The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

  “When you have a son,” her mother-in-law had remarked severely, “I suppose something will be done for Nigel and the estate.”

  This had been said before she had been ten days in the house, and had set her not-too-quick brain working. She had already begun to see that life at Stornham Court was not the luxurious affair it was in the house in Fifth Avenue. Things were shabby and queer and not at all comfortable. Fires were not lighted because a day was chilly and gloomy. She had once asked for one in her bedroom and her mother-in-law had reproved her for indecent extravagance in a manner which took her breath away.

  “I suppose in America you have your house at furnace heat in July,” she said. “Mere wastefulness and self-indulgence! That is why Americans are old women at twenty. They are shrivelled and withered by the unhealthy lives they lead. Stuffing themselves with sweets and hot bread and never breathing the fresh air.”

  Rosalie could not at the moment recall any withered and shrivelled old women of twenty, but she blushed and stammered as usual.

  “It is never cold enough for fires in July,” she answered, “but we—we never think fires extravagant when we are not comfortable without them.”

  “Coal must be cheaper than it is in England,” said her ladyship. “When you have a daughter, I hope you do not expect to bring her up as girls are brought up in New York.”

  This was the first time Rosalie had heard of her daughter, and she was not ready enough to reply. She naturally went into her room and cried again, wondering what her father and mother would say if they knew that bedroom fires were considered vulgarly extravagant by an impressive member of the British aristocracy.

  She was not at all strong at the time and was given to feeling chilly and miserable on wet, windy days. She used to cry more than ever and was so desolate that there were days when she used to go to the vicarage for companionship. On such days the vicar’s wife would entertain her with stories of the villagers’ catastrophes, and she would empty her purse upon the tea table and feel a little consoled because she was the means of consoling someone else.

  “I suppose it gratifies your vanity to play the Lady Bountiful,” Sir Nigel sneered one evening, having heard in the village what she was doing.

  “I—never thought of such a thing,” she stammered feebly. “Mrs. Brent said they were so poor.”

  “You throw your money about as if you were a child,” said her mother-in-law. “It is a pity it is not put in the hands of some person with discretion.”

  It had begun to dawn upon Rosalie that her ladyship was deeply convinced that either herself or her son would be admirably discreet custodians of the money referred to. And even the dawning of this idea had frightened the girl. She was so inexperienced and ignorant that she felt it might be possible that in England one’s husband and one’s mother-in-law could do what they liked. It might be that they could take possession of one’s money as they seemed to take possession of one’s self and one’s very soul. She would have been very glad to give them money, and had indeed wondered frequently if she might dare to offer it to them, if they would be outraged and insulted and slay her in their wrath at her purse-proud daring. She had tried to invent ways in which she could approach the subject, but had not been able to screw up her courage to any sticking point. She was so overpowered by her consciousness that they seemed continually to intimate that Americans with money were ostentatious and always laying stress upon the amount of their possessions. She had no conception of the primeval simpleness of their attitude in such matters, and that no ceremonies were necessary save the process of transferring sufficiently large sums as though they were the mere right of the recipients. She was taught to understand this later. In the meantime, however, ready as she would have been to give large sums if she had known how, she was terrified by the thought that it might be possible that she could be deprived of her bank account and reduced to the condition of a sort of dependent upon the humours of her lately acquired relations. She thought over this a good deal, and would have found immense relief if she dared have consulted anyone. But she could not make up her mind to reveal her unhappiness to her people. She had been married so recently, everybody had thought her marriage so delightful, she could not bear that her father and mother should be distressed by knowing that she was wretched. She also reflected with misery that New York would talk the matter over excitedly and that finally the newspapers would get hold of the gossip. She could even imagine interviewers calling at the house in Fifth Avenue and endeavouring to obtain particulars of the situation. Her father would be angry and refuse to give them, but that would make no difference; the newspapers would give them and everybody would read what they said, whether it was true or not. She could not possibly write facts, she thought, so her poor little letters were restrained and unlike herself, and to the warm-hearted souls in New York, even appearing stiff and unaffectionate, as if her aristocratic surroundings had chilled her love for them. In fact, it became far from easy for her to write at all, since Sir Nigel so disapproved of her interest in the American mail. His objections had indeed taken the form of his feeling himself quite within his rights when he occasionally intercepted letters from her relations, with a view of finding out whether they contained criticisms of himself, which would betray that she had been guilty of indiscreet confidences. He discovered that she had not apparently been so guilty, but it was evident that there were moments when Mrs. Vanderpoel was uneasy and disposed to ask anxious questions. When this occurred he destroyed the letters, and as a result of this precaution on his part her motherly queries seemed to be ignored, and she several times shed tears in the belief that Rosy had grown so patrician that she was capable of snubbing her mother in her resentment at feeling her privacy intruded upon and an unrefined effusiveness shown.

  “I just feel as if she was beginning not to care about us at all, Betty,” she said. “I couldn’t have believed it of Rosy. She was always such an affectionate girl.”

  “I don’t believe it now,” replied Betty sharply. “Rosy couldn’t grow hateful and stuck up. It’s that nasty Nigel I know it is.”

  Sir Nigel’s intention was that there should be as little intercourse between Fifth Avenue and Stornham Court as was possible. Among other things, he did not intend that a lot of American relations should come tumbling in when they chose to cross the Atlantic. He would not have it, and took discreet steps to prevent any accident of the sort. He wrote to America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to make himself civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law as to discourage in them more than once their half-formed plan of paying a visit to their child in her new home. He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to and from New York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find that Rosalie never condescended to make any response to her tentatives concerning her possible visit, Rosalie herself was mystified by the fact that the journey “to Europe” was never spoken of.

  “I don’t see why they never seem to think of coming over,” she said plaintively one day. “They used to talk so much about it.”

  “They?” ejaculated the Dowager Lady Anstruthers. “Whom may you mean?”

  “Mother and father and Betty and some of the others.”

  Her mother-in-law put up her eyeglasses to stare at her.

  “The whole family?” she inquired.

  “There are not so many of them,” Rosalie answered.

  “A family is always too many to descend upon a young woman when she is married,” observed her ladyship unmovedly. Nigel glanced over the top of his Times.

  “I may as well tell you that it would not do at all,” he put in.

  “Why—why not?” exclaimed Rosalie, aghast.

  “Americans don’t do in English society,” slightingly.

  “But they are coming over so much. They like London so— all Americans like London.”

  “Do they?” with a drawl which made Rosalie blush until the tears started to her eyes. “I am afraid the sentiment is scarcely mutual.”


  Rosalie turned and fled from the room. She turned and fled because she realised that she should burst out crying if she waited to hear another word, and she realised that of late she seemed always to be bursting out crying before one or the other of those two. She could not help it. They always seemed to be implying something slighting or scathing. They were always putting her in the wrong and hurting her feelings.

  The day was damp and chill, but she put on her hat and ran out into the park. She went down the avenue and turned into a coppice. There, among the wet bracken, she sank down on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree and huddled herself in a small heap, her head on her arms, actually wailing.

  “Oh, mother! Oh, mother!” she cried hysterically. “Oh, I do wish you would come. I’m so cold, mother; I’m so ill! I can’t bear it! It seems as if you’d forgotten all about me! You’re all so happy in New York that perhaps you have forgotten— perhaps you have! Oh, don’t, mother—don’t! “

  It was a month later that through the vicar’s wife she reached a discovery and a climax. She had heard one morning from this lady of a misfortune which had befallen a small farmer. It was a misfortune which was an actual catastrophe to a man in his position. His house had caught fire during a gale of wind and the fire had spread to the outbuildings and rickyard and swept away all his belongings, his house, his furniture, his hayricks, and stored grain, and even his few cows and horses. He had been a poor, hard-working fellow, and his small insurance had lapsed the day before the fire. He was absolutely ruined, and with his wife and six children stood face to face with beggary and starvation.

  Rosalie Anstruthers entered the vicarage to find the poor woman who was his companion in calamity sobbing in the hall. A child of a few weeks was in her arms, and two small creatures clung crying to her skirts.

  “We’ve worked hard,” she wept; “we have, ma’am. Father, he’s always been steady, an’ up early an’ late. P’r’aps it’s the Lord’s ‘and, as you say, ma’am, but we’ve been decent people an’ never missed church when we could ‘elp it—father didn’t deserve it—that he didn’t.”

  She was heartbroken in her downtrodden hopelessness. Rosalie literally quaked with sympathy. She poured forth her pity in such words as the poor woman had never heard spoken by a great lady to a humble creature like herself. The villagers found the new Lady Anstruthers’ interviews with them curiously simple and suggestive of an equality they could not understand. Stornham was a conservative old village, where the distinction between the gentry and the peasants was clearly marked. The cottagers were puzzled by Sir Nigel’s wife, but they decided that she was kind, if unusual.

  As Rosalie talked to the farmer’s wife she longed for her father’s presence. She had remembered a time when a man in his employ had lost his all by fire, the small house he had just made his last payment upon having been burned to the ground. He had lost one of his children in the fire, and the details had been heartrending. The entire Vanderpoel household had wept on hearing them, and Mr. Vanderpoel had drawn a cheque which had seemed like a fortune to the sufferer. A new house had been bought, and Mrs. Vanderpoel and her daughters and friends had bestowed furniture and clothing enough to make the family comfortable to the verge of luxury.

  “See, you poor thing,” said Rosalie, glowing with memories of this incident, her homesick young soul comforted by the mere likeness in the two calamities. “I brought my cheque book with me because I meant to help you. A man worked for my father had his house burned, just as yours was, and my father made everything all right for him again. I’ll make it all right for you; I’ll make you a cheque for a hundred pounds now, and then when your husband begins to build I’ll give him some more.”

  The woman gasped for breath and turned pale. She was frightened. It really seemed as if her ladyship must have lost her wits a little. She could not mean this. The vicaress turned pale also.

  “Lady Anstruthers,” she said, “Lady Anstruthers, it—it is too much. Sir Nigel–-“

  “Too much!” exclaimed Rosalie. “They have lost everything, you know; their hayricks and cattle as well as their house; I guess it won’t be half enough.”

  Mrs. Brent dragged her into the vicar’s study and talked to her. She tried to explain that in English villages such things were not done in a manner so casual, as if they were the mere result of unconsidered feeling, as if they were quite natural things, such as any human person might do. When Rosalie cried: “But why not—why not? They ought to be.” Mrs. Brent could not seem to make herself quite clear. Rosalie only gathered in a bewildered way that there ought to be more ceremony, more deliberation, more holding off, before a person of rank indulged in such munificence. The recipient ought to be made to feel it more, to understand fully what a great thing was being done.

  “They will think you will do anything for them.”

  “So I will,” said young Lady Anstruthers, “if I have the money when they are in such awful trouble. Suppose we lost everything in the world and there were people who could easily help us and wouldn’t?”

  “You and Sir Nigel—that is quite different,” said Mrs. Brent. “I am afraid that if you do not discuss the matter and ask advice from your husband and mother-in-law they will be very much offended.”

  “If I were doing it with their money they would have the right to be,” replied Rosalie, with entire ingenuousness. “I wouldn’t presume to do such a thing as that. That wouldn’t be right, of course.”

  “They will be angry with me,” said the vicaress awkwardly. This queer, silly girl, who seemed to see nothing in the right light, frequently made her feel awkward. Mrs. Brent told her husband that she appeared to have no sense of dignity or proper appreciation of her position.

  The wife of the farmer, John Wilson, carried away the cheque, quite stunned. She was breathless with amazement and turned rather faint with excitement, bewilderment and her sense of relief. She had to sit down in the vicarage kitchen for a few minutes and drink a glass of the thin vicarage beer.

  Rosalie promised that she would discuss the matter and ask advice when she returned to the Court. Just as she left the house Mrs. Brent suddenly remembered something she had forgotten.

  “The Wilson trouble completely drove it out of my mind,” she said. “It was a stupid mistake of the postboy’s. He left a letter of yours among mine when he came this morning. It was most careless. I shall speak to his father about it. It might have been important that you should receive it early.”

  When she saw the letter Rosalie uttered an exclamation. It was addressed in her father’s handwriting.

  “Oh!” she cried. “It’s from father! And the postmark is Havre. What does it mean?”

  She was so excited that she almost forgot to express her thanks. Her heart leaped up in her throat. Could they have come over from America—could they? Why was it written from Havre? Could they be near her?

  She walked along the road choked with ecstatic, laughing sobs. Her hand shook so that she could scarcely tear open the envelope; she tore a corner of the letter, and when the sheet was spread open her eyes were full of wild, delighted tears, which made it impossible for her to see for the moment. But she swept the tears away and read this:

  DEAR DAUGHTER:

  It seems as if we had had pretty bad luck in not seeing you. We had counted on it very much, and your mother feels it all the more because she is weak after her illness. We don’t quite understand why you did not seem to know about her having had diphtheria in Paris. You did not answer Betty’s letter. Perhaps it missed you in some way. Things do sometimes go wrong in the mail, and several times your mother has thought a letter has been lost. She thought so because you seemed to forget to refer to things. We came over to leave Betty at a French school and we had expected to visit you later. But your mother fell ill of diphtheria and not hearing from you seemed to make her homesick, so we decided to return to New York by the next steamer. I ran over to London, however, to make some inquiries about you, and on the first day I arrived
I met your husband in Bond Street. He at once explained to me that you had gone to a house party at some castle in Scotland, and said you were well and enjoying yourself very much, and he was on his way to join you. I am sorry, daughter, that it has turned out that we could not see each other. It seems a long time since you left us. But I am very glad, however, that you are so well and really like English life. If we had time for it I am sure it would be delightful. Your mother sends her love and wants very much to hear of all you are doing and enjoying. Hoping that we may have better luck the next time we cross— Your affectionate father, REUBEN L. VANDERPOEL.

  Rosalie found herself running breathlessly up the avenue. She was clutching the letter still in her hand, and staggering from side to side. Now and then she uttered horrible little short cries, like an animal’s. She ran and ran, seeing nothing, and now and then with the clenched hand in which the letter was crushed striking a sharp blow at her breast.

  She stumbled up the big stone steps she had mounted on the day she was brought home as a bride. Her dress caught her feet and she fell on her knees and scrambled up again, gasping; she dashed across the huge dark hall, and, hurling herself against the door of the morning room, appeared, dishevelled, haggard-eyed, and with scarlet patches on her wild, white face, before the Dowager, who started angrily to her feet:

  “Where is Nigel? Where is Nigel?” she cried out frenziedly.

  “What in heaven’s name do you mean by such manners?” demanded her ladyship. “Apologise at once!”

  “Where is Nigel? Nigel! Nigel!” the girl raved. “I will see him—I will—I will see him!”