“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 las
t 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.
The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett Page 19