood which it had seemed almost too much to expect to
hear again. The first of these laughs came when she counted her tenth American,
a tall Westerner of the cartoon type, sauntering along with an expression of
speculative enjoyment on his odd face, and evidently, though furtively, chewing
tobacco.
"I absolutely love
him, Betty," she cried. "You couldn't mistake him for anything
else."
"No,"
answered Betty, feeling that she loved him herself, not if you found him embalmed
in the Pyramids."
They pleased themselves
immensely, trying to guess what he would buy and take home to his wife and
girls in his Western town--though Western towns were very grand and amazing in
these days, Betty explained, and knew they could give points to New York. He
would not buy the things he would have bought fifteen years ago. Perhaps, in
fact, his wife and daughters had come with him to London and stayed at the
Metropole or the Savoy, and were at this moment being fitted by tailors and modistes
patronised by Royalty.
"Rosy, look! Do
you see who that is? Do you recognise her? It is Mrs. Bellingham. She was
little Mina Thalberg. She married Captain Bellingham. He was quite poor, but
very well born--a nephew of Lord Dunholm's. He could not have married a poor
girl--but they have been so happy together that Mina is growing fat, and spends
her days in taking reducing treatments. She says she wouldn't care in the
least, but Dicky fell in love with her waist and shoulder line."
The plump, pretty young
woman getting out of her victoria before a fashionable hairdresser's looked
radiant enough. She had not yet lost the waist and shoulder line, though her
pink frock fitted her with discreet tightness. She paused a moment to pat and
fuss prettily over the two blooming, curly children who were to remain under
the care of the nurse, who sat on the back seat, holding the baby on her lap.
"I should not have
known her," said Rosy. "She has grown pretty. She wasn't a pretty
child."
"It's
happiness--and the English climate--and Captain Dicky. They adore each other,
and laugh at everything like a pair of children. They were immensely popular in
New York last winter, when they visited Mina's people."
The effect of the
morning upon Lady Anstruthers was what Betty had hoped it might be. The curious
drawing near of the two nations began to dawn upon her as a truth. Immured in
the country, not sufficiently interested in life to read newspapers, she had
heard rumours of some of the more important marriages, but had known nothing of
the thousand small details which made for the weaving of the web. Mrs. Treat
Hilyar driving in a leisurely, accustomed fashion down Bond Street, and smiling
casually at her compatriots, whose "sailing" was as much part of the
natural order of their luxurious lives as their carriages, gave a definiteness
to the situation. Mina Thalberg, pulling down the embroidered frocks over the
round legs of her English-looking children, seemed to narrow the width of the
Atlantic Ocean between Liverpool and the docks on the Hudson River.
She returned to the
hotel with an appetite for lunch and a new expression in her eyes which made
Ughtred stare at her.
"Mother," he
said, "you look different. You look well. It isn't only your new dress and
your hair."
The new style of her
attire had certainly done much, and the maid who had been engaged to attend her
was a woman who knew her duties. She had been called upon in her time to make
the most of hair offering much less assistance to her skill than was supplied
by the fine, fair colourlessness she had found dragged back from her new
mistress's forehead. It was not dragged back now, but had really been done
wonders with. Rosalie had smiled a little when she had looked at herself in the
glass after the first time it was so dressed.
"You are trying to
make me look as I did when mother saw me last, Betty," she said. "I
wonder if you possibly could."
"Let us believe we
can," laughed Betty. "And wait and see."
It seemed wise neither
to make nor receive visits. The time for such things had evidently not yet
come. Even the mention of the Worthingtons led to the revelation that Rosalie
shrank from immediate contact with people. When she felt stronger, when she
became more accustomed to the thought, she might feel differently, but just
now, to be luxuriously one with the enviable part of London, to look on, to
drink in, to drive here and there, doing the things she liked to do, ordering
what was required at Stornham, was like the creating for her of a new heaven
and a new earth.
When, one night, Betty
took her with Ughtred to the theatre, it was to see a play written by an
American, played by American actors, produced by an American manager. They had
even engaged in theatrical enterprise, it seemed, their actors played before
London audiences, London actors played in American theatres, vibrating almost
yearly between the two continents and reaping rich harvests. Hearing rumours of
this in the past, Lady Anstruthers had scarcely believed it entirely true. Now
the practical reality was brought before her. The French, who were only
separated from the English metropolis by a mere few miles of Channel, did not
exchange their actors year after year in increasing numbers, making a mere
friendly barter of each other's territory, as though each land was common
ground and not divided by leagues of ocean travel.
"It seems so
wonderful," Lady Anstruthers argued. "I have always felt as if they
hated each other."
"They did
once--but how could it last between those of the same blood--of the same
tongue? If we were really aliens we might be a menace. But we are of their
own." Betty leaned forward on the edge of the box, looking out over the
crowded house, filled with almost as many Americans as English faces. She
smiled, reflecting. "We were children put out to nurse and breathe new air
in the country, and now we are coming home, vigorous, and full-grown."
She studied the
audience for some minutes, and, as her glance wandered over the stalls, it took
in more than one marked variety of type. Suddenly it fell on a face she
delightedly recognised. It was that of the nice, speculative-eyed Westerner
they had seen enjoying himself in Bond Street.
"Rosy," she
said, "there is the Western man we love. Near the end of the fourth
row."
Lady Anstruthers looked
for him with eagerness.
"Oh, I see him!
Next to the big one with the reddish hair."
Betty turned her
attention to the man in question, whom she had not chanced to notice. She
uttered an exclamation of surprise and interest.
"The big man with
the red hair. How lovely that they should chance to sit side by side--the big
one is Lord Mount Dunstan!"
The necessity of seeing
his solicitors, who happened to be Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard, had
brought Lord Mount Dunstan to town. After a day devoted to business affairs, he
had been attracted by the idea of going to the theatre to see again a play he
had already seen in New York. It would interest him to observe its exact effect
upon a London audience. While he had been in New York, he had gone with
something of the same feeling to see a great English actor play to a crowded
house. The great actor had been one who had returned to the country for a third
or fourth time, and, in the enthusiasm he had felt in the atmosphere about him,
Mount Dunstan had seen not only pleasure and appreciation of the man's perfect
art, but--at certain tumultuous outbursts--an almost emotional welcome. The
Americans, he had said to himself, were creatures of warmer blood than the
English. The audience on that occasion had been, in mass, American. The
audience he made one of now, was made up of both nationalities, and, in
glancing over it, he realised how large was the number of Americans who came
yearly to London. As Lady Anstruthers had done, he found himself selecting from
the assemblage the types which were manifestly American, and those obviously
English. In the seat next to himself sat a man of a type he felt he had learned
by heart in the days of his life as Jem Salter. At a short distance fluttered
brilliantly an English professional beauty, with her male and female court
about her. In the stage box, made sumptuous with flowers, was a royal party. As
this party had entered, "God save the Queen" had been played, and, in
rising with the audience during the entry, he had recalled that the tune was
identical with that of an American national air. How unconsciously
inseparable--in spite of the lightness with which they regarded the curious tie
between them --the two countries were. The people upon the stage were acting as
if they knew their public, their bearing suggesting no sense of any barrier
beyond the footlights. It was the unconsciousness and lightness of the mutual
attitude which had struck him of late. Punch had long jested about "Fair
Americans," who, in their first introduction to its pages, used exotic and
cryptic language, beginning every sentence either with "I guess," or
"Say, Stranger"; its male American had been of the Uncle Sam order
and had invariably worn a "goatee." American witticisms had
represented the Englishman in plaid trousers, opening his remarks with
"Chawley, deah fellah," and unfailingly missing the point of any
joke. Each country had cherished its type and good-naturedly derided it. In time
this had modified itself and the joke had changed in kind. Many other things
had changed, but the lightness of treatment still remained. And yet their blood
was mingling itself with that of England's noblest and oldest of name, their
wealth was making solid again towers and halls which had threatened to crumble.
Ancient family jewels glittered on slender, young American necks, and
above--sometimes somewhat careless--young American brows. And yet, so far, one
was casual in one's thought of it all, still. On his own part he was obstinate
Briton enough to rebel against and resent it. They were intruders. He resented
them as he had resented in his boyhood the historical fact that, after all, an
Englishman was a German--a savage who, five hundred years after the birth of
Christ, had swooped upon Early Briton from his Engleland and Jutland, and
ravaging with fire and sword, had conquered and made the land his possession,
ravishing its very name from it and giving it his own. These people did not
come with fire and sword, but with cable and telephone, and bribes of gold and
fair women, but they were encroaching like the sea, which, in certain parts of
the coast, gained a few inches or so each year. He shook his shoulders
impatiently, and stiffened, feeling illogically antagonistic towards the
good-natured, lantern-jawed man at his side.
The lantern-jawed man
looked good-natured because he was smiling, and he was smiling because he saw
something which pleased him in one of the boxes.
His expression of
unqualified approval naturally directed Mount Dunstan's eye to the point in
question, where it remained for some moments. This was because he found it
resting upon Miss Vanderpoel, who sat before him in luminous white garments,
and with a brilliant spark of ornament in the dense shadow of her hair. His
sensation at the unexpected sight of her would, if it had expressed itself
physically, have taken the form of a slight start. The luminous quality did not
confine itself to the whiteness of her garments. He was aware of feeling that
she looked luminous herself--her eyes, her cheek, the smile she bent upon the
little woman who was her companion. She was a beautifully living thing.
Naturally, she was
being looked at by others than himself. She was one of those towards whom
glasses in a theatre turn themselves inevitably. The sweep and lift of her
black hair would have drawn them, even if she had offered no other charm. Yes,
he thought, here was another of them. To whom was she bringing her good looks
and her millions? There were men enough who needed money, even if they must
accept it under less alluring conditions. In the box next to the one occupied
by the royal party was a man who was known to be waiting for the advent of some
such opportunity. His was a case of dire, if outwardly stately, need. He was
young, but a fool, and not noted for personal charms, yet he had, in one sense,
great things to offer. There were, of course, many chances that he might offer
them to her. If this happened, would she accept them? There was really no
objection to him but his dulness, consequently there seemed many chances that
she might. There was something akin to the pomp of royalty in the power her
father's wealth implied. She could scarcely make an ordinary marriage. It would
naturally be a sort of state affair. There were few men who had enough to offer
in exchange for Vanderpoel millions, and of the few none had special
attractions. The one in the box next to the royal party was a decent enough
fellow. As young princesses were not infrequently called upon, by the mere
exclusion of royal blood, to become united to young or mature princes without
charm, so American young persons who were of royal possessions must find
themselves limited. If you felt free to pick and choose from among young men in
the Guards or young attachés in the Diplomatic Service with twopence a year,
you might get beauty or wit or temperament or all three by good luck, but if
you were of a royal house of New York or Chicago, you would probably feel you
must draw lines and choose only such splendours as accorded with, even while
differing from, your own.
Any possible connection
of himself with such a case did not present itself to him. If it had done so,
he would have counted himself, haughtily, as beyond the pale. It was for other
men to do things of the sort; a remote antagonism of his whole being warred
against the mere idea. It was bigoted prejudice, perhaps, but it was a strong
thing.
A lovely shoulder and a
brilliant head set on a long and slender neck have no nationality which can
prevent a man's glance turning naturally towards them. His turned again during
the last act of the play, and at a moment when he saw something rather like the
thing he had seen when the Meridiana moved away from the dock and the exalted
Miss Vanderpoel leaning upon the rail had held out her arms towards the child
who had brought his toy to her as a farewell offering.
Sitting by her to-night
was a boy with a crooked back-- Mount Dunstan remembered hearing that the
Anstruthers had a deformed son--and she was leaning towards him, her hand
resting on his shoulder, explaining something he had not quite grasped in the
action of the play. The absolute adoration in the boy's uplifted eyes was an
interesting thing to take in, and the radiant warmth of her bright look was as
unconscious of onlookers as it had been when he had seen it yearning towards
the child on the wharf. Hers was the temperament which gave --which gave. He
found himself restraining a smile because her look brought back to him the
actual sound of the New York youngster's voice.
"I wanted to kiss
you, Betty, oh, I did so want to kiss you!"
Anstruthers' boy--poor
little beggar--looked as if he, too, in the face of actors and audience, and
brilliance of light, wanted to kiss her.
IT would not have been
possible for Miss Vanderpoel to remain long in social seclusion in London, and,
before many days had passed, Stornham village was enlivened by the knowledge
that her ladyship and her sister had returned to the Court. It was also evident
that their visit to London had not been made to no purpose. The stagnation of
the waters of village life threatened to become a whirlpool. A respectable
person, who was to be her ladyship's maid, had come with them, and her ladyship
had not been served by a personal attendant for years. Her ladyship had also
appeared at the dinner-table in new garments, and with her hair done as other
ladies wore theirs. She looked like a different woman, and actually had a bit
of colour, and was beginning to lose her frightened way. Now it dawned upon
even the dullest and least active mind that something had begun to stir.
It had been felt
vaguely when the new young lady from "Meriker" had walked through the
village street, and had drawn people to doors and windows by her mere passing.
After the return from London the signs of activity were such as made the
villagers catch their breaths in uttering uncertain exclamations, and caused
the feminine element to catch up offspring or, dragging it by its hand, run
into neighbours' cottages and stand talking the incredible thing over in
lowered and rather breathless voices. Yet the incredible thing in question
was--had it been seen from the standpoint of more prosperous villagers--
anything but extraordinary. In entirely rural places the Castle, the Hall or
the Manor, the Great House--in short--still retains somewhat of the old feudal
power to bestow benefits or withhold them. Wealth and good will at the Manor
supply work and resultant comfort in the village and its surrounding holdings.
Patronised by the Great House the two or three small village shops bestir
themselves and awaken to activity. The blacksmith swings his hammer with
renewed spirit over the numerous jobs the gentry's stables, carriage houses,
garden tools, and household repairs give to him. The carpenter mends and makes,
the vicarage feels at ease, realising that its church and its charities do not
stand unsupported. Small farmers and larger ones, under a rich and interested
landlord, thrive and are able to hold their own even against the tricks of wind
and weather. Farm labourers being, as a result, certain of steady and decent
wage, trudge to and fro, with stolid cheerfulness, knowing that the pot boils
and the children's feet are shod. Superannuated old men and women are sure of
their broth and Sunday dinner, and their dread of the impending
"Union" fades away. The squire or my lord or my lady can be depended
upon to care for their old bones until they are laid under the sod in the green
churchyard. With wealth and good will at the Great House, life warms and offers
prospects. There are Christmas feasts and gifts and village treats, and the big
carriage or the smaller ones stop at cottage doors and at once confer exciting
distinction and carry good cheer.
But Stornham village
had scarcely a remote memory of any period of such prosperity. It had not
existed even in the older Sir Nigel's time, and certainly the present Sir
Nigel's reign had been marked only by neglect, ill-temper, indifference, and a
falling into disorder and decay. Farms were poorly worked, labourers were
unemployed, there was no trade from the manor household, no carriages, no
horses, no company, no spending of money. Cottages leaked, floors were damp,
the church roof itself was falling to pieces, and the vicar had nothing to
give. The helpless and old cottagers were carried to the "Union" and,
dying there, were buried by the stinted parish in parish coffins. Her ladyship
had not visited the cottages since her child's birth. And now such inspiriting events
as were everyday happenings in lucky places like Westerbridge and Wratcham and
Yangford, showed signs of being about to occur in Stornham itself.
To begin with, even
before the journey to London, Kedgers had made two or three visits to The
Clock, and had been in a communicative mood. He had related the story of the
morning when he had looked up from his work and had found the strange young
lady standing before him, with the result that he had been "struck all of
a heap." And then he had given a detailed account of their walk round the
place, and of the way in which she had looked at things and asked questions,
such as would have done credit to a man "with a 'ead on 'im."
"Nay! Nay!"
commented Kedgers, shaking his own head doubtfully, even while with admiration.
"I've never seen the like before--in young women--neither in lady young
women nor in them that's otherwise."
Afterwards had
transpired the story of Mrs. Noakes, and the kitchen grate, Mrs. Noakes having
a friend in Miss Lupin, the village dressmaker.
"I'd not put it
past her," was Mrs. Noakes' summing up, "to order a new one, I
wouldn't."
The footman in the
shabby livery had been a little wild in his statements, being rendered so by
the admiring and excited state of his mind. He dwelt upon the matter of her
"looks," and the way she lighted up the dingy dining-room, and so
conversed that a man found himself listening and glancing when it was his
business to be an unhearing, unseeing piece of mechanism.
Such simple records of
servitors' impressions were quite enough for Stornham village, and produced in
it a sense of being roused a little from sleep to listen to distant and
uncomprehended, but not unagreeable, sounds.
One morning Buttle, the
carpenter, looked up as Kedgers had done, and saw standing on the threshold of
his shop the tall young woman, who was a sensation and an event in herself.
"You are the
master of this shop?" she asked.
Buttle came forward,
touching his brow in hasty salute.
"Yes, my
lady," he answered. "Joseph Buttle, your ladyship."
"I am Miss
Vanderpoel," dismissing the suddenly bestowed title with easy directness.
"Are you busy? I want to talk to you."
No one had any reason
to be "busy" at any time in Stornham village, no such luck; but
Buttle did not smile as he replied that he was at liberty and placed himself at
his visitor's disposal. The tall young lady came into the little shop, and took
the chair respectfully offered to her. Buttle saw her eyes sweep the place as
if taking in its resources.
"I want to talk to
you about some work which must be done at the Court," she explained at
once. "I want to know how much can be done by workmen of the village. How
many men have you?"
"How many men had
he?" Buttle wavered between gratification at its being supposed that he
had "men" under him and grumpy depression because the illusion must
be dispelled.
"There's me and
Sim Soames, miss," he answered. "No more, an' no less."
"Where can you get
more?" asked Miss Vanderpoel.
It could not be denied
that Buttle received a mental shock which verged in its suddenness on being
almost a physical one. The promptness and decision of such a query swept him
off his feet. That Sim Soames and himself should be an insufficient force to
combat with such repairs as the Court could afford was an idea presenting an
aspect of unheard-of novelty, but that methods as coolly radical as those this
questioning implied, should be resorted to, was staggering.
"Me and Sim has
always done what work was done," he stammered. "It hasn't been
much."
Miss Vanderpoel neither
assented to nor dissented from this last palpable truth. She regarded Buttle
with searching eyes. She was wondering if any practical ability concealed
itself behind his dulness. If she gave him work, could he do it? If she gave
the whole village work, was it too far gone in its unspurred stodginess to be
roused to carrying it out?
"There is a great
deal to be done now," she said. "All that can be done in the village
should be done here. It seems to me that the villagers want work--new work. Do
they?"
Work! New work! The
spark of life in her steady eyes actually lighted a spark in the being of Joe
Buttle. Young ladies in villages--gentry--usually visited the cottagers a bit
if they were well-meaning young women--left good books and broth or jelly,
pottered about and were seen at church, and playing croquet, and finally
married and removed to other places, or gradually faded year by year into
respectable spinsterhood. And this one comes in, and in two or three minutes shows
that she knows things about the place and understands. A man might then take it
for granted that she would understand the thing he daringly gathered courage to
say.
"They want any
work, miss--that they are sure of decent pay for--sure of it."
She did understand. And
she did not treat his implication as an impertinence. She knew it was not
intended as one, and, indeed, she saw in it a sort of earnest of a possible
practical quality in Buttle. Such work as the Court had demanded had remained
unpaid for with quiet persistence, until even bills had begun to lag and fall
off. She could see exactly how it had been done, and comprehended quite clearly
a lack of enthusiasm in the presence of orders from the Great House.
"All work will be
paid for," she said. "Each week the workmen will receive their wages.
They may be sure. I will be responsible."
"Thank you,
miss," said Buttle, and he half unconsciously touched his forehead again.
"In a place like
this," the young lady went on in her mellow voice, and with a reflective
thoughtfulness in her handsome eyes, "on an estate like Stornham, no work
that can be done by the villagers should be done by anyone else. The people of
the land should be trained to do such work as the manor house, or cottages, or
farms require to have done."
"How did she think
that out?" was Buttle's reflection. In places such as Stornham, through
generation after generation, the thing she had just said was accepted as law,
clung to as a possession, any divergence from it being a grievance sullenly and
bitterly grumbled over. And in places enough there was divergence in these
days--the gentry sending to London for things, and having up workmen to do
their best-paying jobs for them. The law had been so long a law that no village
could see justice in outsiders being sent for, even to do work they could not
do well themselves. It showed what she was, this handsome young woman--even
though she did come from America--that she should know what was right.
She took a note-book
out and opened it on the rough table before her.
"I have made some
notes here," she said, "and a sketch or two. We must talk them over
together."
If she had given Joe
Buttle cause for surprise at the outset, she gave him further cause during the
next half-hour. The work that was to be done was such as made him open his
eyes, and draw in his breath. If he was to be allowed to do it--if he could do
it--if it was to be paid for--it struck him that he would be a man set up for
life. If her ladyship had come and ordered it to be done, he would have thought
the poor thing had gone mad. But this one had it all jotted down in a clear
hand, without the least feminine confusion of detail, and with here and there a
little sharply-drawn sketch, such as a carpenter, if he could draw, which
Buttle could not, might have made.
"There's not
workmen enough in the village to do it in a year, miss," he said at last,
with a gasp of disappointment.
She thought it over a
minute, her pencil poised in her hand and her eyes on his face
"Can you,"
she said, "undertake to get men from other villages, and superintend what
they do? If you can do that, the work is still passing through your hands, and
Stornham will reap the benefit of it. Your workmen will lodge at the cottages
and spend part of their wages at the shops, and you who are a Stornham workman
will earn the money to be made out of a rather large contract."
Joe Buttle became quite
hot. If you have brought up a family for years on the proceeds of such jobs as
driving a ten-penny nail in here or there, tinkering a hole in a cottage roof,
knocking up a shelf in the vicarage kitchen, and mending a panel of fence, to
be suddenly confronted with a proposal to engage workmen and undertake
"contracts" is shortening to the breath and heating to the blood.
"Miss," he
said, "we've never done big jobs, Sim Soames an' me. P'raps we're not up
to it--but it'd be a fortune to us."
She was looking down at
one of her papers and making pencil marks on it.
"You did some work
last year on a little house at Tidhurst, didn't you?" she said.
To think of her knowing
that! Yes, the unaccountable good luck had actually come to him that two
Tidhurst carpenters, falling ill of the same typhoid at the same time, through
living side by side in the same order of unsanitary cottage, he and Sim had
been given their work to finish, and had done their best.
"Yes, miss,"
he answered.
"I heard that when
I was inquiring about you. I drove over to Tidhurst to see the work, and it was
very sound and well done. If you did that, I can at least trust you to do
something at the Court which will prove to me what you are equal to. I want a
Stornham man to undertake this."
"No Tidhurst
man," said Joe Buttle, with sudden courage, "nor yet no Barnhurst,
nor yet no Yangford, nor Wratcham shall do it, if I can look it in the face.
It's Stornham work and Stornham had ought to have it. It gives me a brace-up to
hear of it."
The tall young lady
laughed beautifully and got up.
"Come to the Court
to-morrow morning at ten, and we will look it over together," she said.
"Good-morning, Buttle." And she went away.
In the taproom of The
Clock, when Joe Buttle dropped in for his pot of beer, he found Fox, the
saddler, and Tread, the blacksmith, and each of them fell upon the others with
something of the same story to tell. The new young lady from the Court had been
to see them, too, and had brought to each her definite little note-book.
Harness was to be repaired and furbished up, the big carriage and the old
phaeton were to be put in order, and Master Ughtred's cart was to be given new
paint and springs.
"This is what she
said," Fox's story ran, "and she said it so straightforward and
business-like that the conceitedest man that lived couldn't be upset by it. 'I
want to see what you can do,' she says. 'I am new to the place and I must find
out what everyone can do, then I shall know what to do myself.' The way she
sets them eyes on a man is a sight. It's the sense in them and the human nature
that takes you."
"Yes, it's the
sense," said Tread, "and her looking at you as if she expected you to
have sense yourself, and understand that she's doing fair business. It's
clear-headed like--her asking questions and finding out what Stornham men can
do. She's having the old things done up so that she can find out, and so that
she can prove that the Court work is going to be paid for. That's my
belief."
"But what does it
all mean?" said Joe Buttle, setting his pot of beer down on the taproom
table, round which they sat in conclave. "Where's the money coming from?
There's money somewhere."
Tread was the advanced
thinker of the village. He had come--through reverses--from a bigger place. He
read the newspapers.
"It'll come from
where it's got a way of coming," he gave forth portentously. "It'll
come from America. How they manage to get hold of so much of it there is past
me. But they've got it, dang 'em, and they're ready to spend it for what they
want, though they're a sharp lot. Twelve years ago there was a good bit of talk
about her ladyship's father being one of them with the fullest pockets. She
came here with plenty, but Sir Nigel got hold of it for his games, and they're
the games that cost money. Her ladyship wasn't born with a backbone, poor thing,
but this new one was, and her ladyship's father is her father, and you mark my
words, there's money coming into Stornham, though it's not going to be played
the fool with. Lord, yes! this new one has a backbone and good strong wrists
and a good strong head, though I must say"--with a little masculine
chuckle of admission--"it's a bit unnatural with them eyelashes and them
eyes looking at you between 'em. Like blue water between rushes in the
marsh."
Before the next
twenty-four hours had passed a still more unlooked-for event had taken place.
Long outstanding bills had been paid, and in as matter-of-fact manner as if
they had not been sent in and ignored, in some cases for years. The settlement
of Joe Buttle's account sent him to bed at the day's end almost light-headed.
To become suddenly the possessor of thirty-seven pounds, fifteen and tenpence
half-penny, of which all hope had been lost three years ago, was almost too
much for any man. Six pounds, eight pounds, ten pounds, came into places as if
sovereigns had been sixpences, and shillings farthings. More than one cottage
woman, at the sight of the hoarded wealth in her staring goodman's hand, gulped
and began to cry. If they had had it before, and in driblets, it would have
been spent long since, now, in a lump, it meant shoes and petticoats and tea
and sugar in temporary abundance, and the sense of this abundance was felt to
be entirely due to American magic. America was, in fact, greatly lauded and
discussed, the case of "Gaarge" Lumsden being much quoted.
THE work at Stornham
Court went on steadily, though with no greater rapidity than is usually
achieved by rural labourers. There was, however, without doubt, a certain
stimulus in the occasional appearance of Miss Vanderpoel, who almost daily
sauntered round the place to look on, and exchange a few words with the workmen.
When they saw her coming, the men, hastily standing up to touch their
foreheads, were conscious of a slight acceleration of being which was not quite
the ordinary quickening produced by the presence of employers. It was, in fact,
a sensation rather pleasing than anxious. Her interest in the work was, upon
the whole, one which they found themselves beginning to share. The unusualness
of the situation--a young woman, who evidently stood for many things and powers
desirable, employing labourers and seeming to know what she intended them to
do--was a thing not easy to get over, or be come accustomed to. But there she
was, as easy and well mannered as you please--and with gentlefolks' ways,
though, as an American, such finish could scarcely be expected from her. She
knew each man's name, it was revealed gradually, and, what was more, knew what
he stood for in the village, what cottage he lived in, how many children he
had, and something about his wife. She remembered things and made inquiries
which showed knowledge. Besides this, she represented, though perhaps they were
scarcely yet fully awake to the fact, the promise their discouraged dulness had
long lost sight of.
It actually became
apparent that her ladyship, who walked with her, was altering day by day. Was
it true that the bit of colour they had heard spoken of when she returned from
town was deepening and fixing itself on her cheek? It sometimes looked like it.
Was she a bit less stiff and shy-like and frightened in her way? Buttle
mentioned to his friends at The Clock that he was sure of it. She had begun to
look a man in the face when she talked, and more than once he had heard her
laugh at things her sister said.
To one man more than to
any other had come an almost unspeakable piece of luck through the new
arrival--a thing which to himself, at least, was as the opening of the heavens.
This man was the discouraged Kedgers. Miss Vanderpoel, coming with her ladyship
to talk to him, found that the man was a person of more experience than might
have been imagined. In his youth he had been an under gardener at a great
place, and being fond of his work, had learned more than under gardeners often
learn. He had been one of a small army of workers under the orders of an
imposing head gardener, whose knowledge was a science. He had seen and taken
part in what was done in orchid houses, orangeries, vineries, peach houses,
conservatories full of wondrous tropical plants. But it was not easy for a man
like himself, uneducated and lacking confidence of character, to advance as a
bolder young man might have done. The all-ruling head gardener had inspired him
with awe. He had watched him reverently, accumulating knowledge, but being
given, as an underling, no opportunity to do more than obey orders. He had
spent his life in obeying, and congratulated himself that obedience secured him
his weekly wage.
"He was a great
man--Mr. Timson--he was," he said, in talking to Miss Vanderpoel.
"Ay, he was that. Knew everything that could happen to a flower or a s'rub
or a vegetable. Knew it all. Had a lib'ery of books an' read 'em night an' day.
Head gardener's cottage was good enough for gentry. The old Markis used to walk
round the hothouses an' gardens talking to him by the hour. If you did what he
told you exactly like he told it to you, then you were all right, but if you
didn't--well, you was off the place before you'd time to look round. Worked
under him from twenty to forty. Then he died an' the new one that came in had
new ways. He made a clean sweep of most of us. The men said he was jealous of
Mr. Timson."
"That was bad for
you, if you had a wife and children," Miss Vanderpoel said.
"Eight of us to
feed," Kedgers answered. "A man with that on him can't wait, miss. I
had to take the first place I could get. It wasn't a good one--poor parsonage
with a big family an' not room on the place for the vegetables they wanted.
Cabbages, an' potatoes, an' beans, an' broccoli. No time nor ground for
flowers. Used to seem as if flowers got to be a kind of dream." Kedgers
gave vent to a deprecatory half laugh. "Me--I was fond of flowers. I
wouldn't have asked no better than to live among 'em. Mr. Timson gave me a book
or two when his lordship sent him a lot of new ones. I've bought a few
myself--though I suppose I couldn't afford it."
From the poor parsonage
he had gone to a market gardener, and had evidently liked the work better, hard
and unceasing as it had been, because he had been among flowers again. Sudden
changes from forcing houses to chill outside dampness had resulted in
rheumatism. After that things had gone badly. He began to be regarded as past
his prime of strength. Lower wages and labour still as hard as ever, though it
professed to be lighter, and therefore cheaper. At last the big neglected
gardens of Stornham.
"What I'm seeing,
miss, all the time, is what could be done with 'em. Wonderful it'd be. They
might be the show of the county-if we had Mr. Timson here."
Miss Vanderpoel,
standing in the sunshine on the broad weed-grown pathway, was conscious that he
was remotely moving. His flowers-his flowers. They had been the centre of his
rudimentary rural being. Each man or woman cared for some one thing, and the
unfed longing for it left the life of the creature a thwarted passion. Kedgers,
yearning to stir the earth about the roots of blooming things, and doomed to
broccoli and cabbage, had spent his years unfed. No thing is a small thing.
Kedgers, with the earth under his broad finger nails, and his half apologetic
laugh, being the centre of his own world, was as large as Mount Dunstan, who
stood thwarted in the centre of his. Chancing-for KEDGERS 2 1 1 God knows what
mystery of reason-to be born one of those having power, one might perhaps set
in order a world like Kedgers'.
"In the course of
twenty years' work under Timson," she said, "you must have learned a
great deal from him."
"A good bit,
miss-a good bit," admitted Kedgers. " If I hadn't ha' cared for the
work, I might ha' gone on doing it with my eyes shut, but I didn't. Mr.
Timson's heart was set on it as well as his head. An' mine got to be. But I
wasn't even second or third under him-I was only one of a lot. He would have
thought me fine an' impident if I'd told him I'd got to know a good deal of
what he knew-and had some bits of ideas of my own."
"If you had men
enough under you, and could order all you want," Miss Vanderpoel said
tentatively, "you know what the place should be, no doubt."
"That I do,
miss," answered Kedgers, turning red with feeling. "Why, if the soil
was well treated, anything would grow here. There's situations for everything.
There's shade for things that wants it, and south aspects for things that won't
grow without the warmth of 'em. Well, I've gone about many a day when I was low
down in my mind and worked myself up to being cheerful by just planning where I
could put things and what they'd look like. Liliums, now, I could grow them in
masses from June to October." He was becoming excited, like a war horse
scenting battle from afar, and forgot himself. "The Lilium Giganteum--I
don't know whether you've ever seen one, miss--but if you did, it'd almost take
your breath away. A Lilium that grows twelve feet high and more, and has a
flower like a great snow-white trumpet, and the scent pouring out of it so that
it floats for yards. There's a place where I could grow them so that you'd come
on them sudden, and you'd think they couldn't be true."
"Grow them,
Kedgers, begin to grow them," said Miss Vanderpoel. "I have never
seen them--I must see them."
Kedgers' low,
deprecatory chuckle made itself heard again,
"Perhaps I'm going
too fast," he said. " It would take a good bit of expense to do it,
miss. A good bit."
Then Miss Vanderpoel
made--and she made it in the simplest matter-of-fact manner, too--the startling
remark which, three hours later, all Stornham village had heard of. The most
astounding part of the remark was that it was uttered as if there was nothing
in it which was not the absolutely natural outcome of the circumstances of the
case.
"Expense which is
proper and necessary need not be considered," she said. "Regular
accounts will be kept and supervised, but you can have all that is
required."
Then it appeared that
Kedgers almost became pale. Being a foreigner, perhaps she did not know how
much she was implying when she said such a thing to a man who had never held a
place like Timson's.
"Miss," he
hesitated, even shamefacedly, because to suggest to such a fine-mannered, calm
young lady that she might be ignorant, seemed perilously near impertinence.
"Miss, did you mean you wanted only the Lilium Giganteum, or--or other
things, as well."
"I should like to
see," she answered him, "all that you see. I should like to hear more
of it all, when we have time to talk it over. I understand we should need time
to discuss plans."
The quiet way she went
on! Seeming to believe in him, almost as if he was Mr. Timson. The old feeling,
born and fostered by the great head gardener's rule, reasserted itself.
"It means more to
work--and someone over them, miss," he said. "If--if you had a man
like Mr. Timson----"
"You have not
forgotten what you learned. With men enough under you it can be put into
practice."
"You mean you'd
trust me, miss--same as if I was Mr. Timson?"
"Yes. If you ever
feel the need of a man like Timson, no doubt we can find one. But you will not.
You love the work too much."
Then still standing in
the sunshine, on the weed-grown path, she continued to talk to him. It revealed
itself that she understood a good deal. As he was to assume heavier responsibilities,
he was to receive higher wages. It was his experience which was to be
considered, not his years. This was a new point of view. The mere propeller of
wheel-barrows and digger of the soil--particularly after having been attacked
by rheumatism--depreciates in value after youth is past. Kedgers knew that a
Mr. Timson, with a regiment of under gardeners, and daily increasing knowledge
of his profession, could continue to direct, though years rolled by. But to
such fortune he had not dared to aspire.
One of the lodges might
be put in order for him to live in. He might have the hothouses to put in
order, too; he might have implements, plants, shrubs, even some of the newer
books to consult. Kedgers' brain reeled.
"You--think I am
to be trusted, miss?" he said more than once. "You think it would be
all right? I wasn't even second or third under Mr. Timson--but--if I say it as
shouldn't--I never lost a chance of learning things. I was just mad about it.
T'aint only Liliums--Lord, I know 'em all, as if they were my own children born
an' bred--shrubs, coniferas, herbaceous borders that bloom in succession. My
word! what you can do with just delphiniums an' campanula an' acquilegia an'
poppies, everyday things like them, that'll grow in any cottage garden, an'
bulbs an' annuals! Roses, miss--why, Mr. Timson had them in thickets--an'
carpets-- an' clambering over trees and tumbling over walls in sheets an'
torrents--just know their ways an' what they want, an' they'll grow in a riot.
But they want feeding--feeding. A rose is a gross feeder. Feed a Glory deejon,
and watch over him, an' he'll cover a housetop an' give you two
bloomings."
"I have never
lived in an English garden. I should like to see this one at its best."
Leaving her with
salutes of abject gratitude, Kedgers moved away bewildered. What man could
believe it true? At three or four yards' distance he stopped and, turning, came
back to touch his cap again.
"You understand,
miss," he said. "I wasn't even second or third under Mr. Timson. I'm
not deceiving you, am I, miss?"
"You are to be
trusted," said Miss Vanderpoel, "first because you love the
things--and next because of Timson."
MR. GERMEN, the
secretary of the great Mr. Vanderpoel, in arranging the neat stacks of letters
preparatory to his chief's entrance to his private room each morning, knowing
where each should be placed, understood that such as were addressed in Miss
Vanderpoel's hand would be read before anything else. This had been the case
even when she had just been placed in a French school, a tall, slim little
girl, with immense demanding eyes, and a thick black plait of hair swinging
between her straight, rather thin, shoulders. Between other financial
potentates and their little girls, Mr. Germen knew that the oddly confidential
relation which existed between these two was unusual. Her schoolgirl letters,
it had been understood, should be given the first place on the stacks of
envelopes each incoming ocean steamer brought in its mail bags. Since the
beginning of her visit to her sister, Lady Anstruthers, the exact dates of mail
steamers seemed to be of increased importance. Miss Vanderpoel evidently found
much to write about. Each steamer brought a full-looking envelope to be placed
in a prominent position.
On a hot morning in the
early summer Mr. Germen found two or three--two of them of larger size and
seeming to contain business papers. These he placed where they would be seen at
once. Mr. Vanderpoel was a little later than usual in his arrival. At this
season he came from his place in the country, and before leaving it this
morning he had been talking to his wife, whom he found rather disturbed by a
chance encounter with a young woman who had returned to visit her mother after
a year spent in England with her English husband. This young woman, now Lady
Bowen, once Milly Jones, had been one of the amusing marvels of New York. A
girl neither rich nor so endowed by nature as to be able to press upon the
world any special claim to consideration as a beauty, her enterprise, and the
daring of her tactics, had been the delight of many a satiric onlooker. In her
schooldays she had ingenuously mapped out her future career. Other American
girls married men with titles, and she intended to do the same thing. The other
little girls laughed, but they liked to hear her talk. All information
regarding such unions as was to be found in the newspapers and magazines, she
collected and studiously read--sometimes aloud to her companions. Social
paragraphs about royalties, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, court balls
and glittering functions, she devoured and learned by heart. An abominably
vulgar little person, she was an interestingly pertinacious creature, and
wrought night and day at acquiring an air of fashionable elegance, at first
naturally laying it on in such manner as suggested that it should be scraped
off with a knife, but with experience gaining a certain specious knowledge of
forms. How the over-mature child at school had assimilated her uncanny young
worldliness, it would have been less difficult to decide, if possible sources
had been less numerous. The air was full of it, the literature of the day, the
chatter of afternoon teas, the gossip of the hour. Before she was fifteen she
saw the indiscretion of her childish frankness, and realised that it might
easily be detrimental to her ambitions. She said no more of her plans for her
future, and even took the astute tone of carelessly treating as a joke her
vulgar little past. But no titled foreigner appeared upon the horizon without
setting her small, but business-like, brain at work. Her lack of wealth and
assured position made her situation rather hopeless. She was not of the class
of lucky young women whose parents' gorgeous establishments offered attractions
to wandering persons of rank. She and her mother lived in a flat, and gave
rather pathetic afternoon teas in return for such more brilliant hospitalities
as careful and pertinacious calling and recalling obliged their acquaintances
to feel they could not decently be left wholly out of. Milly and her anxious
mother had worked hard. They lost no opportunity of writing a note, or sending
a Christmas card, or an economical funeral wreath. By daily toil and the
amicable ignoring of casualness of manner or slights, they managed to cling to
the edge of the precipice of social oblivion, into whose depths a lesser degree
of assiduity, or a greater sensitiveness, would have plunged them. Once--early
in Milly's career, when her ever-ready chatter and her superficial brightness
were a novelty, it had seemed for a short time that luck might be glancing
towards her. A young man of foreign title and of Bohemian tastes met her at a
studio dance, and, misled by the smartness of her dress and her always
carefully carried air of careless prosperity, began to pay a delusive court to
her. For a few weeks all her freshest frocks were worn assiduously and credit
was strained to buy new ones. The flat was adorned with fresh flowers and
several new yellow and pale blue cushions appeared at the little teas, which
began to assume a more festive air. Desirable people, who went ordinarily to
the teas at long intervals and through reluctant weakness, or sometimes
rebellious amiability, were drummed up and brought firmly to the fore. Milly
herself began to look pink and fluffy through mere hopeful good spirits. Her
thin little laugh was heard incessantly, and people amusedly if they were
good-tempered, derisively if they were spiteful, wondered if it really would
come to something. But it did not. The young foreigner suddenly left New York,
making his adieus with entire lightness. There was the end of it. He had heard
something about lack of income and uncertainty of credit, which had suggested
to him that discretion was the better part of valour. He married later a young
lady in the West, whose father was a solid person.
Less astute young
women, under the circumstances, would have allowed themselves a week or so of
headache or influenza, but Milly did not. She made calls in the new frocks, and
with such persistent spirit that she fished forth from the depths of
indifferent hospitality two or three excellent invitations. She wore her
freshest pink frock, and an amazingly clever little Parisian diamond crescent
in her hair, at the huge Monson ball at Delmonico's, and it was recorded that
it was on that glittering occasion that her "Uncle James" was first
brought upon the scene. He was only mentioned lightly at first. It was to
Milly's credit that he was not made too much of. He was casually touched upon
as a very rich uncle, who lived in Dakota, and had actually lived there since
his youth, letting his few relations know nothing of him. He had been rather a
black sheep as a boy, but Milly's mother had liked him, and, when he had run
away from New York, he had told her what he was going to do, and had kissed her
when she cried, and had taken her daugerreotype with him. Now he had written,
and it turned out that he was enormously rich, and was interested in Milly.
From that time Uncle James formed an atmosphere. He did not appear in New York,
but Milly spent the next season in London, and the Monsons, being at Hurlingham
one day, had her pointed out to them as a new American girl, who was the idol
of a millionaire uncle. She was not living in an ultra fashionable quarter, or
with ultra fashionable people, but she was, on all occasions, they heard,
beautifully dressed and beautifully--if a little heavily--hung with gauds and
gems, her rings being said to be quite amazing and suggesting an impassioned
lavishness on the part of Uncle James. London, having become inured to American
marvels--Milly's bit of it--accepted and enjoyed Uncle James and all the
sumptuous attributes of his Dakota.
English people would
swallow anything sometimes, Mrs. Monson commented sagely, and yet sometimes
they stared and evidently thought you were lying about the simplest things.
Milly's corner of South Kensington had gulped down the Dakota uncle. Her
managing in this way, if there was no uncle, was too clever and amusing. She
had left her mother at home to scrimp and save, and by hook or by crook she had
contrived to get a number of quite good things to wear. She wore them with such
an air of accustomed resource that the jewels might easily--mixed with some
relics of her mother's better days--be of the order of the clever little
Parisian diamond crescent. It was Milly's never-laid-aside manner which did it.
The announcement of her union with Sir Arthur Bowen was received in certain New
York circles with little suppressed shrieks of glee. It had been so sharp of
her to aim low and to realise so quickly that she could not aim high. The
baronetcy was a recent one, and not unconnected with trade. Sir Arthur was not
a rich man, and, had it leaked out, believed in Uncle James. If he did not find
him all his fancy painted, Milly was clever enough to keep him quiet. She was,
when all was said and done, one of the American women of title, her servants
and the tradespeople addressed her as "my lady," and with her
capacity for appropriating what was most useful, and her easy assumption of
possessing all required, she was a very smart person indeed. She provided
herself with an English accent, an English vocabulary, and an English manner,
and in certain circles was felt to be most impressive.
At an afternoon
function in the country Mrs. Vanderpoel had met Lady Bowen. She had been one of
the few kindly ones, who in the past had given an occasional treat to Milly
Jones for her girlhood's sake. Lady Bowen, having gathered a small group of
hearers, was talking volubly to it, when the nice woman entered, and, catching
sight of her, she swept across the room. It would not have been like Milly to
fail to see and greet at once the wife of Reuben Vanderpoel. She would count
anywhere, even in London sets it was not easy to connect one's self with. She
had already discovered that there were almost as many difficulties to be
surmounted in London by the wife of an unimportant baronet as there had been to
be overcome in New York by a girl without money or place. It was well to have
something in the way of information to offer in one's small talk with the lucky
ones and Milly knew what subject lay nearest to Mrs. Vanderpoel's heart.
"Miss Vanderpoel
has evidently been enjoying her visit to Stornham Court," she said, after
her first few sentences. "I met Mrs. Worthington at the Embassy, and she
said she had buried herself in the country. But I think she must have run up to
town quietly for shopping. I saw her one day in Piccadilly, and I was almost
sure Lady Anstruthers was with her in the carriage--almost sure."
Mrs. Vanderpoel's heart
quickened its beat.
"You were so young
when she married," she said. "I daresay you have fogotten her
face."
"Oh, no!"
Milly protested effusively. "I remember her quite well. She was so pretty
and pink and happy-looking, and her hair curled naturally. I used to pray every
night that when I grew up I might have hair and a complexion like hers."
Mrs. Vanderpoel's kind,
maternal face fell.
"And you were not
sure you recognised her? Well, I suppose twelve years does make a
difference," her voice dragging a little.
Milly saw that she had
made a blunder. The fact was she had not even guessed at Rosy's identity until
long after the carriage had passed her.
"Oh, you
see," she hesitated, "their carriage was not near me, and I was not
expecting to see them. And perhaps she looked a little delicate. I heard she
had been rather delicate."
She felt she was
floundering, and bravely floundered away from the subject. She plunged into
talk of Betty and people's anxiety to see her, and the fact that the society
columns were already faintly heralding her. She would surely come soon to town.
It was too late for the first Drawing-room this year. When did Mrs. Vanderpoel
think she would be presented? Would Lady Anstruthers present her? Mrs.
Vanderpoel could not bring her back to Rosy, and the nature of the change which
had made it difficult to recognise her.
The result of this
chance encounter was that she did not sleep very well, and the next morning
talked anxiously to her husband.
"What I could see,
Reuben, was that Milly Bowen had not known her at all, even when she saw her in
the carriage with Betty. She couldn't have changed as much as that, if she had
been taken care of, and happy."
Her affection and
admiration for her husband were such as made the task of soothing her a
comparatively simple thing. The instinct of tenderness for the mate his youth
had chosen was an unchangeable one in Reuben Vanderpoel. He was not a primitive
man, but in this he was as unquestioningly simple as if he had been a kindly
New England farmer. He had outgrown his wife, but he had always loved and
protected her gentle goodness. He had never failed her in her smallest
difficulty, he could not bear to see her hurt. Betty had been his compeer and
his companion almost since her childhood, but his wife was the tenderest care
of his days. There was a strong sense of relief in his thought of Betty now. It
was good to remember the fineness of her preceptions, her clearness of
judgment, and recall that they were qualities he might rely upon.
When he left his wife
to take his train to town, he left her smiling again. She scarcely knew how her
fears had been dispelled. His talk had all been kindly, practical, and
reasonable. It was true Betty had said in her letter that Rosy had been rather
delicate, and had not been taking very good care of herself, but that was to be
remedied. Rosy had made a little joke or so about it herself.
"Betty says I am
not fat enough for an English matron. I am drinking milk and breakfasting in
bed, and am going to be massaged to please her. I believe we all used to obey
Betty when she was a child, and now she is so tall and splendid, one would
never dare to cross her. Oh, mother! I am so happy at having her with me!"
To reread just these
simple things caused the suggestion of things not comfortably normal to melt
away. Mrs. Vanderpoel sat down at a sunny window with her lap full of letters,
and forgot Milly Bowen's floundering.
When Mr. Vanderpoel
reached his office and glanced at his carefully arranged morning's mail, Mr.
Germen saw him smile at the sight of the envelopes addressed in his daughter's
hand. He sat down to read them at once, and, as he read, the smile of welcome became
a shrewd and deeply interested one.
"She has
undertaken a good-sized contract," he was saying to himself, "and
she's to be trusted to see it through. It is rather fine, the way she manages
to combine emotions and romance and sentiments with practical good business,
without letting one interfere with the other. It's none of it bad business
this, as the estate is entailed, and the boy is Rosy's. It's good
business."
This was what Betty had
written to her father in New York from Stornham Court.
"The things I am
beginning to do, it would be impossible for me to resist doing, and it would
certainly be impossible for you. The thing I am seeing I have never seen, at
close hand, before, though I have taken in something almost its parallel as
part of certain picturesqueness of scenes in other countries. But I am living
with this and also, through relationship to Rosy, I, in a measure, belong to
it, and it belongs to me. You and I may have often seen in American villages
crudeness, incompleteness, lack of comfort, and the composition of a picture, a
rough ugliness the result of haste and unsettled life which stays nowhere long,
but packs up its goods and chattels and wanders farther afield in search of
something better or worse, in any case in search of change, but we have never
seen ripe, gradual falling to ruin of what generations ago was beautiful. To me
it is wonderful and tragic and touching. If you could see the Court, if you
could see the village, if you could see the church, if you could see the people,
all quietly disintegrating, and so dearly perfect in their way that if one knew
absolutely that nothing could be done to save them, one could only stand still
and catch one's breath and burst into tears. The church has stood since the
Conquest, and, as it still stands, grey and fine, with its mass of square
tower, and despite the state of its roof, is not yet given wholly to the winds
and weather, it will, no doubt, stand a few centuries longer. The Court,
however, cannot long remain a possible habitation, if it is not given a new
lease of life. I do not mean that it will crumble to-morrow, or the day after,
but we should not think it habitable now, even while we should admit that
nothing could be more delightful to look at. The cottages in the village are
already, many of them, amazing, when regarded as the dwellings of human beings.
How long ago the cottagers gave up expecting that anything in particular would
be done for them, I do not know. I am impressed by the fact that they are an
unexpecting people. Their calm non-expectancy fills me with interest. Only
centuries of waiting for their superiors in rank to do things for them, and the
slow formation of the habit of realising that not to submit to disappointment
was no use, could have produced the almost serenity of their attitude. It is
all very well for newborn republican nations --meaning my native land--to sniff
sternly and say that such a state of affairs is an insult to the spirit of the
race. Perhaps it is now, but it was not apparently centuries ago, which was
when it all began and when 'Man' and the 'Race' had not developed to the point
of asking questions, to which they demand replies, about themselves and the
things which happened to them. It began in the time of Egbert and Canute, and
earlier, in the days of the Druids, when they used peacefully to allow
themselves to be burned by the score, enclosed in wicker idols, as natural
offerings to placate the gods. The modern acceptance of things is only a
somewhat attenuated remnant of the ancient idea. And this is what I have to
deal with and understand. When I begin to do the things I am going to do, with
the aid of your practical advice, if I have your approval, the people will be
at first rather afraid of me. They will privately suspect I am mad. It will,
also, not seem at all unlikely that an American should be of unreasoningly
extravagant and flighty mind. Stornham, having long slumbered in remote peace
through lack of railroad convenience, still regards America as almost of the
character of wild rumour. Rosy was their one American, and she disappeared from
their view so soon that she had not time to make any lasting impression. I am
asking myself how difficult, or how simple, it will be to quite understand
these people, and to make them understand me. I greatly doubt its being simple.
Layers and layers and layers of centuries must be far from easy to burrow
through. They look simple, they do not know that they are not simple, but
really they are not. Their point of view has been the point of view of the
English peasant so many hundred years that an American point of view, which has
had no more than a trifling century and a half to form itself in, may find its
thews and sinews the less powerful of the two. When I walk down the village
street, faces appear at windows, and figures, stolidly, at doors. What I see is
that, vaguely and remotely, American though I am, the fact that I am of 'her
ladyship's blood,' and that her ladyship--American though she is--has the claim
on them of being the mother of the son of the owner of the land--stirs in them
a feeling that I have a shadowy sort of relationship in the whole thing, and
with regard to their bad roofs and bad chimneys, to their broken palings, and
damp floors, to their comforts and discomforts, a sort of responsibility. That
is the whole thing, and you--just you, father--will understand me when I say
that I actually like it. I might not like it if I were poor Rosy, but, being
myself, I love it. There is something patriarchal in it which moves me.
"Is it an
abounding and arrogant delight in power which makes it appeal to me, or is it
something better? To feel that every man on the land, every woman, every child
knew one, counted on one's honour and friendship, turned to one believingly in
time of stress, to know that one could help and be a finely faithful thing, the
very knowledge of it would give one vigour and warm blood in the veins. I wish
I had been born to it, I wish the first sounds falling on my newborn ears had
been the clanging of the peal from an old Norman church tower, calling out to
me, 'Welcome; newcomer of our house, long life among us! Welcome!' Still,
though the first sounds that greeted me were probably the rattling of a Fifth
Avenue stage, I have brought them something, and who knows whether I could have
brought it from without the range of that prosaic, but cheerful, rattle."
The rest of the letter
was detail of a business-like order. A large envelope contained the
detail-notes of things to be done, notes concerning roofs, windows, flooring,
park fences, gardens, greenhouses, tool houses, potting sheds, garden walls,
gates, woodwork, masonry. Sharp little sketches, such as Buttle had seen, notes
concerning Buttle, Fox, Tread, Kedgers, and less accomplished workmen;
concerning wages of day labourers, hours, capabilities. Buttle, if he had
chanced to see them, would have broken into a light perspiration at the idea of
a young woman having compiled the documents. He had never heard of the first
Reuben Vanderpoel.
Her father's reply to Betty
was as long as her own to him, and gave her keen pleasure by its support, both
of sympathetic interest and practical advice. He left none of her points
unnoted, and dealt with each of them as she had most hoped and indeed had felt
she knew he would. This was his final summing up:
"If you had been a
boy, and I own I am glad you were not --a man wants a daughter--I should have
been quite willing to allow you your flutter on Wall Street, or your try at
anything you felt you would like to handle. It would have interested me to look
on and see what you were made of, what you wanted, and how you set about trying
to get it. It's a new kind of deal you have undertaken. It's more romantic than
Wall Street, but I think I do see what you see in it. Even apart from Rosy and
the boy, it would interest me to see what you would do with it. This is your
'flutter.' I like the way you face it. If you were a son instead of a daughter,
I should see I might have confidence in you. I could not confide to Wall Street
what I will tell you--which is that in the midst of the drive and swirl and
tumult of my life here, I like what you see in the thing, I like your idea of
the lord of the land, who should love the land and the souls born on it, and be
the friend and strength of them and give the best and get it back in fair
exchange. There's a steadiness in the thought of such a life among one's kind
which has attractions for a man who has spent years in a maelstrom, snatching
at what whirls among the eddies of it. Your notes and sketches and summing up
of probable costs did us both credit--I say 'both' because your business
education is the result of our long talks and journeyings together. You began
to train for this when you began going to visit mines and railroads with me at
twelve years old. I leave the whole thing in your hands, my girl, I leave Rosy
in your hands, and in leaving Rosy to you, you know how I am trusting you with
your mother. Your letters to her tell her only what is good for her. She is
beginning to look happier and younger already, and is looking forward to the
day when Rosy and the boy will come home to visit us, and when we shall go in
state to Stornham Court. God bless her, she is made up of affection and simple
trust, and that makes it easy to keep things from her. She has never been
ill-treated, and she knows I love her, so when I tell her that things are
coming right, she never doubts me.
"While you are
rebuilding the place you will rebuild Rosy so that the sight of her may not be
a pain when her mother sees her again, which is what she is living for."
A BIRD was perched upon
a swaying branch of a slim young sapling near the fence-supported hedge which
bounded the park, and Mount Dunstan had stopped to look at it and listen. A
soft shower had fallen, and after its passing, the sun coming through the light
clouds, there had broken forth again in the trees brief trills and calls and
fluting of bird notes. The sward and ferns glittered fresh green under the
raindrops; the young leaves on trees and hedge seemed visibly to uncurl, the
uncovered earth looked richly dark and moist, and sent forth the fragrance from
its deeps, which, rising to a man's nostrils, stirs and thrills him because it
is the scent of life's self. The bird upon the sapling was a robin, the tiny
round body perched upon his delicate legs, plump and bright plumaged for
mating. He touched his warm red breast with his beak, fluffed out and shook his
feathers, and, swelling his throat, poured forth his small, entranced song. It
was a gay, brief, jaunty thing, but pure, joyous, gallant, liquid melody. There
was dainty bravado in it, saucy demand and allurement. It was addressed to some
invisible hearer of the tender sex, and wheresoever she might be hidden--whether
in great branch or low thicket or hedge --there was hinted no doubt in her
small wooer's note that she would hear it and in due time respond. Mount
Dunstan, listening, even laughed at its confident music. The tiny thing
uttering its Call of the World--jubilant in the surety of answer! Having flung
it forth, he paused a moment and waited, his small head turned sideways, his
big, round, dew-bright black eye roguishly attentive. Then with more swelling
of the throat he trilled and rippled gayly anew, undisturbed and undoubting,
but with a trifle of insistence. Then he listened, tried again two or three
times, with brave chirps and exultant little roulades. "Here am I, the
bright-breasted, the liquid-eyed, the slender-legged, the joyous and conquering!
Listen to me --listen to me. Listen and answer in the call of God's
world." It was the joy and triumphant faith in the tiny note of the tiny
thing--Life as he himself was, though Life whose mystery his man's hand could
have crushed--which, while he laughed, set Mount Dunstan thinking. Spring
warmth and spring scents and spring notes set a man's being in tune with
infinite things.
The bright roulade
began again, prolonged itself with renewed effort, rose to its height, and
ended. From a bush in the thicket farther up the road a liquid answer came. And
Mount Dunstan's laugh at the sound of it was echoed by another which came
apparently from the bank rising from the road on the other side of the hedge,
and accompanying the laugh was a good-natured nasal voice.
"She's caught on.
There's no mistake about that. I guess it's time for you to hustle, Mr.
Rob."
Mount Dunstan laughed
again. Jem Salter had heard voices like it, and cheerful slang phrases of the
same order in his ranch days. On the other side of his park fence there was
evidently sitting, through some odd chance, an American of the cheery, casual
order, not sufficiently polished by travel to have lost his picturesque
national characteristics.
Mount Dunstan put a
hand on a broken panel of fence and leaped over into the road.
A bicycle was lying
upon the roadside grass, and on the bank, looking as though he had been
sheltering himself under the hedge from the rain, sat a young man in a cheap
bicycling suit. His features were sharply cut and keen, his cap was pushed back
from his forehead, and he had a pair of shrewdly careless boyish eves.
Mount Dunstan liked the
look of him, and seeing his natural start at the unheralded leap over the gap,
which was quite close to him, he spoke.
"Good-morning,"
he said. "I am afraid I startled you."
"Good-morning,"
was the response. "It was a bit of a jolt seeing you jump almost over my
shoulder. Where did you come from? You must have been just behind me."
"I was,"
explained Mount Dunstan. "Standing in the park listening to the
robin."
The young fellow
laughed outright.
"Say," he
said, "that was pretty fine, wasn't it? Wasn't he getting it off his
chest! He was an English robin, I guess. American robins are three or four
times as big. I liked that little chap. He was a winner."
"You are an
American?"
"Sure,"
nodding. "Good old Stars and Stripes for mine. First time I've been here.
Came part for business and part for pleasure. Having the time of my life."
Mount Dunstan sat down
beside him. He wanted to hear him talk. He had liked to hear the ranchmen talk.
This one was of the city type, but his genial conversational wanderings would
be full of quaint slang and good spirits. He was quite ready to converse, as
was made manifest by his next speech.
"I'm biking
through the country because I once had an old grandmother that was English, and
she was always talking about English country, and how green things was, and how
there was hedges instead of rail fences. She thought there was nothing like
little old England. Well, as far as roads and hedges go, I'm with her. They're
all right. I wanted a fellow I met crossing, to come with me, but he took a
Cook's trip to Paris. He's a gay sort of boy. Said he didn't want any green
lanes in his. He wanted Boolyvard." He laughed again and pushed his cap
farther back on his forehead. "Said I wasn't much of a sport. I tell you,
a chap that's got to earn his fifteen per, and live on it, can't be too much of
a sport."
"Fifteen
per?" Mount Dunstan repeated doubtfully.
His companion chuckled.
"I forgot I was
talking to an Englishman. Fifteen dollars per week--that's what 'fifteen per'
means. That's what he told me he gets at Lobenstien's brewery in New York.
Fifteen per. Not much, is it?"
"How does he
manage Continental travel on fifteen per?" Mount Dunstan inquired.
"He's a typewriter
and stenographer, and he dug up some extra jobs to do at night. He's been
working and saving two years to do this. We didn't come over on one of the big
liners with the Four Hundred, you can bet. Took a cheap one, inside cabin,
second class."
"By George!"
said Mount Dunstan. "That was American."
The American eagle
slightly flapped his wings. The young man pushed his cap a trifle sideways this
time, and flushed a little.
"Well, when an
American wants anything he generally reaches out for it."
"Wasn't it
rather--rash, considering the fifteen per?" Mount Dunstan suggested. He
was really beginning to enjoy himself.
"What's the use of
making a dollar and sitting on it. I've not got fifteen per--steady--and here I
am."
Mount Dunstan knew his
man, and looked at him with inquiring interest. He was quite sure he would go
on. This was a thing he had seen before--an utter freedom from the insular
grudging reserve, a sort of occult perception of the presence of friendly
sympathy, and an ingenuous readiness to meet it half way. The youngster, having
missed his fellow-traveler, and probably feeling the lack of companionship in
his country rides, was in the mood for self-revelation
"I'm selling for a
big concern," he said, "and I've got a first-class article to carry.
Up to date, you know, and all that. It's the top notch of typewriting machines,
the Delkoff. Ever seen it? Here's my card," taking a card from an inside
pocket and handing it to him. It was inscribed:
J. BURRIDGE & SON,
DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO.
BROADWAY, NEW YORK.
G. SELDEN.
"That's my name," he
said, pointing to the inscription in the corner. "I'm G. Selden, the
junior assistant of Mr. Jones."
At the sight of the
insigna of his trade, his holiday air dropped from him, and he hastily drew
from another pocket an illustrated catalogue.
"If you use a
typewriter," he broke forth, "I can assure you it would be to your
interest to look at this." And as Mount Dunstan took the proffered
pamphlet, and with amiable gravity opened it, he rapidly poured forth his
salesman's patter, scarcely pausing to take his breath: "It's the most
up-to-date machine on the market. It has all the latest improved mechanical
appliances. You will see from the cut in the catalogue that the platen roller
is easily removed without a long mechanical operation. All you do is to slip
two pins back and off comes the roller. There is also another point worth
mentioning--the ribbon switch. By using this ribbon switch you can write in
either red or blue ink while you are using only one ribbon. By throwing the
switch on this side, you can use thirteen yards on the upper edge of the
ribbon, by reversing it, you use thirteen yards on the lower edge--thus getting
practically twenty-six yards of good, serviceable ribbon out of one that is
only thirteen yards long--making a saving of fifty per cent. in your ribbon
expenditure alone, which you will see is quite an item to any enterprising
firm."
He was obliged to pause
here for a second or so, but as Mount Dunstan exhibited no signs of intending
to use violence, and, on the contrary, continued to inspect the catalogue, he
broke forth with renewed cheery volubility:
"Another advantage
is the new basket shift. Also, the carriage on this machine is perfectly
stationary and rigid. On all other machines it is fastened by a series of
connecting bolts and links, which you will readily understand makes perfect
alignment uncertain. Then our tabulator is a part and parcel of the instrument,
costing you nothing more than the original price of the machine, which is one
hundred dollars--without discount."
"It seems a good
thing," said Mount Dunstan. "If I had much business to transact, I
should buy one."
"If you bought one
you'd have business," responded Selden. "That's what's the matter.
It's the up-to-date machines that set things humming. A slow, old-fashioned
typewriter uses a firm's time, and time's money."
"I don't find it
so," said Mount Dunstan. "I have more time than I can possibly
use--and no money."
G. Selden looked at him
with friendly interest. His experience, which was varied, had taught him to
recognize symptoms. This nice, rough-looking chap, who, despite his rather
shabby clothes, looked like a gentleman, wore an expression Jones's junior
assistant had seen many a time before. He had seen it frequently on the
countenances of other junior assistants who had tramped the streets and met
more or less savage rebuffs through a day's length, without disposing of a single
Delkoff, and thereby adding five dollars to the ten per. It was the kind of
thing which wiped the youth out of a man's face and gave him a hard, worn look
about the eyes. He had looked like that himself many an unfeeling day before he
had learned to "know the ropes and not mind a bit of hot air." His
buoyant, slangy soul was a friendly thing. He was a gregarious creature, and
liked his fellow man. He felt, indeed, more at ease with him when he needed
"jollying along." Reticence was not even etiquette in a case as usual
as this.
"Say," he
broke out, "perhaps I oughtn't to have worried you. Are you up against it?
Down on your luck, I mean," in hasty translation.
Mount Dunstan grinned a
little.
"That's a very
good way of putting it," he answered. "I never heard 'up against it'
before. It's good. Yes, I'm up against it.
"Out of a
job?" with genial sympathy.
"Well, the job I
had was too big for me. It needed capital." He grinned slightly again,
recalling a phrase of his Western past. "I'm afraid I'm down and
out."
"No, you're
not," with cheerful scorn. "You're not dead, are you? S'long as a
man's not been dead a month, there's always a chance that there's luck round
the corner. How did you happen here? Are you piking it?"
Momentarily Mount
Dunstan was baffled. G. Selden, recognising the fact, enlightened him.
"That's New York again," he said, with a boyish touch of apology.
"It means on the tramp. Travelling along the turnpike. You don't look as
if you had come to that--though it's queer the sort of fellows you do meet
piking sometimes. Theatrical companies that have gone to pieces on the road,
you know. Perhaps--" with a sudden thought, "you're an actor. Are
you?"
Mount Dunstan admitted
to himself that he liked the junior assistant of Jones immensely. A more
ingenuously common young man, a more innocent outsider, it had never been his
blessed privilege to enter into close converse with, but his very commonness
was a healthy, normal thing. It made no effort to wreathe itself with chaplets
of elegance; it was beautifully unaware that such adornment was necessary. It
enjoyed itself, youthfully; attacked the earning of its bread with genial
pluck, and its good-natured humanness had touched him. He had enjoyed his talk;
he wanted to hear more of it. He was not in the mood to let him go his way. To
Penzance, who was to lunch with him to-day, he would present a study of
absorbing interest.
"No," he
answered. "I'm not an actor. My name is Mount Dunstan, and this
place," with a nod over his shoulder, "is mine--but I'm up against
it, nevertheless."
Selden looked a trifle
disgusted. He began to pick up his bicycle. He had given a degree of natural
sympathy, and this was an English chap's idea of a joke.
"I'm the Prince of
Wales, myself," he remarked, "and my mother's expecting me to lunch
at Windsor. So long, me lord," and he set his foot on the treadle.
Mount Dunstan rose,
feeling rather awkward. The point seemed somewhat difficult to contend.
"It is not a
joke," he said, conscious that he spoke rather stiffly.
"Little Willie's
not quite as easy as he looks," was the cryptic remark of Mr. Selden.
Mount Dunstan lost his
rather easily lost temper, which happened to be the best thing he could have done
under the circumstances.
"Damn it," he
burst out. "I'm not such a fool as I evidently look. A nice ass I should
be to play an idiot joke like that. I'm speaking the truth. Go if you like--and
be hanged."
Selden's attention was
arrested. The fellow was in earnest. The place was his. He must be the earl
chap he had heard spoken of at the wayside public house he had stopped at for a
pot of beer. He dismounted from his bicycle, and came back, pushing it before
him, good-natured relenting and awkwardness combining in his look.
"All right,"
he said. "I apologise--if it's cold fact. I'm not calling you a
liar."
"Thank you,"
still a little stiffly, from Mount Dunstan.
The unabashed good
cheer of G. Selden carried him lightly over a slightly difficult moment. He
laughed, pushing his cap back, of course, and looking over the hedge at the
sweep of park, with a group of deer cropping softly in the foreground.
"I guess I should
get a bit hot myself," he volunteered handsomely, "if I was an earl,
and owned a place like this, and a fool fellow came along and took me for a
tramp. That was a pretty bad break, wasn't it? But I did say you didn't look
like it. Anyway you needn't mind me. I shouldn't get onto Pierpont Morgan or W.
K. Vanderbilt, if I met 'em in the street."
He spoke the two names
as an Englishman of his class would have spoken of the Dukes of Westminster or
Marlborough. These were his nobles--the heads of the great American houses, and
entirely parallel, in his mind, with the heads of any great house in England.
They wielded the power of the world, and could wield it for evil or good, as
any prince or duke might. Mount Dunstan saw the parallel.
"I apologise, all
right," G. Selden ended genially.
"I am not
offended," Mount Dunstan answered. "There was no reason why you
should know me from another man. I was taken for a gamekeeper a few weeks
since. I was savage a moment, because you refused to believe me--and why should
you believe me after all?"
G. Selden hesitated. He
liked the fellow anyhow.
"You said you were
up against it--that was it. And--and I've seen chaps down on their luck often
enough. Good Lord, the hard-luck stories I hear every day of my life. And they
get a sort of look about the eyes and mouth. I hate to see it on any fellow. It
makes me sort of sick to come across it even in a chap that's only got his fool
self to blame. I may be making another break, telling you--but you looked sort
of that way."
"Perhaps,"
stolidly, "I did." Then, his voice warming,
"It was jolly
good-natured of you to think about it at all. Thank you."
"That's all
right," in polite acknowledgment. Then with another look over the hedge,
"Say--what ought I to call you? Earl, or my Lord?"
"It's not
necessary for you to call me anything in particular--as a rule. If you were
speaking of me, you might say Lord Mount Dunstan."
G. Selden looked
relieved.
"I don't want to
be too much off," he said. "And I'd like to ask you a favour. I've
only three weeks here, and I don't want to miss any chances."
"What chance would
you like?"
"One of the things
I'm biking over the country for, is to get a look at just such a place as this.
We haven't got 'em in America. My old grandmother was always talking about
them. Before her mother brought her to New York she'd lived in a village near
some park gates, and she chinned about it till she died. When I was a little
chap I liked to hear her. She wasn't much of an American. Wore a black net cap
with purple ribbons in it, and hadn't outlived her respect for aristocracy. Gee!"
chuckling, "if she'd heard what I said to you just now, I reckon she'd
have thrown a fit. Anyhow she made me feel I'd like to see the kind of places
she talked about. And I shall think myself in luck if you'll let me have a look
at yours--just a bike around the park, if you don't object--or I'll leave the
bike outside, if you'd rather."
"I don't object at
all," said Mount Dunstan. "The fact is, I happened to be on the point
of asking you to come and have some lunch--when you got on your bicycle."
Selden pushed his cap
and cleared his throat.
"I wasn't
expecting that," he said. "I'm pretty dusty," with a glance at
his clothes. "I need a wash and brush up-- particularly if there are
ladies."
There were no ladies,
and he could be made comfortable. This being explained to him, he was obviously
rejoiced. With unembarrassed frankness, he expressed exultation. Such luck had
not, at any time, presented itself to him as a possibility in his holiday
scheme.
"By gee," he
ejaculated, as they walked under the broad oaks of the avenue leading to the
house. "Speaking of luck, this is the limit! I can't help thinking of what
my grandmother would say if she saw me."
He was a new order of
companion, but before they had reached the house, Mount Dunstan had begun to
find him inspiring to the spirits. His jovial, if crude youth, his unaffected
acknowledgment of unaccustomedness to grandeur, even when in dilapidation, his
delight in the novelty of the particular forms of everything about him--trees
and sward, ferns and moss, his open self-congratulation, were without doubt
cheerful things. His exclamation, when they came within sight of the house
itself, was for a moment disturbing to Mount Dunstan's composure.
"Hully gee!"
he said. "The old lady was right. All I've thought about 'em was 'way off.
It's bigger than a museum." His approval was immense.
During the absence in
which he was supplied with the "wash and brush up," Mount Dunstan
found Mr. Penzance in the library. He explained to him what he had encountered,
and how it had attracted him.
"You have liked to
hear me describe my Western neighbours," he said. "This youngster is
a New York development, and of a different type. But there is a likeness. I
have invited to lunch with us, a young man whom--Tenham, for instance, if he
were here--would call 'a bounder.' He is nothing of the sort. In his
junior-assistant-salesman way, he is rather a fine thing. I never saw anything
more decently human than his way of asking me--man to man, making friends by the
roadside if I was 'up against it.' No other fellow I have known has ever
exhibited the same healthy sympathy."
The Reverend Lewis was
entranced. Already he was really quite flushed with interest. As Assyrian
character, engraved upon sarcophogi, would have allured and thrilled him, so
was he allured by the cryptic nature of the two or three American slang phrases
Mount Dunstan had repeated to him. His was the student's simple ardour.
"Up against
it," he echoed. "Really! Dear! Dear! And that signifies, you
say----"
"Apparently it
means that a man has come face to face with an obstacle difficult or impossible
to overcome."
"But, upon my
word, that is not bad. It is strong figure of speech. It brings up a picture. A
man hurrying to an end--much desired--comes unexpectedly upon a stone wall. One
can almost hear the impact. He is up against it. Most vivid. Excellent!
Excellent!"
The nature of Selden's
calling was such that he was not accustomed to being received with a hint of
enthusiastic welcome. There was something almost akin to this in the vicar's
courteously amiable, aquiline countenance when he rose to shake hands with the
young man on his entrance. Mr. Penzance was indeed slightly disappointed that
his greeting was not responded to by some characteristic phrasing. His American
was that of Sam Slick and Artemus Ward, Punch and various English witticisms in
anecdote. Life at the vicarage of Dunstan had not revealed to him that the
model had become archaic.
The revelation dawned
upon him during his intercourse with G. Selden. The young man in his cheap
bicycling suit was a new development. He was markedly unlike an English youth
of his class, as he was neither shy, nor laboriously at his ease. That he was
at his ease to quite an amazing degree might perhaps have been remotely
resented by the insular mind, accustomed to another order of bearing in its
social inferiors, had it not been so obviously founded on entire
unconsciousness of self, and so mingled with open appreciation of the
unanticipated pleasures of the occasion. Nothing could have been farther from
G. Selden than any desire to attempt to convey the impression that he had
enjoyed the hospitality of persons of rank on previous occasions. He found
indeed a gleeful point in the joke of the incongruousness of his own presence
amid such surroundings.
"What Little
Willie was expecting," he remarked once, to the keen joy of Mr. Penzance,
"was a hunk of bread and cheese at a village saloon somewhere. I ought to
have said 'pub,' oughtn't I? You don't call them saloons here."
He was encouraged to
talk, and in his care-free fluency he opened up many vistas to the interested
Mr. Penzance, who found himself, so to speak, whirled along Broadway, rushed up
the steps of the elevated railroad and struggling to obtain a seat, or a strap
to hang to on a Sixth Avenue train. The man was saturated with the atmosphere
of the hot battle he lived in. From his childhood he had known nothing but the
fever heat of his "little old New York," as he called it with
affectionate slanginess, and any temperature lower than that he was accustomed
to would have struck him as being below normal. Penzance was impressed by his
feeling of affection for the amazing city of his birth. He admired, he adored
it, he boasted joyously of its perfervid charm.
"Something
doing," he said. "That's what my sort of a fellow likes--something
doing. You feel it right there when you walk along the streets. Little old New
York for mine. It's good enough for Little Willie. And it never stops. Why, Broadway
at night----"
He forgot his chop, and
leaned forward on the table to pour forth his description. The manservant,
standing behind Mount Dunstan's chair, forgot himself also, thought he was a
trained domestic whose duty it was to present dishes to the attention without
any apparent mental processes. Certainly it was not his business to listen, and
gaze fascinated. This he did, however, actually for the time unconscious of his
breach of manners. The very crudity of the language used, the oddly sounding,
sometimes not easily translatable slang phrases, used as if they were a
necessary part of any conversation--the blunt, uneducated bareness of
figure--seemed to Penzance to make more roughly vivid the picture dashed off.
The broad thoroughfare almost as thronged by night as by day. Crowds going to
theatres, loaded electric cars, whizzing and clanging bells, the elevated
railroad rushing and roaring past within hearing, theatre fronts flaming with
electric light, announcements of names of theatrical stars and the plays they
appeared in, electric light advertisements of brands of cigars, whiskies,
breakfast foods, all blazing high in the night air in such number and with such
strength of brilliancy that the whole thoroughfare was as bright with light as
a ballroom or a theatre. The vicar felt himself standing in the midst of it
all, blinded by the glare.
"Sit down on the
sidewalk and read your newspaper, a book, a magazine--any old thing you
like," with an exultant laugh.
The names of the
dramatic stars blazing over entrances to the theatres were often English names,
their plays English plays, their companies made up of English men and women. G.
Selden was as familiar with them and commented upon their gifts as easily as if
he had drawn his drama from the Strand instead of from Broadway. The novels
piled up in the stations of what he called "the L" (which revealed
itself as being a New-York-haste abbreviation of Elevated railroad), were in
large proportion English novels, and he had his ingenuous estimate of English
novelists, as well as of all else.
"Ruddy, now,"
he said; "I like him. He's all right, even though we haven't quite caught
onto India yet."
The dazzle and
brilliancy of Broadway so surrounded Penzance that he found it necessary to
withdraw himself and return to his immediate surroundings, that he might
recover from his sense of interested bewilderment. His eyes fell upon the stern
lineaments of a Mount Dunstan in a costume of the time of Henry VIII. He was a
burly gentleman, whose ruff-shortened thick neck and haughty fixedness of stare
from the background of his portrait were such as seemed to eliminate him from
the scheme of things, the clanging of electric cars, and the prevailing roar of
the L. Confronted by his gaze, electric light advertisements of whiskies,
cigars, and corsets seemed impossible.
"He's all
right," continued G. Selden. "I'm ready to separate myself from one
fifty any time I see a new book of his. He's got the goods with him."
The richness of
colloquialism moved the vicar of Mount Dunstan to deep enjoyment.
"Would you mind--I
trust you won't," he apologised courteously, "telling me exactly the
significance of those two last sentences. In think I see their meaning,
but----"
G. Selden looked
good-naturedly apologetic himself.
"Well, it's
slang--you see," he explained. "I guess I can't help it. You--"
flushing a trifle, but without any touch of resentment in the boyish colour,
"you know what sort of a chap I am. I'm not passing myself off as anything
but an ordinary business hustler, am I--just under salesman to a typewriter
concern? I shouldn't like to think I'd got in here on any bluff. I guess I
sling in slang every half dozen words----."
"My dear
boy," Penzance was absolutely moved and he spoke with warmth quite paternal,
"Lord Mount Dunstan and I are genuinely interested--genuinely. He, because
he knows New York a little, and I because I don't. I am an elderly man, and
have spent my life buried in my books in drowsy villages. Pray go on. Your
American slang has frequently a delightful meaning--a fantastic hilarity, or
common sense, or philosophy, hidden in its origin. In that it generally differs
from English slang, which--I regret to say--is usually founded on some silly
catch word. Pray go on. When you see a new book by Mr. Kipling, you are ready
to 'separate yourself from one fifty' because he 'has the goods with him.'
"
G. Selden suppressed an
involuntary young laugh.
"One dollar and
fifty cents is usually the price of a book," he said. "You separate
yourself from it when you take it out of your clothes--I mean out of your
pocket--and pay it over the counter."
"There's a
careless humour in it," said Mount Dunstan grimly. "The suggestion of
parting is not half bad. On the whole, it is subtle."
"A great deal of
it is subtle," said Penzance, "though it all professes to be obvious.
The other sentence has a commercial sound."
"When a man goes
about selling for a concern," said the junior assistant of Jones, "he
can prove what he says, if he has the goods with him. I guess it came from
that. I don't know. I only know that when a man is a straight sort of fellow,
and can show up, we say he's got the goods with him."
They sat after lunch in
the library, before an open window, looking into a lovely sunken garden.
Blossoms were breaking out on every side, and robins, thrushes, and blackbirds
chirped and trilled and whistled, as Mount Dunstan and Penzance led G. Selden
on to paint further pictures for them.
Some of them were
rather painful, Penzance thought. As connected with youth, they held a touch of
pathos Selden was all unconscious of. He had had a hard life, made up, since his
tenth year, of struggles to earn his living. He had sold newspapers, he had run
errands, he had swept out a "candy store." He had had a few years at
the public school, and a few months at a business college, to which he went at
night, after work hours. He had been "up against it good and plenty,"
he told them. He seemed, however, to have had a knack of making friends and of
giving them "a boost along" when such a chance was possible. Both of
his listeners realised that a good many people had liked him, and the reason
was apparent enough to them.
"When a chap gets
sorry for himself," he remarked once, "he's down and out. That's a
stone-cold fact. There's lots of hard-luck stories that you've got to hear
anyhow. The fellow that can keep his to himself is the fellow that's likely to
get there."
"Get there?"
the vicar murmured reflectively, and Selden chuckled again.
"Get where he
started out to go to--the White House, if you like. The fellows that have got
there kept their hard-luck stories quiet, I bet. Guess most of 'em had plenty
during election, if they were the kind to lie awake sobbing on their pillows
because their feelings were hurt."
He had never been sorry
for himself, it was evident, though it must be admitted that there were moments
when the elderly English clergyman, whose most serious encounters had been
annoying interviews with cottagers of disrespectful manner, rather shuddered as
he heard his simple recital of days when he had tramped street after street,
carrying his catalogue with him, and trying to tell his story of the Delkoff to
frantically busy men who were driven mad by the importunate sight of him, to
worried, ill-tempered ones who broke into fury when they heard his voice, and
to savage brutes who were only restrained by law from kicking him into the
street.
"You've got to
take it, if you don't want to lose your job. Some of them's as tired as you
are. Sometimes, if you can give 'em a jolly and make 'em laugh, they'll listen,
and you may unload a machine. But it's no merry jest just at first--
particularly in bad weather. The first five weeks I was with the Delkoff I
never made a sale. Had to live on my ten per, and that's pretty hard in New
York. Three and a half for your hall bedroom, and the rest for your hash and
shoes. But I held on, and gradually luck began to turn, and I began not to care
so much when a man gave it to me hot."
The vicar of Mount
Dunstan had never heard of the "hall bedroom" as an institution. A
dozen unconscious sentences placed it before his mental vision. He thought it
horribly touching. A narrow room at the back of a cheap lodging house, a bed, a
strip of carpet, a washstand--this the sole refuge of a male human creature, in
the flood tide of youth, no more than this to come back to nightly, footsore and
resentful of soul, after a day's tramp spent in forcing himself and his wares
on people who did not want him or them, and who found infinite variety in the
forcefulness of their method of saying so.
"What you know,
when you go into a place, is that nobody wants to see you, and no one will let
you talk if they can help it. The only thing is to get in and rattle off your
stunt before you can be fired out."
Sometimes at first he
had gone back at night to the hall bedroom, and sat on the edge of the narrow
bed, swinging his feet, and asking himself how long he could hold out. But he
had held out, and evidently developed into a good salesman, being bold and of
imperturbable good spirits and temper, and not troubled by hypersensitiveness.
Hearing of the "hall bedroom," the coldness of it in winter, and the
breathless heat in summer, the utter loneliness of it at all times and seasons,
one could not have felt surprise if the grown-up lad doomed to its narrowness
as home had been drawn into the electric-lighted gaiety of Broadway, and being
caught in its maelstrom, had been sucked under to its lowest depths. But it was
to be observed that G. Selden had a clear eye, and a healthy skin, and a
healthy young laugh yet, which were all wonderfully to his credit, and added
enormously to one's liking for him.
"Do you use a
typewriter?" he said at last to Mr. Penzance. "It would cut out half
your work with your sermons. If you do use one, I'd just like to call your
attention to the Delkoff. It's the most up-to-date machine on the market
to-day," drawing out the catalogue.
"I do not use one,
and I am extremely sorry to say that I could not afford to buy one," said
Mr. Penzance with considerate courtesy, "but do tell me about it. I am
afraid I never saw a typewriter."
It was the most
hospitable thing he could have done, and was of the tact of courts. He arranged
his pince nez, and taking the catalogue, applied himself to it. G. Selden's
soul warmed within him. To be listened to like this. To be treated as a
gentleman by a gentleman--by "a fine old swell like this--Hully gee!"
"This isn't what
I'm used to," he said with genuine enjoyment. "It doesn't matter,
your not being ready to buy now. You may be sometime, or you may run up against
someone who is. Little Willie's always ready to say his piece."
He poured it forth with
glee--the improved mechanical appliances, the cuts in the catalogue, the platen
roller, the ribbon switch, the twenty-six yards of red or blue typing, the
fifty per cent. saving in ribbon expenditure alone, the new basket shift, the
stationary carriage, the tabulator, the superiority to all other typewriting
machines--the price one hundred dollars without discount. And both Mount
Dunstan and Mr. Penzance listened entranced, examined cuts in the catalogue,
asked questions, and in fact ended by finding that they must repress an actual
desire to possess the luxury. The joy their attitude bestowed upon Selden was
the thing he would feel gave the finishing touch to the hours which he would
recall to the end of his days as the "time of his life." Yes, by gee!
he was having "the time of his life."
Later he found himself
feeling--as Miss Vanderpoel had felt--rather as if the whole thing was a dream.
This came upon him when, with Mount Dunstan and Penzance, he walked through the
park and the curiously beautiful old gardens. The lovely, soundless quiet,
broken into only by bird notes, or his companions' voices, had an extraordinary
effect on him.
"It's so still you
can hear it," he said once, stopping in a velvet, moss-covered path.
"Seems like you've got quiet shut up here, and you've turned it on till
the air's thick with it. Good Lord, think of little old Broadway keeping it up,
and the L whizzing and thundering along every three minutes, just the same,
while we're standing here! You can't believe it."
It would have gone hard
with him to describe to them the value of his enjoyment. Again and again there
came back to him the memory of the grandmother who wore the black net cap
trimmed with purple ribbons. Apparently she had remained to the last almost
contumaciously British. She had kept photographs of Queen Victoria and the
Prince Consort on her bedroom mantelpiece, and had made caustic, international
comparisons. But she had seen places like this, and her stories became
realities to him now. But she had never thought of the possibility of any
chance of his being shown about by the lord of the manor himself--lunching, by
gee! and talking to them about typewriters. He vaguely knew that if the
grandmother had not emigrated, and he had been born in Dunstan village, he
would naturally have touched his forehead to Mount Dunstan and the vicar when
they passed him in the road, and conversation between them would have been an
unlikely thing. Somehow things had been changed by Destiny-- perhaps for the
whole of them, as years had passed.
What he felt when he
stood in the picture gallery neither of his companions could at first guess. He
ceased to talk, and wandered silently about. Secretly he found himself a trifle
awed by being looked down upon by the unchanging eyes of men in strange, rich
garments--in corslet, ruff, and doublet, velvet, powder, curled love locks,
brocade and lace. The face of long-dead loveliness smiled out from its canvas,
or withheld itself haughtily from his salesman's gaze. Wonderful bare white
shoulders, and bosoms clasped with gems or flowers and lace, defied him to
recall any treasures of Broadway to compare with them. Elderly dames, garbed in
stiff splendour, held stiff, unsympathetic inquiry in their eyes, as they
looked back upon him. What exactly was a thirty shilling bicycle suit doing
there? In the Delkoff, plainly none were interested. A pretty, masquerading
shepherdess, with a lamb and a crook, seemed to laugh at him from under her broad
beribboned straw hat. After looking at her for a minute or so, he gave a half
laugh himself--but it was an awkward one.
"She's a
looker," he remarked. "They're a lot of them lookers--not all--but a
fair show----"
"A looker,"
translated Mount Dunstan in a low voice to Penzance, "means, I believe, a
young women with good looks--a beauty."
"Yes, she is a
looker, by gee," said G. Selden, "but-- but--" the awkward half
laugh, taking on a depressed touch of sheepishness, "she makes me feel
'way off--they all do."
That was it. Surrounded
by them, he was fascinated but not cheered. They were all so smilingly, or
disdainfully, or indifferently unconscious of the existence of the human thing
of his class. His aspect, his life, and his desires were as remote as those of
prehistoric man. His Broadway, his L railroad, his Delkoff--what were they
where did they come into the scheme of the Universe? They silently gazed and
lightly smiled or frowned through him as he stood. He was probably not in the
least aware that he rather loudly sighed.
"Yes," he
said, "they make me feel 'way off. I'm not in it. But she is a looker. Get
onto that dimple in her cheek."
Mount Dunstan and
Penzance spent the afternoon in doing their best for him. He was well worth it.
Mr. Penzance was filled with delight, and saturated with the atmosphere of New
York.
"I feel," he
said, softly polishing his eyeglasses and almost affectionately smiling,
"I really feel as if I had been walking down Broadway or Fifth Avenue. I
believe that I might find my way to--well, suppose we say Weber &
Field's," and G. Selden shouted with glee.
Never before, in fact,
had he felt his heart so warmed by spontaneous affection as it was by this
elderly, somewhat bald and thin-faced clergyman of the Church of England. This
he had never seen before. Without the trained subtlety to have explained to
himself the finely sweet and simply gracious deeps of it, he was moved and
uplifted. He was glad he had "come across" it, he felt a vague regret
at passing on his way, and leaving it behind. He would have liked to feel that
perhaps he might come back. He would have liked to present him with a Delkoff,
and teach him how to run it. He had delighted in Mount Dunstan, and rejoiced in
him, but he had rather fallen in love with Penzance. Certain American doubts he
had had of the solidity and permanency of England's position and power were
somewhat modified. When fellows like these two stood at the first rank, little
old England was a pretty safe proposition.
After they had given
him tea among the scents and songs of the sunken garden outside the library
window, they set him on his way. The shadows were lengthening and the sunlight
falling in deepening gold when they walked up the avenue and shook hands with
him at the big entrance gates.
"Well,
gentlemen," he said, "you've treated me grand--as fine as silk, and
it won't be like Little Willie to forget it. When I go back to New York it'll
be all I can do to keep from getting the swell head and bragging about it. I've
enjoyed myself down to the ground, every minute. I'm not the kind of fellow to
be likely to be able to pay you back your kindness, but, hully gee! if I could
I'd do it to beat the band. Good-bye, gentlemen--and thank you--thank you."
Across which one of
their minds passed the thought that the sound of the hollow impact of a
trotting horse's hoofs on the road, which each that moment became conscious of
hearing was the sound of the advancing foot of Fate? It crossed no mind among the
three. There was no reason why it should. And yet at that moment the meaning of
the regular, stirring sound was a fateful thing.
"Someone on
horseback," said Penzance.
He had scarcely spoken
before round the curve of the road she came. A finely slender and spiritedly
erect girl's figure, upon a satin-skinned bright chestnut with a thoroughbred
gait, a smart groom riding behind her. She came towards them, was abreast them,
looked at Mount Dunstan, a smiling dimple near her lip as she returned his quick
salute.
"Miss
Vanderpoel," he said low to the vicar, "Lady Anstruther's
sister."
Mr. Penzance, replacing
his own hat, looked after her with surprised pleasure.
"Really," he
exclaimed, "Miss Vanderpoel! What a fine girl! How unusually
handsome!"
Selden turned with a
gasp of delighted, amazed recognition.
"Miss
Vanderpoel," he burst forth, "Reuben Vanderpoel's daughter! The one
that's over here visiting her sister. Is it that one--sure?"
"Yes," from
Mount Dunstan without fervour. "Lady Anstruthers lives at Stornham, about
six miles from here."
"Gee," with
feverish regret. "If her father was there, and I could get next to him, my
fortune would be made."
"Should you,"
ventured Penzance politely, "endeavour to sell him a typewriter?"
"A typewriter!
Holy smoke! I'd try to sell him ten thousand. A fellow like that syndicates the
world. If I could get next to him----" and he mounted his bicycle with a
laugh.
"Get next,"
murmured Penzance.
"Get on the good
side of him," Mount Dunstan murmured in reply.
"So long,
gentlemen, good-bye, and thank you again," called G. Selden as he wheeled
off, and was carried soundlessly down the golden road.
THE satin-skinned
chestnut was one of the new horses now standing in the Stornham stables. There
were several of them--a pair for the landau, saddle horses, smart young cobs
for phaeton or dog cart, a pony for Ughtred--the animals necessary at such a
place at Stornham. The stables themselves had been quickly put in order, grooms
and stable boys kept them as they had not been kept for years. The men learned
in a week's time that their work could not be done too well. There were new
carriages as well as horses. They had come from London after Lady Anstruthers and
her sister returned from town. The horses had been brought down by their
grooms--immensely looked after, blanketed, hooded, and altogether cared for as
if they were visiting dukes and duchesses. They were all fine, handsome,
carefully chosen creatures. When they danced and sidled through the village on
their way to the Court, they created a sensation. Whosoever had chosen them had
known his business. The older vehicles had been repaired in the village by
Tread, and did him credit. Fox had also done his work well.
Plenty more of it had
come into their work-shops. Tools to be used on the estate, garden implements,
wheelbarrows, lawn rollers, things needed about the house, stables, and
cottages, were to be attended to. The church roof was being repaired. Taking
all these things and the "doing up" of the Court itself, there was
more work than the village could manage, and carpenters, bricklayers, and
decorators were necessarily brought from other places. Still Joe Buttle and Sim
Soames were allowed to lead in all such things as lay within their
capabilities. It was they who made such a splendid job of the entrance gates
and the lodges. It was astonishing how much was done, and how the sense of life
in the air--the work of resulting prosperity, made men begin to tread with less
listless steps as they went to and from their labour. In the cottages things
were being done which made downcast women bestir themselves and look less
slatternly. Leaks mended here, windows there, the hopeless copper in the tiny
washhouse replaced by a new one, chimneys cured of the habit of smoking, a
clean, flowered paper put on a wall, a coat of whitewash-- they were small
matters, but produced great effect.
Betty had begun to drop
into the cottages, and make the acquaintance of their owners. Her first visits,
she observed, created great consternation. Women looked frightened or sullen,
children stared and refused to speak, clinging to skirts and aprons. She found
the atmosphere clear after her second visit. The women began to talk, and the
children collected in groups and listened with cheerful grins. She could pick
up little Jane's kitten, or give a pat to small Thomas' mongrel dog, in a
manner which threw down barriers.
"Don't put out
your pipe," she said to old Grandfather Doby, rising totteringly
respectful from his chimney-side chair. "You have only just lighted it.
You mustn't waste a whole pipeful of tobacco because I have come in."
The old man, grown
childish with age, tittered and shuffled and giggled. Such a joke as the grand
young lady was having with him. She saw he had only just lighted his pipe. The
gentry joked a bit sometimes. But he was afraid of his grandson's wife, who was
frowning and shaking her head.
Betty went to him, and
put her hand on his arm.
"Sit down,"
she said, "and I will sit by you." And she sat down and showed him
that she had brought a package of tobacco with her, and actually a wonder of a
red and yellow jar to hold it, at the sight of which unheard-of joys his
rapture was so great that his trembling hands could scarcely clasp his
treasures.
"Tee-hee!
Tee-hee-ee! Deary me! Thankee--thankee, my lady," he tittered, and he
gazed and blinked at her beauty through heavenly tears.
"Nearly a hundred
years old, and he has lived on sixteen shillings a week all his life, and
earned it by working every hour between sunrise and sunset," Betty said to
her sister, when she went home. "A man has one life, and his has passed
like that. It is done now, and all the years and work have left nothing in his
old hands but his pipe. That's all. I should not like to put it out for him.
Who am I that I can buy him a new one, and keep it filled for him until the
end? How did it happen? No," suddenly, "I must not lose time in
asking myself that. I must get the new pipe."
She did it--a pipe of
great magnificence--such as drew to the Doby cottage as many callers as the
village could provide, each coming with fevered interest, to look at it--to be
allowed to hold and examine it for a few moments, guessing at its probable enormous
cost, and returning it reverently, to gaze at Doby with respect--the increase
of which can be imagined when it was known that he was not only possessor of
the pipe, but of an assurance that he would be supplied with as much tobacco as
he could use, to the end of his days. From the time of the advent of the pipe,
Grandfather Doby became a man of mark, and his life in the chimney corner a
changed thing. A man who owns splendours and unlimited, excellent shag may like
friends to drop in and crack jokes--and even smoke a pipe with him--a common
pipe, which, however, is not amiss when excellent shag comes free.
"He lives in a
wild whirl of gaiety--a social vortex," said Betty to Lady Anstruthers,
after one of her visits. "He is actually rejuvenated. I must order some
new white smocks for him to receive his visitors in. Someone brought him an old
copy of the Illustrated London News last night. We will send him illustrated
papers every week."
In the dull old brain,
God knows what spark of life had been relighted. Young Mrs. Doby related with
chuckles that granddad had begged that his chair might be dragged to the window,
that he might sit and watch the village street. Sitting there, day after day,
he smoked and looked at his pictures, and dozed and dreamed, his pipe and
tobacco jar beside him on the window ledge. At any sound of wheels or footsteps
his face lighted, and if, by chance, he caught a glimpse of Betty, he tottered
to his feet, and stood hurriedly touching his bald forehead with a reverent,
palsied hand.
" 'Tis 'urr,"
he would say, enrapt. "I seen 'urr--I did." And young Mrs. Doby knew
that this was his joy, and what he waited for as one waits for the coming of
the sun.
" 'Tis 'urr! 'Tis
'urr!"
The vicar's wife, Mrs.
Brent, who since the affair of John Wilson's fire had dropped into the
background and felt it indiscreet to present tales of distress at the Court,
began to recover her courage. Her perfunctory visits assumed a new character.
The vicarage had, of course, called promptly upon Miss Vanderpoel, after her
arrival. Mrs. Brent admired Miss Vanderpoel hugely.
"You seem so
unlike an American," she said once in her most tactful, ingratiating
manner--which was very ingratiating indeed.
"Do I? What is one
like when one is like an American? I am one, you know."
"I can scarcely
believe it," with sweet ardour.
"Pray try,"
said Betty with simple brevity, and Mrs. Brent felt that perhaps Miss
Vanderpoel was not really very easy to get on with.
"She meant to
imply that I did not speak through my nose, and talk too much, and too
vivaciously, in a shrill voice," Betty said afterwards, in talking the
interview over with Rosy. "I like to convince myself that is not one's
sole national characteristic. Also it was not exactly Mrs. Brent's place to
kindly encourage me with the information that I do not seem to belong to my own
country."
Lady Anstruthers
laughed, and Betty looked at her inquiringly.
"You said that
just like--just like an Englishwoman."
"Did I?" said
Betty.
Mrs. Brent had come to
talk to her because she did not wish to trouble dear Lady Anstruthers. Lady
Anstruthers already looked much stronger, but she had been delicate so long
that one hesitated to distress her with village matters. She did not add that
she realised that she was coming to headquarters. The vicar and herself were
much disturbed about a rather tiresome old woman--old Mrs. Welden--who lived in
a tiny cottage in the village. She was eighty-three years old, and a
respectable old person--a widow, who had reared ten children. The children had
all grown up, and scattered, and old Mrs. Welden had nothing whatever to live
on. No one knew how she lived, and really she would be better off in the
workhouse. She could be sent to Brexley Union, and comfortably taken care of,
but she had that singular, obstinate dislike to going, which it was so
difficult to manage. She had asked for a shilling a week from the parish, but
that could not be allowed her, as it would merely uphold her in her obstinate
intention of remaining in her cottage, and taking care of herself--which she
could not do. Betty gathered that the shilling a week would be a drain on the
parish funds, and would so raise the old creature to affluence that she would
feel she could defy fate. And the contumacity of old men and women should not
be strengthened by the reckless bestowal of shillings.
Knowing that Miss
Vanderpoel had already gained influence among the village people, Mrs. Brent
said, she had come to ask her if she would see old Mrs. Welden and argue with
her in such a manner as would convince her that the workhouse was the best
place for her. It was, of course, so much pleasanter if these old people could
be induced to go to Brexley willingly.
"Shall I be
undermining the whole Political Economy of Stornham if I take care of her
myself?" suggested Betty.
"You--you will
lead others to expect the same thing will be done for them."
"When one has
resources to draw on," Miss Vanderpoel commented, "in the case of a
woman who has lived eighty-three years and brought up ten children until they
were old and strong enough to leave her to take care of herself, it is difficult
for the weak of mind to apply the laws of Political Economics. I will go and
see old Mrs. Welden."
If the Vanderpoels
would provide for all the obstinate old men and women in the parish, the
Political Economics of Stornham would proffer no marked objections. "A
good many Americans," Mrs. Brent reflected, "seemed to have those
odd, lavish ways," as witness Lady Anstruthers herself, on her first
introduction to village life. Miss Vanderpoel was evidently a much stronger
character, and extremely clever, and somehow the stream of the American fortune
was at last being directed towards Stornham--which, of course, should have
happened long ago. A good deal was "being done," and the whole
situation looked more promising. So was the matter discussed and summed up, the
same evening after dinner, at the vicarage.
Betty found old Mrs.
Welden's cottage. It was in a green lane, turning from the village
street--which was almost a green lane itself. A tiny hedged-in front garden was
before the cottage door. A crazy-looking wicket gate was in the hedge, and a
fuschia bush and a few old roses were in the few yards of garden. There were
actually two or three geraniums in the window, showing cheerful scarlet between
the short, white dimity curtains.
"A house this size
and of this poverty in an American village," was Betty's thought,
"would be a bare and straggling hideousness, with old tomato cans in the
front yard. Here is one of the things we have to learn from them."
When she knocked at the
door an old woman opened it. She was a well-preserved and markedly respectable
old person, in a decent print frock and a cap. At the sight of her visitor she
beamed and made a suggestion of curtsey.
"How do you do,
Mrs. Welden?" said Betty. "I am Lady Anstruthers' sister, Miss
Vanderpoel. I thought I would like to come and see you."
"Thank you, miss,
I am obliged for the kindness, miss. Won't you come in and have a chair?"
There were no signs of
decrepitude about her, and she had a cheery old eye. The tiny front room was neat,
though there was scarcely space enough in it to contain the table covered with
its blue-checked cotton cloth, the narrow sofa, and two or three chairs. There
were a few small coloured prints, and a framed photograph or so on the walls,
and on the table was a Bible, and a brown earthenware teapot, and a plate.
"Tom Wood's wife,
that's neighbour next door to me," she said, "gave me a pinch o'
tea--an' I've just been 'avin it. Tom Woods, miss, 'as just been took on by
Muster Kedgers as one of the new under gardeners at the Court."
Betty found her
delightful. She made no complaints, and was evidently pleased with the
excitement of receiving a visitor. The truth was, that in common with every
other old woman, she had secretly aspired to being visited some day by the
amazing young lady from "Meriker." Betty had yet to learn of the
heartburnings which may be occasioned by an unconscious favouritism. She was
not aware that when she dropped in to talk to old Doby, his neighbour, old
Megworth, peered from behind his curtains, with the dew of envy in his rheumy
eyes.
"S'ems," he
mumbled, "as if they wasn't nobody now in Stornham village but Gaarge
Doby--s'ems not." They were very fierce in their jealousy of attention,
and one must beware of rousing evil passions in the octogenarian breast.
The young lady from
"Meriker" had not so far had time to make a call at any cottage in
old Mrs. Welden's lane--and she had knocked just at old Mrs. Welden's door.
This was enough to put in good spirits even a less cheery old person.
At first Betty wondered
how she could with delicacy ask personal questions. A few minutes'
conversation, however, showed her that the personal affairs of Sir Nigel's
tenants were also the affairs of not only himself, but of such of his relatives
as attended to their natural duty. Her presence in the cottage, and her
interest in Mrs. Welden's ready flow of simple talk, were desirable and proper
compliments to the old woman herself. She was a decent and self-respecting old person,
but in her mind there was no faintest glimmer of resentment of questions
concerning rent and food and the needs of her simple, hard-driven existence.
She had answered such questions on many occasions, when they had not been asked
in the manner in which her ladyship's sister asked them. Mrs. Brent had scolded
her and "poked about" her cottage, going into her tiny "wash
'us," and up into her infinitesimal bedroom under the slanting roof, to
see that they were kept clean. Miss Vanderpoel showed no disposition to
"poke." She sat and listened, and made an inquiry here and there, in
a nice voice and with a smile in her eyes. There was some pleasure in relating
the whole history of your eighty-three years to a young lady who listened as if
she wanted to hear it. So old Mrs. Welden prattled on. About her good days,
when she was young, and was kitchenmaid at the parsonage in a village twenty
miles away; about her marriage with a young farm labourer; about his
"steady" habits, and the comfort they had together, in spite of the
yearly arrival of a new baby, and the crowding of the bit of a cottage his
master allowed them. Ten of 'em, and it had been "up before sunrise, and a
good bit of hard work to keep them all fed and clean." But she had not
minded that until Jack died quite sudden after a sunstroke. It was odd how much
colour her rustic phraseology held. She made Betty see it all. The apparent
natural inevitableness of their being turned out of the cottage, because
another man must have it; the years during which she worked her way while the
ten were growing up, having measles, and chicken pox, and scarlet fever, one
dying here and there, dropping out quite in the natural order of things, and
being buried by the parish in corners of the ancient church yard. Three of them
"was took" by scarlet fever, then one of a "decline," then
one or two by other illnesses. Only four reached man and womanhood. One had
gone to Australia, but he never was one to write, and after a year or two,
Betty gathered, he had seemed to melt away into the great distance. Two girls
had married, and Mrs. Welden could not say they had been "comf'able."
They could barely feed themselves and their swarms of children. The other son
had never been steady like his father. He had at last gone to London, and
London had swallowed him up. Betty was struck by the fact that she did not seem
to feel that the mother of ten might have expected some return for her labours,
at eighty-three.
Her unresentful
acceptance of things was at once significant and moving. Betty found her
amazing. What she lived on it was not easy to understand. She seemed rather
like a cheerful old bird, getting up each unprovided-for morning, and picking
up her sustenance where she found it.
"There's more in
the sayin' 'the Lord pervides' than a good many thinks," she said with a
small chuckle, marked more by a genial and comfortable sense of humour than by
an air of meritoriously quoting the vicar. "He do."
She paid one and
threepence a week in rent for her cottage, and this was the most serious drain
upon her resources. She apparently could live without food or fire, but the
rent must be paid. "An' I do get a bit be'ind sometimes," she
confessed apologetically, "an' then it's a trouble to get straight."
Her cottage was one of
a short row, and she did odd jobs for the women who were her neighbours. There
were always babies to be looked after, and "bits of 'elp" needed,
sometimes there were "movings" from one cottage to another, and
"confinements" were plainly at once exhilarating and enriching. Her
temperamental good cheer, combined with her experience, made her a desirable
companion and assistant. She was engagingly frank.
"When they're new
to it, an' a bit frightened, I just give 'em a cup of 'ot tea, an' joke with
'em to cheer 'em up," she said. "I says to Charles Jenkins' wife, as
lives next door, 'come now, me girl, it's been goin' on since Adam an' Eve, an'
there's a good many of us left, isn't there?' An' a fine boy it was, too, miss,
an' 'er up an' about before 'er month."
She was paid in
sixpences and spare shillings, and in cups of tea, or a fresh-baked loaf, or
screws of sugar, or even in a garment not yet worn beyond repair. And she was
free to run in and out, and grow a flower or so in her garden, and talk with a
neighbour over the low dividing hedge.
"They want me to
go into the 'Ouse,' " reaching the dangerous subject at last. "They
say I'll be took care of an' looked after. But I don't want to do it, miss. I
want to keep my bit of a 'ome if I can, an' be free to come an' go. I'm
eighty-three, an' it won't be long. I 'ad a shilling a week from the parish,
but they stopped it because they said I ought to go into the 'Ouse.' "
She looked at Betty
with a momentarily anxious smile.
"P'raps you don't
quite understand, miss," she said. "It'll seem like nothin' to you--a
place like this."
"It doesn't,"
Betty answered, smiling bravely back into the old eyes, though she felt a
slight fulness of the throat. "I understand all about it."
It is possible that old
Mrs. Welden was a little taken aback by an attitude which, satisfactory to her
own prejudices though it might be, was, taken in connection with fixed customs,
a trifle unnatural.
"You don't mind me
not wantin' to go?" she said.
"No," was the
answer, "not at all."
Betty began to ask
questions. How much tea, sugar, soap, candles, bread, butter, bacon, could Mrs.
Welden use in a week? It was not very easy to find out the exact quantities, as
Mrs. Welden's estimates of such things had been based, during her entire existence,
upon calculation as to how little, not how much she could use.
When Betty suggested a
pound of tea, a half pound--the old woman smiled at the innocent ignorance the
suggestion of such reckless profusion implied.
"Oh, no! Bless
you, miss, no! I couldn't never do away with it. A quarter, miss--that 'd be
plenty--a quarter."
Mrs. Welden's idea of
"the best," was that at two shillings a pound. Quarter of a pound
would cost sixpence (twelve cents, thought Betty). A pound of sugar would be
twopence, Mrs. Welden would use half a pound (the riotous extravagance of two
cents). Half a pound of butter, "Good tub butter, miss," would be ten
pence three farthings a pound. Soap, candles, bacon, bread, coal, wood, in the
quantities required by Mrs. Welden, might, with the addition of rent, amount to
the dizzying height of eight or ten shillings.
"With careful
extravagance," Betty mentally summed up, "I might spend almost two
dollars a week in surrounding her with a riot of luxury."
She made a list of the
things, and added some extras as an idea of her own. Life had not afforded her
this kind of thing before, she realised. She felt for the first time the joy of
reckless extravagance, and thrilled with the excitement of it.
"You need not
think of Brexley Union any more," she said, when she, having risen to go,
stood at the cottage door with old Mrs. Welden. "The things I have written
down here shall be sent to you every Saturday night. I will pay your
rent."
"Miss--miss!"
Mrs. Welden looked affrighted. "It's too much, miss. An' coals eighteen
pence a hundred!"
"Never mind,"
said her ladyship's sister, and the old woman, looking up into her eyes, found
there the colour Mount Dunstan had thought of as being that of bluebells under
water. "I think we can manage it, Mrs. Welden. Keep yourself as warm as
you like, and sometime I will come and have a cup of tea with you and see if
the tea is good."
"Oh! Deary
me!" said Mrs. Welden. "I can't think what to say, miss. It lifts
everythin'--everythin'. It's not to be believed. It's like bein' left a
fortune."
When the wicket gate
swung to and the young lady went up the lane, the old woman stood staring after
her. And here was a piece of news to run into Charley Jenkins' cottage and
tell--and what woman or man in the row would quite believe it?
LORD DUNHOLM and his
eldest son, Lord Westholt, sauntered together smoking their after-dinner cigars
on the broad-turfed terrace overlooking park and gardens which seemed to sweep
without boundary line into the purplish land beyond. The grey mass of the
castle stood clear-cut against the blue of a sky whose twilight was still
almost daylight, though in the purity of its evening stillness a star already
hung, here and there, and a young moon swung low. The great spaces about them
held a silence whose exquisite entirety was marked at intervals by the distant
bark of a shepherd dog driving his master's sheep to the fold, their soft,
intermittent plaints--the mother ewes' mellow answering to the tender, fretful
lambs-- floated on the air, a lovely part of the ending day's repose. Where two
who are friends stroll together at such hours, the great beauty makes for
silence or for thoughtful talk. These two men--father and son--were friends and
intimates, and had been so from Westholt's first memory of the time when his
childish individuality began to detach itself from the background of misty and
indistinct things. They had liked each other, and their liking and intimacy had
increased with the onward moving and change of years. After sixty sane and
decently spent active years of life, Lord Dunholm, in either country tweed or
evening dress, was a well-built and handsome man; at thirty-three his son was
still like him.
"Have you seen
her?" he was saying.
"Only at a
distance. She was driving Lady Anstruthers across the marshes in a cart. She
drove well and----" he laughed as he flicked the ash from his
cigar--"the back of her head and shoulders looked handsome."
"The American
young woman is at present a factor which is without doubt to be counted
with," Lord Dunholm put the matter without lightness. "Any young
woman is a factor, but the American young woman just now--just now----" He
paused a moment as though considering. "It did not seem at all necessary
to count with them at first, when they began to appear among us. They were
generally curiously exotic, funny little creatures with odd manners and voices.
They were often most amusing, and one liked to hear them chatter and see the
airy lightness with which they took superfluous, and sometimes unsuperfluous,
conventions, as a hunter takes a five-barred gate. But it never occurred to us
to marry them. We did not take them seriously enough. But we began to marry
them-- we began to marry them, my good fellow!"
The final words broke
forth with such a suggestion of sudden anxiety that, in spite of himself,
Westholt laughed involuntarily, and his father, turning to look at him, laughed
also. But he recovered his seriousness.
"It was all rather
a muddle at first," he went on. "Things were not fairly done, and
certain bad lots looked on it as a paying scheme on the one side, while it was
a matter of silly, little ambitions on the other. But that it is an extraordinary
country there is no sane denying--huge, fabulously resourceful in every
way--area, variety of climate, wealth of minerals, products of all sorts, soil
to grow anything, and sun and rain enough to give each thing what it needs;
last, or rather first, a people who, considered as a nation, are in the riot of
youth, and who began by being English--which we Englishmen have an innocent
belief is the one method of 'owning the earth.' That figure of speech is an
Americanism I carefully committed to memory. Well, after all, look at the
map--look at the map! There we are."
They had frequently
discussed together the question of the development of international relations.
Lord Dunholm, a man of far-reaching and clear logic, had realised that the
oddly unaccentuated growth of intercourse between the two countries might be a
subject to be reflected on without lightness.
"The habit we have
of regarding America and Americans as rather a joke," he had once said,
"has a sort of parallel in the condescendingly amiable amusement of a
parent at the precocity or whimsicalness of a child. But the child is shooting
up amazingly--amazingly. In a way which suggests divers possibilities."
The exchange of visits
between Dunholm and Stornham had been rare and formal. From the call made upon
the younger Lady Anstruthers on her marriage, the Dunholms had returned with a
sense of puzzled pity for the little American bride, with her wonderful frock
and her uneasy, childish eyes. For some years Lady Anstruthers had been too
delicate to make or return calls. One heard painful accounts of her apparent
wretched ill-health and of the condition of her husband's estate.
"As the relations
between the two families have evidently been strained for years," Lord
Dunholm said, "it is interesting to hear of the sudden advent of the
sister. It seems to point to reconciliation. And you say the girl is an unusual
person.
"From what one
hears, she would be unusual if she were an English girl who had spent her life
on an English estate. That an American who is making her first visit to England
should seem to see at once the practical needs of a neglected place is a thing
to wonder at. What can she know about it, one thinks. But she apparently does
know. They say she has made no mistakes--even with the village people. She is
managing, in one way or another, to give work to every man who wants it.
Result, of course--unbounded rustic enthusiasm."
Lord Dunholm laughed
between the soothing whiffs of his cigar.
"How clever of
her! And what sensible good feeling! Yes--yes! She evidently has learned things
somewhere. Perhaps New York has found it wise to begin to give young women
professional training in the management of English estates. Who knows? Not a
bad idea."
It was the rustic
enthusiasm, Westholt explained, which had in a manner spread her fame. One
heard enlightening and illustrative anecdotes of her. He related several well
worth hearing. She had evidently a sense of humour and unexpected perceptions.
"One detail of the
story of old Doby's meerschaum," Westholt said, "pleased me
enormously. She managed to convey to him--without hurting his aged feelings or
overwhelming him with embarrassment--that if he preferred a clean churchwarden
or his old briarwood, he need not feel obliged to smoke the new pipe. He could
regard it as a trophy. Now, how did she do that without filling him with fright
and confusion, lest she might think him not sufficiently grateful for her
present? But they tell me she did it, and that old Doby is rapturously happy
and takes the meerschaum to bed with him, but only smokes it on
Sundays--sitting at his window blowing great clouds when his neighbours are
coming from church. It was a clever girl who knew that an old fellow might
secretly like his old pipe best."
"It was a
deliciously clever girl," said Lord Dunholm. "One wants to know and
make friends with her. We must drive over and call. I confess, I rather
congratulate myself that Anstruthers is not at home."
"So do I,"
Westholt answered. "One wonders a little how far he and his sister-in-law
will 'foregather' when he returns. He's an unpleasant beggar."
A few days later Mrs.
Brent, returning from a call on Mrs. Charley Jenkins, was passed by a carriage
whose liveries she recognised half way up the village street. It was the carriage
from Dunholm Castle. Lord and Lady Dunholm and Lord Westholt sat in it. They
were, of course, going to call at the Court. Miss Vanderpoel was beginning to
draw people. She naturally would. She would be likely to make quite a
difference in the neighbourhood now that it had heard of her and Lady
Anstruthers had been seen driving with her, evidently no longer an unvisitable
invalid, but actually decently clothed and in her right mind. Mrs. Brent
slackened her steps that she might have the pleasure of receiving and
responding gracefully to salutations from the important personages in the
landau. She felt that the Dunholms were important. There were earldoms and
earldoms, and that of Dunholm was dignified and of distinction.
A common-looking young
man on a bicycle, who had wheeled into the village with the carriage, riding
alongside it for a hundred yards or so, stopped before the Clock Inn and
dismounted, just as Mrs. Brent neared him. He saw her looking after the
equipage, and lifting his cap spoke to her civilly.
"This is Stornham
village, ain't it, ma'am?" he inquired.
"Yes, my
man." His costume and general aspect seemed to indicate that he was of the
class one addressed as "my man," though there was something a little
odd about him.
"Thank you. That
wasn't Miss Vanderpoel's eldest sister in that carriage, was it?"
"Miss
Vanderpoel's----" Mrs. Brent hesitated. "Do you mean Lady
Anstruthers?"
"I'd forgotten her
name. I know Miss Vanderpoel's eldest sister lives at Stornham--Reuben S.
Vanderpoel's daughter."
"Lady Anstruthers'
younger sister is a Miss Vanderpoel, and she is visiting at Stornham Court
now." Mrs. Brent could not help adding, curiously, "Why do you
ask?"
"I am going to see
her. I'm an American."
Mrs. Brent coughed to
cover a slight gasp. She had heard remarkable things of the democratic customs
of America. It was painful not to be able to ask questions.
"The lady in the
carriage was the Countess of Dunholm," she said rather grandly. "They
are going to the Court to call on Miss Vanderpoel."
"Then Miss
Vanderpoel's there yet. That's all right. Thank you, ma'am," and lifting
his cap again he turned into the little public house.
The Dunholm party had
been accustomed on their rare visits to Stornham to be received by the kind of
man-servant in the kind of livery which is a manifest, though unwilling,
confession. The men who threw open the doors were of regulation height, well
dressed, and of trained bearing. The entrance hall had lost its hopeless
shabbiness. It was a complete and picturesquely luxurious thing. The change
suggested magic. The magic which had been used, Lord Dunholm reflected, was the
simplest and most powerful on earth. Given surroundings, combined with a gift
for knowing values of form and colour, if you have the power to spend thousands
of guineas on tiger skins, Oriental rugs, and other beauties, barrenness is
easily transformed.
The drawing-room wore a
changed aspect, and at a first glance it was to be seen that in poor little
Lady Anstruthers, as she had generally been called, there was to be noted
alteration also. In her case the change, being in its first stages, could not
perhaps be yet called transformation, but, aided by softly pretty arrangement
of dress and hair, a light in her eyes, and a suggestion of pink under her
skin, one recalled that she had once been a pretty little woman, and that after
all she was only about thirty-two years old
That her sister, Miss
Vanderpoel, had beauty, it was not necessary to hesitate in deciding. Neither
Lord Dunholm nor his wife nor their son did hesitate. A girl with long limbs an
alluring profile, and extraordinary black lashes set round lovely Irish-blue
eyes, possesses physical capital not to be argued about.
She was not one of the
curious, exotic little creatures, whose thin, though sometimes rather sweet,
and always gay, high-pitched young voices Lord Dunholm had been so especially
struck by in the early days of the American invasion. Her voice had a tone one
would be likely to remember with pleasure. How well she moved--how well her
black head was set on her neck! Yes, she was of the new type--the later
generation. These amazing, oddly practical people had evolved it-- planned it,
perhaps, bought--figuratively speaking--the architects and material to design
and build it--bought them in whatever country they found them, England, France,
Italy Germany--pocketing them coolly and carrying them back home to develop,
complete, and send forth into the world when their invention was a perfected
thing. Struck by the humour of his fancy, Lord Dunholm found himself smiling
into the Irish-blue eyes. They smiled back at him in a way which warmed his
heart. There were no pauses in the conversation which followed. In times past,
calls at Stornham had generally held painfully blank moments. Lady Dunholm was
as pleased as her husband. A really charming girl was an enormous acquisition
to the neighbourhood.
Westholt, his father
saw, had found even more than the story of old Doby's pipe had prepared him to
expect.
Country calls were not
usually interesting or stimulating, and this one was. Lord Dunholm laid subtly
brilliant plans to lead Miss Vanderpoel to talk of her native land and her
views of it. He knew that she would say things worth hearing. Incidentally one
gathered picturesque detail. To have vibrated between the two continents since
her thirteenth year, to have spent a few years at school in one country, a few
years in another, and yet a few years more in still another, as part of an
arranged educational plan; to have crossed the Atlantic for the holidays, and
to have journeyed thousands of miles with her father in his private car; to
make the visits of a man of great schemes to his possessions of mines,
railroads, and lands which were almost principalities--these things had been
merely details of her life, adding interest and variety, it was true, but
seeming the merely normal outcome of existence. They were normal to Vanderpoels
and others of their class who were abnormalities in themselves when compared
with the rest of the world.
Her own very lack of
any abnormality reached, in Lord Dunholm's mind, the highest point of
illustration of the phase of life she beautifully represented--for beautiful he
felt its rare charms were.
When they strolled out
to look at the gardens he found talk with her no less a stimulating thing. She
told her story of Kedgers, and showed the chosen spot where thickets of lilies
were to bloom, with the giants lifting white archangel trumpets above them in
the centre.
"He can be
trusted," she said. "I feel sure he can be trusted. He loves them. He
could not love them so much and not be able to take care of them." And as
she looked at him in frank appeal for sympathy, Lord Dunholm felt that for the
moment she looked like a tall, queenly child.
But pleased as he was,
he presently gave up his place at her side to Westholt. He must not be a
selfish old fellow and monopolise her. He hoped they would see each other
often, he said charmingly. He thought she would be sure to like Dunholm, which
was really a thoroughly English old place, marked by all the features she
seemed so much attracted by. There were some beautiful relics of the past
there, and some rather shocking ones--certain dungeons, for instance, and a
gallows mount, on which in good old times the family gallows had stood. This
had apparently been a working adjunct to the domestic arrangements of every
respectable family, and that irritating persons should dangle from it had been
a simple domestic necessity, if one were to believe old stories.
"It was then that
nobles were regarded with respect," he said, with his fine smile. "In
the days when a man appeared with clang of arms and with javelins and spears
before, and donjon keeps in the background, the attitude of bent knees and
awful reverence were the inevitable results. When one could hang a servant on
one's own private gallows, or chop off his hand for irreverence or
disobedience--obedience and reverence were a rule. Now, a month's notice is the
extremity of punishment, and the old pomp of armed servitors suggests comic
opera. But we can show you relics of it at Dunholm."
He joined his wife and
began at once to make himself so delightful to Rosy that she ceased to be
afraid of him, and ended by talking almost gaily of her London visit.
Betty and Westholt
walked together. The afternoon being lovely, they had all sauntered into the
park to look at certain views, and the sun was shining between the trees. Betty
thought the young man almost as charming as his father, which was saying much.
She had fallen wholly in love with Lord Dunholm--with his handsome, elderly
face, his voice, his erect bearing, his fine smile, his attraction of manner,
his courteous ease and wit. He was one of the men who stood for the best of all
they had been born to represent. Her own father, she felt, stood for the best
of all such an American as himself should be. Lord Westholt would in time be
what his father was. He had inherited from him good looks, good feeling, and a
sense of humour. Yes, he had been given from the outset all that the other man
had been denied. She was thinking of Mount Dunstan as "the other
man," and spoke of him.
"You know Lord
Mount Dunstan?" she said.
Westholt hesitated
slightly.
"Yes--and
no," he answered, after the hesitation. "No one knows him very well.
You have not met him?" with a touch of surprise in his tone.
"He was a
passenger on the Meridiana when I last crossed the Atlantic. There was a slight
accident and we were thrown together for a few moments. Afterwards I met him by
chance again. I did not know who he was."
Lord Westholt showed
signs of hesitation anew. In fact, he was rather disturbed. She evidently did
not know anything whatever of the Mount Dunstans. She would not be likely to
hear the details of the scandal which had obliterated them, as it were, from
the decent world.
The present man, though
he had not openly been mixed up with the hideous thing, had borne the brand
because he had not proved himself to possess any qualities likely to recommend
him. It was generally understood that he was a bad lot also. To such a man the
allurements such a young woman as Miss Vanderpoel would present would be
extraordinary. It was unfortunate that she should have been thrown in his way.
At the same time it was not possible to state the case clearly during one's
first call on a beautiful stranger.
"His going to
America was rather spirited," said the mellow voice beside him. "I
thought only Americans took their fates in their hands in that way. For a man
of his class to face a rancher's life means determination. It means the
spirit----" with a low little laugh at the leap of her imagination--"of
the men who were Mount Dunstans in early days and went forth to fight for what
they meant to have. He went to fight. He ought to have won. He will win some
day."
"I do not know
about fighting," Lord Wetsholt answered. Had the fellow been telling her
romantic stories? "The general impression was that he went to America to
amuse himself."
"No, he did not do
that," said Betty, with simple finality. "A sheep ranch is not
amusing----" She stopped short and stood still for a moment. They had been
walking down the avenue, and she stopped because her eyes had been caught by a
figure half sitting, half lying in the middle of the road, a prostrate bicycle
near it. It was the figure of a cheaply dressed young man, who, as she looked,
seemed to make an ineffectual effort to rise.
"Is that man
ill?" she exclaimed. "I think he must be." They went towards him
at once, and when they reached him he lifted a dazed white face, down which a
stream of blood was trickling from a cut on his forehead. He was, in fact, very
white indeed, and did not seem to know what he was doing.
"I am afraid you
are hurt," Betty said, and as she spoke the rest of the party joined them.
The young man vacantly smiled, and making an unconscious-looking pass across
his face with his hand, smeared the blood over his features painfully. Betty
kneeled down, and drawing out her handkerchief, lightly wiped the gruesome
smears away. Lord Westholt saw what had happened, having given a look at the
bicycle.
"His chain broke
as he was coming down the incline, and as he fell he got a nasty knock on this
stone," touching with his foot a rather large one, which had evidently
fallen from some cartload of building material.
The young man, still
vacantly smiling, was fumbling at his breast pocket. He began to talk
incoherently in good, nasal New York, at the mere sound of which Lady
Anstruthers made a little yearning step forward.
"Superior any
other," he muttered. "Tabulator spacer-- marginal release key--call
your 'tention--instantly--'justable --Delkoff--no equal on market." And
having found what he had fumbled for, he handed a card to Miss Vanderpoel and
sank unconscious on her breast.
"Let me support
him, Miss Vanderpoel," said Westholt, starting forward.
"Never mind, thank
you," said Betty. "If he has fainted I suppose he must be laid flat
on the ground. Will you please to read the card.
It was the card Mount
Dunstan had read the day before.
J. BURRIDGE & SON,
DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO.
BROADWAY, NEW YORK.
G. SELDEN.
"He is probably G.
Selden," said Westholt. "Travelling in the interests of his firm,
poor chap. The clue is not of much immediate use, however."
They were fortunately
not far from the house, and Westholt went back quickly to summon servants and
send for the village doctor. The Dunholms were kindly sympathetic, and each of
the party lent a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding. Lord Dunholm helped Miss
Vanderpoel to lay the young man down carefully.
"I am
afraid," he said; "I am really afraid his leg is broken. It was
twisted under him. What can be done with him?"
Miss Vanderpoel looked
at her sister.
"Will you allow
him to be carried to the house temporarily, Rosy?" she asked. "There
is apparently nothing else to be done."
"Yes, yes,"
said Lady Anstruthers. "How could one send him away, poor fellow! Let him
be carried to the house."
Miss Vanderpoel smiled
into Lord Dunholm's much approving, elderly eyes.
"G. Selden is a
compatriot," she said. "Perhaps he heard I was here and came to sell
me a typewriter."
Lord Westholt returning
with two footmen and a light mattress, G. Selden was carried with cautious care
to the house. The afternoon sun, breaking through the branches of the ancestral
oaks, kindly touched his keen-featured, white young face. Lord Dunholm and Lord
Westholt each lent a friendly hand, and Miss Vanderpoel, keeping near, once or
twice wiped away an insistent trickle of blood which showed itself from beneath
the handkerchiefs. Lady Dunholm followed with Lady Anstruthers.
Afterwards, during his
convalescence, G. Selden frequently felt with regret that by his
unconsciousness of the dignity of his cortège at the moment he had missed
feeling himself to be for once in a position he would have designated as
"out of sight" in the novelty of its importance. To have beheld him,
borne by nobles and liveried menials, accompanied by ladies of title, up the
avenue of an English park on his way to be cared for in baronial halls, would,
he knew, have added a joy to the final moments of his grandmother, which the
consolations of religion could scarcely have met equally in competition. His
own point of view, however, would not, it is true, have been that of the old
woman in the black net cap and purple ribbons, but of a less reverent nature.
His enjoyment, in fact, would have been based upon that transatlantic sense of
humour, whose soul is glee at the incompatible, which would have been full fed
by the incongruity of "Little Willie being yanked along by a bunch of
earls, and Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughters following the funeral." That
he himself should have been unconscious of the situation seemed to him like
"throwing away money."
The doctor arriving
after he had been put to bed found slight concussion of the brain and a broken
leg. With Lady Anstruthers' kind permission, it would certainly be best that he
should remain for the present where he was. So, in a bedroom whose windows
looked out upon spreading lawns and broad-branched trees, he was as comfortably
established as was possible. G. Selden, through the capricious intervention of
Fate, if he had not "got next" to Reuben S. Vanderpoel himself, had
most undisputably "got next" to his favourite daughter.
As the Dunholm carriage
rolled down the avenue there reigned for a few minutes a reflective silence. It
was Lady Dunholm who broke it. "That," she said in her softly decided
voice, that is a nice girl."
Lord Dunholm's
agreeable, humorous smile flickered into evidence.
"That is it,"
he said. "Thank you, Eleanor, for supplying me with a quite delightful
early Victorian word. I believe I wanted it. She is a beauty and she is clever.
She is a number of other things--but she is also a nice girl. If you will allow
me to say so, I have fallen in love with her."
"If you will allow
me to say so," put in Westholt, "so have I--quite fatally."
"That," said
his father, with speculation in his eye, "is more serious."
G. SELDEN, awakening to
consciousness two days later, lay and stared at the chintz covering of the top
of his four-post bed through a few minutes of vacant amazement. It was a
four-post bed he was lying on, wasn't it? And his leg was bandaged and felt
unmovable. The last thing he remembered was going down an incline in a
tree-bordered avenue. There was nothing more. He had been all right then. Was
this a four-post bed or was it not? Yes, it was. And was it part of the
furnishings of a swell bedroom--the kind of bedroom he had never been in
before? Tip top, in fact? He stared and tried to recall things--but could not,
and in his bewilderment exclaimed aloud.
"Well," he
said, "if this ain't the limit! You may search me!"
A respectable person in
a white apron came to him from the other side of the room. It was Buttle's
wife, who had been hastily called in.
"Sh--sh," she
said soothingly. "Don't you worry. Nobody ain't goin' to search you.
Nobody ain't. There! Sh, sh, sh," rather as if he were a baby. Beginning
to be conscious of a curious sense of weakness, Selden lay and stared at her in
a helplessness which might have been considered pathetic. Perhaps he had got
"bats in his belfry," and there was no use in talking.
At that moment,
however, the door opened and a young lady entered. She was "a
looker," G. Selden's weakness did not interfere with his perceiving.
"A looker, by gee!" She was dressed, as if for going out, in softly
tinted, exquisite things, and a large, strange hydrangea blue flower under the
brim of her hat rested on soft and full black hair. The black hair gave him a
clue. It was hair like that he had seen as Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter rode
by when he stood at the park gates at Mount Dunstan. "Bats in his
belfry," of course.
"How is he?"
she said to the nurse.
"He's been seeming
comfortable all day, miss," the woman answered, "but he's
light-headed yet. He opened his eyes quite sensible looking a bit ago, but he
spoke queer. He said something was the limit, and that we might search
him."
Betty approached the
bedside to look at him, and meeting the disturbed inquiry in his uplifted eyes,
laughed, because, seeing that he was not delirious, she thought she understood.
She had not lived in New York without hearing its argot, and she realised that
the exclamation which had appeared delirium to Mrs. Buttle had probably indicated
that the unexplainableness of the situation in which G. Selden found himself
struck him as reaching the limit of probability, and that the most extended
search of his person would fail to reveal any clue to satisfactory explanation.
She bent over him, with
her laugh still shining in her eyes.
"I hope you feel
better. Can you tell me?" she said.
His voice was not
strong, but his answer was that of a young man who knew what he was saying.
"If I'm not off my
head, ma'am, I'm quite comfortable, thank you," he replied.
"I am glad to hear
that," said Betty. "Don't be disturbed. Your mind is quite
clear."
"All I want,"
said G. Selden impartially, "is just to know where I'm at, and how I blew
in here. It would help me to rest better."
"You met with an
accident," the "looker" explained, still smiling with both lips
and eyes. "Your bicycle chain broke and you were thrown and hurt yourself.
It happened in the avenue in the park. We found you and brought you in. You are
at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Lady Anstruthers is
my sister. I am Miss Vanderpoel."
"Hully gee!"
ejaculated G. Selden inevitably. "Hully gee!" The splendour of the
moment was such that his brain whirled. As it was not yet in the physical
condition to whirl with any comfort, he found himself closing his eyes weakly.
"That's
right," Miss Vanderpoel said. "Keep them closed. I must not talk to
you until you are stronger. Lie still and try not to think. The doctor says you
are getting on very well. I will come and see you again."
As the soft sweep of
her dress reached the door he managed to open his eyes.
"Thank you, Miss
Vanderpoel," he said. "Thank you, ma'am. And as his eyelids closed
again he murmured in luxurious peace: "Well, if that's her--she can have
me--and welcome!" . . . . .
She came to see him
again each day--sometimes in a linen frock and garden hat, sometimes in her
soft tints and lace and flowers before or after her drive in the afternoon, and
two or three times in the evening, with lovely shoulders and wonderfully
trailing draperies--looking like the women he had caught far-off glimpses of on
the rare occasion of his having indulged himself in the highest and most
remotely placed seat in the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had
borne not through any ardent desire to hear the music, but because he wanted to
see the show and get "a look-in" at the Four Hundred. He believed
very implicitly in his Four Hundred, and privately--though perhaps almost
unconsciously--cherished the distinction his share of them conferred upon him,
as fondly as the English young man of his rudimentary type cherishes his dukes
and duchesses. The English young man may revel in his coroneted beauties in photograph
shops, the young American dwells fondly on flattering, or very unflattering,
reproductions of his multi-millionaires' wives and daughters in the voluminous
illustrated sheets of his Sunday paper, without which life would be a wretched
and savourless thing.
Selden had never seen
Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday paper, and here he was lying in a room in the
same house with her. And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he was
one of the Four Hundred himself! The comfort and luxury with which he found
himself surrounded sank into insignificance when compared with such unearthly
luck as this. Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times
brought with her a queer little lame fellow, who was spoken of as "Master
Ughtred." "Master" was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort of
title conferred upon the small sons of baronets and the like. The children he
knew in New York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob, or Jimmy, or Bill.
No parallel to "Master" had been in vogue among them.
Lady Anstruthers was
not like her sister. She was a little thing, and both she and Master Ughtred
seemed fond of talking of New York. She had not been home for years, and the
youngster had never seen it at all. He had some queer ideas about America, and
seemed never to have seen anything but Stornham and the village. G. Selden
liked him, and was vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the
festivities attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential election
seemed like stories from the Arabian Nights.
"Tell me about the
Tammany Tiger, if you please," he said once. "I want to know what
kind of an animal it is."
From a point of view
somewhat different from that of Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, Betty
Vanderpoel found talk with him interesting. To her he did not wear the aspect
of a foreign product. She had not met and conversed with young men like him,
but she knew of them. Stringent precautions were taken to protect her father
from their ingenuous enterprises. They were not permitted to enter his offices;
they were even discouraged from hovering about their neighbourhood when seen
and suspected. The atmosphere, it was understood, was to be, if possible,
disinfected of agents. This one, lying softly in the four-post bed, cheerfully
grateful for the kindness shown him, and plainly filled with delight in his
adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending it, gave her, as he began
to recover, new views of the life he lived in common with his kind. It was like
reading scenes from a realistic novel of New York life to listen to his frank,
slangy conversation. To her, as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights were thrown
upon existence in the "hall bedroom" and upon previously unknown
phases of business life in Broadway and roaring "downtown" streets.
His determination, his
sharp readiness, his control of temper under rebuff and superfluous harshness,
his odd, impersonal summing up of men and things, and good-natured patience
with the world in general, were, she knew, business assets. She was even
moved--no less--by the remote connection of such a life with that of the first
Reuben Vanderpoel who had laid the huge, solid foundations of their modern
fortune. The first Reuben Vanderpoel must have seen and known the faces of men
as G. Selden saw and knew them. Fighting his way step by step, knocking
pertinaciously at every gateway which might give ingress to some passage
leading to even the smallest gain, meeting with rebuff and indifference only to
be overcome by steady and continued assault--if G. Selden was a nuisance, the
first Vanderpoel had without doubt worn that aspect upon innumerable occasions.
No one desires the presence of the man who while having nothing to give must
persist in keeping himself in evidence, even if by strategy or force. From
stories she was familiar with, she had gathered that the first Reuben
Vanderpoel had certainly lacked a certain youth of soul she felt in this modern
struggler for life. He had been the cleverer man of the two; G. Selden she
secretly liked the better.
The curiosity of Mrs.
Buttle, who was the nurse, had been awakened by a singular feature of her
patient's feverish wanderings.
"He keeps
muttering, miss, things I can't make out about Lord Mount Dunstan, and Mr.
Penzance, and some child he calls Little Willie. He talks to them the same as
if he knew them--same as if he was with them and they were talking to him quite
friendly."
One morning Betty,
coming to make her visit of inquiry found the patient looking thoughtful, and
when she commented upon his air of pondering, his reply cast light upon the
mystery.
"Well, Miss
Vanderpoel," he explained, "I was lying here thinking of Lord Mount
Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, and how well they treated me--I haven't told you
about that, have I?
"That explains
what Mrs. Buttle said," she answered. "When you were delirious you
talked frequently to Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance. We both wondered
why."
Then he told her the
whole story. Beginning with his sitting on the grassy bank outside the park,
listening to the song of the robin, he ended with the adieux at the entrance
gates when the sound of her horse's trotting hoofs had been heard by each of
them.
"What I've been
lying here thinking of," he said, "is how queer it was it happened
just that way. If I hadn't stopped just that minute, and if you hadn't gone by,
and if Lord Mount Dunstan hadn't known you and said who you were, Little Willie
would have been in London by this time, hustling to get a cheap bunk back to
New York in."
"Because?"
inquired Miss Vanderpoel.
G. Selden laughed and
hesitated a moment. Then he made a clean breast of it.
"Say, Miss
Vanderpoel," he said, "I hope it won't make you mad if I own up.
Ladies like you don't know anything about chaps like me. On the square and
straight out, when I seen you and heard your name I couldn't help remembering
whose daughter you was. Reuben S. Vanderpoel spells a big thing. Why, when I
was in New York we fellows used to get together and talk about what it'd mean
to the chap who could get next to Reuben S. Vanderpoel. We used to count up all
the business he does, and all the clerks he's got under him pounding away on
typewriters, and how they'd be bound to get worn out and need new ones. And
we'd make calculations how many a man could unload, if he could get next. It
was a kind of typewriting junior assistant fairy story, and we knew it couldn't
happen really. But we used to chin about it just for the fun of the thing. One
of the boys made up a thing about one of us saving Reuben S.'s life--dragging
him from under a runaway auto and, when he says, 'What can I do to show my
gratitude, young man?' him handing out his catalogue and saying, 'I should like
to call your attention to the Delkoff, sir,' and getting him to promise he'd
never use any other, as long as he lived!"
Reuben S. Vanderpoel's
daughter laughed as spontaneously as any girl might have done. G. Selden
laughed with her. At any rate, she hadn't got mad, so far.
"That was what did
it," he went on. "When I rode away on my bike I got thinking about it
and could not get it out of my head. The next day I just stopped on the road
and got off my wheel, and I says to myself: 'Look here, business is business,
if you are travelling in Europe and lunching at Buckingham Palace with the main
squeeze. Get busy! What'll the boys say if they hear you've missed a chance
like this? You hit the pike for Stornham Castle, or whatever it's called, and
take your nerve with you! She can't do more than have you fired out, and you've
been fired before and got your breath after it. So I turned round and made
time. And that was how I happened on your avenue. And perhaps it was because I
was feeling a bit rattled I lost my hold when the chain broke, and pitched over
on my head. There, I've got it off my chest. I was thinking I should have to
explain somehow."
Something akin to her
feeling of affection for the nice, long-legged Westerner she had seen rambling
in Bond Street touched Betty again. The Delkoff was the centre of G. Selden's
world as the flowers were of Kedgers', as the "little 'ome" was of
Mrs. Welden's.
"Were you going to
try to sell me a typewriter?" she asked.
"Well," G. Selden
admitted, "I didn't know but what there might be use for one, writing
business letters on a big place like this. Straight, I won't say I wasn't going
to try pretty hard. It may look like gall, but you see a fellow has to rush
things or he'll never get there. A chap like me has to get there,
somehow."
She was silent a few
moments and looked as if she was thinking something over. Her silence and this
look on her face actually caused to dawn in the breast of Selden a gleam of
daring hope. He looked round at her with a faint rising of colour.
"Say, Miss
Vanderpoel--say----" he began, and then broke off.
"Yes?" said
Betty, still thinking.
"C-could you use
one--anywhere?" he said. "I don't want to rush things too much,
but--could you?"
"Is it easy to
learn to use it?"
"Easy!" his
head lifted from his pillow. "It's as easy as falling off a log. A baby in
a perambulator could learn to tick off orders for its bottle. And--on the
square--there isn't its equal on the market, Miss Vanderpoel--there isn't."
He fumbled beneath his pillow and actually brought forth his catalogue.
"I asked the nurse
to put it there. I wanted to study it now and then and think up arguments.
See--adjustable to hold with perfect ease an envelope, an index card, or a
strip of paper no wider than a postage stamp. Unsurpassed paper feed, practical
ribbon mechanism--perfect and permanent alignment. "
As Mount Dunstan had
taken the book, Betty Vanderpoel took it. Never had G. Selden beheld such
smiling in eyes about to bend upon his catalogue.
"You will raise
your temperature," she said, "if you excite yourself. You mustn't do
that. I believe there are two or three people on the estate who might be taught
to use a typewriter. I will buy three. Yes--we will say three."
She would buy three. He
soared to heights. He did not know how to thank her, though he did his best.
Dizzying visions of what he would have to tell "the boys" when he
returned to New York flashed across his mind. The daughter of Reuben S.
Vanderpoel had bought three Delkoffs, and he was the junior assistant who had
sold them to her.
"You don't know
what it means to me, Miss Vanderpoel," he said, "but if you were a
junior salesman you'd know. It's not only the sale--though that's a rake-off of
fifteen dollars to me--but it's because it's you that's bought them. Gee!"
gazing at her with a frank awe whose obvious sincerity held a queer touch of
pathos. "What it must be to be you--just you!"
She did not laugh. She
felt as if a hand had lightly touched her on her naked heart. She had thought
of it so often--had been bewildered restlessly by it as a mere child--this
difference in human lot--this chance. Was it chance which had placed her entity
in the centre of Bettina Vanderpoel's world instead of in that of some little
cash girl with hair raked back from a sallow face, who stared at her as she
passed in a shop--or in that of the young Frenchwoman whose life was spent in
serving her, in caring for delicate dresses and keeping guard over ornaments
whose price would have given to her own humbleness ease for the rest of
existence? What did it mean? And what Law was laid upon her? What Law which
could only work through her and such as she who had been born with almost
unearthly power laid in their hands--the reins of monstrous wealth, which
guided or drove the world? Sometimes fear touched her, as with this light touch
an her heart, because she did not know the Law and could only pray that her
guessing at it might be right. And, even as she thought these things, G. Selden
went on.
"You never can
know," he said, "because you've always been in it. And the rest of
the world can't know, because they've never been anywhere near it." He
stopped and evidently fell to thinking.
"Tell me about the
rest of the world," said Betty quietly.
He laughed again.
"Why, I was just
thinking to myself you didn't know a thing about it. And it's queer. It's the
rest of us that mounts up when you come to numbers. I guess it'd run into
millions. I'm not thinking of beggars and starving people, I've been rushing
the Delkoff too steady to get onto any swell charity organisation, so I don't
know about them. I'm just thinking of the millions of fellows, and women, too,
for the matter of that, that waken up every morning and know they've got to hustle
for their ten per or their fifteen per--if they can stir it up as thick as
that. If it's as much as fifty per, of course, seems like to me, they're on
Easy Street. But sometimes those that's got to fifty per--or even more--have
got more things to do with it--kids, you know, and more rent and clothes.
They've got to get at it just as hard as we have. Why, Miss Vanderpoel, how
many people do you suppose there are in a million that don't have to worry over
their next month's grocery bills, and the rent of their flat? I bet there's not
ten--and I don't know the ten."
He did not state his
case uncheerfully. "The rest of the world" represented to him the
normal condition of things.
"Most married
men's a bit afraid to look an honest grocery bill in the face. And they will
come in--as regular as spring hats. And I tell you, when a man's got to live on
seventy-five a month, a thing that'll take all the strength and energy out of a
twenty-dollar bill sorter gets him down on the mat."
Like old Mrs. Welden's,
his roughly sketched picture was a graphic one.
" 'Tain't the
working that bothers most of us. We were born to that, and most of us would
feel like deadbeats if we were doing nothing. It's the earning less than you
can live on, and getting a sort of tired feeling over it. It's the having to
make a dollar-bill look like two, and watching every other fellow try to do the
same thing, and not often make the trip. There's millions of us--just
millions--every one of us with his Delkoff to sell----" his figure of
speech pleased him and he chuckled at his own cleverness--"and thinking of
it, and talking about it, and--under his vest--half afraid that he can't make
it. And what you say in the morning when you open your eyes and stretch
yourself is, 'Hully gee! I've got to sell a Delkoff to-day, and suppose I
shouldn't, and couldn't hold down my job!' I began it over my feeding bottle.
So did all the people I know. That's what gave me a sort of a jolt just now
when I looked at you and thought about you being you-- and what it meant."
When their conversation
ended she had a much more intimate knowledge of New York than she had ever had
before, and she felt it a rich possession. She had heard of the "hall
bedroom" previously, and she had seen from the outside the "quick
lunch" counter, but G. Selden unconsciously escorted her inside and threw
upon faces and lives the glare of a flashlight.
"There was a thing
I've been thinking I'd ask you, Miss Vanderpoel," he said just before she
left him. "I'd like you to tell me, if you please. It's like this. You see
those two fellows treated me as fine as silk. I mean Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr.
Penzance. I never expected it. I never saw a lord before, much less spoke to
one, but I can tell you that one's just about all right--Mount Dunstan. And the
other one-- the old vicar--I've never taken to anyone since I was born like I
took to him. The way he puts on his eye-glasses and looks at you, sorter kind
and curious about you at the same time! And his voice and his way of saying his
words --well, they just got me--sure. And they both of 'em did say they'd like
to see me again. Now do you think, Miss Vanderpoel, it would look too fresh--if
I was to write a polite note and ask if either of them could make it convenient
to come and take a look at me, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. I don't want
to be too fresh--and perhaps they wouldn't come anyhow--and if it is, please
won't you tell me, Miss Vanderpoel?"
Betty thought of Mount
Dunstan as he had stood and talked to her in the deepening afternoon sun. She
did not know much of him, but she thought--having heard G. Selden's story of
the lunch--that he would come. She had never seen Mr. Penzance, but she knew
she should like to see him.
"I think you might
write the note," she said. "I believe they would come to see
you."
"Do you?"
with eager pleasure. "Then I'll do it. I'd give a good deal to see them
again. I tell you, they are just It--both of them."
MOUNT DUNSTAN, walking
through the park next morning on his way to the vicarage, just after post time,
met Mr. Penzance himself coming to make an equally early call at the Mount.
Each of them had a letter in his hand, and each met the other's glance with a
smile.
"G. Selden,"
Mount Dunstan said. "And yours?"
"G. Selden
also," answered the vicar. "Poor young fellow, what ill-luck. And
yet--is it ill-luck? He says not."
"He tells me it is
not," said Mount Dunstan. "And I agree with him."
Mr. Penzance read his
letter aloud.
"DEAR SIR:
"This is to notify
you that owing to my bike going back on me when going down hill, I met with an
accident in Stornham Park. Was cut about the head and leg broken. Little Willie
being far from home and mother, you can see what sort of fix he'd been in if it
hadn't been for the kindness of Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughters--Miss Bettina
and her sister Lady Anstruthers. The way they've had me taken care of has been
great. I've been under a nurse and doctor same as if I was Albert Edward with
appendycytus (I apologise if that's not spelt right). Dear Sir, this is to say
that I asked Miss Vanderpoel if I should be butting in too much if I dropped a
line to ask if you could spare the time to call and see me. It would be considered
a favour and appreciated by "G. SELDEN, "Delkoff Typewriter Co.
Broadway.
"P. S. Have
already sold three Delkoffs to Miss Vanderpoel."
"Upon my
word," Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable fervour quite glowed,
"I like that queer young fellow-- I like him. He does not wish to 'butt in
too much.' Now, there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous,
forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal--a goat, I seem to see,
preferably--forcing its way into a group or closed circle of persons."
His gleeful analysis of
the phrase had such evident charm for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout
of laughter, even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber &
Fields.
"Shall we ride
over together to see him this morning? An hour with G. Selden, surrounded by
the atmosphere of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing," he
said.
"It would,"
Mr. Penzance answered. "Let us go by all means. We should not, I
suppose," with keen delight, "be 'butting in' upon Lady Anstruthers
too early?" He was quite enraptured with his own aptness. "Like G.
Selden, I should not like to 'butt in,' " he added.
The scent and warmth
and glow of a glorious morning filled the hour. Combining themselves with a
certain normal human gaiety which surrounded the mere thought of G. Selden,
they were good things for Mount Dunstan. Life was strong and young in him, and
he had laughed a big young laugh, which had, perhaps tended to the waking in
him of the feeling he was suddenly conscious of--that a six-mile ride over a
white, tree-dappled, sunlit road would be pleasant enough, and, after all, if
at the end of the gallop one came again upon that other in whom life was strong
and young, and bloomed on rose-cheek and was the far fire in the blue deeps of
lovely eyes, and the slim straightness of the fair body, why would it not be,
in a way, all to the good? He had thought of her on more than one day, and felt
that he wanted to see her again.
"Let us go,"
he answered Penzance. "One can call on an invalid at any time. Lady
Anstruthers will forgive us."
In less than an hour's
time they were on their way. They laughed and talked as they rode, their
horses' hoofs striking out a cheerful ringing accompaniment to their voices.
There is nothing more exhilarating than the hollow, regular ring and
click-clack of good hoofs going well over a fine old Roman road in the morning
sunlight. They talked of the junior assistant salesman and of Miss Vanderpoel.
Penzance was much pleased by the prospect of seeing "this delightful and
unusual girl." He had heard stories of her, as had Lord Westholt. He knew
of old Doby's pipe, and of Mrs. Welden's respite from the Union, and though
such incidents would seem mere trifles to the dweller in great towns, he had
himself lived and done his work long enough in villages to know the village
mind and the scale of proportions by which its gladness and sadness were
measured. He knew more of all this than Mount Dunstan could, since Mount
Dunstan's existence had isolated itself, from rather gloomy choice. But as he
rode, Mount Dunstan knew that he liked to hear these things. There was the
suggestion of new life and new thought in them, and such suggestion was good
for any man--or woman, either--who had fallen into living in a dull, narrow
groove.
"It is the new
life in her which strikes me," he said. "She has brought wealth with
her, and wealth is power to do the good or evil that grows in a man's soul; but
she has brought something more. She might have come here and brought all the
sumptuousness of a fashionable young beauty, who drove through the village and
drew people to their windows, and made clodhoppers scratch their heads and pull
their forelocks, and children bob curtsies and stare. She might have come and
gone and left a mind-dazzling memory and nothing else. A few sovereigns tossed
here and there would have earned her a reputation--but, by gee! to quote
Selden--she has begun living with them, as if her ancestors had done it for six
hundred years. And what I see is that if she had come without a penny in her
pocket she would have done the same thing." He paused a pondering moment,
and then drew a sharp breath which was an exclamation in itself. "She's
Life!" he said. "She's Life itself! Good God! what a thing it is for a
man or woman to be Life--instead of a mass of tissue and muscle and nerve,
dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!"
Penzance had listened
seriously.
"What you say is
very suggestive," he commented. "It strikes me as true, too. You have
seen something of her also, at least more than I have."
"I did not think
these things when I saw her--though I suppose I felt them unconsciously. I have
reached this way of summing her up by processes of exclusion and inclusion. One
hears of her, as you know yourself, and one thinks her over."
"You have thought
her over?"
"A lot,"
rather grumpily. "A beautiful female creature inevitably gives an
unbeautiful male creature something to think of--if he is not otherwise
actively employed. I am not. She has become a sort of dawning relief to my
hopeless humours. Being a low and unworthy beast, I am sometimes resentful
enough of the unfairness of things. She has too much."
When they rode through
Stornham village they saw signs of work already done and work still in hand.
There were no broken windows or palings or hanging wicket gates; cottage
gardens had been put in order, and there were evidences of such cheering
touches as new bits of window curtain and strong-looking young plants blooming
between them. So many small, but necessary, things had been done that the whole
village wore the aspect of a place which had taken heart, and was facing
existence in a hopeful spirit. A year ago Mount Dunstan and his vicar riding
through it had been struck by its neglected and dispirited look.
As they entered the
hall of the Court Miss Vanderpoel was descending the staircase. She was
laughing a little to herself, and she looked pleased when she saw them.
"It is good of you
to come," she said, as they crossed the hall to the drawing-room.
"But I told him I really thought you would. I have just been talking to
him, and he was a little uncertain as to whether he had assumed too much."
"As to whether he
had 'butted in,' " said Mr. Penzance. "I think he must have said
that."
"He did. He also
was afraid that he might have been 'too fresh.' " answered Betty.
"On our
part," said Mr. Penzance, with gentle glee, "we hesitated a moment in
fear lest we also might appear to be 'butting in.' "
Then they all laughed
together. They were laughing when Lady Anstruthers entered, and she herself
joined them. But to Mount Dunstan, who felt her to be somehow a touching little
person, there was manifest a tenderness in her feeling for G. Selden. For that
matter, however, there was something already beginning to be rather
affectionate in the attitude of each of them. They went upstairs to find him
lying in state upon a big sofa placed near a window, and his joy at the sight
of them was a genuine, human thing. In fact, he had pondered a good deal in
secret on the possibility of these swell people thinking he had "more than
his share of gall" to expect them to remember him after he passed on his
junior assistant salesman's way. Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughters were of the
highest of his Four Hundred, but they were Americans, and Americans were not as
a rule so "stuck on themselves" as the English. And here these two
swells came as friendly as you please. And that nice old chap that was a vicar,
smiling and giving him "the glad hand"!
Betty and Mount Dunstan
left Mr. Penzance talking to the convalescent after a short time. Mount Dunstan
had asked to be shown the gardens. He wanted to see the wonderful things he had
heard had been already done to them.
They went down the
stairs together and passed through the drawing-room into the pleasure grounds.
The once neglected lawns had already been mown and rolled, clipped and trimmed,
until they spread before the eye huge measures of green velvet; even the beds
girdling and adorning them were brilliant with flowers.
"Kedgers!"
said Betty, waving her hand. "In my ignorance I thought we must wait for
blossoms until next year; but it appears that wonders can be brought all ready
to bloom for one from nursery gardens, and can be made to grow with care--and
daring--and passionate affection. I have seen Kedgers turn pale with anguish as
he hung over a bed of transplanted things which seemed to droop too long. They
droop just at first, you know, and then they slowly lift their heads, slowly,
as if to listen to a Voice calling--calling. Once I sat for quite a long time
before a rose, watching it. When I saw it begin to listen, I felt a little
trembling pass over my body. I seemed to be so strangely near to such a strange
thing. It was Life--Life coming back--in answer to what we cannot hear."
She had begun lightly,
and then her voice had changed. It was very quiet at the end of her speaking.
Mount Dunstan simply repeated her last words.
"To what we cannot
hear."
"One feels it so
much in a garden," she said. "I have never lived in a garden of my
own. This is not mine, but I have been living in it--with Kedgers. One is so
close to Life in it-- the stirring in the brown earth, the piercing through of
green spears, that breaking of buds and pouring forth of scent! Why shouldn't
one tremble, if one thinks? I have stood in a potting shed and watched Kedgers
fill a shallow box with damp rich mould and scatter over it a thin layer of
infinitesimal seeds; then he moistens them and carries them reverently to his
altars in a greenhouse. The ledges in Kedgers' greenhouses are altars. I think
he offers prayers before them. Why not? I should. And when one comes to see
them, the moist seeds are swelled to fulness, and when one comes again they are
bursting. And the next time, tiny green things are curling outward. And, at
last, there is a fairy forest of tiniest pale green stems and leaves. And one
is standing close to the Secret of the World! And why should not one prostrate
one's self, breathing softly--and touching one's awed forehead to the
earth?"
Mount Dunstan turned
and looked at her--a pause in his step--they were walking down a turfed path,
and over their heads meeting branches of new leaves hung. Something in his
movement made her turn and pause also. They both paused --and quite
unknowingly.
"Do you
know," he said, in a low and rather unusual voice, "that as we were
on our way here, I said of you to Penzance, that you were Life--you!"
For a few seconds, as
they stood so, his look held her--their eyes involuntarily and strangely held
each other. Something softly glowing in the sunlight falling on them both,
something raining down in the song of a rising skylark trilling in the blue a
field away, something in the warmed incense of blossoms near them, was calling--calling
in the Voice, though they did not know they heard. Strangely, a splendid blush
rose in a fair flood under her skin. She was conscious of it, and felt a
second's amazed impatience that she should colour like a schoolgirl suspecting
a compliment. He did not look at her as a man looks who has made a pretty
speech. His eyes met hers straight and thoughtfully, and he repeated his last
words as he had before repeated hers.
"That you were
Life--you!"
The bluebells under
water were for the moment incredibly lovely. Her feeling about the blush melted
away as the blush itself had done.
"I am glad you
said that!" she answered. "It was a beautiful thing to say. I have
often thought that I should like it to be true."
"It is true,"
he said.
Then the skylark,
showering golden rain, swept down to earth and its nest in the meadow, and they
walked on.
She learned from him,
as they walked together, and he also learned from her, in a manner which built
for them as they went from point to point, a certain degree of delicate
intimacy, gradually, during their ramble, tending to make discussion and
question possible. Her intelligent and broad interest in the work on the
estate, her frank desire to acquire such practical information as she lacked,
aroused in himself an interest he had previously seen no reason that he should
feel. He realised that his outlook upon the unusual situation was being
illuminated by an intelligence at once brilliant and fine, while it was also
full of nice shading. The situation, of course, was unusual. A beautiful young
sister-in-law appearing upon the dark horizon of a shamefully ill-used estate,
and restoring, with touches of a wand of gold, what a fellow who was a
blackguard should have set in order years ago. That Lady Anstruthers' money
should have rescued her boy's inheritance instead of being spent upon lavish
viciousness went without saying. What Mount Dunstan was most struck by was the
perfect clearness, and its combination with a certain judicial good breeding,
in Miss Vanderpoel's view of the matter. She made no confidences, beautifully
candid as her manner was, but he saw that she clearly understood the thing she
was doing, and that if her sister had had no son she would not have done this,
but something totally different. He had an idea that Lady Anstruthers would
have been swiftly and lightly swept back to New York, and Sir Nigel left to his
own devices, in which case Stornham Court and its village would gradually have
crumbled to decay. It was for Sir Ughtred Anstruthers the place was being
restored. She was quite clear on the matter of entail. He wondered at
first--not unnaturally--how a girl had learned certain things she had an
obviously clear knowledge of. As they continued to converse he learned. Reuben
S. Vanderpoel was without doubt a man remarkable not only in the matter of
being the owner of vast wealth. The rising flood of his millions had borne him
upon its strange surface a thinking, not an unthinking being--in fact, a strong
and fine intelligence. His thousands of miles of yearly journeying in his
sumptuous private car had been the means of his accumulating not merely added
gains, but ideas, points of view, emotions, a human outlook worth counting as
an asset. His daughter, when she had travelled with him, had seen and talked
with him of all he himself had seen. When she had not been his companion she
had heard from him afterwards all best worth hearing. She had become--without
any special process--familiar with the technicalities of huge business schemes,
with law and commerce and political situations. Even her childish interest in
the world of enterprise and labour had been passionate. So she had
acquired--inevitably, while almost unconsciously--a remarkable education.
"If he had not
been himself he might easily have grown tired of a little girl constantly
wanting to hear things-- constantly asking questions," she said. "But
he did not get tired. We invented a special knock on the door of his private
room. It said, 'May I come in, father?' If he was busy he answered with one
knock on his desk, and I went away. If he had time to talk he called out,
'Come, Betty,' and I went to him. I used to sit upon the floor and lean against
his knee. He had a beautiful way of stroking my hair or my hand as he talked.
He trusted me. He told me of great things even before he had talked of them to
men. He knew I would never speak of what was said between us in his room. That
was part of his trust. He said once that it was a part of the evolution of
race, that men had begun to expect of women what in past ages they really only
expected of each other."
Mount Dunstan hesitated
before speaking.
"You
mean--absolute faith--apart from affection?"
"Yes. The power to
be quite silent, even when one is tempted to speak--if to speak might betray
what it is wiser to keep to one's self because it is another man's affair. The
kind of thing which is good faith among business men. It applies to small
things as much as to large, and to other things than business."
Mount Dunstan,
recalling his own childhood and his own father, felt again the pressure of the
remote mental suggestion that she had had too much, a childhood and girlhood
like this, the affection and companionship of a man of large and ordered
intelligence, of clear and judicial outlook upon an immense area of life and
experience. There was no cause for wonder that her young womanhood was all it
presented to himself, as well as to others. Recognising the shadow of
resentment in his thought, he swept it away, an inward sense making it clear to
him that if their positions had been reversed, she would have been more
generous than himself.
He pulled himself
together with an unconscious movement of his shoulders. Here was the day of
early June, the gold of the sun in its morning, the green shadows, the turf
they walked on together, the skylark rising again from the meadow and showering
down its song. Why think of anything else. What a line that was which swept
from her chin down her long slim throat to its hollow! The colour between the
velvet of her close-set lashes--the remembrance of her curious splendid
blush--made the man's lost and unlived youth come back to him. What did it
matter whether she was American or English--what did it matter whether she was
insolently rich or beggarly poor? He would let himself go and forget all but
the pleasure of the sight and hearing of her.
So as they went they
found themselves laughing together and talking without restraint. They went
through the flower and kitchen gardens; they saw the once fallen wall rebuilt
now with the old brick; they visited the greenhouses and came upon Kedgers
entranced with business, but enraptured at being called upon to show his
treasures. His eyes, turning magnetised upon Betty, revealed the story of his
soul. Mount Dunstan remarked that when he spoke to her of his flowers it was as
if there existed between them the sympathy which might be engendered between
two who had sat up together night after night with delicate children.
"He's stronger
to-day, miss," he said, as they paused before a new wonderful bloom.
"What he's getting now is good for him. I had to change his food, miss,
but this seems all right. His colour's better."
Betty herself bent over
the flower as she might have bent over a child. Her eyes softened, she touched
a leaf with a slim finger, as delicately as if it had been a new-born baby's
cheek. As Mount Dunstan watched her he drew a step nearer to her side. For the
first time in his life he felt the glow of a normal and simple pleasure
untouched by any bitterness.
OLD DOBY, sitting at
his open window, with his pipe and illustrated papers on the table by his side,
began to find life a series of thrills. The advantage of a window giving upon
the village street unspeakably increased. For many years he had preferred the
chimney corner greatly, and had rejoiced at the drawing in of winter days when
a fire must be well kept up, and a man might bend over it, and rub his hands
slowly gazing into the red coals or little pointed flames which seemed the only
things alive and worthy the watching. The flames were blue at the base and
yellow at the top, and jumped looking merry, and caught at bits of black coal,
and set them crackling and throwing off splinters till they were ablaze and as
much alive as the rest. A man could get comfort and entertainment therefrom.
There was naught else so good to live with. Nothing happened in the street, and
every dull face that passed was an old story, and told an old tale of
stupefying hard labour and hard days.
But now the window was
a better place to sit near. Carts went by with men whistling as they walked by
the horses heads. Loads of things wanted for work at the Court. New faces
passed faces of workmen--sometimes grinning, "impident youngsters,"
who larked with the young women, and called out to them as they passed their
cottages, if a good-looking one was loitering about her garden gate. Old Doby
chuckled at their love-making chaff, remembering dimly that seventy years ago
he had been just as proper a young chap, and had made love in the same way.
Lord, Lord, yes! He had been a bold young chap as ever winked an eye. Then,
too, there were the vans, heavy-loaded and closed, and coming along slowly.
Every few days, at first, there had come a van from "Lunnon." Going
to the Court, of course. And to sit there, and hear the women talk about what
might be in them, and to try to guess one's self, that was a rare pastime. Fine
things going to the Court these days--furniture and grandeur filling up the
shabby or empty old rooms, and making them look like other big houses--same as
Westerbridge even, so the women said. The women were always talking and getting
bits of news somehow, and were beginning to be worth listening to, because they
had something more interesting to talk about than children's worn-out shoes,
and whooping cough.
Doby heard everything
first from them. "Dang the women, they always knowed things fust." It
was them as knowed about the smart carriages as began to roll through the one
village street. They were gentry's carriages, with fine, stamping horses, and
jingling silver harness, and big coachmen, and tall footmen, and such like had
long ago dropped off showing themselves at Stornham.
"But now the
gentry has heard about Miss Vanderpoel, and what's being done at the Court, and
they know what it means," said young Mrs. Doby. "And they want to see
her, and find out what she's like. It's her brings them."
Old Doby chuckled and
rubbed his hands. He knew what she was like. That straight, slim back of hers,
and the thick twist of black hair, and the way she had of laughing at you, as
cheery as if a bell was ringing. Aye, he knew all about that.
"When they see her
once, they'll come agen, for sure," he quavered shrilly, and day by day he
watched for the grand carriages with vivid eagerness. If a day or two passed
without his seeing one, he grew fretful, and was injured, feeling that his
beauty was being neglected! "None to-day, nor yet yest'day," he would
cackle. "What be they folk a-doin'?"
Old Mrs. Welden, having
heard of the pipe, and come to see it, had struck up an acquaintance with him,
and dropped in almost every day to talk and sit at his window. She was a young
thing, by comparison, and could bring him lively news, and, indeed, so stir him
up with her gossip that he was in danger of becoming a young thing himself. Her
groceries and his tobacco were subjects whose interest was undying.
A great curiosity had
been awakened in the county, and visitors came from distances greater than such
as ordinarily include usual calls. Naturally, one was curious about the daughter
of the Vanderpoel who was a sort of national institution in his own country.
His name had not been so much heard of in England when Lady Anstruthers had
arrived but there had, at first, been felt an interest in her. But she had been
a failure--a childish-looking girl--whose thin, fair, prettiness had no
distinction, and who was obviously overwhelmed by her surroundings. She had
evidently had no influence over Sir Nigel, and had not been able to prevent his
making ducks and drakes of her money, which of course ought to have been spent
on the estate. Besides which a married woman represented fewer potentialities
than a handsome unmarried girl entitled to expectations from huge American
wealth.
So the carriages came
and came again, and, stately or unstately far-off neighbours sat at tea upon
the lawn under the trees, and it was observed that the methods and appointments
of the Court had entirely changed. Nothing looked new and American. The
silently moving men-servants could not have been improved upon, there was
plainly an excellent chef somewhere, and the massive silver was old and
wonderful. Upon everybody's word, the change was such as it was worth a long
drive merely to see!
The most wonderful
thing, however, was Lady Anstruthers herself. She had begun to grow delicately
plump, her once drawn and haggard face had rounded out, her skin had smoothed,
and was actually becoming pink and fair, a nimbus of pale fine hair puffed
airily over her forehead, and she wore the most charming little clothes, all of
which made her look fifteen years younger than she had seemed when, on the
grounds of ill-health, she had retired into seclusion. The renewed relations
with her family, the atmosphere by which she was surrounded, had evidently
given her a fresh lease of life, and awakened in her a new courage.
When the summer
epidemic of garden parties broke forth, old Doby gleefully beheld, day after
day, the Court carriage drive by bearing her ladyship and her sister attired in
fairest shades and tints "same as if they was flowers." Their
delicate vaporousness, and rare colours, were sweet delights to the old man,
and he and Mrs. Welden spent happy evenings discussing them as personal
possessions. To these two Betty was a personal possession, bestowing upon them
a marked distinction. They were hers and she was theirs. No one else so owned
her. Heaven had given her to them that their last years might be lighted with
splendour.
On her way to one of
the garden parties she stopped the carriage before old Doby's cottage, and went
in to him to speak a few words. She was of pale convolvulus blue that
afternoon, and Doby, standing up touching his forelock and Mrs. Welden
curtsying, gazed at her with prayer in their eyes. She had a few flowers in her
hand, and a book of coloured photographs of Venice.
"These are
pictures of the city I told you about--the city built in the sea--where the
streets are water. You and Mrs. Welden can look at them together," she
said, as she laid flowers and book down. "I am going to Dunholm Castle to
a garden party this afternoon. Some day I will come and tell you about
it."
The two were at the
window staring spellbound, as she swept back to the carriage between the
sweet-williams and Canterbury bells bordering the narrow garden path.
"Do you know I
really went in to let them see my dress," she said, when she rejoined Lady
Anstruthers. "Old Doby's granddaughter told me that he and Mrs. Welden
have little quarrels about the colours I wear. It seems that they find my
wardrobe an absorbing interest. When I put the book on the table, I felt Doby
touch my sleeve with his trembling old hand. He thought I did not know."
"What will they do
with Venice?" asked Rosy.
"They will believe
the water is as blue as the photographs make it--and the palaces as pink. It
will seem like a chapter out of Revelations, which they can believe is true and
not merely 'Scriptur,'--because I have been there. I wish I had been to the
City of the Gates of Pearl, and could tell them about that."
On the lawns at the
garden parties she was much gazed at and commented upon. Her height and her
long slender neck held her head above those of other girls, the dense black of
her hair made a rich note of shadow amid the prevailing English blondness. Her
mere colouring set her apart. Rosy used to watch her with tender wonder,
recalling her memory of nine-year-old Betty, with the long slim legs and the
demanding and accusing child-eyes. She had always been this creature even in
those far-off days. At the garden party at Dunholm Castle it became evident
that she was, after a manner, unusually the central figure of the occasion. It
was not at all surprising, people said to each other. Nothing could have been
more desirable for Lord Westholt. He combined rank with fortune, and the
Vanderpoel wealth almost constituted rank in itself. Both Lord and Lady Dunholm
seemed pleased with the girl. Lord Dunholm showed her great attention. When she
took part in the dancing on the lawn, he looked on delightedly. He walked about
the gardens with her, and it was plain to see that their conversation was not
the ordinary polite effort to accord, usually marking the talk between a mature
man and a merely pretty girl. Lord Dunholm sometimes laughed with unfeigned
delight, and sometimes the two seemed to talk of grave things.
"Such occasions as
these are a sort of yearly taking of the social census of the county,"
Lord Dunholm explained. "One invites all one's neighbours and is invited
again. It is a friendly duty one owes."
"I do not see Lord
Mount Dunstan," Betty answered. "Is he here?"
She had never denied to
herself her interest in Mount Dunstan, and she had looked for him. Lord Dunholm
hesitated a second, as his son had done at Miss Vanderpoel's mention of the
tabooed name. But, being an older man, he felt more at liberty to speak, and
gave her a rather long kind look.
"My dear young
lady," he said, "did you expect to see him here?"
"Yes, I think I
did," Betty replied, with slow softness. "I believe I rather hoped I
should."
"Indeed! You are
interested in him?"
"I know him very
little. But I am interested. I will tell you why."
She paused by a seat
beneath a tree, and they sat down together. She gave, with a few swift vivid
touches, a sketch of the red-haired second-class passenger on the Meridiana, of
whom she had only thought that he was an unhappy, rough-looking young man,
until the brief moment in which they had stood face to face, each comprehending
that the other was to be relied on if the worst should come to the worst. She
had understood his prompt disappearance from the scene, and had liked it. When
she related the incident of her meeting with him when she thought him a mere
keeper on his own lands, Lord Dunholm listened with a changed and thoughtful
expression. The effect produced upon her imagination by what she had seen, her
silent wandering through the sad beauty of the wronged place, led by the man
who tried stiffly to bear himself as a servant, his unintended
self-revelations, her clear, well-argued point of view charmed him. She had
seen the thing set apart from its county scandal, and so had read possibilities
others had been blind to. He was immensely touched by certain things she said
about the First Man.
"He is one of
them," she said. "They find their way in the end--they find their
way. But just now he thinks there is none. He is standing in the dark--where
the roads meet."
"You think he will
find his way?" Lord Dunholm said. "Why do you think so? "
"Because I know he
will," she answered. "But I cannot tell you why I know."
"What you have
said has been interesting to me, because of the light your own thought threw
upon what you saw. It has not been Mount Dunstan I have been caring for, but
for the light you saw him in. You met him without prejudice, and you carried
the light in your hand. You always carry a light, my impression is," very
quietly. "Some women do."
"The prejudice you
speak of must be a bitter thing for a proud man to bear. Is it a just
prejudice? What has he done?"
Lord Dunholm was
gravely silent for a few moments.
"It is an
extraordinary thing to reflect,"--his words came slowly--"that it may
not be a just prejudice. I do not know that he has done anything--but seem
rather sulky, and be the son of his father, and the brother of his
brother."
"And go to
America," said Betty. "He could have avoided doing that--but he
cannot be called to account for his relations. If that is all--the prejudice is
not just."
"No, it is
not," said Lord Dunholm, "and one feels rather awkward at having
shared it. You have set me thinking again, Miss Vanderpoel."
THE SHUTTLE having in
its weaving caught up the thread of G. Selden's rudimentary existence and drawn
it, with the young man himself, across the sea, used curiously the thread in
question, in the forming of the design of its huge web. As wool and coarse
linen are sometimes interwoven with rich silk for decorative or utilitarian
purposes, so perhaps was this previously unvalued material employed.
It was, indeed, an
interesting truth that the young man, during his convalescence, without his own
knowledge, acted as a species of magnet which drew together persons who might
not easily otherwise have met. Mr. Penzance and Mount Dunstan rode over to see
him every few days, and their visits naturally established relations with
Stornham Court much more intimate than could have formed themselves in the same
length of time under any of the ordinary circumstances of country life.
Conventionalities lost their prominence in friendly intercourse with Selden. It
was not, however, that he himself desired to dispense with convention. His
intense wish to "do the right thing," and avoid giving offence was
the most ingenuous and touching feature of his broad cosmopolitan good nature.
"If I ever make a
break, sir," he had once said, with almost passionate fervour, in talking
to Mr. Penzance, "please tell me, and set me on the right track. No fellow
likes to look like a hoosier, but I don't mind that half as much as--as seeming
not to appreciate."
He used the word
"appreciate" frequently. It expressed for him many degrees of thanks.
"I tell you that's
fine," he said to Ughtred, who brought him a flower from the garden.
"I appreciate that."
To Betty he said more
than once:
"You know how I
appreciate all this, Miss Vanderpoel. You do know I appreciate it, don't
you?"
He had an immense
admiration for Mount Dunstan, and talked to him a great deal about America,
often about the sheep ranch, and what it might have done and ought to have
done. But his admiration for Mr. Penzance became affection. To him he talked
oftener about England, and listened to the vicar's scholarly stories of its
history, its past glories and its present ones, as he might have listened at
fourteen to stories from the Arabian Nights.
These two being
frequently absorbed in conversation, Mount Dunstan was rather thrown upon
Betty's hands. When they strolled together about the place or sat under the
deep shade of green trees, they talked not only of England and America, but of
divers things which increased their knowledge of each other. It is points of
view which reveal qualities, tendencies, and innate differences, or accordances
of thought, and the points of view of each interested the other.
"Mr. Selden is
asking Mr. Penzance questions about English history," Betty said, on one
of the afternoons in which they sat in the shade. "I need not ask you
questions. You are English history."
"And you are
American history," Mount Dunstan answered.
"I suppose I
am."
At one of their chance
meetings Miss Vanderpoel had told Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt something of
the story of G. Selden. The novelty of it had delighted and amused them. Lord
Dunholm had, at points, been touched as Penzance had been. Westholt had felt
that he must ride over to Stornham to see the convalescent. He wanted to learn
some New York slang. He would take lessons from Selden, and he would also buy a
Delkoff--two Delkoffs, if that would be better. He knew a hard-working fellow
who ought to have a typewriter.
"Heath ought to
have one," he had said to his father. Heath was the house-steward.
"Think of the letters the poor chap has to write to trades-people to order
things, and unorder them, and blackguard the shopkeepers when they are not
satisfactory. Invest in one for Heath, father."
"It is by no means
a bad idea," Lord Dunholm reflected. "Time would be saved by the use
of it, I have no doubt."
"It saves time in
any department where it can be used," Betty had answered. "Three are
now in use at Stornham, and I am going to present one to Kedgers. This is a
testimonial I am offering. Three weeks ago I began to use the Delkoff. Since
then I have used no other. If you use them you will introduce them to the
county."
She understood the
feeling of the junior assistant, when he found himself in the presence of
possible purchasers. Her blood tingled slightly. She wished she had brought a
catalogue.
"We will come to
Stornham to see the catalogue," Lord Dunholm promised.
"Perhaps you will
read it aloud to us," Westholt suggested gleefully.
"G. Selden knows
it by heart, and will repeat it to you with running comments. Do you know I
shall be very glad if you decide to buy one--or two--or three," with an
uplift of the Irish blue eyes to Lord Dunholm. "The blood of the first
Reuben Vanderpoel stirs in my veins--also I have begun to be fond of G.
Selden."
Therefore it occurred
that on the afternoon referred to Lady Anstruthers appeared crossing the sward
with two male visitors in her wake.
"Lord Dunholm and
Lord Westholt," said Betty, rising.
For this meeting
between the men Selden was, without doubt, responsible. While his father talked
to Mount Dunstan, Westholt explained that they had come athirst for the
catalogue. Presently Betty took him to the sheltered corner of the lawn, where
the convalescent sat with Mr. Penzance.
But, for a short time,
Lord Dunholm remained to converse with Mount Dunstan. In a way the situation
was delicate. To encounter by chance a neighbour whom one-- for reasons--has
not seen since his childhood, and to be equal to passing over and gracefully
obliterating the intervening years, makes demand even upon finished tact. Lord
Dunholm's world had been a large one, and he had acquired experience tending to
the development of the most perfect methods. If G. Selden had chanced to be the
magnet which had decided his course this special afternoon, Miss Vanderpoel it
was who had stirred in him sufficient interest in Mount Dunstan to cause him to
use the best of these methods when he found himself face to face with him.
He beautifully
eliminated the years, he eliminated all but the facts that the young man's
father and himself had been acquaintances in youth, that he remembered Mount
Dunstan himself as a child, that he had heard with interest of his visit to
America. Whatsoever the young man felt, he made no sign which presented
obstacles. He accepted the eliminations with outward composure. He was a
powerful-looking fellow, with a fine way of carrying his shoulders, and an eye
which might be able to light savagely, but just now, at least, he showed
nothing of the sulkiness he was accused of.
Lord Dunholm progressed
admirably with him. He soon found that he need not be upon any strain with
regard to the eliminations. The man himself could eliminate, which was an
assistance.
They talked together
when they turned to follow the others to the retreat of G. Selden.
"Have you bought a
Delkoff?" Lord Dunholm inquired.
"If I could have
afforded it, I should have bought one."
"I think that we
have come here with the intention of buying three. We did not know we required
them until Miss Vanderpoel recited half a page of the catalogue to us."
"Three will mean a
'rake off' of fifteen dollars to G. Selden," said Mount Dunstan. It was,
he saw, necessary that he should explain the meaning of a "rake off,"
and he did so to his companion's entertainment.
The afternoon was a
satisfactory one. They were all kind to G. Selden, and he on his part was an
aid to them. In his innocence he steered three of them, at least, through
narrow places into an open sea of easy intercourse. This was a good beginning.
The junior assistant was recovering rapidly, and looked remarkably well. The
doctor had told him that he might try to use his leg. The inside cabin of the
cheap Liner and "little old New York" were looming up before him. But
what luck he had had, and what a holiday! It had been enough to set a fellow up
for ten years' work. It would set up the boys merely to be told about it. He
didn't know what he had ever done to deserve such luck as had happened to him.
For the rest of his life he would he waving the Union Jack alongside of the
Stars and Stripes.
Mr. Penzance it was who
suggested that he should try the strength of the leg now.
"Yes," Mount
Dunstan said. "Let me help you."
As he rose to go to
him, Westholt good-naturedly got up also. They took their places at either side
of his invalid chair and assisted him to rise and stand on his feet.
"It's all right,
gentlemen. It's all right," he called out with a delighted flush, when he
found himself upright. "I believe I could stand alone. Thank you. Thank
you."
He was able, leaning on
Mount Dunstan's arm, to take a few steps. Evidently, in a short time, he would
find himself no longer disabled.
Mr. Penzance had
invited him to spend a week at the vicarage. He was to do this as soon as he
could comfortably drive from the one place to the other. After receiving the
invitation he had sent secretly to London for one of the Delkoffs he had
brought with him from America as a specimen. He cherished in private a plan of
gently entertaining his host by teaching him to use the machine. The vicar
would thus be prepared for that future in which surely a Delkoff must in some
way fall into his hands. Indeed, Fortune having at length cast an eye on himself,
might chance to favour him further, and in time he might be able to send a
"high-class machine" as a grateful gift to the vicarage. Perhaps Mr.
Penzance would accept it because he would understand what it meant of feeling
and appreciation.
During the afternoon
Lord Dunholm managed to talk a good deal with Mount Dunstan. There was no air
of intention in his manner, nevertheless intention was concealed beneath its
courteous amiability. He wanted to get at the man. Before they parted he felt
he had, perhaps, learned things opening up new points of view. . . . . .
In the smoking-room at
Dunholm that night he and his son talked of their chance encounter. It seemed
possible that mistakes had been made about Mount Dunstan. One did not form a
definite idea of a man's character in the course of an afternoon, but he
himself had been impressed by a conviction that there had been mistakes.
"We are rather a
stiff-necked lot--in the country--when we allow ourselves to be taken
possession of by an idea," Westholt commented.
"I am not at all
proud of the way in which we have taken things for granted," was his
father's summing up. "It is, perhaps, worth observing," taking his
cigar from his mouth and smiling at the end of it, as he removed the ash,
"that, but for Miss Vanderpoel and G. Selden, we might never have had an
opportunity of facing the fact that we may not have been giving fair play. And
one has prided one's self on one's fair play."
AT the close of a long,
warm afternoon Betty Vanderpoel came out upon the square stone terrace
overlooking the gardens, and that part of the park which, enclosing them,
caused them, as they melted into its greenness, to lose all limitations and
appear to be only a more blooming bit of the landscape.
Upon the garden Betty's
eyes dwelt, as she stood still for some minutes taking in their effect
thoughtfully.
Kedgers had certainly
accomplished much. His close-trimmed lawns did him credit, his flower beds were
flushed and azured, purpled and snowed with bloom. Sweet tall spires, hung with
blue or white or rosy flower bells, lifted their heads above the colour of
lower growths. Only the fervent affection, the fasting and prayer of a Kedgers
could have done such wonders with new things and old. The old ones he had
cherished and allured into a renewal of existence-- the new ones he had so
coaxed out of their earthen pots into the soil, luxuriously prepared for their
reception, and had afterwards so nourished and bedewed with soft waterings, so
supported, watched over and adored that they had been almost unconscious of
their transplanting. Without assistants he could have done nothing, but he had
been given a sufficient number of under gardeners, and had even managed to
inspire them with something of his own ambition and solicitude. The result was
before Betty's eyes in an aspect which, to such as knew the gardens well,--the
Dunholms, for instance,--was astonishing in its success.
"I've had
privileges, miss, and so have the flowers," Kedgers had said warmly, when
Miss Vanderpoel had reported to him, for his encouragement, Dunholm Castle's
praise. "Not one of 'em has ever had to wait for his food and drink, nor
to complain of his bed not being what he was accustomed to. They've not had to
wait for rain, for we've given it to 'em from watering cans, and, thank
goodness, the season's been kind to 'em."
Betty, descending the
terrace steps, wandered down the paths between the flower beds, glancing about
her as she went. The air of neglect and desolation had been swept away. Buttle
and Tim Soames had been given as many privileges as Kedgers. The chief points
impressed upon them had been that the work must be done, not only thoroughly,
but quickly. As many additional workmen as they required, as much solid
material as they needed, but there must be a despatch which at first it
staggered them to contemplate. They had not known such methods before. They had
been accustomed to work under money limitation throughout their lives, and,
when work must be done with insufficient aid, it must be done slowly. Economy
had been the chief factor in all calculations, speed had not entered into them,
so leisureliness had become a fixed habit. But it seemed American to sweep
leisureliness away into space with a free gesture.
"It must be done
quickly," Miss Vanderpoel had said. "If ten men cannot do it quickly
enough, you must have twenty--or as many more as are needed. It is time which
must be saved just now."
Time more than money,
it appeared. Buttle's experience had been that you might take time, if you did
not charge for it. When time began to mean money, that was a different matter.
If you did work by the job, you might drive in a few nails, loiter, and return
without haste; if you worked by the hour, your absence would be inquired into.
In the present case no one could loiter. That was realised early. The tall
girl, with the deep straight look at you, made you realise that without spoken
words. She expected energy something like her own. She was a new force and
spurred them. No man knew how it was done, but, when she appeared among
them--even in the afternoon--"lookin' that womany," holding up her
thin dress over lace petticoats, the like of which had not been seen before,
she looked on with just the same straight, expecting eyes. They did not seem to
doubt in the least that she would find that great advance had been made.
So advance had been
made, and work accomplished. As Betty walked from one place to another she saw
the signs of it with gratification. The place was not the one she had come to a
few months ago. Hothouses, outbuildings, stables were in repair. Work was still
being done in different places. In the house itself carpenters or decorators
were enclosed in some rooms, and at their business, but exterior order
prevailed. In the courtyard stablemen were at work, and her own groom came
forward touching his forehead. She paid a visit to the horses. They were fine
creatures, and, when she entered their stalls, made room for her and whinnied
gently, in well-founded expectation of sugar and bread which were kept in a
cupboard awaiting her visits. She smoothed velvet noses and patted satin sides,
talking to Mason a little before she went her way.
Then she strolled into
the park. The park was always a pleasure. She was in a thoughtful mood, and the
soft green shadowed silence lured her. The summer wind hus-s-shed the branches
as it lightly waved them, the brown earth of the avenue was sun-dappled, there were
bird notes and calls to be heard here and there and everywhere, if one only
arrested one's attention a moment to listen. And she was in a listening and
dreaming mood--one of the moods in which bird, leaf, and wind, sun, shade, and
scent of growing things have part.
And yet her thoughts
were of mundane things.
It was on this avenue
that G. Selden had met with his accident. He was still at Dunstan vicarage, and
yesterday Mount Dunstan, in calling, had told them that Mr. Penzance was
applying himself with delighted interest to a study of the manipulation of the
Delkoff.
The thought of Mount
Dunstan brought with it the thought of her father. This was because there was
frequently in her mind a connection between the two. How would the man of
schemes, of wealth, and power almost unbounded, regard the man born with a load
about his neck-chained to earth by it, standing in the midst of his hungering
and thirsting possessions, his hands empty of what would feed them and restore
their strength? Would he see any solution of the problem? She could imagine his
looking at the situation through his gaze at the man, and considering both in
his summing up.
"Circumstances and
the man," she had heard him say. "But always the man first."
Being no visionary, he
did not underestimate the power of circumstance. This Betty had learned from
him. And what could practically be done with circumstance such as this? The
question had begun to recur to her. What could she herself have done in the
care of Rosy and Stornham, if chance had not placed in her hand the strongest
lever? What she had accomplished had been easy--easy. All that had been
required had been the qualities which control of the lever might itself tend to
create in one. Given--by mere chance again--imagination and initiative, the
moving of the lever did the rest. If chance had not been on one's side, what
then? And where was this man's chance? She had said to Rosy, in speaking of the
wealth of America, "Sometimes one is tired of it." And Rosy had
reminded her that there were those who were not tired of it, who could bear
some of the burden of it, if it might be laid on their own shoulders. The great
beautiful, blind-faced house, awaiting its slow doom in the midst of its lonely
unfed lands--what could save it, and all it represented of race and name, and
the stately history of men, but the power one professed to call base and
sordid--mere money? She felt a sudden impatience at herself for having said she
was tired of it. That was a folly which took upon itself the aspect of an
affectation.
And, if a man could not
earn money--or go forth to rob richer neighbours of it as in the good old
marauding days-- or accept it if it were offered to him as a gift--what could
he do? Nothing. If he had been born a village labourer, he could have earned by
the work of his hands enough to keep his cottage roof over him, and have held
up his head among his fellows. But for such as himself there was no mere labour
which would avail. He had not that rough honest resource. Only the decent
living and orderly management of the generations behind him would have left to
him fairly his own chance to hold with dignity the place in the world into
which Fate had thrust him at the outset--a blind, newborn thing of whom no
permission had been asked.
"If I broke stones
upon the highway for twelve hours a day, I might earn two shillings," he
had said to Betty, on the previous day. "I could break stones well,"
holding out a big arm, "but fourteen shillings a week will do no more than
buy bread and bacon for a stonebreaker."
He was ordinarily
rather silent and stiff in his conversational attitude towards his own affairs.
Betty sometimes wondered how she herself knew so much about them--how it
happened that her thoughts so often dwelt upon them. The explanation she had
once made to herself had been half irony, half serious reflection.
"It is a result of
the first Reuben Vanderpoel. It is because I am of the fighting commercial
stock, and, when I see a business problem, I cannot leave it alone, even when
it is no affair of mine."
As an exposition of the
type of the commercial fighting-stock she presented, as she paused beneath
overshadowing trees, an aspect beautifully suggesting a far different thing.
She stood--all white
from slim shoe to tilted parasol,--and either the result of her inspection of
the work done by her order, or a combination of her summer-day mood with her
feeling for the problem, had given her a special radiance. It glowed on lip and
cheek, and shone in her Irish eyes.
She had paused to look
at a man approaching down the avenue. He was not a labourer, and she did not
know him. Men who were not labourers usually rode or drove, and this one was
walking. He was neither young nor old, and, though at a distance his aspect was
not attracting, she found that she regarded him curiously, and waited for him
to draw nearer.
The man himself was
glancing about him with a puzzled look and knitted forehead. When he had passed
through the village he had seen things he had not expected to see; when he had
reached the entrance gate, and--for reasons of his own --dismissed his station
trap, he had looked at the lodge scrutinisingly, because he was not prepared
for its picturesque trimness. The avenue was free from weeds and in order, the
two gates beyond him were new and substantial. As he went on his way and
reached the first, he saw at about a hundred yards distance a tall girl in
white standing watching him. Things which were not easily explainable always
irritated him. That this place--which was his own affair--should present an air
of mystery, did not improve his humour, which was bad to begin with. He had
lately been passing through unpleasant things, which had left him feeling
himself tricked and made ridiculous--as only women can trick a man and make him
ridiculous, he had said to himself. And there had been an acrid consolation in
looking forward to the relief of venting one's self on a woman who dare not
resent.
"What has
happened, confound it!" he muttered, when he caught sight of the girl.
"Have we set up a house party?" And then, as he saw more distinctly,
"Damn! What a figure!"
By this time Betty
herself had begun to see more clearly. Surely this was a face she
remembered--though the passing of years and ugly living had thickened and
blurred, somewhat, its always heavy features. Suddenly she knew it, and the
look in its eyes--the look she had, as a child, unreasoningly hated.
Nigel Anstruthers had
returned from his private holiday.
As she took a few quiet
steps forward to meet him, their eyes rested on each other. After a night or
two in town his were slightly bloodshot, and the light in them was not
agreeable.
It was he who spoke
first, and it is possible that he did not quite intend to use the expletive
which broke from him. But he was remembering things also. Here were eyes he,
too, had seen before--twelve years ago in the face of an objectionable,
long-legged child in New York. And his own hatred of them had been founded in
his own opinion on the best of reasons. And here they gazed at him from the
face of a young beauty--for a beauty she was.
"Damn it!" he
exclaimed; "it is Betty."
"Yes," she
answered, with a faint, but entirely courteous, smile. "It is. I hope you
are very well."
She held out her hand.
"A delicious hand," was what he said to himself, as he took it. And
what eyes for a girl to have in her head were those which looked out at him
between shadows. Was there a hint of the devil in them? He thought so--he hoped
so, since she had descended on the place in this way. But what the devil was
the meaning of her being on the spot at all? He was, however, far beyond the
lack of astuteness which might have permitted him to express this last thought
at this particular juncture. He was only betrayed into stupid mistakes, afterwards
to be regretted, when rage caused him utterly to lose control of his wits. And,
though he was startled and not exactly pleased, he was not in a rage now. The
eyelashes and the figure gave an agreeable fillip to his humour. Howsoever she
had come, she was worth looking at.
"How could one
expect such a delightful thing as this?" he said, with a touch of ironic
amiability. "It is more than one deserves."
"It is very polite
of you to say that," answered Betty.
He was thinking rapidly
as he stood and gazed at her. There were, in truth, many things to think of
under circumstances so unexpected.
"May I ask you to
excuse my staring at you?" he inquired with what Rosy had called his
"awful, agreeable smile." "When I saw you last you were a fierce
nine-year-old American child. I use the word 'fierce' because--if you'll pardon
my saying so--there was a certain ferocity about you."
"I have learned at
various educational institutions to conceal it," smiled Betty.
"May I ask when
you arrived?"
"A short time
after you went abroad."
"Rosalie did not
inform me of your arrival."
"She did not know
your address. You had forgotten to leave it."
He had made a mistake
and realised it. But she presented to him no air of having observed his slip.
He paused a few seconds, still regarding her and still thinking rapidly. He
recalled the mended windows and roofs and palings in the village, the park
gates and entrance. Who the devil had done all that? How could a mere handsome
girl be concerned in it? And yet--here she was.
"When I drove
through the village," he said next, "I saw that some remarkable
changes had taken place on my property. I feel as if you can explain them to
me."
"I hope they are
changes which meet with your approval."
"Quite--quite,"
a little curtly. "Though I confess they mystify me. Though I am the
son-in-law of an American multimillionaire, I could not afford to make such
repairs myself."
A certain small
spitefulness which was his most frequent undoing made it impossible for him to
resist adding the innuendo in his last sentence. And again he saw it was a
folly. The impersonal tone of her reply simply left him where he had placed
himself.
"We were sorry not
to be able to reach you. As it seemed well to begin the work at once, we
consulted Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard."
"We?" he
repeated. "Am I to have the pleasure," with a slight wryness of the
mouth, "of finding Mr. Vanderpoel also at Stornham?"
"No--not yet. As I
was on the spot, I saw your solicitors and asked their advice and approval--for
my father. If he had known how necessary the work was, it would have been done
before, for Ughtred's sake."
Her voice was that of a
person who, in stating obvious facts, provides no approach to enlightening
comment upon them. And there was in her manner the merest gracious
impersonality.
"Do I understand
that Mr. Vanderpoel employed someone to visit the place and direct the
work?"
"It was really not
difficult to direct. It was merely a matter of engaging labour and competent
foremen."
An odd expression rose
in his eyes.
"You suggest a
novel idea, upon my word," he said. "Is it possible--you see I know
something of America--is it possible I must thank you for the working of this
magic?"
"You need not
thank me," she said, rather slowly, because it was necessary that she also
should think of many things at once. "I could not have helped doing
it."
She wished to make all
clear to him before he met Rosy. She knew it was not unnatural that the
unexpectedness of his appearance might deprive Lady Anstruthers of presence of
mind. Instinct told her that what was needed in intercourse with him was, above
all things, presence of mind.
"I will tell you
about it," she said. "We will walk slowly up and down here, if you do
not object."
He did not object. He
wanted to hear the story as he could not hear it from his nervous little fool
of a wife, who would be frightened into forgetting things and their sequence.
What he meant to discover was where he stood in the matter--where his father-in-law
stood, and, rather specially, to have a chance to sum up the weaknesses and
strengths of the new arrival. That would be to his interest. In talking this
thing over she would unconsciously reveal how much vanity or emotion or
inexperience he might count upon as factors safe to use in one's dealings with
her in the future.
As he listened he was
supported by the fact that he did not lose consciousness of the eyes and the
figure. But for these it is probable that he would have gone blind with fury at
certain points which forced themselves upon him. The first was that there had
been an absurd and immense expenditure which would simply benefit his son and
not himself. He could not sell or borrow money on what had been given.
Apparently the place had been re-established on a footing such as it had not
rested upon during his own generation, or his father's. As he loathed life in
the country, it was not he who would enjoy its luxury, but his wife and her
child. The second point was that these people--this girl--had somehow had the
sharpness to put themselves in the right, and to place him in a position at
which he could not complain without putting himself in the wrong. Public
opinion would say that benefits had been heaped upon him, that the correct
thing had been done correctly with the knowledge and approval of the legal
advisers of his family. It had been a masterly thing, that visit to Townlinson
& Sheppard. He was obliged to aid his self-control by a glance at the
eyelashes. She was a new sort of girl, this Betty, whose childhood he had
loathed, and, to his jaded taste, novelty appealed enormously. Her attraction
for him was also added to by the fact that he was not at all sure that there
was not combined with it a pungent spice of the old detestation. He was
repelled as well as allured. She represented things which he hated. First, the
mere material power, which no man can bully, whatsoever his humour. It was the
power he most longed for and, as he could not hope to possess it, most sneered
at and raged against. Also, as she talked, it was plain that her habit of
self-control and her sense of resource would be difficult to deal with. He was
a survival of the type of man whose simple creed was that women should not
possess resources, as when they possessed them they could rarely be made to
behave themselves.
But while he thought
these things, he walked by her side and both listened and talked smiling the
agreeable smile.
"You will pardon
my dull bewilderment," he said. "It is not unnatural, is it--in a mere
outsider?"
And Betty, with the
beautiful impersonal smile, said:
"We felt it so
unfortunate that even your solicitors did not know your address."
When, at length, they
turned and strolled towards the house, a carriage was drawing up before the
door, and at the sight of it, Betty saw her companion slightly lift his
eyebrows. Lady Anstruthers had been out and was returning. The groom got down
from the box, and two men-servants appeared upon the steps. Lady Anstruthers
descended, laughing a little as she talked to Ughtred, who had been with her.
She was dressed in clear, pale grey, and the soft rose lining of her parasol
warmed the colour of her skin.
Sir Nigel paused a
second and put up his glass.
"Is that my
wife?" he said. "Really! She quite recalls New York."
The agreeable smile was
on his lips as he hastened forward. He always more or less enjoyed coming upon
Rosalie suddenly. The obvious result was a pleasing tribute to his power.
Betty, following him,
saw what occurred.
Ughtred saw him first,
and spoke quick and low.
"Mother!" he
said.
The tone of his voice
was evidently enough. Lady Anstruthers turned with an unmistakable start. The
rose lining of her parasol ceased to warm her colour. In fact, the parasol
itself stepped aside, and she stood with a blank, stiff, white face.
"My dear
Rosalie," said Sir Nigel, going towards her. "You don't look very
glad to see me."
He bent and kissed her
quite with the air of a devoted husband. Knowing what the caress meant, and seeing
Rosy's face as she submitted to it, Betty felt rather cold. After the conjugal
greeting he turned to Ughtred.
"You look
remarkably well," he said.
Betty came forward.
"We met in the
park, Rosy," she explained. "We have been talking to each other for
half an hour."
The atmosphere which
had surrounded her during the last three months had done much for Lady
Anstruthers' nerves. She had the power to recover herself. Sir Nigel himself
saw this when she spoke.
"I was startled
because I was not expecting to see you," she said. "I thought you
were still on the Riviera. I hope you had a pleasant journey home."
"I had an
extraordinarily pleasant surprise in finding your sister here," he
answered. And they went into the house.
In descending the staircase
on his way to the drawing-room before dinner, Sir Nigel glanced about him with
interested curiosity. If the village had been put in order, something more had
been done here. Remembering the worn rugs and the bald-headed tiger, he lifted
his brows. To leave one's house in a state of resigned dilapidation and return
to find it filled with all such things as comfort combined with excellent taste
might demand, was an enlivening experience--or would have been so under some
circumstances. As matters stood, perhaps, he might have felt better pleased if
things had been less well done. But they were very well done. They had managed
to put themselves in the right in this also. The rich sobriety of colour and
form left no opening for supercilious comment--which was a neat weapon it was
annoying to be robbed of.
The drawing-room was
fresh, brightly charming, and full of flowers. Betty was standing before an
open window with her sister. His wife's shoulders, he observed at once, had
absolutely begun to suggest contours. At all events, her bones no longer stuck
out. But one did not look at one's wife's shoulders when one could turn from
them to a fairness of velvet and ivory.
"You know,"
he said, approaching them, "I find all this very amazing. I have been
looking out of my window on to the gardens."
"It is Betty who
has done it all," said Rosy.
"I did not suspect
you of doing it, my dear Rosalie," smiling. "When I saw Betty
standing in the avenue, I knew at once that it was she who had mended the
chimney-pots in the village and rehung the gates."
For the present, at
least, it was evident that he meant to be sufficiently amiable. At the dinner
table he was conversational and asked many questions, professing a natural
interest in what had been done. It was not difficult to talk to a girl whose
eyes and shoulders combined themselves with a quick wit and a power to attract
which he reluctantly owned he had never seen equalled. His reluctance arose
from the fact that such a power complicated matters. He must be on the
defensive until he knew what she was going to do, what he must do himself, and
what results were probable or possible. He had spent his life in intrigue of
one order or another. He enjoyed outwitting people and rather preferred to
attain an end by devious paths. He began every acquaintance on the defensive.
His argument was that you never knew how things would turn out, consequently,
it was as well to conduct one's self at the outset with the discreet
forethought of a man in the presence of an enemy. He did not know how things
would turn out in Betty's case, and it was a little confusing to find one's
self watching her with a sense of excitement. He would have preferred to be
cool--to be cold--and he realised that he could not keep his eyes off her.
"I remember, with
regret," he said to her later in the evening, "that when you were a
child we were enemies."
"I am afraid we
were," was Betty's impartial answer.
"I am sure it was
my fault," he said. "Pray forget it. Since you have accomplished such
wonders, will you not, in the morning, take me about the place and explain to
me how it has been done?"
When Betty went to her
room she dismissed her maid as soon as possible, and sat for some time alone
and waiting. She had had no opportunity to speak to Rosy in private, and she
was sure she would come to her. In the course of half an hour she heard a knock
at the door.
Yes, it was Rosy, and
her newly-born colour had fled and left her looking dragged again. She came
forward and dropped into a low chair near Betty, letting her face fall into her
hands.
"I'm very sorry,
Betty," she half whispered, "but it is no use."
"What is no
use?" Betty asked.
"Nothing is any
use. All these years have made me such a coward. I suppose I always was a
coward, but in the old days there never was anything to be afraid of."
"What are you most
afraid of now?"
"I don't know.
That is the worst. I am afraid of him-- just of himself--of the look in his
eyes--of what he may be planning quietly. My strength dies away when he comes
near me."
"What has he said
to you?" she asked.
"He came into my
dressing-room and sat and talked. He looked about from one thing to another and
pretended to admire it all and congratulated me. But though he did not sneer at
what he saw, his eyes were sneering at me. He talked about you. He said that
you were a very clever woman. I don't know how he manages to imply that a very
clever woman is something cunning and debased--but it means that when he says it.
It seems to insinuate things which make one grow hot all over."
She put out a hand and
caught one of Betty's.
"Betty,
Betty," she implored. "Don't make him angry. Don't."
"I am not going to
begin by making him angry," Betty said. "And I do not think he will
try to make me angry-- at first."
"No, he will
not," cried Rosalie. "And--and you remember what I told you when
first we talked about him?"
"And do you
remember," was Betty's answer, "what I said to you when I first met
you in the park? If we were to cable to New York this moment, we could receive
an answer in a few hours."
"He would not let
us do it," said Rosy. "He would stop us in some way--as he stopped my
letters to mother--as he stopped me when I tried to run away. Oh, Betty, I know
him and you do not."
"I shall know him
better every day. That is what I must do. I must learn to know him. He said
something more to you than you have told me, Rosy. What was it?"
"He waited until
Detcham left me," Lady Anstruthers confessed, more than half reluctantly.
"And then he got up to go away, and stood with his hands resting on the
chairback, and spoke to me in a low, queer voice. He said, 'Don't try to play
any tricks on me, my good girl--and don't let your sister try to play any. You
would both have reason to regret it.' "
She was a
half-hypnotised thing, and Betty, watching her with curious but tender eyes,
recognised the abnormality.
"Ah, if I am a
clever woman," she said, "he is a clever man. He is beginning to see
that his power is slipping away. That was what G. Selden would call 'bluff.'
"
SIR NIGEL did not
invite Rosalie to accompany them, when the next morning, after breakfast, he
reminded Betty of his suggestion of the night before, that she should walk over
the place with him, and show him what had been done. He preferred to make his
study of his sister-in-law undisturbed.
There was no detail
whose significance he missed as they went about together. He had keen eyes and
was a quite sufficiently practical person on such matters as concerned his own
interests. In this case it was to his interest to make up his mind as to what
he might gain or lose by the appearance of his wife's family. He did not mean
to lose--if it could be helped-- anything either of personal importance or
material benefit. And it could only be helped by his comprehending clearly what
he had to deal with. Betty was, at present, the chief factor in the situation,
and he was sufficiently astute to see that she might not be easy to read. His
personal theories concerning women presented to him two or three effective ways
of managing them. You made love to them, you flattered them either subtly or
grossly, you roughly or smoothly bullied them, or you harrowed them with
haughty indifference--if your love-making had produced its proper effect--when
it was necessary to lure or drive or trick them into submission. Women should
be made useful in one way or another. Little fool as she was, Rosalie had been
useful. He had, after all was said and done, had some comparatively easy years
as the result of her existence. But she had not been useful enough, and there
had even been moments when he had wondered if he had made a mistake in
separating her entirely from her family. There might have been more to be
gained if he had allowed them to visit her and had played the part of a devoted
husband in their presence. A great bore, of course, but they could not have
spent their entire lives at Stornham. Twelve years ago, however, he had known
very little of Americans, and he had lost his temper. He was really very fond
of his temper, and rather enjoyed referring to it with tolerant regret as being
a bad one and beyond his control--with a manner which suggested that the
attribute was the inevitable result of strength of character and masculine
spirit. The luxury of giving way to it was a great one, and it was exasperating
as he walked about with this handsome girl to find himself beginning to suspect
that, where she was concerned, some self-control might be necessary. He was led
to this thought because the things he took in on all sides could only have been
achieved by a person whose mind was a steadily-balanced thing. In one's
treatment of such a creature, methods must be well chosen. The crudest had
sufficed to overwhelm Rosalie. He tried two or three little things as
experiments during their walk.
The first was to touch
with dignified pathos on the subject of Ughtred. Betty, he intimated gently,
could imagine what a man's grief and disappointment might be on finding his son
and heir deformed in such a manner. The delicate reserve with which he managed
to convey his fear that Rosalie's own uncontrolled hysteric attacks had been
the cause of the misfortune was very well done. She had, of course, been very young
and much spoiled, and had not learned self-restraint, poor girl.
It was at this point
that Betty first realised a certain hideous thing. She must actually remain
silent--there would be at the outset many times when she could only protect her
sister by refraining from either denial or argument. If she turned upon him now
with refutation, it was Rosy who would be called upon to bear the consequences.
He would go at once to Rosy, and she herself would have done what she had said
she would not do--she would have brought trouble upon the poor girl before she
was strong enough to bear it. She suspected also that his intention was to
discover how much she had heard, and if she might be goaded into betraying her
attitude in the matter.
But she was not to be so
goaded. He watched her closely and her very colour itself seemed to be under
her own control. He had expected--if she had heard hysteric, garbled stories
from his wife--to see a flame of scarlet leap up on the cheek he was admiring.
There was no such leap, which was baffling in itself. Could it be that
experience had taught Rosalie the discretion of keeping her mouth shut?
"I am very fond of
Ughtred," was the sole comment he was granted. "We made friends from
the first. As he grows older and stronger, his misfortune may be less apparent.
He will be a very clever man."
"He will be a very
clever man if he is at all like----" He checked himself with a slight
movement of his shoulders. "I was going to say a thing utterly banal. I
beg your pardon. I forgot for the moment that I was not talking to an English
girl."
It was so stupid that
she turned and looked at him, smiling faintly. But her answer was quite mild
and soft.
"Do not deprive me
of compliments because I am a mere American," she said. "I am very
fond of them, and respond at once."
"You are very
daring," he said, looking straight into her eyes--"deliciously so.
American women always are, I think."
"The young
devil," he was saying internally. "The beautiful young devil! She
throws one off the track."
He found himself more
and more attracted and exasperated as they made their rounds. It was his sense
of being attracted which was the cause of his exasperation. A girl who could
stir one like this would be a dangerous enemy. Even as a friend she would not
be safe, because one faced the absurd peril of losing one's head a little and
forgetting the precautions one should never lose sight of where a woman was
concerned--the precautions which provided for one's holding a good taut rein in
one's own hands.
They went from gardens
to greenhouses, from greenhouses to stables, and he was on the watch for the
moment when she would reveal some little feminine pose or vanity, but, this
morning, at least, she laid none bare. She did not strike him as a being of
angelic perfections, but she was very modern and not likely to show easily any
openings in her armour.
"Of course, I
continue to be amazed," he commented, "though one ought not to be
amazed at anything which evolves from your extraordinary country. In spite of
your impersonal air, I shall persist in regarding you as my benefactor. But, to
be frank, I always told Rosalie that if she would write to your father he would
certainly put things in order."
"She did write
once, you will remember," answered Betty.
"Did she?"
with courteous vagueness. "Really, I am afraid I did not hear of it. My
poor wife has her own little ideas about the disposal of her income."
And Betty knew that she
was expected to believe that Rosy had hoarded the money sent to restore the
place, and from sheer weak miserliness had allowed her son's heritage to fall
to ruin. And but for Rosy's sake, she might have stopped upon the path and,
looking at him squarely, have said, "You are lying to me. And I know the
truth."
He continued to
converse amiably.
"Of course, it is
you one must thank, not only for rousing in the poor girl some interest in her
personal appearance, but also some interest in her neighbours. Some women,
after they marry and pass girlhood, seem to release their hold on all desire to
attract or retain friends. For years Rosalie has given herself up to a chronic
semi-invalidism. When the mistress of a house is always depressed and languid
and does not return visits, neighbours become discouraged and drop off, as it
were."
If his wife had told
stories to gain her sympathy his companion would be sure to lose her temper and
show her hand. If he could make her openly lose her temper, he would have made
an advance.
"One can quite
understand that," she said. "It is a great happiness to me to see
Rosy gaining ground every day. She has taken me out with her a good many times,
and people are beginning to realise that she likes to see them at
Stornham."
"You are very
delightful," he said, "with your 'She has taken me out.' When I
glanced at the magnificent array of cards on the salver in the hall, I realised
a number of things, and quite vulgarly lost my breath. The Dunholms have been
very amiable in recalling our existence. But charming Americans-- of your
order--arouse amiable emotions."
"I am very amiable
myself," said Betty.
It was he who flushed
now. He was losing patience at feeling himself held with such lightness at
arm's length, and at being, in spite of himself, somehow compelled to continue
to assume a jocular courtesy.
"No, you are
not," he answered.
"Not?"
repeated Betty, with an incredulous lifting of her brows.
"You are charming
and clever, but I rather suspect you of being a vixen. At all events you are a
spirited young woman and quick-witted enough to understand the attraction you
must have for the sordid herd."
And then he became
aware--if not of an opening in her armour--at least of a joint in it. For he
saw, near her ear, a deepening warmth. That was it. She was quick-witted, and
she hid somewhere a hot pride.
"I confess,
however," he proceeded cheerfully, "that notwithstanding my own
experience of the habits of the sordid herd, I saw one card I was surprised to
find, though really" --shrugging his shoulders--"I ought to have been
less surprised to find it than to find any other. But it was bold. I suppose
the fellow is desperate."
"You are speaking
of----?" suggested Betty.
"Of Mount Dunstan.
Hang it all, it was bold!" As if in half-amused disgust.
As she had walked
through the garden paths, Betty had at intervals bent and gathered a flower,
until she held in one hand a loose, fair sheaf. At this moment she stooped to
break off a spire of pale blue campanula. And she was--as with a shock --struck
with a consciousness that she bent because she must-- because to do so was a
refuge--a concealment of something she must hide. It had come upon her without
a second's warning. Sir Nigel was right. She was a vixen--a virago. She was in
such a rage that her heart sprang up and down and her cheek and eyes were on
fire. Her long-trained control of herself was gone. And her shock was a
lightning-swift awakening to the fact that she felt all this--she must hide her
face--because it was this one man--just this one and no other--who was being
dragged into this thing with insult.
It was an awakening,
and she broke off, rather slowly, one-- two--three--even four campanula stems
before she stood upright again.
As for Nigel
Anstruthers--he went on talking in his low-pitched, disgusted voice.
"Surely he might
count himself out of the running. There will be a good deal of running, my dear
Betty. You fair Americans have learned that by this time. But that a man who
has not even a decent name to offer--who is blackballed by his county--should
coolly present himself as a pretendant is an insolence he should be kicked
for."
Betty arranged her
campanulas carefully. There was no exterior reason why she should draw sword in
Lord Mount Dunstan's defence. He had certainly not seemed to expect anything
intimately interested from her. His manner she had generally felt to be rather
restrained. But one could, in a measure, express one's self.
"Whatsoever the
'running,' " she remarked, "no pretendant has complimented me by
presenting himself, so far--and Lord Mount Dunstan is physically an unusually
strong man."
"You mean it would
be difficult to kick him? Is this partisanship? I hope not. Am I to
understand," he added with deliberation, "that Rosalie has received
him here?"
"Yes."
"And that you have
received him, also--as you have received Lord Westholt?"
"Quite."
"Then I must
discuss the matter with Rosalie. It is not to be discussed with you."
"You mean that you
will exercise your authority in the matter?"
"In England, my
dear girl, the master of a house is still sometimes guilty of exercising
authority in matters which concern the reputation of his female relatives. In
the absence of your father, I shall not allow you, while you are under my roof,
to endanger your name in any degree. I am, at least, your brother by marriage.
I intend to protect you."
"Thank you,"
said Betty.
"You are young and
extremely handsome, you will have an enormous fortune, and you have evidently
had your own way all your life. A girl, such as you are, may either make a
magnificent marriage or a ridiculous and humiliating one. Neither American
young women, nor English young men, are as disinterested as they were some
years ago. Each has begun to learn what the other has to give."
"I think that is
true," commented Betty.
"In some cases
there is a good deal to be exchanged on both sides. You have a great deal to
give, and should get exchange worth accepting. A beggared estate and a tainted
title are not good enough."
"That is businesslike,"
Betty made comment again.
Sir Nigel laughed
quietly.
"The fact is--I
hope you won't misunderstand my saying it--you do not strike me as being
un-businesslike, yourself."
"I am not,"
answered Betty.
"I thought
not," rather narrowing his eyes as he watched her, because he believed
that she must involuntarily show her hand if he irritated her sufficiently.
"You do not impress me as being one of the girls who make unsuccessful
marriages. You are a modern New York beauty--not an early Victorian
sentimentalist." He did not despair of results from his process of
irritation. To gently but steadily convey to a beautiful and spirited young
creature that no man could approach her without ulterior motive was rather a
good idea. If one could make it clear--with a casual air of sensibly taking it
for granted-- that the natural power of youth, wit, and beauty were rendered
impotent by a greatness of fortune whose proportions obliterated all else; if
one simply argued from the premise that young love was no affair of hers, since
she must always be regarded as a gilded chattel, whose cost was writ large in
plain figures, what girl, with blood in her veins, could endure it long without
wincing? This girl had undue, and, as he regarded such matters, unseemly
control over her temper and her nerves, but she had blood enough in her veins,
and presently she would say or do something which would give him a lead.
"When you
marry----" he began.
She lifted her head
delicately, but ended the sentence for him with eyes which were actually not
unsmiling.
"When I marry, I
shall ask something in exchange for what I have to give."
"If the exchange
is to be equal, you must ask a great deal," he answered. "That is why
you must be protected from such fellows as Mount Dunstan."
"If it becomes
necessary, perhaps I shall be able to protect myself," she said.
"Ah!"
regretfully, "I am afraid I have annoyed you-- and that you need
protection more than you suspect." If she were flesh and blood, she could
scarcely resist resenting the implication contained in this. But resist it she
did, and with a cool little smile which stirred him to sudden, if irritated,
admiration.
She paused a second,
and used the touch of gentle regret herself.
"You have wounded
my vanity by intimating that my admirers do not love me for myself alone."
He paused, also, and,
narrowing his eyes again, looked straight between her lashes.
"They ought to
love you for yourself alone," he said, in a low voice. "You are a
deucedly attractive girl."
"Oh, Betty,"
Rosy had pleaded, "don't make him angry --don't make him angry."
So Betty lifted her
shoulders slightly without comment.
"Shall we go back
to the house now?" she said. "Rosalie will naturally be anxious to
hear that what has been done in your absence has met with your approval."
In what manner his
approval was expressed to Rosalie, Betty did not hear this morning, at least.
Externally cool though she had appeared, the process had not been without its
results, and she felt that she would prefer to be alone.
"I must write some
letters to catch the next steamer," she said, as she went upstairs.
When she entered her
room, she went to her writing table and sat down, with pen and paper before
her. She drew the paper towards her and took up the pen, but the next moment
she laid it down and gave a slight push to the paper. As she did so she
realised that her hand trembled.
"I must not let
myself form the habit of falling into rages--or I shall not be able to keep
still some day, when I ought to do it," she whispered. "I am in a
fury--a fury." And for a moment she covered her face.
She was a strong girl,
but a girl, notwithstanding her powers. What she suddenly saw was that, as if
by one movement of some powerful unseen hand, Rosy, who had been the centre of
all things, had been swept out of her thought. Her anger at the injustice done
to Rosy had been as nothing before the fire which had flamed in her at the
insult flung at the other. And all that was undue and unbalanced. One might as
well look the thing straightly in the face. Her old child hatred of Nigel
Anstruthers had sprung up again in ten-fold strength. There was, it was true,
something abominable about him, something which made his words more abominable
than they would have been if another man had uttered them--but, though it was
inevitable that his method should rouse one, where those of one's own blood
were concerned, it was not enough to fill one with raging flame when his
malignity was dealing with those who were almost strangers. Mount Dunstan was
almost a stranger--she had met Lord Westholt oftener. Would she have felt the
same hot beat of the blood, if Lord Westholt had been concerned? No, she
answered herself frankly, she would not.
A CERTAIN great ball,
given yearly at Dunholm Castle, was one of the most notable social features of
the county. It took place when the house was full of its most interestingly
distinguished guests, and, though other balls might be given at other times, this
one was marked by a degree of greater state. On several occasions the chief
guests had been great personages indeed, and to be bidden to meet them implied
a selection flattering in itself. One's invitation must convey by inference
that one was either brilliant, beautiful, or admirable, if not important.
Nigel Anstruthers had
never appeared at what the uninvited were wont, with derisive smiles, to call
The Great Panjandrum Function--which was an ironic designation not employed by
such persons as received cards bidding them to the festivity. Stornham Court
was not popular in the county; no one had yearned for the society of the
Dowager Lady Anstruthers, even in her youth; and a not too well-favoured young
man with an ill-favoured temper, noticeably on the lookout for grievances, is
not an addition to one's circle. At nineteen Nigel had discovered the older
Lord Mount Dunstan and his son Tenham to be congenial acquaintances, and had
been so often absent from home that his neighbours would have found social intercourse
with him difficult, even if desirable. Accordingly, when the county paper
recorded the splendours of The Great Panjandrum Function--which it by no means
mentioned by that name--the list of "Among those present " had not so
far contained the name of Sir Nigel Anstruthers.
So, on a morning a few
days after his return, the master of Stornham turned over a card of invitation
and read it several times before speaking.
"I suppose you
know what this means," he said at last to Rosalie, who was alone with him.
"It means that we
are invited to Dunholm Castle for the ball, doesn't it?"
Her husband tossed the
card aside on the table.
"It means that
Betty will be invited to every house where there is a son who must be disposed
of profitably.
"She is invited
because she is beautiful and clever. She would be invited if she had no money
at all," said Rosy daringly. She was actually growing daring, she thought
sometimes. It would not have been possible to say anything like this a few
months ago.
"Don't make silly
mistakes," said Nigel. "There are a good many handsome girls who
receive comparatively little attention. But the hounds of war are let loose,
when one of your swollen American fortunes appears. The obviousness of it
'virtuously' makes me sick. It's as vulgar--as New York."
What befel next brought
to Sir Nigel a shock of curious enlightenment, but no one was more amazed than
Rosy herself. She felt, when she heard her own voice, as if she must be rather
mad.
"I would
rather," she said quite distinctly, "that you did not speak to me of
New York in that way."
"What!" said
Anstruthers, staring at her with contempt which was derision.
"It is my
home," she answered. "It is not proper that I should hear it spoken
of slightingly."
"Your home! It has
not taken the slightest notice of you for twelve years. Your people dropped you
as if you were a hot potato."
"They have taken
me up again." Still in amazement at her own boldness, but somehow learning
something as she went on.
He walked over to her
side, and stood before her.
"Look here,
Rosalie," he said. "You have been taking lessons from your sister.
She is a beauty and young and you are not. People will stand things from her
they will not take from you. I would stand some things myself, because it
rather amuses a man to see a fine girl peacocking. It's merely ridiculous in
you, and I won't stand it--not a bit of it."
It was not specially
fortunate for him that the door opened as he was speaking, and Betty came in
with her own invitation in her hand. He was quick enough, however, to turn to
greet her with a shrug of his shoulders.
"I am being
favoured with a little scene by my wife," he explained. "She is
capable of getting up excellent little scenes, but I daresay she does not show
you that side of her temper."
Betty took a
comfortable chintz-covered, easy chair. Her expression was evasively
speculative.
"Was it a scene I
interrupted?" she said. "Then I must not go away and leave you to
finish it. You were saying that you would not 'stand' something. What does a
man do when he will not 'stand' a thing? It always sounds so final and
appalling--as if he were threatening horrible things such as, perhaps, were a
resource in feudal times. What is the resource in these dull days of law and order--and
policemen?"
"Is this American
chaff?" he was disagreeably conscious that he was not wholly successful in
his effort to be lofty.
The frankness of
Betty's smile was quite without prejudice.
"Dear me,
no," she said. "It is only the unpicturesque result of an unfeminine
knowledge of the law. And I was thinking how one is limited--and yet how things
are simplified after all."
"Simplified!"
disgustedly.
"Yes, really. You
see, if Rosy were violent she could not beat you--even if she were strong
enough--because you could ring the bell and give her into custody. And you
could not beat her because the same unpleasant thing would happen to you.
Policemen do rob things of colour, don't they? And besides, when one remembers
that mere vulgar law insists that no one can be forced to live with another
person who is brutal or loathsome, that's simple, isn't it? You could go away
from Rosy," with sweet clearness, "at any moment you wished--as far
away as you liked."
"You seem to
forget," still feeling that convincing loftiness was not easy, "that
when a man leaves his wife, or she deserts him, it is she who is likely to be
called upon to bear the onus of public opinion."
"Would she be
called upon to bear it under all circumstances?"
"Damned clever
woman as you are, you know that she would, as well as I know it." He made
an abrupt gesture with his hand. "You know that what I say is true. Women
who take to their heels are deucedly unpopular in England."
"I have not been
long in England, but I have been struck by the prevalence of a sort of
constitutional British sense of fair play among the people who really count.
The Dunholms, for instance, have it markedly. In America it is the men who
force women to take to their heels who are deucedly unpopular. The Americans'
sense of fair play is their most English quality. It was brought over in ships
by the first colonists--like the pieces of fine solid old furniture, one even
now sees, here and there, in houses in Virginia."
"But the fact remains,"
said Nigel, with an unpleasant laugh, "the fact remains, my dear
girl."
"The fact that
does remain," said Betty, not unpleasantly at all, and still with her
gentle air of mere unprejudiced speculation, "is that, if a man or woman
is properly ill-treated-- properly--not in any amateurish way--they reach the
point of not caring in the least--nothing matters, but that they must get away
from the horror of the unbearable thing --never to see or hear of it again is
heaven enough to make anything else a thing to smile at. But one could settle
the other point by experimenting. Suppose you run away from Rosy, and then we
can see if she is cut by the county."
His laugh was
unpleasant again.
"So long as you
are with her, she will not be cut. There are a number of penniless young men of
family in this, as well as the adjoining, counties. Do you think Mount Dunstan
would cut her?"
She looked down at the
carpet thoughtfully a moment, and then lifted her eyes.
"I do not think
so," she answered. "But I will ask him."
He was startled by a
sudden feeling that she might be capable of it.
"Oh, come
now," he said, "that goes beyond a joke. You will not do any such
absurd thing. One does not want one's domestic difficulties discussed by one's
neighbours."
Betty opened coolly
surprised eyes.
"I did not
understand it was a personal matter," she remarked. "Where do the
domestic difficulties come in?"
He stared at her a few
seconds with the look she did not like, which was less likeable at the moment,
because it combined itself with other things.
"Hang it," he
muttered. "I wish I could keep my temper as you can keep yours," and
he turned on his heel and left the room.
Rosy had not spoken.
She had sat with her hands in her lap, looking out of the window. She had at
first had a moment of terror. She had, indeed, once uttered in her soul the
abject cry: "Don't make him angry, Betty--oh, don't, don't!" And
suddenly it had been stilled, and she had listened. This was because she
realised that Nigel himself was listening. That made her see what she had not
dared to allow herself to see before. These trite things were true. There were
laws to protect one. If Betty had not been dealing with mere truths, Nigel
would have stopped her. He had been supercilious, but he could not contradict
her.
"Betty," she
said, when her sister came to her, "you said that to show me things, as
well as to show them to him. I knew you did, and listened to every word. It was
good for me to hear you."
"Clear-cut,
unadorned facts are like bullets," said Betty. "They reach home, if
one's aim is good. The shiftiest people cannot evade them." . . . . .
A certain thing became
evident to Betty during the time which elapsed between the arrival of the
invitations and the great ball. Despite an obvious intention to assume an
amiable pose for the time being, Sir Nigel could not conceal a not quite
unexplainable antipathy to one individual. This individual was Mount Dunstan,
whom it did not seem easy for him to leave alone. He seemed to recur to him as
a subject, without any special reason, and this somewhat puzzled Betty until
she heard from Rosalie of his intimacy with Lord Tenham, which, in a measure,
explained it. The whole truth was that "The Lout," as he had been
called, had indulged in frank speech in his rare intercourse with his brother
and his friends, and had once interfered with hot young fury in a matter in
which the pair had specially wished to avoid all interference. His open scorn
of their methods of entertaining themselves they had felt to be disgusting
impudence, which would have been deservedly punished with a horsewhip, if the
youngster had not been a big-muscled, clumsy oaf, with a dangerous eye. Upon
this footing their acquaintance had stood in past years, and to decide--as Sir
Nigel had decided--that the oaf in question had begun to make his bid for
splendid fortune under the roof of Stornham Court itself was a thing not to be
regarded calmly. It was more than he could stand, and the folly of temper,
which was forever his undoing, betrayed him into mistakes more than once. This
girl, with her beauty and her wealth, he chose to regard as a sort of property
rightfully his own. She was his sister-in-law, at least; she was living under
his roof; he had more or less the power to encourage or discourage such
aspirants as appeared. Upon the whole there was something soothing to one's
vanity in appearing before the world as the person at present responsible for
her. It gave a man a certain dignity of position, and his chief girding at fate
had always risen from the fact that he had not had dignity of position. He
would not be held cheap in this matter, at least. But sometimes, as he looked
at the girl he turned hot and sick, as it was driven home to him that he was no
longer young, that he had never been good-looking, and that he had cut the
ground from under his feet twelve years ago, when he had married Rosalie! If he
could have waited--if he could have done several other things--perhaps the
clever acting of a part, and his power of domination might have given him a
chance. Even that blackguard of a Mount Dunstan had a better one now. He was
young, at least, and free--and a big strong beast. He was forced, with bitter
reluctance, to admit that he himself was not even particularly strong--of late
he had felt it hideously.
So he detested Mount
Dunstan the more for increasing reasons, as he thought the matter over. It
would seem, perhaps, but a subtle pleasure to the normal mind, but to him there
was pleasure--support--aggrandisement--in referring to the ill case of the
Mount Dunstan estate, in relating illustrative anecdotes, in dwelling upon the
hopelessness of the outlook, and the notable unpopularity of the man himself. A
confiding young lady from the States was required, he said on one occasion, but
it would be necessary that she should be a young person of much simplicity, who
would not be alarmed or chilled by the obvious. No one would realise this more
clearly than Mount Dunstan himself. He said it coldly and casually, as if it
were the simplest matter of fact. If the fellow had been making himself
agreeable to Betty, it was as well that certain points should be--as it were
inadvertently --brought before her.
Miss Vanderpoel was
really rather fine, people said to each other afterwards, when she entered the
ballroom at Dunholm Castle with her brother-in-law. She bore herself as
composedly as if she had been escorted by the most admirable and dignified of
conservative relatives, instead of by a man who was more definitely disliked
and disapproved of than any other man in the county whom decent people were
likely to meet. Yet, she was far too clever a girl not to realise the situation
clearly, they said to each other. She had arrived in England to find her sister
a neglected wreck, her fortune squandered, and her existence stripped bare of
even such things as one felt to be the mere decencies. There was but one thing
to be deduced from the facts which had stared her in the face. But of her
deductions she had said nothing whatever, which was, of course, remarkable in a
young person. It may be mentioned that, perhaps, there had been those who would
not have been reluctant to hear what she must have had to say, and who had even
possibly given her a delicate lead. But the lead had never been taken. One lady
had even remarked that, on her part, she felt that a too great reserve verged
upon secretiveness, which was not a desirable girlish quality.
Of course the situation
had been so much discussed that people were naturally on the lookout for the
arrival of the Stornham party, as it was known that Sir Nigel had returned
home, and would be likely to present himself with his wife and sister-in-law.
There was not a dowager present who did not know how and where he had
reprehensibly spent the last months. It served him quite right that the Spanish
dancing person had coolly left him in the lurch for a younger and more
attractive, as well as a richer man. If it were not for Miss Vanderpoel, one
need not pretend that one knew nothing about the affair--in fact, if it had not
been for Miss Vanderpoel, he would not have received an invitation--and poor
Lady Anstruthers would be sitting at home, still the forlorn little frump and
invalid she had so wonderfully ceased to be since her sister had taken her in hand.
She was absolutely growing even pretty and young, and her clothes were really
beautiful. The whole thing was amazing.
Betty, as well as
Rosalie and Nigel--knew that many people turned undisguisedly to look at
them--even to watch them as they came into the splendid ballroom. It was a
splendid ballroom and a stately one, and Lord Dunholm and Lord Westholt shared
a certain thought when they met her, which was that hers was distinctly the
proud young brilliance of presence which figured most perfectly against its
background. Much as people wanted to look at Sir Nigel, their eyes were drawn
from him to Miss Vanderpoel. After all it was she who made him an object of
interest. One wanted to know what she would do with him--how she would
"carry him off." How much did she know of the distaste people felt
for him, since she would not talk or encourage talk? The Dunholms could not
have invited her and her sister, and have ignored him; but did she not guess
that they would have ignored him, if they could? and was there not natural
embarrassment in feeling forced to appear in pomp, as it were, under his
escort?
But no embarrassment
was perceptible. Her manner committed her to no recognition of a shadow of a
flaw in the character of her companion. It even carried a certain conviction
with it, and the lookers-on felt the impossibility of suggesting any such flaw
by their own manner. For this evening, at least, the man must actually be
treated as if he were an entirely unobjectionable person. It appeared as if
that was what the girl wanted, and intended should happen.
This was what Nigel
himself had begun to perceive, but he did not put it pleasantly. Deucedly
clever girl as she was, he said to himself, she saw that it would be more
agreeable to have no nonsense talked, and no ruffling of tempers. He had always
been able to convey to people that the ruffling of his temper was a thing to be
avoided, and perhaps she had already been sharp enough to realise this was a
fact to be counted with. She was sharp enough, he said to himself, to see
anything.
The function was a
superb one. The house was superb, the rooms of entertainment were in every
proportion perfect, and were quite renowned for the beauty of the space they
offered; the people themselves were, through centuries of dignified living, so
placed that intercourse with their kind was an easy and delightful thing. They
need never doubt either their own effect, or the effect of their hospitalities.
Sir Nigel saw about him all the people who held enviable place in the county.
Some of them he had never known, some of them had long ceased to recall his
existence. There were those among them who lifted lorgnettes or stuck monocles
into their eyes as he passed, asking each other in politely subdued tones who
the man was who seemed to be in attendance on Miss Vanderpoel. Nigel knew this
and girded at it internally, while he made the most of his suave smile.
The distinguished
personage who was the chief guest was to be seen at the upper end of the room
talking to a tall man with broad shoulders, who was plainly interesting him for
the moment. As the Stornham party passed on, this person, making his bow,
retired, and, as he turned towards them, Sir Nigel recognising him, the
agreeable smile was for the moment lost.
"How in the name
of Heaven did Mount Dunstan come here?" broke from him with involuntary
heat.
"Would it be rash
to conclude," said Betty, as she returned the bow of a very grand old lady
in black velvet and an imposing tiara, "that he came in response to
invitation?"
The very grand old lady
seemed pleased to see her, and, with a royal little sign, called her to her
side. As Betty Vanderpoel was a great success with the Mrs. Weldens and old
Dobys of village life, she was also a success among grand old ladies. When she
stood before them there was a delicate submission in her air which was
suggestive of obedience to the dignity of their years and state. Strongly
conservative and rather feudal old persons were much pleased by this. In the
present irreverent iconoclasm of modern times, it was most agreeable to talk to
a handsome creature who was as beautifully attentive as if she had been a
specially perfect young lady-in-waiting.
This one even patted
Betty's hand a little, when she took it. She was a great county potentate, who
was known as Lady Alanby of Dole--her house being one of the most ancient and
interesting in England.
"I am glad to see
you here to-night," she said. "You are looking very nice. But you
cannot help that."
Betty asked permission
to present her sister and brother-in-law. Lady Alanby was polite to both of
them, but she gave Nigel a rather sharp glance through her gold pince-nez as
she greeted him.
"Janey and
Mary," she said to the two girls nearest her, "I daresay you will
kindly change your chairs and let Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel sit next
to me."
The Ladies Jane and
Mary Lithcom, who had been ordered about by her from their infancy, obeyed with
polite smiles. They were not particularly pretty girls, and were of the
indigent noble. Jane, who had almost overlarge blue eyes, sighed as she
reseated herself a few chairs lower down.
"It does seem
beastly unfair," she said in a low voice to her sister, "that a girl
such as that should be so awfully good-looking. She ought to have a turned-up
nose."
"Thank you,"
said Mary, "I have a turned-up nose myself, and I've got nothing to
balance it."
"Oh, I didn't mean
a nice turned-up nose like yours," said Jane; "I meant an ugly one.
Of course Lady Alanby wants her for Tommy." And her manner was not
resigned.
"What she, or
anyone else for that matter," disdainfully, "could want with Tommy, I
don't know," replied Mary.
"I do,"
answered Jane obstinately. "I played cricket with him when I was eight,
and I've liked him ever since. It is awful," in a smothered outburst,
"what girls like us have to suffer."
Lady Mary turned to
look at her curiously.
"Jane," she
said, "are you suffering about Tommy?"
"Yes, I am. Oh,
what a question to ask in a ballroom! Do you want me to burst out crying?"
"No,"
sharply, "look at the Prince. Stare at that fat woman curtsying to him.
Stare and then wink your eyes."
Lady Alanby was talking
about Mount Dunstan.
"Lord Dunholm has
given us a lead. He is an old friend of mine, and he has been talking to me
about it. It appears that he has been looking into things seriously. Modern as
he is, he rather tilts at injustices, in a quiet way. He has satisfactorily
convinced himself that Lord Mount Dunstan has been suffering for the sins of
the fathers--which must be annoying."
"Is Lord Dunholm
quite sure of that?" put in Sir Nigel, with a suggestively civil air.
Old Lady Alanby gave
him an unencouraging look.
"Quite," she
said. "He would be likely to be before he took any steps."
"Ah,"
remarked Nigel. "I knew Lord Tenham, you see."
Lady Alanby's look was
more unencouraging still. She quietly and openly put up her glass and stared.
There were times when she had not the remotest objection to being rude to
certain people.
"I am sorry to
hear that," she observed. "There never was any room for mistake about
Tenham. He is not usually mentioned."
"I do not think
this man would be usually mentioned, if everything were known," said
Nigel.
Then an appalling thing
happened. Lady Alanby gazed at him a few seconds, and made no reply whatever.
She dropped her glass, and turned again to talk to Betty. It was as if she had
turned her back on him, and Sir Nigel, still wearing an amiable exterior, used
internally some bad language.
"But I was a fool
to speak of Tenham," he thought. "A great fool."
A little later Miss
Vanderpoel made her curtsy to the exalted guest, and was commented upon again
by those who looked on. It was not at all unnatural that one should find ones
eyes following a girl who, representing a sort of royal power, should have the
good fortune of possessing such looks and bearing.
Remembering his child bête
noir of the long legs and square, audacious little face, Nigel Anstruthers
found himself restraining a slight grin as he looked on at her dancing.
Partners flocked about her like bees, and Lady Alanby of Dole, and other very
grand old or middle-aged ladies all found the evening more interesting because
they could watch her.
"She is full of
spirit," said Lady Alanby, "and she enjoys herself as a girl should.
It is a pleasure to look at her. I like a girl who gets a magnificent colour
and stars in her eyes when she dances. It looks healthy and young."
It was Tommy Miss
Vanderpoel was dancing with when her ladyship said this. Tommy was her grandson
and a young man of greater rank than fortune. He was a nice, frank, heavy
youth, who loved a simple county life spent in tramping about with guns, and in
friendly hobnobbing with the neighbours, and eating great afternoon teas with
people whose jokes were easy to understand, and who were ready to laugh if you
tried a joke yourself. He liked girls, and especially he liked Jane Lithcom,
but that was a weakness his grandmother did not at all encourage, and, as he
danced with Betty Vanderpoel, he looked over her shoulder more than once at a
pair of big, unhappy blue eyes, whose owner sat against the wall.
Betty Vanderpoel
herself was not thinking of Tommy. In fact, during this brilliant evening she
faced still further developments of her own strange case. Certain new things
were happening to her. When she had entered the ballroom she had known at once
who the man was who stood before the royal guest--she had known before he bowed
low and withdrew. And her recognition had brought with it a shock of joy. For a
few moments her throat felt hot and pulsing. It was true--the things which
concerned him concerned her. All that happened to him suddenly became her
affair, as if in some way they were of the same blood. Nigel's slighting of him
had infuriated her; that Lord Dunholm had offered him friendship and
hospitality was a thing which seemed done to herself, and filled her with
gratitude and affection; that he should be at this place, on this special
occasion, swept away dark things from his path. It was as if it were stated
without words that a conservative man of the world, who knew things as they
were, having means of reaching truths, vouched for him and placed his dignity
and firmness at his side.
And there was the
gladness at the sight of him. It was an overpoweringly strong thing. She had
never known anything like it. She had not seen him since Nigel's return, and
here he was, and she knew that her life quickened in her because they were
together in the same room. He had come to them and said a few courteous words,
but he had soon gone away. At first she wondered if it was because of Nigel,
who at the time was making himself rather ostentatiously amiable to her. Afterwards
she saw him dancing, talking, being presented to people, being, with a tactful
easiness, taken care of by his host and hostess, and Lord Westholt. She was
struck by the graceful magic with which this tactful ease surrounded him
without any obviousness. The Dunholms had given a lead, as Lady Alanby had
said, and the rest were following it and ignoring intervals with reposeful
readiness. It was wonderfully well done. Apparently there had been no past at
all. All began with this large young man, who, despite his Viking type, really
looked particularly well in evening dress. Lady Alanby held him by her chair
for some time, openly enjoying her talk with him, and calling up Tommy, that
they might make friends.
After a while, Betty
said to herself, he would come and ask for a dance. But he did not come, and
she danced with one man after another. Westholt came to her several times and
had more dances than one. Why did the other not come? Several times they
whirled past each other, and when it occurred they looked--both feeling it an
accident--into each other's eyes.
The strong and strange
thing--that which moves on its way as do birth and death, and the rising and
setting of the sun-- had begun to move in them. It was no new and rare thing,
but an ancient and common one--as common and ancient as death and birth
themselves; and part of the law as they are. As it comes to royal persons to
whom one makes obeisance at their mere passing by, as it comes to scullery
maids in royal kitchens, and grooms in royal stables, as it comes to
ladies-in-waiting and the women who serve them, so it had come to these two who
had been drawn near to each other from the opposite sides of the earth, and
each started at the touch of it, and withdrew a pace in bewilderment, and some fear.
"I wish,"
Mount Dunstan was feeling throughout the evening, "that her eyes had some
fault in their expression--that they drew one less--that they drew me less. I
am losing my head."
"It would be
better," Betty thought, "if I did not wish so much that he would come
and ask me to dance with him-- that he would not keep away so. He is keeping
away for a reason. Why is he doing it?"
The music swung on in
lovely measures, and the dancers swung with it. Sir Nigel walked dutifully
through the Lancers once with his wife, and once with his beautiful
sister-in-law. Lady Anstruthers, in her new bloom, had not lacked partners, who
discovered that she was a childishly light creature who danced extremely well.
Everyone was kind to her, and the very grand old ladies, who admired Betty,
were absolutely benign in their manner. Betty's partners paid ingenuous court
to her, and Sir Nigel found he had not been mistaken in his estimate of the
dignity his position of escort and male relation gave to him.
Rosy, standing for a
moment looking out on the brilliancy and state about her, meeting Betty's eyes,
laughed quiveringly.
"I am in a
dream," she said.
"You have awakened
from a dream," Betty answered.
From the opposite side
of the room someone was coming towards them, and, seeing him, Rosy smiled in
welcome.
"I am sure Lord
Mount Dunstan is coming to ask you to dance with him," she said. "Why
have you not danced with him before, Betty?"
"He has not asked
me," Betty answered. "That is the only reason."
"Lord Dunholm and
Lord Westholt called at the Mount a few days after they met him at
Stornham," Rosalie explained in an undertone. "They wanted to know
him. Then it seems they found they liked each other. Lady Dunholm has been
telling me about it. She says Lord Dunholm thanks you, because you said
something illuminating. That was the word she used--'illuminating.' I believe
you are always illuminating, Betty."
Mount Dunstan was
certainly coming to them. How broad his shoulders looked in his close-fitting
black coat, how well built his whole strong body was, and how steadily he held
his eyes! Here and there one sees a man or woman who is, through some trick of
fate, by nature a compelling thing unconsciously demanding that one should
submit to some domineering attraction. One does not call it domineering, but it
is so. This special creature is charged unfairly with more than his or her
single share of force. Betty Vanderpoel thought this out as this "other
one" came to her. He did not use the ballroom formula when he spoke to
her. He said in rather a low voice:
"Will you dance
with me?"
"Yes," she
answered.
Lord Dunholm and his
wife agreed afterwards that so noticeable a pair had never before danced
together in their ballroom. Certainly no pair had ever been watched with quite
the same interested curiosity. Some onlookers thought it singular that they
should dance together at all, some pleased themselves by reflecting on the fact
that no other two could have represented with such picturesqueness the opposite
poles of fate and circumstance. No one attempted to deny that they were an
extraordinarily striking-looking couple, and that one's eyes followed them in
spite of one's self.
"Taken together
they produce an effect that is somehow rather amazing," old Lady Alanby
commented. "He is a magnificently built man, you know, and she is a
magnificently built girl. Everybody should look like that. My impression would
be that Adam and Eve did, but for the fact that neither of them had any
particular character. That affair of the apple was so silly. Eve has always
struck me as being the kind of woman who, if she lived to-day, would run up
stupid bills at her dressmakers and be afraid to tell her husband. That
wonderful black head of Miss Vanderpoel's looks very nice poised near Mount
Dunstan's dark red one."
"I am glad to be
dancing with him," Betty was thinking. "I am glad to be near
him."
"Will you dance
this with me to the very end," asked Mount Dunstan--"to the very late
note?"
"Yes,"
answered Betty.
He had spoken in a low
but level voice--the kind of voice whose tone places a man and woman alone
together, and wholly apart from all others by whomsoever they are surrounded.
There had been no preliminary speech and no explanation of the request
followed. The music was a perfect thing, the brilliant, lofty ballroom, the
beauty of colour and sound about them, the jewels and fair faces, the warm
breath of flowers in the air, the very sense of royal presence and its
accompanying state and ceremony, seemed merely a naturally arranged background
for the strange consciousness each held close and silently--knowing nothing of
the mind of the other.
This was what was
passing through the man's mind.
This is the thing which
most men experience several times during their lives. It would be reason enough
for all the great deeds and all the crimes one hears of. It is an enormous kind
of anguish and a fearful kind of joy. It is scarcely to be borne, and yet, at
this moment, I could kill myself and her, at the thought of losing it. If I had
begun earlier, would it have been easier? No, it would not. With me it is bound
to go hard. At twenty I should probably not have been able to keep myself from
shouting it aloud, and I should not have known that it was only the working of
the Law. 'Only!' Good God, what a fool I am! It is because it is only the Law
that I cannot escape, and must go on to the end, grinding my teeth together
because I cannot speak. Oh, her smooth young cheek! Oh, the deep shadows of her
lashes! And while we sway round and round together, I hold her slim strong body
in the hollow of my arm."
It was, quite possibly,
as he thought this that Nigel Anstruthers, following him with his eyes as he
passed, began to frown. He had been watching the pair as others had, he had
seen what others saw, and now he had an idea that he saw something more, and it
was something which did not please him. The instinct of the male bestirred
itself--the curious instinct of resentment against another man--any other man.
And, in this case, Mount Dunstan was not any other man, but one for whom his
antipathy was personal.
"I won't have
that," he said to himself. "I won't have it." . . . . .
The music rose and
swelled, and then sank into soft breathing, as they moved in harmony together,
gliding and swirling as they threaded their way among other couples who swirled
and glided also, some of them light and smiling, some exchanging low-toned
speech--perhaps saying words which, unheard by others, touched on deep things.
The exalted guest fell into momentary silence as he looked on, being a man much
attracted by physical fineness and temperamental power and charm. A girl like
that would bring a great deal to a man and to the country he belonged to. A
great race might be founded on such superbness of physique and health and
beauty. Combined with abnormal resources, certainly no more could be asked. He
expressed something of the kind to Lord Dunholm, who stood near him in
attendance.
To herself Betty was
saying: "That was a strange thing he asked me. It is curious that we say
so little. I should never know much about him. I have no intelligence where he
is concerned--only a strong, stupid feeling, which is not like a feeling of my
own. I am no longer Betty Vanderpoel-- and I wish to go on dancing with him--on
and on--to the last note, as he said."
She felt a little hot
wave run over her cheek uncomfortably, and the next instant the big arm
tightened its clasp of her-- for just one second--not more than one. She did
not know that he, himself, had seen the sudden ripple of red colour, and that
the equally sudden contraction of the arm had been as unexpected to him and as
involuntary as the quick wave itself. It had horrified and made him angry. He
looked the next instant entirely stiff and cold.
"He did not know
it happened," Betty resolved.
"The music is
going to stop," said Mount Dunstan. "I know the waltz. We can get
once round the room again before the final chord. It was to be the last
note--the very last," but he said it quite rigidly, and Betty laughed.
"Quite the
last," she answered.
The music hastened a
little, and their gliding whirl became more rapid--a little faster--a little
faster still--a running sweep of notes, a big, terminating harmony, and the
thing was over.
"Thank you,"
said Mount Dunstan. "One will have it to remember." And his tone was
slightly sardonic.
"Yes," Betty
acquiesced politely.
"Oh, not you. Only
I. I have never waltzed before."
Betty turned to look at
him curiously.
"Under
circumstances such as these," he explained. "I learned to dance at a
particularly hideous boys' school in France. I abhorred it. And the trend of my
life has made it quite easy for me to keep my twelve-year-old vow that I would
never dance after I left the place, unless I wanted to do it, and that,
especially, nothing should make me waltz until certain agreeable conditions
were fulfilled. Waltzing I approved of --out of hideous schools. I was a
pig-headed, objectionable child. I detested myself even, then."
Betty's composure
returned to her.
"I am
trusting," she remarked, "that I may secretly regard myself as one of
the agreeable conditions to be fulfilled. Do not dispel my hopes roughly."
"I will not,"
he answered. "You are, in fact, several of them."
"One breathes with
much greater freedom," she responded.
This sort of cool
nonsense was safe. It dispelled feelings of tenseness, and carried them to the
place where Sir Nigel and Lady Anstruthers awaited them. A slight stir was
beginning to be felt throughout the ballroom. The royal guest was retiring, and
soon the rest began to melt away. The Anstruthers, who had a long return drive
before them, were among those who went first.
When Lady Anstruthers
and her sister returned from the cloak room, they found Sir Nigel standing near
Mount Dunstan, who was going also, and talking to him in an amiably detached
manner. Mount Dunstan, himself, did not look amiable, or seem to be saying
much, but Sir Nigel showed no signs of being disturbed.
"Now that you have
ceased to forswear the world," he said as his wife appoached, "I hope
we shall see you at Stornham. Your visits must not cease because we cannot
offer you G. Selden any longer."
He had his own reasons
for giving the invitation--several of them. And there was a satisfaction in
letting the fellow know, casually, that he was not in the ridiculous position
of being unaware of what had occurred during his absence--that there had been
visits--and also the objectionable episode of the American bounder. That the
episode had been objectionable, he knew he had adroitly conveyed by mere tone
and manner.
Mount Dunstan thanked
him in the usual formula, and then spoke to Betty.
"G. Selden left us
tremulous and fevered with ecstatic anticipation. He carried your kind letter
to Mr. Vanderpoel, next to his heart. His brain seemed to whirl at the thought
of what 'the boys' would say, when he arrived with it in New York. You have
materialised the dream of his life!"
"I have interested
my father," Betty answered, with a brilliant smile. "He liked the
romance of the Reuben S. Vanderpoel who rewarded the saver of his life by
unbounded orders for the Delkoff." . . . . .
As their carriage drove
away, Sir Nigel bent forward to look out of the window, and having done it,
laughed a little.
"Mount Dunstan
does not play the game well," he remarked.
It was annoying that
neither Betty nor his wife inquired what the game in question might be, and
that his temperament forced him into explaining without encouragement.
"He should have
'stood motionless with folded arms,' or something of the sort, and 'watched her
equipage until it was out of sight.' "
"And he did
not?" said Betty
"He turned on his
heel as soon as the door was shut."
"People ought not
to do such things," was her simple comment. To which it seemed useless to
reply.
THERE is no one thing
on earth of such interest as the study of the laws of temperament, which impel,
support, or entrap into folly and danger the being they rule. As a child, not
old enough to give a definite name to the thing she watched and pondered on, in
child fashion, Bettina Vanderpoel had thought much on this subject. As she had
grown older, she had never been ignorant of the workings of her own
temperament, and she had looked on for years at the laws which had wrought in
her father's being--the laws of strength, executive capacity, and that pleasure
in great schemes, which is roused less by a desire for gain than for a
strongly-felt necessity for action, resulting in success. She mentally followed
other people on their way, sometimes asking herself how far the individual was
to be praised or blamed for his treading of the path he seemed to choose. And
now there was given her the opportunity to study the workings of the nature of
Nigel Anstruthers, which was a curious thing.
He was not an
individual to be envied. Never was man more tormented by lack of power to
control his special devil, at the right moment of time, and therefore, never
was there one so inevitably his own frustration. This Betty saw after the
passing of but a few days, and wondered how far he was conscious or unconscious
of the thing. At times it appeared to her that he was in a state of
unrest--that he was as a man wavering between lines of action, swayed at one
moment by one thought, at another by an idea quite different, and that he was
harried because he could not hold his own with himself.
This was true. The ball
at Dunholm Castle had been enlightening, and had wrought some changes in his
points of view. Also other factors had influenced him. In the first place, the
changed atmosphere of Stornham, the fitness and luxury of his surroundings, the
new dignity given to his position by the altered aspect of things, rendered
external amiability more easy. To ride about the country on a good horse, or
drive in a smart phaeton, or suitable carriage, and to find that people who a
year ago had passed him with the merest recognition, saluted him with polite
intention, was, to a certain degree, stimulating to a vanity which had been
long ill-fed. The power which produced these results should, of course, have
been in his own hands--his money-making father-in-law should have seen that it
was his affair to provide for that--but since he had not done so, it was rather
entertaining that it should be, for the present, in the hands of this extraordinarily
good-looking girl.
He had begun by merely
thinking of her in this manner-- as "this extraordinarily good-looking
girl," and had not, for a moment, hesitated before the edifying idea of
its not being impossible to arrange a lively flirtation with her. She was at an
age when, in his opinion, girlhood was poised for flight with adventure, and
his tastes had not led him in the direction of youth which was fastidious. His
Riviera episode had left his vanity blistered and requiring some soothing
application. His life had worked evil with him, and he had fallen ill on the
hands of a woman who had treated him as a shattered, useless thing whose day
was done and with whom strength and bloom could not be burdened. He had kept
his illness a hidden secret, on his return to Stornham, his one desire having
been to forget--even to disbelieve in it, but dreams of its suggestion
sometimes awakened him at night with shudders and cold sweat. He was hideously
afraid of death and pain, and he had had monstrous pain--and while he had lain
battling with it, upon his bed in the villa on the Mediterranean, he had been
able to hear, in the garden outside, the low voices and laughter of the Spanish
dancer and the healthy, strong young fool who was her new adorer.
When he had found
himself face to face with Betty in the avenue, after the first leap of
annoyance, which had suddenly died down into perversely interested curiosity,
he could have laughed outright at the novelty and odd unexpectedness of the
situation. The ill-mannered, impudently-staring, little New York beast had
developed into this! Hang it! No man could guess what the embryo female
creature might result in. His mere shakiness of physical condition added
strength to her attraction. She was like a young goddess of health and life and
fire; the very spring of her firm foot upon the moss beneath it was a
stimulating thing to a man whose nerves sprung secret fears upon him. There
were sparks between the sweep of her lashes, but she managed to carry herself
with the air of being as cool as a cucumber, which gave spice to the effort to
"upset" her. If she did not prove suitably amenable, there would be
piquancy in getting the better of her --in stirring up unpleasant little
things, which would make it easier for her to go away than remain on the
spot--if one should end by choosing to get rid of her. But, for the moment, he
had no desire to get rid of her. He wanted to see what she intended to do--to
see the thing out, in fact. It amused him to hear that Mount Dunstan was on her
track. There exists for persons of a certain type a pleasure full-fed by the
mere sense of having "got even" with an opponent. Throughout his life
he had made a point of "getting even" with those who had irritatingly
crossed his path, or much disliked him. The working out of small or large plans
to achieve this end had formed one of his most agreeable recreations. He had
long owed Mount Dunstan a debt, which he had always meant to pay. He had not
intended to forget the episode of the nice little village girl with whom Tenham
and himself had been getting along so enormously well, when the raging young
ass had found them out, and made an absurdly exaggerated scene, even going so
far as threatening to smash the pair of them, marching off to the father and mother,
and setting the vicar on, and then scratching together--God knows how--money
enough to pack the lot off to America, where they had since done well. Why
should a man forgive another who had made him look like a schoolboy and a fool?
So, to find Mount Dunstan rushing down a steep hill into this thing, was
edifying. You cannot take much out of a man if you never encounter him. If you
meet him, you are provided by Heaven with opportunities. You can find out what
he feels most sharply, and what he will suffer most by being deprived of. His
impression was that there was a good deal to be got out of Mount Dunstan. He
was an obstinate, haughty devil, and just the fellow to conceal with a fury of
pride. a score of tender places in his hide
At the ball he had seen
that the girl's effect had been of a kind which even money and good looks
uncombined with another thing might not have produced. And she had the other
thing--whatsoever it might be. He observed the way in which the Dunholms met
and greeted her, he marked the glance of the royal personage, and his manner,
when after her presentation he conversed with and detained her, he saw the
turning of heads and exchange of remarks as she moved through the rooms. Most
especially, he took in the bearing of the very grand old ladies, led by Lady
Alanby of Dole. Barriers had thrown themselves down, these portentous, rigorous
old pussycats admired her, even liked her.
"Upon my
word," he said to himself. "She has a way with her, you know. She is
a combination of Ethel Newcome and Becky Sharp. But she is more level-headed
than either of them, There's a touch of Trix Esmond, too."
The sense of the
success which followed her, and the gradually-growing excitement of looking on
at her light whirls of dance, the carnation of her cheek, and the laughter and
pleasure she drew about her, had affected him in a way by which he was secretly
a little exhilarated. He was conscious of a rash desire to force his way
through these laughing, vaunting young idiots, juggle or snatch their dances
away from them, and seize on the girl himself. He had not for so long a time
been impelled by such agreeable folly that he had sometimes felt the stab of
the thought that he was past it. That it should rise in him again made him feel
young. There was nothing which so irritated him against Mount Dunstan as his
own rebelling recognition of the man's youth, the strength of his fine body,
his high-held head and clear eye.
These things and others
it was which swayed him, as was plain to Betty in the time which followed, to
many changes of mood.
"Are you sorry for
a man who is ill and depressed," he asked one day, "or do you despise
him?"
"I am sorry."
"Then be sorry for
me."
He had come out of the
house to her as she sat on the lawn, under a broad, level-branched tree, and
had thrown himself upon a rug with his hands clasped behind his head.
"Are you
ill?"
"When I was on the
Riviera I had a fall." He lied simply. "I strained some muscle or
other, and it has left me rather lame. Sometimes I have a good deal of
pain."
"I am very
sorry," said Betty. "Very."
A woman who can be made
sorry it is rarely impossible to manage. To dwell with pathetic patience on
your grievances, if she is weak and unintelligent, to deplore, with honest
regret, your faults and blunders, if she is strong, are not bad ideas.
He looked at her
reflectively.
"Yes, you are
capable of being sorry," he decided. For a few moments of silence his eyes
rested upon the view spread before him. To give the expression of dignified
reflection was not a bad idea either.
"Do you
know," he said at length, "that you produce an extraordinary effect
upon me, Betty?"
She was occupying
herself by adding a few stitches to one of Rosy's ancient strips of embroidery,
and as she answered, she laid it flat upon her knee to consider its effect
"Good or
bad?" she inquired, with delicate abstraction.
He turned his face
towards her again--this time quickly.
"Both," he
answered. "Both."
His tone held the flash
of a heat which he felt should have startled her slightly. But apparently it
did not.
"I do not like
'both,' " with composed lightness. "If you had said that you felt
yourself develop angelic qualities when you were near me, I should feel
flattered, and swell with pride. But 'both' leaves me unsatisfied. It
interferes with the happy little conceit that one is an all-pervading,
beneficent power. One likes to contemplate a large picture of one's self-- not
plain, but coloured--as a wholesale reformer."
"I see. Thank
you," stiffly and flushing. "You do not believe me."
Her effect upon him was
such that, for the moment, he found himself choosing to believe that he was in
earnest. His desire to impress her with his mood had actually led to this
result. She ought to have been rather moved--a little fluttered, perhaps, at
hearing that she disturbed his equilibrium.
"You set yourself
against me, as a child, Betty," he said. "And you set yourself
against me now. You will not give me fair play. You might give me fair
play." He dropped his voice at the last sentence, and knew it was well
done. A touch of hopelessness is not often lost on a woman.
"What would you
consider fair play?" she inquired.
"It would be fair
to listen to me without prejudice--to let me explain how it has happened that I
have appeared to you a--a blackguard--I have no doubt you would call it--and a
fool. He threw out his hand in an impatient gesture--impatient of himself--his
fate--the tricks of bad fortune which it implied had made of him a more erring
mortal than he would have been if left to himself, and treated decently.
"Do not put it so
strongly," with conservative politeness.
"I don't refuse to
admit that I am handicapped by a devil of a temperament. That is an inherited
thing."
"Ah!" said
Betty. "One of the temperaments one reads about--for which no one is to be
blamed but one's deceased relatives. After all, that is comparatively easy to
deal with. One can just go on doing what one wants to do--and then condemn one's
grandparents severely.
A repellent quality in
her--which had also the trick of transforming itself into an exasperating
attraction--was that she deprived him of the luxury he had been most tenacious
of throughout his existence. If the injustice of fate has failed to bestow upon
a man fortune, good looks or brilliance, his exercise of the power to disturb,
to enrage those who dare not resent, to wound and take the nonsense out of
those about him, will, at all events, preclude the possibility of his being
passed over as a factor not to be considered. If to charm and bestow gives the
sense of power, to thwart and humiliate may be found not wholly unsatisfying.
But in her case the
inadequacy of the usual methods had forced itself upon him. It was as if the
dart being aimed at her, she caught it in her hand in its flight, broke off its
point and threw it lightly aside without comment. Most women cannot resist the
temptation to answer a speech containing a sting or a reproach. It was part of
her abnormality that she could let such things go by in a detached silence,
which did not express even the germ of comment or opinion upon them. This, he
said, was the result of her beastly sense of security, which, in its turn, was
the result of the atmosphere of wealth she had breathed since her birth. There
had been no obstacle which could not be removed for her, no law of limitation
had laid its rein on her neck. She had not been taught by her existence the
importance of propitiating opinion. Under such conditions, how was fear to be
learned? She had not learned it. But for the devil in the blue between her
lashes, he realised that he should have broken loose long ago.
"I suppose I
deserved that for making a stupid appeal to sympathy," he remarked.
"I will not do it again."
If she had been the
woman who can be gently goaded into reply, she would have made answer to this.
But she allowed the observation to pass, giving it free flight into space,
where it lost itself after the annoying manner of its kind.
"Have you any
objection to telling me why you decided to come to England this year?" he
inquired, with a casual air, after the pause which she did not fill in.
The bluntness of the
question did not seem to disturb her. She was not sorry, in fact, that he had
asked it. She let her work lie upon her knee, and leaned back in her low garden
chair, her hands resting upon its wicker arms. She turned on him a clear
unprejudiced gaze.
"I came to see
Rosy. I have always been very fond of her. I did not believe that she had
forgotten how much we had loved her, or how much she had loved us. I knew that
if I could see her again I should understand why she had seemed to forget
us."
"And when you saw
her, you, of course, decided that I had behaved, to quote my own words--like a
blackguard and a fool."
"It is, of course,
very rude to say you have behaved like a fool, but--if you'll excuse my saying
so--that is what has impressed me very much. Don't you know," with a
moderation, which singularly drove itself home, "that if you had been kind
to her, and had made her happy, you could have had anything you wished
for--without trouble?"
This was one of the
unadorned facts which are like bullets. Disgustedly, he found himself veering
towards an outlook which forced him to admit that there was probably truth in
what she said, and he knew he heard more truth as she went on.
"She would have
wanted only what you wanted, and she would not have asked much in return. She
would not have asked as much as I should. What you did was not business-like."
She paused a moment to give thought to it. "You paid too high a price for
the luxury of indulging the inherited temperament. Your luxury was not to
control it. But it was a bad investment."
"The figure of
speech is rather commercial," coldly.
"It is curious
that most things are, as a rule. There is always the parallel of profit and
loss whether one sees it or not. The profits are happiness and
friendship--enjoyment of life and approbation. If the inherited temperament
supplies one with all one wants of such things, it cannot be called a loss, of
course."
"You think,
however, that mine has not brought me much?"
"I do not know. It
is you who know."
"Well,"
viciously, "there has been a sort of luxury in it in lashing out with
one's heels, and smashing things--and in knowing that people prefer to keep
clear."
She lifted her
shoulders a little.
"Then perhaps it
has paid."
"No,"
suddenly and fiercely, "damn it, it has not!"
And she actually made
no reply to that.
"What do you mean
to do?" he questioned as bluntly as before. He knew she would understand
what he meant.
"Not much. To see
that Rosy is not unhappy any more. We can prevent that. She was out of
repair--as the house was. She is being rebuilt and decorated. She knows that
she will be taken care of."
"I know her better
than you do," with a laugh. "She will not go away. She is too
frightened of the row it would make-- of what I should say. I should have
plenty to say. I can make her shake in her shoes."
Betty let her eyes rest
full upon him, and he saw that she was softly summing him up--quite without
prejudice, merely in interested speculation upon the workings of type.
"You are letting
the inherited temperament run away with you at this moment," she reflected
aloud--her quiet scrutiny almost abstracted. "It was foolish to say
that."
He had known it was
foolish two seconds after the words had left his lips. But a temper which has
been allowed to leap hedges, unchecked throughout life, is in peril of forming
a habit of taking them even at such times as a leap may land its owner in a
ditch. This last was what her interested eyes were obviously saying. It suited
him best at the moment to try to laugh.
"Don't look at me
like that," he threw off. "As if you were calculating that two and
two make four."
"No prejudice of
mine can induce them to make five or six--or three and a half," she said.
"No prejudice of mine-- or of yours."
The two and two she was
calculating with were the likelihoods and unlikelihoods of the inherited
temperament, and the practical powers she could absolutely count on if
difficulty arose with regard to Rosy.
He guessed at this, and
began to make calculations himself. But there was no further conversation for
them, as they were obliged to rise to their feet to receive visitors. Lady
Alanby of Dole and Sir Thomas, her grandson, were being brought out of the
house to them by Rosalie.
He went forward to meet
them--his manner that of the graceful host. Lady Alanby, having been welcomed
by him, and led to the most comfortable, tree-shaded chair, found his bearing
so elegantly chastened that she gazed at him with private curiosity. To her
far-seeing and highly experienced old mind it seemed the bearing of a man who
was "up to something." What special thing did he chance to be
"up to"? His glance certainly lurked after Miss Vanderpoel oddly. Was
he falling in unholy love with the girl, under his stupid little wife's very
nose?
She could not, however,
give her undivided attention to him, as she wished to keep her eye on her
grandson and--outrageously enough fit happened that just as tea was brought out
and Tommy was beginning to cheer up and quite come out a little under the spur
of the activities of handing bread and butter and cress sandwiches, who should
appear but the two Lithcom girls, escorted by their aunt, Mrs. Manners, with
whom they lived. As they were orphans without money, if the Manners, who were
rather well off, had not taken them in, they would have had to go to the
workhouse, or into genteel amateur shops, as they were not clever enough for
governesses.
Mary, with her
turned-up nose, looked just about as usual, but Jane had a new frock on which
was exactly the colour of the big, appealing eyes, with their trick of
following people about. She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow
gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was not at all. The
swaying young thinness of those very slight girls whose soft summer muslins
make them look like delicate bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons,
has almost invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose characters
are chiefly marked by lack of forethought, and Lady Alanby saw Tommy's robust
young body give a sort of jerk as the party of three was brought across the
grass. After it he pulled himself together hastily, and looked stiff and pink,
shaking hands as if his elbow joint was out of order, being at once too loose
and too rigid. He began to be clumsy with the bread and butter, and, ceasing
his talk with Miss Vanderpoel, fell into silence. Why should he go on talking?
he thought. Miss Vanderpoel was a cracking handsome girl, but she was too
clever for him, and he had to think of all sorts of new things to say when he
talked to her. And-- well, a fellow could never imagine himself stretched out
on the grass, puffing happily away at a pipe, with a girl like that sitting
near him, smiling--the hot turf smelling almost like hay, the hot blue sky
curving overhead, and both the girl and himself perfectly happy--chock full of
joy--though neither of them were saying anything at all. You could imagine it
with some girls--you did imagine it when you wakened early on a summer morning,
and lay in luxurious stillness listening to the birds singing like mad.
Lady Jane was a
nicely-behaved girl, and she tried to keep her following blue eyes fixed on the
grass, or on Lady Anstruthers, or Miss Vanderpoel, but there was something like
a string, which sometimes pulled them in another direction, and once when this
had happened--quite against her will--she was terrified to find Lady Alanby's
glass lifted and fixed upon her.
As Lady Alanby's
opinion of Mrs. Manners was but a poor one, and as Mrs. Manners was stricken
dumb by her combined dislike and awe of Lady Alanby, a slight stiffness might
have settled upon the gathering if Betty had not made an effort. She applied
herself to Lady Alanby and Mrs. Manners at once, and ended by making them talk
to each other. When they left the tea table under the trees to look at the
gardens, she walked between them, playing upon the primeval horticultural
passions which dominate the existence of all respectable and normal country
ladies, until the gulf between them was temporarily bridged. This being
achieved, she adroitly passed them over to Lady Anstruthers, who, Nigel
observed with some curiosity, accepted the casual responsibility without manifest
discomfiture.
To the aching Tommy the
manner in which, a few minutes later, he found himself standing alone with Jane
Lithcom in a path of clipped laurels was almost bewilderingly simple. At the
end of the laurel walk was a pretty peep of the country, and Miss Vanderpoel
had brought him to see it. Nigel Anstruthers had been loitering behind with
Jane and Mary. As Miss Vanderpoel turned with him into the path, she stooped
and picked a blossom from a clump of speedwell growing at the foot of a bit of
wall.
"Lady Jane's eyes
are just the colour of this flower," she said.
"Yes, they
are," he answered, glancing down at the lovely little blue thing as she
held it in her hand. And then, with a thump of the heart, "Most people do
not think she is pretty, but I--"quite desperately--"I do." His
mood had become rash.
"So do I,"
Betty Vanderpoel answered.
Then the others joined
them, and Miss Vanderpoel paused to talk a little--and when they went on she
was with Mary and Nigel Anstruthers, and he was with Jane, walking slowly, and
somehow the others melted away, turning in a perfectly natural manner into a
side path. Their own slow pace became slower. In fact, in a few moments, they
were standing quite still between the green walls. Jane turned a little aside,
and picked off some small leaves, nervously. He saw the muslin on her chest
lift quiveringly.
"Oh, little
Jane!" he said in a big, shaky whisper. The following eyes incontinently
brimmed over. Some shining drops fell on the softness of the blue muslin.
"Oh, Tommy,"
giving up, "it's no use--talking at all."
"You mustn't
think--you mustn't think--anything," he falteringly commanded, drawing
nearer, because it was impossible not to do it.
What he really meant,
though he did not know how decorously to say it, was that she must not think
that he could be moved by any tall beauty, towards the splendour of whose
possessions his revered grandmother might be driving him.
"I am not thinking
anything," cried Jane in answer. "But she is everything, and I am
nothing. Just look at her--and then look at me, Tommy."
"I'll look at you
as long as you'll let me," gulped Tommy, and he was boy enough and man
enough to put a hand on each of her shoulders, and drown his longing in her
brimming eyes. . . . . .
Mary and Miss
Vanderpoel were talking with a curious intimacy, in another part of the garden,
where they were together alone, Sir Nigel having been reattached to Lady
Alanby.
"You have known
Sir Thomas a long time?" Betty had just said.
"Since we were children.
Jane reminded me at the Dunholms' ball that she had played cricket with him
when she was eight."
"They have always
liked each other?" Miss Vanderpoel suggested.
Mary looked up at her,
and the meeting of their eyes was frank to revelation. But for the clear
girlish liking for herself she saw in Betty Vanderpoel's, Mary would have known
her next speech to be of imbecile bluntness. She had heard that Americans often
had a queer, delightful understanding of unconventional things. This splendid
girl was understanding her.
"Oh! You
see!" she broke out. "You left them together on purpose!"
"Yes, I did."
And there was a comprehension so deep in her look that Mary knew it was deeper
than her own, and somehow founded on some subtler feeling than her own.
"When two people want so much--care so much to be together," Miss
Vanderpoel added quite slowly--even as if the words rather forced themselves
from her, "it seems as if the whole world ought to help them--everything
in the world-- the very wind, and rain, and sun, and stars--oh, things have no
right to keep them apart."
Mary stared at her,
moved and fascinated. She scarcely knew that she caught at her hand.
"I have never been
in the state that Jane is," she poured forth. "And I can't understand
how she can be such a fool, but--but we care about each other more than most
girls do-- perhaps because we have had no people. And it's the kind of thing
there is no use talking against, it seems. It's killing the youngness in her.
If it ends miserably, it will be as if she had had an illness, and got up from
it a faded, done-for spinster with a stretch of hideous years to live. Her blue
eyes will look like boiled gooseberries, because she will have cried all the
colour out of them. Oh! You understand! I see you do."
Before she had finished
both Miss Vanderpoel's hands were holding hers.
"I do! I do,"
she said. And she did, as a year ago she had not known she could. "Is it
Lady Alanby?" she ventured.
"Yes. Tommy will
be helplessly poor if she does not leave him her money. And she won't if he
makes her angry. She is very determined. She will leave it to an awful cousin
if she gets in a rage. And Tommy is not clever. He could never earn his living.
Neither could Jane. They could never marry. You can't defy relatives, and marry
on nothing, unless you are a character in a book."
"Has she liked
Lady Jane in the past?" Miss Vanderpoel asked, as if she was, mentally,
rapidly going over the ground, that she might quite comprehend everything.
"Yes. She used to
make rather a pet of her. She didn't like me. She was taken by Jane's meek,
attentive, obedient ways. Jane was born a sweet little affectionate worm. Lady
Alanby can't hate her, even now. She just pushes her out of her path."
"Because?"
said Betty Vanderpoel.
Mary prefaced her
answer with a brief, half-embarrassed laugh.
"Because of
you."
"Because she
thinks----?"
"I don't see how
she can believe he has much of a chance. I don't think she does--but she will
never forgive him if he doesn't make a try at finding out whether he has one or
not."
"It is very
businesslike," Betty made observation.
Mary laughed.
"We talk of
American business outlook," she said, "but very few of us English
people are dreamy idealists. We are of a coolness and a daring--when we are
dealing with questions of this sort. I don't think you can know the thing you
have brought here. You descend on a dull country place, with your money and
your looks, and you simply stay and amuse yourself by doing extraordinary
things, as if there was no London waiting for you. Everyone knows this won't
last. Next season you will be presented, and have a huge success. You will be
whirled about in a vortex, and people will sit on the edge, and cast big strong
lines, baited with the most glittering things they can get together. You won't
be able to get away. Lady Alanby knows there would be no chance for Tommy then.
It would be too idiotic to expect it. He must make his try now."
Their eyes met again,
and Miss Vanderpoel looked neither shocked nor angry, but an odd small shadow
swept across her face. Mary, of course, did not know that she was thinking of
the thing she had realised so often--that it was not easy to detach one's self
from the fact that one was Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter. As a result of it
here one was indecently and unwillingly disturbing the lives of innocent,
unassuming lovers.
"And so long as
Sir Thomas has not tried--and found out-- Lady Jane will be made unhappy?"
"If he were to let
you escape without trying, he would not be forgiven. His grandmother has had
her own way all her life."
"But suppose after
I went away someone else came?"
Mary shook her head.
"People like you
don't happen in one neighbourhood twice in a lifetime. I am twenty-six and you
are the first I have seen."
"And he will only
be safe if?"
Mary Lithcom nodded.
"Yes--if,"
she answered. "It's silly--and frightful--but it is true."
Miss Vanderpoel looked
down on the grass a few moments, and then seemed to arrive at a decision.
"He likes you? You
can make him understand things?" she inquired.
"Yes."
"Then go and tell
him that if he will come here and ask me a direct question, I will give him a
direct answer--which will satisfy Lady Alanby."
Lady Mary caught her
breath.
"Do you know, you
are the most wonderful girl I ever saw!" she exclaimed. "But if you
only knew what I feel about Janie!" And tears rushed into her eyes.
"I feel just the
same thing about my sister," said Miss Vanderpoel. "I think Rosy and
Lady Jane are rather alike." . . . . .
When Tommy tramped
across the grass towards her he was turning red and white by turns, and looking
somewhat like a young man who was being marched up to a cannon's mouth. It
struck him that it was an American kind of thing he was called upon to do, and
he was not an American, but British from the top of his closely-cropped head to
the rather thick soles of his boots. He was, in truth, overwhelmed by his sense
of his inadequacy to the demands of the brilliantly conceived, but unheard-of
situation. Joy and terror swept over his being in waves.
The tall, proud,
wood-nymph look of her as she stood under a tree, waiting for him, would have
struck his courage dead on the spot and caused him to turn and flee in anguish,
if she had not made a little move towards him, with a heavenly, every-day
humanness in her eyes. The way she managed it was an amazing thing. He could
never have managed it at all himself.
She came forward and
gave him her hand, and really it was her hand which held his own comparatively
steady.
"It is for Lady
Jane," she said. "That prevents it from being ridiculous or improper.
It is for Lady Jane. Her eyes," with a soft-touched laugh, "are the
colour of the blue speedwell I showed you. It is the colour of babies' eyes.
And hers look as theirs do--as if they asked everybody not to hurt them."
He actually fell upon
his knee, and bending his head over her hand, kissed it half a dozen times with
adoration. Good Lord, how she saw and knew!
"If Jane were not
Jane, and you were not you," the words rushed from him, "it would be
the most outrageous--the most impudent thing a man ever had the cheek to
do."
"But it is
not." She did not draw her hand away, and oh, the girlish kindness of her
smiling, supporting look. "You came to ask me if----"
"If you would
marry me, Miss Vanderpoel," his head bending over her hand again. "I
beg your pardon, I beg your pardon. Oh Lord, I do.'
"I thank you for
the compliment you pay me," she answered. "I like you very much, Sir
Thomas--and I like you just now more than ever--but I could not marry you. I
should not make you happy, and I should not be happy myself. The truth
is----" thinking a moment, "each of us really belongs to a different
kind of person. And each of knows the fact."
"God bless
you," he said. "I think you know everything in the world a woman can know--and
remain an angel."
It was an outburst of
eloquence, and she took it in the prettiest way--with the prettiest laugh,
which had in it no touch of mockery or disbelief in him.
"What I have said
is quite final--if Lady Alanby should inquire," she said--adding rather
quickly, "Someone is coming."
It pleased her to see
that he did not hurry to his feet clumsily, but even stood upright, with a
shade of boyish dignity, and did not release her hand before he had bent his
head low over it again.
Sir Nigel was bringing
with him Lady Alanby, Mrs. Manners, and his wife, and when Betty met his eyes,
she knew at once that he had not made his way to this particular garden without
intention. He had discovered that she was with Tommy, and it had entertained him
to break in upon them.
"I did not intend
to interrupt Sir Thomas at his devotions," he remarked to her after
dinner. "Accept my apologies."
"It did not matter
in the least, thank you," said Betty. . . . . .
"I am glad to be
able to say, Thomas, that you did not look an entire fool when you got up from
your knees, as we came into the rose garden." Thus Lady Alanby, as their
carriage turned out of Stornham village.
"I'm glad
myself," Tommy answered.
"What were you
doing there? Even if you were asking her to marry you, it was not necessary to
go that far. We are not in the seventeenth century.
Then Tommy flushed.
"I did not intend
to do it. I could not help it. She was so--so nice about everything. That girl
is an angel. I told her so."
"Very right and
proper spirit to approach her in," answered the old woman, watching him
keenly. "Was she angel enough to say she would marry you?"
Tommy, for some occult
reason, had the courage to stare back into his grandmother's eyes, quite as if
he were a man, and not a hobbledehoy, expecting to be bullied.
"She does not want
me," he answered. "And I knew she wouldn't. Why should she? I did
what you ordered me to do, and she answered me as I knew she would. She might
have snubbed me, but she has such a way with her--such a way of saying things
and understanding, that--that--well, I found myself on one knee, kissing her
hand--as if I was being presented at court."
Old Lady Alanby looked
out on the passing landscape.
"Well, you did
your best," she summed the matter up at last, "if you went down on
your knees involuntarily. If you had done it on purpose, it would have been
unpardonable."
STORNHAM COURT had
taken its proper position in the county as a place which was equal to social
exchange in the matter of entertainment. Sir Nigel and Lady Anstruthers had
given a garden party, according to the decrees of the law obtaining in country
neighbourhoods. The curiosity to behold Miss Vanderpoel, and the change which
had been worked in the well-known desolation and disrepair, precluded the
possibility of the refusal of any invitations sent, the recipient being in his
or her right mind, and sound in wind and limb. That astonishing things had been
accomplished, and that the party was a successful affair, could not but be
accepted as truths. Garden parties had been heard of, were a trifle
repetitional, and even dull, but at this one there was real music and real
dancing, and clever entertainments were given at intervals in a green-embowered
little theatre, erected for the occasion. These were agreeable additions to
mere food and conversation, which were capable of palling.
To the garden party the
Anstruthers did not confine themselves. There were dinner parties at Stornham,
and they also were successful functions. The guests were of those who make for
the success of such entertainments.
"I called upon
Mount Dunstan this afternoon," Sir Nigel said one evening, before the
first of these dinners. "He might expect it, as one is asking him to dine.
I wish him to be asked. The Dunholms have taken him up so tremendously that no
festivity seems complete without him."
He had been invited to
the garden party, and had appeared, but Betty had seen little of him. It is
easy to see little of a guest at an out-of-door festivity. In assisting Rosalie
to attend to her visitors she had been much occupied, but she had known that
she might have seen more of him, if he had intended that it should be so. He
did not--for reasons of his own--intend that it should be so, and this she
became aware of. So she walked, played in the bowling green, danced and talked
with Westholt, Tommy Alanby and others.
"He does not want
to talk to me. He will not, if he can avoid it, was what she said to herself.
She saw that he rather
sought out Mary Lithcom, who was not accustomed to receiving special attention.
The two walked together, danced together, and in adjoining chairs watched the
performance in the embowered theatre. Lady Mary enjoyed her companion very
much, but she wondered why he had attached himself to her.
Betty Vanderpoel asked
herself what they talked to each other about, and did not suspect the truth,
which was that they talked a good deal of herself.
"Have you seen
much of Miss Vanderpoel?" Lady Mary had begun by asking.
"I have seen her a
good deal, as no doubt you have."
Lady Mary's plain face
expressed a somewhat touched reflectiveness.
"Do you
know," she said, "that the garden parties have been a different thing
this whole summer, just because one always knew one would see her at
them?"
A short laugh from
Mount Dunstan.
"Jane and I have
gone to every garden party within twenty miles, ever since we left the
schoolroom. And we are very tired of them. But this year we have quite cheered
up. When we are dressing to go to something dull, we say to each other, 'Well,
at any rate, Miss Vanderpoel will be there, and we shall see what she has on,
and how her things are made,' and that's something--besides the fun of watching
people make up to her, and hearing them talk about the men who want to marry
her, and wonder which one she will take. She will not take anyone in this
place," the nice turned-up nose slightly suggesting a derisive sniff.
"Who is there who is suitable?"
Mount Dunstan laughed
shortly again.
"How do you know I
am not an aspirant myself?" he said. He had a mirthless sense of enjoyment
in his own brazenness. Only he himself knew how brazen the speech was.
Lady Mary looked at him
with entire composure.
"I am quite sure
you are not an aspirant for anybody. And I happen to know that you dislike
moneyed international marriages. You are so obviously British that, even if I
had not been told that, I should know it was true. Miss Vanderpoel herself knows
it is true."
"Does she?"
"Lady Alanby spoke
of it to Sir Nigel, and I heard Sir Nigel tell her."
"Exactly the kind
of unnecessary thing he would be likely to repeat." He cast the subject
aside as if it were a worthless superfluity and went on: "When you say
there is no one suitable, you surely forget Lord Westholt."
"Yes, it's true I
forgot him for the moment. But--" with a laugh--"one rather feels as
if she would require a royal duke or something of that sort."
"You think she
expects that kind of thing?" rather indifferently.
"She? She doesn't
think of the subject. She simply thinks of other things--of Lady Anstruthers
and Ughtred, of the work at Stornham and the village life, which gives her new
emotions and interest. She also thinks about being nice to people. She is nicer
than any girl I know."
"You feel,
however, she has a right to expect it?" still without more than a casual
air of interest.
"Well, what do you
feel yourself?" said Lady Mary. "Women who look like that--even when
they are not millionairesses-- usually marry whom they choose. I do not believe
that the two beautiful Miss Gunnings rolled into one would have made anything
as undeniable as she is. One has seen portraits of them. Look at her as she
stands there talking to Tommy and Lord Dunholm!"
Internally Mount
Dunstan was saying: "I am looking at her, thank you," and setting his
teeth a little.
But Lady Mary was
launched upon a subject which swept her along with it, and she--so to
speak--ground the thing in.
"Look at the turn
of her head! Look at her mouth and chin, and her eyes with the lashes sweeping
over them when she looks down! You must have noticed the effect when she lifts
them suddenly to look at you. It's so odd and lovely that it--it
almost----"
"Almost makes you
jump," ended Mount Dunstan drily.
She did not laugh and,
in fact, her expression became rather sympathetically serious.
"Ah," she
said, "I believe you feel a sort of rebellion against the unfairness of
the way things are dealt out. It does seem unfair, of course. It would be
perfectly disgraceful--if she were different. I had moments of almost hating
her until one day not long ago she did something so bewitchingly kind and
understanding of other people's feelings that I gave up. It was clever,
too," with a laugh, "clever and daring. If she were a young man she
would make a dashing soldier."
She did not give him
the details of the story, but went on to say in effect what she had said to
Betty herself of the inevitable incidentalness of her stay in the country. If
she had not evidently come to Stornham this year with a purpose, she would have
spent the season in London and done the usual thing. Americans were generally
presented promptly, if they had any position--sometimes when they had not. Lady
Alanby had heard that the fact that she was with her sister had awakened
curiosity and people were talking about her.
"Lady Alanby said
in that dry way of hers that the arrival of an unmarried American fortune in
England was becoming rather like the visit of an unmarried royalty. People ask
each other what it means and begin to arrange for it. So far, only the women
have come, but Lady Alanby says that is because the men have had no time to do
anything but stay at home and make the fortunes. She believes that in another
generation there will be a male leisure class, and then it will swoop down too,
and marry people. She was very sharp and amusing about it. She said it would
help them to rid themselves of a plethora of wealth and keep them from
bursting."
She was an amiable, if
unsentimental person, Mary Lithcom --and was, quite without ill nature,
expressing the consensus of public opinion. These young women came to the
country with something practical to exchange in these days, and as there were
men who had certain equivalents to offer, so also there were men who had none,
and whom decency should cause to stand aside. Mount Dunstan knew that when she
had said, "Who is there who is suitable?" any shadow of a thought of
himself as being in the running had not crossed her mind. And this was not only
for the reasons she had had the ready composure to name, but for one less
conquerable.
Later, having left Mary
Lithcom, he decided to take a turn by himself. He had done his duty as a
masculine guest. He had conversed with young women and old ones, had danced,
visited gardens and greenhouses, and taken his part in all things. Also he had,
in fact, reached a point when a few minutes of solitude seemed a good thing. He
found himself turning into the clipped laurel walk, where Tommy Alanby had
stood with Jane Lithcom, and he went to the end of it and stood looking out on
the view.
"Look at the turn
of her head," Lady Mary had said. "Look at her mouth and chin."
And he had been looking at them the whole afternoon, not because he had
intended to do so, but because it was not possible to prevent himself from
doing it.
This was one of the
ironies of fate. Orthodox doctrine might suggest that it was to teach him that
his past rebellion had been undue. Orthodox doctrine was ever ready with these
soothing little explanations. He had raged and sulked at Destiny, and now he
had been given something to rage for.
"No one knows anything
about it until it takes him by the throat," he was thinking, "and
until it happens to a man he has no right to complain. I was not starving
before. I was not hungering and thirsting--in sight of food and water. I
suppose one of the most awful things in the world is to feel this and know it
is no use."
He was not in the
condition to reason calmly enough to see that there might be one chance in a
thousand that it was of use. At such times the most intelligent of men and
women lose balance and mental perspicacity. A certain degree of unreasoning
madness possesses them. They see too much and too little. There were, it was
true, a thousand chances against him, but there was one for him--the chance
that selection might be on his side. He had not that balance of thought left
which might have suggested to him that he was a man young and powerful, and
filled with an immense passion which might count for something. All he saw was
that he was notably in the position of the men whom he had privately disdained
when they helped themselves by marriage. Such marriages he had held were
insults to the manhood of any man and the womanhood of any woman. In such
unions neither party could respect himself or his companion. They must always
in secret doubt each other, fret at themselves, feel distaste for the whole
thing. Even if a man loved such a woman, and the feeling was mutual, to whom
would it occur to believe it--to see that they were not gross and contemptible?
To no one. Would it have occurred to himself that such an extenuating
circumstance was possible? Certainly it would not. Pig-headed pride and
obstinacy it might be, but he could not yet face even the mere thought of
it--even if his whole position had not been grotesque. Because, after all, it
was grotesque that he should even argue with himself. She--before his eyes and
the eyes of all others--the most desirable of women; people dinning it in one's
ears that she was surrounded by besiegers who waited for her to hold out her
sceptre, and he--well, what was he! Not that his mental attitude was that of a
meek and humble lover who felt himself unworthy and prostrated himself before
her shrine with prayers --he was, on the contrary, a stout and obstinate Briton
finding his stubbornly-held beliefs made as naught by a certain obsession --an
intolerable longing which wakened with him in the morning, which sank into
troubled sleep with him at night--the longing to see her, to speak to her, to
stand near her, to breathe the air of her. And possessed by this--full of the
overpowering strength of it--was a man likely to go to a woman and say,
"Give your life and desirableness to me; and incidentally support me, feed
me, clothe me, keep the roof over my head, as if I were an impotent
beggar"?
"No, by God!"
he said. "If she thinks of me at all it shall be as a man. No, by God, I
will not sink to that!" . . . . .
A moving touch of
colour caught his eye. It was the rose of a parasol seen above the laurel
hedge, as someone turned into the walk. He knew the colour of it and expected
to see other parasols and hear voices. But there was no sound, and
unaccompanied, the wonderful rose-thing moved towards him.
"The usual things
are happening to me," was his thought as it advanced. "I am hot and
cold, and just now my heart leaped like a rabbit. It would be wise to walk off,
but I shall not do it. I shall stay here, because I am no longer a reasoning
being. I suppose that a horse who refuses to back out of his stall when his
stable is on fire feels something of the same thing."
When she saw him she
made an involuntary-looking pause, and then recovering herself, came forward.
"I seem to have
come in search of you," she said. "You ought to be showing someone
the view really--and so ought I."
"Shall we show it
to each other?" was his reply.
"Yes." And
she sat down on the stone seat which had been placed for the comfort of view
lovers. "I am a little tired-- just enough to feel that to slink away for
a moment alone would be agreeable. It is slinking to leave Rosalie to battle with
half the county. But I shall only stay a few minutes."
She sat still and gazed
at the beautiful lands spread before her, but there was no stillness in her
mind, neither was there stillness in his. He did not look at the view, but at
her, and he was asking himself what he should be saying to her if he were such
a man as Westholt. Though he had boldness enough, he knew that no man--even
though he is free to speak the best and most passionate thoughts of his
soul--could be sure that he would gain what he desired. The good fortune of
Westholt, or of any other, could but give him one man's fair chance. But having
that chance, he knew he should not relinquish it soon. There swept back into
his mind the story of the marriage of his ancestor, Red Godwyn, and he laughed
low in spite of himself.
Miss Vanderpoel looked
up at him quickly.
"Please tell me
about it, if it is very amusing," she said.
"I wonder if it
will amuse you," was his answer. "Do you like savage romance?"
"Very much."
It might seem à propos
de rien, but he did not care in the least. He wanted to hear what she would
say.
"An ancestor of
mine--a certain Red Godwyn--was a barbarian immensely to my taste. He became
enamoured of rumours of the beauty of the daughter and heiress of his bitterest
enemy. In his day, when one wanted a thing, one rode forth with axe and spear
to fight for it."
"A simple and
alluring method," commented Betty. "What was her name?"
She leaned in light
ease against the stone back of her seat, the rose light cast by her parasol
faintly flushed her. The silence of their retreat seemed accentuated by its
background of music from the gardens. They smiled a second bravely into each
other's eyes, then their glances became entangled, as they had done for a
moment when they had stood together in Mount Dunstan park. For one moment each
had been held prisoner then--now it was for longer.
"Alys of the
Sea-Blue Eyes."
Betty tried to release
herself, but could not.
"Sometimes the sea
is grey," she said.
His own eyes were still
in hers.
"Hers were the
colour of the sea on a day when the sun shines on it, and there are large
fleece-white clouds floating in the blue above. They sparkled and were often
like bluebells under water."
"Bluebells under
water sounds entrancing," said Betty.
He caught his breath
slightly.
"They
were--entrancing," he said. "That was evidently the devil of
it--saving your presence."
"I have never
objected to the devil," said Betty. "He is an energetic, hard-working
creature and paints himself an honest black. Please tell me the rest."
"Red Godwyn went
forth, and after a bloody fight took his enemy's castle. If we still lived in
like simple, honest times, I should take Dunholm Castle in the same way. He
also took Alys of the Eyes and bore her away captive."
"From such
incidents developed the germs of the desire for female suffrage," Miss
Vanderpoel observed gently.
"The interest of
the story lies in the fact that apparently the savage was either epicure or
sentimentalist, or both. He did not treat the lady ill. He shut her in a tower
chamber overlooking his courtyard, and after allowing her three days to weep,
he began his barbarian wooing. Arraying himself in splendour he ordered her to
appear before him. He sat upon the dais in his banquet hall, his retainers
gathered about him-- a great feast spread. In archaic English we are told that
the board groaned beneath the weight of golden trenchers and flagons. Minstrels
played and sang, while he displayed all his splendour."
"They do it
yet," said Miss Vanderpoel, "in London and New York and other
places."
"The next day,
attended by his followers, he took her with him to ride over his lands. When
she returned to her tower chamber she had learned how powerful and great a
chieftain he was. She 'laye softely' and was attended by many maidens, but she
had no entertainment but to look out upon the great green court. There he
arranged games and trials of strength and skill, and she saw him bigger,
stronger, and more splendid than any other man. He did not even lift his eyes
to her window. He also sent her daily a rich gift."
"How long did this
go on?"
"Three months. At
the end of that time he commanded her presence again in his banquet hall. He
told her the gates were opened, the drawbridge down and an escort waiting to
take her back to her father's lands, if she would."
"What did she
do?"
"She looked at him
long--and long. She turned proudly away--in the sea-blue eyes were heavy and
stormy tears, which seeing----"
"Ah, he saw
them?" from Miss Vanderpoel.
"Yes. And seizing
her in his arms caught her to his breast, calling for a priest to make them one
within the hour. I am quoting the chronicle. I was fifteen when I read it
first."
"It is
spirited," said Betty, "and Red Godwyn was almost modern in his
methods."
While professing
composure and lightness of mood, the spell which works between two creatures of
opposite sex when in such case wrought in them and made them feel awkward and
stiff. When each is held apart from the other by fate, or will, or
circumstance, the spell is a stupefying thing, deadening even the clearness of
sight and wit.
"I must slink back
now," Betty said, rising. "Will you slink back with me to give me
countenance? I have greatly liked Red Godwyn."
So it occurred that
when Nigel Anstruthers saw them again it was as they crossed the lawn together,
and people looked up from ices and cups of tea to follow their slow progress
with questioning or approving eyes.
THERE was only one man
to speak to, and it being the nature of the beast--so he harshly put it to
himself--to be absolutely impelled to speech at such times, Mount Dunstan laid
bare his breast to him, tearing aside all the coverings pride would have folded
about him. The man was, of course, Penzance, and the laying bare was done the
evening after the story of Red Godwyn had been told in the laurel walk.
They had driven home
together in a profound silence, the elder man as deep in thought as the younger
one. Penzance was thinking that there was a calmness in having reached sixty
and in knowing that the pain and hunger of earlier years would not tear one
again. And yet, he himself was not untorn by that which shook the man for whom
his affection had grown year by year. It was evidently very bad--very bad,
indeed. He wondered if he would speak of it, and wished he would, not because
he himself had much to say in answer, but because he knew that speech would be
better than hard silence.
"Stay with me
to-night," Mount Dunstan said, as they drove through the avenue to the
house. "I want you to dine with me and sit and talk late. I am not
sleeping well."
They often dined
together, and the vicar not infrequently slept at the Mount for mere
companionship's sake. Sometimes they read, sometimes went over accounts,
planned economies, and balanced expenditures. A chamber still called the
Chaplain's room was always kept in readiness. It had been used in long past
days, when a household chaplain had sat below the salt and left his patron's
table before the sweets were served. They dined together this night almost as
silently as they had driven homeward, and after the meal they went and sat
alone in the library.
The huge room was never
more than dimly lighted, and the far-off corners seemed more darkling than
usual in the insufficient illumination of the far from brilliant lamps. Mount
Dunstan, after standing upon the hearth for a few minutes smoking a pipe, which
would have compared ill with old Doby's Sunday splendour, left his coffee cup
upon the mantel and began to tramp up and down--out of the dim light into the
shadows, back out of the shadows into the poor light.
"You know,"
he said, "what I think about most things-- you know what I feel."
"I think I
do."
"You know what I
feel about Englishmen who brand themselves as half men and marked merchandise
by selling themselves and their houses and their blood to foreign women who can
buy them. You know how savage I have been at the mere thought of it. And how I
have sworn----"
"Yes, I know what
you have sworn," said Mr. Penzance.
It struck him that
Mount Dunstan shook and tossed his head rather like a bull about to charge an
enemy.
"You know how I
have felt myself perfectly within my rights when I blackguarded such men and
sneered at such women--taking it for granted that each was merchandise of his
or her kind and beneath contempt. I am not a foul-mouthed man, but I have used
gross words and rough ones to describe them."
"I have heard
you."
Mount Dunstan threw
back his head with a big, harsh laugh. He came out of the shadow and stood
still.
"Well," he
said, "I am in love--as much in love as any lunatic ever was--with the
daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel. There you are--and there I am!"
"It has seemed to
me," Penzance answered, "that it was almost inevitable."
"My condition is
such that it seems to me that it would be inevitable in the case of any man.
When I see another man look at her my blood races through my veins with an
awful fear and a wicked heat. That will show you the point I have
reached." He walked over to the mantelpiece and laid his pipe down with a
hand Penzance saw was unsteady. "In turning over the pages of the volume
of Life," he said, "I have come upon the Book of Revelations."
"That is
true," Penzance said.
"Until one has
come upon it one is an inchoate fool," Mount Dunstan went on. "And
afterwards one is--for a time at least--a sort of madman raving to one's self,
either in or out of a straitjacket--as the case may be. I am wearing the jacket
--worse luck! Do you know anything of the state of a man who cannot utter the
most ordinary words to a woman without being conscious that he is making mad
love to her? This afternoon I found myself telling Miss Vanderpoel the story of
Red Godwyn and Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes. I did not make a single statement
having any connection with myself, but throughout I was calling on her to think
of herself and of me as of those two. I saw her in my own arms, with the tears
of Alys on her lashes. I was making mad love, though she was unconscious of my
doing it."
"How do you know
she was unconscious?" remarked Mr. Penzance. "You are a very strong
man."
Mount Dunstan's short
laugh was even a little awful, because it meant so much. He let his forehead
drop a moment on to his arms as they rested on the mantelpiece.
"Oh, my God!"
he said. But the next instant his head lifted itself. "It is the mystery
of the world--this thing. A tidal wave gathering itself mountain high and
crashing down upon one's helplessness might be as easily defied. It is supposed
to disperse, I believe. That has been said so often that there must be truth in
it. In twenty or thirty or forty years one is told one will have got over it.
But one must live through the years--one must live through them--and the chief
feature of one's madness is that one is convinced that they will last forever."
"Go on," said
Mr. Penzance, because he had paused and stood biting his lip. "Say all
that you feel inclined to say. It is the best thing you can do. I have never
gone through this myself, but I have seen and known the amazingness of it for
many years. I have seen it come and go."
"Can you
imagine," Mount Dunstan said, "that the most damnable thought of
all--when a man is passing through it-- is the possibility of its going?
Anything else rather than the knowledge that years could change or death could
end it! Eternity seems only to offer space for it. One knows--but one does not
believe. It does something to one's brain."
"No scientist,
howsoever profound, has ever discovered what," the vicar mused aloud.
"The Book of
Revelations has shown to me how--how magnificent life might be!" Mount
Dunstan clenched and unclenched his hands, his eyes flashing.
"Magnificent--that is the word. To go to her on equal ground to take her
hands and speak one's passion as one would--as her eyes answered. Oh, one would
know! To bring her home to this place--having made it as it once was--to live
with her here--to be with her as the sun rose and set and the seasons
changed--with the joy of life filling each of them. She is the joy of Life--the
very heart of it. You see where I am--you see!"
"Yes,"
Penzance answered. He saw, and bowed his head, and Mount Dunstan knew he wished
him to continue.
"Sometimes--of
late--it has been too much for me and I have given free rein to my
fancy--knowing that there could never be more than fancy. I was doing it this
afternoon as I watched her move about among the people. And Mary Lithcom began
to talk about her." He smiled a grim smile. "Perhaps it was an
intervention of the gods to drag me down from my impious heights. She was quite
unconscious that she was driving home facts like nails--the facts that every
man who wanted money wanted Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter--and that the young
lady, not being dull, was not unaware of the obvious truth! And that men with
prizes to offer were ready to offer them in a proper manner. Also that she was
only a brilliant bird of passage, who, in a few months, would be caught in the
dazzling net of the great world. And that even Lord Westholt and Dunholm Castle
were not quite what she might expect. Lady Mary was sincerely interested. She
drove it home in her ardour. She told me to look at her--to look at her mouth
and chin and eyelashes--and to make note of what she stood for in a crowd of
ordinary people. I could have laughed aloud with rage and self-mockery."
Mr. Penzance was
resting his forehead on his hand, his elbow on his chair's arm.
"This is profound
unhappiness," he said. "It is profound unhappiness."
Mount Dunstan answered
by a brusque gesture.
"But it will pass
away," went on Penzance, and not as you fear it must," in answer to
another gesture, fiercely impatient. "Not that way. Some day--or
night--you will stand here together, and you will tell her all you have told
me. I know it will be so."
"What!" Mount
Dunstan cried out. But the words had been spoken with such absolute conviction
that he felt himself become pale.
It was with the same
conviction that Penzance went on.
"I have spent my
quiet life in thinking of the forces for which we find no explanation--of the
causes of which we only see the effects. Long ago in looking at you in one of
my pondering moments I said to myself that you were of the Primeval Force which
cannot lose its way--which sweeps a clear pathway for itself as it moves--and
which cannot be held back. I said to you just now that because you are a strong
man you cannot be sure that a woman you are--even in spite of yourself-- making
mad love to, is unconscious that you are doing it. You do not know what your
strength lies in. I do not, the woman does not, but we must all feel it,
whether we comprehend it or no. You said of this fine creature, some time
since, that she was Life, and you have just said again something of the same
kind. It is quite true. She is Life, and the joy of it. You are two strong
forces, and you are drawing together."
He rose from his chair,
and going to Mount Dunstan put his hand on his shoulder, his fine old face
singularly rapt and glowing.
"She is drawing
you and you are drawing her, and each is too strong to release the other. I
believe that to be true. Both bodies and souls do it. They are not separate
things. They move on their way as the stars do--they move on their way."
As he spoke, Mount
Dunstan's eyes looked into his fixedly. Then they turned aside and looked down
upon the mantel against which he was leaning. He aimlessly picked up his pipe
and laid it down again. He was paler than before, but he said no single word.
"You think your
reasons for holding aloof from her are the reasons of a man." Mr.
Penzance's voice sounded to him remote. "They are the reasons of a man's
pride--but that is not the strongest thing in the world. It only imagines it
is. You think that you cannot go to her as a luckier man could. You think
nothing shall force you to speak. Ask yourself why. It is because you believe
that to show your heart would be to place yourself in the humiliating position
of a man who might seem to her and to the world to be a base fellow."
"An impudent,
pushing, base fellow," thrust in Mount Dunstan fiercely. "One of a
vulgar lot. A thing fancying even its beggary worth buying. What has a
man--whose very name is hung with tattered ugliness--to offer?"
Penzance's hand was
still on his shoulder and his look at him was long.
"His very
pride," he said at last, "his very obstinacy and haughty, stubborn
determination. Those broken because the other feeling is the stronger and
overcomes him utterly."
A flush leaped to Mount
Dunstan's forehead. He set both elbows on the mantel and let his forehead fall
on his clenched fists. And the savage Briton rose in him.
"No!" he said
passionately. "By God, no!"
"You say
that," said the older man, "because you have not yet reached the end
of your tether. Unhappy as you are, you are not unhappy enough. Of the two, you
love yourself the more--your pride and your stubbornness."
"Yes,"
between his teeth. "I suppose I retain yet a sort of respect--and
affection--for my pride. May God leave it to me!"
Penzance felt himself
curiously exalted; he knew himself unreasoningly passing through an oddly
unpractical, uplifted moment, in whose impelling he singularly believed.
"You are drawing
her and she is drawing you," he said. "Perhaps you drew each other
across seas. You will stand here together and you will tell her of this--on
this very spot."
Mount Dunstan changed
his position and laughed roughly, as if to rouse himself. He threw out his arm
in a big, uneasy gesture, taking in the room.
"Oh, come,"
he said. "You talk like a seer. Look about you. Look! I am to bring her
here!"
"If it is the
primeval thing she will not care. Why should she?"
"She! Bring a life
like hers to this! Or perhaps you mean that her own wealth might make her
surroundings becoming-- that a man would endure that?"
"If it is the
primeval thing, you would not care. You would have forgotten that you two had
ever lived an hour apart."
He spoke with a deep,
moved gravity--almost as if he were speaking of the first Titan building of the
earth. Mount Dunstan staring at his delicate, insistent, elderly face, tried to
laugh again--and failed because the effort seemed actually irreverent. It was a
singular hypnotic moment, indeed. He himself was hypnotised. A flashlight of
new vision blazed before him and left him dumb. He took up his pipe hurriedly,
and with still unsteady fingers began to refill it. When it was filled he
lighted it, and then without a word of answer left the hearth and began to
tramp up and down the room again--out of the dim light into the shadows, back
out of the shadows and into the dim light again, his brow working and his teeth
holding hard his amber mouthpiece.
The morning awakening
of a normal healthy human creature should be a joyous thing. After the soul's
long hours of release from the burden of the body, its long hours spent-- one
can only say in awe at the mystery of it, "away, away"-- in flight,
perhaps, on broad, tireless wings, beating softly in fair, far skies, breathing
pure life, to be brought back to renew the strength of each dawning day; after these
hours of quiescence of limb and nerve and brain, the morning life returning
should unseal for the body clear eyes of peace at least. In time to come this
will be so, when the soul's wings are stronger, the body more attuned to
infinite law and the race a greater power--but as yet it often seems as though
the winged thing came back a lagging and reluctant rebel against its fate and
the chain which draws it back a prisoner to its toil.
It had seemed so often
to Mount Dunstan--oftener than not. Youth should not know such awakening, he
was well aware; but he had known it sometimes even when he had been a child,
and since his return from his ill-starred struggle in America, the dull and
reluctant facing of the day had become a habit. Yet on the morning after his
talk with his friend-- the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed
to hypnotise him--he knew when he opened his eyes to the light that he had
awakened as a man should awake--with an unreasoning sense of pleasure in the
life and health of his own body, as he stretched mighty limbs, strong after the
night's rest, and feeling that there was work to be done. It was all
unreasoning-- there was no more to be done than on those other days which he
had wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed useless and empty of any
worth--but this morning the mere light of the sun was of use, the rustle of the
small breeze in the leaves, the soft floating past of the white clouds, the
mere fact that the great blind-faced, stately house was his own, that he could
tramp far over lands which were his heritage, unfed though they might be, and
that the very rustics who would pass him in the lanes were, so to speak, his
own people: that he had name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his
morning food--it was all of use.
An alluring picture--of
a certain deep, clear bathing pool in the park rose before him. It had not
called to him for many a day, and now he saw its dark blueness gleam between
flags and green rushes in its encircling thickness of shrubs and trees. He
sprang from his bed, and in a few minutes was striding across the grass of the
park, his towels over his arm, his head thrown back as he drank in the
freshness of the morning-scented air. It was scented with dew and grass and the
breath of waking trees and growing things; early twitters and thrills were to
be heard here and there, insisting on morning joyfulness; rabbits frisked about
among the fine-grassed hummocks of their warren and, as he passed, scuttled
back into their holes, with a whisking of short white tails, at which he
laughed with friendly amusement. Cropping stags lifted their antlered heads,
and fawns with dappled sides and immense lustrous eyes gazed at him without
actual fear, even while they sidled closer to their mothers. A skylark
springing suddenly from the grass a few yards from his feet made him stop short
once and stand looking upward and listening. Who could pass by a skylark at
five o'clock on a summer's morning--the little, heavenly light-heart circling
and wheeling, showering down diamonds, showering down pearls, from its tiny
pulsating, trilling throat?
"Do you know why
they sing like that? It is because all but the joy of things has been kept
hidden from them. They knew nothing but life and flight and mating, and the
gold of the sun. So they sing." That she had once said.
He listened until the
jewelled rain seemed to have fallen into his soul. Then he went on his way
smiling as he knew he had never smiled in his life before. He knew it because
he realised that he had never before felt the same vigorous, light normality of
spirit, the same sense of being as other men. It was as though something had
swept a great clear space about him, and having room for air he breathed deep
and was glad of the commonest gifts of being.
The bathing pool had
been the greatest pleasure of his uncared-for boyhood. No one knew which long
passed away Mount Dunstan had made it. The oldest villager had told him that it
had "allus ben there," even in his father's time. Since he himself
had known it he had seen that it was kept at its best. Its dark blue depths
reflected in their pellucid clearness the water plants growing at its edge and
the enclosing shrubs and trees. The turf bordering it was velvet-thick and
green, and a few flag-steps led down to the water. Birds came there to drink
and bathe and preen and dress their feathers. He knew there were often nests in
the bushes--sometimes the nests of nightingales who filled the soft darkness or
moonlight of early June with the wonderfulness of nesting song. Sometimes a
straying fawn poked in a tender nose, and after drinking delicately stole away,
as if it knew itself a trespasser.
To undress and plunge
headlong into the dark sapphire water was a rapturous thing. He swam swiftly
and slowly by turns, he floated, looking upward at heaven's blue, listening to
birds' song and inhaling all the fragrance of the early day. Strength grew in
him and life pulsed as the water lapped his limbs. He found himself thinking
with pleasure of a long walk he intended to take to see a farmer he must talk
to about his hop gardens; he found himself thinking with pleasure of other
things as simple and common to everyday life--such things as he ordinarily
faced merely because he must, since he could not afford an experienced bailiff.
He was his own bailiff, his own steward, merely, he had often thought, an
unsuccessful farmer of half-starved lands. But this morning neither he nor they
seemed so starved, and--for no reason--there was a future of some sort.
He emerged from his
pool glowing, the turf feeling like velvet beneath his feet, a fine light in
his eyes.
"Yes," he
said, throwing out his arms in a lordly stretch of physical well-being,
"it might be a magnificent thing--mere strong living. This is
magnificent."
HIS breakfast and the
talk over it with Penzance seemed good things. It suddenly had become worth
while to discuss the approaching hop harvest and the yearly influx of the hop
pickers from London. Yesterday the subject had appeared discouraging enough.
The great hop gardens of the estate had been in times past its most prolific
source of agricultural revenue and the boast and wonder of the hop-growing
county.
The neglect and scant
food of the lean years had cost them their reputation. Each season they had
needed smaller bands of "hoppers," and their standard had been
lowered. It had been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and
irretrievable loss. Because this morning, for a remote reason, the pulse of
life beat strong in him he was taking a new view. Might not study of the
subject, constant attention and the application of all available resource to
one end produce appreciable results? The idea presented itself in the form of a
thing worth thinking of.
"It would provide
an outlook and give one work to do," he put it to his companion. "To
have a roof over one's head, a sound body, and work to do, is not so bad. Such
things form the whole of G. Selden's cheerful aim. His spirit is alight within
me. I will walk over and talk to Bolter."
Bolter was a farmer
whose struggle to make ends meet was almost too much for him. Holdings whose
owners, either through neglect or lack of money, have failed to do their duty
as landlords in the matter of repairs of farmhouses, outbuildings, fences, and
other things, gradually fall into poor hands. Resourceful and prosperous
farmers do not care to hold lands under unprosperous landlords. There were
farms lying vacant on the Mount Dunstan estate, there were others whose tenants
were uncertain rent payers or slipshod workers or dishonest in small ways.
Waste or sale of the fertiliser which should have been given to the soil as its
due, neglect in the case of things whose decay meant depreciation of property
and expense to the landlord, were dishonesties. But Mount Dunstan knew that if
he turned out Thorn and Fittle, whom no watching could wholly frustrate in
their tricks, Under Mount Farm and Oakfield Rise would stand empty for many a
year. But for his poverty Bolter would have been a good tenant enough. He was
in trouble now because, though his hops promised well, he faced difficulties in
the matter of "pickers." Last year he had not been able to pay
satisfactory prices in return for labour, and as a result the prospect of
securing good workers was an unpromising one.
The hordes of men,
women, and children who flock year after year to the hop-growing districts know
each other. They learn also which may be called the good neighbourhoods and
which the bad; the gardens whose holders are considered satisfactory as
masters, and those who are undesirable. They know by experience or report where
the best "huts" are provided, where tents are supplied, and where one
must get along as one can. Generally the regular flocks are under a
"captain," who gathers his followers each season, manages them and
looks after their interests and their employers'. In some cases the same
captain brings his regiment to the same gardens year after year, and ends by
counting himself as of the soil and almost of the family of his employer. Each
hard, thick-fogged winter they fight through in their East End courts and
streets, they look forward to the open-air weeks spent between long, narrow
green groves of tall garlanded poles, whose wreathings hang thick with fresh
and pungent-scented hop clusters. Children play " 'oppin" in dingy
rooms and alleys, and talk to each other of days when the sun shone hot and
birds were singing and flowers smelling sweet in the hedgerows; of others when
the rain streamed down and made mud of the soft earth, and yet there was pleasure
in the gipsying life, and high cheer in the fire of sticks built in the field
by some bold spirit, who hung over it a tin kettle to boil for tea. They never
forgot the gentry they had caught sight of riding or driving by on the road,
the parson who came to talk, and the occasional groups of ladies from the
"great house" who came into the gardens to walk about and look at the
bins and ask queer questions in their gentry-sounding voices. They never knew
anything, and they always seemed to be entertained. Sometimes there were
enterprising, laughing ones, who asked to be shown how to strip the hops into
the bins, and after being shown played at the work for a little while, taking
off their gloves and showing white fingers with rings on. They always looked as
if they had just been washed, and as if all of their clothes were fresh from
the tub, and when anyone stood near them it was observable that they smelt
nice. Generally they gave pennies to the children before they left the garden,
and sometimes shillings to the women. The hop picking was, in fact, a wonderful
blend of work and holiday combined.
Mount Dunstan had liked
the "hopping" from his first memories of it. He could recall his
sensations of welcoming a renewal of interesting things when, season after
season, he had begun to mark the early stragglers on the road. The stragglers
were not of the class gathered under captains. They were derelicts--tramps who
spent their summers on the highways and their winters in such workhouses as
would take them in; tinkers, who differ from the tramps only because sometimes
they owned a rickety cart full of strange household goods and drunken
tenth-hand perambulators piled with dirty bundles and babies, these last
propelled by robust or worn-out, slatternly women, who sat by the small
roadside fire stirring the battered pot or tending the battered kettle, when
resting time had come and food must be cooked. Gipsies there were who had
cooking fires also, and hobbled horses cropping the grass. Now and then
appeared a grand one, who was rumoured to be a Lee and therefore royal, and who
came and lived regally in a gaily painted caravan. During the late summer weeks
one began to see slouching figures tramping along the high road at intervals.
These were men who were old, men who were middle-aged and some who were young,
all of them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten, or ragged. Occasionally
one was to be seen in heavy beery slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the
grass smoking lazily, or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment.
Such as these were drifting in early that they might be on the ground when
pickers were wanted. They were the forerunners of the regular army.
On his walk to West
Ways, the farm Bolter lived on, Mount Dunstan passed two or three of these
strays. They were the usual flotsam and jetsam, but on the roadside near a hop
garden he came upon a group of an aspect so unusual that it attracted his
attention. Its unusualness consisted in its air of exceeding bustling
cheerfulness. It was a domestic group of the most luckless type, and ragged,
dirty, and worn by an evidently long tramp, might well have been expected to
look forlorn, discouraged, and out of spirits. A slouching father of five
children, one plainly but a few weeks old, and slung in a dirty shawl at its
mother's breast, an unhealthy looking slattern mother, two ancient
perambulators, one piled with dingy bundles and cooking utensils, the
seven-year-old eldest girl unpacking things and keeping an eye at the same time
on the two youngest, who were neither of them old enough to be steady on their
feet, the six-year-old gleefully aiding the slouching father to build the
wayside fire. The mother sat upon the grass nursing her baby and staring about
her with an expression at once stupefied and illuminated by some temporary
bliss. Even the slouching father was grinning, as if good luck had befallen
him, and the two youngest were tumbling about with squeals of good cheer. This
was not the humour in which such a group usually dropped wearily on the grass
at the wayside to eat its meagre and uninviting meal and rest its dragging
limbs. As he drew near, Mount Dunstan saw that at the woman's side there stood
a basket full of food and a can full of milk.
Ordinarily he would
have passed on, but, perhaps because of the human glow the morning had brought
him, he stopped and spoke.
"Have you come for
the hopping?" he asked.
The man touched his
forehead, apparently not conscious that the grin was yet on his face.
"Yes, sir,"
he answered.
"How far have you
walked?"
"A good fifty
miles since we started, sir. It took us a good bit. We was pretty done up when
we stopped here. But we've 'ad a wonderful piece of good luck." And his
grin broadened immensely.
"I am glad to hear
that," said Mount Dunstan. The good luck was plainly of a nature to have
excited them greatly. Chance good luck did not happen to people like
themselves. They were in the state of mind which in their class can only be
relieved by talk. The woman broke in, her weak mouth and chin quite unsteady.
"Seems like it
can't be true, sir," she said. "I'd only just come out of the
Union--after this one," signifying the new baby at her breast. "I
wasn't fit to drag along day after day. We 'ad to stop 'ere 'cos I was near
fainting away."
"She looked fair
white when she sat down," put in the man. "Like she was goin'
off."
"And that very
minute," said the woman, "a young lady came by on 'orseback, an' the
minute she sees me she stops her 'orse an' gets down."
"I never seen
nothing like the quick way she done it," said the husband. "Sharp,
like she was a soldier under order. Down an' give the bridle to the groom an'
comes over
"And kneels
down," the woman took him up, "right by me an' says, 'What's the
matter? What can I do?' an' finds out in two minutes an' sends to the farm for
some brandy an' all this basketful of stuff," jerking her head towards the
treasure at her side. "An' gives 'im," with another jerk towards her
mate, "money enough to 'elp us along till I'm fair on my feet. That quick
it was--that quick," passing her hand over her forehead, "as if it
wasn't for the basket," with a nervous, half-hysteric giggle, "I
wouldn't believe but what it was a dream--I wouldn't."
"She was a very
kind young lady," said Mount Dunstan, "and you were in luck."
He gave a few coppers
to the children and strode on his way. The glow was hot in his heart, and he
held his head high.
"She has gone
by," he said. "She has gone by."
He knew he should find
her at West Ways Farm, and he did so. Slim and straight as a young birch tree,
and elate with her ride in the morning air, she stood silhouetted in her black
habit against the ancient whitewashed brick porch as she talked to Bolter.
"I have been
drinking a glass of milk and asking questions about hops," she said,
giving him her hand bare of glove. "Until this year I have never seen a
hop garden or a hop picker."
After the exchange of a
few words Bolter respectfully melted away and left them together.
"It was such a
wonderful day that I wanted to be out under the sky for a long time--to ride a
long way," she explained. "I have been looking at hop gardens as I
rode. I have watched them all the summer--from the time when there was only a
little thing with two or three pale green leaves looking imploringly all the
way up to the top of each immensely tall hop pole, from its place in the earth
at the bottom of it-- as if it was saying over and over again, under its
breath, 'Can I get up there? Can I get up? Can I do it in time? Can I do it in
time?' Yes, that was what they were saying, the little bold things. I have
watched them ever since, putting out tendrils and taking hold of the poles and
pulling and climbing like little acrobats. And curling round and unfolding
leaves and more leaves, until at last they threw them out as if they were
beginning to boast that they could climb up into the blue of the sky if the
summer were long enough. And now, look at them!" her hand waved towards
the great gardens. "Forests of them, cool green pathways and avenues with
leaf canopies over them."
"You have seen it
all," he said. "You do see things, don't you? A few hundred yards
down the road I passed something you had seen. I knew it was you who had seen
it, though the poor wretches had not heard your name."
She hesitated a moment,
then stooped down and took up in her hand a bit of pebbled earth from the
pathway. There was storm in the blue of her eyes as she held it out for him to
look at as it lay on the bare rose-flesh of her palm.
"See," she
said, "see, it is like that--what we give. It is like that." And she
tossed the earth away.
"It does not seem
like that to those others."
"No, thank God, it
does not. But to one's self it is the mere luxury of self-indulgence, and the
realisation of it sometimes tempts one to be even a trifle morbid. Don't you
see," a sudden thrill in her voice startled him, "they are on the
roadside everywhere all over the world."
"Yes. All over the
world."
"Once when I was a
child of ten I read a magazine article about the suffering millions and the
monstrously rich, who were obviously to blame for every starved sob and cry. It
almost drove me out of my childish senses. I went to my father and threw myself
into his arms in a violent fit of crying. I clung to him and sobbed out, 'Let
us give it all away; let us give it all away and be like other people!' "
"What did he
say?"
"He said we could
never be quite like other people. We had a certain load to carry along the
highway. It was the thing the whole world wanted and which we ourselves wanted
as much as the rest, and we could not sanely throw it away. It was my first
lesson in political economy and I abhorred it. I was a passionate child and
beat furiously against the stone walls enclosing present suffering. It was
horrible to know that they could not be torn down. I cried out, 'When I see
anyone who is miserable by the roadside I shall stop and give him everything he
wants--everything!' I was ten years old, and thought it could be done."
"But you stop by
the roadside even now."
"Yes. That one can
do."
"You are two
strong creatures and you draw each other," Penzance had said.
"Perhaps you drew each other across seas. Who knows?"
Coming to West Ways on
a chance errand he had, as it were, found her awaiting him on the threshold. On
her part she had certainly not anticipated seeing him there, but--when one
rides far afield in the sun there are roads towards which one turns as if
answering a summoning call, and as her horse had obeyed a certain touch of the
rein at a certain point her cheek had felt momentarily hot.
Until later, when the
"picking" had fairly begun, the kilns would not be at work; but there
was some interest even now in going over the ground for the first time.
"I have never been
inside an oast house," she said; "Bolter is going to show me his, and
explain technicalities."
"May I come with
you?" he asked.
There was a change in
him. Something had lighted in his eyes since the day before, when he had told
her his story of Red Godwyn. She wondered what it was. They went together over
the place, escorted by Bolter. They looked into the great circular ovens, on
whose floors the hops would be laid for drying, they mounted ladder-like steps
to the upper room where, when dried, the same hops would lie in soft, light
piles, until pushed with wooden shovels into the long "pokes" to be
pressed and packed into a solid marketable mass. Bolter was allowed to explain
the technicalities, but it was plain that Mount Dunstan was familiar with all
of them, and it was he who, with a sentence here and there, gave her the colour
of things.
"When it is being
done there is nearly always outside a touch of the sharp sweetness of early
autumn," he said "The sun slanting through the little window falls on
the pale yellow heaps, and there is a pungent scent of hops in the air which is
rather intoxicating."
"I am coming later
to see the entire process," she answered.
It was a mere matter of
seeing common things together and exchanging common speech concerning them, but
each was so strongly conscious of the other that no sentence could seem wholly
impersonal. There are times when the whole world is personal to a mood whose
intensity seems a reason for all things. Words are of small moment when the
mere sound of a voice makes an unreasonable joy
"There was that
touch of sharp autumn sweetness in the air yesterday morning," she said.
"And the chaplets of briony berries that look as if they had been thrown
over the hedges are beginning to change to scarlet here and there. The wild
rose-haws are reddening, and so are the clusters of berries on the thorn trees
and bushes."
"There are
millions of them," Mount Dunstan said, "and in a few weeks' time they
will look like bunches of crimson coral. When the sun shines on them they will
be wonderful to see.
What was there in such
speeches as these to draw any two nearer and nearer to each other as they
walked side by side-- to fill the morning air with an intensity of life, to seem
to cause the world to drop away and become as nothing? As they had been
isolated during their waltz in the crowded ballroom at Dunholm Castle, so they
were isolated now. When they stood in the narrow green groves of the hop
garden, talking simply of the placing of the bins and the stripping and
measuring of the vines, there might have been no human thing within a hundred
miles--within a thousand. For the first time his height and strength conveyed
to her an impression of physical beauty. His walk and bearing gave her
pleasure. When he turned his red-brown eyes upon her suddenly she was conscious
that she liked their colour, their shape, the power of the look in them. On his
part, he--for the twentieth time-- found himself newly moved by the dower nature
had bestowed on her. Had the world ever held before a woman creature so much to
be longed for?--abnormal wealth, New York and Fifth Avenue notwithstanding, a
man could only think of folding arms round her and whispering in her lovely
ear--follies, oaths, prayers, gratitude.
And yet as they went
about together there was growing in Betty Vanderpoel's mind a certain
realisation. It grew in spite of the recognition of the change in him--the new
thing lighted in his eyes. Whatsoever he felt--if he felt anything-- he would
never allow himself speech. How could he? In his place she could not speak
herself. Because he was the strong thing which drew her thoughts, he would not
come to any woman only to cast at her feet a burden which, in the nature of
things, she must take up. And suddenly she comprehended that the mere obstinate
Briton in him--even apart from greater things--had an immense attraction for
her. As she liked now the red-brown colour of his eyes and saw beauty in his
rugged features, so she liked his British stubbornness and the pride which
would not be beaten.
"It is the
unconquerable thing, which leads them in their battles and makes them bear any
horror rather than give in. They have taken half the world with it; they are
like bulldogs and lions," she thought. "And--and I am glorying in it."
"Do you
know," said Mount Dunstan, "that sometimes you suddenly fling out the
most magnificent flag of colour--as if some splendid flame of thought had sent
up a blaze?"
"I hope it is not
a habit," she answered. "When one has a splendid flare of thought one
should be modest about it."
What was there worth
recording in the whole hour they spent together? Outwardly there had only been
a chance meeting and a mere passing by. But each left something with the other
and each learned something; and the record made was deep.
At last she was on her
horse again, on the road outside the white gate.
"This morning has
been so much to the good," he said. "I had thought that perhaps we
might scarcely meet again this year. I shall become absorbed in hops and you
will no doubt go away. You will make visits or go to the Riviera--or to New
York for the winter?"
"I do not know
yet. But at least I shall stay to watch the thorn trees load themselves with
coral." To herself she was saying: "He means to keep away. I shall
not see him."
As she rode off Mount
Dunstan stood for a few moments, not moving from his place. At a short distance
from the farmhouse gate a side lane opened upon the highway, and as she
cantered in its direction a horseman turned in from it-- a man who was young
and well dressed and who sat well a spirited animal. He came out upon the road
almost face to face with Miss Vanderpoel, and from where he stood Mount Dunstan
could see his delighted smile as he lifted his hat in salute. It was Lord
Westholt, and what more natural than that after an exchange of greetings the
two should ride together on their way! For nearly three miles their homeward
road would be the same.
But in a breath's space
Mount Dunstan realised a certain truth--a simple, elemental thing. All the
exaltation of the morning swooped and fell as a bird seems to swoop and fall
through space. It was all over and done with, and he understood it. His normal
awakening in the morning, the physical and mental elation of the first clear
hours, the spring of his foot as he had trod the road, had all had but one
meaning. In some occult way the hypnotic talk of the night before had formed
itself into a reality, fantastic and unreasoning as it had been. Some insistent
inner consciousness had seized upon and believed it in spite of him and had set
all his waking being in tune to it. That was the explanation of his undue
spirits and hope. If Penzance had spoken a truth he would have had a natural,
sane right to feel all this and more. But the truth was that he, in his guise--was
one of those who are "on the roadside everywhere--all over the
world." Poetically figurative as the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.
So, still hearing the
distant sounds of the hoofs beating in cheerful diminuendo on the roadway, he
turned about and went back to talk to Bolter.
TO spend one's days
perforce in an enormous house alone is a thing likely to play unholy tricks
with a man's mind and lead it to gloomy workings. To know the existence of a
hundred or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms; to be
conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of untrodden corridors,
of unending walls, from which the pictured eyes of long dead men and women
stare, as if seeing things which human eyes behold not--is an eerie and
unwholesome thing Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in a chamber in
which he might have died or been murdered a score of times without being able
to communicate with the remote servants' quarters below stairs, where lay the
one man and one woman who attended him. When he came late to his room and
prepared for sleep by the light of two flickering candles the silence of the
dead in tombs was about him; but it was only a more profound and insistent
thing than the silence of the day, because it was the silence of the night,
which is a presence. He used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact
that at certain times the fantasy was half believable--that there were things
which walked about softly at night--things which did not want to be dead. He
himself had picked them out from among the pictures in the gallery--pretty,
light, petulant women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded, eager men. His theory
was that they hated their stone coffins, and fought their way back through the
grey mists to try to talk and make love and to be seen of warm things which
were alive. But it was not to be done, because they had no bodies and no
voices, and when they beat upon closed doors they would not open. Still they
came back--came back. And sometimes there was a rustle and a sweep through the
air in a passage, or a creak, or a sense of waiting which was almost a sound.
"Perhaps some of
them have gone when they have been as I am," he had said one black night,
when he had sat in his room staring at the floor. "If a man was dragged
out when he had not lived a day, he would come back I should come back if--God!
A man could not be dragged away--like this!"
And to sit alone and
think of it was an awful and a lonely thing--a lonely thing.
But loneliness was
nothing new, only that in these months his had strangely intensified itself.
This, though he was not aware of it, was because the soul and body which were
the completing parts of him were within reach--and without it. When he went down
to breakfast he sat singly at his table, round which twenty people might have
laughed and talked. Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days
when he was not out of doors. Since he could not afford servants, the many
other rooms must be kept closed. It was a ghastly and melancholy thing to make,
as he must sometimes, a sort of precautionary visit to the state apartments. He
was the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see them opened again for use,
but so long as he lived under the roof he might by prevision check, in a
measure, the too rapid encroachments of decay. To have a leak stopped here, a
nail driven or a support put there, seemed decent things to do.
"Whom am I doing
it for?" he said to Mr. Penzance "I am doing it for myself--because I
cannot help it. The place seems to me like some gorgeous old warrior come to
the end of his days It has stood the war of things for century after
century--the war of things. It is going now I am all that is left to it. It is
all I have. So I patch it up when I can afford it, with a crutch or a splint
and a bandage."
Late in the afternoon
of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel rode away from West Ways with Lord
Westholt, a stealthy and darkly purple cloud rose, lifting its ominous bulk
against a chrysoprase and pink horizon. It was the kind of cloud which speaks
of but one thing to those who watch clouds, or even casually consider them. So
Lady Anstruthers felt some surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse
before the stone steps and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of the
coming storm.
"Nigel will be
caught in the rain," she said to her sister. "I wonder why he goes
out now. It would be better to wait until to-morrow."
But Sir Nigel did not
think so. He had calculated matters with some nicety. He was not exactly on
such terms with Mount Dunstan as would make a casual call seem an entirely
natural thing, and he wished to drop in upon him for a casual call and in an
unpremeditated manner. He meant to reach the Mount about the time the storm
broke, under which circumstance nothing could bear more lightly an air of being
unpremeditated than to take refuge in a chance passing.
Mount Dunstan was in
the library. He had sat smoking his pipe while he watched the purple cloud roll
up and spread itself, blotting out the chrysoprase and pink and blue, and when
the branches of the trees began to toss about he had looked on with pleasure as
the rush of big rain drops came down and pelted things. It was a fine storm,
and there were some imposing claps of thunder and jagged flashes of lightning.
As one splendid rattle shook the air he was surprised to hear a summons at the
great hall door. Who on earth could be turning up at this time? His man Reeve
announced the arrival a few moments later, and it was Sir Nigel Anstruthers. He
had, he explained, been riding through the village when the deluge descended,
and it had occurred to him to turn in at the park gates and ask a temporary
shelter. Mount Dunstan received him with sufficient courtesy. His appearance
was not a thing to rejoice over, but it could be endured. Whisky and soda and a
smoke would serve to pass the hour, if the storm lasted so long.
Conversation was not
the easiest thing in the world under the circumstances, but Sir Nigel led the
way steadily after he had taken his seat and accepted the hospitalities
offered. What a place it was--this! He had been struck for the hundredth time
with the impressiveness of the mass of it, the sweep of the park and the
splendid grouping of the timber, as he had ridden up the avenue. There was no
other place like it in the county. Was there another like it in England?
"Not in its case,
I hope," Mount Dunstan said.
There were a few
seconds of silence. The rain poured down in splashing sheets and was swept in
rattling gusts against the window panes.
"What the place
needs is--an heiress," Anstruthers observed in the tone of a practical
man. "I believe I have heard that your views of things are such that she
should preferably not be an American."
Mount Dunstan did not
smile, though he slightly showed his teeth.
"When I am driven
to the wall," he answered, "I may not be fastidious as to
nationality."
Nigel Anstruthers'
manner was not a bad one. He chose that tone of casual openness which, while it
does not wholly commit itself, may be regarded as suggestive of the amiable
half confidence of speeches made as "man to man."
"My own
opportunity of studying the genus American heiress within my own gates is a
first-class one. I find that it knows what it wants and that its intention is
to get it." A short laugh broke from him as he flicked the ash from his
cigar on to the small bronze receptacle at his elbow. "It is not many
years since it would have been difficult for a girl to be frank enough to say,
'When I marry I shall ask something in exchange for what I have to give.'
"
"There are not
many who have as much to give," said Mount Dunstan coolly.
"True," with
a slight shrug. "You are thinking that men are glad enough to take a girl
like that--even one who has not a shape like Diana's and eyes like the sea.
Yes, by George," softly, and narrowing his lids, "she is a handsome creature."
Mount Dunstan did not
attempt to refute the statement, and Anstruthers laughed low again.
"It is an asset
she knows the value of quite clearly. That is the interesting part of it. She
has inherited the far-seeing commercial mind. She does not object to admitting
it. She educated herself in delightful cold blood that she might be prepared
for the largest prize appearing upon the horizon. She held things in view when
she was a child at school, and obviously attacked her French, German, and Italian
conjugations with a twelve-year-old eye on the future."
Mount Dunstan leaning
back carelessly in his chair, laughed-- as it seemed--with him. Internally he
was saying that the man was a liar who might always be trusted to lie, but he
knew with shamed fury that the lies were doing something to his soul--rolling
dark vapours over it--stinging him, dragging away props, and making him feel
they had been foolish things to lean on. This can always be done with a man in
love who has slight foundation for hope. For some mysterious and occult reason
civilisation has elected to treat the strange and great passion as if it were
an unholy and indecent thing, whose dominion over him proper social training
prevents any man from admitting openly. In passing through its cruelest phases
he must bear himself as if he were immune, and this being the custom, he may be
called upon to endure much without the relief of striking out with manly blows.
An enemy guessing his case and possessing the infernal gift whose joy is to dishearten
and do hurt with courteous despitefulness, may plant a poisoned arrow here and
there with neatness and fine touch, while his bound victim can, with decency,
neither start, nor utter brave howls, nor guard himself, but must sit still and
listen, hospitably supplying smoke and drink and being careful not to make an
ass of himself.
Therefore Mount Dunstan
pushed the cigars nearer to his visitor and waved his hand hospitably towards
the whisky and soda. There was no reason, in fact, why Anstruthers--or any one
indeed, but Penzance, should suspect that he had become somewhat mad in secret.
The man's talk was marked merely by the lightly disparaging malice which was
rarely to be missed from any speech of his which touched on others. Yet it
might have been a thing arranged beforehand, to suggest adroitly either lies or
truth which would make a man see every sickeningly good reason for feeling that
in this contest he did not count for a man at all.
"It has all been
pretty obvious," said Sir Nigel. "There is a sort of cynicism in the
openness of the siege. My impression is that almost every youngster who has met
her has taken a shot. Tommy Alanby scrambling up from his knees in one of the
rose-gardens was a satisfying sight. His much-talked-of-passion for Jane
Lithcom was temporarily in abeyance."
The rain swirled in a
torrent against the window, and casually glancing outside at the tossing
gardens he went on.
"She is enjoying
herself. Why not? She has the spirit of the huntress. I don't think she talks
nonsense about friendship to the captives of her bow and spear. She knows she
can always get what she wants. A girl like that must have an arrogance of mind.
And she is not a young saint. She is one of the women born with the look in her
eyes. I own I should not like to be in the place of any primeval poor brute who
really went mad over her--and counted her millions as so much dirt."
Mount Dunstan answered
with a shrug of his big shoulders:
"Apparently he
would seem as remote from the reason of to-day as the men who lived on the land
when Hengist and Horsa came--or when Cæsar landed at Deal."
"He would seem as
remote to her," with a shrug also. "I should not like to contend that
his point of view would not interest her or that she would particularly discourage
him. Her eyes would call him--without malice or intention, no doubt, but your
early Briton ceorl or earl would be as well understood by her. Your New York
beauty who has lived in the market place knows principally the prices of
things."
He was not ill pleased
with himself. He was putting it well and getting rather even with her. If this
fellow with his shut mouth had a sore spot hidden anywhere he was giving him
"to think." And he would find himself thinking, while, whatsoever he
thought, he would be obliged to continue to keep his ugly mouth shut. The great
idea was to say things without saying them, to set your hearer's mind to saying
them for you.
"What strikes one
most is a sort of commercial brilliance in her," taking up his thread
again after a smilingly reflective pause. "It quite exhilarates one by its
novelty. There's spice in it. We English have not a look-in when we are dealing
with Americans, and yet France calls us a nation of shop-keepers. My impression
is that their women take little inventories of every house they enter, of every
man they meet. I heard her once speaking to my wife about this place, as if she
had lived in it. She spoke of the closed windows and the state of the
gardens--of broken fountains and fallen arches. She evidently deplored the
deterioration of things which represented capital. She has inventoried Dunholm,
no doubt. That will give Westholt a chance. But she will do nothing until after
her next year's season in London--that I'd swear. I look forward to next year.
It will be worth watching. She has been training my wife. A sister who has
married an Englishman and has at least spent some years of her life in England
has a certain established air. When she is presented one knows she will be a
sensation. After that----" he hesitated a moment, smiling not too
pleasantly.
"After that,"
said Mount Dunstan, "the Deluge."
"Exactly. The
Deluge which usually sweeps girls off their feet--but it will not sweep her off
hers. She will stand quite firm in the flood and lose sight of nothing of
importance which floats past."
Mount Dunstan took him
up. He was sick of hearing the fellow's voice.
"There will be a
good many things," he said; "there will be great personages and small
ones, pomps and vanities, glittering things and heavy ones."
"When she sees
what she wants," said Anstruthers, "she will hold out her hand,
knowing it will come to her. The things which drown will not disturb her. I
once made the blunder of suggesting that she might need protection against the
importunate--as if she had been an English girl. It was an idiotic thing to
do."
"Because?"
Mount Dunstan for the moment had lost his head. Anstruthers had maddeningly
paused.
"She answered that
if it became necessary she might perhaps be able to protect herself. She was as
cool and frank as a boy. No air pincé about it--merely consciousness of being
able to put things in their right places. Made a mere male relative feel like a
fool."
"When are things
in their right places?" To his credit be it spoken, Mount Dunstan managed
to say it as if in the mere putting together of idle words. What man likes to
be reminded of his right place! No man wants to be put in his right place.
There is always another place which seems more desirable.
"She knows--if we
others do not. I suppose my right place is at Stornham, conducting myself as
the brother-in-law of a fair American should. I suppose yours is here--shut up
among your closed corridors and locked doors. There must be a lot of them in a
house like this. Don't you sometimes feel it too large for you?"
"Always,"
answered Mount Dunstan.
The fact that he added
nothing else and met a rapid side glance with unmoving red-brown eyes gazing
out from under rugged brows, perhaps irritated Anstruthers. He had been rather
enjoying himself, but he had not enjoyed himself enough. There was no denying
that his plaything had not openly flinched. Plainly he was not good at
flinching. Anstruthers wondered how far a man might go. He tried again.
"She likes the
place, though she has a natural disdain for its condition. That is practical
American. Things which are going to pieces because money is not spent upon
them--mere money, of which all the people who count for anything have so
much--are inevitably rather disdained. They are 'out of it.' But she likes the
estate." As he watched Mount Dunstan he felt sure he had got it at
last--the right thing. "If you were a duke with fifty thousand a
year," with a distinctly nasty, amicably humorous, faint laugh, "she
would--by the Lord, I believe, she would take it over--and you with it."
Mount Dunstan got up.
In his rough walking tweeds he looked over-big--and heavy--and perilous. For
two seconds Nigel Anstruthers would not have been surprised if he had without
warning slapped his face, or knocked him over, or whirled him out of his chair
and kicked him. He would not have liked it, but--for two seconds--it would have
been no surprise. In fact, he instinctively braced his not too firm muscles.
But nothing of the sort occurred. During the two seconds--perhaps three--Mount
Dunstan stood still and looked down at him. The brief space at an end, he
walked over to the hearth and stood with his back to the big fireplace.
"You don't like
her," he said, and his manner was that of a man dealing with a matter of
fact. "Why do you talk about her?"
He had got away
again--quite away.
An ugly flush shot over
Anstruthers' face. There was one more thing to say--whether it was idiotic to
say it or not. Things can always be denied afterwards, should denial appear
necessary--and for the moment his special devil possessed him.
"I do not like
her!" And his mouth twisted. "Do I not? I am not an old woman. I am a
man--like others. I chance to like her--too much."
There was a short
silence. Mount Dunstan broke it.
"Then," he
remarked, "you had better emigrate to some country with a climate which
suits you. I should say that England--for the present--does not."
"I shall stay
where I am," answered Anstruthers, with a slight hoarseness of voice,
which made it necessary for him to clear his throat. "I shall stay where
she is. I will have that satisfaction, at least. She does not mind. I am only a
racketty, middle-aged brother-in-law, and she can take care of herself. As I
told you, she has the spirit of the huntress."
"Look here,"
said Mount Dunstan, quite without haste, and with an iron civility. "I am
going to take the liberty of suggesting something. If this thing is true, it
would be as well not to talk about it."
"As well for
me--or for her?" and there was a serene significance in the query.
Mount Dunstan thought a
few seconds.
"I confess,"
he said slowly, and he planted his fine blow between the eyes well and with
directness. "I confess that it would not have occurred to me to ask you to
do anything or refrain from doing it for her sake."
"Thank you.
Perhaps you are right. One learns that one must protect one's self. I shall not
talk--neither will you. I know that. I was a fool to let it out. The storm is
over. I must ride home." He rose from his seat and stood smiling. "It
would smash up things nicely if the new beauty's appearance in the great world
were preceded by chatter of the unseemly affection of some adorer of ill
repute. Unfairly enough it is always the woman who is hurt."
"Unless,"
said Mount Dunstan civilly, "there should arise the poor, primeval brute,
in his neolithic wrath, to seize on the man to blame, and break every bone and
sinew in his damned body."
"The newspapers
would enjoy that more than she would," answered Sir Nigel. "She does
not like the newspapers. They are too ready to disparage the multi-millionaire,
and cackle about members of his family."
The unhidden hatred
which still professed to hide itself in the depths of their pupils, as they
regarded each other, had its birth in a passion as elemental as the quakings of
the earth, or the rage of two lions in a desert, lashing their flanks in the
blazing sun. It was well that at this moment they should part ways.
Sir Nigel's horse being
brought, he went on the way which was his.
"It was a mistake
to say what I did," he said before going. "I ought to have held my
tongue. But I am under the same roof with her. At any rate, that is a privilege
no other man shares with me."
He rode off smartly,
his horse's hoofs splashing in the rain pools left in the avenue after the
storm. He was not so sure after all that he had made a mistake, and for the
moment he was not in the mood to care whether he had made one or not. His
agreeable smile showed itself as he thought of the obstinate, proud brute he
had left behind, sitting alone among his shut doors and closed corridors. They
had not shaken hands either at meeting or parting. Queer thing it was--the kind
of enmity a man could feel for another when he was upset by a woman. It was
amusing enough that it should be she who was upsetting him after all these
years--impudent little Betty, with the ferocious manner.
ON a late-summer
evening in New York the atmosphere surrounding a certain corner table at
Shandy's cheap restaurant in Fourteenth Street was stirred by a sense of
excitement. The corner table in question was the favourite meeting place of a
group of young men of the G. Selden type, who usually took possession of it at
dinner time--having decided that Shandy's supplied more decent food for fifty
cents, or even for twenty-five, than was to be found at other places of its
order. Shandy's was "about all right," they said to each other, and
patronised it accordingly, three or four of them generally dining together,
with a friendly and adroit manipulation of "portions" and "half
portions" which enabled them to add variety to their bill of fare.
The street outside was
lighted, the tide of passers-by was less full and more leisurely in its
movements than it was during the seething, working hours of daylight, but the
electric cars swung past each other with whiz and clang of bell almost
unceasingly, their sound being swelled, at short intervals, by the roar and
rumbling rattle of the trains dashing by on the elevated railroad. This,
however, to the frequenters of Shandy's, was the usual accompaniment of
every-day New York life and was regarded as a rather cheerful sort of thing.
This evening the four
claimants of the favourite corner table had met together earlier than usual.
Jem Belter, who "hammered" a typewriter at Schwab's Brewery, Tom Wetherbee,
who was "in a downtown office," Bert Johnson, who was "out for
the Delkoff," and Nick Baumgarten, who having for some time
"beaten" certain streets as assistant salesman for the same
illustrious machine, had been recently elevated to a "territory" of
his own, and was therefore in high spirits.
"Say!" he
said. "Let's give him a fine dinner. We can make it between us. Beefsteak
and mushrooms, and potatoes hashed brown. He likes them. Good old G. S. I shall
be right glad to see him. Hope foreign travel has not given him the swell
head."
"Don't believe
it's hurt him a bit. His letter didn't sound like it. Little Georgie ain't a
fool," said Jem Belter.
Tom Wetherbee was
looking over the letter referred to. It had been written to the four conjointly,
towards the termination of Selden's visit to Mr. Penzance. The young man was
not an ardent or fluent correspondent; but Tom Wetherbee was chuckling as he
read the epistle.
"Say, boys,"
he said, "this big thing he's keeping back to tell us when he sees us is
all right, but what takes me is old George paying a visit to a parson. He ain't
no Young Men's Christian Association."
Bert Johnson leaned
forward, and looked at the address on the letter paper.
"Mount Dunstan
Vicarage," he read aloud. "That looks pretty swell, doesn't it?"
with a laugh. "Say, fellows, you know Jepson at the office, the chap that
prides himself on reading such a lot? He said it reminded him of the names of
places in English novels. That Johnny's the biggest snob you ever set your
tooth into. When I told him about the lord fellow that owns the castle, and
that George seemed to have seen him, he nearly fell over himself. Never had any
use for George before, but just you watch him make up to him when he sees him
next."
People were dropping in
and taking seats at the tables. They were all of one class. Young men who lived
in hall bedrooms. Young women who worked in shops or offices, a couple here and
there, who, living far uptown, had come to Shandy's to dinner, that they might
go to cheap seats in some theatre afterwards. In the latter case, the girls
wore their best hats, had bright eyes, and cheeks lightly flushed by their
sense of festivity. Two or three were very pretty in their thin summer dresses
and flowered or feathered head gear, tilted at picturesque angles over their
thick hair. When each one entered the eyes of the young men at the corner table
followed her with curiosity and interest, but the glances at her escort were
always of a disparaging nature.
"There's a
beaut!" said Nick Baumgarten. "Get onto that pink stuff on her hat,
will you. She done it because it's just the colour of her cheeks."
They all looked, and
the girl was aware of it, and began to laugh and talk coquettishly to the young
man who was her companion.
"I wonder where
she got Clarence?" said Jem Belter in sarcastic allusion to her escort.
"The things those lookers have fastened on to them gets me."
"If it was one of
us, now," said Bert Johnson. Upon which they broke into simultaneous good-natured
laughter.
"It's queer, isn't
it," young Baumgarten put in, "how a fellow always feels sore when he
sees another fellow with a peach like that? It's just straight human nature, I
guess."
The door swung open to
admit a newcomer, at the sight of whom Jem Belter exclaimed joyously:
"Good old Georgie! Here he is, fellows! Get on to his glad rags."
"Glad rags"
is supposed to buoyantly describe such attire as, by its freshness or elegance
of style, is rendered a suitable adornment for festive occasions or loftier
leisure moments. "Glad rags" may mean evening dress, when a young
gentleman's wardrobe can aspire to splendour so marked, but it also applies to
one's best and latest-purchased garb, in contradistinction to the less
ornamental habiliments worn every day, and designated as "office
clothes."
G. Selden's economies
had not enabled him to give himself into the hands of a Bond Street tailor, but
a careful study of cut and material, as spread before the eye in elegant
coloured illustrations in the windows of respectable shops in less ambitious
quarters, had resulted in the purchase of a well-made suit of smart English
cut. He had a nice young figure, and looked extremely neat and tremendously new
and clean, so much so, indeed, that several persons glanced at him a little
admiringly as he was met half way to the corner table by his friends.
"Hello, old chap!
Glad to see you. What sort of a voyage? How did you leave the royal family?
Glad to get back?"
They all greeted him at
once, shaking hands and slapping him on the back, as they hustled him gleefully
back to the corner table and made him sit down.
"Say,
garsong," said Nick Baumgarten to their favourite waiter, who came at once
in answer to his summons, "let's have a porterhouse steak, half the size
of this table, and with plenty of mushrooms and potatoes hashed brown. Here's
Mr. Selden just returned from visiting at Windsor Castle, and if we don't treat
him well, he'll look down on us."
G. Selden grinned.
"How have you been getting on, Sam?" he said, nodding cheerfully to
the man. They were old and tried friends. Sam knew all about the days when a
fellow could not come into Shandy's at all, or must satisfy his strong young
hunger with a bowl of soup, or coffee and a roll. Sam did his best for them in
the matter of the size of portions, and they did their good-natured utmost for
him in the affair of the pooled tip.
"Been getting on
as well as can be expected," Sam grinned back. "Hope you had a fine
time, Mr Selden?"
"Fine! I should
smile! Fine wasn't in it," answered Seiden. "But I'm looking forward
to a Shandy porterhouse steak, all the same."
"Did they give you
a better one in the Strawnd?" asked Baumgarten, in what he believed to be
a correct Cockney accent.
"You bet they
didn't," said Selden. "Shandy's takes a lot of beating. That last is
English.
The people at the other
tables cast involuntary glances at them. Their eager, hearty young pleasure in
the festivity of the occasion was a healthy thing to see. As they sat round the
corner table, they produced the effect of gathering close about G. Selden. They
concentrated their combined attention upon him, Belter and Johnson leaning
forward on their folded arms, to watch him as he talked.
"Billy Page came
back in August, looking pretty bum," Nick Baumgarten began. "He'd
been painting gay Paree brick red, and he'd spent more money than he'd meant
to, and that wasn't half enough. Landed dead broke. He said he'd had a great
time, but he'd come home with rather a dark brown taste in his mouth, that he'd
like to get rid of."
"He thought you
were a fool to go off cycling into the country," put in Wetherbee,
"but I told him I guessed that was where he was 'way off. I believed you'd
had the best time of the two of you."
"Boys," said
Selden, "I had the time of my life." He said it almost solemnly, and
laid his hand on the table. "It was like one of those yarns Bert tells us.
Half the time I didn't believe it, and half the time I was ashamed of myself to
think it was all happening to me and none of your fellows were in it."
"Oh, well,"
said Jem Belter, "luck chases some fellows, anyhow. Look at Nick,
there."
"Well,"
Selden summed the whole thing up, "I just fell into it where it was so
deep that I had to strike out all I knew how to keep from drowning."
"Tell us the whole
thing," Nick Baumgarten put in; "from beginning to end. Your letter
didn't give anything away."
"A letter would
have spoiled it. I can't write letters anyhow. I wanted to wait till I got
right here with you fellows round where I could answer questions. First
off," with the deliberation befitting such an opening, "I've sold
machines enough to pay my expenses, and leave some over."
"You have? Gee
whiz! Say, give us your prescription. Glad I know you, Georgy!"
"And who do you
suppose bought the first three?" At this point, it was he who leaned
forward upon the table--his climax being a thing to concentrate upon.
"Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter--Miss Bettina! And, boys, she gave me a
letter to Reuben S., himself, and here it is."
He produced a flat
leather pocketbook and took an envelope from an inner flap, laying it before
them on the tablecloth. His knowledge that they would not have believed him if
he had not brought his proof was founded on everyday facts. They would not have
doubted his veracity, but the possibility of such delirious good fortune. What
they would have believed would have been that he was playing a hilarious joke
on them. Jokes of this kind, but not of this proportion, were common
entertainments.
Their first impulse had
been towards an outburst of laughter, but even before he produced his letter a
certain truthful seriousness in his look had startled them. When he laid the
envelope down each man caught his breath. It could not be denied that Jem Belter
turned pale with emotion. Jem had never been one of the lucky ones.
"She let me read
it," said G. Selden, taking the letter from its envelope with great care.
"And I said to her: 'Miss Vanderpoel, would you let me just show that to
the boys the first night I go to Shandy's?' I knew she'd tell me if it wasn't
all right to do it. She'd know I'd want to be told. And she just laughed and
said: 'I don't mind at all. I like "the boys." Here is a message to
them. 'Good luck to you all.' "
"She said
that?" from Nick Baumgarten.
"Yes, she did, and
she meant it. Look at this."
This was the letter. It
was quite short, and written in a clear, definite hand.
"DEAR FATHER: This
will be brought to you by Mr. G. Selden, of whom I have written to you. Please
be good to him. "Affectionately, "BETTY."
Each young man read it
in turn. None of them said anything just at first. A kind of awe had descended
upon them-- not in the least awe of Vanderpoel, who, with other
multi-millionaires, were served up each week with cheerful neighbourly comment
or equally neighbourly disrespect, in huge Sunday papers read throughout the
land--but awe of the unearthly luck which had fallen without warning to good
old G. S., who lived like the rest of them in a hall bedroom on ten per, earned
by tramping the streets for the Delkoff.
"That girl,"
said G. Selden gravely, "that girl is a winner from Winnersville. I take
off my hat to her. If it's the scheme that some people's got to have millions,
and others have got to sell Delkoffs, that girl's one of those that's entitled
to the millions. It's all right she should have 'em. There's no kick coming
from me."
Nick Baumgarten was the
first to resume wholly normal condition of mind.
"Well, I guess
after you've told us about her there'll be no kick coming from any of us. Of
course there's something about you that royal families cry for, and they won't
be happy till they get. All of us boys knows that. But what we want to find out
is how you worked it so that they saw the kind of pearl-studded hairpin you
were."
"Worked it!"
Selden answered. "I didn't work it. I've got a good bit of nerve, but I
never should have had enough to invent what happened--just happened. I broke my
leg falling off my bike, and fell right into a whole bunch of them --earls and
countesses and viscounts and Vanderpoels. And it was Miss Vanderpoel who saw me
first lying on the ground. And I was in Stornham Court where Lady Anstruthers
lives --and she used to be Miss Rosalie Vanderpoel."
"Boys," said
Bert Johnson, with friendly disgust, "he's been up to his neck in
'em."
"Cheer up. The
worst is yet to come," chaffed Tom Wetherbee.
Never had such a dinner
taken place at the corner table, or, in fact, at any other table at Shandy's.
Sam brought beefsteaks, which were princely, mushrooms, and hashed brown
potatoes in portions whose generosity reached the heart. Sam was on good terms
with Shandy's carver, and had worked upon his nobler feelings. Steins of lager
beer were ventured upon. There was hearty satisfying of fine hungers. Two of
the party had eaten nothing but one "Quick Lunch" throughout the day,
one of them because he was short of time, the other for economy's sake, because
he was short of money. The meal was a splendid thing. The telling of the story
could not be wholly checked by the eating of food. It advanced between
mouthfuls, questions being asked and details given in answers. Shandy's became
more crowded, as the hour advanced. People all over the room cast interested
looks at the party at the corner table, enjoying itself so hugely. Groups
sitting at the tables nearest to it found themselves excited by the things they
heard.
"That young fellow
in the new suit has just come back from Europe," said a man to his wife
and daughter. "He seems to have had a good time."
"Papa," the
daughter leaned forward, and spoke in a low voice, "I heard him say 'Lord
Mount Dunstan said Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel were at the garden
party.' Who do you suppose he is? "
"Well, he's a nice
young fellow, and he has English clothes on, but he doesn't look like one of
the Four Hundred. Will you have pie or vanilla ice cream, Bessy?"
Bessy--who chose
vanilla ice cream--lost all knowledge of its flavour in her absorption in the
conversation at the next table, which she could not have avoided hearing, even
if she had wished.
"She bent over the
bed and laughed--just like any other nice girl--and she said, 'You are at
Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Lady Anstruthers is my
sister. I am Miss Vanderpoel.' And, boys, she used to come and talk to me every
day."
"George,"
said Nick Baumgarten, "you take about seventy-five bottles of Warner's
Safe Cure, and rub yourself all over with St. Jacob's Oil. Luck like that ain't
healthy!" . . . . .
Mr. Vanderpoel, sitting
in his study, wore the interestedly grave look of a man thinking of absorbing
things. He had just given orders that a young man who would call in the course
of the evening should be brought to him at once, and he was incidentally
considering this young man, as he reflected upon matters recalled to his mind
by his impending arrival. They were matters he had thought of with gradually
increasing seriousness for some months, and they had, at first, been the result
of the letters from Stornham, which each "steamer day" brought. They
had been of immense interest to him-- these letters. He would have found them
absorbing as a study, even if he had not deeply loved Betty. He read in them
things she did not state in words, and they set him thinking. He was not
suspected by men like himself of concealing an imagination beneath the trained
steadiness of his exterior, but he possessed more than the world knew, and it
singularly combined itself with powers of logical deduction. If he had been
with his daughter, he would have seen, day by day, where her thoughts were
leading her, and in what direction she was developing, but, at a distance of
three thousand miles, he found himself asking questions, and endeavouring to
reach conclusions. His affection for Betty was the central emotion of his
existence. He had never told himself that he had outgrown the kind and pretty
creature he had married in his early youth, and certainly his tender care for
her and pleasure in her simple goodness had never wavered, but Betty had given
him a companionship which had counted greatly in the sum of his happiness.
Because imagination was not suspected in him, no one knew what she stood for in
his life. He had no son; he stood at the head of a great house, so to
speak--the American parallel of what a great house is in non-republican
countries. The power of it counted for great things, not in America alone, but
throughout the world. As international intimacies increased, the influence of
such houses might end in aiding in the making of history. Enormous constantly
increasing wealth and huge financial schemes could not confine their influence,
but must reach far. The man whose hand held the lever controlling them was
doing well when he thought of them gravely. Such a man had to do with more than
his own mere life and living. This man had confronted many problems as the
years had passed. He had seen men like himself die, leaving behind them the
force they had controlled, and he had seen this force-- controlled no
longer--let loose upon the world, sometimes a power of evil, sometimes
scattering itself aimlessly into nothingness and folly, which wrought harm. He
was not an ambitious man, but--perhaps because he was not only a man of
thought, but a Vanderpoel of the blood of the first Reuben--these were things
he did not contemplate without restlessness. When Rosy had gone away and seemed
lost to them, he had been glad when he had seen Betty growing, day by day, into
a strong thing. Feminine though she was, she somethimes suggested to him the
son who might have been his, but was not. As the closeness of their
companionship increased with her years, his admiration for her grew with his
love. Power left in her hands must work for the advancement of things, and
would not be idly disseminated--if no antagonistic influence wrought against
her. He had found himself reflecting that, after all was said, the marriage of
such a girl had a sort of parallel in that of some young royal creature, whose
union might make or mar things, which must be considered. The man who must
inevitably strongly colour her whole being, and vitally mark her life, would,
in a sense, lay his hand upon the lever also. If he brought sorrow and disorder
with him, the lever would not move steadily. Fortunes such as his grow rapidly,
and he was a richer man by millions than he had been when Rosalie had married
Nigel Anstruthers. The memory of that marriage had been a painful thing to him,
even before he had known the whole truth of its results. The man had been a
common adventurer and scoundrel, despite the facts of good birth and the air of
decent breeding. If a man who was as much a scoundrel, but cleverer--it would
be necessary that he should be much cleverer--made the best of himself to
Betty----! It was folly to think one could guess what a woman--or a man,
either, for that matter--would love. He knew Betty, but no man knows the thing
which comes, as it were, in the dark and claims its own--whether for good or
evil. He had lived long enough to see beautiful, strong-spirited creatures do
strange things, follow strange gods, swept away into seas of pain by strange
waves.
"Even Betty,"
he had said to himself, now and then. "Even my Betty. Good God--who knows!
"
Because of this, he had
read each letter with keen eyes. They were long letters, full of detail and
colour, because she knew he enjoyed them. She had a delightful touch. He
sometimes felt as if they walked the English lanes together. His intimacy with
her neighbours, and her neighbourhood, was one of his relaxations. He found
himself thinking of old Doby and Mrs. Welden, as a sort of soporific measure,
when he lay awake at night. She had sent photographs of Stornham, of Dunholm
Castle, and of Dole, and had even found an old engraving of Lady Alanby in her
youth. Her evident liking for the Dunholms had pleased him. They were people
whose dignity and admirableness were part of general knowledge. Lord Westholt
was plainly a young man of many attractions. If the two were drawn to each
other--and what more natural--all would be well. He wondered if it would be
Westholt. But his love quickened a sagacity which needed no stimulus. He said
to himself in time that, though she liked and admired Westholt, she went no
farther. That others paid court to her he could guess without being told. He
had seen the effect she had produced when she had been at home, and also an
unexpected letter to his wife from Milly Bowen had revealed many things. Milly,
having noted Mrs. Vanderpoel's eager anxiety to hear direct news of Lady
Anstruthers, was not the person to let fall from her hand a useful thread of
connection. She had written quite at length, managing adroitly to convey all
that she had seen, and all that she had heard. She had been making a visit
within driving distance of Stornham, and had had the pleasure of meeting both
Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel at various parties. She was so sure that
Mrs. Vanderpoel would like to hear how well Lady Anstruthers was looking, that
she ventured to write. Betty's effect upon the county was made quite clear, as
also was the interested expectation of her appearance in town next season. Mr.
Vanderpoel, perhaps, gathered more from the letter than his wife did. In her
mind, relieved happiness and consternation were mingled.
"Do you think,
Reuben, that Betty will marry that Lord Westholt?" she rather faltered.
"He seems very nice, but I would rather she married an American. I should
feel as if I had no girls at all, if they both lived in England."
"Lady Bowen gives
him a good character," her husband said, smiling. "But if anything
untoward happens, Annie, you shall have a house of your own half way between
Dunholm Castle and Stornham Court."
When he had begun to
decide that Lord Westholt did not seem to be the man Fate was veering towards,
he not unnaturally cast a mental eye over such other persons as the letters
mentioned. At exactly what period his thought first dwelt a shade anxiously on
Mount Dunstan he could not have told, but he at length became conscious that it
so dwelt. He had begun by feeling an interest in his story, and had asked
questions about him, because a situation such as his suggested query to a man
of affairs. Thus, it had been natural that the letters should speak of him.
What she had written had recalled to him certain rumours of the disgraceful old
scandal. Yes, they had been a bad lot. He arranged to put a casual-sounding
question or so to certain persons who knew English society well. What he
gathered was not encouraging. The present Lord Mount Dunstan was considered
rather a surly brute, and lived a mysterious sort of life which might cover
many things. It was bad blood, and people were naturally shy of it. Of course,
the man was a pauper, and his place a barrack falling to ruin. There had been
something rather shady in his going to America or Australia a few years ago.
Good looking? Well, so few people had seen him. The lady, who was speaking, had
heard that he was one of those big, rather lumpy men, and had an ill-tempered
expression. She always gave a wide berth to a man who looked nasty-tempered.
One or two other persons who had spoken of him had conveyed to Mr. Vanderpoel
about the same amount of vaguely unpromising information. The episode of G.
Selden had been interesting enough, with its suggestions of picturesque
contrasts and combinations. Betty's touch had made the junior salesman
attracting. It was a good type this, of a young fellow who, battling with the
discouragements of a hard life, still did not lose his amazing good cheer and
patience, and found healthy sleep and honest waking, even in the hall bedroom.
He had consented to Betty's request that he would see him, partly because he
was inclined to like what he had heard, and partly for a reason which Betty did
not suspect. By extraordinary chance G. Selden had seen Mount Dunstan and his
surroundings at close range. Mr. Vanderpoel had liked what he had gathered of
Mount Dunstan's attitude towards a personality so singularly exotic to himself.
Crude, uneducated, and slangy, the junior salesman was not in any degree a
fool. To an American father with a daughter like Betty, the summing-up of a
normal, nice-natured, common young denizen of the United States, fresh from
contact with the effete, might be subtly instructive, and well worth hearing,
if it was unconsciously expressed. Mr. Vanderpoel thought he knew how, after he
had overcome his visitor's first awkwardness--if he chanced to be
self-conscious--he could lead him to talk. What he hoped to do was to make him
forget himself and begin to talk to him as he had talked to Betty, to
ingenuously reveal impressions and points of view. Young men of his clean,
rudimentary type were very definite about the things they liked and disliked,
and could be trusted to reveal admiration, or lack of it, without absolute
intention or actual statement. Being elemental and undismayed, they saw things
cleared of the mists of social prejudice and modification. Yes, he felt he
should be glad to hear of Lord Mount Dunstan and the Mount Dunstan estate from
G. Selden in a happy moment of unawareness.
Why was it that it
happened to be Mount Dunstan he was desirous to hear of? Well, the absolute
reason for that he could not have explained, either. He had asked himself
questions on the subject more than once. There was no well-founded reason,
perhaps. If Betty's letters had spoken of Mount Dunstan and his home, they had
also described Lord Westholt and Dunholm Castle. Of these two men she had
certainly spoken more fully than of others. Of Mount Dunstan she had had more
to relate through the incident of G. Selden. He smiled as he realised the
importance of the figure of G. Selden. It was Selden and his broken leg the two
men had ridden over from Mount Dunstan to visit. But for Selden, Betty might
not have met Mount Dunstan again. He was reason enough for all she had said.
And yet----! Perhaps, between Betty and himself there existed the thing which
impresses and communicates without words. Perhaps, because their affection was
unusual, they realised each other's emotions. The half-defined anxiety he felt
now was not a new thing, but he confessed to himself that it had been spurred a
little by the letter the last steamer had brought him. It was not Lord Westholt,
it definitely appeared. He had asked her to be his wife, and she had declined
his proposal.
"I could not have
liked a man any more without being in love with him," she wrote. "I
like him more than I can say --so much, indeed, that I feel a little depressed
by my certainty that I do not love him."
If she had loved him,
the whole matter would have been simplified. If the other man had drawn her,
the thing would not be simple. Her father foresaw all the complications--and he
did not want complications for Betty. Yet emotions were perverse and
irresistible things, and the stronger the creature swayed by them, the more
enormous their power. But, as he sat in his easy chair and thought over it all,
the one feeling predominant in his mind was that nothing mattered but
Betty--nothing really mattered but Betty.
In the meantime G.
Selden was walking up Fifth Avenue, at once touched and exhilarated by the stir
about him and his sense of home-coming. It was pretty good to be in little old
New York again. The hurried pace of the life about him stimulated his young
blood. There were no street cars in Fifth Avenue, but there were carriages,
waggons, carts, motors, all pantingly hurried, and fretting and struggling when
the crowded state of the thoroughfare held them back. The beautifully dressed
women in the carriages wore no light air of being at leisure. It was evident
that they were going to keep engagements, to do things, to achieve objects.
"Something doing.
Something doing," was his cheerful self-congratulatory thought. He had
spent his life in the midst of it, he liked it, and it welcomed him back.
The appointment he was
on his way to keep thrilled him into an uplifted mood. Once or twice a
half-nervous chuckle broke from him as he tried to realise that he had been
given the chance which a year ago had seemed so impossible that its mere
incredibleness had made it a natural subject for jokes. He was going to call on
Reuben S. Vanderpoel, and he was going because Reuben S. had made an
appointment with him.
He wore his London suit
of clothes and he felt that he looked pretty decent. He could only do his best
in the matter of bearing. He always thought that, so long as a fellow didn't
get "chesty" and kept his head from swelling, he was all right. Of
course he had never been in one of these swell Fifth Avenue houses, and he felt
a bit nervous--but Miss Vanderpoel would have told her father what sort of
fellow he was, and her father was likely to be something like herself. The
house, which had been built since Lady Anstruthers' marriage, was well
"up-town," and was big and imposing. When a manservant opened the
front door, the square hall looked very splendid to Selden. It was full of
light, and of rich furniture, which was like the stuff he had seen in one or
two special shop windows in Fifth Avenue--places where they sold magnificent
gilded or carven coffers and vases, pieces of tapestry and marvellous
embroideries, antiquities from foreign palaces. Though it was quite different,
it was as swell in its way as the house at Mount Dunstan, and there were gleams
of pictures on the walls that looked fine, and no mistake.
He was expected. The
man led him across the hall to Mr. Vanderpoel's room. After he had announced
his name he closed the door quietly and went away. Mr. Vanderpoel rose from an
armchair to come forward to meet his visitor. He was tall and straight--Betty
had inherited her slender height from him. His well-balanced face suggested the
relationship between them. He had a steady mouth, and eyes which looked as if
they saw much and far.
"I am glad to see
you, Mr. Selden," he said, shaking hands with him. "You have seen my
daughters, and can tell me how they are. Miss Vanderpoel has written to me of
you several times."
He asked him to sit
down, and as he took his chair Selden felt that he had been right in telling
himself that Reuben S. Vanderpoel would be somehow like his girl. She was a
girl, and he was an elderly man of business, but they were like each other.
There was the same kind of straight way of doing things, and the same
straight-seeing look in both of them.
It was queer how
natural things seemed, when they really happened to a fellow. Here he was
sitting in a big leather chair and opposite to him in its fellow sat Reuben S.
Vanderpoel, looking at him with friendly eyes. And it seemed all right,
too--not as if he had managed to "butt in," and would find himself
politely fired out directly. He might have been one of the Four Hundred making
a call. Reuben S. knew how to make a man feel easy, and no mistake. This G.
Selden observed at once, though he had, in fact, no knowledge of the practical
tact which dealt with him. He found himself answering questions about Lady
Anstruthers and her sister, which led to the opening up of other subjects. He
did not realise that he began to express ingenuous opinions and describe
things. His listener's interest led him on, a question here, a rather pleased
laugh there, were encouraging. He had enjoyed himself so much during his stay
in England, and had felt his experiences so greatly to be rejoiced over, that
they were easy to talk of at any time--in fact, it was even a trifle difficult
not to talk of them--but, stimulated by the look which rested on him, by the
deft word and ready smile, words flowed readily and without the restraint of
self-consciousness.
"When you think
that all of it sort of began with a robin, it's queer enough," he said.
"But for that robin I shouldn't be here, sir," with a boyish laugh.
"And he was an English robin--a little fellow not half the size of the
kind that hops about Central Park."
"Let me hear about
that," said Mr. Vanderpoel.
It was a good story,
and he told it well, though in his own junior salesman phrasing. He began with
his bicycle ride into the green country, his spin over the fine roads, his rest
under the hedge during the shower, and then the song of the robin perched among
the fresh wet leafage, his feathers puffed out, his red young satin-glossed breast
pulsating and swelling. His words were colloquial enough, but they called up
the picture.
"Everything sort
of glittering with the sunshine on the wet drops, and things smelling good,
like they do after rain-- leaves, and grass, and good earth. I tell you it made
a fellow feel as if the whole world was his brother. And when Mr. Rob. lit on
that twig and swelled his red breast as if he knew the whole thing was his, and
began to let them notes out, calling for his lady friend to come and go halves
with him, I just had to laugh and speak to him, and that was when Lord Mount
Dunstan heard me and jumped over the hedge. He'd been listening, too."
The expression Reuben
S. Vanderpoel wore made it an agreeable thing to talk--to go on. He evidently
cared to hear. So Selden did his best, and enjoyed himself in doing it. His
style made for realism and brought things clearly before one. The big-built man
in the rough and shabby shooting clothes, his way when he dropped into the
grass to sit beside the stranger and talk, certain meanings in his words which
conveyed to Vanderpoel what had not been conveyed to G. Selden. Yes, the man
carried a heaviness about with him and hated the burden. Selden quite
unconsciously brought him out strongly.
"I don't know
whether I'm the kind of fellow who is always making breaks," he said, with
his boy's laugh again, "but if I am, I never made a worse one than when I
asked him straight if he was out of a job, and on the tramp. It showed what a
nice fellow he was that he didn't get hot about it. Some fellows would. He only
laughed--sort of short-- and said his job had been more than he could handle,
and he was afraid he was down and out."
Mr. Vanderpoel was
conscious that so far he was somewhat attracted by this central figure. G. Selden
was also proving satisfactory in the matter of revealing his excellently simple
views of persons and things.
"The only time he
got mad was when I wouldn't believe him when he told me who he was. I was a bit
hot in the collar myself. I'd felt sorry for him, because I thought he was a
chap like myself, and he was up against it. I know what that is, and I'd wanted
to jolly him along a bit. When he said his name was Mount Dunstan, and the
place belonged to him, I guessed he thought he was making a joke. So I got on
my wheel and started off, and then he got mad for keeps. He said he wasn't such
a damned fool as he looked, and what he'd said was true, and I could go and be
hanged."
Reuben S. Vanderpoel
laughed. He liked that. It sounded like decent British hot temper, which he had
often found accompanied honest British decencies.
He liked other things,
as the story proceeded. The picture of the huge house with the shut windows,
made him slightly restless. The concealed imagination, combined with the financier's
resentment of dormant interests, disturbed him. That which had attracted Selden
in the Reverend Lewis Penzance strongly attracted himself. Also, a man was a
good deal to be judged by his friends. The man who lived alone in the midst of
stately desolateness and held as his chief intimate a high-bred and
gentle-minded scholar of ripe years, gave, in doing this, certain evidence
which did not tell against him. The whole situation meant something a splendid,
vivid-minded young creature might be moved by--might be allured by, even
despite herself.
There was something
fantastic in the odd linking of incidents--Selden's chance view of Betty as she
rode by, his next day's sudden resolve to turn back and go to Stornham, his
accident, all that followed seemed, if one were fanciful --part of a scheme
prearranged
"When I came to
myself," G. Selden said, "I felt like that fellow in the Shakespeare
play that they dress up and put to bed in the palace when he's drunk. I thought
I'd gone off my head. And then Miss Vanderpoel came." He paused a moment
and looked down on the carpet, thinking. "Gee whiz! It was queer," he
said.
Betty Vanderpoel's
father could almost hear her voice as the rest was told. He knew how her laugh
had sounded, and what her presence must have been to the young fellow. His
delightful, human, always satisfying Betty!
Through this odd trick
of fortune, Mount Dunstan had begun to see her. Since, through the unfair
endowment of Nature--that it was not wholly fair he had often told himself-- she
was all the things that desire could yearn for, there were many chances that
when a man saw her he must long to see her again, and there were the same
chances that such an one as Mount Dunstan might long also, and, if Fate was
against him, long with a bitter strength. Selden was not aware that he had
spoken more fully of Mount Dunstan and his place than of other things. That
this had been the case, had been because Mr. Vanderpoel had intended it should
be so. He had subtly drawn out and encouraged a detailed account of the time
spent at Mount Dunstan vicarage. It was easily encouraged. Selden's
affectionate admiration for the vicar led him on to enthusiasm. The quiet house
and garden, the old books, the afternoon tea under the copper beech, and the
long talks of old things, which had been so new to the young New Yorker, had
plainly made a mark upon his life, not likely to be erased even by the rush of
after years.
"The way he knew
history was what got me," he said. "And the way you got interested in
it, when he talked. It wasn't just history, like you learn at school, and
forget, and never see the use of, anyhow. It was things about men, just like
yourself--hustling for a living in their way, just as we're hustling in
Broadway. Most of it was fighting, and there are mounds scattered about that
are the remains of their forts and camps. Roman camps, some of them. He took me
to see them. He had a little old pony chaise we trundled about in, and he'd
draw up and we'd sit and talk. 'There were men here on this very spot,' he'd
say, 'looking out for attack, eating, drinking, cooking their food, polishing
their weapons, laughing, and shouting--men--Selden, fifty-five years before
Christ was born--and sometimes the New Testament times seem to us so far away
that they are half a dream.' That was the kind of thing he'd say, and I'd
sometimes feel as if I heard the Romans shouting. The country about there was
full of queer places, and both he and Lord Dunstan knew more about them than I
know about Twenty-third Street."
"You saw Lord
Mount Dunstan often?" Mr. Vanderpoel suggested.
"Every day, sir.
And the more I saw him, the more I got to like him. He's all right. But it's
hard luck to be fixed as he is--that's stone-cold truth. What's a man to do?
The money he ought to have to keep up his place was spent before he was born.
His father and his eldest brother were a bum lot, and his grandfather and
great-grandfather were fools. He can't sell the place, and he wouldn't if he
could. Mr. Penzance was so fond of him that sometimes he'd say things.
But," hastily, "perhaps I'm talking too much."
"You happen to be
talking about questions I have been greatly interested in. I have thought a
good deal at times of the position of the holders of large estates they cannot
afford to keep up. This special instance is a case in point."
G. Selden felt himself
in luck again. Reuben S., quite evidently, found his subject worthy of
undivided attention. Selden had not heartily liked Lord Mount Dunstan, and
lived in the atmosphere surrounding him, looking about him with sharp young New
York eyes, without learning a good deal. He had seen the practical hardship of
the situation, and laid it bare.
"What Mr. Penzance
says is that he's like the men that built things in the beginning--fought for
them--fought Romans and Saxons and Normans--perhaps the whole lot at different
times. I used to like to get Mr. Penzance to tell stories about the Mount
Dunstans. They were splendid. It must be pretty fine to look back about a
thousand years and know your folks have been something. All the same its pretty
fierce to have to stand alone at the end of it, not able to help yourself,
because some of your relations were crazy fools. I don't wonder he feels
mad."
"Does he?"
Mr. Vanderpoel inquired.
"He's straight,"
said G. Selden sympathetically. "He's all right. But only money can help
him, and he's got none, so he has to stand and stare at things falling to
pieces. And--well, I tell you, Mr. Vanderpoel, he loves that place--he's crazy
about it. And he's proud--I don't mean he's got the swell-head, because he
hasn't--but he's just proud. Now, for instance, he hasn't any use for men like
himself that marry just for money. He's seen a lot of it, and it's made him
sick. He's not that kind."
He had been asked and
had answered a good many questions before he went away, but each had dropped
into the talk so incidentally that he had not recognised them as queries. He
did not know that Lord Mount Dunstan stood out a clearly defined figure in Mr.
Vanderpoel's mind, a figure to be reflected upon, and one not without its
attraction.
"Miss Vanderpoel
tells me," Mr. Vanderpoel said, when the interview was drawing to a close,
"that you are an agent for the Delkoff typewriter."
G. Selden flushed slightly.
"Yes, sir,"
he answered, "but I didn't----"
"I hear that three
machines are in use on the Stornham estate, and that they have proved
satisfactory."
"It's a good
machine," said G. Selden, his flush a little deeper.
Mr. Vanderpoel smiled.
"You are a
business-like young man," he said, "and I have no doubt you have a
catalogue in your pocket."
G. Selden was a
business-like young man. He gave Mr. Vanderpoel one serious look, and the
catalogue was drawn forth.
"It wouldn't be
business, sir, for me to be caught out without it," he said. "I
shouldn't leave it behind if I went to a funeral. A man's got to run no
risks."
"I should like to
look at it."
The thing had happened.
It was not a dream. Reuben S. Vanderpoel, clothed and in his right mind, had,
without pressure being exerted upon him, expressed his desire to look at the
catalogue--to examine it--to have it explained to him at length.
He listened
attentively, while G. Selden did his best. He asked a question now and then, or
made a comment. His manner was that of a thoroughly composed man of business,
but he was remembering what Betty had told him of the "ten per," and
a number of other things. He saw the flush come and go under the still boyish
skin, he observed that G. Selden's hand was not wholly steady, though he was
making an effort not to seem excited. But he was excited. This actually
meant--this thing so unimportant to multi-millionaires --that he was having his
"chance," and his young fortunes were, perhaps, in the balance.
"Yes," said
Reuben S., when he had finished, "it seems a good, up-to-date
machine."
"It's the best on
the market," said G. Selden, "out and out, the best."
"I understand you
are only junior salesman?"
"Yes, sir. Ten per
and five dollars on every machine I sell. If I had a territory, I should get
ten."
"Then,"
reflectively, "the first thing is to get a territory."
"Perhaps I shall
get one in time, if I keep at it," said Selden courageously.
"It is a good
machine. I like it," said Mr. Vanderpoel. "I can see a good many
places where it could be used. Perhaps, if you make it known at your office
that when you are given a good territory, I shall give preference to the
Delkoff over other typewriting machines, it might--eh?"
A light broke out upon
G. Selden's countenance--a light radiant and magnificent. He caught his breath.
A desire to shout--to yell--to whoop, as when in the society of "the
boys," was barely conquered in time.
"Mr.
Vanderpoel," he said, standing up, "I--Mr. Vanderpoel--sir--I feel as
if I was having a pipe dream. I'm not, am I?"
"No,"
answered Mr. Vanderpoel, "you are not. I like you, Mr. Selden. My daughter
liked you. I do not mean to lose sight of you. We will begin, however, with the
territory, and the Delkoff. I don't think there will be any difficulty about
it." . . . . .
Ten minutes later G.
Selden was walking down Fifth Avenue, wondering if there was any chance of his
being arrested by a policeman upon the charge that he was reeling, instead of
walking steadily. He hoped he should get back to the hall bedroom safely. Nick
Baumgarten and Jem Bolter both "roomed" in the house with him. He
could tell them both. It was Jem who had made up the yarn about one of them
saving Reuben S. Vanderpoel's life. There had been no life-saving, but the
thing had come true.
"But, if it hadn't
been for Lord Mount Dunstan," he said, thinking it over excitedly, "I
should never have seen Miss Vanderpoel, and, if it hadn't been for Miss
Vanderpoel, I should never have got next to Reuben S. in my life. Both sides of
the Atlantic Ocean got busy to do a good turn to Little Willie. Hully
gee!"
In his study Mr.
Vanderpoel was rereading Betty's letters. He felt that he had gained a certain
knowledge of Lord Mount Dunstan.
THE marshes stretched
mellow in the autumn sun, sheep wandered about, nibbling contentedly, or lay
down to rest in groups, the sky reflecting itself in the narrow dykes gave a
blue colour to the water, a scent of the sea was in the air as one breathed it,
flocks of plover rose, now and then, crying softly. Betty, walking with her
dog, had passed a heron standing at the edge of a pool.
From her first
discovery of them, she had been attracted by the marshes with their English
suggestion of the Roman Campagna, their broad expanse of level land spread out
to the sun and wind, the thousands of white sheep dotted or clustered as far as
eye could reach, the hues of the marsh grass and the plants growing thick at
the borders of the strips of water. Its beauty was all its own and curiously
aloof from the softly-wooded, undulating world about it. Driving or walking
along the high road--the road the Romans had built to London town long
centuries ago--on either side of one were meadows, farms, scattered cottages,
and hop gardens, but beyond and below stretched the marsh land, golden and
grey, and always alluring one by its silence.
"I never pass it
without wanting to go to it--to take solitary walks over it, to be one of the
spots on it as the sheep are. It seems as if, lying there under the blue sky or
the low grey clouds with all the world held at bay by mere space and stillness,
they must feel something we know nothing of. I want to go and find out what it
is."
This she had once said
to Mount Dunstan.
So she had fallen into
the habit of walking there with her dog at her side as her sole companion, for
having need for time and space for thought, she had found them in the silence
and aloofness.
Life had been a vivid
and pleasurable thing to her, as far as she could look back upon it. She began
to realise that she must have been very happy, because she had never found
herself desiring existence other than such as had come to her day by day.
Except for her passionate childish regret at Rosy's marriage, she had experienced
no painful feeling. In fact, she had faced no hurt in her life, and certainly
had been confronted by no limitations. Arguing that girls in their teens
usually fall in love, her father had occasionally wondered that she passed
through no little episodes of sentiment, but the fact was that her interests
had been larger and more numerous than the interests of girls generally are,
and her affectionate intimacy with himself had left no such small vacant spaces
as are frequently filled by unimportant young emotions. Because she was a
logical creature, and had watched life and those living it with clear and
interested eyes, she had not been blind to the path which had marked itself
before her during the summer's growth and waning. She had not, at first, perhaps,
known exactly when things began to change for her--when the clarity of her mind
began to be disturbed. She had thought in the beginning--as people have a habit
of doing--that an instance --a problem--a situation had attracted her attention
because it was absorbing enough to think over. Her view of the matter had been
that as the same thing would have interested her father, it had interested
herself. But from the morning when she had been conscious of the sudden fury
roused in her by Nigel Anstruthers' ugly sneer at Mount Dunstan, she had better
understood the thing which had come upon her. Day by day it had increased and
gathered power, and she realised with a certain sense of impatience that she
had not in any degree understood it when she had seen and wondered at its
effect on other women. Each day had been like a wave encroaching farther upon
the shore she stood upon. At the outset a certain ignoble pride--she knew it
ignoble--filled her with rebellion. She had seen so much of this kind of
situation, and had heard so much of the general comment. People had learned how
to sneer because experience had taught them. If she gave them cause, why should
they not sneer at her as at things? She recalled what she had herself thought
of such things--the folly of them, the obviousness--the almost deserved
disaster. She had arrogated to herself judgment of women--and men--who might,
yes, who might have stood upon their strip of sand, as she stood, with the
waves creeping in, each one higher, stronger, and more engulfing than the last.
There might have been those among them who also had knowledge of that sudden
deadly joy at the sight of one face, at the drop of one voice. When that wave
submerged one's pulsing being, what had the world to do with one--how could one
hear and think of what its speech might be? Its voice clamoured too far off.
As she walked across
the marsh she was thinking this first phase over. She had reached a new one,
and at first she looked back with a faint, even rather hard, smile. She walked straight
ahead, her mastiff, Roland, padding along heavily close at her side. How still
and wide and golden it was; how the cry of plover and lifting trill of skylark
assured one that one was wholly encircled by solitude and space which were more
enclosing than any walls! She was going to the mounds to which Mr. Penzance had
trundled G. Selden in the pony chaise, when he had given him the marvellous
hour which had brought Roman camp and Roman legions to life again. Up on the
largest hillock one could sit enthroned, resting chin in hand and looking out
under level lids at the unstirring, softly-living loveliness of the marsh-land
world. So she was presently seated, with her heavy-limbed Roland at her feet.
She had come here to try to put things clearly to herself, to plan with such
reason as she could control. She had begun to be unhappy, she had begun --with
some unfairness--to look back upon the Betty Vanderpoel of the past as an
unwittingly self-sufficient young woman, to find herself suddenly entangled by things,
even to know a touch of desperateness.
"Not to take a
remnant from the ducal bargain counter," she was saying mentally. That was
why her smile was a little hard. What if the remnant from the ducal bargain
counter had prejudices of his own?
"If he were
passionately--passionately in love with me," she said, with red staining
her cheeks, "he would not come--he would not come--he would not come. And,
because of that, he is more to me--more! And more he will become every day
--and the more strongly he will hold me. And there we stand."
Roland lifted his fine
head from his paws, and, holding it erect on a stiff, strong neck, stared at
her in obvious inquiry. She put out her hand and tenderly patted him.
"He will have none
of me," she said. "He will have none of me." And she faintly
smiled, but the next instant shook her head a little haughtily, and, having
done so, looked down with an altered expression upon the cloth of her skirt,
because she had shaken upon it, from the extravagant lashes, two clear drops.
It was not the result
of chance that she had seen nothing of him for weeks. She had not attempted to
persuade herself of that. Twice he had declined an invitation to Stornham, and
once he had ridden past her on the road when he might have stopped to exchange
greetings, or have ridden on by her side. He did not mean to seem to desire,
ever so lightly, to be counted as in the lists. Whether he was drawn by any
liking for her or not, it was plain he had determined on this.
If she were to go away now,
they would never meet again. Their ways in this world would part forever. She
would not know how long it took to break him utterly--if such a man could be
broken. If no magic change took place in his fortunes --and what change could
come?--the decay about him would spread day by day. Stone walls last a long
time, so the house would stand while every beauty and stateliness within it
fell into ruin. Gardens would become wildernesses, terraces and fountains
crumble and be overgrown, walls that were to-day leaning would fall with time.
The years would pass, and his youth with them; he would gradually change into
an old man while he watched the things he loved with passion die slowly and
hard. How strange it was that lives should touch and pass on the ocean of Time,
and nothing should result--nothing at all! When she went on her way, it would
be as if a ship loaded with every aid of food and treasure had passed a boat in
which a strong man tossed, starving to death, and had not even run up a flag.
"But one cannot
run up a flag," she said, stroking Roland. "One cannot. There we
stand."
To her recognition of
this deadlock of Fate, there had been adding the growing disturbance caused by
yet another thing which was increasingly troubling, increasingly difficult to
face.
Gradually, and at first
with wonderful naturalness of bearing, Nigel Anstruthers had managed to create
for himself a singular place in her everyday life. It had begun with a certain
personalness in his attitude, a personalness which was a thing to dislike, but
almost impossible openly to resent. Certainly, as a self-invited guest in his
house, she could scarcely protest against the amiability of his demeanour and
his exterior courtesy and attentiveness of manner in his conduct towards her.
She had tried to sweep away the objectionable quality in his bearing, by
frankness, by indifference, by entire lack of response, but she had remained
conscious of its increasing as a spider's web might increase as the spider spun
it quietly over one, throwing out threads so impalpable that one could not
brush them away because they were too slight to be seen. She was aware that in
the first years of his married life he had alternately resented the scarcity of
the invitations sent them and rudely refused such as were received. Since he
had returned to find her at Stornham, he had insisted that no invitations
should be declined, and had escorted his wife and herself wherever they went.
What could have been conventionally more proper--what more improper than that he
should have persistently have remained at home? And yet there came a time when,
as they three drove together at night in the closed carriage, Betty was
conscious that, as he sat opposite to her in the dark, when he spoke, when he
touched her in arranging the robe over her, or opening or shutting the window,
he subtly, but persistently, conveyed that the personalness of his voice, look,
and physical nearness was a sort of hideous confidence between them which they
were cleverly concealing from Rosalie and the outside world.
When she rode about the
country, he had a way of appearing at some turning and making himself her
companion, riding too closely at her side, and assuming a noticeable air of
being engaged in meaningly confidential talk. Once, when he had been leaning
towards her with an audaciously tender manner, they had been passed by the
Dunholm carriage, and Lady Dunholm and the friend driving with her had
evidently tried not to look surprised. Lady Alanby, meeting them in the same
way at another time, had put up her glasses and stared in open disapproval. She
might admire a strikingly handsome American girl, but her favour would not last
through any such vulgar silliness as flirtations with disgraceful
brothers-in-law. When Betty strolled about the park or the lanes, she much too
often encountered Sir Nigel strolling also, and knew that he did not mean to
allow her to rid herself of him. In public, he made a point of keeping
observably close to her, of hovering in her vicinity and looking on at all she
did with eyes she rebelled against finding fixed on her each time she was
obliged to turn in his direction. He had a fashion of coming to her side and
speaking in a dropped voice, which excluded others, as a favoured lover might.
She had seen both men and women glance at her in half-embarrassment at their
sudden sense of finding themselves slightly de trop. She had said aloud to him
on one such occasion--and she had said it with smiling casualness for the
benefit of Lady Alanby, to whom she had been talking:
"Don't alarm me by
dropping your voice, Nigel. I am easily frightened--and Lady Alanby will think
we are conspirators."
For an instant he was
taken by surprise. He had been pleased to believe that there was no way in
which she could defend herself, unless she would condescend to something
stupidly like a scene. He flushed and drew himself up.
"I beg your
pardon, my dear Betty," he said, and walked away with the manner of an
offended adorer, leaving her to realise an odiously unpleasant truth--which is
that there are incidents only made more inexplicable by an effort to explain.
She saw also that he was quite aware of this, and that his offended departure
was a brilliant inspiration, and had left her, as it were, in the lurch. To
have said to Lady Alanby: "My brother-in-law, in whose house I am merely
staying for my sister's sake, is trying to lead you to believe that I allow him
to make love to me," would have suggested either folly or insanity on her
own part. As it was--after a glance at Sir Nigel's stiffly retreating
back--Lady Alanby merely looked away with a wholly uninviting expression.
When Betty spoke to him
afterwards, haughtily and with determination, he laughed.
"My dearest
girl," he said, "if I watch you with interest and drop my voice when
I get a chance to speak to you, I only do what every other man does, and I do
it because you are an alluring young woman--which no one is more perfectly
aware of than yourself. Your pretence that you do not know you are alluring is
the most captivating thing about you. And what do you think of doing if I
continue to offend you? Do you propose to desert us--to leave poor Rosalie to
sink back again into the bundle of old clothes she was when you came? For
Heaven's sake, don't do that!"
All that his words
suggested took form before her vividly. How well he understood what he was
saying. But she answered him bravely.
"No. I do not mean
to do that."
He watched her for a
few seconds. There was curiosity in his eyes.
"Don't make the
mistake of imagining that I will let my wife go with you to America," he
said next. "She is as far off from that as she was when I brought her to
Stornham. I have told her so. A man cannot tie his wife to the bedpost in these
days, but he can make her efforts to leave him so decidedly unpleasant that
decent women prefer to stay at home and take what is coming. I have seen that
often enough 'to bank on it,' if I may quote your American friends."
"Do you remember
my once saying," Betty remarked, "that when a woman has been properly
ill-treated the time comes when nothing matters--nothing but release from the
life she loathes?"
"Yes," he
answered. "And to you nothing would matter but--excuse my saying it--your
own damnable, headstrong pride. But Rosalie is different. Everything matters to
her. And you will find it so, my dear girl."
And that this was at
least half true was brought home to her by the fact that late the same night
Rosy came to her white with crying.
"It is not your
fault, Betty," she said. "Don't think that I think it is your fault,
but he has been in my room in one of those humours when he seems like a devil.
He thinks you will go back to America and try to take me with you. But, Betty,
you must not think about me. It will be better for you to go. I have seen you
again. I have had you for--for a time. You will be safer at home with father
and mother."
Betty laid a hand on
her shoulder and looked at her fixedly.
"What is it,
Rosy?" she said. "What is it he does to you --that makes you like
this?"
"I don't know--but
that he makes me feel that there is nothing but evil and lies in the world and
nothing can help one against them. Those things he says about everyone--men and
women--things one can't repeat--make me sick. And when I try to deny them, he
laughs."
"Does he say
things about me?" Betty inquired, very quietly, and suddenly Rosalie threw
her arms round her.
"Betty,
darling," she cried, "go home--go home. You must not stay here."
"When I go, you
will go with me," Betty answered. "I am not going back to mother
without you."
She made a collection
of many facts before their interview was at an end, and they parted for the
night. Among the first was that Nigel had prepared for certain possibilities as
wise holders of a fortress prepare for siege. A rather long sitting alone over
whisky and soda had, without making him loquacious, heated his blood in such a
manner as led him to be less subtle than usual. Drink did not make him drunk,
but malignant, and when a man is in the malignant mood, he forgets his
cleverness. So he revealed more than he absolutely intended. It was to be
gathered that he did not mean to permit his wife to leave him, even for a
visit; he would not allow himself to be made ridiculous by such a thing. A man
who could not control his wife was a fool and deserved to be a laughing-stock.
As Ughtred and his future inheritance seemed to have become of interest to his
grandfather, and were to be well nursed and taken care of, his intention was
that the boy should remain under his own supervision. He could amuse himself
well enough at Stornham, now that it had been put in order, if it was kept up
properly and he filled it with people who did not bore him. There were people
who did not bore him--plenty of them. Rosalie would stay where she was and
receive his guests. If she imagined that the little episode of Ffolliott had
been entirely dormant, she was mistaken. He knew where the man was, and exactly
how serious it would be to him if scandal was stirred up. He had been at some
trouble to find out. The fellow had recently had the luck to fall into a very
fine living. It had been bestowed on him by the old Duke of Broadmorlands, who
was the most strait-laced old boy in England. He had become so in his disgust
at the light behaviour of the wife he had divorced in his early manhood. Nigel
cackled gently as he detailed that, by an agreeable coincidence, it happened
that her Grace had suddenly become filled with pious fervour--roused thereto by
a good-looking locum tenens-- result, painful discoveries--the pair being now
rumoured to be keeping a lodging-house together somewhere in Australia. A word
to good old Broadmorlands would produce the effect of a lighted match on a
barrel of gunpowder. It would be the end of Ffolliott. Neither would it be a
good introduction to Betty's first season in London, neither would it be
enjoyed by her mother, whom he remembered as a woman with primitive views of
domestic rectitude. He smiled the awful smile as he took out of his pocket the
envelope containing the words his wife had written to Mr. Ffolliott, "Do
not come to the house. Meet me at Bartyon Wood." It did not take much to
convince people, if one managed things with decent forethought. The Brents, for
instance, were fond neither of her nor of Betty, and they had never forgotten
the questionable conduct of their locum tenens. Then, suddenly, he had changed
his manner and had sat down, laughing, and drawn Rosalie to his knee and kissed
her--yes, he had kissed her and told her not to look like a little foor or act
like one. Nothing unpleasant would happen if she behaved herself. Betty had
improved her greatly, and she had grown young and pretty again. She looked
quite like a child sometimes, now that her bones were covered and she dressed
well. If she wanted to please him she could put her arms round his neck and
kiss him, as he had kissed her.
"That is what has
made you look white," said Betty.
"Yes. There is
something about him that sometimes makes you feel as if the very blood in your
veins turned white," answered Rosy--in a low voice, which the next moment
rose. "Don't you see--don't you see," she broke out, "that to
displease him would be like murdering Mr. Ffolliott--like murdering his mother
and mine--and like murdering Ughtred, because he would be killed by the shame
of things--and by being taken from me. We have loved each other so much--so
much. Don't you see?"
"I see all that
rises up before you," Betty said, "and I understand your feeling that
you cannot save yourself by bringing ruin upon an innocent man who helped you.
I realise that one must have time to think it over. But, Rosy," a sudden
ring in her voice, "I tell you there is a way out--there is a way out! The
end of the misery is coming--and it will not be what he thinks."
"You always
believe----" began Rosy.
"I know,"
answered Betty. "I know there are some things so bad that they cannot go
on. They kill themselves through their own evil. I know! I know! That is
all."
OF these things, as of
others, she had come to her solitude to think. She looked out over the marshes
scarcely seeing the wandering or resting sheep, scarcely hearing the crying
plover, because so much seemed to confront her, and she must look it all well
in the face. She had fulfilled the promise she had made to herself as a child.
She had come in search of Rosy, she had found her as simple and loving of heart
as she had ever been. The most painful discoveries she had made had been concealed
from her mother until their aspect was modified. Mrs. Vanderpoel need now feel
no shock at the sight of the restored Rosy. Lady Anstruthers had been still
young enough to respond both physically and mentally to love, companionship,
agreeable luxuries, and stimulating interests. But for Nigel's antagonism there
was now no reason why she should not be taken home for a visit to her family,
and her long-yearned-for New York, no reason why her father and mother should
not come to Stornham, and thus establish the customary social relations between
their daughter's home and their own. That this seemed out of the question was
owing to the fact that at the outset of his married life Sir Nigel had allowed
himself to commit errors in tactics. A perverse egotism, not wholly normal in
its rancour, had led him into deeds which he had begun to suspect of having
cost him too much, even before Betty herself had pointed out to him their
unbusinesslike indiscretion. He had done things he could not undo, and now, to
his mind, his only resource was to treat them boldly as having been the proper
results of decision founded on sound judgment, which he had no desire to
excuse. A sufficiently arrogant loftiness of bearing would, he hoped, carry him
through the matter. This Betty herself had guessed, but she had not realised
that this loftiness of attitude was in danger of losing some of its
effectiveness through his being increasingly stung and spurred by circumstances
and feelings connected with herself, which were at once exasperating and at
times almost overpowering. When, in his mingled dislike and admiration, he had
begun to study his sister-in-law, and the half-amused weaving of the small
plots which would make things sufficiently unpleasant to be used as factors in
her removal from the scene, if necessary, he had not calculated, ever so
remotely, on the chance of that madness besetting him which usually besets men
only in their youth. He had imagined no other results to himself than a
subtly-exciting private entertainment, such as would give spice to the dulness
of virtuous life in the country. But, despite himself and his intentions, he
had found the situation alter. His first uncertainty of himself had arisen at
the Dunholm ball, when he had suddenly realised that he was detesting men who,
being young and free, were at liberty to pay gallant court to the new beauty.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing to him had been his consciousness of his
sudden leap of antagonism towards Mount Dunstan, who, despite his obvious lack
of chance, somehow especially roused in him the rage of warring male instinct.
There had been admissions he had been forced, at length, to make to himself.
You could not, it appeared, live in the house with a splendid creature like
this one--with her brilliant eyes, her beauty of line and movement before you
every hour, her bloom, her proud fineness holding themselves wholly in their
own keeping--without there being the devil to pay. Lately he had sometimes gone
hot and cold in realising that, having once told himself that he might choose
to decide to get rid of her, he now knew that the mere thought of her sailing
away of her own choice was maddening to him. There was the devil to pay! It
sometimes brought back to him that hideous shakiness of nerve which had been a
feature of his illness when he had been on the Riviera with Teresita.
Of all this Betty only
knew the outward signs which, taken at their exterior significance, were
detestable enough, and drove her hard as she mentally dwelt on them in
connection with other things. How easy, if she stood alone, to defy his evil
insolence to do its worst, and leaving the place at an hour's notice, to sail
away to protection, or, if she chose to remain in England, to surround herself
with a bodyguard of the people in whose eyes his disrepute relegated a man such
as Nigel Anstruthers to powerless nonentity. Alone, she could have smiled and
turned her back upon him. But she was here to take care of Rosy. She occupied a
position something like that of a woman who remains with a man and endures
outrage because she cannot leave her child. That thought, in itself, brought
Ughtred to her mind. There was Ughtred to be considered as well as his mother.
Ughtred's love for and faith in her were deep and passionate things. He fed on
her tenderness for him, and had grown stronger because he spent hours of each
day talking, reading, and driving with her. The simple truth was that neither
she nor Rosalie could desert Ughtred, and so long as Nigel managed cleverly
enough, the law would give the boy to his father.
"You are obliged
to prove things, you know, in a court of law," he had said, as if with
casual amiability, on a certain occasion. "Proving things is the devil.
People lose their tempers and rush into rows which end in lawsuits, and then
find they can prove nothing. If I were a villain," slightly showing his
teeth in an agreeable smile--"instead of a man of blameless life, I should
go in only for that branch of my profession which could be exercised without
leaving stupid evidence behind."
Since his return to
Stornham the outward decorum of his own conduct had entertained him and he had
kept it up with an increasing appreciation of its usefulness in the present
situation. Whatsoever happened in the end, it was the part of discretion to
present to the rural world about him an appearance of upright behaviour. He had
even found it amusing to go to church and also to occasionally make amiable
calls at the vicarage. It was not difficult, at such times, to refer delicately
to his regret that domestic discomfort had led him into the error of remaining
much away from Stornham. He knew that he had been even rather touching in his
expression of interest in the future of his son, and the necessity of the boy's
being protected from uncontrolled hysteric influences. And, in the years of
Rosalie's unprotected wretchedness, he had taken excellent care that no
"stupid evidence" should be exposed to view.
Of all this Betty was
thinking and summing up definitely, point after point. Where was the wise and
practical course of defence? The most unthinkable thing was that one could find
one's self in a position in which action seemed inhibited. What could one do?
To send for her father would surely end the matter--but at what cost to Rosy,
to Ughtred, to Ffolliott, before whom the fair path to dignified security had
so newly opened itself? What would be the effect of sudden confusion, anguish,
and public humiliation upon Rosalie's carefully rebuilt health and
strength--upon her mother's new hope and happiness? At moments it seemed as if
almost all that had been done might be undone. She was beset by such a moment
now, and felt for the time, at least, like a creature tied hand and foot while
in full strength.
Certainly she was not
prepared for the event which happened. Roland stiffened his ears, and,
beginning a rumbling growl, ended it suddenly, realising it an unnecessary
precaution. He knew the man walking up the incline of the mound from the side
behind them. So did Betty know him. It was Sir Nigel looking rather glowering
and pale and walking slowly. He had discovered where she had meant to take
refuge, and had probably ridden to some point where he could leave his horse
and follow her at the expense of taking a short cut which saved walking.
As he climbed the mound
to join her, Betty rose to her feet.
"My dear
girl," he said, "don't get up as if you meant to go away. It has cost
me some exertion to find you."
It will not cost you
any exertion to lose me," was her light answer. "I am going away."
He had reached her, and
stood still before her with scarcely a yard's distance between them. He was
slightly out of breath and even a trifle livid. He leaned on his stick and his
look at her combined leaping bad temper with something deeper.
"Look here!"
he broke out, "why do you make such a point of treating me like the
devil?"
Betty felt her heart
give a hastened beat, not of fear, but of repulsion. This was the mood and
manner which subjugated Rosalie. He had so raised his voice that two men in the
distance, who might be either labourers or sportsmen, hearing its high tone,
glanced curiously towards them.
"Why do you ask me
a question which is totally absurd?" she said.
"It is not
absurd," he answered. "I am speaking of facts, and I intend to come
to some understanding about them."
For reply, after
meeting his look a few seconds, she simply turned her back and began to walk
away. He followed and overtook her.
"I shall go with
you, and I shall say what I want to say," he persisted. "If you
hasten your pace I shall hasten mine. I cannot exactly see you running away
from me across the marsh, screaming. You wouldn't care to be rescued by those
men over there who are watching us. I should explain myself to them in terms
neither you nor Rosalie would enjoy. There! I knew Rosalie's name would pull
you up. Good God! I wish I were a weak fool with a magnificent creature
protecting me at all risks."
If she had not had
blood and fire in her veins, she might have found it easy to answer calmly. But
she had both, and both leaped and beat furiously for a few seconds. It was only
human that it should be so. But she was more than a passionate girl of high and
trenchant spirit, and she had learned, even in the days at the French school,
what he had never been able to learn in his life--self-control. She held
herself in as she would have held in a horse of too great fire and action. She
was actually able to look--as the first Reuben Vanderpoel would have looked--at
her capital of resource. But it meant taut holding of the reins.
"Will you tell
me," she said, stopping, "what it is you want?"
"I want to talk to
you. I want to tell you truths you would rather be told here than on the high
road, where people are passing--or at Stornham, where the servants would
overhear and Rosalie be thrown into hysterics. You will not run screaming
across the marsh, because I should run screaming after you, and we should both
look silly. Here is a rather scraggy tree. Will you sit on the mound near
it--for Rosalie's sake?"
"I will not sit
down," replied Betty, "but I will listen, because it is not a bad
idea that I should understand you. But to begin with, I will tell you
something." She stopped beneath the tree and stood with her back against
its trunk. "I pick up things by noticing people closely, and I have
realised that all your life you have counted upon getting your own way because
you saw that people--especially women --have a horror of public scenes, and
will submit to almost anything to avoid them. That is true very often, but not
always." Her eyes, which were well opened, were quite the blue of steel,
and rested directly upon him. "I, for instance, would let you make a scene
with me anywhere you chose--in Bond Street-- in Piccadilly--on the steps of
Buckingham Palace, as I was getting out of my carriage to attend a
drawing-room--and you would gain nothing you wanted by it--nothing. You may
place entire confidence in that statement."
He stared back at her,
momentarily half-magnetised, and then broke forth into a harsh half-laugh.
"You are so damned
handsome that nothing else matters. I'm hanged if it does!" and the words
were an exclamation. He drew still nearer to her, speaking with a sort of savagery.
"Cannot you see
that you could do what you pleased with me? You are too magnificent a thing for
a man to withstand. I have lost my head and gone to the devil through you. That
is what I came to say."
In the few seconds of
silence that followed, his breath came quickly again and he was even paler than
before.
"You came to me to
say that?" asked Betty.
"Yes--to say it
before you drove me to other things."
Her gaze was for a
moment even slightly wondering. He presented the curious picture of a cynical
man of the world, for the time being ruled and impelled only by the most
primitive instincts. To a clear-headed modern young woman of the most powerful
class, he--her sister's husband--was making threatening love as if he were a
savage chief and she a savage beauty of his tribe. All that concerned him was
that he should speak and she should hear--that he should show her he was the
stronger of the two.
"Are you quite
mad?" she said.
"Not quite,"
he answered; "only three parts--but I am beyond my own control. That is
the best proof of what has happened to me. You are an arrogant piece and you
would defy me if you stood alone, but you don't, and, by the Lord! I have
reached a point where I will make use of every lever I can lay my hand on--yourself,
Rosalie, Ughtred, Ffolliott-- the whole lot of you!"
The thing which was
hardest upon her was her knowledge of her own strength--of what she might have
allowed herself of flaming words and instant action--but for the memory of
Rosy's ghastly little face, as it had looked when she cried out, "You must
not think of me. Betty, go home--go home!" She held the white desperation
of it before her mental vision and answered him even with a certain interested
deliberateness.
"Do you
know," she inquired, "that you are talking to me as though you were
the villain in the melodrama?"
"There is an
advantage in that," he answered, with an unholy smile. "If you repeat
what I say, people will only think that you are indulging in hysterical
exaggeration. They don't believe in the existence of melodrama in these
days."
The cynical, absolute
knowledge of this revealed so much that nerve was required to face it with
steadiness.
"True," she
commented. "Now I think I understand."
"No, you
don't," he burst forth. "You have spent your life standing on a
golden pedestal, being kowtowed to, and you imagine yourself immune from
difficulties because you think you can pay your way out of anything. But you
will find that you cannot pay your way out of this--or rather you cannot pay
Rosalie's way out of it."
"I shall not try.
Go on," said the girl. "What I do not understand, you must explain to
me. Don't leave anything unsaid."
"Good God, what a
woman you are!" he cried out bitterly. He had never seen such beauty in
his life as he saw in her as she stood with her straight young body flat
against the tree. It was not a matter of deep colour of eye, or high spirit of
profile--but of something which burned him. Still as she was, she looked like a
flame. She made him feel old and body-worn, and all the more senselessly
furious.
"I believe you
hate me," he raged. "And I may thank my wife for that." Then he
lost himself entirely. "Why cannot you behave well to me? If you will
behave well to me, Rosalie shall go her own way. If you even looked at me as
you look at other men--but you do not. There is always something under your
lashes which watches me as if I were a wild beast you were studying. Don't
fancy yourself a dompteuse. I am not your man. I swear to you that you don't know
what you are dealing with. I swear to you that if you play this game with me I
will drag you two down if I drag myself with you. I have nothing much to lose.
You and your sister have everything."
"Go on,"
Betty said briefly.
"Go on! Yes, I
will go on. Rosalie and Ffolliott I hold in the hollow of my hand. As for
you--do you know that people are beginning to discuss you? Gossip is easily
stirred in the country, where people are so bored that they chatter in
self-defence. I have been considered a bad lot. I have become curiously
attached to my sister-in-law. I am seen hanging about her, hanging over her as
we ride or walk alone together. An American young woman is not like an English
girl--she is used to seeing the marriage ceremony juggled with. There's a
trifle of prejudice against such young women when they are too rich and too
handsome. Don't look at me like that!" he burst forth, with maddened
sharpness, "I won't have it!"
The girl was regarding
him with the expression he most resented--the reflection of a normal person
watching an abnormal one, and studying his abnormality.
"Do you know that
you are raving?" she said, with quiet curiosity--"raving?"
Suddenly he sat down on
the low mound near him, and as he touched his forehead with his handkerchief,
she saw that his hand actually shook.
"Yes," he
answered, panting, "but 'ware my ravings! They mean what they say."
"You do yourself
an injury when you give way to them"-- steadily, even with a touch of slow
significance--"a physical injury. I have noticed that more than
once."
He sprang to his feet
again. Every drop of blood left his face. For a second he looked as if he would
strike her. His arm actually flung itself out--and fell.
"You devil!"
he gasped. "You count on that? You she-devil!"
She left her tree and
stood before him.
"Listen to
me," she said. "You intimate that you have been laying melodramatic
plots against me which will injure my good name. That is rubbish. Let us leave
it at that. You threaten that you will break Rosy's heart and take her child
from her, you say also that you will wound and hurt my mother to her death and
do your worst to ruin an honest man----"
"And, by God, I
will!" he raged. "And you cannot stop me, if----"
"I do not know
whether I can stop you or not, though you may be sure I will try," she
interrupted him, "but that is not what I was going to say." She drew
a step nearer, and there was something in the intensity of her look which
fascinated and held him for a moment. She was curiously grave. "Nigel, I
believe in certain things you do not believe in. I believe black thoughts breed
black ills to those who think them. It is not a new idea. There is an old Oriental
proverb which says, 'Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.' I believe also
that the worst--the very worst cannot be done to those who think
steadily--steadily--only of the best. To you that is merely superstition to be
laughed at. That is a matter of opinion. But--don't go on with this
thing--don't go on with it. Stop and think it over."
He stared at her
furiously--tried to laugh outright, and failed because the look in her eyes was
so odd in its strength and stillness.
"You think you can
lay some weird spell upon me," he jeered sardonically.
"No, I
don't," she answered. "I could not if I would. It is no affair of
mine. It is your affair only--and there is nothing weird about it. Don't go on,
I tell you. Think better of it."
She turned about
without further speech, and walked away from him with light swiftness over the
marsh. Oddly enough, he did not even attempt to follow her. He felt a little
weak-- perhaps because a certain thing she had said had brought back to him a
familiar touch of the horrors. She had the eyes of a falcon under the odd, soft
shade of the extraordinary lashes. She had seen what he thought no one but
himself had realised. Having watched her retreating figure for a few seconds,
he sat down--as suddenly as before--on the mound near the tree.
"Oh, damn
her!" he said, his damp forehead on his hands. "Damn the whole
universe!" . . . . .
When Betty and Roland
reached Stornham, the wicker-work pony chaise from the vicarage stood before
the stone entrance steps. The drawing-room door was open, and Mrs. Brent was
standing near it saying some last words to Lady Anstruthers before leaving the
house, after a visit evidently made with an object. This Betty gathered from
the solemnity of her manner.
"Betty," said
Lady Anstruthers, catching sight of her, "do come in for a moment."
When Betty entered,
both her sister and Mrs. Brent looked at her questioningly.
"You look a little
pale and tired, Miss Vanderpoel," Mrs. Brent said, rather as if in haste
to be the first to speak. "I hope you are not at all unwell. We need all
our strength just now. I have brought the most painful news. Malignant typhoid
fever has broken out among the hop pickers on the Mount Dunstan estate. Some
poor creature was evidently sickening for it when he came from London. Three
people died last night."
SIR NIGEL'S face was
not a good thing to see when he appeared at the dinner table in the evening. As
he took his seat the two footmen glanced quickly at each other, and the butler
at the sideboard furtively thrust out his underlip. Not a man or woman in the
household but had learned the signal denoting the moment when no service would
please, no word or movement be unobjectionable. Lady Anstruthers' face
unconsciously assumed its propitiatory expression, and she glanced at her
sister more than once when Betty was unaware that she did so.
Until the soup had been
removed, Sir Nigel scarcely spoke, merely making curt replies to any casual
remark. This was one of his simple and most engaging methods of at once
enjoying an ill-humour and making his wife feel that she was in some way to
blame for it.
"Mount Dunstan is
in a deucedly unpleasant position," he condescended at last. "I
should not care to stand in his shoes."
He had not returned to
the Court until late in the afternoon, but having heard in the village the
rumour of the outbreak of fever, he had made inquiries and gathered detail.
"You are thinking
of the outbreak of typhoid among the hop pickers?" said Lady Anstruthers.
"Mrs. Brent thinks it threatens to be very serious."
"An epidemic,
without a doubt," he answered. "In a wretched unsanitary place like
Dunstan village, the wretches will die like flies."
"What will be
done?" inquired Betty.
He gave her one of the
unpleasant personal glances and laughed derisively.
"Done? The county
authorities, who call themselves 'guardians,' will be frightened to death and
will potter about and fuss like old women, and profess to examine and protect
and lay restrictions, but everyone will manage to keep at a discreet distance,
and the thing will run riot and do its worst. As far as one can see, there
seems no reason why the whole place should not be swept away. No doubt Mount
Dunstan has wisely taken to his heels already."
"I think that, on
the contrary, there would be much doubt of that," Betty said. "He
would stay and do what he could."
Sir Nigel shrugged his
shoulders.
"Would he? I think
you'll find he would not."
"Mrs. Brent tells
me," Rosalie broke in somewhat hurriedly, "that the huts for the
hoppers are in the worst possible condition. They are so dilapidated that the
rain pours into them. There is no proper shelter for the people who are ill,
and Lord Mount Dunstan connot afford to take care of them."
"But he will--he
will," broke forth Betty. Her head lifted itself and she spoke almost as
if through her small, shut teeth. A wave of intense belief--high, proud, and
obstinate, swept through her. It was a feeling so strong and vibrant that she
felt as if Mount Dunstan himself must be reached and upborne by it--as if he
himself must hear her.
Rosalie looked at her
half-startled, and, for the moment held fascinated by the sudden force rising
in her and by the splendid spark of light under her lids. She was reminded of
the fierce little Betty of long ago, with her delicate, indomitable small face
and the spirit which even at nine years old had somehow seemed so strong and
straitly keen of sight that one had known it might always be trusted. Actually,
in one way, she had not changed. She saw the truth of things. The next instant,
however, inadvertantly glancing towards her husband, she caught her breath
quickly. Across his heavy-featured face had shot the sudden gleam of a new
expression. It was as if he had at the moment recognised something which filled
him with a rush of fury he himself was not prepared for. That he did not wish
it to be seen she knew by his manner. There was a brief silence in which it
passed away. He spoke after it, with disagreeable precision.
"He has had an
enormous effect on you--that man," he said to Betty.
He spoke clearly so
that she might have the pleasure of being certain that the menservants heard.
They were close to the table, handing fruit--professing to be automatons, eyes
down, faces expressing nothing, but as quick of hearing as it is said that
blind men are. He knew that if he had been in her place and a thing as
insultingly significant had been said to him, he should promptly have hurled
the nearest object--plate, wine-glass, or decanter--in the face of the speaker.
He knew, too, that women cannot hurl projectiles without looking like viragos
and fools. The weakly-feminine might burst into tears or into a silly rage and
leave the table. There was a distinct breath's space of pause, and Betty,
cutting a cluster from a bunch of hothouse grapes presented by the footman at
her side, answered as clearly as he had spoken himself.
"He is strong
enough to produce an effect on anyone," she said. "I think you feel
that yourself. He is a man who will not be beaten in the end. Fortune will give
him some good thing."
"He is a fellow
who knows well enough on which hand of him good things lie," he said.
"He will take all that offers itself."
"Why not?"
Betty said impartially.
"There must be no
riding or driving in the neighbourhood of the place," he said next.
"I will have no risks run." He turned and addressed the butler.
"Jennings, tell the servants that those are my orders."
He sat over his wine
but a short time that evening, and when he joined his wife and sister-in-law in
the drawing-room he went at once to Betty. In fact, he was in the condition
when a man cannot keep away from a woman, but must invent some reason for
reaching her whether it is fatuous or plausible.
"What I said to
Jennings was an order to you as well as to the people below stairs. I know you
are particularly fond of riding in the direction of Mount Dunstan. You are in
my care so long as you are in my house."
"Orders are not
necessary," Betty replied. "The day is past when one rushed to smooth
pillows and give the wrong medicine when one's friends were ill. If one is not
a properly-trained nurse, it is wiser not to risk being very much in the
way."
He spoke over her
shoulder, dropping his voice, though Lady Anstruthers sat apart, appearing to
read.
"Don't think I am
fool enough not to understand. You have yourself under magnificent control, but
a woman passionately in love cannot keep a certain look out of her eyes."
He was standing on the hearth.
Betty swung herself lightly round, facing him squarely. Her full look was
splendid.
"If it is
there--let it stay," she said. "I would not keep it out of my eyes if
I could, and, you are right, I could not if I would--if it is there. If it
is--let it stay."
The daring, throbbing,
human truth of her made his brain whirl. To a man young and clean and fit to
count as in the lists, to have heard her say the thing of a rival would have
been hard enough, but base, degenerate, and of the world behind her day, to
hear it while frenzied for her, was intolerable. And it was Mount Dunstan she
bore herself so highly for. Whether melodrama is out of date or not there are,
occasionally, some fine melodramatic touches in the enmities of to-day.
"You think you will
reach him," he persisted. "You think you will help him in some way.
You will not let the thing alone."
"Excuse my
mentioning that whatsoever I take the liberty of doing will encroach on no
right of yours," she said.
But, alone in her room,
after she went upstairs, the face reflecting itself in the mirror was pale and
its black brows were drawn together.
She sat down at the
dressing-table, and, seeing the paled face, drew the black brows closer,
confronting a complicating truth.
"If I were free to
take Rosalie and Ughtred home tomorrow," she thought, "I could not
bear to go. I should suffer too much."
She was suffering now.
The strong longing in her heart was like a physical pain. No word or look of
this one man had given her proof that his thoughts turned to her, and yet it
was intolerable--intolerable--that in his hour of stress and need they were as
wholly apart as if worlds rolled between them. At any dire moment it was mere
nature that she should give herself in help and support. If, on the night at
sea, when they had first spoken to each other, the ship had gone down, she knew
that they two, strangers though they were, would have worked side by side among
the frantic people, and have been among the last to take to the boats. How did
she know? Only because, he being he, and she being she, it must have been so in
accordance with the laws ruling entities. And now he stood facing a calamity
almost as terrible--and she with full hands sat still.
She had seen the hop
pickers' huts and had recognised their condition. Mere brick sheds in which the
pickers slept upon bundles of hay or straw in their best days; in their decay
they did not even provide shelter. In fine weather the hop gatherers slept well
enough in them, cooking their food in gypsy-fashion in the open. When the rain
descended, it must run down walls and drip through the holes in the roofs in
streams which would soak clothes and bedding. The worst that Nigel and Mrs.
Brent had implied was true. Illness of any order, under such circumstances,
would have small chance of recovery, but malignant typhoid without shelter,
without proper nourishment or nursing, had not one chance in a million. And
he--this one man--stood alone in the midst of the tragedy--responsible and
helpless. He would feel himself responsible as she herself would, if she were
in his place. She was conscious that suddenly the event of the afternoon--the
interview upon the marshes, had receded until it had become an almost unmeaning
incident. What did the degenerate, melodramatic folly matter----!
She had restlessly left
her chair before the dressing-table, and was walking to and fro. She paused and
stood looking down at the carpet, though she scarcely saw it.
"Nothing matters
but one thing--one person," she owned to herself aloud. "I suppose it
is always like this. Rosy, Ughtred, even father and mother--everyone seems less
near than they were. It is too strong--too strong. It is----" the words
dropped slowly from her lips, "the strongest thing-- in the world."
She lifted her face and
threw out her hands, a lovely young half-sad smile curling the deep corners of
her mouth. "Sometimes one feels so disdained," she said--"so
disdained with all one's power. Perhaps I am an unwanted thing."
But even in this case
there were aids one might make an effort to give. She went to her writing-table
and sat thinking for some time. Afterwards she began to write letters. Three or
four were addressed to London--one was to Mr. Penzance. . . . . .
Mount Dunstan and his
vicar were walking through the village to the vicarage. They had been to the
hop pickers' huts to see the people who were ill of the fever. Both of them
noticed that cottage doors and windows were shut, and that here and there
alarmed faces looked out from behind latticed panes.
"They are in a
panic of fear," Mount Dunstan said, "and by way of safeguard they
shut out every breath of air and stifle indoors. Something must be done."
Catching the eye of a
woman who was peering over her short white dimity blind, he beckoned to her
authoritatively. She came to the door and hesitated there, curtsying nervously.
Mount Dunstan spoke to
her across the hedge.
"You need not come
out to me, Mrs. Binner. You may stay where you are," he said. "Are
you obeying the orders given by the Guardians?"
"Yes, my lord.
Yes, my lord," with more curtsys.
"Your health is
very much in your own hands," he added. "You must keep your cottage
and your children cleaner than you have ever kept them before, and you must use
the disinfectant I sent you. Keep away from the huts, and open your windows. If
you don't open them, I shall come and do it for you. Bad air is infection
itself. Do you understand?"
"Yes, my lord.
Thank your lordship."
"Go in and open
your windows now, and tell your neighbours to do the same. If anyone is ill let
me know at once. The vicar and I will do our best for everyone."
By that time curiosity
had overcome fear, and other cottage doors had opened. Mount Dunstan passed
down the row and said a few words to each woman or man who looked out.
Questions were asked anxiously and he answered them. That he was personally
unafraid was comfortingly plain, and the mere sight of him was, on the whole,
an unexplainable support.
"We heard said
your lordship was going away," put in a stout mother with a heavy child on
her arm, a slight testiness scarcely concealed by respectful good-manners. She
was a matron with a temper, and that a Mount Dunstan should avoid responsibilities
seemed highly credible.
"I shall stay
where I am," Mount Dunstan answered. "My place is here."
They believed him,
Mount Dunstan though he was. It could not be said that they were fond of him,
but gradually it had been borne in upon them that his word was to be relied on,
though his manner was unalluring and they knew he was too poor to do his duty
by them or his estate. As he walked away with the vicar, windows were opened,
and in one or two untidy cottages a sudden flourishing of mops and brooms began.
There was dark trouble
in Mount Dunstan's face. In the huts they had left two man stiff on their
straw, and two women and a child in a state of collapse. Added to these were
others stricken helpless. A number of workers in the hop gardens, on realising
the danger threatening them, had gathered together bundles and children, and,
leaving the harvest behind, had gone on the tramp again. Those who remained
were the weaker or less cautious, or were held by some tie to those who were
already ill of the fever. The village doctor was an old man who had spent his
blameless life in bringing little cottagers into the world, attending their
measles and whooping coughs, and their father's and grandfather's rheumatics.
He had never faced a village crisis in the course of his seventy-five years,
and was aghast and flurried with fright. His methods remained those of his
youth, and were marked chiefly by a readiness to prescribe calomel in any
emergency. A younger and stronger man was needed, as well as a man of more modern
training. But even the most brilliant practitioner of the hour could not have
provided shelter and nourishment, and without them his skill would have counted
as nothing. For three weeks there had been no rain, which was a condition of
the barometer not likely to last. Already grey clouds were gathering and
obscuring the blueness of the sky.
The vicar glanced
upwards anxiously.
"When it
comes," he said, "there will be a downpour, and a persistent
one."
"Yes," Mount
Dunstan answered.
He had lain awake
thinking throughout the night. How was a man to sleep! It was as Betty
Vanderpoel had known it would be. He, who--beggar though he might be--was the
lord of the land, was the man to face the strait of these poor workers on the
land, as his own. Some action must be taken. What action? As he walked by his
friend's side from the huts where the dead men lay it revealed itself that he
saw his way.
They were going to the
vicarage to consult a medical book, but on the way there they passed a part of
the park where, through a break in the timber the huge, white, blind-faced
house stood on view. Mount Dunstan laid his hand on Mr. Penzance's shoulder and
stopped him
"Look there!"
he said. "There are weather-tight rooms enough."
A startled expression
showed itself on the vicar's face.
"For what?"
he exclaimed
"For a
hospital," brusquely "I can give them one thing, at
least--shelter."
"It is a very
remarkable thing to think of doing," Mr. Penzance said.
"It is not so
remarkable as that labourers on my land should die at my gate because I cannot
give them decent roofs to cover them. There is a roof that will shield them
from the weather. They shall be brought to the Mount."
The vicar was silent a
moment, and a flush of sympathy warmed his face.
"You are quite
right, Fergus," he said, "entirely right."
"Let us go to your
study and plan how it shall be done," Mount Dunstan said.
As they walked towards
the vicarage, he went on talking.
"When I lie awake
at night, there is one thread which always winds itself through my thoughts
whatsoever they are. I don't find that I can disentangle it. It connects itself
with Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter. You would know that without my telling
you. If you had ever struggled with an insane passion----"
"It is not insane,
I repeat," put in Penzance unflinchingly.
"Thank
you--whether you are right or wrong," answered Mount Dunstan, striding by
his side. "When I am awake, she is as much a part of my existence as my
breath itself. When I think things over, I find that I am asking myself if her
thoughts would be like mine. She is a creature of action. Last night, as I lay
awake, I said to myself, 'She would do something. What would she do?' She would
not be held back by fear of comment or convention. She would look about her for
the utilisable, and she would find it somewhere and use it. I began to sum up
the village resources and found nothing--until my thoughts led me to my own
house. There it stood--empty and useless. If it were hers, and she stood in my
place, she would make it useful. So I decided."
"You are quite
right," Mr. Penzance said again.
They spent an hour in
his library at the vicarage, arranging practical methods for transforming the
great ballroom into a sort of hospital ward. It could be done by the removal of
pieces of furniture from the many unused bedrooms. There was also the
transportation of the patients from the huts to be provided for. But, when all
this was planned out, each found himself looking at the other with an unspoken
thought in his mind. Mount Dunstan first expressed it.
"As far as I can
gather, the safety of typhoid fever patients depends almost entirely on
scientific nursing, and the caution with which even liquid nourishment is
given. The woman whose husband died this morning told me that he had seemed
better in the night, and had asked for something to eat. She gave him a piece
of bread and a slice of cold bacon, because he told her he fancied it. I could
not explain to her, as she sat sobbing over him, that she had probably killed
him. When we have patients in our ward, what shall we feed them on, and who
will know how to nurse them? They do not know how to nurse each other, and the
women in the village would not run the risk of undertaking to help us."
But, even before he had
left the house, the problem was solved for them. The solving of it lay in the
note Miss Vanderpoel had written the night before at Stornham.
When it was brought to
him Mr. Penzance glanced up from certain calculations he was making upon a
sheet of notepaper. The accumulating difficulties made him look worn and tired.
He opened the note and read it gravely, and then as gravely, though with a
change of expression, handed it to Mount Dunstan.
"Yes, she is a
creature of action. She has heard and understood at once, and she has done
something. It is immensely practical--it is fine--it--it is lovable."
"Do you mind my
keeping it?" Mount Dunstan asked, after he had read it.
"Keep it by all
means," the vicar answered. "It is worth keeping."
But it was quite brief.
She had heard of the outbreak of fever among the hop pickers, and asked to be
allowed to give help to the people who were suffering. They would need prompt
aid. She chanced to know something of the requirements of such cases, and had
written to London for certain supplies which would be sent to them at once. She
had also written for nurses, who would be needed above all else. Might she ask
Mr. Penzance to kindly call upon her for any further assistance required.
"Tell her we are
deeply grateful," said Mount Dunstan, "and that she has given us
greater help than she knows."
"Why not answer
her note yourself?" Penzance suggested.
Mount Dunstan shook his
head.
"No," he said
shortly. "No."
THOUGH Dunstan village
was cut off, by its misfortune, from its usual intercourse with its neighbours,
in some mystic manner villages even at twenty miles' distance learned all it
did and suffered, feared or hoped. It did not hope greatly, the rustic habit of
mind tending towards a discouraged outlook, and cherishing the drama of
impending calamity. As far as Yangford and Marling inmates of cottages and
farmhouses were inclined to think it probable that Dunstan would be "swep
away," and rumours of spreading death and disaster were popular. Tread,
the advanced blacksmith at Stornham, having heard in his by-gone, better days
of the Great Plague of London, was greatly in demand as a narrator of
illuminating anecdotes at The Clock Inn.
Among the parties
gathered at the large houses Mount Dunstan himself was much talked of. If he
had been a popular man, he might have become a sort of hero; as he was not
popular, he was merely a subject for discussion. The fever-stricken patients
had been carried in carts to the Mount and given beds in the ballroom, which
had been made into a temporary ward. Nurses and supplies had been sent for from
London, and two energetic young doctors had taken the place of old Dr. Fenwick,
who had been frightened and overworked into an attack of bronchitis which
confined him to his bed. Where the money came from, which must be spent every
day under such circumstances, it was difficult to say. To the simply
conservative of mind, the idea of filling one's house with dirty East End hop
pickers infected with typhoid seemed too radical. Surely he could have done
something less extraordinary. Would everybody be expected to turn their houses
into hospitals in case of village epidemics, now that he had established a
precedent? But there were people who approved, and were warm in their sympathy
with him. At the first dinner party where the matter was made the subject of
argument, the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel, who was present, listened silently to
the talk with such brilliant eyes that Lord Dunholm, who was in an elderly way
her staunch admirer, spoke to her across the table:
"Tell us what you
think of it, Miss Vanderpoel," he suggested.
She did not hesitate at
all.
"I like it,"
she answered, in her clear, well-heard voice. "I like it better than
anything I have ever heard."
"So do I,"
said old Lady Alanby shortly. "I should never have done it myself--but I
like it just as you do."
"I knew you would,
Lady Alanby," said the girl. "And you, too, Lord Dunholm."
"I like it so much
that I shall write and ask if I cannot be of assistance," Lord Dunholm
answered.
Betty was glad to hear
this. Only quickness of thought prevented her from the error of saying,
"Thank you," as if the matter were personal to herself. If Mount
Dunstan was restive under the obviousness of the fact that help was so sorely
needed, he might feel less so if her offer was only one among others.
"It seems rather
the duty of the neighbourhood to show some interest," put in Lady Alanby.
"I shall write to him myself. He is evidently of a new order of Mount
Dunstan. It's to be hoped he won't take the fever himself, and die of it He
ought to marry some handsome, well-behaved girl, and refound the family."
Nigel Anstruthers spoke
from his side of the table, leaning slightly forward.
"He won't if he
does not take better care of himself. He passed me on the road two days ago,
riding like a lunatic. He looks frightfully ill--yellow and drawn and lined. He
has not lived the life to prepare him for settling down to a fight with typhoid
fever. He would be done for if he caught the infection."
"I beg your
pardon," said Lord Dunholm, with quiet decision. "Unprejudiced
inquiry proves that his life has been entirely respectable. As Lady Alanby
says, he seems to be of a new order of Mount Dunstan."
"No doubt you are
right," said Sir Nigel suavely. "He looked ill,
notwithstanding."
"As to looking
ill," remarked Lady Alanby to Lord Dunholm, who sat near her, "that
man looks as if he was going to pieces pretty rapidly himself, and unprejudiced
inquiry would not prove that his past had nothing to do with it."
Betty wondered if her
brother-in-law were lying. It was generally safest to argue that he was. But
the fever burned high at Mount Dunstan, and she knew by instinct what its owner
was giving of the strength of his body and brain. A young, unmarried woman
cannot go about, however, making anxious inquiries concerning the welfare of a
man who has made no advance towards her. She must wait for the chance which
brings news. . . . . .
The fever, having
ill-cared for and habitually ill fed bodies to work upon, wrought fiercely,
despite the energy of the two young doctors and the trained nurses. There were
many dark hours in the ballroom ward, hours filled with groans and wild
ravings. The floating Terpsichorean goddesses upon the lofty ceiling gazed down
with wondering eyes at haggard faces and plucking hands which sometimes, behind
the screen drawn round their beds, ceased to look feverish, and grew paler and
stiller, until they moved no more. But, at least, none had died through want of
shelter and care. The supplies needed came from London each day. Lord Dunholm
had sent a generous cheque to the aid of the sufferers, and so, also, had old
Lady Alanby, but Miss Vanderpoel, consulting medical authorities and hospitals,
learned exactly what was required, and necessities were forwarded daily in
their most easily utilisable form.
"You generously
told me to ask you for anything we found we required," Mr. Penzance wrote
to her in his note of thanks. "My dear and kind young lady, you leave
nothing to ask for. Our doctors, who are young and enthusiastic, are filled
with delight in the completeness of the resources placed in their hands."
She had, in fact, gone
to London to consult an eminent physician, who was an authority of world-wide
reputation. Like the head of the legal firm of Townlinson & Sheppard, he
had experienced a new sensation in the visit paid him by an indubitably modern
young beauty, who wasted no word, and whose eyes, while he answered her
amazingly clear questions, were as intelligently intent as those of an ardent
and serious young medical student. What a surgical nurse she would have made!
It seemed almost a pity that she evidently belonged to a class the members of
which are rich enough to undertake the charge of entire epidemics, but who do
not usually give themselves to such work, especially when they are young and
astonishing in the matter of looks.
In addition to the work
they did in the ballroom ward, Mount Dunstan and the vicar found much to do
among the villagers. Ignorance and alarm combined to create dangers, even where
they might not have been feared. Daily instruction and inspection of the
cottages and their inmates was required. The knowledge that they were under
control and supervision was a support to the frightened people and prevented
their lapsing into careless habits. Also, there began to develop among them a
secret dependence upon, and desire to please "his lordship," as the
existing circumstances drew him nearer to them, and unconsciously they were
attracted and dominated by his strength. The strong man carries his power with
him, and, when Mount Dunstan entered a cottage and talked to its inmates, the
anxious wife or surlily depressed husband was conscious of feeling a certain
sense of security. It had been a queer enough thing, this he had done--bundling
the infected hoppers out of their leaking huts and carrying them up to the
Mount itself for shelter and care. At the most, gentlefolk generally gave soup
or blankets or hospital tickets, and left the rest to luck, but,
"gentry-way" or not, a man who did a thing like that would be likely
to do other things, if they were needed, and gave folk a feeling of being safer
than ordinary soup and blankets and hospital tickets could make them.
But "where did the
money come from?" was asked during the first days. Beds and doctors,
nurses and medicine, fine brandy and unlimited fowls for broth did not come up
from London without being paid for. Pounds and pounds a day must be paid out to
get the things that were delivered "regular" in hampers and boxes.
The women talked to one another over their garden palings, the men argued
together over their beer at the public house. Was he running into more debt?
But even the village knew that Mount Dunstan credit had been exhausted long
ago, and there had been no money at the Mount within the memory of man, so to
speak.
One morning the matron
with the sharp temper found out the truth, though the outburst of gratitude to
Mount Dunstan which resulted in her enlightenment, was entirely spontaneous and
without intention. Her doubt of his Mount Dunstan blood had grown into a sturdy
liking even for his short speech and his often drawn-down brows.
"We've got more to
thank your lordship for than common help," she said. "God Almightly
knows where we'd all ha' been but for what you've done. Those poor souls you've
nursed and fed----"
"I've not done
it," he broke in promptly. "You're mistaken; I could not have done
it. How could I?"
"Well,"
exclaimed the matron frankly, "we was wondering where things came
from."
"You might well
wonder. Have any of you seen Lady Anstruthers' sister, Miss Vanderpoel, ride
through the village? She used sometimes to ride this way. If you saw her you
will remember it.'
"The 'Merican
young lady!" in ejaculatory delight. "My word, yes! A fine young
woman with black hair? That rich, they say, as millions won't cover it."
"They won't,"
grimly. "Lord Dunholm and Lady Alanby of Dole kindly sent cheques to help
us, but the American young lady was first on the field. She sent both doctors
and nurses, and has supplied us with food and medicine every day. As you say,
Mrs. Brown, God Almighty knows what would have become of us, but for what she
has done."
Mrs. Brown had listened
with rather open mouth. She caught her breath heartily, as a sort of approving
exclamation.
"God bless
her!" she broke out. "Girls isn't generally like that. Their heads is
too full of finery. God bless her, 'Merican or no 'Merican! That's what I
say."
Mount Dunstan's
red-brown eyes looked as if she had pleased him.
"That's what I
say, too," he answered. " God bless her! "
There was not a day
which passed in which he did not involuntarily say the words to himself again
and again. She had been wrong when she had said in her musings that they were
as far apart as if worlds rolled between them. Something stronger than sight or
speech drew them together. The thread which wove itself through his thoughts
grew stronger and stronger. The first day her gifts arrived and he walked about
the ballroom ward directing the placing of hospital cots and hospital aids and
comforts, the spirit of her thought and intelligence, the individuality and
cleverness of all her methods, brought her so vividly before him that it was
almost as if she walked by his side, as if they spoke together, as if she said,
"I have tried to think of everything. I want you to miss nothing. Have I
helped you? Tell me if there is anything more." The thing which moved and
stirred him was his knowledge that when he had thought of her she had also been
thinking of him, or of what deeply concerned him. When he had said to himself,
tossing on his pillow, "What would she do?" she had been planning in
such a way as answered his question. Each morning, when the day's supplies
arrived, it was as if he had received a message from her.
As the people in the
cottages felt the power of his temperament and depended upon him, so, also, did
the patients in the ballroom ward. The feeling had existed from the outset and
increased daily. The doctors and nurses told one another that his passing
through the room was like the administering of a tonic. Patients who were weak
and making no effort, were lifted upon the strong wave of his will and carried
onward towards the shore of greater courage and strength.
Young Doctor Thwaite
met him when he came in one morning, and spoke in a low voice:
"There is a young
man behind the screen there who is very low," he said. "He had an
internal hæmorrhage towards morning, and has lost his pluck. He has a wife and
three children. We have been doing our best for him with hot-water bottles and
stimulants, but he has not the courage to help us. You have an extraordinary
effect on them all, Lord Mount Dunstan. When they are depressed, they always
ask when you are coming in, and this man--Patton, his name is-- has asked for
you several times. Upon my word, I believe you might set him going again."
Mount Dunstan walked to
the bed, and, going behind the screen, stood looking down at the young fellow
lying breathing pantingly. His eyes were closed as he laboured, and his pinched
white nostrils drew themselves in and puffed out at each breath. A nurse on the
other side of the cot had just surrounded him with fresh hot-water bottles.
Suddenly the sunken
eyelids flew open, and the eyes met Mount Dunstan's in imploring anxiousness.
"Here I am,
Patton," Mount Dunstan said. "You need not speak."
But he must speak. Here
was the strength his sinking soul had longed for.
"Cruel bad--goin'
fast--m' lord," he panted.
Mount Dunstan made a
sign to the nurse, who gave him a chair. He sat down close to the bed, and took
the bloodless hand in his own.
"No," he
said, "you are not going. You'll stay here. I will see to that."
The poor fellow smiled
wanly. Vague yearnings had led him sometimes, in the past, to wander into
chapels or stop and listen to street preachers, and orthodox platitudes came
back to him.
"God's--will,"
he trailed out.
"It's nothing of
the sort. It's God's will that you pull yourself together. A man with a wife
and three children has no right to slip out."
A yearning look
flickered in the lad's eyes--he was scarcely more than a lad, having married at
seventeen, and had a child each year.
"She's--a
good--girl."
"Keep that in your
mind while you fight this out," said Mount Dunstan. "Say it over to
yourself each time you feel yourself letting go. Hold on to it. I am going to
fight it out with you. I shall sit here and take care of you all day --all
night, if necessary. The doctor and the nurse will tell me what to do. Your
hand is warmer already. Shut your eyes."
He did not leave the
bedside until the middle of the night.
By that time the worst
was over. He had acted throughout the hours under the direction of nurse and
doctor. No one but himself had touched the patient. When Patton's eyes were
open, they rested on him with a weird growing belief. He begged his lordship to
hold his hand, and was uneasy when he laid it down.
"Keeps--me--up,"
he whispered.
"He pours
something into them--vigour--magnetic power --life. He's like a charged
battery," Dr. Thwaite said to his co-workers. "He sat down by Patton just
in time. It sets one to thinking."
Having saved Patton, he
must save others. When a man or woman sank, or had increased fever, they
believed that he alone could give them help. In delirium patients cried out for
him. He found himself doing hard work, but he did not flinch from it. The
adoration for him became a sort of passion. Haggard faces lighted up into life
at the sound of his footstep, and heavy heads turned longingly on their pillows
as he passed by. In the winter days to come there would be many an hour's talk
in East End courts and alleys of the queer time when a score or more of them
had lain in the great room with the dancing and floating goddesses looking down
at them from the high, painted ceiling, and the swell, who was a lord, walking
about among them, working for them as the nurses did, and sitting by some of
them through awful hours, sometimes holding burning or slackening and chilling
hands with a grip whose steadiness seemed to hold them back from the brink of
the abyss they were slipping into. The mere ignorantly childish desire to do
his prowess credit and to play him fair saved more than one man and woman from
going out with the tide.
"It is the first
time in my life that I have fairly counted among men. It's the first time I have
known human affection, other than yours, Penzance. They want me, these people;
they are better for the sight of me. It is a new experience, and it is good for
a man's soul," he said.
BETTY walked much alone
upon the marshes with Roland at her side. At intervals she heard from Mr.
Penzance, but his notes were necessarily brief, and at other times she could
only rely upon report for news of what was occurring at Mount Dunstan. Lord
Mount Dunstan's almost military supervision of and command over his villagers
had certainly saved them from the horrors of an uncontrollable epidemic; his
decision and energy had filled the alarmed Guardians with respect and this
respect had begun to be shared by many other persons. A man as prompt in
action, and as faithful to such responsibilities as many men might have found
plausible reasons enough for shirking, inevitably assumed a certain dignity of
aspect, when all was said and done. Lord Dunholm was most clear in his
expressions of opinion concerning him. Lady Alanby of Dole made a practice of
speaking of him in public frequently, always with admiring approval, and in
that final manner of hers, to whose authority her neighbours had so long
submitted. It began to be accepted as a fact that he was a new development of
his race--as her ladyship had put it, "A new order of Mount Dunstan."
The story of his power
over the stricken people, and of their passionate affection and admiration for
him, was one likely to spread far, and be immensely popular. The drama of
certain incidents appealed greatly to the rustic mind, and by cottage firesides
he was represented with rapturous awe, as raising men, women, and children from
the dead, by the mere miracle of touch. Mrs. Welden and old Doby revelled in
thrilling, almost Biblical, versions of current anecdotes, when Betty paid her
visits to them.
"It's like the
Scripture, wot he done for that young man as the last breath had gone out of
him, an' him lyin' stiffening fast. 'Young man, arise,' he says. 'The Lord
Almighty calls. You've got a young wife an' three children to take care of.
Take up your bed an' walk.' Not as he wanted him to carry his bed anywheres,
but it was a manner of speaking. An' up the young man got. An' a sensible
way," said old Mrs. Welden frankly, "for the Lord to look at it-- for
I must say, miss, if I was struck down for it, though I s'pose it's only my
sinful ignorance--that there's times when the Lord seems to think no more of
sweepin' away a steady eighteen-shillin' a week, and p'raps seven in family,
an' one at the breast, an' another on the way--than if it was nothin'. But
likely enough, eighteen shillin' a week an' confinements does seem paltry to
the Maker of 'eaven an' earth."
But, to the girl
walking over the marshland, the humanness of the things she heard gave to her
the sense of nearness--of being almost within sight and sound--which Mount
Dunstan himself had felt, when each day was filled with the result of her
thought of the needs of the poor souls thrown by fate into his hands. In these
days, after listening to old Mrs. Welden's anecdotes, through which she
gathered the simpler truth of things, Betty was able to construct for herself a
less Scriptural version of what she had heard. She was glad--glad in his
sitting by a bedside and holding a hand which lay in his hot or cold, but
always trusting to something which his strong body and strong soul gave without
stint. There would be no restraint there. Yes, he was kind--kind--kind --with
the kindness a woman loves, and which she, of all women, loved most. Sometimes
she would sit upon some mound, and, while her eyes seemed to rest on the
yellowing marsh and its birds and pools, they saw other things, and their
colour grew deep and dark as the marsh water between the rushes.
The time was pressing
when a change in her life must come. She frequently asked herself if what she
saw in Nigel Anstruthers' face was the normal thinking of a sane man, which he
himself could control. There had been moments when she had seriously doubted it.
He was haggard, aging and restless. Sometimes he--always as if by
chance--followed her as she went from one room to another, and would seat
himself and fix his miserable eyes upon her for so long a time that it seemed
he must be unconscious of what he was doing. Then he would appear suddenly to
recollect himself and would start up with a muttered exclamation, and stalk out
of the room. He spent long hours riding or driving alone about the country or
wandering wretchedly through the Park and gardens. Once he went up to town,
and, after a few days' absence, came back looking more haggard than before, and
wearing a hunted look in his eyes. He had gone to see a physician, and, after
having seen him, he had tried to lose himself in a plunge into deep and turbid enough
waters; but he found that he had even lost the taste of high flavours, for
which he had once had an epicurean palate. The effort had ended in his being
overpowered again by his horrors--the horrors in which he found himself staring
at that end of things when no pleasure had spice, no debauchery the sting of
life, and men, such as he, stood upon the shore of time shuddering and naked
souls, watching the great tide, bearing its treasures, recede forever, and
leave them to the cold and hideous dark. During one day of his stay in town he
had seen Teresita, who had at first stared half frightened by the change she
saw in him, and then had told him truths he could have wrung her neck for
putting into words.
"You look an old
man," she said, with the foreign accent he had once found deliciously
amusing, but which now seemed to add a sting. "And somesing is eating you
op. You are mad in lofe with some beautiful one who will not look at you. I haf
seen it in mans before. It is she who eats you op--your evil thinkings of her.
It serve you right. Your eyes look mad."
He himself, at times,
suspected that they did, and cursed himself because he could not keep cool. It
was part of his horrors that he knew his internal furies were worse than folly,
and yet he could not restrain them. The creeping suspicion that this was only
the result of the simple fact that he had never tried to restrain any tendency
of his own was maddening. His nervous system was a wreck. He drank a great deal
of whisky to keep himself "straight" during the day, and he rose many
times during his black waking hours in the night to drink more because he
obstinately refused to give up the hope that, if he drank enough, it would make
him sleep. As through the thoughts of Mount Dunstan, who was a clean and
healthy human being, there ran one thread which would not disentangle itself,
so there ran through his unwholesome thinking a thread which burned like fire.
His secret ravings would not have been good to hear. His passion was more than
half hatred, and a desire for vengeance, for the chance to reassert his own
power, to prove himself master, to get the better in one way or another of this
arrogant young outsider and her high-handed pride. The condition of his mind
was so far from normal that he failed to see that the things he said to
himself, the plans he laid, were grotesque in their folly. The old cruel
dominance of the man over the woman thing, which had seemed the mere natural
working of the law among men of his race in centuries past, was awake in him,
amid the limitations of modern days.
"My God," he said
to himself more than once, "I would like to have had her in my hands a few
hundred years ago. Women were kept in their places, then."
He was even frenzied
enough to think over what he would have done, if such a thing had been--of her
utter helplessness against that which raged in him--of the grey thickness of
the walls where he might have held and wrought his will upon her--insult,
torment, death. His alcohol-excited brain ran riot--but, when it did its
foolish worst, he was baffled by one thing.
"Damn her!"
he found himself crying out. "If I had hung her up and cut her into strips
she would have died staring at me with her big eyes--without uttering a
sound."
There was a long reach
between his imaginings and the time he lived in. America had not been
discovered in those decent days, and now a man could not beat even his own
wife, or spend her money, without being meddled with by fools. He was thinking
of a New York young woman of the nineteenth century who could actually do as
she hanged pleased, and who pleased to be damned high and mighty. For that
reason in itself it was incumbent upon a man to get even with her in one way or
another. High and mightiness was not the hardest thing to reach. It offered a
good aim.
His temper when he
returned to Stornham was of the order which in past years had set Rosalie and
her child shuddering and had sent the servants about the house with pale or
sullen faces. Betty's presence had the odd effect of restraining him, and he
even told her so with sneering resentment.
"There would be
the devil to pay if you were not here," he said. "You keep me in
order, by Jove! I can't work up steam properly when you watch me."
He himself knew that it
was likely that some change would take place. She would not stay at Stornham
and she would not leave his wife and child alone with him again. It would be
like her to hold her tongue until she was ready with her infernal plans and
could spring them on him. Her letters to her father had probably prepared him
for such action as such a man would be likely to take. He could guess what it
would be. They were free and easy enough in America in their dealings with the
marriage tie. Their idea would doubtless be a divorce with custody of the
child. He wondered a little that they had remained quiet so long. There had
been American shrewdness in her coming boldly to Stornham to look over the
ground herself and actually set the place in order. It did not present itself
to his mind that what she had done had been no part of a scheme, but the mere
result of her temperament and training. He told himself that it had been
planned beforehand and carried out in hard-headed commercial American fashion
as a matter of business. The thing which most enraged him was the implied cool,
practical realisation of the fact that he, as inheritor of an entailed estate,
was but owner in charge, and not young enough to be regarded as an
insurmountable obstacle to their plans. He could not undo the greater part of
what had been done, and they were calculating, he argued, that his would not be
likely to be a long life, and if --if anything happened--Stornham would be
Ughtred's and the whole vulgar lot of them would come over and take possession
and swagger about the place as if they had been born on it. As to divorce or
separation--if they took that line, he would at least give them a good run for
their money. They would wish they had let sleeping dogs lie before the thing
was over. The right kind of lawyer could bully Rosalie into saying anything he
chose on the witness-stand. There was not much limit to the evidence a man
could bring if he was experienced enough to be circumstantial, and knew whom he
was dealing with. The very fact that the little fool could be made to appear to
have been so sly and sanctimonious would stir the gall of any jury of men. His
own condoning the matter for the sake of his sensitive boy, deformed by his
mother's unrestrained and violent hysteria before his birth, would go a long
way. Let them get their divorce, they would have paid for it, the whole lot of
them, the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel and all. Such a story as the newspapers
would revel in would not be a recommendation to Englishmen of unsmirched
reputation. Then his exultation would suddenly drop as his mental excitement
produced its effect of inevitable physical fatigue. Even if he made them pay
for getting their own way, what would happen to himself afterwards? No morbid
vanity of self-bolstering could make the outlook anything but unpromising. If
he had not had such diabolical luck in his few investments he could have lived
his own life. As it was, old Vanderpoel would possibly condescend to make him
some insufficient allowance because Rosalie would wish that it might be done,
and he would be expected to drag out to the end the kind of life a man
pensioned by his wife's relatives inevitably does. If he attempted to live in
the country he should blow out his brains. When his depression was at its
worst, he saw himself aging and shabby, rambling about from one cheap
Continental town to another, blackballed by good clubs, cold-shouldered even by
the Teresitas, cut off from society by his limited means and the stories his
wife's friends would spread. He ground his teeth when he thought of Betty. Her
splendid vitality had done something to life for him--had given it savour. When
he had come upon her in the avenue his blood had stirred, even though it had
been maliciously, and there had been spice in his very resentment of her
presence. And she would go away. He would not be likely to see her again if his
wife broke with him; she would be swept out of his days. It was hideous to
think of, and his rage would overpower him and his nerves go to pieces again.
"What are you
going to do?" he broke forth suddenly one evening, when he found himself
temporarily alone with her. "You are going to do something. I see it in
your eyes."
He had been for some
time watching her from behind his newspaper, while she, with an unread book
upon her lap, had, in fact, been thinking deeply and putting to herself serious
questions.
Her answer made him
stir rather uncomfortably.
"I am going to
write to my father to ask him to come to England."
So this was what she
had been preparing to spring upon him. He laughed insolently.
"To ask him to
come here?"
"With your
permission."
"With mine? Does
an American father-in-law wait for permission?"
"Is there any
practical reason why you should prefer that he should not come?"
He left his seat and
walked over to her.
"Yes. Your sending
for him is a declaration of war."
"It need not be
so. Why should it?"
"In this case I
happen to be aware that it is. The choice is your own, I suppose," with
ready bravado, "that you and he are prepared to face the consequences. But
is Rosalie, and is your mother?"
"My father is a
business man and will know what can be done. He will know what is worth
doing," she answered, without noticing his question. "But," she
added the words slowly, "I have been making up my mind--before I write to
him--to say something to you--to ask you a question."
He made a mock
sentimental gesture.
"To ask me to
spare my wife, to 'remember that she is the mother of my child'?"
She passed over that
also.
"To ask you if
there is no possible way in which all this unhappiness can be ended decently."
"The only decent
way of ending it would be that there should be no further interference. Let
Rosalie supply the decency by showing me the consideration due from a wife to
her husband. The place has been put in order. It was not for my benefit, and I
have no money to keep it up. Let Rosalie be provided with means to do it."
As he spoke the words
he realised that he had opened a way for embarrassing comment. He expected her
to remind him that Rosalie had not come to him without money. But she said
nothing about the matter. She never said the things he expected to hear.
"You do not want
Rosalie for your wife," she went on "but you could treat her
courteously without loving her. You could allow her the privileges other men's
wives are allowed. You need not separate her from her family. You could allow
her father and mother to come to her and leave her free to go to them
sometimes. Will you not agree to that? Will you not let her live peaceably in
her own simple way? She is very gentle and humble and would ask nothing
more."
"She is a
fool!" he exclaimed furiously. "A fool! She will stay where she is
and do as I tell her."
"You knew what she
was when you married her. She was simple and girlish and pretended to be
nothing she was not. You chose to marry her and take her from the people who
loved her. You broke her spirit and her heart. You would have killed her if I
had not come in time to prevent it."
"I will kill her
yet if you leave her," his folly made him say.
"You are talking
like a feudal lord holding the power of life and death in his hands," she
said. "Power like that is ancient history. You can hurt no one who has
friends--without being punished."
It was the old story.
She filled him with the desire to shake or disturb her at any cost, and he did
his utmost. If she was proposing to make terms with him, he would show her
whether he would accept them or not. He let her hear all he had said to himself
in his worst moments--all that he had argued concerning what she and her people
would do, and what his own actions would be--all his intention to make them pay
the uttermost farthing in humiliation if he could not frustrate them. His
methods would be definite enough. He had not watched his wife and Ffolliott for
weeks to no end. He had known what he was dealing with. He had put other people
upon the track and they would testify for him. He poured forth unspeakable statements
and intimations, going, as usual, further than he had known he should go when
he began. Under the spur of excitement his imagination served him well. At last
he paused.
"Well," he
put it to her, "what have you to say?"
"I?" with the
remote intent curiosity growing in her eyes. "I have nothing to say. I am
leaving you to say things."
"You will, of
course, try to deny----" he insisted.
"No, I shall not.
Why should I?"
"You may assume
your air of magnificence, but I am dealing with uncomfortable factors." He
stopped in spite of himself, and then burst forth in a new order of rage.
"You are trying some confounded experiment on me. What is it?"
She rose from her chair
to go out of the room, and stood a moment holding her book half open in her hand.
"Yes. I suppose it
might be called an experiment," was her answer. "Perhaps it was a
mistake. I wanted to make quite sure of something."
"Of what?"
"I did not want to
leave anything undone. I did not want to believe that any man could exist who had
not one touch of decent feeling to redeem him. It did not seem human."
White dints showed
themselves about his nostrils.
"Well, you have
found one," he cried. "You have a lashing tongue, by God, when you
choose to let it go. But I could teach you a good many things, my girl. And
before I have done you will have learned most of them."
But though he threw
himself into a chair and laughed aloud as she left him, he knew that his
arrogance and bullying were proving poor weapons, though they had done him good
service all his life. And he knew, too, that it was mere simple truth that, as
a result of the intellectual, ethical vagaries he scathingly derided--she had
actually been giving him a sort of chance to retrieve himself, and that if he
had been another sort of man he might have taken it.
IT was cold enough for
fires in halls and bedrooms, and Lady Anstruthers often sat over hers and
watched the glowing bed of coals with a fixed thoughtfulness of look. She was
so sitting when her sister went to her room to talk to her, and she looked up
questioningly when the door closed and Betty came towards her.
"You have come to
tell me something," she said.
A slight shade of
anxiousness showed itself in her eyes, and Betty sat down by her and took her
hand. She had come because what she knew was that Rosalie must be prepared for
any step taken, and the time had arrived when she must not be allowed to remain
in ignorance even of things it would be unpleasant to put into words.
"Yes," she
answered. "I want to talk to you about something I have decided to do. I
think I must write to father and ask him to come to us."
Rosalie turned white,
but though her lips parted as if she were going to speak, she said nothing.
"Do not be
frightened," Betty said. "I believe it is the only thing to do."
"I know! I
know!"
Betty went on, holding
the hand a little closer. "When I came here you were too weak physically
to be able to face even the thought of a struggle. I saw that. I was afraid it
must come in the end, but I knew that at that time you could not bear it. It
would have killed you and might have killed mother, if I had not waited; and
until you were stronger, I knew I must wait and reason coolly about you--about
everything."
"I used to
guess--sometimes," said Lady Anstruthers.
"I can tell you
about it now. You are not as you were then," Betty said. "I did not
know Nigel at first, and I felt I ought to see more of him. I wanted to make
sure that my child hatred of him did not make me unfair. I even tried to hope
that when he came back and found the place in order and things going well, he
might recognise the wisdom of behaving with decent kindness to you. If he had
done that I knew father would have provided for you both, though he would not
have left him the opportunity to do again what he did before. No business man
would allow such a thing as that. But as time has gone by I have seen I was
mistaken in hoping for a respectable compromise. Even if he were given a free
hand he would not change. And now----" She hesitated, feeling it difficult
to choose such words as would not be too unpleasant. How was she to tell Rosy
of the ugly, morbid situation which made ordinary passiveness impossible.
"Now there is a reason----" she began again.
To her surprise and
relief it was Rosalie who ended for her. She spoke with the painful courage
which strong affection gives a weak thing. Her face was pale no longer, but
slightly reddened, and she lifted the hand which held hers and kissed it.
"You shall not say
it," she interrupted her. "I will. There is a reason now why you
cannot stay here--why you shall not stay here. That was why I begged you to go.
You must go, even if I stay behind alone."
Never had the beautiful
Miss Vanderpoel's eyes worn so fully their look of being bluebells under water.
That this timid creature should so stand at bay to defend her was more moving
than anything else could have been.
"Thank you,
Rosy--thank you," she answered. "But you shall not be left alone. You
must go, too. There is no other way. Difficulties will be made for us, but we
must face them. Father will see the situation from a practical man's
standpoint. Men know the things other men cannot do. Women don't. Generally
they know nothing about the law and can be bullied into feeling that it is
dangerous and compromising to inquire into it. Nigel has always seen that it
was easy to manage women. A strong business man who has more exact legal
information than he has himself will be a new factor to deal with. And he
cannot make objectionable love to him. It is because he knows these things that
he says that my sending for father will be a declaration of war."
"Did he say
that?" a little breathlessly.
"Yes, and I told
him that it need not be so. But he would not listen."
"And you are sure
father will come?"
"I am sure. In a
week or two he will be here."
Lady Anstruthers' lips
shook, her eyes lifted themselves to Betty's in a touchingly distressed appeal.
Had her momentary courage fled beyond recall? If so, that would be the worst
coming to the worst, indeed. Yet it was not ordinary fear which expressed
itself in her face, but a deeper piteousness, a sudden hopeless pain, baffling
because it seemed a new emotion, or perhaps the upheaval of an old one long and
carefully hidden.
"You will be
brave?" Betty appealed to her. "You will not give way, Rosy?"
"Yes, I must be
brave--I am not ill now. I must not fail you--I won't, Betty, but----"
She slipped upon the
floor and dropped her face upon the girl's knee, sobbing.
Betty bent over her,
putting her arms round the heaving shoulders, and pleading with her to speak.
Was there something more to be told, something she did not know?
"Yes, yes. Oh, I
ought to have told you long ago--but I have always been afraid and ashamed. It
has made everything so much worse. I was afraid you would not understand and
would think me wicked--wicked."
It was Betty who now
lost a shade of colour. But she held the slim little body closer and kissed her
sister's cheek.
"What have you
been afraid and ashamed to tell me? Do not be ashamed any more. You must not
hide anything, no matter what it is, Rosy. I shall understand."
"I know I must not
hide anything, now that all is over and father is coming. It is--it is about
Mr. Ffolliott."
"Mr.
Ffolliott?" repeated Betty quite softly.
Lady Anstruthers' face,
lifted with desperate effort, was like a weeping child's. So much so in its
tear-wet simpleness and utter lack of any effort at concealment, that after one
quick look at it Betty's hastened pulses ceased to beat at double-quick time.
"Tell me,
dear," she almost whispered.
"Mr. Ffolliott
himself does not know--and I could not help it. He was kind to me when I was
dying of unkindness. You don't know what it was like to be drowning in
loneliness and misery, and to see one good hand stretched out to help you.
Before he went away--oh, Betty, I know it was awful because I was married!--I
began to care for him very much, and I have cared for him ever since. I cannot
stop myself caring, even though I am terrified."
Betty kissed her again
with a passion of tender pity. Poor little, simple Rosy, too! The tide had
crept around her also, and had swept her off her feet, tossing her upon its
surf like a wisp of seaweed and bearing her each day farther from firm shore.
"Do not be
terrified," she said. "You need only be afraid if--if you had told
him."
"He will never
know--never. Once in the middle of the night," there was anguish in the delicate
face, pure anguish, "a strange loud cry wakened me, and it was I myself
who had cried out--because in my sleep it had come home to me that the years
would go on and on, and at last some day he would die and go out of the
world--and I should die and go out of the world. And he would never know--even
know."
Betty's clasp of her
loosened and she sat very still, looking straight before her into some unseen
place.
"Yes," she
said involuntarily. "Yes, I know--I know--I know."
Lady Anstruthers fell back
a little to gaze at her.
"You know? You
know?" she breathed. "Betty?"
But Betty at first did
not speak. Her lovely eyes dwelt on the far-away place.
"Betty,"
whispered Rosy, "do you know what you have said?"
The lovely eyes turned
slowly towards her, and the soft corners of Betty's mouth deepened in a curious
unsteadiness.
"Yes. I did not
intend to say it. But it is true. I know--I know--I know. Do not ask me
how."
Rosalie flung her arms
round her waist and for a moment hid her face.
"You! You!"
she murmured, but stopped herself almost as she uttered the exclamation.
"I will not ask you," she said when she spoke again. "But now I
shall not be so ashamed. You are a beauty and wonderful, and I am not; but if
you know, that makes us almost the same. You will understand why I broke down.
It was because I could not bear to think of what will happen. I shall be saved
and taken home, but Nigel will wreak revenge on him. And I shall be the shame
that is put upon him--only because he was kind--kind. When father comes it will
all begin." She wrung her hands, becoming almost hysterical.
"Hush," said
Betty. "Hush! A man like that cannot be hurt, even by a man like Nigel.
There is a way out-- there is. Oh, Rosy, we must believe it."
She soothed and
caressed her and led her on to relieving her long locked-up misery by speech.
It was easy to see the ways in which her feeling had made her life harder to
bear. She was as inexperienced as a girl, and had accused herself cruelly. When
Nigel had tormented her with evil, carefully chosen taunts, she had felt half
guilty and had coloured scarlet or turned pale, afraid to meet his sneeringly
smiling face. She had tried to forget the kind voice, the kindly, understanding
eyes, and had blamed herself as a criminal because she could not.
"I had nothing
else to remember--but unhappiness--and it seemed as if I could not help but
remember him," she said as simply as the Rosy who had left New York at
nineteen might have said it. "I was afraid to trust myself to speak his
name. When Nigel made insulting speeches I could not answer him, and he used to
say that women who had adventures should train their faces not to betray them
every time they were looked at.
"Oh!" broke
from Betty's lips, and she stood up on the hearth and threw out her hands.
"I wish that for one day I might be a man--and your brother instead of
your sister!"
"Why?"
Betty smiled
strangely--a smile which was not amused-- which was perhaps not a smile at all.
Her voice as she answered was at once low and tense.
"Because, then I
should know what to do. When a male creature cannot be reached through manhood
or decency or shame, there is one way in which he can be punished. A man-- a
real man--should take him by his throat and lash him with a whip--while others
look on--lash him until he howls aloud like a dog."
She had not expected to
say it, but she had said it. Lady Anstruthers looked at her fascinated, and
then she covered her face with her hands, huddling herself in a heap as she
knelt on the rug, looking singularly small and frail.
"Betty," she
said presently, in a new, awful little voice, "I--I will tell you
something. I never thought I should dare to tell anyone alive. I have shuddered
at it myself. There have been days--awful, helpless days, when I was sure there
was no hope for me in all the world--when deep down in my soul I understood
what women felt when they murdered people --crept to them in their wicked sleep
and struck them again --and again--and again. Like that!" She sat up suddenly,
as if she did not know what she was doing, and uncovering her little ghastly
face struck downward three fierce times at nothingness--but as if it were not
nothingness, and as if she held something in her hand.
There was horror in
it--Betty sprang at the hand and caught it.
"No! no!" she
cried out. "Poor little Rosy! Darling little Rosy! No! no! no!"
That instant Lady
Anstruthers looked up at her shocked and awake. She was Rosy again, and clung
to her, holding to her dress, piteous and panting.
"No! no!" she
said. "When it came to me in the night-- it was always in the night--I
used to get out of bed and pray that it might never, never come again, and that
I might be forgiven--just forgiven. It was too horrible that I should even
understand it so well." A woful, wry little smile twisted her mouth.
"I was not brave enough to have done it. I could never have done it,
Betty; but the thought was there-- it was there! I used to think it had made a
black mark on my soul." . . . . .
The letter took long to
write. It led a consecutive story up to the point where it culminated in a
situation which presented itself as no longer to be dealt with by means at
hand. Parts of the story previous letters had related, though some of them it
had not seemed absolutely necessary to relate in detail. Now they must be made
clear, and Betty made them so.
"Because you
trusted me you made me trust myself," was one of the things she wrote.
"For some time I felt that it was best to fight for my own hand without
troubling you. I hoped perhaps I might be able to lead things to a decorous
sort of issue. I saw that secretly Rosy hoped and prayed that it might be
possible. She gave up expecting happiness before she was twenty, and mere
decent peace would have seemed heaven to her, if she could have been allowed
sometimes to see those she loved and longed for. Now that I must give up my
hope --which was perhaps a rather foolish one--and now that I cannot remain at
Stornham, she would have no defence at all if she were left alone. Her
condition would be more hopeless than before, because Nigel would never forget
that we had tried to rescue her and had failed. If I were a man, or if I were
very much older, I need not be actually driven away, but as it is I think that
you must come and take the matter into your own hands."
She had remained in her
sister's room until long after midnight, and by the time the American letter
was completed and sealed, a pale touch of dawning light was showing itself. She
rose, and going to the window drew the blind up and looked out. The looking out
made her open the window, and when she had done so she stood feeling the almost
unearthly freshness of the morning about her. The mystery of the first faint
light was almost unearthly, too. Trees and shrubs were beginning to take form
and outline themselves against the still pallor of the dawn. Before long the
waking of the birds would begin --a brief chirping note here and there breaking
the silence and warning the world with faint insistence that it had begun to
live again and must bestir itself. She had got out of her bed sometimes on a
summer morning to watch the beauty of it, to see the flowers gradually reveal
their colour to the eye, to hear the warmly nesting things begin their joyous
day. There were fewer bird sounds now, and the garden beds were autumnal. But
how beautiful it all was! How wonderful life in such a place might be if
flowers and birds and sweep of sward, and mass of stately, broad-branched
trees, were parts of the home one loved and which surely would in its own way
love one in return. But soon all this phase of life would be over. Rosalie,
once safe at home, would look back, remembering the place with a shudder. As
Ughtred grew older the passing of years would dim miserable child memories, and
when his inheritance fell to him he might return to see it with happier eyes.
She began to picture to herself Rosy's voyage in the ship which would carry her
across the Atlantic to her mother and the scenes connected in her mind only
with a girl's happiness. Whatsoever happened before it took place, the voyage
would be made in the end. And Rosalie would be like a creature in a dream--a
heavenly, unbelievable dream. Betty could imagine how she would look wrapped up
and sitting in her steamer chair, gazing out with rapturous eyes upon the
racing waves
"She will be
happy," she thought. "But I shall not. No, I shall not."
She drew in the morning
air and unconsciously turned towards the place where, across the rising and
falling lands and behind the trees, she knew the great white house stood far
away, with watchers' lights showing dimly behind the line of ballroom windows.
"I do not know how
such a thing could be! I do not know how such a thing could be!" she said.
"It could not." And she lifted a high head, not even asking herself
what remote sense in her being so obstinately defied and threw down the glove
to Fate.
Sounds gain a curious
distinctness and meaning in the hour of the break of the dawn; in such an hour
they seem even more significant than sounds heard in the dead of night. When
she had gone to the window she had fancied that she heard something in the
corridor outside her door, but when she had listened there had been only
silence. Now there was sound again--that of a softly moved slippered foot. She
went to the room's centre and waited. Yes, certainly something had stirred in
the passage. She went to the door itself. The dragging step had
hesitated--stopped. Could it be Rosalie who had come to her for something. For
one second her impulse was to open the door herself; the next, she had changed
her mind with a sense of shock. Someone had actually touched the handle and
very delicately turned it. It was not pleasant to stand looking at it and see
it turn. She heard a low, evidently unintentionally uttered exclamation, and
she turned away, and with no attempt at softening the sound of her footsteps
walked across the room, hot with passionate disgust. As well as if she had
flung the door open, she knew who stood outside. It was Nigel Anstruthers,
haggard and unseemly, with burned-out, sleepless eyes and bitten lip.
Bad and mad as she had
at last seen the situation to be, it was uglier and more desperate than she
could well know.
THE following morning
Sir Nigel did not appear at the breakfast table. He breakfasted in his own
room, and it be came known throughout the household that he had suddenly
decided to go away, and his man was packing for the journey. What the journey
or the reason for its being taken happened to be were things not explained to
anyone but Lady Anstruthers, at the door of whose dressing room he appeared
without warning, just as she was leaving it.
Rosalie started when
she found herself confronting him. His eyes looked hot and hollow with feverish
sleeplessness.
"You look
ill," she exclaimed involuntarily. "You look as if you had not
slept."
"Thank you. You
always encourage a man. I am not in the habit of sleeping much," he
answered. "I am going away for my health. It is as well you should know. I
am going to look up old Broadmorlands. I want to know exactly where he is, in
case it becomes necessary for me to see him. I also require some trifling data
connected with Ffolliott. If your father is coming, it will be as well to be
able to lay my hands on things. You can explain to Betty. Good-morning."
He waited for no reply, but wheeled about and left her.
Betty herself wore a
changed face when she came down. A cloud had passed over her blooming, as
clouds pass over a morning sky and dim it. Rosalie asked herself if she had not
noticed something like this before. She began to think she had. Yes, she was
sure that at intervals there had been moments when she had glanced at the
brilliant face with an uneasy and yet half-unrealising sense of looking at a
glowing light temporarily waning. The feeling had been unrealisable, because it
was not to be explained. Betty was never ill, she was never low-spirited, she
was never out of humour or afraid of things--that was why it was so wonderful
to live with her. But--yes, it was true--there had been days when the strong,
fine light of her had waned. Lady Anstruthers' comprehension of it arose now
from her memory of the look she had seen the night before in the eyes which suddenly
had gazed straight before her, as into an unknown place.
"Yes, I know--I
know--I know!" And the tone in the girl's voice had been one Rosy had not
heard before.
Slight wonder--if you
knew--at any outward change which showed itself, though in your own most
desperate despite. It would be so even with Betty, who, in her sister's eyes,
was unlike any other creature. But perhaps it would be better to make no
comment. To make comment would be almost like asking the question she had been
forbidden to ask.
While the servants were
in the room during breakfast they talked of common things, resorting even to
the weather and the news of the village. Afterwards they passed into the
morning room together, and Betty put her arm around Rosalie and kissed her.
"Nigel has
suddenly gone away, I hear," she said. "Do you know where he has
gone?"
"He came to my
dressing-room to tell me." Betty felt the whole slim body stiffen itself
with a determination to seem calm. "He said he was going to find out where
the old Duke of Broadmorlands was staying at present."
"There is some
forethought in that," was Betty's answer. "He is not on such terms
with the Duke that he can expect to be received as a casual visitor. It will
require apt contrivance to arrange an interview. I wonder if he will be able to
accomplish it?"
"Yes, he
will," said Lady Anstruthers. "I think he can always contrive things
like that." She hesitated a moment, and then added: "He said also
that he wished to find out certain things about Mr. Ffolliott--'trifling data,'
he called it--that he might be able to lay his hands on things if father came.
He told me to explain to you."
"That was intended
for a taunt--but it's a warning," Betty said, thinking the thing over.
"We are rather like ladies left alone to defend a besieged castle. He
wished us to feel that." She tightened her enclosing arm. "But we
stand together-- together. We shall not fail each other. We can face siege
until father comes."
"You wrote to him
last night?"
"A long letter,
which I wish him to receive before he sails. He might decide to act upon it
before leaving New York, to advise with some legal authority he knows and
trusts, to prepare our mother in some way--to do some wise thing we cannot
foresee the value of. He has known the outline of the story, but not exact
details--particularly recent ones. I have held back nothing it was necessary he
should know. I am going out to post the letter myself. I shall send a cable
asking him to prepare to come to us after he has reflected on what I have
written."
Rosalie was very quiet,
but when, having left the room to prepare to go to the village, Betty came back
to say a last word, her sister came to her and laid her hand on her arm.
"I have been so
weak and trodden upon for years that it would not be natural for you to quite
trust me," she said. "But I won't fail you, Betty--I won't."
The winter was drawing
in, the last autumn days were short and often grey and dreary; the wind had
swept the leaves from the trees and scattered them over park lands and lanes,
where they lay a mellow-hued, rustling carpet, shifting with each chill breeze
that blew. The berried briony garlands clung to the bared hedges, and here and
there flared scarlet, still holding their red defiantly until hard frosts should
come to shrivel and blacken them. The rare hours of sunshine were amber hours
instead of golden.
As she passed through
the park gate Betty was thinking of the first morning on which she had walked
down the village street between the irregular rows of red-tiled cottages with
the ragged little enclosing gardens. Then the air and sunshine had been of the
just awakening spring, now the sky was brightly cold, and through the
small-paned windows she caught glimpses of fireglow. A bent old man walking
very slowly, leaning upon two sticks, had a red-brown woollen muffler wrapped
round his neck. Seeing her, he stopped and shuffled the two sticks into one
hand that he might leave the other free to touch his wrinkled forehead stiffly,
his face stretching into a slow smile as she stopped to speak to him.
"Good-morning,
Marlow," he said. "How is the rheumatism to-day?"
He was a deaf old man,
whose conversation was carried on principally by guesswork, and it was easy for
him to gather that when her ladyship's handsome young sister had given him
greeting she had not forgotten to inquire respecting the
"rheumatics," which formed the greater part of existence.
"Mornin',
miss--mornin'," he answered in the high, cracked voice of rural ancientry.
"Winter be nigh, an' they damp days be full of rheumatiz. 'T'int easy to
get about on my old legs, but I be main thankful for they warm things you sent,
miss. This 'ere," fumbling at his red-brown muffler proudly, " 'tis a
comfort on windy days, so 'tis, and warmth be a good thing to a man when he be
goin' down hill in years."
"All of you who
are not able to earn your own fires shall be warm this winter," her
ladyship's handsome sister said, speaking closer to his ear. "You shall
all be warm. Don't be afraid of the cold days coming."
He shuffled his sticks
and touched his forehead again, looking up at her admiringly and chuckling.
" 'T'will be a new
tale for Stornham village," he cackled. " 'T'will be a new tale.
Thank ye, miss. Thank ye."
As she nodded smilingly
and passed on, she heard him cackling still under his breath as he hobbled on
his slow way, comforted and elate. How almost shamefully easy it was; a few
loads of coal and faggots here and there, a few blankets and warm garments
whose cost counted for so little when one's hands were full, could change a
gruesome village winter into a season during which labour-stiffened and broken
old things, closing their cottage doors, could draw their chairs round the
hearth and hover luxuriously over the red glow, which in its comforting fashion
of seeming to have understanding of the dull dreams in old eyes, was more to be
loved than any human friend.
But she had not needed
her passing speech with Marlow to stimulate realisation of how much she had
learned to care for the mere living among these people, to whom she seemed to
have begun to belong, and whose comfortably lighting faces when they met her
showed that they knew her to be one who might be turned to in any hour of
trouble or dismay. The centuries which had trained them to depend upon their
"betters" had taught the slowest of them to judge with keen sight
those who were to be trusted, not alone as power and wealth holders, but as
creatures humanly upright and merciful with their kind.
"Workin' folk
allus knows gentry," old Doby had once shrilled to her. "Gentry's
gentry, an' us knows 'em wheresoever they be. Better'n they know theirselves.
So us do!"
Yes, they knew. And
though they accepted many things as being merely their natural rights, they
gave an unsentimental affection and appreciation in return. The patriarchal
note in the life was lovable to her. Each creature she passed was a sort of
friend who seemed almost of her own blood. It had come to that. This particular
existence was more satisfying to her than any other, more heart-filling and
warmly complete.
"Though I am only
an impostor," she thought; "I was born in Fifth Avenue; yet since I
have known this I shall be quite happy in no other place than an English
village, with a Norman church tower looking down upon it and rows of little
gardens with spears of white and blue lupins and Canterbury bells standing
guard before cottage doors."
And Rosalie--on the
evening of that first strange day when she had come upon her piteous figure
among the heather under the trees near the lake--Rosalie had held her arm with
a hot little hand and had said feverishly:
"If I could hear
the roar of Broadway again! Do the stages rattle as they used to, Betty? I
can't help hoping that threy do."
She carried her letter
to the post and stopped to talk a few minutes with the postmaster, who
transacted his official business in a small shop where sides of bacon and hams
hung suspended from the ceiling, while groceries, flannels, dress prints, and
glass bottles of sweet stuff filled the shelves. "Mr. Tewson's" was
the central point of Stornham in a commercial sense. The establishment had also
certain social qualifications. Mr. Tewson knew the secrets of all hearts within
the village radius, also the secrets of all constitutions. He knew by some
occult means who had been "taken bad," or who had "taken a
turn," and was aware at once when anyone was "sinkin' fast."
With such differences of opinion as occasionally arose between the vicar and
his churchwardens he was immediately familiar. The history of the fever among
the hop pickers at Dunstan village he had been able to relate in detail from
the moment of its outbreak. It was he who had first dramatically revealed the
truth of the action Miss Vanderpoel had taken in the matter, which revelation
had aroused such enthusiasm as had filled The Clock Inn to overflowing and
given an impetus to the sale of beer. Tread, it was said, had even made a
speech which he had ended with vague but excellent intentions by proposing the
joint healths of her ladyship's sister and the "President of
America." Mr. Tewson was always glad to see Miss Vanderpoel cross his
threshold. This was not alone because she represented the custom of the Court,
which since her arrival had meant large regular orders and large bills promptly
paid, but that she brought with her an exotic atmosphere of interest and
excitement.
He had mentioned to
friends that somehow a talk with her made him feel "set up for the
day." Betty was not at all sure that he did not prepare and hoard up
choice remarks or bits of information as openings to conversation.
This morning he had
thrilling news for her and began with it at once.
"Dr. Fenwick at
Stornham is very low, miss," he said. "He's very low, you'll be sorry
to hear. The worry about the fever upset him terrible and his bronchitis took
him bad. He's an old man, you know."
Miss Vanderpoel was
very sorry to hear it. It was quite in the natural order of things that she
should ask other questions about Dunstan village and the Mount, and she asked
several. The fever was dying out and pale convalescents were sometimes seen in
the village or strolling about the park. His lordship was taking care of the
people and doing his best for them until they should be strong enough to return
to their homes.
"But he's very
strict about making it plain that it's you, miss, they have to thank for what
he does."
"That is not quite
just," said Miss Vanderpoel. "He and Mr. Penzance fought on the
field. I only supplied some of the ammunition."
"The county
doesn't think of him as it did even a year ago, miss," said Tewson rather
smugly. "He was very ill thought of then among the gentry. It's wonderful
the change that's come about. If he should fall ill there'll be a deal of sympathy."
"I hope there is
no question of his falling ill," said Miss Vanderpoel.
Mr. Tewson lowered his
voice confidentially. This was really his most valuable item of news.
"Well, miss,"
he admitted, "I have heard that he's been looking very bad for a good bit,
and it was told me quite private, because the doctors and the vicar don't want
the people to be upset by hearing it--that for a week he's not been well enough
to make his rounds."
"Oh!" The
exclamation was a faint one, but it was an exclamation. "I hope that means
nothing really serious," Miss Vanderpoel added. "Everyone will hope
so."
"Yes, miss,"
said Mr. Tewson, deftly twisting the string round the package he was tying up
for her. "A sad reward it would be if he lost his life after doing all he
has done. A sad reward! But there'd be a good deal of sympathy."
The small package
contained trifles of sewing and knitting materials she was going to take to
Mrs. Welden, and she held out her hand for it. She knew she did not smile quite
naturally as she said her good-morning to Tewson. She went out into the pale
amber sunshine and stood a few moments, glad to find herself bathed in it
again. She suddenly needed air and light. "A sad reward!" Sometimes
people were not rewarded. Brave men were shot dead on the battlefield when they
were doing brave things; brave physicians and nurses died of the plagues they
faithfully wrestled with. Here were dread and pain confronting her--Betty
Vanderpoel--and while almost everyone else seemed to have faced them, she was
wholly unused to their appalling clutch. What a life hers had been-- that in
looking back over it she should realise that she had never been touched by
anything like this before! There came back to her the look of almost awed
wonder in G. Selden's honest eyes when he said: "What it must be to be
you--just you!" He had been thinking only of the millions and of the
freedom from all everyday anxieties the millions gave. She smiled faintly as
the thought crossed her brain. The millions! The rolling up of them year by
year, because millions were breeders! The newspaper stories of them--the wonder
at and belief in their power! It was all going on just as before, and yet here
stood a Vanderpoel in an English village street, of no more worth as far as power
to aid herself went than Joe Buttle's girl with the thick waist and round red
cheeks. Jenny Buttle would have believed that her ladyship's rich American
sister could do anything she chose, open any door, command any presence, sweep
aside any obstacle with a wave of her hand. But of the two, Jenny Buttle's path
would have laid straighter before her. If she had had "a young man"
who had fallen ill she would have been free if his mother had cherished no
objection to their "walking out"--to spend all her spare hours in his
cottage, making gruel and poultices, crying until her nose and eyes were red,
and pouring forth her hopes and fears to any neighbour who came in or out or
hung over the dividing garden hedge. If the patient died, the deeper her
mourning and the louder her sobs at his funeral the more respectable and
deserving of sympathy and admiration would Jenny Buttle have been counted. Her
ladyship's rich American sister had no "young man"; she had not at
any time been asked to "walk out." Even in the dark days of the
fever, each of which had carried thought and action of hers to the scene of
trouble, there had reigned unbroken silence, except for the vicar's notes of
warm and appreciative gratitude.
"You are very
obstinate, Fergus," Mr. Penzance had said.
And Mount Dunstan had
shaken his head fiercely and answered:
"Don't speak to me
about it. Only obstinacy will save me from behaving like--other
blackguards."
Mr. Penzance, carefully
polishing his eyeglasses as he watched him, was not sparing in his comment.
"That is pure
folly," he said, "pure bull-necked, stubborn folly, charging with its
head down. Before it has done with you it will have made you suffer quite
enough."
"Be sure of
that," Mount Dunstan had said, setting his teeth, as he sat in his chair
clasping his hands behind his head and glowering into space.
Mr. Penzance quietly,
speculatively, looked him over, and reflected aloud--or, so it sounded.
"It is a big-boned
and big-muscled characteristic, but there are things which are stronger. Some
one minute will arrive-- just one minute--which will be stronger. One of those
moments when the mysteries of the universe are at work."
"Don't speak to me
like that, I tell you!" Mount Dunstan broke out passionately. And he
sprang up and marched out of the room like an angry man.
Miss Vanderpoel did not
go to Mrs. Welden's cottage at once, but walked past its door down the lane,
where there were no more cottages, but only hedges and fields on either side of
her. "Not well enough to make his rounds" might mean much or little.
It might mean a temporary breakdown from overfatigue or a sickening for deadly
illness. She looked at a group of cropping sheep in a field and at a flock of
rooks which had just alighted near it with cawing and flapping of wings. She
kept her eyes on them merely to steady herself. The thoughts she had brought
out with her had grown heavier and were horribly difficult to control. One must
not allow one's self to believe the worst will come--one must not allow it. She
always held this rule before herself, and now she was not holding it steadily.
There was nothing to do. She could write a mere note of inquiry to Mr.
Penzance, but that was all. She could only walk up and down the lanes and
think--whether he lay dying or not. She could do nothing, even if a day came
when she knew that a pit had been dug in the clay and he had been lowered into
it with creaking ropes, and the clods shovelled back upon him where he lay
still--never having told her that he was glad that her being had turned to him
and her heart cried aloud his name. She recalled with curious distinctness the
effect of the steady toll of the church bell--the "passing bell." She
could hear it as she had heard it the first time it fell upon her ear, and she
had inquired what it meant. Why did they call it the "passing bell"?
All had passed before it began to toll--all had passed. If it tolled at Dunstan
and the pit was dug in the churchyard before her father came, would he see, the
moment they met, that something had befallen her--that the Betty he had known
was changed--gone? Yes, he would see. Affection such as his always saw. Then he
would sit alone with her in some quiet room and talk to her, and she would tell
him the strange thing that had happened. He would understand--perhaps better
than she.
She stopped abruptly in
her walk and stood still. The hand holding her package was quite cold. This was
what one must not allow one's self. But how the thoughts had raced through her
brain! She turned and hastened her steps towards Mrs. Welden's cottage.
In Mrs. Welden's tiny
back yard there stood a "coal lodge" suited to the size of the
domicile and already stacked with a full winter's supply of coal. Therefore the
well-polished and cleanly little grate in the living-room was bright with fire.
Old Doby, who had tottered round the corner to pay his fellow gossip a visit,
was sitting by it, and old Mrs. Welden, clean as to cap and apron and small
purple shoulder shawl, had evidently been allaying his natural anxiety as to
the conduct of foreign sovereigns by reading in a loud voice the
"print" under the pictures in an illustrated paper.
This occupation had,
however, been interrupted a few moments before Miss Vanderpoel's arrival. Mrs.
Bester, the neighbour in the next cottage, had stepped in with her youngest on
her hip and was talking breathlessly. She paused to drop her curtsy as Betty
entered, and old Doby stood up and made his salute with a trembling hand
"She'll
know," he said. "Gentry knows the ins an' outs of gentry fust. She'll
know the rights."
"What has
happened?"
Mrs. Bester
unexpectedly burst into tears. There was an element in the female villagers'
temperament which Betty had found was frequently unexpected in its breaking
forth.
"He's down,
miss," she said. "He's down with it crool bad. There'll be no savin'
of him--none."
Betty laid her package
of sewing cotton and knitting wool quietly on the blue and white checked
tablecloth.
"Who--is he?"
she asked.
"His lordship--and
him just saved all Dunstan parish from death--to go like this!"
In Stornham village and
in all others of the neighbourhood the feminine attitude towards Mount Dunstan
had been one of strongly emotional admiration. The thwarted female longing for
romance--the desire for drama and a hero had been fed by him. A fine, big young
man, one that had been "spoke ill of" and regarded as an outcast, had
suddenly turned the tables on fortune and made himself the central figure of
the county, the talk of gentry in their grand houses, of cottage women on their
doorsteps, and labourers stopping to speak to each other by the roadside. Magic
stories had been told of him, beflowered with dramatic detail. No incident
could have been related to his credit which would not have been believed and
improved upon. Shut up in his village working among his people and unseen by
outsiders, he had become a popular idol. Any scrap of news of him--any rumour,
true or untrue, was seized upon and excitedly spread abroad. Therefore Mrs.
Rester wept as she talked, and, if the truth must be told, enjoyed the
situation. She was the first to tell the story to her ladyship's sister
herself, as well as to Mrs Welden and old Doby.
"It's Tom as
brought it in," she said. "He's my brother, miss, an' he's one of the
ringers. He heard it from Jem Wesgate, an' he heard it at Toomy's farm. They've
been keepin' it hid at the Mount because the people that's ill hangs on his
lordship so that the doctors daren't let them know the truth. They've been told
he had to go to London an' may come back any day. What Tom was sayin', miss,
was that we'd all know when it was over, for we'd hear the church bell toll
here same as it'd toll at Dunstan, because they ringers have talked it over an'
they're goin' to talk it over to-day with the other parishes--Yangford an'
Meltham an' Dunholm an' them. Tom says Stornham ringers met just now at The
Clock an' said that for a man that's stood by labouring folk like he has, toll
they will, an' so ought the other parishes, same as if he was royalty, for he's
made himself nearer. They'll toll the minute they hear it, miss. Lord help
us!" with a fresh outburst of crying. "It don't seem like it's fair
as it should be. When we hear the bell toll, miss----"
"Don't!" said
her ladyship's handsome sister suddenly. "Please don't say it again."
She sat down by the
table, and resting her elbows on the blue and white checked cloth, covered her
face with her hands. She did not speak at all. In this tiny room, with these
two old souls who loved her, she need not explain. She sat quite still, and
Mrs. Welden after looking at her for a few seconds was prompted by some
sublimely simple intuition, and gently sidled Mrs. Bester and her youngest into
the little kitchen, where the copper was.
"Her helpin' him
like she did, makes it come near," she whispered. "Dessay it seems as
if he was a'most like a relation."
Old Doby sat and looked
at his goddess. In his slowly moving old brain stirred far-off memories like
long-dead things striving to come to life. He did not know what they were, but
they wakened his dim eyes to a new seeing of the slim young shape leaning a
little forward, the soft cloud of hair, the fair beauty of the cheek. He had
not seen anything like it in his youth, but--it was Youth itself, and so was
that which the ringers were so soon to toll for; and for some remote and
unformed reason, to his scores of years they were pitiful and should be
cheered. He bent forward himself and put out his ancient, veined and knotted,
gnarled and trembling hand, to timorously touch the arm of her he worshipped and
adored.
"God bless
ye!" he said, his high, cracked voice even more shrill and thin than
usual. "God bless ye!" And as she let her hands slip down, and,
turning, gently looked at him, he nodded to her speakingly, because out of the
dimness of his being, some part of Nature's working had strangely answered and
understood.
ON her way back to the
Court her eyes saw only the white road before her feet as she walked. She did
not lift them until she found herself passing the lych-gate at the entrance to
the churchyard. Then suddenly she looked up at the square grey stone tower
where the bells hung, and from which they called the village to church, or
chimed for weddings--or gave slowly forth to the silent air one heavy, regular
stroke after another. She looked and shuddered, and spoke aloud with a curious,
passionate imploring, like a child's.
"Oh, don't toll!
Don't toll! You must not! You cannot!" Terror had sprung upon her, and her
heart was being torn in two in her breast. That was surely what it seemed
like--this agonising ache of fear. Now from hour to hour she would be waiting
and listening to each sound borne on the air. Her thought would be a possession
she could not escape. When she spoke or was spoken to, she would be listening--
when she was silent every echo would hold terror, when she slept--if sleep
should come to her--her hearing would be awake, and she would be
listening--listening even then. It was not Betty Vanderpoel who was walking
along the white road, but another creature--a girl whose brain was full of
abnormal thought, and whose whole being made passionate outcry against the
thing which was being slowly forced upon her. If the bell tolled--suddenly, the
whole world would be swept clean of life--empty and clean. If the bell tolled.
Before the entrance of
the Court she saw, as she approached it, the vicarage pony carriage, standing
as it had stood on the day she had returned from her walk on the marshes. She
felt it quite natural that it should be there. Mrs. Brent always seized upon
any fragment of news, and having seized on something now, she had not been able
to resist the excitement of bringing it to Lady Anstruthers and her sister.
She was in the
drawing-room with Rosalie, and was full of her subject and the emotion suitable
to the occasion. She had even attained a certain modified dampness of
handkerchief. Rosalie's handkerchief, however, was not damp. She had not even
attempted to use it, but sat still, her eyes brimming with tears, which, when
she saw Betty, brimmed over and slipped helplessly down her cheeks.
"Betty!" she
exclaimed, and got up and went towards her, "I believe you have
heard."
"In the village, I
heard something--yes," Betty answered, and after giving greeting to Mrs.
Brent, she led her sister back to her chair, and sat near her.
This--the thought
leaped upon her--was the kind of situation she must be prepared to be equal to.
In the presence of these who knew nothing, she must bear herself as if there
was nothing to be known. No one but herself had the slightest knowledge of what
the past months had brought to her--no one in the world. If the bell tolled, no
one in the world but her father ever would know. She had no excuse for emotion.
None had been given to her. The kind of thing it was proper that she should say
and do now, in the presence of Mrs. Brent, it would be proper and decent that
she should say and do in all other cases. She must comport herself as Betty
Vanderpoel would if she were moved only by ordinary human sympathy and regret.
"We must remember
that we have only excited rumour to depend upon," she said. "Lord
Mount Dunstan has kept his village under almost military law. He has put it
into quarantine. No one is allowed to leave it, so there can be no direct source
of information. One cannot be sure of the entire truth of what one hears. Often
it is exaggerated cottage talk. The whole neighbourhood is wrought up to a
fever heat of excited sympathy. And villagers like the drama of things."
Mrs. Brent looked at
her admiringly, it being her fixed habit to admire Miss Vanderpoel, and all
such as Providence had set above her.
"Oh, how wise you
are, Miss Vanderpoel!" she exclaimed, even devoutly. "It is so nice
of you to be calm and logical when everybody else is so upset. You are quite
right about villagers enjoying the dramatic side of troubles. They always do.
And perhaps things are not so bad as they say. I ought not to have let myself
believe the worst. But I quite broke down under the ringers--I was so
touched."
"The
ringers?" faltered Lady Anstruthers
"The leader came
to the vicar to tell him they wanted permission to toll--if they heard tolling
at Dunstan. Weaver's family lives within hearing of Dunstan church bells, and
one of his boys is to run across the fields and bring the news to Stornham. And
it was most touching, Miss Vanderpoel. They feel, in their rustic way, that
Lord Mount Dunstan has not been treated fairly in the past. And now he seems to
them a hero and a martyr--or like a great soldier who has died fighting."
"Who may die
fighting," broke from Miss Vanderpoel sharply.
"Who--who
may----" Mrs. Brent corrected herself, "though Heaven grant he will
not. But it was the ringers who made me feel as if all really was over. Thank
you, Miss Vanderpoel, thank you for being so practical and--and cool."
"It was
touching," said Lady Anstruthers, her eyes brimming over again. "And
what the villagers feel is true. It goes to one's heart," in a little
outburst. "People have been unkind to him! And he has been lonely in that
great empty place --he has been lonely. And if he is dying to-day, he is lonely
even as he dies--even as he dies."
Betty drew a deep
breath. For one moment there seemed to rise before her vison of a huge room,
whose stately size made its bareness a more desolate thing. And Mr. Penzance
bent low over the bed. She tore her thought away from it.
"No! No!" she
cried out in low, passionate protest.
There will be love and
yearning all about him everywhere. The villagers who are waiting--the poor
things he has worked for--the very ringers themselves, are all pouring forth
the same thoughts. He will feel even ours--ours too! His soul cannot be
lonely."
A few minutes earlier,
Mrs. Brent had been saying to herself inwardly: "She has not much heart
after all, you know." Now she looked at her in amazement.
The blue bells were
under water in truth--drenched and drowned. And yet as the girl stood up before
her, she looked taller--more the magnificent Miss Vanderpoel than ever-- though
she expressed a new meaning.
"There is one
thing the villagers can do for him," she said. "One thing we can all
do. The bell has not tolled yet. There is a service for those who are--in
peril. If the vicar will call the people to the church, we can all kneel down
there-- and ask to be heard. The vicar will do that I am sure--and the people
will join him with all their hearts."
Mrs. Brent was
overwhelmed.
"Dear, dear, Miss
Vanderpoel!" she exclaimed. "That is touching, indeed it is! And so
right and so proper. I will drive back to the village at once. The vicar's
distress is as great as mine. You think of everything. The service for the sick
and dying. How right--how right!"
With a sense of an
increase of value in herself, the vicar, and the vicarage, she hastened back to
the pony carriage, but in the hall she seized Betty's hand emotionally.
"I cannot tell you
how much I am touched by this," she murmured. "I did not know you
were--were a religious girl, my dear."
Betty answered with
grave politeness.
"In times of great
pain and terror," she said, "I think almost everybody is religious--a
little. If that is the right word."
There was no ringing of
the ordinary call to service. In less than an hour's time people began to come
out of their cottages and wend their way towards the church. No one had put on
his or her Sunday clothes. The women had hastily rolled down their sleeves,
thrown off their aprons, and donned everyday bonnets and shawls. The men were
in their corduroys, as they had come in from the fields, and the children wore
their pinafores. As if by magic, the news had flown from house to house, and
each one who had heard it had left his or her work without a moment's
hesitation. They said but little as they made their way to the church Betty,
walking with her sister, was struck by the fact that there were more of them
than formed the usual Sunday morning congregation. They were doing no
perfunctory duty. The men's faces were heavily moved, most of the women wiped
their eyes at intervals, and the children looked awed. There was a suggestion
of hurried movement in the step of each--as if no time must be lost--as if they
must begin their appeal at once. Betty saw old Doby tottering along stiffly,
with his granddaughter and Mrs. Welden on either side of him. Marlow, on his
two sticks, was to be seen moving slowly, but steadily.
Within the ancient
stone walls, stiff old knees bent themselves with care, and faces were covered
devoutly by work-hardened hands. As she passed through the churchyard Betty
knew that eyes followed her affectionately, and that the touching of foreheads
and dropping of curtsies expressed a special sympathy. In each mind she was
connected with the man they came to pray for--with the work he had done--with
the danger he was in. It was vaguely felt that if his life ended, a bereavement
would have fallen upon her. This the girl knew.
The vicar lifted his
bowed head and began his service. Every man, woman and child before him
responded aloud and with a curious fervour--not in decorous fear of seeming to
thrust themselves before the throne, making too much of their petitions, in the
presence of the gentry. Here and there sobs were to be heard. Lady Anstruthers
followed the service timorously and with tears. But Betty, kneeling at her
side, by the round table in the centre of the great square Stornham pew, which
was like a room, bowed her head upon her folded arms, and prayed her own
intense, insistent prayer.
"God in
Heaven!" was her inward cry. "God of all the worlds! Do not let him
die. 'If ye ask anything in my name that I will do.' Christ said it. In the
name of Jesus of Nazareth--do not let him die! All the worlds are yours--all
the power--listen to us--listen to us. Lord, I believe--help thou my unbelief.
If this terror robs me of faith, and I pray madly--forgive, forgive me. Do not
count it against me as sin. You made him. He has suffered and been alone. It is
not time--it is not time yet for him to go. He has known no joy and no bright
thing. Do not let him go out of the warm world like a blind man. Do not let him
die. Perhaps this is not prayer, but raging. Forgive--forgive! All power is gone
from me. God of the worlds, and the great winds, and the myriad stars--do not
let him die!"
She knew her thoughts
were wild, but their torrent bore her with them into a strange, great silence.
She did not hear the vicar's words, or the responses of the people. She was not
within the grey stone walls. She had been drawn away as into the darkness and
stillness of the night, and no soul but her own seemed near. Through the
stillness and the dark her praying seemed to call and echo, clamouring again
and again. It must reach Something--it must be heard, because she cried so
loud, though to the human beings about her she seemed kneeling in silence. She
went on and on, repeating her words, changing them, ending and beginning again,
pouring forth a flood of appeal. She thought later that the flood must have
been at its highest tide when, singularly, it was stemmed. Without warning, a
wave of awe passed over her which strangely silenced her--and left her bowed
and kneeling, but crying out no more. The darkness had become still, even as it
had not been still before. Suddenly she cowered as she knelt and held her
breath. Something had drawn a little near. No thoughts--no words--no cries were
needed as the great stillness grew and spread, and folded her being within it.
She waited--only waited. She did not know how long a time passed before she
felt herself drawn back from the silent and shadowy places--awakening, as it
were, to the sounds in the church.
"Our Father,"
she began to say, as simply as a child. "Our Father who art in
Heaven--hallowed be thy name." There was a stirring among the
congregation, and sounds of feet, as the people began to move down the aisle in
reverent slowness. She caught again the occasional sound of a subdued sob.
Rosalie gently touched her, and she rose, following her out of the big pew and
passing down the aisle after the villagers.
Outside the entrance
the people waited as if they wanted to see her again. Foreheads were touched as
before, and eyes followed her. She was to the general mind the centre of the
drama, and "the A'mighty" would do well to hear her. She had been
doing his work for him "same as his lordship." They did not expect
her to smile at such a time, when she returned their greetings, and she did not,
but they said afterwards, in their cottages, that "trouble or not she was
a wonder for looks, that she was--Miss Vanderpoel."
Rosalie slipped a hand
through her arm, and they walked home together, very close to each other. Now
and then there was a questioning in Rosy's look. But neither of them spoke
once.
On an oak table in the
hall a letter from Mr. Penzance was lying. It was brief, hurried, and anxious.
The rumour that Mount Dunstan had been ailing was true, and that they had felt
they must conceal the matter from the villagers was true also. For some
baffling reason the fever had not absolutely declared itself, but the young
doctors were beset by grave forebodings. In such cases the most serious
symptoms might suddenly develop. One never knew. Mr. Penzance was evidently
torn by fears which he desperately strove to suppress. But Betty could see the
anguish on his fine old face, and between the lines she read dread and warning
not put into words. She believed that, fearing the worst, he felt he must
prepare her mind.
"He has lived
under a great strain for months," he ended. "It began long before the
outbreak of the fever. I am not strong under my sense of the cruelty of
things--and I have never loved him as I love him to-day."
Betty took the letter
to her room, and read it two or three times. Because she had asked intelligent
questions of the medical authority she had consulted on her visit to London,
she knew something of the fever and its habits. Even her unclerical knowledge
was such as it was not well to reflect upon. She refolded the letter and laid
it aside.
"I must not think.
I must do something. It may prevent my listening," she said aloud to the
silence of her room.
She cast her eyes about
her as if in search. Upon her desk lay a notebook. She took it up and opened
it. It contained lists of plants, of flower seeds, of bulbs, and shrubs. Each
list was headed with an explanatory note.
"Yes, this will
do," she said. "I will go and talk to Kedgers."
Kedgers and every man
under him had been at the service, but they had returned to their respective
duties. Kedgers, giving directions to some under gardeners who were clearing
flower beds and preparing them for their winter rest, turned to meet her as she
approached. To Kedgers the sight of her coming towards him on a garden path was
a joyful thing. He had done wonders, it is true, but if she had not stood by
his side with inspiration as well as confidence, he knew that things might have
"come out different."
"You was born a
gardener, miss--born one," he had said months ago.
It was the time when
flower beds must be planned for the coming year. Her notebook was filled with
memoranda of the things they must talk about.
It was good, normal,
healthy work to do. The scent of the rich, damp, upturned mould was a good
thing to inhale. They walked from one end to another, stood before clumps of
shrubs, and studied bits of wall. Here a mass of blue might grow, here low
things of white and pale yellow. A quickly-climbing rose would hang sheets of
bloom over this dead tree. This sheltered wall would hold warmth for a Marechal
Niel.
"You must take
care of it all--even if I am not here next year," Miss Vanderpoel said.
Kedgers' absorbed face
changed.
"Not here,
miss," he exclaimed. "You not here! Things wouldn't grow, miss."
He checked himself, his weather-toughened skin reddening because he was afraid
he had perhaps taken a liberty. And then moving his hat uneasily on his head,
he took another. "But it's true enough," looking down on the gravel
walk, "we--we couldn't expect to keep you."
She did not look as if
she had noticed the liberty, but she did not look quite like herself, Kedgers
thought. If she had been another young lady, and but for his established feeling
that she was somehow immune from all ills, he would have thought she had a
headache, or was low in her mind.
She spent an hour or
two with him, and together they planned for the changing seasons of the year to
come. How she could keep her mind on a thing, and what a head she had for
planning, and what an eye for colour! But yes--there was something a bit wrong
somehow. Now and then she would stop and stand still for a moment, and suddenly
it struck Kedgers that she looked as if she were listening.
"Did you think you
heard something, miss?" he asked her once when she paused and wore this
look.
"No," she
answered, "no." And drew him on quickly-- almost as if she did not
want him to hear what she had seemed listening for.
When she left him and
went back to the house, all the loveliness of spring, summer and autumn had
been thought out and provided for. Kedgers stood on the path and looked after
her until she passed through the terrace door. He chewed his lip uneasily. Then
he remembered something and felt a bit relieved. It was the service he
remembered.
"Ah! it's that
that's upset her--and it's natural, seeing how she's helped him and Dunstan
village. It's only natural." He chewed his lip again, and nodded his head
in odd reflection. "Ay! Ay!" he summed her up. "She's a great
lady that--she's a great lady--same as if she'd been born in a civilised
land."
During the rest of the
day the look of question in Rosalie's eyes changed in its nature. When her
sister was near her she found herself glancing at her with a new feeling. It
was a growing feeling, which gradually became--anxiousness. Betty presented to
her the aspect of one withdrawn into some remote space. She was not living this
day as her days were usually lived. She did not sit still or stroll about the
gardens quietly. The consecutiveness of her action seemed broken. She did one
thing after another, as if she must fill each moment. This was not her Betty.
Lady Anstruthers watched and thought until, in the end, a new pained fear began
to creep slowly into her mind, and make her feel as if she were slightly
trembling though her hands did not shake. She did not dare to allow herself to
think the thing she knew she was on the brink of thinking. She thrust it away
from her, and tried not to think at all. Her Betty--her splendid Betty, whom
nothing could hurt--who could not be touched by any awful thing--her dear
Betty!
In the afternoon she
saw her write notes steadily for an hour, then she went out into the stables
and visited the horses, talked to the coachman and to her own groom. She was
very kind to a village boy who had been recently taken on as an additional
assistant in the stable, and who was rather frightened and shy. She knew his
mother, who had a large family, and she had, indeed, given the boy his place
that he might be trained under the great Mr. Buckham, who was coachman and head
of the stables. She said encouraging things which quite cheered him, and she
spoke privately to Mr. Buckham about him. Then she walked in the park a little,
but not for long. When she came back Rosalie was waiting for her.
"I want to take a
long drive," she said. "I feel restless. Will you come with me,
Betty?" Yes, she would go with her, so Buckham brought the landau with its
pair of big horses, and they rolled down the avenue, and into the smooth, white
high road. He took them far--past the great marshes, between miles of bared
hedges, past farms and scattered cottages. Sometimes he turned into lanes,
where the hedges were closer to each other, and where, here and there, they
caught sight of new points of view between trees. Betty was glad to feel Rosy's
slim body near her side, and she was conscious that it gradually seemed to draw
closer and closer. Then Rosy's hand slipped into hers and held it softly on her
lap.
When they drove
together in this way they were usually both of them rather silent and quiet,
but now Rosalie spoke of many things--of Ughtred, of Nigel, of the Dunholms, of
New York, and their father and mother.
"I want to talk
because I'm nervous, I think," she said half apologetically. "I do
not want to sit still and think too much--of father's coming. You don't mind my
talking, do you, Betty?"
"No," Betty
answered. "It is good for you and for me." And she met the pressure
of Rosy's hand halfway.
But Rosy was talking,
not because she did not want to sit still and think, but because she did not
want Betty to do so. And all the time she was trying to thrust away the thought
growing in her mind.
They spent the evening
together in the library, and Betty read aloud. She read a long time--until
quite late. She wished to tire herself as well as to force herself to stop
listening.
When they said
good-night to each other Rosy clung to her as desperately as she had clung on
the night after her arrival. She kissed her again and again, and then hung her
head and excused herself.
"Forgive me for
being--nervous. I'm ashamed of myself," she said. "Perhaps in time I
shall get over being a coward."
But she said nothing of
the fact that she was not a coward for herself, but through a slowly
formulating and struggled-- against fear, which chilled her very heart, and
which she could best cover by a pretence of being a poltroon.
She could not sleep
when she went to bed. The night seemed crowded with strange, terrified
thoughts. They were all of Betty, though sometimes she thought of her father's
coming, of her mother in New York, and of Betty's steady working throughout the
day. Sometimes she cried, twisting her hands together, and sometimes she dropped
into a feverish sleep, and dreamed that she was watching Betty's face, yet was
afraid to look at it.
She awakened suddenly
from one of these dreams, and sat upright in bed to find the dawn breaking. She
rose and threw on a dressing-gown, and went to her sister's room because she
could not bear to stay away.
The door was not
locked, and she pushed it open gently. One of the windows had its blind drawn
up, and looked like a patch of dull grey. Betty was standing upright near it.
She was in her night-gown, and a long black plait of hair hung over one
shoulder heavily. She looked all black and white in strong contrast. The grey
light set her forth as a tall ghost.
Lady Anstruthers slid
forward, feeling a tightness in her chest.
"The dawn wakened
me too," she said.
"I have been
waiting to see it come," answered Betty. "It is going to be a dull,
dreary day."
IT was a dull and
dreary day, as Betty had foreseen it would be. Heavy rain clouds hung and
threatened, and the atmosphere was damp and chill. It was one of those days of
the English autumn which speak only of the end of things, bereaving one of the
power to remember next year's spring and summer, which, after all, must surely
come. Sky is grey, trees are grey, dead leaves lie damp beneath the feet,
sunlight and birds seem forgotten things. All that has been sad and to be
regretted or feared hangs heavy in the air and sways all thought. In the
passing of these hours there is no hope anywhere. Betty appeared at breakfast
in short dress and close hat. She wore thick little boots, as if for walking.
"I am going to
make visits in the village," she said. "I want a basket of good
things to take with me. Stourton's children need feeding after their measles.
They looked very thin when I saw them playing in the road yesterday."
"Yes, dear,"
Rosalie answered. "Mrs. Noakes shall prepare the basket. Good chicken
broth, and jelly, and nourishing things. Jennings," to the butler,
"you know the kind of basket Miss Vanderpoel wants. Speak to Mrs. Noakes,
please."
"Yes, my lady,"
Jennings knew the kind of basket and so did Mrs. Noakes. Below stairs a strong
sympathy with Miss Vanderpoel's movements had developed. No one resented the
preparation of baskets. Somehow they were always managed, even if asked for at
untimely hours.
Betty was sitting
silent, looking out into the greyness of the autumn-smitten park.
"Are--are you
listening for anything, Betty?" Lady Anstruthers asked rather falteringly.
"You have a sort of listening look in your eyes."
Betty came back to the
room, as it were.
"Have I," she
said. "Yes, I think I was listening for-- something."
And Rosalie did not ask
her what she listened for. She was afraid she knew.
It was not only the
Stourtons Betty visited this morning. She passed from one cottage to another--to
see old women, and old men, as well as young ones, who for one reason or
another needed help and encouragement. By one bedside she read aloud; by
another she sat and told cheerful stories; she listened to talk in little
kitchens, and in one house welcomed a newborn thing. As she walked steadily
over grey road and down grey lanes damp mist rose and hung about her. And she
did not walk alone. Fear walked with her, and anguish, a grey ghost by her
side. Once she found herself standing quite still on a side path, covering her
face with her hands. She filled every moment of the morning, and walked until
she was tired. Before she went home she called at the post office, and Mr.
Tewson greeted her with a solemn face. He did not wait to be questioned.
"There's been no
news to-day, miss, so far," he said. "And that seems as if they might
be so given up to hard work at a dreadful time that there's been no chance for
anything to get out. When people's hanging over a man's bed at the end, it's as
if everything stopped but that--that's stopping for all time."
After luncheon the rain
began to fall softly, slowly, and with a suggestion of endlessness. It was a
sort of mist itself, and became a damp shadow among the bare branches of trees
which soon began to drip.
"You have been
walking about all morning, and you are tired, dear," Lady Anstruthers said
to her. "Won't you go to your room and rest, Betty?"
Yes, she would go to
her room, she said. Some new books had arrived from London this morning, and
she would look over them. She talked a little about her visits before she went,
and when, as she talked, Ughtred came over to her and stood close to her side
holding her hand and stroking it, she smiled at him sweetly--the smile he
adored. He stroked the hand and softly patted it, watching her wistfully.
Suddenly he lifted it to his lips, and kissed it again and again with a sort of
passion.
"I love you so
much, Aunt Betty," he cried. "We both love you so much. Something
makes me love you to-day more than ever I did before. It almost makes me cry. I
love you so."
She stooped swiftly and
drew him into her arms and kissed him close and hard. He held his head back a
little and looked into the blue under her lashes.
"I love your
eyes," he said. "Anyone would love your eyes, Aunt Betty. But what is
the matter with them? You are not crying at all, but--oh! what is the
matter?"
"No, I am not
crying at all," she said, and smiled--almost laughed.
But after she had
kissed him again she took her books and went upstairs.
She did not lie down,
and she did not read when she was alone in her room. She drew a long chair
before the window and watched the slow falling of the rain. There is nothing
like it--that slow weeping of the rain on an English autumn day. Soft and light
though it was, the park began to look sodden. The bare trees held out their
branches like imploring arms, the brown garden beds were neat and bare. The
same rain was drip-dripping at Mount Dunstan--upon the desolate great
house--upon the village--upon the mounds and ancient stone tombs in the
churchyard, sinking into the earth--sinking deep, sucked in by the clay
beneath--the cold damp clay. She shook herself shudderingly. Why should the
thought come to her--the cold damp clay? She would not listen to it, she would
think of New York, of its roaring streets and crash of sound, of the rush of
fierce life there--of her father and mother. She tried to force herself to call
up pictures of Broadway, swarming with crowds of black things, which, seen from
the windows of its monstrous buildings, seemed like swarms of ants, burst out
of ant-hills, out of a thousand ant-hills. She tried to remember shop windows,
the things in them, the throngs going by, and the throngs passing in and out of
great, swinging glass doors. She dragged up before her a vision of Rosalie,
driving with her mother and herself, looking about her at the new buildings and
changed streets, flushed and made radiant by the accelerated pace and
excitement of her beloved New York. But, oh, the slow, penetrating rainfall,
and--the cold damp clay!"
She rose, making an
involuntary sound which was half a moan. The long mirror set between two
windows showed her momentarily an awful young figure, throwing up its arms. Was
that Betty Vanderpoel--that?
"What does one
do," she said, "when the world comes to an end? What does one
do?"
All her days she had
done things--there had always been something to do. Now there was nothing. She
went suddenly to her bell and rang for her maid. The woman answered the summons
at once.
"Send word to the
stable that I want Childe Harold. I do not want Mason. I shall ride
alone."
"Yes, miss,"
Ambleston answered, without any exterior sign of emotion. She was too
well-trained a person to express any shade of her internal amazement. After she
had transmitted the order to the proper manager she returned and changed her
mistress's costume.
She had contemplated
her task, and was standing behind Miss Vanderpoel's chair, putting the last
touch to her veil, when she became conscious of a slight stiffening of the neck
which held so well the handsome head, then the head slowly turned towards the
window giving upon the front park. Miss Vanderpoel was listening to something,
listening so intently that Ambleston felt that, for a few moments, she did not
seem to breathe. The maid's hands fell from the veil, and she began to listen
also. She had been at the service the day before. Miss Vanderpoel rose from her
chair slowly--very slowly, and took a step forward. Then she stood still and
listened again.
"Open that window,
if you please," she commanded--"as if a stone image was
speaking"--Ambleston said later. The window was thrown open, and for a few
seconds they both stood still again. When Miss Vanderpoel spoke, it was as if
she had forgotten where she was, or as if she were in a dream.
"It is the
ringers," she said. "They are tolling the passing bell."
The serving woman was
soft of heart, and had her feminine emotions. There had been much talk of this
thing in the servant's hall. She turned upon Betty, and forgot all rules and
training.
"Oh, miss!"
she cried. "He's gone--he's gone! That good man--out of this hard world.
Oh, miss, excuse me-- do!" And as she burst into wild tears, she ran out
of the room. . . . . .
Rosalie had been
sitting in the morning room. She also had striven to occupy herself with work.
She had written to her mother, she had read, she had embroidered, and then read
again. What was Betty doing--what was she thinking now? She laid her book down
in her lap, and covering her face with her hands, breathed a desperate little
prayer. That life should be pain and emptiness to herself, seemed somehow
natural since she had married Nigel--but pain and emptiness for Betty--No! No!
No! Not for Betty! Piteous sorrow poured upon her like a flood. She did not
know how the time passed. She sat, huddled together in her chair, with hidden
face. She could not bear to look at the rain and ghost mist out of doors. Oh,
if her mother were only here, and she might speak to her! And as her loving
tears broke forth afresh, she heard the door open.
"If you please, my
lady--I beg your pardon, my lady," as she started and uncovered her face.
"What is it,
Jennings?"
The figure at the door
was that of the serious, elderly butler, and he wore a respectfully grave air.
"As your ladyship
is sitting in this room, we thought it likely you would not hear, the windows
being closed, and we felt sure, my lady, that you would wish to know----"
Lady Anstruthers' hands
shook as they clung to the arms of her chair.
"To know----"
she faltered. "Hear what?"
"The passing bell is
tolling, my lady. It has just begun. It is for Lord Mount Dunstan. There's not
a dry eye downstairs, your ladyship, not one."
He opened the windows,
and she stood up. Jennings quietly left the room. The slow, heavy knell struck
ponderously on the damp air, and she stood and shivered.
A moment or two later
she turned, because it seemed as if she must.
Betty, in her riding
habit, was standing motionless against the door, her wonderful eyes still as
death, gazing at her, gazing in an awful, simple silence.
Oh, what was the use of
being afraid to speak at such a time as this? In one moment Rosy was kneeling
at her feet, clinging about her knees, kissing her hands, the very cloth of her
habit, and sobbing aloud.
"Oh, my
darling--my love--my own Betty! I don't know--and I won't ask--but speak to
me--speak just a word --my dearest dear!"
Betty raised her up and
drew her within the room, closing the door behind them.
"Kind little
Rosy," she said. "I came to speak--because we two love each other.
You need not ask, I will tell you. That bell is tolling for the man who taught
me--to know. He never spoke to me of love. I have not one word or look to
remember. And now---- Oh, listen--listen! I have been listening since the
morning of yesterday." It was an awful thing--her white face, with all the
flame of life swept out of it.
"Don't
listen--darling--darling!" Rosy cried out in anguish. "Shut your
ears--shut your ears!" And she tried to throw her arms around the high
black head, and stifle all sound with her embrace.
"I don't want to
shut them," was the answer. "All the unkindness and misery are over
for him, I ought to thank God-- but I don't. I shall hear--O Rosy, listen!--I
shall hear that to the end of my days."
Rosy held her tight,
and rocked and sobbed.
"My Betty,"
she kept saying. "My Betty," and she could say no more. What more was
there to say? At last Betty withdrew herself from her arms, and then Rosalie
noticed for the first time that she wore the habit.
"Dearest,"
she whispered, "what are you going to do?"
"I was going to
ride, and I am going to do it still. I must do something. I shall ride a long,
long way--and ride hard. You won't try to keep me, Rosy. You will
understand."
"Yes," biting
her lip, and looking at her with large, awed eyes, as she patted her arm with a
hand that trembled. "I would not hold you back, Betty, from anything in
the world you chose to do."
And with another long,
clinging clasp of her, she let her go.
Mason was standing by
Childe Harold when she went down the broad steps. He also wore a look of
repressed emotion, and stood with bared head bent, his eyes fixed on the gravel
of the drive, listening to the heavy strokes of the bell in the church tower,
rather as if he were taking part in some solemn ceremony.
He mounted her
silently, and after he had given her the bridle, looked up, and spoke in a
somewhat husky voice:
"The order was
that you did not want me, miss? Was that correct?"
"Yes, I wish to
ride alone."
"Yes, miss. Thank
you, miss."
Childe Harold was in
good spirits. He held up his head, and blew the breath through his delicate,
dilated, red nostrils as he set out with his favourite sidling, dancing steps.
Mason watched him down the avenue, saw the lodge keeper come out to open the
gate, and curtsy as her ladyship's sister passed through it. After that he went
slowly back to the stables, and sat in the harness-room a long time, staring at
the floor, as the bell struck ponderously on his ear.
The woman who had
opened the gate for her Betty saw had red eyes. She knew why.
"A year ago they
all thought of him as an outcast. They would have believed any evil they had
heard connected with his name. Now, in every cottage, there is weeping--weeping.
And he lies deaf and dumb," was her thought.
She did not wish to
pass through the village, and turned down a side road, which would lead her to
where she could cross the marshes, and come upon lonely places. The more
lonely, the better. Every few moments she caught her breath with a hard short
gasp. The slow rain fell upon her, big round, crystal drops hung on the
hedgerows, and dripped upon the grass banks below them; the trees, wreathed
with mist, were like waiting ghosts as she passed them by; Childe Harold's hoof
upon the road, made a hollow, lonely sound.
A thought began to fill
her brain, and make insistent pressure upon it. She tried no more to thrust
thought away. Those who lay deaf and dumb, those for whom people wept--where
were they when the weeping seemed to sound through all the world? How far had
they gone? Was it far? Could they hear and could they see? If one plead with
them aloud, could they draw near to listen? Did they begin a long, long journey
as soon as they had slipped away? The "wonder of the world," she had
said, watching life swelling and bursting the seeds in Kedgers' hothouses! But
this was a greater wonder still, because of its awesomeness. This man had been,
and who dare say he was not--even now? The strength of his great body, the look
in his red-brown eyes, the sound of his deep voice, the struggle, the meaning
of him, where were they? She heard herself followed by the hollow echo of
Childe Harold's hoofs, as she rode past copse and hedge, and wet spreading
fields. She was this hour as he had been a month ago. If, with some strange
suddenness, this which was Betty Vanderpoel, slipped from its body----She put
her hand up to her forehead. It was unthinkable that there would be no more.
Where was he now--where was he now?
This was the thought
that filled her brain cells to the exclusion of all others. Over the road, down
through by-lanes, out on the marshes. Where was he--where was he--where? Childe
Harold's hoofs began to beat it out as a refrain. She heard nothing else. She
did not know where she was going and did not ask herself. She went down any
road or lane which looked empty of life, she took strange turnings, without
caring; she did not know how far she was afield.
Where was he now--this
hour--this moment--where was he now? Did he know the rain, the greyness, the
desolation of the world?
Once she stopped her
horse on the loneliness of the marsh land, and looked up at the low clouds
about her, at the creeping mist, the dank grass. It seemed a place in which a newly-released
soul might wander because it did not yet know its way.
"If you should be
near, and come to me, you will understand," her clear voice said gravely
between the caught breaths, "what I gave you was nothing to you--but you
took it with you. Perhaps you know without my telling you. I want you to know.
When a man is dead, everything melts away. I loved you. I wish you had loved
me."
IN the unnatural
unbearableness of her anguish, she lost sight of objects as she passed them,
she lost all memory of what she did. She did not know how long she had been
out, or how far she had ridden. When the thought of time or distance vaguely
flitted across her mind, it seemed that she had been riding for hours, and
might have crossed one county and entered another. She had long left familiar
places behind. Riding through and inclosed by the mist, she, herself, might
have been a wandering ghost, lost in unknown places. Where was he now--where
was he now?
Afterwards she could
not tell how or when it was that she found herself becoming conscious of the
evidences that her horse had been ridden too long and hard, and that he was
worn out with fatigue. She did not know that she had ridden round and round
over the marshes, and had passed several times through the same lanes. Childe
Harold, the sure of foot, actually stumbled, out of sheer weariness of limb.
Perhaps it was this which brought her back to earth, and led her to look around
her with eyes which saw material objects with comprehension. She had reached
the lonely places, indeed and the evening was drawing on. She was at the edge
of the marsh, and the land about her was strange to her and desolate. At the
side of a steep lane, overgrown with grass, and seeming a mere cart-path, stood
a deserted-looking, black and white, timbered cottage, which was half a ruin.
Close to it was a dripping spinney, its trees forming a darkling background to
the tumble-down house, whose thatch was rotting into holes, and its walls
sagging forward perilously. The bit of garden about it was neglected and
untidy, here and there windows were broken, and stuffed with pieces of ragged
garments. Altogether a sinister and repellent place enough.
She looked at it with
heavy eyes. (Where was he now-- where was he now?--This repeating itself in the
far chambers of her brain.) Her sight seemed dimmed, not only by the mist, but
by a sinking faintness which possessed her. She did not remember how little
food she had eaten during more than twenty-four hours. Her habit was heavy with
moisture, and clung to her body; she was conscious of a hot tremor passing over
her, and saw that her hands shook as they held the bridle on which they had
lost their grip. She had never fainted in her life, and she was not going to
faint now--women did not faint in these days--but she must reach the cottage
and dismount, to rest under shelter for a short time. No smoke was rising from
the chimney, but surely someone was living in the place, and could tell her
where she was, and give her at least water for herself and her horse. Poor
beast! how wickedly she must have been riding him, in her utter absorption in
her thoughts. He was wet, not alone with rain, but with sweat. He snorted out
hot, smoking breaths.
She spoke to him, and
he moved forward at her command. He was trembling too. Not more than two
hundred yards, and she turned him into the lane. But it was wet and slippery,
and strewn with stones. His trembling and her uncertain hold on the bridle
combined to produce disaster. He set his foot upon a stone which slid beneath
it, he stumbled, and she could not help him to recover, so he fell, and only by
Heaven's mercy not upon her, with his crushing, big-boned weight, and she was
able to drag herself free of him before he began to kick, in his humiliated
efforts to rise. But he could not rise, because he was hurt--and when she,
herself, got up, she staggered, and caught at the broken gate, because in her
wrenching leap for safety she had twisted her ankle, and for a moment was in
cruel pain.
When she recovered from
her shock sufficiently to be able to look at the cottage, she saw that it was
more of a ruin than it had seemed, even at a short distance. Its door hung open
on broken hinges, no smoke rose from the chimney, because there was no one
within its walls to light a fire. It was quite empty. Everything about the
place lay in dead and utter silence. In a normal mood she would have liked the
mystery of the situation, and would have set about planning her way out of her
difficulty. But now her mind made no effort, because normal interest in things
had fallen away from her. She might be twenty miles from Stornham, but the
possible fact did not, at the moment, seem to concern her. (Where is he
now--where is he now?) Childe Harold was trying to rise, despite his hurt, and
his evident determination touched her. He was too proud to lie in the mire. She
limped to him, and tried to steady him by his bridle. He was not badly injured,
though plainly in pain.
"Poor boy, it was
my fault," she said to him as he at last struggled to his feet. "I
did not know I was doing it. Poor boy!"
He turned a velvet dark
eye upon her, and nosed her forgivingly with a warm velvet muzzle, but it was
plain that, for the time, he was done for. They both moved haltingly to the
broken gate, and Betty fastened him to a thorn tree near it, where he stood on
three feet, his fine head drooping.
She pushed the gate
open, and went into the house through the door which hung on its hinges. Once
inside, she stood still and looked about her. If there was silence and
desolateness outside, there was within the deserted place a stillness like the
unresponse of death. It had been long since anyone had lived in the cottage,
but tramps or gipsies had at times passed through it. Dead, blackened embers
lay on the hearth, a bundle of dried grass which had been slept on was piled in
the corner, an empty nail keg and a wooden box had been drawn before the big
chimney place for some wanderer to sit on when the black embers had been hot
and red.
Betty gave one glance
around her and sat down upon the box standing on the bare hearth, her head
sinking forward, her hands falling clasped between her knees, her eyes on the
brick floor.
"Where is he
now?" broke from her in a loud whisper, whose sound was mechanical and
hollow. "Where is he now?"
And she sat there
without moving, while the grey mist from the marshes crept close about the door
and through it and stole about her feet.
So she sat
long--long--in a heavy, far-off dream.
Along the road a man
was riding with a lowering, fretted face. He had come across country on
horseback, because to travel by train meant wearisome stops and changes and
endlessly slow journeying, annoying beyond endurance to those who have not
patience to spare. His ride would have been pleasant enough but for the slow
mist-like rain. Also he had taken a wrong turning, because he did not know the
roads he travelled. The last signpost he had passed, however, had given him his
cue again, and he began to feel something of security. Confound the rain! The
best road was slippery with it, and the haze of it made a man's mind feel
befogged and lowered his spirits horribly--discouraged him--would worry him
into an ill humour even if he had reason to be in a good one. As for him, he
had no reason for cheerfulness--he never had for the matter of that, and just
now----! What was the matter with his horse? He was lifting his head and
sniffing the damp air restlessly, as if he scented or saw something. Beasts
often seemed to have a sort of second sight--horses particularly. What ailed
him that he should prick up his ears and snort after his sniffing the mist! Did
he hear anything? Yes, he did, it seemed. He gave forth suddenly a loud shrill
whinny, turning his head towards a rough lane they were approaching, and
immediately from the vicinity of a deserted-looking cottage behind a hedge came
a sharp but mournful-sounding neigh in answer.
"What horse is
that?" said Nigel Anstruthers, drawing in at the entrance to the lane and
looking down it. "There is a fine brute with a side-saddle on," he
added sharply. "He is waiting for someone. What is a woman doing there at
this time? Is it a rendezvous? A good place----"
He broke off short and
rode forward. "I'm hanged if it is not Childe Harold," he broke out,
and he had no sooner assured himself of the fact than he threw himself from his
saddle, tethered his horse and strode up the path to the broken-hinged door.
He stood on the
threshold and stared. What a hole it was-- what a hole! And there she
sat--alone--eighteen or twenty miles from home--on a turned-up box near the
black embers, her hands clasped loosely between her knees, her face rather
awful, her eyes staring at the floor, as if she did not see it.
"Where is he
now?" he heard her whisper to herself with soft weirdness. "Where is
he now?"
Sir Nigel stepped into
the place and stood before her. He had smiled with a wry unpleasantness when he
had heard her evidently unconscious words.
"My good
girl," he said, "I am sure I do not know where he is--but it is very
evident that he ought to be here, since you have amiably put yourself to such
trouble. It is fortunate for you perhaps that I am here before him. What does
this mean?" the question breaking from him with savage authority.
He had dragged her back
to earth. She sat upright and recognised him with a hideous sense of shock, but
he did not give her time to speak. His instinct of male fury leaped within him.
"You!" he
cried out. "It takes a woman like you to come and hide herself in a place
of this sort, like a trolloping gipsy wench! It takes a New York millionairess
or a Roman empress or one of Charles the Second's duchesses to plunge as deep
as this. You, with your golden pedestal--you, with your ostentatious airs and
graces--you, with your condescending to give a man a chance to repent his sins
and turn over a new leaf! Damn it," rising to a sort of frenzy, "what
are you doing waiting in a hole like this--in this weather--at this hour--you
--you!"
The fool's flame leaped
high enough to make him start forward, as if to seize her by the shoulder and
shake her.
But she rose and
stepped back to lean against the side of the chimney--to brace herself against
it, so that she could stand in her lame foot's despite. Every drop of blood had
been swept from her face, and her eyes looked immense. His coming was a good
thing for her, though she did not know it. It brought her back from unearthly
places. All her child hatred woke and blazed in her. Never had she hated a thing
so, and it set her slow, cold blood running like something molten.
"Hold your
tongue!" she said in a clear, awful young voice of warning. "And take
care not to touch me. If you do--I have my whip here--I shall lash you across
your mouth!"
He broke into ribald
laughter. A certain sudden thought which had cut into him like a knife thrust
into flesh drove him on.
"Do!" he
cried. "I should like to carry your mark back to Stornham--and tell people
why it was given. I know who you are here for. Only such fellows ask such
things of women. But he was determined to be safe, if you hid in a ditch. You
are here for Mount Dunstan--and he has failed you!"
But she only stood and
stared at him, holding her whip behind her, knowing that at any moment he might
snatch it from her hand. And she knew how poor a weapon it was. To strike out
with it would only infuriate him and make him a wild beast. And it was becoming
an agony to stand upon her foot. And even if it had not been so--if she had
been strong enough to make a leap and dash past him, her horse stood outside
disabled.
Nigel Anstruthers' eyes
ran over her from head to foot, down the side of her mud-stained habit, while a
curious light dawned in them.
"You have had a
fall from your horse," he exclaimed. "You are lame!" Then
quickly, "That was why Childe Harold was trembling and standing on three
feet! By Jove!"
Then he sat down on the
nail keg and began to laugh. He laughed for a full minute, but she saw he did
not take his eyes from her.
"You are in as unpleasant
a situation as a young woman can well be," he said, when he stopped.
"You came to a dirty hole to be alone with a man who felt it safest not to
keep his appointment. Your horse stumbled and disabled himself and you. You are
twenty miles from home in a deserted cottage in a lane no one passes down even
in good weather. You are frightened to death and you have given me even a
better story to play with than your sister gave me. By Jove!"
His face was an unholy
thing to look upon. The situation and her powerlessness were exciting him.
"No," she
answered, keeping her eyes on his, as she might have kept them on some wild
animal's, "I am not frightened to death."
His ugly dark flush
rose.
"Well, if you are
not," he said, "don't tell me so. That kind of defiance is not your
best line just now. You have been disdaining me from magnificent New York
heights for some time. Do you think that I am not enjoying this?"
"I cannot imagine
anyone else who would enjoy it so much." And she knew the answer was daring,
but would have made it if he had held a knife's point at her throat.
He got up, and walking
to the door drew it back on its crazy hinges and managed to shut it close.
There was a big wooden bolt inside and he forced it into its socket.
"Presently I shall
go and put the horses into the cowshed," he said. "If I leave them
standing outside they will attract attention. I do not intend to be disturbed
by any gipsy tramp who wants shelter. I have never had you quite to myself
before."
He sat down again and
nursed his knee gracefully.
"And I have never
seen you look as attractive," biting his under lip in cynical enjoyment.
"To-day's adventure has roused your emotions and actually beautified
you--which was not necessary. I daresay you have been furious and have cried. Your
eyes do not look like mere eyes, but like splendid blue pools of tears. Perhaps
I shall make you cry sometime, my dear Betty."
"No, you will
not."
"Don't tempt me.
Women always cry when men annoy them. They rage, but they cry as well."
"I shall
not."
"It's true that
most women would have begun to cry before this. That is what stimulates me. You
will swagger to the end. You put the devil into me. Half an hour ago I was
jogging along the road, languid and bored to extinction. And now----" He
laughed outright in actual exultation. "By Jove!" he cried out.
"Things like this don't happen to a man in these dull days! There's no
such luck going about. We've gone back five hundred years, and we've taken New
York with us." His laugh shut off in the middle, and he got up to thrust
his heavy, congested face close to hers. "Here you are, as safe as if you
were in a feudal castle, and here is your ancient enemy given his chance--given
his chance. Do you think, by the Lord, he is going to give it up? No. To quote
your own words, 'you may place entire confidence in that.' "
Exaggerated as it all
was, somehow the melodrama dropped away from it and left bare, simple, hideous
fact for her to confront. The evil in him had risen rampant and made him lose
his head. He might see his senseless folly to-morrow and know he must pay for
it, but he would not see it to-day. The place was not a feudal castle, but what
he said was insurmountable truth. A ruined cottage on the edge of miles of
marsh land, a seldom-trodden road, and night upon them! A wind was rising on
the marshes now, and making low, steady moan. Horrible things had happened to
women before, one heard of them with shudders when they were recorded in the
newspapers. Only two days ago she had remembered that sometimes there seemed
blunderings in the great Scheme of things. Was all this real, or was she
dreaming that she stood here at bay, her back against the chimney-wall, and
this degenerate exulting over her, while Rosy was waiting for her at
Stornham--and at this very hour her father was planning his journey across the
Atlantic?
"Why did you not
behave yourself?" demanded Nigel Anstruthers, shaking her by the shoulder.
"Why did you not realise that I should get even with you one day, as sure
as you were woman and I was man?"
She did not shrink
back, though the pupils of her eyes dilated. Was it the wildest thing in the
world which happened to her-- or was it not? Without warning--the sudden rush
of a thought, immense and strange, swept over her body and soul and possessed
her--so possessed her that it changed her pallor to white flame. It was
actually Anstruthers who shrank back a shade because, for the moment, she
looked so near unearthly.
"I am not afraid
of you," she said, in a clear, unshaken voice. "I am not afraid. Something
is near me which will stand between us--something which died to-day."
He almost gasped before
the strangeness of it, but caught back his breath and recovered himself.
"Died to-day!
That's recent enough," he jeered. "Let us hear about it. Who was
it?"
"It was Mount
Dunstan," she flung at him. "The church-bells were tolling for him
when I rode away. I could not stay to hear them. It killed me--I loved him. You
were right when you said it. I loved him, though he never knew. I shall always
love him--though he never knew. He knows now. Those who died cannot go away
when that is holding them. They must stay. Because I loved him, he may be in
this place. I call on him----" raising her clear voice. "I call on
him to stand between us."
He backed away from
her, staring an evil, enraptured stare.
"What! There is
that much temperament in you?" he said. "That was what I
half-suspected when I saw you first. But you have hidden it well. Now it bursts
forth in spite of you. Good Lord! What luck--what luck!"
He moved to the door
and opened it.
"I am a very
modern man, and I enjoy this to the utmost," he said. "What I like
best is the melodrama of it--in connection with Fifth Avenue. I am perfectly
aware that you will not discuss this incident in the future. You are a clever
enough young woman to know that it will be more to your interest than to mine
that it shall be kept exceedingly quiet."
The white fire had not
died out of her and she stood straight.
"What I have
called on will be near me, and will stand between us," she said.
Old though it was, the
door was massive and heavy to lift. To open it cost him some muscular effort.
"I am going to the
horses now," he explained before he dragged it back into its frame and
shut her in. "It is safe enough to leave you here. You will stay where you
are."
He felt himself secure
in leaving her because he believed she could not move, and because his
arrogance made it impossible for him to count on strength and endurance greater
than his own. Of endurance he knew nothing and in his keen and cynical
exultance his devil made a fool of him.
As she heard him walk
down the path to the gate, Betty stood amazed at his lack of comprehension of
her.
"He thinks I will
stay here. He absolutely thinks I will wait until he comes back," she
whispered to the emptiness of the bare room.
Before he had arrived
she had loosened her boot, and now she stooped and touched her foot.
"If I were safe at
home I should think I could not walk, but I can walk now--I can--I can--because
I will bear the pain."
In such cottages there
is always a door opening outside from the little bricked kitchen, where the
copper stands. She would reach that, and, passing through, would close it
behind her. After that something would tell her what to do--something would
lead her.
She put her lame foot
upon the floor, and rested some of her weight upon it--not all. A jagged pain
shot up from it through her whole side it seemed, and, for an instant, she
swayed and ground her teeth.
"That is because it
is the first step," she said. "But if I am to be killed, I will die
in the open--I will die in the open."
The second and third
steps brought cold sweat out upon her, but she told herself that the fourth was
not quite so unbearable, and she stiffened her whole body, and muttered some
words while she took a fifth and sixth which carried her into the tiny back
kitchen.
"Father," she
said. "Father, think of me now--think of me! Rosy, love me--love me and
pray that I may come home. You--you who have died, stand very near!"
If her father ever held
her safe in his arms again--if she ever awoke from this nightmare, it would be
a thing never to let one's mind hark back to again--to shut out of memory with
iron doors.
The pain had shot up
and down, and her forehead was wet by the time she had reached the small back
door. Was it locked or bolted--was it? She put her hand gently upon the latch
and lifted it without making any sound. Thank God Almighty, it was neither
bolted nor locked, the latch lifted, the door opened, and she slid through it
into the shadow of the grey which was already almost the darkness of night.
Thank God for that, too.
She flattened herself
against the outside wall and listened. He was having difficulty in managing
Childe Harold, who snorted and pulled back, offended and made rebellious by his
savagely impatient hand. Good Childe Harold, good boy! She could see the massed
outline of the trees of the spinney. If she could bear this long enough to get
there--even if she crawled part of the way. Then it darted through her mind
that he would guess that she would be sure to make for its cover, and that he would
go there first to search.
"Father, think for
me--you were so quick to think!" her brain cried out for her, as if she
was speaking to one who could physically hear.
She almost feared she
had spoken aloud, and the thought which flashed upon her like lightning seemed
to be an answer given. He would be convinced that she would at once try to get
away from the house. If she kept near it--somewhere-- somewhere quite close,
and let him search the spinney, she might get away to its cover after he gave
up the search and came back. The jagged pain had settled in a sort of
impossible anguish, and once or twice she felt sick. But she would die in the
open--and she knew Rosalie was frightened by her absence, and was praying for
her. Prayers counted and, yet, they had all prayed yesterday.
"If I were not
very strong, I should faint," she thought. "But I have been strong
all my life. That great French doctor--I have forgotten his name--said that I
had the physique to endure anything."
She said these things
that she might gain steadiness and convince herself that she was not merely
living through a nightmare. Twice she moved her foot suddenly because she found
herself in a momentary respite from pain, beginning to believe that the thing
was a nightmare--that nothing mattered--because she would wake up presently--so
she need not try to hide.
"But in a
nightmare one has no pain. It is real and I must go somewhere," she said,
after the foot was moved. Where could she go? She had not looked at the place
as she rode up. She had only half-consciously seen the spinney. Nigel was
swearing at the horses. Having got Childe Harold into the shed, there seemed to
be nothing to fasten his bridle to. And he had yet to bring his own horse in
and secure him. She must get away somewhere before the delay was over.
How dark it was
growing! Thank God for that again! What was the rather high, dark object she
could trace in the dimness near the hedge? It was sharply pointed, is if it
were a narrow tent. Her heart began to beat like a drum as she recalled
something. It was the shape of the sort of wigwam structure made of hop poles,
after they were taken from the fields. If there was space between it and the
hedge--even a narrow space--and she could crouch there? Nigel was furious because
Childe Harold was backing, plunging, and snorting dangerously. She halted
forward, shutting her teeth in her terrible pain. She could scarcely see, and
did not recognise that near the wigwam was a pile of hop poles laid on top of
each other horizontally. It was not quite as high as the hedge whose dark
background prevented its being seen. Only a few steps more. No, she was
awake--in a nightmare one felt only terror, not pain.
"You, who died
to-day," she murmured.
She saw the horizontal
poles too late. One of them had rolled from its place and lay on the ground,
and she trod on it, was thrown forward against the heap, and, in her blind
effort to recover herself, slipped and fell into a narrow, grassed hollow
behind it, clutching at the hedge. The great French doctor had not been quite
right. For the first time in her life she felt herself sinking into bottomless
darkness--which was what happened to people when they fainted.
When she opened her
eyes she could see nothing, because on one side of her rose the low mass of the
hop poles, and on the other was the long-untrimmed hedge, which had thrown out
a thick, sheltering growth and curved above her like a penthouse. Was she
awakening, after all? No, because the pain was awakening with her, and she
could hear, what seemed at first to be quite loud sounds. She could not have
been unconscious long, for she almost immediately recognised that they were the
echo of a man's hurried foot-steps upon the bare wooden stairway, leading to
the bedrooms in the empty house. Having secured the horses, Nigel had returned
to the cottage, and, finding her gone had rushed to the upper floor in search
of her. He was calling her name angrily, his voice resounding in the emptiness
of the rooms.
"Betty; don't play
the fool with me!"
She cautiously drew
herself further under cover, making sure that no end of her habit remained in
sight. The over-growth of the hedge was her salvation. If she had seen the spot
by daylight, she would not have thought it a possible place of concealment.
Once she had read an
account of a woman's frantic flight from a murderer who was hunting her to her
death, while she slipped from one poor hiding place to another, sometimes
crouching behind walls or bushes, sometimes lying flat in long grass, once wading
waist-deep through a stream, and at last finding a miserable little fastness,
where she hid shivering for hours, until her enemy gave up his search. One
never felt the reality of such histories, but there was actually a sort of
parallel in this. Mad and crude things were let loose, and the world of
ordinary life seemed thousands of miles away.
She held her breath,
for he was leaving the house by the front door. She heard his footsteps on the
bricked path, and then in the lane. He went to the road, and the sound of his
feet died away for a few moments. Then she heard them returning--he was back in
the lane--on the brick path, and stood listening or, perhaps, reflecting. He
muttered something exclamatory, and she heard a match struck, and shortly afterwards
he moved across the garden patch towards the little spinney. He had thought of
it, as she had believed he would. He would not think of this place, and in the
end he might get tired or awakened to a sense of his lurid folly, and realise
that it would be safer for him to go back to Stornham with some clever lie,
trusting to his belief that there existed no girl but would shrink from telling
such a story in connection with a man who would brazenly deny it with
contemptuous dramatic detail. If he would but decide on this, she would be
safe--and it would be so like him that she dared to hope. But, if he did not,
she would lie close, even if she must wait until morning, when some labourer's
cart would surely pass, and she would hear it jolting, and drag herself out,
and call aloud in such a way that no man could be deaf. There was more room
under her hedge than she had thought, and she found that she could sit up, by
clasping her knees and bending her head, while she listened to every sound,
even to the rustle of the grass in the wind sweeping across the marsh.
She moved very
gradually and slowly, and had just settled into utter motionlessness when she
realised that he was coming back through the garden--the straggling currant and
gooseberry bushes were being trampled through.
"Betty, go
home," Rosalie had pleaded. "Go home--go home." And she had
refused, because she could not desert her.
She held her breath and
pressed her hand against her side, because her heart beat, as it seemed to her,
with an actual sound. He moved with unsteady steps from one point to another,
more than once he stumbled, and his angry oath reached her; at last he was so
near her hiding place that his short hard breathing was a distinct sound. A
moment later he spoke, raising his voice, which fact brought to her a rush of
relief, through its signifying that he had not even guessed her nearness.
"My dear
Betty," he said, "you have the pluck of the devil, but circumstances
are too much for you. You are not on the road, and I have been through the
spinney. Mere logic convinces me that you cannot be far away. You may as well
give the thing up. It will be better for you."
"You who died
to-day--do not leave me," was Betty's inward cry, and she dropped her face
on her knees.
"I am not a
pleasant-tempered fellow, as you know, and I am losing my hold on myself. The
wind is blowing the mist away, and there will be a moon. I shall find you, my
good girl, in half an hour's time--and then we shall be jolly well even."
She had not dropped her
whip, and she held it tight. If, when the moonlight revealed the pile of hop
poles to him, he suspected and sprang at them to tear them away, she would be
given strength to make one spring, even in her agony, and she would strike at
his eyes--awfully, without one touch of compunction--she would strike--strike.
There was a brief
silence, and then a match was struck again, and almost immediately she inhaled
the fragrance of an excellent cigar.
"I am going to
have a comfortable smoke and stroll about --always within sight and hearing. I
daresay you are watching me, and wondering what will happen when I discover
you, I can tell you what will happen. You are not a hysterical girl, but you
will go into hysterics--and no one will hear you."
(All the power of
her--body and soul--in one leap on him and then a lash that would cut to the
bone. And it was not a nightmare--and Rosy was at Stornham, and her father
looking over steamer lists and choosing his staterooms.)
He walked about slowly,
the scent of his cigar floating behind him. She noticed, as she had done more
than once before, that he seemed to slightly drag one foot, and she wondered
why. The wind was blowing the mist away, and there was a faint growing of
light. The moon was not full, but young, and yet it would make a difference.
But the upper part of the hedge grew thick and close to the heap of wood, and,
but for her fall, she would never have dreamed of the refuge.
She could only guess at
his movements, but his footsteps gave some clue. He was examining the ground in
as far as the darkness would allow. He went into the shed and round about it,
he opened the door of the tiny coal lodge, and looked again into the small back
kitchen. He came near--nearer --so near once that, bending sidewise, she could
have put out a hand and touched him. He stood quite still, then made a step or
so away, stood still again, and burst into a laugh once more.
"Oh, you are here,
are you?" he said. "You are a fine big girl to be able to crowd
yourself into a place like that!"
Hot and cold dew stood
out on her forehead and made her hair damp as she held her whip hard.
"Come out, my
dear!" alluringly. "It is not too soon. Or do you prefer that I
should assist you?"
Her heart stood quite
still--quite. He was standing by the wigwam of hop poles and thought she had
hidden herself inside it. Her place under the hedge he had not even glanced at.
She knew he bent down
and thrust his arm into the wigwam, for his fury at the result expressed itself
plainly enough. That he had made a fool of himself was worse to him than all
else. He actually wheeled about and strode away to the house.
Because minutes seemed
hours, she thought he was gone long, but he was not away for twenty minutes. He
had, in fact, gone into the bare front room again, and sitting upon the box
near the hearth, let his head drop in his hands and remained in this position
thinking. In the end he got up and went out to the shed where he had left the
horses.
Betty was feeling that
before long she might find herself making that strange swoop into the darkness
of space again, and that it did not matter much, as one apparently lay quite
still when one was unconscious--when she heard that one horse was being led out
into the lane. What did that mean? Had he got tired of the chase--as the other
man did--and was he going away because discomfort and fatigue had cooled and
disgusted him--perhaps even made him feel that he was playing the part of a
sensational idiot who was laying himself open to derision? That would be like
him, too.
Presently she heard his
footsteps once more, but he did not come as near her as before--in fact, he
stood at some yards' distance when he stopped and spoke--in quite a new manner.
"Betty," his
tone was even cynically cool, "I shall stalk you no more. The chase is at
an end. I think I have taken all out of you I intended to. Perhaps it was a bad
joke and was carried too far. I wanted to prove to you that there were
circumstances which might be too much even for a young woman from New York. I
have done it. Do you suppose I am such a fool as to bring myself within reach
of the law? I am going away and will send assistance to you from the next house
I pass. I have left some matches and a few broken sticks on the hearth in the
cottage. Be a sensible girl. Limp in there and build yourself a fire as soon as
you hear me gallop away. You must be chilled through. Now I am going."
He tramped across the
bit of garden, down the brick path, mounted his horse and put it to a gallop at
once. Clack, clack, clack--clacking fainter and fainter into the distance--and
he was gone.
When she realised that
the thing was true, the effect upon her of her sense of relief was that the
growing likelihood of a second swoop into darkness died away, but one curious
sob lifted her chest as she leaned back against the rough growth behind her. As
she changed her position for a better one she felt the jagged pain again and
knew that in the tenseness of her terror she had actually for some time felt
next to nothing of her hurt. She had not even been cold, for the hedge behind
and over her and the barricade before had protected her from both wind and
rain. The grass beneath her was not damp for the same reason. The weary thought
rose in her mind that she might even lie down and sleep. But she pulled herself
together and told herself that this was like the temptation of believing in the
nightmare. He was gone, and she had a respite--but was it to be anything more?
She did not make any attempt to leave her place of concealment, remembering the
strange things she had learned in watching him, and the strange terror in which
Rosalie lived.
"One never knows
what he will do next; I will not stir," she said through her teeth.
"No, I will not stir from here."
And she did not, but
sat still, while the pain came back to her body and the anguish to her
heart--and sometimes such heaviness that her head dropped forward upon her knees
again, and she fell into a stupefied half-doze.
From one such doze she
awakened with a start, hearing a slight click of the gate. After it, there were
several seconds of dead silence. It was the slightness of the click which was
startling--if it had not been caused by the wind, it had been caused by
someone's having cautiously moved it--and this someone wishing to make a
soundless approach had immediately stood still and was waiting. There was only
one person who would do that. By this time, the mist being blown away, the
light of the moon began to make a growing clearness. She lifted her hand and
delicately held aside a few twigs that she might look out.
She had been quite
right in deciding not to move. Nigel Anstruthers had come back, and after his
pause turned, and avoiding the brick path, stole over the grass to the cottage
door. His going had merely been an inspiration to trap her, and the wood and
matches had been intended to make a beacon light for him. That was like him, as
well. His horse he had left down the road.
But the relief of his
absence had been good for her, and she was able to check the shuddering fit
which threatened her for a moment. The next, her ears awoke to a new sound.
Something was stumbling heavily about the patch of garden--some animal. A
cropping of grass, a snorting breath, and more stumbling hoofs, and she knew
that Childe Harold had managed to loosen his bridle and limp out of the shed.
The mere sense of his nearness seemed a sort of protection.
He had limped and stumbled
to the front part of the garden before Nigel heard him. When he did hear, he
came out of the house in the humour of a man the inflaming of whose mood has
been cumulative; Childe Harold's temper also was not to be trifled with. He
threw up his head, swinging the bridle out of reach; he snorted, and even
reared with an ugly lashing of his forefeet.
"Good boy!"
whispered Betty. "Do not let him take you --do not!"
If he remained where he
was he would attract attention if anyone passed by. "Fight, Childe Harold,
be as vicious as you choose--do not allow yourself to be dragged back."
And fight he did, with
an ugliness of temper he had never shown before--with snortings and tossed head
and lashed--out heels, as if he knew he was fighting to gain time and with a
purpose.
But in the midst of the
struggle Nigel Anstruthers stopped suddenly. He had stumbled again, and risen
raging and stained with damp earth. Now he stood still, panting for breath--as
still as he had stood after the click of the gate. Was he--listening? What was
he listening to? Had she moved in her excitement, and was it possible he had
caught the sound? No, he was listening to something else. Far up the road it
echoed, but coming nearer every moment, and very fast. Another horse--a big one--galloping
hard. Whosoever it was would pass this place; it could only be a man--God grant
that he would not go by so quickly that his attention would not be arrested by
a shriek! Cry out she must--and if he did not hear and went galloping on his
way she would have betrayed herself and be lost.
She bit off a groan by
biting her lip.
"You who died
to-day--now--now!"
Nearer and nearer. No
human creature could pass by a thing like this--it would not be possible. And
Childe Harold, backing and fighting, scented the other horse and neighed
fiercely and high. The rider was slackening his pace; he was near the lane. He
had turned into it and stopped. Now for her one frantic cry--but before she
could gather power to give it forth, the man who had stopped had flung himself
from his saddle and was inside the garden speaking. A big voice and a clear
one, with a ringing tone of authority.
"What are you
doing here? And what is the matter with Miss Vanderpoel's horse?" it
called out.
Now there was danger of
the swoop into the darkness-- great danger--though she clutched at the hedge
that she might feel its thorns and hold herself to the earth.
"You!" Nigel
Anstruthers cried out. "You!" and flung forth a shout of laughter.
"Where is
she?" fiercely. "Lady Anstruthers is terrified. We have been
searching for hours. Only just now I heard on the marsh that she had been seen
to ride this way. Where is she, I say?"
A strong, angry,
earthly voice--not part of the melodrama-- not part of a dream, but a voice she
knew, and whose sound caused her heart to leap to her throat, while she
trembled from head to foot, and a light, cold dampness broke forth on her skin.
Something had been a dream--her wild, desolate ride-- the slew tolling; for the
voice which commanded with such human fierceness was that of the man for whom
the heavy bell had struck forth from the church tower.
Sir Nigel recovered
himself brilliantly. Not that he did not recognise that he had been a fool
again and was in a nasty place; but it was not for the first time in his life,
and he had learned how to brazen himself out of nasty places.
"My dear Mount Dunstan,"
he answered with tolerant irritation, "I have been having a devil of a
time with female hysterics. She heard the bell toll and ran away with the idea
that it was for you, and paid you the compliment of losing her head. I came on
her here when she had ridden her horse half to death and they had both come a
cropper. Confound women's hysterics! I could do nothing with her. When I left
her for a moment she ran away and hid herself. She is concealed somewhere on
the place or has limped off on to the marsh. I wish some New York millionairess
would work herself into hysteria on my humble account."
"Those are
lies," Mount Dunstan answered--" every damned one of them!"
He wheeled around to
look about him, attracted by a sound, and in the clearing moonlight saw a
figure approaching which might have risen from the earth, so far as he could
guess where it had come from. He strode over to it, and it was Betty
Vanderpoel, holding her whip in a clenched hand and showing to his eagerness
such hunted face and eyes as were barely human. He caught her unsteadiness to
support it, and felt her fingers clutch at the tweed of his coatsleeve and move
there as if the mere feeling of its rough texture brought heavenly comfort to
her and gave her strength.
"Yes, they are lies,
Lord Mount Dunstan," she panted. "He said that he meant to get what
he called 'even' with me. He told me I could not get away from him and that no
one would hear me if I cried out for help. I have hidden like some hunted
animal." Her shaking voice broke, and she held the cloth of his sleeve
tightly. "You are alive--alive!" with a sudden sweet wildness.
"But it is true the bell tolled! While I was crouching in the dark I
called to you--who died to-day--to stand between us!"
The man absolutely
shuddered from head to foot.
"I was alive, and
you see I heard you and came," he answered hoarsely.
He lifted her in his
arms and carried her into the cottage. Her cheek felt the enrapturing roughness
of his tweed shoulder as he did it. He laid her down on the couch of hay and
turned away.
"Don't move,"
he said. "I will come back. You are safe."
If there had been more
light she would have seen that his jaw was set like a bulldog's, and there was
a red spark in his eyes--a fearsome one. But though she did not clearly see,
she knew, and the nearness of the last hours swept away all relenting.
Nigel Anstruthers
having discreetly waited until the two had passed into the house, and feeling
that a man would be an idiot who did not remove himself from an atmosphere so
highly charged, was making his way toward the lane and was, indeed, halfway
through the gate when heavy feet were behind him and a grip of ugly strength
wrenched him backward.
"Your horse is
cropping the grass where you left him, but you are not going to him," said
a singularly meaning voice. "You are coming with me."
Anstruthers endeavoured
to convince himself that he did not at that moment turn deadly sick and that
the brute would not make an ass of himself.
"Don't be a bally
fool!" he cried out, trying to tear himself free.
The muscular hand on
his shoulder being reinforced by another, which clutched his collar, dragged
him back, stumbling ignominiously through the gooseberry bushes towards the
cart-shed. Betty lying upon her bed of hay heard the scuffling, mingled with
raging and gasping curses. Childe Harold, lifting his head from his cropping of
the grass, looked after the violently jerking figures and snorted slightly,
snuffing with dilated red nostrils. As a war horse scenting blood and battle,
he was excited.
When Mount Dunstan got
his captive into the shed the blood which had surged in Red Godwyn's veins was
up and leaping. Anstruthers, his collar held by a hand with fingers of iron,
writhed about and turned a livid, ghastly face upon his captor.
"You have twice my
strength and half my age, you beast and devil!" he foamed in a half
shriek, and poured forth frightful blasphemies.
"That counts
between man and man, but not between vermin and executioner," gave back
Mount Dunstan.
The heavy whip, flung
upward, whistled down through the air, cutting through cloth and linen as
though it would cut through flesh to bone.
"By God!"
shrieked the writhing thing he held, leaping like a man who has been shot.
"Don't do that again! Damn you!" as the unswerving lash cut down
again--again.
What followed would not
be good to describe. Betty through the open door heard wild and awful
things--and more than once a sound as if a dog were howling.
When the thing was
over, one of the two--his clothes cut to ribbons, his torn white linen exposed,
lay, a writhing, huddled worm, hiccoughing frenzied sobs upon the earth in a
corner of the cart-shed. The other man stood over him, breathless and white,
but singularly exalted.
"You won't want
your horse to-night, because you can't use him," he said. "I shall
put Miss Vanderpoel's saddle upon him and ride with her back to Stornham. You
think you are cut to pieces, but you are not, and you'll get over it. I'll ask
you to mark, however, that if you open your foul mouth to insinuate lies
concerning either Lady Anstruthers or her sister I will do this thing again in
public some day--on the steps of your club--and do it more thoroughly."
He walked into the
cottage soon afterwards looking, to Betty Vanderpoel's eyes, pale and
exceptionally big, and also more a man than it is often given even to the most
virile male creature to look--and he walked to the side of her resting place
and stood there looking down.
"I thought I heard
a dog howl," she said.
"You did hear a
dog howl," he answered. He said no other word, and she asked no further
question. She knew what he had done, and he was well aware that she knew it.
There was a long,
strangely tense silence. The light of the moon was growing. She made at first
no effort to rise, but lay still and looked up at him from under splendid
lifted lashes, while his own gaze fell into the depth of hers like a plummet
into a deep pool. This continued for almost a full minute, when he turned
quickly away and walked to the hearth, indrawing a heavy breath.
He could not endure
that which beset him; it was unbearable, because her eyes had maddeningly
seemed to ask him some wistful question. Why did she let her loveliness so call
to him. She was not a trifler who could play with meanings. Perhaps she did not
know what her power was. Sometimes he could believe that beautiful women did
not.
In a few moments,
almost before he could reach her, she was rising, and when she got up she
supported herself against the open door, standing in the moonlight. If he was
pale, she was pale also, and her large eyes would not move from his face, so
drawing him that he could not keep away from her.
"Listen," he
broke out suddenly. "Penzance told me-- warned me--that some time a moment
would come which would be stronger than all else in a man--than all else in the
world. It has come now. Let me take you home."
"Than what
else?" she said slowly, and became even paler than before.
He strove to release
himself from the possession of the moment, and in his struggle answered with a
sort of savagery.
"Than
scruple--than power--even than a man's determination and decent pride."
"Are you
proud?" she half whispered quite brokenly. "I am not--since I waited
for the ringing of the church bell-- since I heard it toll. After that the
world was empty--and it was as empty of decent pride as of everything else.
There was nothing left. I was the humblest broken thing on earth."
"You!" he
gasped. "Do you know I think I shall go mad directly perhaps it is
happening now. You were humble and broken--your world was empty!
Because----?"
"Look at me, Lord
Mount Dunstan," and the sweetest voice in the world was a tender, wild
little cry to him. "Oh look at me!"
He caught her
out-thrown hands and looked down into the beautiful passionate soul of her. The
moment had come, and the tidal wave rising to its height swept all the common
earth away when, with a savage sob, he caught and held her close and hard
against that which thudded racing in his breast.
And they stood and
swayed together, folded in each other's arms, while the wind from the marshes
lifted its voice like an exulting human thing as it swept about them.
THE exulting wind had
swept the clouds away, and the moon rode in a dark blue sea of sky, making the
night light purely clear, when they drew a little apart, that they might better
see the wonderfulness in each other's faces. It was so mysteriously great a
thing that they felt near to awe.
"I fought too
long. I wore out my body's endurance, and now I am quaking like a boy. Red
Godwyn did not begin his wooing like this. Forgive me," Mount Dunstan said
at last.
"Do you
know," with lovely trembling lips and voice, "that for
long--long--you have been unkind to me?"
It was merely human
that he should swiftly enfold her again, and answer with his lips against her
cheek.
"Unkind! Unkind!
Oh, the heavenly woman's sweetness of your telling me so--the heavenly
sweetness of it!" he exclaimed passionately and low. "And I was one
of those who are 'by the roadside everywhere,' an unkempt, raging beggar, who
might not decently ask you for a crust.
"It was all wrong--wrong!"
she whispered back to him, and he poured forth the tenderest, fierce words of
confession and prayer, and she listened, drinking them in, with now and then a
soft sob pressed against the roughness of the enrapturing tweed. For a space
they had both forgotten her hurt, because there are other things than terror
which hypnotise pain. Mount Dunstan was to be praised for remembering it first.
He must take her back to Stornham and her sister without further delay.
"I will put your
saddle on Anstruthers' horse, or mine, and lift you to your seat. There is a
farmhouse about two miles away, where I will take you first for food and
warmth. Perhaps it would be well for you to stay there to rest for an hour or
so, and I will send a message to Lady Anstruthers."
"I will go to the
place, and eat and drink what you advise," she answered. "But I beg
you to take me back to Rosalie without delay. I feel that I must see her."
"I feel that I
must see her, too," he said. "But for her--God bless her!" he
added, after his sudden pause.
Betty knew that the
exclamation meant strong feeling, and that somehow in the past hours Rosalie
had awakened it. But it was only when, after their refreshment at the farm,
they had taken horse again and were riding homeward together, that she heard
from him what had passed between them.
"All that has led
to this may seem the merest chance," he said. "But surely a strange
thing has come about. I know that without understanding it." He leaned
over and touched her hand. "You, who are Life--without understanding I
ride here beside you, believing that you brought me back."
"I tried--I tried!
With all my strength, I tried."
"After I had seen
your sister to-day, I guessed--I knew. But not at first. I was not ill of the
fever, as excited rumour had it; but I was ill, and the doctors and the vicar
were alarmed. I had fought too long, and I was giving up, as I have seen the
poor fellows in the ballroom give up. If they were not dragged back they
slipped out of one's hands. If the fever had developed, all would have been
over quickly. I knew the doctors feared that, and I am ashamed to say I was
glad of it. But, yesterday, in the morning, when I was letting myself go with a
morbid pleasure in the luxurious relief of it--something reached me--some slow
rising call to effort and life."
She turned towards him
in her saddle, listening, her lips parted.
"I did not even
ask myself what was happening, but I began to be conscious of being drawn back,
and to long intensely to see you again. I was gradually filled with a restless
feeling that you were near me, and that, though I could not physically hear
your voice, you were surely calling to me. It was the thing which could not
be--but it was--and because of it I could not let myself drift."
"I did call you! I
was on my knees in the church asking to be forgiven if I prayed mad
prayers--but praying the same thing over and over. The villagers were kneeling
there, too. They crowded in, leaving everything else. You are their hero, and
they were in deep earnest."
His look was gravely
pondering. His life had not made a mystic of him--it was Penzance who was the
mystic --but he felt himself perplexed by mysteriously suggestive thought.
"I was brought
back--I was brought back," he said. "In the afternoon I fell asleep
and slept profoundly until the morning. When I awoke, I realised that I was a
remade man. The doctors were almost awed when I first spoke to them. Old Dr. Fenwick
died later, and, after I had heard about it, the church bell was tolled. It was
heard at Weaver's farmhouse, and, as everybody had been excitedly waiting for
the sound, it conveyed but one idea to them--and the boy was sent racing across
the fields to Stornham village. Dearest! Dearest!" he exclaimed.
She had bowed her head
and burst into passionate sobbing. Because she was not of the women who wept,
her moment's passion was strong and bitter.
"It need not have
been!" she shuddered. "One cannot bear it--because it need not have
been!"
"Stop your horse a
moment," he said, reining in his own, while, with burning eyes and
swelling throat, he held and steadied her. But he did not know that neither her
sister nor her father had ever seen her in such mood, and that she had never so
seen herself.
"You shall not
remember it," he said to her.
"I will not,"
she answered, recovering herself. "But for one moment all the awful hours
rushed back. Tell me the rest."
"We did not know
that the blunder had been made until a messenger from Dole rode over to inquire
and bring messages of condolence. Then we understood what had occurred and I
own a sort of frenzy seized me. I knew I must see you, and, though the doctors
were horribly nervous, they dare not hold me back. The day before it would not
have been believed that I could leave my room. You were crying out to me, and
though I did not know, I was answering, body and soul. Penzance knew I must
have my way when I spoke to him--mad as it seemed. When I rode through Stornham
village, more than one woman screamed at sight of me. I shall not be able to
blot out of my mind your sister's face. She will tell you what we said to each
other. I rode away from the Court quite half mad----" his voice became
very gentle, "because of something she had told me in the first wild
moments."
Lady Anstruthers had
spent the night moving restlessly from one room to another, and had not been to
bed when they rode side by side up the avenue in the early morning sunlight. An
under keeper, crossing the park a few hundred yards above them, after one
glance, dashed across the sward to the courtyard and the servants' hall. The
news flashed electrically through the house, and Rosalie, like a small ghost,
came out upon the steps as they reined in. Though her lips moved, she could not
speak aloud, as she watched Mount Dunstan lift her sister from her horse.
"Childe Harold
stumbled and I hurt my foot," said Betty, trying to be calm.
"I knew he would
find you!" Rosalie answered quite faintly. "I knew you would!"
turning to Mount Dunstan, adoring him with all the meaning of her small paled
face.
She would have been
afraid of her memory of what she had said in the strange scene which had taken
place before them a few hours ago, but almost before either of the two spoke
she knew that a great gulf had been crossed in some one inevitable, though
unforeseen, leap. How it had been taken, when or where, did not in the least
matter, when she clung to Betty and Betty clung to her.
After a few moments of
moved and reverent waiting, the admirable Jennings stepped forward and
addressed her in lowered voice.
"There's been
little sleep in the village this night, my lady," he murmured earnestly.
"I promised they should have a sign, with your permission. If the flag was
run up--they're all looking out, and they'd know."
"Run it up,
Jennings," Lady Anstruthers answered, "at once."
When it ran up the
staff on the tower and fluttered out in gay answering to the morning breeze,
children in the village began to run about shouting, men and women appeared at
cottage doors, and more than one cap was thrown up in the air. But old Doby and
Mrs. Welden, who had been waiting for hours, standing by Mrs. Welden's gate,
caught each other's dry, trembling old hands and began to cry.
The Broadmorlands
divorce scandal, having made conversation during a season quite forty years
before Miss Vanderpoel appeared at Stornham Court, had been laid upon a lower
shelf and buried beneath other stories long enough to be forgotten. Only one
individual had not forgotten it, and he was the Duke of Broadmorlands himself,
in whose mind it remained hideously clear. He had been a young man, honestly
and much in love when it first revealed itself to him, and for a few months he
had even thought it might end by being his death, notwithstanding that he was
strong and in first-rate physical condition. He had been a fine, hearty young
man of clean and rather dignified life, though he was not understood to be
brilliant of mind. Privately he had ideals connected with his rank and name
which he was not fluent enough clearly to express. After he had realised that
he should not die of the public humiliation and disgrace, which seemed to point
him out as having been the kind of gullible fool it is scarcely possible to
avoid laughing at--or, so it seemed to him in his heart-seared frenzy--he
thought it not improbable that he should go mad. He was harried so by memories
of lovely little soft ways of Edith's (his wife's name was Edith), of the
pretty sound of her laugh, and of her innocent, girlish habit of kneeling down
by her bedside every night and morning to say her prayers. This had so touched
him that he had sometimes knelt down to say his, too, saying to her, with
slight awkward boyishness, that a fellow who had a sort of angel for his wife
ought to do his best to believe in the things she believed in.
"And all the
time----!" a devil who laughed used to snigger in his ear over and over
again, until it was almost like the ticking of a clock during the worst months,
when it did not seem probable that a man could feel his brain whirling like a
Catherine wheel night and day, and still manage to hold on and not reach the
point of howling and shrieking and dashing his skull against wails and
furniture.
But that passed in
time, and he told himself that he passed with it. Since then he had lived
chiefly at Broadmorlands Castle, and was spoken of as a man who had become
religious, which was not true, but, having reached the decision that religion
was good for most people, he paid a good deal of attention to his church and
schools, and was rigorous in the matter of curates.
He had passed seventy
now, and was somewhat despotic and haughty, because a man who is a Duke and
does not go out into the world to rub against men of his own class and others,
but lives altogether on a great and splendid estate, saluted by every creature
he meets, and universally obeyed and counted before all else, is not unlikely
to forget that he is a quite ordinary human being, and not a sort of monarch.
He had done his best to
forget Edith, who had soon died of being a shady curate's wife in Australia,
but he had not been able to encompass it. He used, occasionally, to dream she
was kneeling by the bed in her childish nightgown saying her prayers aloud, and
would waken crying--as he had cried in those awful young days. Against social
immorality or village light-mindedness he was relentlessly savage. He allowed
for no palliating or exonerating facts. He began to see red when he heard of or
saw lightness in a married woman, and the outside world frequently said that
this characteristic bordered on monomania.
Nigel Anstruthers,
having met him once or twice, had at first been much amused by him, and had
even, by giving him an adroitly careful lead, managed to guide him into an
expression of opinion. The Duke, who had heard men of his class discussed, did
not in the least like him, notwithstanding his sympathetic suavity of manner
and his air of being intelligently impressed by what he heard. Not long afterwards,
however, it transpired that the aged rector of Broadmorlands having died, the
living had been given to Ffolliott, and, hearing it, Sir Nigel was not slow to
conjecture that quite decently utilisable tools would lie ready to his hand if
circumstances pressed; this point of view, it will be seen, being not
illogical. A man who had not been a sort of hermit would have heard enough of
him to be put on his guard, and one who was a man of the world, looking
normally on existence, would have reasoned coolly, and declined to concern
himself about what was not his affair. But a parallel might be drawn between
Broadmorlands and some old lion wounded sorely in his youth and left to drag
his unhealed torment through the years of age. On one subject he had no point
of view but his own, and could be roused to fury almost senseless by wholly
inadequately supported facts. He presented exactly the material required--and
that in mass.
About the time the flag
was run up on the tower at Stornham Court a carter, driving whistling on the
road near the deserted cottage, was hailed by a man who was walking slowly a
few yards ahead of him. The carter thought that he was a tramp, as his clothes
were plainly in bad case, which seeing, his answer was an unceremonious grunt,
and it certainly did not occur to him to touch his forehead. A minute later,
however, he "got a start," as he related afterwards. The tramp was a
gentleman whose riding costume was torn and muddied, and who looked
"gashly," though he spoke with the manner and authority which Binns,
the carter, recognised as that of one of the "gentry" addressing a
day-labourer.
"How far is it
from here to Medham?" he inquired.
"Medham be about
four mile, sir," was the answer. "I be carryin' these 'taters there
to market."
"I want to get
there. I have met with an accident. My horse took fright at a pheasant starting
up rocketting under his nose. He threw me into a hedge and bolted. I'm badly
enough bruised to want to reach a town and see a doctor. Can you give me a lift?"
"That I will, sir,
ready enough," making room on the seat beside him. "You be bruised
bad, sir," he said sympathetically, as his passenger climbed to his place,
with a twisted face and uttering blasphemies under his breath.
"Damned
badly," he answered. "No bones broken, however."
"That cut on your
cheek and neck'll need plasterin', sir."
"That's a scratch.
Thorn bush," curtly.
Sympathy was plainly
not welcome. In fact Binns was soon of the opinion that here was an ugly
customer, gentleman or no gentleman. A jolting cart was, however, not the best
place for a man who seemed sore from head to foot, and done for out and out. He
sat and ground his teeth, as he clung to the rough seat in the attempt to
steady himself. He became more and more "gashly," and a certain awful
light in his eyes alarmed the carter by leaping up at every jolt. Binns was
glad when he left him at Medham Arms, and felt he had earned the half-sovereign
handed to him.
Four days Anstruthers
lay in bed in a room at the Inn. No one saw him but the man who brought him
food. He did not send for a doctor, because he did not wish to see one. He sent
for such remedies as were needed by a man who had been bruised by a fall from
his horse. He made no remark which could be considered explanatory, after he
had said irritably that a man was a fool to go loitering along on a nervous
brute who needed watching. Whatsoever happened was his own damned fault.
Through hours of day
and night he lay staring at the white-washed beams or the blue roses on the
wall paper. They were long hours, and filled with things not pleasant enough to
dwell on in detail. Physical misery which made a man writhe at times was not
the worst part of them. There were a thousand things less endurable. More than
once he foamed at the mouth, and recognised that he gibbered like a madman.
There was but one
memory which saved him from feeling that this was the very end of things. That
was the memory of Broadmorlands. While a man had a weapon left, even though it
could not save him, he might pay up with it--get almost even. The whole
Vanderpoel lot could be plunged neck deep in a morass which would leave mud
enough sticking to them, even if their money helped them to prevent its
entirely closing over their heads. He could attend to that, and, after he had
set it well going, he could get out. There were India, South Africa,
Australia--a dozen places that would do. And then he would remember Betty
Vanderpoel, and curse horribly under the bed clothes. It was the memory of
Betty which outdid all others in its power to torment.
On the morning of the
fifth day the Duke of Broadmorlands received a note, which he read with
somewhat annoyed curiosity. A certain Sir Nigel Anstruthers, whom it appeared
he ought to be able to recall, was in the neighbourhood, and wished to see him
on a parochial matter of interest. "Parochial matter" was vague, and
so was the Duke's recollection of the man who addressed him. If his memory served
him rightly, he had met him in a country house in Somersetshire, and had heard
that he was the acquaintance of the disreputable eldest son. What could a
person of that sort have to say of parochial matters? The Duke considered, and
then, in obedience to a rigorous conscience, decided that one ought, perhaps,
to give him half an hour.
There was that in the
intruder's aspect, when he arrived in the afternoon, which produced somewhat
the effect of shock. In the first place, a man in his unconcealable physical
condition had no right to be out of his bed. Though he plainly refused to admit
the fact, his manner of bearing himself erect, and even with a certain touch of
cool swagger, was, it was evident, achieved only by determined effort. He
looked like a man who had not yet recovered from some evil fever. Since the
meeting in Somersetshire he had aged more than the year warranted. Despite his
obstinate fight with himself it was obvious that he was horribly shaky. A
disagreeable scratch or cut, running from cheek to neck, did not improve his
personal appearance.
He pleased his host no
more than he had pleased him at their first encounter; he, in fact, repelled
him strongly, by suggesting a degree of abnormality of mood which was smoothed
over by an attempt at entire normality of manner. The Duke did not present an
approachable front as, after Anstruthers had taken a chair, he sat and examined
him with bright blue old eyes set deep on either side of a dominant nose and
framed over by white eyebrows. No, Nigel Anstruthers summed him up, it would
not be easy to open the matter with the old fool. He held himself magnificently
aloof, with that lack of modernity in his sense of place which, even at this
late day, sometimes expressed itself here and there in the manner of the feudal
survival.
"I am afraid you
have been ill," with rigid civility.
"A man feels
rather an outsider in confessing he has let his horse throw him into a hedge.
It was my own fault entirely. I allowed myself to forget that I was riding a dangerously
nervous brute. I was thinking of a painful and absorbing subject. I was badly
bruised and scratched, but that was all."
"What did your
doctor say?"
"That I was in
luck not to have broken my neck."
"You had better
have a glass of wine," touching a bell. "You do not look equal to any
exertion."
In gathering himself
together, Sir Nigel felt he was forced to use enormous effort. It had cost him
a gruesome physical struggle to endure the drive over to Broadmorlands, though
it was only a few miles from Medham. There had been something unnatural in the
exertion necessary to sit upright and keep his mind decently clear. That was
the worst of it. The fever and raging hours of the past days and nights had so
shaken him that he had become exhausted, and his brain was not alert. He was
not thinking rapidly, and several times he had lost sight of a point it was
important to remember. He grew hot and cold and knew his hands and voice shook,
as he answered. But, perhaps--he felt desperately--signs of emotion were not
bad.
"I am not quite
equal to exertion," he began slowly. "But a man cannot lie on his bed
while some things are undone-- a man cannot."
As the old Duke sat
upright, the blue eyes under his bent brows were startled, as well as curious.
Was the man going out of his mind about something? He looked rather like it,
with the dampness starting out on his haggard face, and the ugly look suddenly
stamped there. The fact was that the insensate fury which had possessed and
torn Anstruthers as he had writhed in his inn bedroom had sprung upon him again
in full force, and his weakness could not control it, though it would have been
wiser to hold it in check. He also felt frightfully ill, which filled him with
despair, and, through this fact, he lost sight of the effect he produced, as he
stood up, shaking all over.
"I come to you
because you are the one man who can most easily understand the thing I have
been concealing for a good many years."
The Duke was irritated.
Confound the objectionable idiot, what did he mean by taking that intimate tone
with a man who was not prepared to concern himself in his affairs?
"Excuse me,"
he said, holding up an authoritative hand, "are you going to make a
confession? I don't like such things. I prefer to be excused. Personal
confidences are not parochial matters."
"This one
is." And Sir Nigel was sickeningly conscious that he was putting the
statement rashly, while at the same time all better words escaped him. "It
is as much a parochial matter," losing all hold on his wits and
stammering, "as was--as was--the affair of--your wife."
It was the Duke who
stood up now, scarlet with anger. He sprang from his chair as if he had been a
young man in whom some insult had struck blazing fire.
"You--you
dare!" he shouted. "You insolent blackguard! You force your way in
here and dare--dare----!" And he clenched his fist, wildly shaking it.
Nigel Anstruthers,
staggering on his uncertain feet, would have shouted also, but could not,
though he tried, and he heard his own voice come forth brokenly.
"Yes, I dare!
I--your--my own--my----!"
Swaying and tottering,
he swung round to the chair he had left, and fell into it, even while the old
Duke, who stood raging before him, started back in outraged amazement. What was
the fellow doing? Was he making faces at him? The drawn malignant mouth and
muscles suggested it. Was he a lunatic, indeed? But the sense of disgusted
outrage changed all at once to horror, as, with a countenance still more
hideously livid and twisted, his visitor slid helplessly from his seat and lay
a huddling heap of clothes on the floor.
WHEN Mr. Vanderpoel
landed in England his wife was with him. This quiet-faced woman, who was known
to be on her way to join her daughter in England, was much discussed, envied,
and glanced at, when she promenaded the deck with her husband, or sat in her
chair softly wrapped in wonderful furs. Gradually, during the past months, she
had been told certain modified truths connected with her elder daughter's
marriage. They had been painful truths, but had been so softened and expurgated
of their worst features that it had been possible to bear them, when one
realised that they did not, at least, mean that Rosy had forgotten or ceased to
love her mother and father, or wish to visit her home. The steady clearness of
foresight and readiness of resource which were often spoken of as being
specially characteristic of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, were all required, and
employed with great tenderness, in the management of this situation. As little
as it was possible that his wife should know, was the utmost she must hear and
be hurt by. Unless ensuing events compelled further revelations, the rest of it
should be kept from her. As further protection, her husband had frankly asked
her to content herself with a degree of limited information.
"I have meant all
our lives, Annie, to keep from you the unpleasant things a woman need not be
troubled with," he had said. "I promised myself I would when you were
a girl. I knew you would face things, if I needed your help, but you were a
gentle little soul, like Rosy, and I never intended that you should bear what
was useless. Anstruthers was a blackguard, and girls of all nations have
married blackguards before. When you have Rosy safe at home, and know nothing
can hurt her again, you both may feel you would like to talk it over. Till then
we won't go into detail. You trust me, I know, when I tell you that you shall
hold Rosy in your arms very soon. We may have something of a fight, but there
can only be one end to it in a country as decent as England. Anstruthers isn't
exactly what I should call an Englishman. Men rather like him are to be found
in two or three places." His good-looking, shrewd, elderly face lighted with
a fine smile. "My handsome Betty has saved us a good deal by carrying out
her fifteen-year-old plan of going to find her sister," he ended.
Before they landed they
had decided that Mrs. Vanderpoel should be comfortably established in a hotel
in London, and that after this was arranged, her husband should go to Stornham
Court alone. If Sir Nigel could be induced to listen to logic, Rosalie, her
child, and Betty should come at once to town.
"And, if he won't
listen to logic," added Mr. Vanderpoel, with a dry composure, "they
shall come just the same, my dear." And his wife put her arms round his
neck and kissed him because she knew what he said was quite true, and she
admired him--as she had always done--greatly.
But when the pilot came
on board and there began to stir in the ship the agreeable and exciting bustle
of the delivery of letters and welcoming telegrams, among Mr. Vanderpoel's many
yellow envelopes he opened one the contents of which caused him to stand still
for some moments--so still, indeed, that some of the bystanders began to touch
each other's elbows and whisper. He certainly read the message two or three
times before he folded it up, returned it to its receptacle, and walked gravely
to his wife's sitting-room.
"Reuben!" she
exclaimed, after her first look at him, "have you bad news? Oh, I hope
not!"
He came and sat down
quietly beside her, taking her hand.
"Don't be frightened,
Annie, my dear," he said. "I have just been reminded of a verse in
the Bible--about vengeance not belonging to mere human beings. Nigel
Anstruthers has had a stroke of paralysis, and it is not his first. Apparently,
even if he lies on his back for some months thinking of harm, he won't be able
to do it. He is finished."
When he was carried by
the express train through the country, he saw all that Betty had seen, though
the summer had passed, and there were neither green trees nor hedges. He knew
all that the long letters had meant of stirred emotion and affection, and he
was strongly moved, though his mind was full of many things. There were the
farmhouses, the square-towered churches, the red-pointed hop oasts, and the
village children. How distinctly she had made him see them! His Betty--his
splendid Betty! His heart beat at the thought of seeing her high, young black
head, and holding her safe in his arms again. Safe! He resented having used the
word, because there was a shock in seeming to admit the possibility that
anything in the universe could do wrong to her. Yet one man had been villain
enough to mean her harm, and to threaten her with it. He slightly shuddered as
he thought of how the man was finished--done for.
The train began to puff
more loudly, as it slackened its pace. It was drawing near to a rustic little
station, and, as it passed in, he saw a carriage standing outside, waiting on
the road, and a footman in a long coat, glancing into each window as the train
went by. Two or three country people were watching it intently. Miss
Vanderpoel's father was coming up from London on it. The stationmaster rushed
to open the carriage door, and the footman hastened forward, but a tall lovely
thing in grey was opposite the step as Mr. Vanderpoel descended it to the
platform. She did not recognise the presence of any other human being than
himself. For the moment she seemed to forget even the broad-shouldered man who
had plainly come with her. As Reuben S. Vanderpoel folded her in his arms, she
folded him and kissed him as he was not sure she had ever kissed him before.
"My splendid
Betty! My own fine girl!" he said.
And when she cried out
"Father! Father!" she bent and kissed the breast of his coat.
He knew who the big
young man was before she turned to present him.
"This is Lord
Mount Dunstan, father," she said. "Since Nigel was brought home, he
has been very good to us."
Reuben S. Vanderpoel
looked well into the man's eyes, as he shook hands with him warmly, and this
was what he said to himself:
"Yes, she's safe.
This is quite safe. It is to be trusted with the whole thing."
Not many days after her
husband's arrival at Stornham Court, Mrs. Vanderpoel travelled down from
London, and, during her journey, scarcely saw the wintry hedges and bare trees,
because, as she sat in her cushioned corner of the railway carriage, she was
inwardly offering up gentle, pathetically ardent prayers of gratitude. She was
the woman who prays, and the many sad petitions of the past years were being
answered at last. She was being allowed to go to Rosy-- whatsoever happened,
she could never be really parted from her girl again. She asked pardon many
times because she had not been able to be really sorry when she had heard of
her son-in-law's desperate condition. She could feel pity for him in his awful
case, she told herself, but she could not wish for the thing which perhaps she
ought to wish for. She had confided this to her husband with innocent, penitent
tears, and he had stroked her cheek, which had always been his comforting way
since they had been young things together.
"My dear," he
said, "if a tiger with hydrophobia were loose among a lot of decent
people--or indecent ones, for the matter of that--you would not feel it your
duty to be very sorry if, in springing on a group of them, he impaled himself
on an iron fence. Don't reproach yourself too much." And, though the
realism of the picture he presented was such as to make her exclaim, "No!
No!" there were still occasional moments when she breathed a request for
pardon if she was hard of heart--this softest of creatures human.
It was arranged by the
two who best knew and loved her that her meeting with Rosalie should have no
spectators, and that their first hour together should be wholly unbroken in upon.
"You have not seen
each other for so long," Betty said, when, on her arrival, she led her at
once to the morning-room where Rosy waited, pale with joy, but when the door
was opened, though the two figures were swept into each other's arms by one wild,
tremulous rush of movement, there were no sounds to be heard, only caught
breaths, until the door had closed again.
The talks which took
place between Mr. Vanderpoel and Lord Mount Dunstan were many and long, and
were of absorbing interest to both. Each presented to the other a new world,
and a type of which his previous knowledge had been but incomplete.
"I wonder,"
Mr. Vanderpoel said, in the course of one of them, "if my world appeals to
you as yours appeals to me. Naturally, from your standpoint, it scarcely seems
probable. Perhaps the up-building of large financial schemes presupposes a
certain degree of imagination. I am becoming a romantic New York man of
business, and I revel in it. Kedgers, for instance," with the smile which,
somehow, suggested Betty, "Kedgers and the Lilium Giganteum, Mrs. Welden
and old Doby threaten to develop into quite necessary factors in the scheme of
happiness. What Betty has felt is even more comprehensible than it seemed at
first."
They walked and rode
together about the countryside; when Mount Dunstan itself was swept clean of
danger, and only a few convalescents lingered to be taken care of in the huge
ballroom, they spent many days in going over the estate. The desolate beauty of
it appealed to and touched Mr. Vanderpoel, as it had appealed to and touched
his daughter, and, also, wakened in him much new and curious delight. But Mount
Dunstan, with a touch of his old obstinacy, insisted that he should ignore the
beauty, and look closely at less admirable things.
"You must see the
worst of this," he said. "You must understand that I can put no good
face upon things, that I offer nothing, because I have nothing to offer."
If he had not been
swept through and through by a powerful and rapturous passion, he would have
detested and abhorred these days of deliberate proud laying bare of the
nakedness of the land. But in the hours he spent with Betty Vanderpoel the
passion gave him knowledge of the things which, being elemental, do not concern
themselves with pride and obstinacy, and do not remember them. Too much had
ended, and too much begun, to leave space or thought for poor things. In their
eyes, when they were together, and even when they were apart, dwelt a glow
which was deeply moving to those who, looking on, were sufficiently profound of
thought to understand.
Watching the two
walking slowly side by side down the leafless avenue on a crystal winter day,
Mr. Vanderpoel conversed with the vicar, whom he greatly liked.
"A young man of
the name of Selden," he remarked, "told me more of this than he
knew."
"G. Selden,"
said the vicar, with affectionate smiling. "He is not aware that he was
largely concerned in the matter. In fact, without G. Selden, I do not know how,
exactly, we should have got on. How is he, nice fellow?"
"Extremely well,
and in these days in my employ. He is of the honest, indefatigable stuff which
makes its way."
His own smiles, as he
watched the two tall figures in the distance, settled into an expression of
speculative absorption, because he was reflecting upon profoundly interesting
matters.
"There is a great
primeval thing which sometimes--not often, only sometimes--occurs to two
people," he went on. "When it leaps into being, it is well if it is
not thwarted, or done to death. It has happened to my girl and Mount Dunstan.
If they had been two young tinkers by the roadside, they would have come
together, and defied their beggary. As it is, I recognise, as I sit here, that
the outcome of what is to be may reach far, and open up broad new ways."
"Yes," said
the vicar. "She will live here and fill a strong man's life with wonderful
human happiness--her splendid children will be born here, and among them will
be those who lead the van and make history." . . . . .
For some time Nigel
Anstruthers lay in his room at Stornham Court, surrounded by all of aid and
luxury that wealth and exalted medical science could gather about him.
Sometimes he lay a livid unconscious mask, sometimes his nurses and doctors
knew that in his hollow eyes there was the light of a raging half reason, and
they saw that he struggled to utter coherent sounds which they might
comprehend. This he never accomplished, and one day, in the midst of such an
effort, he was stricken dumb again, and soon afterwards sank into stillness and
died.
And the Shuttle in the
hand of Fate, through every hour of every day, and through the slow, deep
breathing of all the silent nights, weaves to and fro--to and fro--drawing with
it the threads of human life and thought which strengthen its web: and trace
the figures of its yet vague and uncompleted design.
THE END