“Do you know,” she inquired, “that you are talking to me as though you were the villain in the melodrama?”
“There is an advantage in that,” he answered, with an unholy smile. “If you repeat what I say, people will only think that you are indulging in hysterical exaggeration. They don’t believe in the existence of melodrama in these days.”
The cynical, absolute knowledge of this revealed so much that nerve was required to face it with steadiness.
“True,” she commented. “Now I think I understand.”
“No, you don’t,” he burst forth. “You have spent your life standing on a golden pedestal, being kowtowed to, and you imagine yourself immune from difficulties because you think you can pay your way out of anything. But you will find that you cannot pay your way out of this—or rather you cannot pay Rosalie’s way out of it.”
“I shall not try. Go on,” said the girl. “What I do not understand, you must explain to me. Don’t leave anything unsaid.”
“Good God, what a woman you are!” he cried out bitterly. He had never seen such beauty in his life as he saw in her as she stood with her straight young body flat against the tree. It was not a matter of deep colour of eye, or high spirit of profile—but of something which burned him. Still as she was, she looked like a flame. She made him feel old and body-worn, and all the more senselessly furious.
“I believe you hate me,” he raged. “And I may thank my wife for that.” Then he lost himself entirely. “Why cannot you behave well to me? If you will behave well to me, Rosalie shall go her own way. If you even looked at me as you look at other men—but you do not. There is always something under your lashes which watches me as if I were a wild beast you were studying. Don’t fancy yourself a dompteuse. I am not your man. I swear to you that you don’t know what you are dealing with. I swear to you that if you play this game with me I will drag you two down if I drag myself with you. I have nothing much to lose. You and your sister have everything.”
“Go on,” Betty said briefly.
“Go on! Yes, I will go on. Rosalie and Ffolliott I hold in the hollow of my hand. As for you—do you know that people are beginning to discuss you? Gossip is easily stirred in the country, where people are so bored that they chatter in self-defence. I have been considered a bad lot. I have become curiously attached to my sister-in-law. I am seen hanging about her, hanging over her as we ride or walk alone together. An American young woman is not like an English girl—she is used to seeing the marriage ceremony juggled with. There’s a trifle of prejudice against such young women when they are too rich and too handsome. Don’t look at me like that!” he burst forth, with maddened sharpness, “I won’t have it!”
The girl was regarding him with the expression he most resented—the reflection of a normal person watching an abnormal one, and studying his abnormality.
“Do you know that you are raving?” she said, with quiet curiosity—”raving?”
Suddenly he sat down on the low mound near him, and as he touched his forehead with his handkerchief, she saw that his hand actually shook.
“Yes,” he answered, panting, “but ‘ware my ravings! They mean what they say.”
“You do yourself an injury when you give way to them”— steadily, even with a touch of slow significance—”a physical injury. I have noticed that more than once.”
He sprang to his feet again. Every drop of blood left his face. For a second he looked as if he would strike her. His arm actually flung itself out—and fell.
“You devil!” he gasped. “You count on that? You she-devil!”
She left her tree and stood before him.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You intimate that you have been laying melodramatic plots against me which will injure my good name. That is rubbish. Let us leave it at that. You threaten that you will break Rosy’s heart and take her child from her, you say also that you will wound and hurt my mother to her death and do your worst to ruin an honest man–-“
“And, by God, I will!” he raged. “And you cannot stop me, if–-“
“I do not know whether I can stop you or not, though you may be sure I will try,” she interrupted him, “but that is not what I was going to say.” She drew a step nearer, and there was something in the intensity of her look which fascinated and held him for a moment. She was curiously grave. “Nigel, I believe in certain things you do not believe in. I believe black thoughts breed black ills to those who think them. It is not a new idea. There is an old Oriental proverb which says, `Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.’ I believe also that the worst—the very worst CANNOT be done to those who think steadily—steadily—only of the best. To you that is merely superstition to be laughed at. That is a matter of opinion. But—don’t go on with this thing—DON’T GO ON WITH IT. Stop and think it over.”
He stared at her furiously—tried to laugh outright, and failed because the look in her eyes was so odd in its strength and stillness.
“You think you can lay some weird spell upon me,” he jeered sardonically.
“No, I don’t,” she answered. “I could not if I would. It is no affair of mine. It is your affair only—and there is nothing weird about it. Don’t go on, I tell you. Think better of it.”
She turned about without further speech, and walked away from him with light swiftness over the marsh. Oddly enough, he did not even attempt to follow her. He felt a little weak— perhaps because a certain thing she had said had brought back to him a familiar touch of the horrors. She had the eyes of a falcon under the odd, soft shade of the extraordinary lashes. She had seen what he thought no one but himself had realised. Having watched her retreating figure for a few seconds, he sat down—as suddenly as before—on the mound near the tree.
“Oh, damn her!” he said, his damp forehead on his hands. “Damn the whole universe!”
… . .
When Betty and Roland reached Stornham, the wicker-work pony chaise from the vicarage stood before the stone entrance steps. The drawing-room door was open, and Mrs. Brent was standing near it saying some last words to Lady Anstruthers before leaving the house, after a visit evidently made with an object. This Betty gathered from the solemnity of her manner.
“Betty,” said Lady Anstruthers, catching sight of her, “do come in for a moment.”
When Betty entered, both her sister and Mrs. Brent looked at her questioningly.
“You look a little pale and tired, Miss Vanderpoel,” Mrs. Brent said, rather as if in haste to be the first to speak. “I hope you are not at all unwell. We need all our strength just now. I have brought the most painful news. Malignant typhoid fever has broken out among the hop pickers on the Mount Dunstan estate. Some poor creature was evidently sickening for it when he came from London. Three people died last night.”
CHAPTER XLI
SHE WOULD DO SOMETHING
Sir Nigel’s face was not a good thing to see when he appeared at the dinner table in the evening. As he took his seat the two footmen glanced quickly at each other, and the butler at the sideboard furtively thrust out his underlip. Not a man or woman in the household but had learned the signal denoting the moment when no service would please, no word or movement be unobjectionable. Lady Anstruthers’ face unconsciously assumed its propitiatory expression, and she glanced at her sister more than once when Betty was unaware that she did so.
Until the soup had been removed, Sir Nigel scarcely spoke, merely making curt replies to any casual remark. This was one of his simple and most engaging methods of at once enjoying an ill-humour and making his wife feel that she was in some way to blame for it.
“Mount Dunstan is in a deucedly unpleasant position,” he condescended at last. “I should not care to stand in his shoes.”
He had not returned to the Court until late in the afternoon, but having heard in the village the rumour of the outbreak of fever, he had made inquiries and gathered detail.
“You are thinking of the outbreak of typhoid among the hop pickers?” sai
d Lady Anstruthers. “Mrs. Brent thinks it threatens to be very serious.”
“An epidemic, without a doubt,” he answered. “In a wretched unsanitary place like Dunstan village, the wretches will die like flies.”
“What will be done?” inquired Betty.
He gave her one of the unpleasant personal glances and laughed derisively.
“Done? The county authorities, who call themselves `guardians,’ will be frightened to death and will potter about and fuss like old women, and profess to examine and protect and lay restrictions, but everyone will manage to keep at a discreet distance, and the thing will run riot and do its worst. As far as one can see, there seems no reason why the whole place should not be swept away. No doubt Mount Dunstan has wisely taken to his heels already.”
“I think that, on the contrary, there would be much doubt of that,” Betty said. “He would stay and do what he could.”
Sir Nigel shrugged his shoulders.
“Would he? I think you’ll find he would not.”
“Mrs. Brent tells me,” Rosalie broke in somewhat hurriedly, “that the huts for the hoppers are in the worst possible condition. They are so dilapidated that the rain pours into them. There is no proper shelter for the people who are ill, and Lord Mount Dunstan cannot afford to take care of them.”
“But he WILL—he WILL,” broke forth Betty. Her head lifted itself and she spoke almost as if through her small, shut teeth. A wave of intense belief—high, proud, and obstinate, swept through her. It was a feeling so strong and vibrant that she felt as if Mount Dunstan himself must be reached and upborne by it—as if he himself must hear her.
Rosalie looked at her half-startled, and, for the moment held fascinated by the sudden force rising in her and by the splendid spark of light under her lids. She was reminded of the fierce little Betty of long ago, with her delicate, indomitable small face and the spirit which even at nine years old had somehow seemed so strong and straitly keen of sight that one had known it might always be trusted. Actually, in one way, she had not changed. She saw the truth of things. The next instant, however, inadvertently glancing towards her husband, she caught her breath quickly. Across his heavy-featured face had shot the sudden gleam of a new expression. It was as if he had at the moment recognised something which filled him with a rush of fury he himself was not prepared for. That he did not wish it to be seen she knew by his manner. There was a brief silence in which it passed away. He spoke after it, with disagreeable precision.
“He has had an enormous effect on you—that man,” he said to Betty.
He spoke clearly so that she might have the pleasure of being certain that the menservants heard. They were close to the table, handing fruit—professing to be automatons, eyes down, faces expressing nothing, but as quick of hearing as it is said that blind men are. He knew that if he had been in her place and a thing as insultingly significant had been said to him, he should promptly have hurled the nearest object—plate, wine-glass, or decanter—in the face of the speaker. He knew, too, that women cannot hurl projectiles without looking like viragos and fools. The weakly-feminine might burst into tears or into a silly rage and leave the table. There was a distinct breath’s space of pause, and Betty, cutting a cluster from a bunch of hothouse grapes presented by the footman at her side, answered as clearly as he had spoken himself.
“He is strong enough to produce an effect on anyone,” she said. “I think you feel that yourself. He is a man who will not be beaten in the end. Fortune will give him some good thing.”
“He is a fellow who knows well enough on which hand of him good things lie,” he said. “He will take all that offers itself.”
“Why not?” Betty said impartially.
“There must be no riding or driving in the neighbourhood of the place,” he said next. “I will have no risks run.” He turned and addressed the butler. “Jennings, tell the servants that those are my orders.”
He sat over his wine but a short time that evening, and when he joined his wife and sister-in-law in the drawing-room he went at once to Betty. In fact, he was in the condition when a man cannot keep away from a woman, but must invent some reason for reaching her whether it is fatuous or plausible.
“What I said to Jennings was an order to you as well as to the people below stairs. I know you are particularly fond of riding in the direction of Mount Dunstan. You are in my care so long as you are in my house.”
“Orders are not necessary,” Betty replied. “The day is past when one rushed to smooth pillows and give the wrong medicine when one’s friends were ill. If one is not a properly-trained nurse, it is wiser not to risk being very much in the way.”
He spoke over her shoulder, dropping his voice, though Lady Anstruthers sat apart, appearing to read.
“Don’t think I am fool enough not to understand. You have yourself under magnificent control, but a woman passionately in love cannot keep a certain look out of her eyes.”
He was standing on the hearth. Betty swung herself lightly round, facing him squarely. Her full look was splendid.
“If it is there—let it stay,” she said. “I would not keep it out of my eyes if I could, and, you are right, I could not if I would—if it is there. If it is—let it stay.”
The daring, throbbing, human truth of her made his brain whirl. To a man young and clean and fit to count as in the lists, to have heard her say the thing of a rival would have been hard enough, but base, degenerate, and of the world behind her day, to hear it while frenzied for her, was intolerable. And it was Mount Dunstan she bore herself so highly for. Whether melodrama is out of date or not there are, occasionally, some fine melodramatic touches in the enmities of to-day.
“You think you will reach him,” he persisted. “You think you will help him in some way. You will not let the thing alone.”
“Excuse my mentioning that whatsoever I take the liberty of doing will encroach on no right of yours,” she said.
But, alone in her room, after she went upstairs, the face reflecting itself in the mirror was pale and its black brows were drawn together.
She sat down at the dressing-table, and, seeing the paled face, drew the black brows closer, confronting a complicating truth.
“If I were free to take Rosalie and Ughtred home to-morrow,” she thought, “I could not bear to go. I should suffer too much.”
She was suffering now. The strong longing in her heart was like a physical pain. No word or look of this one man had given her proof that his thoughts turned to her, and yet it was intolerable—intolerable—that in his hour of stress and need they were as wholly apart as if worlds rolled between them. At any dire moment it was mere nature that she should give herself in help and support. If, on the night at sea, when they had first spoken to each other, the ship had gone down, she knew that they two, strangers though they were, would have worked side by side among the frantic people, and have been among the last to take to the boats. How did she know? Only because, he being he, and she being she, it must have been so in accordance with the laws ruling entities. And now he stood facing a calamity almost as terrible—and she with full hands sat still.
She had seen the hop pickers’ huts and had recognised their condition. Mere brick sheds in which the pickers slept upon bundles of hay or straw in their best days; in their decay they did not even provide shelter. In fine weather the hop gatherers slept well enough in them, cooking their food in gypsy-fashion in the open. When the rain descended, it must run down walls and drip through the holes in the roofs in streams which would soak clothes and bedding. The worst that Nigel and Mrs. Brent had implied was true. Illness of any order, under such circumstances, would have small chance of recovery, but malignant typhoid without shelter, without proper nourishment or nursing, had not one chance in a million. And he—this one man—stood alone in the midst of the tragedy—responsible and helpless. He would feel himself responsible as she herself would, if she were in his place. She was conscious that suddenly the event of the afternoon—the
interview upon the marshes, had receded until it had become an almost unmeaning incident. What did the degenerate, melodramatic folly matter–-!
She had restlessly left her chair before the dressing-table, and was walking to and fro. She paused and stood looking down at the carpet, though she scarcely saw it.
“Nothing matters but one thing—one person,” she owned to herself aloud. “I suppose it is always like this. Rosy, Ughtred, even father and mother—everyone seems less near than they were. It is too strong—too strong. It is–-” the words dropped slowly from her lips, “the strongest thing— in the world.”
She lifted her face and threw out her hands, a lovely young half-sad smile curling the deep corners of her mouth. “Sometimes one feels so disdained,” she said—”so disdained with all one’s power. Perhaps I am an unwanted thing.”
But even in this case there were aids one might make an effort to give. She went to her writing-table and sat thinking for some time. Afterwards she began to write letters. Three or four were addressed to London—one was to Mr. Penzance.
… . .
Mount Dunstan and his vicar were walking through the village to the vicarage. They had been to the hop pickers’ huts to see the people who were ill of the fever. Both of them noticed that cottage doors and windows were shut, and that here and there alarmed faces looked out from behind latticed panes.
“They are in a panic of fear,” Mount Dunstan said, “and by way of safeguard they shut out every breath of air and stifle indoors. Something must be done.”
Catching the eye of a woman who was peering over her short white dimity blind, he beckoned to her authoritatively. She came to the door and hesitated there, curtsying nervously.
The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett Page 52
