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Title: The Shuttle

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Release Date: March 18, 2006 [EBook #506]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger





THE SHUTTLE

By Frances Hodgson Burnett




CONTENTS

     CHAPTER
     I.       THE WEAVING OF THE SHUTTLE
     II.      A LACK OF PERCEPTION
     III.     YOUNG LADY ANSTRUTHERS
     IV.      A MISTAKE OF THE POSTBOY'S
     V.       ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC
     VI.      AN UNFAIR ENDOWMENT
     VII.     ON BOARD THE "MERIDIANA"
     VIII.    THE SECOND-CLASS PASSENGER
     IX.      LADY JANE GREY
     X.       "IS LADY ANSTRUTHERS AT HOME?"
     XI.      "I THOUGHT YOU HAD ALL FORGOTTEN"
     XII.     UGHTRED
     XIII.    ONE OF THE NEW YORK DRESSES
     XIV.     IN THE GARDENS
     XV.      THE FIRST MAN
     XVI.     THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT
     XVII.    TOWNLINSON & SHEPPARD
     XVIII.   THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN
     XIX.     SPRING IN BOND STREET
     XX.      THINGS OCCUR IN STORNHAM VILLAGE
     XXI.     KEDGERS
     XXII.    ONE OF MR. VANDERPOEL'S LETTERS
     XXIII.   INTRODUCING G. SELDEN
     XXIV.    THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF STORNHAM
     XXV.     "WE BEGAN TO MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!"
     XXVI.    "WHAT IT MUST BE TO BE YOU--JUST YOU!"
     XXVII.   LIFE
     XXVIII.  SETTING THEM THINKING
     XXIX.    THE THREAD OF G. SELDEN
     XXX.     A RETURN
     XXXI.    NO, SHE WOULD NOT
     XXXII.   A GREAT BALL
     XXXIII.  FOR LADY JANE
     XXXIV.   RED GODWYN
     XXXV.    THE TIDAL WAVE
     XXXVI.   BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE
     XXXVII.  CLOSED CORRIDORS
     XXXVIII. AT SHANDY'S
     XXXIX.   ON THE MARSHES
     XL.      "DON'T GO ON WITH THIS"
     XLI.     SHE WOULD DO SOMETHING
     XLII.    IN THE BALLROOM
     XLIII.   HIS CHANCE
     XLIV.    A FOOTSTEP
     XLV.     THE PASSING BELL
     XLVI.    LISTENING
     XLVII.   "I HAVE NO WORD OR LOOK TO REMEMBER"
     XLVIII.  THE MOMENT
     XLIX.    AT STORNHAM AND AT BROADMORLANDS
     L.       THE PRIMEVAL THING





THE SHUTTLE




CHAPTER I

THE WEAVING OF THE SHUTTLE

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 re-discussed, 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
Elysees, 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 piece 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 wording 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 villainous 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?




CHAPTER II

A LACK OF PERCEPTION

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 tradespeople 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 embarrassment 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.



CHAPTER III

YOUNG LADY ANSTRUTHERS

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 endimanche at whatever
time of day you come across them."

"Oh, Nigel!" cried Rosy woefully. 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 Vanderpoel 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 appalling
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!"



CHAPTER IV

A MISTAKE OF THE POSTBOY'S

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 can't 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.




CHAPTER V

ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC

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 chateau
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 menage 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."



CHAPTER VI

AN UNFAIR ENDOWMENT

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 debutante 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 be 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."



CHAPTER VII

ON BOARD THE "MERIDIANA"

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.



CHAPTER VIII

THE SECOND-CLASS PASSENGER

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."




CHAPTER IX

LADY JANE GREY

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--Baggage-room," 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 passe. 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."




CHAPTER X

"IS LADY ANSTRUTHERS AT HOME?"

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."



CHAPTER XI

"I THOUGHT YOU HAD ALL FORGOTTEN."

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 woefulness.
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.



CHAPTER XII

UGHTRED

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."




CHAPTER XIII

ONE OF THE NEW YORK DRESSES

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
drawing-room 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 'm 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.



CHAPTER XIV

IN THE GARDENS

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.



CHAPTER XV

THE FIRST MAN

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 Anstruthers, 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.



CHAPTER XVI

THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT

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 role 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 Anstruthers' 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 villain! 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."



CHAPTER XVII

TOWNLINSON & SHEPPARD

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."



CHAPTER XVIII

THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN

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
cortege 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 ignominiously
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 countryside 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 last 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."



CHAPTER XIX

SPRING IN BOND STREET

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 ladyship's 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 sales people 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 attaches 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.





CHAPTER XX

THINGS OCCUR IN STORNHAM VILLAGE

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 dullness.
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.



CHAPTER XXI

KEDGERS

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 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."



CHAPTER XXII

ONE OF MR. VANDERPOEL'S LETTERS

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 daguerreotype 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
forgotten 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 perceptions, 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. T