He turned with an air of far from pleased surprise. The afternoon sun was in his eyes and made him scowl. For a moment he did not see distinctly who was approaching him, but he had at once recognised a certain cool tone of command in the voice whose suddenness had roused him from a black mood. A few steps brought them to close quarters, and when he found himself looking into the eyes of his pursuer he made a movement as if to lift his cap, then checking himself, touched it, keeper fashion.
“Oh!” he said shortly. “Miss Vanderpoel! Beg pardon.”
Bettina stood still a second. She had her surprise also. Here was the unexpected again. The under keeper was the red-haired second-class passenger of the Meridiana.
He did not look pleased to see her, and the suddenness of his appearance excluded the possibility of her realising that upon the whole she was at least not displeased to see him.
“How do you do?” she said, feeling the remark fantastically conventional, but not being inspired by any alternative. “I came to tell you that one of the stags has got through a gap in the fence.”
“Damn!” she heard him say under his breath. Aloud he said, “Thank you.”
“He is a splendid creature,” she said. “I did not know what to do. I was glad to see a keeper coming.”
“Thank you,” he said again, and strode towards the place where the stag still stood gazing up the road, as if reflecting as to whether it allured him or not.
Betty walked back more slowly, watching him with interest. She wondered what he would find it necessary to do. She heard him begin a low, flute-like whistling, and then saw the antlered head turn towards him. The woodland creature moved, but it was in his direction. It had without doubt answered his call before and knew its meaning to be friendly. It went towards him, stretching out a tender sniffing nose, and he put his hand in the pocket of his rough coat and gave it something to eat. Afterwards he went to the gap in the fence and drew the wires together, fastening them with other wire, which he also took out of the coat pocket.
“He is not afraid of making himself useful,” thought Betty. “And the animals know him. He is not as bad as he looks.”
She lingered a moment watching him, and then walked towards the gate through which she had entered. He glanced up as she neared him.
“I don’t see your carriage,” he said. “Your man is probably round the trees.”
“I walked,” answered Betty. “I had heard of this place and wanted to see it.”
He stood up, putting his wire back into his pocket.
“There is not much to be seen from the road,” he said. “Would you like to see more of it?”
His manner was civil enough, but not the correct one for a servant. He did not say “miss” or touch his cap in making the suggestion. Betty hesitated a moment.
“Is the family at home?” she inquired.
“There is no family but—his lordship. He is off the place.”
“Does he object to trespassers?”
“Not if they are respectable and take no liberties.”
“I am respectable, and I shall not take liberties,” said Miss Vanderpoel, with a touch of hauteur. The truth was that she had spent a sufficient number of years on the Continent to have become familiar with conventions which led her not to approve wholly of his bearing. Perhaps he had lived long enough in America to forget such conventions and to lack something which centuries of custom had decided should belong to his class. A certain suggestion of rough force in the man rather attracted her, and her slight distaste for his manner arose from the realisation that a gentleman’s servant who did not address his superiors as was required by custom was not doing his work in a finished way. In his place she knew her own demeanour would have been finished.
“If you are sure that Lord Mount Dunstan would not object to my walking about, I should like very much to see the gardens and the house,” she said. “If you show them to me, shall I be interfering with your duties?”
“No,” he answered, and then for the first time rather glumly added, “miss.”
“I am interested,” she said, as they crossed the grass together, “because places like this are quite new to me. I have never been in England before.”
“There are not many places like this,” he answered, “not many as old and fine, and not many as nearly gone to ruin. Even Stornham is not quite as far gone.”
“It is far gone,” said Miss Vanderpoel. “I am staying there—with my sister, Lady Anstruthers.”
“Beg pardon—miss,” he said. This time he touched his cap in apology.
Enormous as the gulf between their positions was, he knew that he had offered to take her over the place because he was in a sense glad to see her again. Why he was glad he did not profess to know or even to ask himself. Coarsely speaking, it might be because she was one of the handsomest young women he had ever chanced to meet with, and while her youth was apparent in the rich red of her mouth, the mass of her thick, soft hair and the splendid blue of her eyes, there spoke in every line of face and pose something intensely more interesting and compelling than girlhood. Also, since the night they had come together on the ship’s deck for an appalling moment, he had liked her better and rebelled less against the unnatural wealth she represented. He led her first to the wood from which she had seen him emerge.
“I will show you this first,” he explained. “Keep your eyes on the ground until I tell you to raise them.”
Odd as this was, she obeyed, and her lowered glance showed her that she was being guided along a narrow path between trees. The light was mellow golden-green, and birds were singing in the boughs above her. In a few minutes he stopped.
“Now look up,” he said.
She uttered an exclamation when she did so. She was in a fairy dell thick with ferns, and at beautiful distances from each other incredibly splendid oaks spread and almost trailed their lovely giant branches. The glow shining through and between them, the shadows beneath them, their great boles and moss-covered roots, and the stately, mellow distances revealed under their branches, the ancient wildness and richness, which meant, after all, centuries of cultivation, made a picture in this exact, perfect moment of ripening afternoon sun of an almost unbelievable beauty.
“There is nothing lovelier,” he said in a low voice, “in all England.”
Bettina turned to look at him, because his tone was a curious one for a man like himself. He was standing resting on his gun and taking in the loveliness with a strange look in his rugged face.
“You—you love it!” she said.
“Yes,” but with a suggestion of stubborn reluctance in the admission.
She was rather moved.
“Have you been keeper here long?” she asked.
“No—only a few years. But I have known the place all my life.”
“Does Lord Mount Dunstan love it?”
“In his way—yes.”
He was plainly not disposed to talk of his master. He was perhaps not on particularly good terms with him. He led her away and volunteered no further information. He was, upon the whole, uncommunicative. He did not once refer to the circumstance of their having met before. It was plain that he had no intention of presuming upon the fact that he, as a second-class passenger on a ship, had once been forced by accident across the barriers between himself and the saloon deck. He was stubbornly resolved to keep his place; so stubbornly that Bettina felt that to broach the subject herself would verge upon offence.
But the golden ways through which he led her made the afternoon one she knew she should never forget. They wandered through moss walks and alleys, through tangled shrubberies bursting into bloom, beneath avenues of blossoming horse-chestnuts and scented limes, between thickets of budding red and white may, and jungles of neglected rhododendrons; through sunken gardens and walled ones, past terraces with broken balustrades of stone, and fallen Floras and Dianas, past moss-grown fountains splashing in lovely corners. Arches, overgrown with yet unblooming roses, crumbled in their
time stained beauty. Stillness brooded over it all, and they met no one. They scarcely broke the silence themselves. The man led the way as one who knew it by heart, and Bettina followed, not caring for speech herself, because the stillness seemed to add a spell of enchantment. What could one say, to a stranger, of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin and decay.
“But, oh!” she murmured once, standing still, with in-drawn breath, “if it were mine!—if it were mine!” And she said the thing forgetting that her guide was a living creature and stood near.
Afterwards her memories of it all seemed to her like the memories of a dream. The lack of speech between herself and the man who led her, his often averted face, her own sense of the desertedness of each beauteous spot she passed through, the mossy paths which gave back no sound of footfalls as they walked, suggested, one and all, unreality. When at last they passed through a door half hidden in an ivied wall, and crossing a grassed bowling green, mounted a short flight of broken steps which led them to a point through which they saw the house through a break in the trees, this last was the final touch of all. It was a great place, stately in its masses of grey stone to which thick ivy clung. To Bettina it seemed that a hundred windows stared at her with closed, blind eyes. All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors. Not one showed signs of life. The silent stone thing stood sightless among all of which it was dead master—rolling acres, great trees, lost gardens and deserted groves.
“Oh!” she sighed, “Oh!”
Her companion stood still and leaned upon his gun again, looking as he had looked before.
“Some of it,” he said, “was here before the Conquest. It belonged to Mount Dunstans then.”
“And only one of them is left,” she cried, “and it is like this!”
“They have been a bad lot, the last hundred years,” was the surly liberty of speech he took, “a bad lot.”
It was not his place to speak in such manner of those of his master’s house, and it was not the part of Miss Vanderpoel to encourage him by response. She remained silent, standing perhaps a trifle more lightly erect as she gazed at the rows of blind windows in silence.
Neither of them uttered a word for some time, but at length Bettina roused herself. She had a six-mile walk before her and must go.
“I am very much obliged to you,” she began, and then paused a second. A curious hesitance came upon her, though she knew that under ordinary circumstances such hesitation would have been totally out of place. She had occupied the man’s time for an hour or more, he was of the working class, and one must not be guilty of the error of imagining that a man who has work to do can justly spend his time in one’s service for the mere pleasure of it. She knew what custom demanded. Why should she hesitate before this man, with his not too courteous, surly face. She felt slightly irritated by her own unpractical embarrassment as she put her hand into the small, latched bag at her belt.
“I am very much obliged, keeper,” she said. “You have given me a great deal of your time. You know the place so well that it has been a pleasure to be taken about by you. I have never seen anything so beautiful—and so sad. Thank you —thank you.” And she put a goldpiece in his palm.
His fingers closed over it quietly. Why it was to her great relief she did not know—because something in the simple act annoyed her, even while she congratulated herself that her hesitance had been absurd. The next moment she wondered if it could be possible that he had expected a larger fee. He opened his hand and looked at the money with a grim steadiness.
“Thank you, miss,” he said, and touched his cap in the proper manner.
He did not look gracious or grateful, but he began to put it in a small pocket in the breast of his worn corduroy shooting jacket. Suddenly he stopped, as if with abrupt resolve. He handed the coin back without any change of his glum look.
“Hang it all,” he said, “I can’t take this, you know. I suppose I ought to have told you. It would have been less awkward for us both. I am that unfortunate beggar, Mount Dunstan, myself.”
A pause was inevitable. It was a rather long one. After it, Betty took back her half-sovereign and returned it to her bag, but she pleased a certain perversity in him by looking more annoyed than confused.
“Yes,” she said. “You ought to have told me, Lord Mount Dunstan.”
He slightly shrugged his big shoulders.
“Why shouldn’t you take me for a keeper? You crossed the Atlantic with a fourth-rate looking fellow separated from you by barriers of wood and iron. You came upon him tramping over a nobleman’s estate in shabby corduroys and gaiters, with a gun over his shoulder and a scowl on his ugly face. Why should you leap to the conclusion that he is the belted Earl himself? There is no cause for embarrassment.”
“I am not embarrassed,” said Bettina.
“That is what I like,” gruffly.
“I am pleased,” in her mellowest velvet voice, “that you like it.”
Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling, and Mount Dunstan slightly frowned.
“I beg pardon,” he said. “You are quite right. It had a deucedly patronising sound.”
As he stood before her Betty was given her opportunity to see him as she had not seen him before, to confront the sum total of his physique. His red-brown eyes looked out from rather fine heavy brows, his features were strong and clear, though ruggedly cut, his build showed weight of bone, not of flesh, and his limbs were big and long. He would have wielded a battle-axe with power in centuries in which men hewed their way with them. Also it occurred to her he would have looked well in a coat of mail. He did not look ill in his corduroys and gaiters.
“I am a self-absorbed beggar,” he went on. “I had been slouching about the place, almost driven mad by my thoughts, and when I saw you took me for a servant my fancy was for letting the thing go on. If I had been a rich man instead of a pauper I would have kept your half-sovereign.”
“I should not have enjoyed that when I found out the truth,” said Miss Vanderpoel
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. But I should not have cared.”
He was looking at her straightly and summing her up as she had summed him up. A man and young, he did not miss a line or a tint of her chin or cheek, shoulder, or brow, or dense, lifted hair. He had already, even in his guise of keeper, noticed one thing, which was that while at times her eyes were the blue of steel, sometimes they melted to the colour of bluebells under water. They had been of this last hue when she had stood in the sunken garden, forgetting him and crying low:
“Oh, if it were mine! If it were mine!”
He did not like American women with millions, but while he would not have said that he liked her, he did not wish her yet to move away. And she, too, did not wish, just yet, to move away. There was something dramatic and absorbing in the situation. She looked over the softly stirring grass and saw the sunshine was deepening its gold and the shadows were growing long. It was not a habit of hers to ask questions, but she asked one.
“Did you not like America?” was what she said.
“Hated it! Hated it! I went there lured by a belief that a man like myself, with muscle and will, even without experience, could make a fortune out of small capital on a sheep ranch. Wind and weather and disease played the devil with me. I lost the little I had and came back to begin over again— on nothing—here!” And he waved his hand over the park with its sward and coppice and bracken and the deer cropping in the late afternoon gold.
“To begin what again?” said Betty. It was an extraordinary enough thing, seen in the light of conventions, that they should stand and talk like this. But the spark had kindled between eye and eye, and because of it they suddenly had forgotten that they were strangers.
“You are an American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it would to others. To begin to build up again, in one man’s life, what has taken c
enturies to grow—and fall into this.”
“It would be a splendid thing to do,” she said slowly, and as she said it her eyes took on their colour of bluebells, because what she had seen had moved her. She had not looked at him, but at the cropping deer as she spoke, but at her next sentence she turned to him again.
“Where should you begin?” she asked, and in saying it thought of Stornham.
He laughed shortly.
“That is American enough,” he said. “Your people have not finished their beginnings yet and live in the spirit of them.
I tell you of a wild fancy, and you accept it as a possibility and turn on me with, `Where should you begin?’ “
“That is one way of beginning,” said Bettina. “In fact, it is the only way.”
He did not tell her that he liked that, but he knew that he did like it and that her mere words touched him like a spur. It was, of course, her lifelong breathing of the atmosphere of millions which made for this fashion of moving at once in the direction of obstacles presenting to the rest of the world barriers seemingly insurmountable. And yet there was something else in it, some quality of nature which did not alone suggest the omnipotence of wealth, but another thing which might be even stronger and therefore carried conviction. He who had raged and clenched his hands in the face of his knowledge of the aspect his dream would have presented if he had revealed it to the ordinary practical mind, felt that a point of view like this was good for him. There was in it stimulus for a fleeting moment at least.
“That is a good idea,” he answered. “Where should you begin?”
She replied quite seriously, though he could have imagined some girls rather simpering over the question as a casual joke.
“One would begin at the fences,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”
“That is practical.”
“That is where I shall begin at Stornham,” reflectively.
“You are going to begin at Stornham?”
“How could one help it? It is not as large or as splendid as this has been, but it is like it in a way. And it will belong to my sister’s son. No, I could not help it.”
The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett Page 18
