Bettina stood alone in her bedroom a couple of hours later. Lady Anstruthers had taken her to it, preparing her for its limitations by explaining that she would find it quite different from her room in New York. She had been pathetically nervous and flushed about it, and Bettina had also been aware that the apartment itself had been hastily, and with much moving of objects from one chamber to another, made ready for her.
The room was large and square and low. It was panelled in small squares of white wood. The panels were old enough to be cracked here and there, and the paint was stained and yellow with time, where it was not knocked or worn off. There was a small paned, leaded window which filled a large part of one side of the room, and its deep seat was an agreeable feature. Sitting in it, one looked out over several red-walled gardens, and through breaks in the trees of the park to a fair beyond. Bettina stood before this window for a few moments, and then took a seat in the embrasure, that she might gaze out and reflect at leisure.
Her genius, as has before been mentioned, was the genius for living, for being vital. Many people merely exist, are kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the persistent action of normal functions will allow of their doing no less. Bettina Vanderpoel had lived vividly, and in the midst of a self-created atmosphere of action from her first hour. It was not possible for her to be one of the horde of mere spectators. Wheresoever she moved there was some occult stirring of the mental, and even physical, air. Her pulses beat too strongly, her blood ran too fast to allow of inaction of mind or body. When, in passing through the village, she had seen the broken windows and the hanging palings of the cottages, it had been inevitable that, at once, she should, in thought, repair them, set them straight. Disorder filled her with a sort of impatience which was akin to physical distress. If she had been born a poor woman she would have worked hard for her living, and found an interest, almost an exhilaration, in her labour. Such gifts as she had would have been applied to the tasks she undertook. It had frequently given her pleasure to imagine herself earning her livelihood as a seamstress, a housemaid, a nurse. She knew what she could have put into her service, and how she could have found it absorbing. Imagination and initiative could make any service absorbing. The actual truth was that if she had been a housemaid, the room she set in order would have taken a character under her touch; if she had been a seamstress, her work would have been swiftly done, her imagination would have invented for her combinations of form and colour; if she had been a nursemaid, the children under her care would never have been sufficiently bored to become tiresome or intractable, and they also would have gained character to which would have been added an undeniable vividness of outlook. She could not have left them alone, so to speak. In obeying the mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated them. Unconsciously she had stimulated her fellow pupils at school; when she was his companion, her father had always felt himself stirred to interest and enterprise.
“You ought to have been a man, Betty,” he used to say to her sometimes.
But Betty had not agreed with him.
“You say that,” she once replied to him, “because you see I am inclined to do things, to change them, if they need changing. Well, one is either born like that, or one is not. Sometimes I think that perhaps the people who must ACT are of a distinct race. A kind of vigorous restlessness drives them. I remember that when I was a child I could not see a pin lying upon the ground without picking it up, or pass a drawer which needed closing, without giving it a push. But there has always been as much for women to do as for men.”
There was much to be done here of one sort of thing and another. That was certain. As she gazed through the small panes of her large windows, she found herself overlooking part of a wilderness of garden, which revealed itself through an arch in an overgrown laurel hedge. She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park beyond a cuckoo was calling.
She was conscious both of the forlorn beauty and significance of the neglected garden, and of the clear quaintness of the cuckoo call, as she thought of other things.
“Her spirit and her health are broken,” was her summing up. “Her prettiness has faded to a rag. She is as nervous as an ill-treated child. She has lost her wits. I do not know where to begin with her. I must let her tell me things as gradually as she chooses. Until I see Nigel I shall not know what his method with her has been. She looks as if she had ceased to care for things, even for herself. What shall I write to mother?”
She knew what she should write to her father. With him she could be explicit. She could record what she had found and what it suggested to her. She could also make clear her reason for hesitance and deliberation. His discretion and affection would comprehend the thing which she herself felt and which affection not combined with discretion might not take in. He would understand, when she told him that one of the first things which had struck her, had been that Rosy herself, her helplessness and timidity, might, for a period at least, form obstacles in their path of action. He not only loved Rosy, but realised how slight a sweet thing she had always been, and he would know how far a slight creature's gentleness might be overpowered and beaten down.
There was so much that her mother must be spared, there was indeed so little that it would be wise to tell her, that Bettina sat gently rubbing her forehead as she thought of it. The truth was that she must tell her nothing, until all was over, accomplished, decided. Whatsoever there was to be “over,” whatsoever the action finally taken, must be a matter lying as far as possible between her father and herself. Mrs. Vanderpoel's trouble would be too keen, her anxiety too great to keep to herself, even if she were not overwhelmed by them. She must be told of the beauties and dimensions of Stornham, all relatable details of Rosy's life must be generously dwelt on. Above all Rosy must be made to write letters, and with an air of freedom however specious.
A knock on the door broke the thread of her reflection. It was a low-sounding knock, and she answered the summons herself, because she thought it might be Rosy's.
It was not Lady Anstruthers who stood outside, but Ughtred, who balanced himself on his crutches, and lifted his small, too mature, face.
“May I come in?” he asked.
Here was the unexpected again, but she did not allow him to see her surprise.
“Yes,” she said. “Certainly you may.”
He swung in and then turned to speak to her.
“Please shut the door and lock it,” he said.
There was sudden illumination in this, but of an order almost whimsical. That modern people in modern days should feel bolts and bars a necessity of ordinary intercourse was suggestive. She was plainly about to receive enlightenment. She turned the key and followed the halting figure across the room.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked.
“When mother and I talk things over,” he said, “we always do it where no one can see or hear. It's the only way to be safe.”
“Safe from what?”
His eyes fixed themselves on her as he answered her almost sullenly.
“Safe from people who might listen and go and tell that we had been talking.”
In his thwarted-looking, odd child-face there was a shade of appeal not wholly hidden by his evident wish not to be boylike. Betty felt a desire to kneel down suddenly and embrace him, but she knew he was not prepared for such a demonstration. He looked like a creature who had lived continually at bay, and had learned to adjust himself to any situation with caution and restraint.
“Sit down, Ughtred,” she said, and when he did so she herself sat down, but not too near him.
Resting his chin on the handle of a crutch, he gazed at her almost protestingly.
“I always have to do these things,” he said, “and I am not clever enough, or old enough. I am only eleven.”
The mention of the number of his years was plainly not apologetic, but was a mere statement of his limitations. There the fact was, and he must make the best of it he could.
“What things do you mean?”
“Trying to make things easier—explaining things when she cannot think of excuses. To-day it is telling you what she is too frightened to tell you herself. I said to her that you must be told. It made her nervous and miserable, but I knew you must.”
“Yes, I must,” Betty answered. “I am glad she has you to depend on, Ughtred.”
His crutch grated on the floor and his boy eyes forbade her to believe that their sudden lustre was in any way connected with restrained emotion.
“I know I seem queer and like a little old man,” he said. “Mother cries about it sometimes. But it can't be helped. It is because she has never had anyone but me to help her. When I was very little, I found out how frightened and miserable she was. After his rages,” he used no name, “she used to run into my nursery and snatch me up in her arms and hide her face in my pinafore. Sometimes she stuffed it into her mouth and bit it to keep herself from screaming. Once—before I was seven—I ran into their room and shouted out, and tried to fight for her. He was going out, and had his riding whip in his hand, and he caught hold of me and struck me with it—until he was tired.”
Betty stood upright.
“What! What! What!” she cried out.
He merely nodded his head shortly. She saw what the thing had been by the way his face lost colour.
“Of course he said it was because I was impudent, and needed punishment,” he said. “He said she had encouraged me in American impudence. It was worse for her than for me. She kneeled down and screamed out as if she was crazy, that she would give him what he wanted if he would stop.”
“Wait,” said Betty, drawing in her breath sharply. “'He,' is Sir Nigel? And he wanted something.”
He nodded again
“Tell me,” she demanded, “has he ever struck her?”
“Once,” he answered slowly, “before I was born—he struck her and she fell against something. That is why I am like this.” And he touched his shoulder.
The feeling which surged through Betty Vanderpoel's being forced her to go and stand with her face turned towards the windows, her hands holding each other tightly behind her back.
“I must keep still,” she said. “I must make myself keep still.”
She spoke unconsciously half aloud, and Ughtred heard her and replied hurriedly.
“Yes,” he said, “you must make yourself keep still. That is what we have to do whatever happens. That is one of the things mother wanted you to know. She is afraid. She daren't let you——”
She turned from the window, standing at her full height and looking very tall for a girl.
“She is afraid? She daren't? See—that will come to an end now. There are things which can be done.”
He flushed nervously.
“That is what she was afraid you would say,” he spoke fast and his hands trembled. “She is nearly wild about it, because she knows he will try to do something that will make you feel as if she does not want you.”
“She is afraid of that?” Betty exclaimed.
“He'd do it! He'd do it—if you did not know beforehand.”
“Oh!” said Betty, with unflinching clearness. “He is a liar, is he?”
The helpless rage in the unchildish eyes, the shaking voice, as he cried out in answer, were a shock. It was as if he wildly rejoiced that she had spoken the word.
“Yes, he's a liar—a liar!” he shrilled. “He's a liar and a bully and a coward. He'd—he'd be a murderer if he dared—but he daren't.” And his face dropped on his arms folded on his crutch, and he broke into a passion of crying. Then Betty knew she might go to him. She went and knelt down and put her arm round him.
“Ughtred,” she said, “cry, if you like, I should do it, if I were you. But I tell you it can all be altered—and it shall be.”
He seemed quite like a little boy when he put out his hand to hers and spoke sobbingly:
“She—she says—that because you have only just come from America—and in America people—can do things—you will think you can do things here—and you don't know. He will tell lies about you lies you can't bear. She sat wringing her hands when she thought of it. She won't let you be hurt because you want to help her.” He stopped abruptly and clutched her shoulder.
“Aunt Betty! Aunt Betty—whatever happens—whatever he makes her seem like—you are to know that it is not true. Now you have come—now she has seen you it would KILL her if you were driven away and thought she wanted you to go.”
“I shall not think that,” she answered, slowly, because she realised that it was well that she had been warned in time. “Ughtred, are you trying to tell me that above all things I must not let him think that I came here to help you, because if he is angry he will make us all suffer—and your mother most of all?”
“He'll find a way. We always know he will. He would either be so rude that you would not stay here—or he would make mother seem rude—or he would write lies to grandfather. Aunt Betty, she scarcely believes you are real yet. If she won't tell you things at first, please don't mind.” He looked quite like a child again in his appeal to her, to try to understand a state of affairs so complicated. “Could you—could you wait until you have let her get—get used to you?”
“Used to thinking that there may be someone in the world to help her?” slowly. “Yes, I will. Has anyone ever tried to help her?”
“Once or twice people found out and were sorry at first, but it only made it worse, because he made them believe things.”
“I shall not TRY, Ughtred,” said Betty, a remote spark kindling in the deeps of the pupils of her steel-blue eyes. “I shall not TRY. Now I am going to ask you some questions.”
Before he left her she had asked many questions which were pertinent and searching, and she had learned things she realised she could have learned in no other way and from no other person. But for his uncanny sense of the responsibility he clearly had assumed in the days when he wore pinafores, and which had brought him to her room to prepare her mind for what she would find herself confronted with in the way of apparently unexplainable obstacles, there was a strong likelihood that at the outset she might have found herself more than once dangerously at a loss. Yes, she would have been at a loss, puzzled, perhaps greatly discouraged. She was face to face with a complication so extraordinary.
That one man, through mere persistent steadiness in evil temper and domestic tyranny, should have so broken the creatures of his household into abject submission and hopelessness, seemed too incredible. Such a power appeared as remote from civilised existence in London and New York as did that which had inflicted tortures in the dungeons of castles of old. Prisoners in such dungeons could utter no cry which could reach the outside world; the prisoners at Stornham Court, not four hours from Hyde Park Corner, could utter none the world could hear, or comprehend if it heard it. Sheer lack of power to resist bound them hand and foot. And she, Betty Vanderpoel, was here upon the spot, and, as far as she could understand, was being implored to take no steps, to do nothing. The atmosphere in which she had spent her life, the world she had been born into, had not made for fearfulness that one would be at any time defenceless against circumstances and be obliged to submit to outrage. To be a Vanderpoel was, it was true, to be a shining mark for envy as for admiration, but the fact removed obstacles as a rule, and to find one's self standing before a situation with one's hands, figuratively speaking, tied, was new enough to arouse unusual sensations. She recalled, with an ironic sense of bewilderment, as a sort of material evidence of her own reality, the fact that not a week ago she had stepped on to English soil from the gangway of a solid Atlantic liner. It aided her to resist the feeling that she had been swept back into the Middle Ages.
“When he is angry,” was one of the first questions she put to Ughtred, “what does he give as his reason? He must profess to have a reason.”
“When he gets in a rage he says it is because mother is silly and common, and I am badly brought up. But we always know he wants money, and it makes him furious. He could kill us with rage.”
“Oh!” said Betty. “I see.”
“It began that time when he struck her. He said then that it was not decent that a woman who was married should keep her own money. He made her give him almost everything she had, but she wants to keep some for me. He tries to make her get more from grandfather, but she will not write begging letters, and she won't give him what she is saving for me.”
It was a simple and sordid enough explanation in one sense, and it was one of which Bettina had known, not one parallel, but several. Having married to ensure himself power over unquestioned resources, the man had felt himself disgustingly taken in, and avenged himself accordingly. In him had been born the makings of a domestic tyrant who, even had he been favoured by fortune, would have wreaked his humours upon the defenceless things made his property by ties of blood and marriage, and who, being unfavoured, would do worse. Betty could see what the years had held for Rosy, and how her weakness and timidity had been considered as positive assets. A woman who will cry when she is bullied, may be counted upon to submit after she has cried. Rosy had submitted up to a certain point and then, with the stubbornness of a weak creature, had stood at timid bay for her young.
What Betty gathered was that, after the long and terrible illness which had followed Ughtred's birth, she had risen from what had been so nearly her deathbed, prostrated in both mind and body. Ughtred did not know all that he revealed when he touched upon the time which he said his mother could not quite remember—when she had sat for months staring vacantly out of her window, trying to recall something terrible which had happened, and which she wanted to tell her mother, if the day ever came when she could write to her again. She had never remembered clearly the details of the thing she had wanted to tell, and Nigel had insisted that her fancy was part of her past delirium. He had said that at the beginning of her delirium she had attacked and insulted his mother and himself but they had excused her because they realised afterwards what the cause of her excitement had been. For a long time she had been too brokenly weak to question or disbelieve, but, later she had vaguely known that he had been lying to her, though she could not refute what he said. She recalled, in course of time, a horrible scene in which all three of them had raved at each other, and she herself had shrieked and laughed and hurled wild words at Nigel, and he had struck her. That she knew and never forgot. She had been ill a year, her hair had fallen out, her skin had faded and she had begun to feel like a nervous, tired old woman instead of a girl. Girlhood, with all the past, had become unreal and too far away to be more than a dream. Nothing had remained real but Stornham and Nigel and the little hunchbacked baby. She was glad when the Dowager died and when Nigel spent his time in London or on the Continent and left her with Ughtred. When he said that he must spend her money on the estate, she had acquiesced without comment, because that insured his going away. She saw that no improvement or repairs were made, but she could do nothing and was too listless to make the attempt. She only wanted to be left alone with Ughtred, and she exhibited willpower only in defence of her child and in her obstinacy with regard to asking money of her father.
“She thought, somehow, that grandfather and grandmother did not care for her any more—that they had forgotten her and only cared for you,” Ughtred explained. “She used to talk to me about you. She said you must be so clever and so handsome that no one could remember her. Sometimes she cried and said she did not want any of you to see her again, because she was only a hideous, little, thin, yellow old woman. When I was very little she told me stories about New York and Fifth Avenue. I thought they were not real places—I though they were places in fairyland.”
Betty patted his shoulder and looked away for a moment when he said this. In her remote and helpless loneliness, to Rosy's homesick, yearning soul, noisy, rattling New York, Fifth Avenue with its traffic and people, its brown-stone houses and ricketty stages, had seemed like THAT—so splendid and bright and heart-filling, that she had painted them in colours which could belong only to fairyland. It said so much.
The thing she had suspected as she had talked to her sister was, before the interview ended, made curiously clear. The first obstacle in her pathway would be the shrinking of a creature who had been so long under dominion that the mere thought of seeing any steps taken towards her rescue filled her with alarm. One might be prepared for her almost praying to be let alone, because she felt that the process of her salvation would bring about such shocks and torments as she could not endure the facing of.
“She will have to get used to you,” Ughtred kept saying. “She will have to get used to thinking things.”
“I will be careful,” Bettina answered. “She shall not be troubled. I did not come to trouble her.”
--
As she went down the staircase later, on her way to dinner, Miss Vanderpoel saw on all sides signs of the extent of the nakedness of the land. She was in a fine old house, stripped of most of its saleable belongings, uncared for, deteriorating year by year, gradually going to ruin. One need not possess particular keenness of sight to observe this, and she had chanced to see old houses in like condition in other countries than England. A man-servant, in a shabby livery, opened the 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 into the air silver fountains of trilling song. When Bettina paused, leaning against the balustrade of the terrace that she might hear all the beauty of it, and feel all the beauty of the warm spring night, Rosy went on making her effort to talk.
“It is not much of a neighbourhood, Betty,” she said. “You are too accustomed to livelier places to like it.”
“That is my reason for feeling that I shall like it. I don't think I could be called a lively person, and I rather hate lively places.”
“But you are accustomed—accustomed——” Rosy harked back uncertainly.
“I have been accustomed to wishing that I could come to you,” said Betty. “And now I am here.”
Lady Anstruthers laid a hand on her dress.
“I can't believe it! I can't believe it!” she breathed.
“You will believe it,” said Betty, drawing the hand around her waist and enclosing in her own arm the narrow shoulders. “Tell me about the neighbourhood.”
“There isn't any, really,” said Lady Anstruthers. “The houses are so far away from each other. The nearest is six miles from here, and it is one that doesn't count.
“Why?”
“There is no family, and the man who owns it is so poor. It is a big place, but it is falling to pieces as this is.
“What is it called?”
“Mount Dunstan. The present earl only succeeded about three years ago. Nigel doesn't know him. He is queer and not liked. He has been away.”
“Where?”
“No one knows. To Australia or somewhere. He has odd ideas. The Mount Dunstans have been awful people for two generations. This man's father was almost mad with wickedness. So was the elder son. This is a second son, and he came into nothing but debt. Perhaps he feels the disgrace and it makes him rude and ill-tempered. His father and elder brother had been in such scandals that people did not invite them.
“Do they invite this man?”
“No. He probably would not go to their houses if they did. And he went away soon after he came into the title.”
“Is the place beautiful?”
“There is a fine deer park, and the gardens were wonderful a long time ago. The house is worth looking at—outside.”
“I will go and look at it,” said Betty.
“The carriage is out of order. There is only Ughtred's cart.”
“I am a good walker,” said Betty.
“Are you? It would be twelve miles—there and back. When I was in New York people didn't walk much, particularly girls.”
“They do now,” Betty answered. “They have learned to do it in England. They live out of doors and play games. They have grown athletic and tall.”
As they talked the nightingales sang, sometimes near, sometimes in the distance, and scents of dewy grass and leaves and earth were wafted towards them. Sometimes they strolled up and down the terrace, sometimes they paused and leaned against the stone balustrade. Betty allowed Rosy to talk as she chose. She herself asked no obviously leading questions and passed over trying moments with lightness. Her desire was to place herself in a position where she might hear the things which would aid her to draw conclusions. Lady Anstruthers gradually grew less nervous and afraid of her subjects. In the wonder of the luxury of talking to someone who listened with sympathy, she once or twice almost forgot herself and made revelations she had not intended to make. She had often the manner of a person who was afraid of being overheard; sometimes, even when she was making speeches quite simple in themselves, her voice dropped and she glanced furtively aside as if there were chances that something she dreaded might step out of the shadow.
When they went upstairs together and parted for the night, the clinging of Rosy's embrace was for a moment almost convulsive. But she tried to laugh off its suggestion of intensity.
“I held you tight so that I could feel sure that you were real and would not melt away,” she said. “I hope you will be here in the morning.”
“I shall never really go quite away again, now I have come,” Betty answered. “It is not only your house I have come into. I have come back into your life.”
After she had entered her room and locked the door she sat down and wrote a letter to her father. It was a long letter, but a clear one. She painted a definite and detailed picture and made distinct her chief point.
“She is afraid of me,” she wrote. “That is the first and worst obstacle. She is actually afraid that I will do something which will only add to her trouble. She has lived under dominion so long that she has forgotten that there are people who have no reason for fear. Her old life seems nothing but a dream. The first thing I must teach her is that I am to be trusted not to do futile things, and that she need neither be afraid of nor for me.”
After writing these sentences she found herself leaving her desk and walking up and down the room to relieve herself. She could not sit still, because suddenly the blood ran fast and hot through her veins. She put her hands against her cheeks and laughed a little, low laugh.
“I feel violent,” she said. “I feel violent and I must get over it. This is rage. Rage is worth nothing.”
It was rage—the rage of splendid hot blood which surged in answer to leaping hot thoughts. There would have been a sort of luxury in giving way to the sway of it. But the self-indulgence would have been no aid to future action. Rage was worth nothing. She said it as the first Reuben Vanderpoel might have said of a useless but glittering weapon. “This gun is worth nothing,” and cast it aside.
--
She came out upon the stone terrace again rather early in the morning. She wanted to wander about in the first freshness of the day, which was always an uplifting thing to her. She wanted to see the dew on the grass and on the ragged flower borders and to hear the tender, broken fluting of birds in the trees. One cuckoo was calling to another in the park, and she stopped and listened intently. Until yesterday she had never heard a cuckoo call, and its hollow mellowness gave her delight. It meant the spring in England, and nowhere else.
There was space enough to ramble about in the gardens. Paths and beds were alike overgrown with weeds, but some strong, early-blooming things were fighting for life, refusing to be strangled. Against the beautiful old red walls, over which age had stolen with a wonderful grey bloom, venerable fruit trees were spread and nailed, and here and there showed bloom, clumps of low-growing things sturdily advanced their yellowness or whiteness, as if defying neglect. In one place a wall slanted and threatened to fall, bearing its nectarine trees with it; in another there was a gap so evidently not of to-day that the heap of its masonry upon the border bed was already covered with greenery, and the roots of the fruit tree it had supported had sent up strong, insistent shoots.
She passed down broad paths and narrow ones, sometimes walking under trees, sometimes pushing her way between encroaching shrubs; she descended delightful mossy and broken steps and came upon dilapidated urns, in which weeds grew instead of flowers, and over which rampant but lovely, savage little creepers clambered and clung.
In one of the walled kitchen gardens she came upon an elderly gardener at work. At the sound of her approaching steps he glanced round and then stood up, touching his forelock in respectful but startled salute. He was so plainly amazed at the sight of her that she explained herself.
“Good-morning,” she said. “I am her ladyship's sister, Miss Vanderpoel. I came yesterday evening. I am looking over your gardens.”
He touched his forehead again and looked round him. His manner was not cheerful. He cast a troubled eye about him.
“They're not much to see, miss,” he said. “They'd ought to be, but they're not. Growing things has to be fed and took care of. A man and a boy can't do it—nor yet four or five of 'em.”
“How many ought there to be?” Betty inquired, with business-like directness. It was not only the dew on the grass she had come out to see.
“If there was eight or ten of us we might put it in order and keep it that way. It's a big place, miss.”
Betty looked about her as he had done, but with a less discouraged eye.
“It is a beautiful place, as well as a large one,” she said. “I can see that there ought to be more workers.”
“There's no one,” said the gardener, “as has as many enemies as a gardener, an' as many things to fight. There's grubs an' there's greenfly, an' there's drout', an' wet an' cold, an' mildew, an' there's what the soil wants and starves without, an' if you haven't got it nor yet hands an' feet an' tools enough, how's things to feed, an' fight an' live—let alone bloom an' bear?”
“I don't know much about gardens,” said Miss Vanderpoel, “but I can understand that.”
The scent of fresh bedewed things was in the air. It was true that she had not known much about gardens, but here standing in the midst of one she began to awaken to a new, practical interest. A creature of initiative could not let such a place as this alone. It was beauty being slowly slain. One could not pass it by and do nothing.
“What is your name?” she asked
“Kedgers, miss. I've only been here about a twelve-month. I was took on because I'm getting on in years an' can't ask much wage.”
“Can you spare time to take me through the gardens and show me things?”
Yes, he could do it. In truth, he privately welcomed an opportunity offering a prospect of excitement so novel. He had shown more flourishing gardens to other young ladies in his past years of service, but young ladies did not come to Stornham, and that one having, with such extraordinary unexpectedness arrived, should want to look over the desolation of these, was curious enough to rouse anyone to a sense of a break in accustomed monotony. The young lady herself mystified him by her difference from such others as he had seen. What the man in the shabby livery had felt, he felt also, and added to this was a sense of the practicalness of the questions she asked and the interest she showed and a way she had of seeming singularly to suggest by the look in her eyes and the tone of her voice that nothing was necessarily without remedy. When her ladyship walked through the place and looked at things, a pale resignation expressed itself in the very droop of her figure. When this one walked through the tumbled-down grape-houses, potting-sheds and conservatories, she saw where glass was broken, where benches had fallen and where roofs sagged and leaked. She inquired about the heating apparatus and asked that she might see it. She asked about the village and its resources, about labourers and their wages.
“As if,” commented Kedgers mentally, “she was what Sir Nigel is—leastways what he'd ought to be an' ain't.”
She led the way back to the fallen wall and stood and looked at it.
“It's a beautiful old wall,” she said. “It should be rebuilt with the old brick. New would spoil it.”
“Some of this is broken and crumbled away,” said Kedgers, picking up a piece to show it to her.
“Perhaps old brick could be bought somewhere,” replied the young lady speculatively. “One ought to be able to buy old brick in England, if one is willing to pay for it.”
Kedgers scratched his head and gazed at her in respectful wonder which was almost trouble. Who was going to pay for things, and who was going to look for things which were not on the spot? Enterprise like this was not to be explained.
When she left him he stood and watched her upright figure disappear through the ivy-grown door of the kitchen gardens with a disturbed but elated expression on his countenance. He did not know why he felt elated, but he was conscious of elation. Something new had walked into the place. He stopped his work and grinned and scratched his head several times after he went back to his pottering among the cabbage plants.
“My word,” he muttered. “She's a fine, straight young woman. If she was her ladyship things 'ud be different. Sir Nigel 'ud be different, too—or there'd be some fine upsets.”
There was a huge stable yard, and Betty passed through that on her way back. The door of the carriage house was open and she saw two or three tumbled-down vehicles. One was a landau with a wheel off, one was a shabby, old-fashioned, low phaeton. She caught sight of a patently venerable cob in one of the stables. The stalls near him were empty.
“I suppose that is all they have to depend upon,” she thought. “And the stables are like the gardens.”
She found Lady Anstruthers and Ughtred waiting for her upon the terrace, each of them regarding her with an expression suggestive of repressed curiosity as she approached. Lady Anstruthers flushed a little and went to meet her with an eager kiss.
“You look like—I don't know quite what you look like, Betty!” she exclaimed.
The girl's dimple deepened and her eyes said smiling things.
“It is the morning—and your gardens,” she answered. “I have been round your gardens.”
“They were beautiful once, I suppose,” said Rosy deprecatingly.
“They are beautiful now. There is nothing like them in America at least.”
“I don't remember any gardens in America,” Lady Anstruthers owned reluctantly, “but everything seemed so cheerful and well cared for and—and new. Don't laugh, Betty. I have begun to like new things. You would if you had watched old ones tumbling to pieces for twelve years.”
“They ought not to be allowed to tumble to pieces,” said Betty. She added her next words with simple directness. She could only discover how any advancing steps would be taken by taking them. “Why do you allow them to do it?”
Lady Anstruthers looked away, but as she looked her eyes passed Ughtred's.
“I!” she said. “There are so many other things to do. It would cost so much—such an enormity to keep it all in order.”
“But it ought to be done—for Ughtred's sake.”
“I know that,” faltered Rosy, “but I can't help it.”
“You can,” answered Betty, and she put her arm round her as they turned to enter the house. “When you have become more used to me and my driving American ways I will show you how.”
The lightness with which she said it had an odd effect on Lady Anstruthers. Such casual readiness was so full of the suggestion of unheard of possibilities that it was a kind of shock.
“I have been twelve years in getting un-used to you—I feel as if it would take twelve years more to get used again,” she said.
“It won't take twelve weeks,” said Betty.
--