The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

  “Oh!” The exclamation was a faint one, but it was an exclamation. “I hope that means nothing really serious,” Miss Vanderpoel added. “Everyone will hope so.”

  “Yes, miss,” said Mr. Tewson, deftly twisting the string round the package he was tying up for her. “A sad reward it would be if he lost his life after doing all he has done. A sad reward! But there’d be a good deal of sympathy.”

  The small package contained trifles of sewing and knitting materials she was going to take to Mrs. Welden, and she held out her hand for it. She knew she did not smile quite naturally as she said her good-morning to Tewson. She went out into the pale amber sunshine and stood a few moments, glad to find herself bathed in it again. She suddenly needed air and light. “A sad reward!” Sometimes people were not rewarded. Brave men were shot dead on the battlefield when they were doing brave things; brave physicians and nurses died of the plagues they faithfully wrestled with. Here were dread and pain confronting her—Betty Vanderpoel—and while almost everyone else seemed to have faced them, she was wholly unused to their appalling clutch. What a life hers had been— that in looking back over it she should realise that she had never been touched by anything like this before! There came back to her the look of almost awed wonder in G. Selden’s honest eyes when he said: “What it must be to be you—just YOU!” He had been thinking only of the millions and of the freedom from all everyday anxieties the millions gave. She smiled faintly as the thought crossed her brain. The millions! The rolling up of them year by year, because millions were breeders! The newspaper stories of them—the wonder at and belief in their power! It was all going on just as before, and yet here stood a Vanderpoel in an English village street, of no more worth as far as power to aid herself went than Joe Buttle’s girl with the thick waist and round red cheeks. Jenny Buttle would have believed that her ladyship’s rich American sister could do anything she chose, open any door, command any presence, sweep aside any obstacle with a wave of her hand. But of the two, Jenny Buttle’s path would have laid straighter before her. If she had had “a young man” who had fallen ill she would have been free if his mother had cherished no objection to their “walking out”—to spend all her spare hours in his cottage, making gruel and poultices, crying until her nose and eyes were red, and pouring forth her hopes and fears to any neighbour who came in or out or hung over the dividing garden hedge. If the patient died, the deeper her mourning and the louder her sobs at his funeral the more respectable and deserving of sympathy and admiration would Jenny Buttle have been counted. Her ladyship’s rich American sister had no “young man”; she had not at any time been asked to “walk out.” Even in the dark days of the fever, each of which had carried thought and action of hers to the scene of trouble, there had reigned unbroken silence, except for the vicar’s notes of warm and appreciative gratitude.

  “You are very obstinate, Fergus,” Mr. Penzance had said.

  And Mount Dunstan had shaken his head fiercely and answered:

  “Don’t speak to me about it. Only obstinacy will save me from behaving like—other blackguards.”

  Mr. Penzance, carefully polishing his eyeglasses as he watched him, was not sparing in his comment.

  “That is pure folly,” he said, “pure bull-necked, stubborn folly, charging with its head down. Before it has done with you it will have made you suffer quite enough.”

  “Be sure of that,” Mount Dunstan had said, setting his teeth, as he sat in his chair clasping his hands behind his head and glowering into space.

  Mr. Penzance quietly, speculatively, looked him over, and reflected aloud—or, so it sounded.

  “It is a big-boned and big-muscled characteristic, but there are things which are stronger. Some one minute will arrive— just one minute—which will be stronger. One of those moments when the mysteries of the universe are at work.”

  “Don’t speak to me like that, I tell you!” Mount Dunstan broke out passionately. And he sprang up and marched out of the room like an angry man.

  Miss Vanderpoel did not go to Mrs. Welden’s cottage at once, but walked past its door down the lane, where there were no more cottages, but only hedges and fields on either side of her. “Not well enough to make his rounds” might mean much or little. It might mean a temporary breakdown from overfatigue or a sickening for deadly illness. She looked at a group of cropping sheep in a field and at a flock of rooks which had just alighted near it with cawing and flapping of wings. She kept her eyes on them merely to steady herself. The thoughts she had brought out with her had grown heavier and were horribly difficult to control. One must not allow one’s self to believe the worst will come—one must not allow it.

  She always held this rule before herself, and now she was not holding it steadily. There was nothing to do. She could write a mere note of inquiry to Mr. Penzance, but that was all. She could only walk up and down the lanes and think—whether he lay dying or not. She could do nothing, even if a day came when she knew that a pit had been dug in the clay and he had been lowered into it with creaking ropes, and the clods shovelled back upon him where he lay still—never having told her that he was glad that her being had turned to him and her heart cried aloud his name. She recalled with curious distinctness the effect of the steady toll of the church bell—the “passing bell.”

  She could hear it as she had heard it the first time it fell upon her ear, and she had inquired what it meant. Why did they call it the “passing bell”? All had passed before it began to toll—all had passed. If it tolled at Dunstan and the pit was dug in the churchyard before her father came, would he see, the moment they met, that something had befallen her—that the Betty he had known was changed—gone? Yes, he would see. Affection such as his always saw. Then he would sit alone with her in some quiet room and talk to her, and she would tell him the strange thing that had happened. He would understand—perhaps better than she.

  She stopped abruptly in her walk and stood still. The hand holding her package was quite cold. This was what one must not allow one’s self. But how the thoughts had raced through her brain! She turned and hastened her steps towards Mrs. Welden’s cottage.

  In Mrs. Welden’s tiny back yard there stood a “coal lodge” suited to the size of the domicile and already stacked with a full winter’s supply of coal. Therefore the well-polished and cleanly little grate in the living-room was bright with fire.

  Old Doby, who had tottered round the corner to pay his fellow gossip a visit, was sitting by it, and old Mrs. Welden, clean as to cap and apron and small purple shoulder shawl, had evidently been allaying his natural anxiety as to the conduct of foreign sovereigns by reading in a loud voice the “print” under the pictures in an illustrated paper.

  This occupation had, however, been interrupted a few moments before Miss Vanderpoel’s arrival. Mrs. Bester, the neighbour in the next cottage, had stepped in with her youngest on her hip and was talking breathlessly. She paused to drop her curtsy as Betty entered, and old Doby stood up and made his salute with a trembling hand

  “She’ll know,” he said. “Gentry knows the ins an’ outs of gentry fust. She’ll know the rights.”

  “What has happened?”

  Mrs. Bester unexpectedly burst into tears. There was an element in the female villagers’ temperament which Betty had found was frequently unexpected in its breaking forth.

  “He’s down, miss,” she said. “He’s down with it crool bad. There’ll be no savin’ of him—none.”

  Betty laid her package of sewing cotton and knitting wool quietly on the blue and white checked tablecloth.

  “Who—is he?” she asked.

  “His lordship—and him just saved all Dunstan parish from death—to go like this!”

  In Stornham village and in all others of the neighbourhood the feminine attitude towards Mount Dunstan had been one of strongly emotional admiration. The thwarted female longing for romance—the desire for drama and a hero had been fed by him. A fine, big young man, one that had been “spoke ill of” and
regarded as an outcast, had suddenly turned the tables on fortune and made himself the central figure of the county, the talk of gentry in their grand houses, of cottage women on their doorsteps, and labourers stopping to speak to each other by the roadside. Magic stories had been told of him, beflowered with dramatic detail. No incident could have been related to his credit which would not have been believed and improved upon. Shut up in his village working among his people and unseen by outsiders, he had become a popular idol. Any scrap of news of him—any rumour, true or untrue, was seized upon and excitedly spread abroad. Therefore Mrs. Bester wept as she talked, and, if the truth must be told, enjoyed the situation. She was the first to tell the story to her ladyship’s sister herself, as well as to Mrs. Welden and old Doby.

  “It’s Tom as brought it in,” she said. “He’s my brother, miss, an’ he’s one of the ringers. He heard it from Jem Wesgate, an’ he heard it at Toomy’s farm. They’ve been keepin’ it hid at the Mount because the people that’s ill hangs on his lordship so that the doctors daren’t let them know the truth. They’ve been told he had to go to London an’ may come back any day. What Tom was sayin’, miss, was that we’d all know when it was over, for we’d hear the church bell toll here same as it’d toll at Dunstan, because they ringers have talked it over an’ they’re goin’ to talk it over to-day with the other parishes—Yangford an’ Meltham an’ Dunholm an’ them. Tom says Stornham ringers met just now at The Clock an’ said that for a man that’s stood by labouring folk like he has, toll they will, an’ so ought the other parishes, same as if he was royalty, for he’s made himself nearer. They’ll toll the minute they hear it, miss. Lord help us!” with a fresh outburst of crying. “It don’t seem like it’s fair as it should be. When we hear the bell toll, miss–-“

  “Don’t!” said her ladyship’s handsome sister suddenly. “Please don’t say it again.”

  She sat down by the table, and resting her elbows on the blue and white checked cloth, covered her face with her hands. She did not speak at all. In this tiny room, with these two old souls who loved her, she need not explain. She sat quite still, and Mrs. Welden after looking at her for a few seconds was prompted by some sublimely simple intuition, and gently sidled Mrs. Bester and her youngest into the little kitchen, where the copper was.

  “Her helpin’ him like she did, makes it come near,” she whispered. “Dessay it seems as if he was a’most like a relation.”

  Old Doby sat and looked at his goddess. In his slowly moving old brain stirred far-off memories like long-dead things striving to come to life. He did not know what they were, but they wakened his dim eyes to a new seeing of the slim young shape leaning a little forward, the soft cloud of hair, the fair beauty of the cheek. He had not seen anything like it in his youth, but—it was Youth itself, and so was that which the ringers were so soon to toll for; and for some remote and unformed reason, to his scores of years they were pitiful and should be cheered. He bent forward himself and put out his ancient, veined and knotted, gnarled and trembling hand, to timorously touch the arm of her he worshipped and adored.

  “God bless ye!” he said, his high, cracked voice even more shrill and thin than usual. “God bless ye!” And as she let her hands slip down, and, turning, gently looked at him, he nodded to her speakingly, because out of the dimness of his being, some part of Nature’s working had strangely answered and understood.

  CHAPTER XLVI

  LISTENING

  On her way back to the Court her eyes saw only the white road before her feet as she walked. She did not lift them until she found herself passing the lych-gate at the entrance to the churchyard. Then suddenly she looked up at the square grey stone tower where the bells hung, and from which they called the village to church, or chimed for weddings—or gave slowly forth to the silent air one heavy, regular stroke after another. She looked and shuddered, and spoke aloud with a curious, passionate imploring, like a child’s.

  “Oh, don’t toll! Don’t toll! You must not! You cannot!” Terror had sprung upon her, and her heart was being torn in two in her breast. That was surely what it seemed like—this agonising ache of fear. Now from hour to hour she would be waiting and listening to each sound borne on the air. Her thought would be a possession she could not escape. When she spoke or was spoken to, she would be listening— when she was silent every echo would hold terror, when she slept—if sleep should come to her—her hearing would be awake, and she would be listening—listening even then. It was not Betty Vanderpoel who was walking along the white road, but another creature—a girl whose brain was full of abnormal thought, and whose whole being made passionate outcry against the thing which was being slowly forced upon her. If the bell tolled—suddenly, the whole world would be swept clean of life—empty and clean. If the bell tolled.

  Before the entrance of the Court she saw, as she approached it, the vicarage pony carriage, standing as it had stood on the day she had returned from her walk on the marshes. She felt it quite natural that it should be there. Mrs. Brent always seized upon any fragment of news, and having seized on something now, she had not been able to resist the excitement of bringing it to Lady Anstruthers and her sister.

  She was in the drawing-room with Rosalie, and was full of her subject and the emotion suitable to the occasion. She had even attained a certain modified dampness of handkerchief. Rosalie’s handkerchief, however, was not damp. She had not even attempted to use it, but sat still, her eyes brimming with tears, which, when she saw Betty, brimmed over and slipped helplessly down her cheeks.

  “Betty!” she exclaimed, and got up and went towards her, “I believe you have heard.”

  “In the village, I heard something—yes,” Betty answered, and after giving greeting to Mrs. Brent, she led her sister back to her chair, and sat near her.

  This—the thought leaped upon her—was the kind of situation she must be prepared to be equal to. In the presence of these who knew nothing, she must bear herself as if there was nothing to be known. No one but herself had the slightest knowledge of what the past months had brought to her—no one in the world. If the bell tolled, no one in the world but her father ever would know. She had no excuse for emotion. None had been given to her. The kind of thing it was proper that she should say and do now, in the presence of Mrs. Brent, it would be proper and decent that she should say and do in all other cases. She must comport herself as Betty Vanderpoel would if she were moved only by ordinary human sympathy and regret.

  “We must remember that we have only excited rumour to depend upon,” she said. “Lord Mount Dunstan has kept his village under almost military law. He has put it into quarantine. No one is allowed to leave it, so there can be no direct source of information. One cannot be sure of the entire truth of what one hears. Often it is exaggerated cottage talk. The whole neighbourhood is wrought up to a fever heat of excited sympathy. And villagers like the drama of things.”

  Mrs. Brent looked at her admiringly, it being her fixed habit to admire Miss Vanderpoel, and all such as Providence had set above her.

  “Oh, how wise you are, Miss Vanderpoel!” she exclaimed, even devoutly. “It is so nice of you to be calm and logical when everybody else is so upset. You are quite right about villagers enjoying the dramatic side of troubles. They always do. And perhaps things are not so bad as they say. I ought not to have let myself believe the worst. But I quite broke down under the ringers—I was so touched.”

  “The ringers?” faltered Lady Anstruthers

  “The leader came to the vicar to tell him they wanted permission to toll—if they heard tolling at Dunstan. Weaver’s family lives within hearing of Dunstan church bells, and one of his boys is to run across the fields and bring the news to Stornham. And it was most touching, Miss Vanderpoel. They feel, in their rustic way, that Lord Mount Dunstan has not been treated fairly in the past. And now he seems to them a hero and a martyr—or like a great soldier who has died fighting.”

  “Who MAY die fighting,” broke from Miss Vanderpoel sha
rply.

  “Who—who may–-” Mrs. Brent corrected herself, “though Heaven grant he will not. But it was the ringers who made me feel as if all really was over. Thank you, Miss Vanderpoel, thank you for being so practical and—and cool.”

  “It WAS touching,” said Lady Anstruthers, her eyes brimming over again. “And what the villagers feel is true. It goes to one’s heart,” in a little outburst. “People have been unkind to him! And he has been lonely in that great empty place —he has been lonely. And if he is dying to-day, he is lonely even as he dies—even as he dies.”

  Betty drew a deep breath. For one moment there seemed to rise before her vision of a huge room, whose stately size made its bareness a more desolate thing. And Mr. Penzance bent low over the bed. She tore her thought away from it.

  “No! No!” she cried out in low, passionate protest. “There will be love and yearning all about him everywhere. The villagers who are waiting—the poor things he has worked for—the very ringers themselves, are all pouring forth the same thoughts. He will feel even ours—ours too! His soul cannot be lonely.”

  A few minutes earlier, Mrs. Brent had been saying to herself inwardly: “She has not much heart after all, you know.” Now she looked at her in amazement.

  The blue bells were under water in truth—drenched and drowned. And yet as the girl stood up before her, she looked taller—more the magnificent Miss Vanderpoel than ever— though she expressed a new meaning.

  “There is one thing the villagers can do for him,” she said. “One thing we can all do. The bell has not tolled yet. There is a service for those who are—in peril. If the vicar will call the people to the church, we can all kneel down there— and ask to be heard. The vicar will do that I am sure—and the people will join him with all their hearts.”

  Mrs. Brent was overwhelmed.