 Chapter sixteen of the shuttle, the slipper-box recording is in the public domain, the shuttle by Francis Hodgson Burnett, Chapter sixteen, the particular incident. Betty Vanderbould'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 wood paths 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 spendered 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 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. Candles 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 forads, things haunting places of amusement and finding inordinate entertainment in strange jokes and horse-play. 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 Anstra there sitting. 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 like 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 in 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 Anstra thus 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're not as new as they seem, said Bettie. 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 furnish them up and pretend their hours, 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 Anstra, thus with yearning humbleness. The whole civilised world is thinking what you call new things, said Bettie. 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 further—we must begin again. It is such a long time, since I began, said Rosie, such a long time. Then there must be another beginning for you, too. The hour has struck. Lady Anstra thus rose with as involuntary a movement as if a strong hand had drawn her to her feet. She stood facing Bettie, a pathetic little figure in her washed-out muzzle and frock, and with her washed-out face and eyes and being, though on her faded cheeks a flush was rising. Oh, Bettie, 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 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." Bettie 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 Rosie Anstra, thus with a quivering mouth, I do believe it so. I walked to Mount Dunstan, Bettie said later. Really, said Rosie, there and back—yes, and all around the park and the gardens. Rosie 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 up to be Lord Mount Dunstan. Lady Anstra thus 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 Bettie. He has enough to rouse his evil passions and make him savage. What a fateful man with any sense and decency of feeling! That 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, said Lady Anstra others. Bettie nodded slowly as she looked out, reflecting into the park. Yes, it would require money, was her admission. And he has none, Lady Anstra others added. None whatever. He will get some, said Bettie, 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, Bettie, said Rosie, oh, Bettie! Watch that man, said Bettie. You will see it will come. Lady Anstra others' 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 side again. He will not do it on purpose, Bettiener answered slowly, and with such an air of absence of mind that Rosie laughed a little. Will he do it accidentally or against his will, she said? Bettie herself smiled. Perhaps he will, she said. There are Englishmen who rather dislike Americans. I think he's one of them. It apparently became necessary for Lady Anstra, as a moment later, to lean upon the stone balustrade and pick off a young leaf or so, for no reason whatever, unless it in doing so she averted her look from her sister as she made an extra mark. Are you—are you going to write to father and mother? I have written, with unembarrassed evenness of tone, mother will be counting the days. Mother! Rosie breathed with a soft little gasp. Mother! And turned her face further away. What did you tell her? Bettie 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 Utread adored you, and how you loved us all, and longed to see New York again. The relief on the poor little face was so immense that Bettie's heart shook before it. Lady Anstra thus looked up at her with adoring eyes. I might have known, she said, I might have known that you would only say the right thing, you couldn't say the wrong thing, Bettie. Bettie 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 Anstra, thus 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, Bettie 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 that she never would. She will, Bettie's tone was cool and clear. But before she does, I shall have made you look more like yourself. Lady Anstra's 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, Bettie. 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 Anstra's became a little pale. What! She asked low and nervously, and Bettie saw her glance sideways at the windows of the room which opened onto the terrace. Bettie 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 Anstra's 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 Bettie 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 to the place with me and show me everything. Walls and fences and greenhouses and outbuildings must not be allowed to crumble away. What! cried Rosie. Have you seen all that already? She actually stared at her. How practical and American! To see that a wall has fallen when you find yourself obliged to walk around a pile of grass-grown brickwork, said Bettie. Lady Anstra was still softly stared. What are you thinking of? she asked. Thinking that it's all too beautiful, Bettie'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 Rosie, and the deep dimple near her mouth showed itself delightfully. It is a throwing away of capital, she added. Oh! cried Lady Anstra, thus how clever you are, and you look so different, Bettie. Do I look stupid? The dimple deepening. I must try to alter that. Don't try to alter your looks, said Rosie. It's your looks that make you so, so wonderful. But usually women, girls—Rosie paused. Oh! I have been trained, laughed Bettie. I am the spoiled daughter of a businessman of genius. His business is an art and a science. I've 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 the 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 Utrid's. It is Nigel's, put in Rosie. It's entailed, isn't it, turning quickly? He cannot sell it? If he could, we should not be sitting here, roofily. 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 Anne Struthers' voice lowered itself as it always did when she spoke of her husband, and she indulged in the involuntary hasty glance about her. I'm 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 Utreet was born. You guessed that it happened then, gossed Lady Anne Struthers. 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 Anne Struthers' voice was a sharp little moan. That is 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 Anne Struthers 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 Anne Struthers 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 English woman, 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 Anne Struthers' head drooped. 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 hadn't 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 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 Anne Struthers started. Oh, you know it all," she exclaimed. Only because I have heard it before—it's 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 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 Anne Struthers 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 English woman 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 Stornum, and once he made you right 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 Stornum for Utrid. Nothing can take Stornum from Utrid. 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 does not go into that. If I would ask questions he would make me know that I had better stop. He says I know nothing about things, and he's right. He's never allowed me to know, and I'm 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 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 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 Anne Stuthers answered. He was here for a few days a 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 Anne Stuthers 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 Anne Stuthers. 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, Rosie protested. It would be something no one would 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 stunned to you. Lifting her eyes she saw that a troubled flush was creeping over Lady Anstrother's face. There have been so many queer things, she faulted. 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 Anstrother's looked nervous. Rosie, in the level voice. There has been a particular incident and I would rather hear of it from you than from him. Rosie'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 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 reigned in a divorce court on charges of misbehavior would have made Betty smile if she had been in a smiling mood. What did he accuse you of? That was 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, Rosie exclaimed aloud, How did you know, she said, You're 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 Rosie told a 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 Follyott. I liked to hear him preach. He said things that comforted me. Knightle found out that he comforted me and when he called here he was more polite to him than he'd 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'd go out of the room and leave us together. Oh, Betty, clinging to her hands, I was so richer 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 couldn't. 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 Knightle, he only shrugged his shoulders and sneered when I said it, but afterwards I knew he had remembered. One evening when he'd asked Mr. Follyott 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 any one 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'm not clever enough to think of the right things to say. He meant Mr. Follyott 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 couldn't begin to speak because of the lump in my throat. And then suddenly but quietly Mr. Follyott 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 didn't 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 that I need not utter a word to explain to him that he'd 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 didn't 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've 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, Rosie 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 Follyots here. He said Mrs. Follyot was a gentle woman 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. Follyot. 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, Rosie had begun to feel that she might be allowed a friend, though she lived in secret tremor since 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 listened at the sound of the leaves, the sound that never stops, and it seemed as if it were 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're growing young and lovely, my dear, your colour is improving, the council 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 didn't last long. I was afraid not, said Betty. An old woman in the lane near Bartian Wood was ill. Mr. Follyott 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 Bartian 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 Utrid's locking of the door had seemed too wild for modern days. Lady Anstra thus saw her expression and understood it. She made a hopeless gesture with her small bony hand. Yes, she said, it's 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. Follyott. 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'd 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. Follyott? I asked. Yes, it is your note to Mr. Follyott, and he read it aloud. Do not come to the house. I will meet you and Barty and 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. Farn 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's very likely. But you believe it, I said. You know it's 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've 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 couldn't tell what it was. He said at last that he was going to Mr. Follyott. 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's 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'd tried to make me write to Father for money, and I cried out, catching at his coat and holding him back. I'll write to Father as you asked me. I will do anything. I can't bear it." That was the 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. Follyott. And I wrote to Father. I remember that, Betty answered. Did you ever speak to Mr. Follyott 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's 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 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'd 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, though she ate and longed for, could be told a 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 to scants when the Foliates were mentioned. I am afraid, Lady Anstruthers, that Mr. Foliate 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 Foliate with sneering lightness as your lover. Do you defend your lover to me, it 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 Vanderpool's veins. Rosie, 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 farther by cable or letter or 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's not the awful truth now, said Betty as she rose to her feet and stood looking before her, but with a look that 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 Rosie's face between her hands, kissed it with a kiss that 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 Anne Struthers. That is American too. It is a quality Americans inherited from England, likely. 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 what you have said. We might give some hours, I dare say, to what the Dowager didn't said. But wiser people than we are have found out that thinking of black things fast is living them again and it is like poisoning one's blood. It's deterioration of property. She said the last words as if she'd 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, Rosie, and let us walk over the house. We will begin with that. During the whole course of her interesting life and she had always found life interesting, Betty Vanderpool 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 led in rain which had stained and rotted walls plaster and woodwork. Wind and storm had beaten through broken window-pains 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 wane-scotting. 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, Rosie 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 called it a rat hole. 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 chints covered with a pattern of loose clusters of moss rose buds. 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 underneath 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 Anstrother, 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 Anstrother's 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 dart 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, butaries 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 a single-handed cook, Mrs. Noakes had sent up on inviting 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 unshearful 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 matted 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 I don't use them like that in these days. I thought not, said Miss Vanderpool. 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 the 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 what'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 open for years. More shame to them that should have opened them, remarked Mrs. Noakes. Her ladyship's a poor, listless thing, but her spirit was broken long ago. This one amended for her, perhaps, said the man's 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 her Nigel employs? Betty had asked her sister when their pilgrimage through the house had been completed. Mrs. Townlinson and Shepard, a firm which, for several generations, had transacted the legal business of much more important estates than Stornham, held its affairs in hand. Lady Anstra thus 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. Rosie was agitated. Why should one see them? What was there to be spoken of? They're going, Betty explained, would be a sort of visit of ceremony, in a measure of precaution. Since Nigel was apparently not to be reached, having given no clue as to where he intended to go, it might be discreet to consult Mrs. Townlinson and Shepard with regard to the things it might be well to do, the repairs it appeared necessary to make at once. If Mrs. Townlinson and Shepard approved of the doing of such work, Sir Nigel could not present their action and say that in his absence liberties had been taken. Such, of course, seemed business-like 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, Rosie. I have nothing but rags to wear, answered Lady Anstrother's 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 Vanderpool already stood in London for inexhaustible resource. Yes, it was simple enough to send for politely subservient sales-women to bring what one wanted. The being reminded in everyday matters of the still real existence of the power of this magic was the first step in the rebuilding of Lady Anstrother's. 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 in folded layers of garments, Lady Anstrother 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 baldress. 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 the 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 Russian roar of New York traffic. Fiti carried on the hall 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 build 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's 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's wonderful, but it doesn't tend to calm the mind. That's why we cross the Atlantic so much. The sober, quiet, loving blood our forebears 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 Gromersie 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'd 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 fortune so colossal that they seemed monstrosity 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 fashion's customs, belongings of twenty years ago, were an air of almost picturesque antiquity. It does not take long to make an old New Yorker, as she said, each day bring so many new ones. There were indeed many new ones, Lady Ann Struthers 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, but Inna 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 oneself 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 Ann Struthers 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 surged 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 streetcar in which they must be packed together, and swinging 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 Vanderpool had actually gone to London, the dignified firm of Townlinson and Shepard 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 Vanderpool herself who had asked that the appointment be made. Men of messes Townlinson and Shepard's indubitable rank in their profession could not fail to know the significance of the Vanderpool name. They knew and understood its weight perfectly well. When their client had married one of Reuben Vanderpool's daughters, they had felt that extraordinary good fortune had befallen him and his estate. Their private opinion had been that Mr. Vanderpool's knowledge of his son-in-law must have been limited, or that he had curiously lacks 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 Sennigel and Struthers. Its opinions of him it reserved to itself. If messes Townlinson and Shepard had been asked to give a daughter into their client's keeping, they would have flatly refused to accept the honor 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 Sennigel, 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 Anstra's fortune was her own and not her husband's. Mr. Townlinson, playing 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. Sennigel 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 remonstrants resulted only in most disagreeable scenes. Mrs. Townlinson and Shepard 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 oneself with. Lady Anstra, this 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 Vanderpool who wishes to appoint an interview with Mrs. Townlinson and Shepard. 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 Anstra others? Is she an older woman, if that's strong and rather trying, American type one hears of? Or is she younger than a ladyship, a pretty indignant, totally unpractical girl outraged by the state of affairs she has discovered foolishly coming to demand of Mrs. Townlinson and Shepard an explanation of things they're 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. Shepard who had been called an authentic insured to attend a 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 Anstrother, she explained without superfluous phrase, had no definite knowledge of her husband's whereabouts, and it had seemed possible that Mrs. Townlinson and Shepard might have received some information more recent than 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 realized 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 Vanderpool exhibited no signs of expecting anything of this kind, even when she went on with what she had come to say. Stornham caught 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 Vanderpool, 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 Anstrothers 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 Vanderpool, 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. Vanderpool's part, Mr. Townlinson commented, the estate would, of course, increase greatly in value. Circumstances had prevented her father from visiting Stornham, Miss Vanderpool 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 Mrs. Townlinson and Shepard saw no obstacles other than scarcity of money. Mr. Townlinson, 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 St. Nigel's marriage, sufficient reason for the neglect of dilapidations. The firm had strongly represented to St. Nigel that certain resources should not be devoted 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 this clear review of the proprieties and discretion as 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 recognized was that although she had not seen St. 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 realize 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 Anstrother's is the mother of the heir, and as Lady Anstrother's 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, realizing that he was committing himself and feeling firmly willing to do so for reasons of his own, St. Nigel is a man who objects strongly to putting himself publicly in the wrong. Thank you, said Miss Vanderpool. 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 should be happy to place ourselves at your disposal at all times, Miss Vanderpool. We are obliged to you for your consideration in the matter. Thank you, said Miss Vanderpool, again. I wish to be sure that I would not be infringing any English rule I had no knowledge of. You'll 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. Vanderpool was prepared to spend money in a lavish manner, it was all to the good so far as the estate was concerned. There was stupendous these people, and after all the air 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 Anne Struthers and the future of her son, Sir Nigel, being unable to sell either house or land, 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 fairytale. He sought to of his under-clarks with the impropriety of middle-class youth, looking out of an office window at the dark blue broom 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 ripen-ansome girl, they knew nothing of the interesting interview. He himself returned to his private room in amusing 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 James Hubert John Fergus Salter, fifteen-thirl of Mount Dunstan, James 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'd lived in as a child he'd 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 years he always remembered because he'd seen them, and once when he'd 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 bare-headed until it passed because it was the queen. Somehow from that afternoon he dated the first presentation of certain vaguely miserable ideas. Enquiries made of his attendant, when the courtage 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, and 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'd 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, rough her name was, that he had mysteriously gathered that he was not a desirable charge as regarded from the point of view 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 townhouse was objectionable and Mount Dunstan was without attractions. Other big houses were in some marked way different. The townhouse 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 muse were at least there were horses and grooms who hissed cheerfully while they carried and brushed them. He hated the townhouse 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 townhouse 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 realized, 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 betted 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 smoldered 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 gambles 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 us to suspect his feelings and no one had noticed, and if any one 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 have right belonged to persons of rank was the radical objection to his people. At the townhouse 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 Saltier 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 around 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 lovable-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 Tenom, 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 Saltier 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 an 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 cacking 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 all after, when the world next day heard that the fugitives had put the English Channel between themselves and their country's laws. Lord Tannum 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 worthwhile 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 gem-salter and laboured as any hand 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 Louis 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 pour over books and manuscripts. He was a born monk and celibate. In bygone centuries he would have lived peacefully in some monastery, spending his years in the reading and writing of black letter and the illuminating of missiles. At the vicarage he could lead an existence which was almost the same thing. At Mount Dunstan there remains still the large remnant of a great library, a huge room whose neglected and half-emptied shelves contained some strange things and wonderful ones, although all were in disorder and given up to dust and natural dilapidation. Inevitably the Reverend Louis Penzance had found his way there. Inevitably he'd 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 pouring 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 Dunstan's who had lived in the centuries past. He supposedly 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 today. They would be different themselves, of course, in one way, but they must be the same men in others. Perhaps Mr. Penzant's reddening again understood what he meant. He knew himself very well because he'd thought it all out. He was always thinking about it, but he was no good at explaining. Mr. Penzant's 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. He 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's centuries ago, provided him with a new subject for reflection. That had been the beginning of an unusual friendship. Gradually Penzant's had reached a clear understanding of all the building of the young life, of its rankling humiliation, and the quality 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 a revival of type. There had been a certain Red Godwin 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 Godwin had a deeper traction for his descendant, who knew the whole story of his fierce life, as told in one yellow manuscript and another, by heart. Why might one not fancy, Penzance was drawn by the imagining, this strong thing reborn, even as the offspring of a poorer effete type. Red Godwin, 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 Soltear had a passion for knowledge. Among the old books and manuscripts he gained a singular education. Without 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 fighting 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 rap and violence and death. There were annals of early England and of marauders, monks and danes, and through all these some things 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 there had been born others who hadn't 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 Soltier 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 Tenom were sick enough without being called upon to contemplate the Lout, whose opinion in any case they preferred not to hear. Soltier 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 a sin bygone times, he said, but it was not like this. Savagery and 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 moment to step forth and win his place. But we're done for, he shouted once, we're done for, and I'm 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 noticed 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. The 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 forces 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-back chair, holding its arms with long, thin hands, and looking for some time at James Hubert John Fergus Salter, he said at last in a sane-level voice, Lord Tenom is not the last Mount Dunstan, after which the stillness remained unbroken again for some minutes. Salter 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 poured over accounts, leases, maps, plans. By nightfall both were fagged and neither in a 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's just come back to me. Singulally enough, or perhaps naturally enough, it had also just arisen again from the depths of Benzanz's subconsciousness. Yes, he answered. I remember. Tonight 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. Mwa kivu pa, the last. Benzanz'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 singulally, 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 Benz answered none 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. Benzanz 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 widespread 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 Benzanz 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 that 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 countryside. Village stories are often quaint, and stories of the countryside are sometimes not always interesting. Tom Benzanz'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 nutcracker face like a withered rosy apple, his gnarled hand grasping the knotted stuff his bent body leaned on, undunced and grinned a little. He did not smile when Penzanz passed to the restoration of the ancient church at Melodyne. Restoration usually meant the tearing away of ancient oak and 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 a gathering at Denham Castle which was twelve miles away. Denham was the possession of a man who stood for all that was first and highest in the land dignity, learning, exalted character, generosity, honor. 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 honorable 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. Tenom 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. His international marriages are often singular things. Now, apparently without having been expected, the sister appears. Fandipool is the name, Miss Fandipool. I crossed the Atlantic with her in the Meridiana, said Mount Dunstan. Indeed, that's interesting. You did not, of course, know that she was coming here. I knew nothing of her, but that she was a saloon passenger, was the suite of staterooms, and I was in the second cabin. Nothing—that's 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 recognize 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's 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 confessed to an interest in the sister. Why? She's made a curious impression. She's begun to do things. Stornham Village has lost its breath. He laughed a little. She's been going over the place and discussing repairs. Aunt Dunstan laughed also. He remembered what she had said, and she had actually begun. That is practical, he commented. It's really interesting. Why should a young woman turn her attention to repairs? If it had been her father, the omnipotent Mr. Vanderpool, 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 tea-cups 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 inquiry or so. Sir Nightell and Stothers is not often at Stornham. He's away now. It's plainly not he who is interested in repairs. He's on the Riviera, in retreat, in a place he's fond of, Mount Dunstan said dryly. He took a companion with him, a new infatuation. He will not return soon.