The Shuttle, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Title: The Shuttle

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Release Date: March 18, 2006 [EBook #506]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHUTTLE ***




Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger





THE SHUTTLE

By Frances Hodgson Burnett




CONTENTS

     CHAPTER
     I.       THE WEAVING OF THE SHUTTLE
     II.      A LACK OF PERCEPTION
     III.     YOUNG LADY ANSTRUTHERS
     IV.      A MISTAKE OF THE POSTBOY'S
     V.       ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC
     VI.      AN UNFAIR ENDOWMENT
     VII.     ON BOARD THE "MERIDIANA"
     VIII.    THE SECOND-CLASS PASSENGER
     IX.      LADY JANE GREY
     X.       "IS LADY ANSTRUTHERS AT HOME?"
     XI.      "I THOUGHT YOU HAD ALL FORGOTTEN"
     XII.     UGHTRED
     XIII.    ONE OF THE NEW YORK DRESSES
     XIV.     IN THE GARDENS
     XV.      THE FIRST MAN
     XVI.     THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT
     XVII.    TOWNLINSON & SHEPPARD
     XVIII.   THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN
     XIX.     SPRING IN BOND STREET
     XX.      THINGS OCCUR IN STORNHAM VILLAGE
     XXI.     KEDGERS
     XXII.    ONE OF MR. VANDERPOEL'S LETTERS
     XXIII.   INTRODUCING G. SELDEN
     XXIV.    THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF STORNHAM
     XXV.     "WE BEGAN TO MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!"
     XXVI.    "WHAT IT MUST BE TO BE YOU--JUST YOU!"
     XXVII.   LIFE
     XXVIII.  SETTING THEM THINKING
     XXIX.    THE THREAD OF G. SELDEN
     XXX.     A RETURN
     XXXI.    NO, SHE WOULD NOT
     XXXII.   A GREAT BALL
     XXXIII.  FOR LADY JANE
     XXXIV.   RED GODWYN
     XXXV.    THE TIDAL WAVE
     XXXVI.   BY THE ROADSIDE EVERYWHERE
     XXXVII.  CLOSED CORRIDORS
     XXXVIII. AT SHANDY'S
     XXXIX.   ON THE MARSHES
     XL.      "DON'T GO ON WITH THIS"
     XLI.     SHE WOULD DO SOMETHING
     XLII.    IN THE BALLROOM
     XLIII.   HIS CHANCE
     XLIV.    A FOOTSTEP
     XLV.     THE PASSING BELL
     XLVI.    LISTENING
     XLVII.   "I HAVE NO WORD OR LOOK TO REMEMBER"
     XLVIII.  THE MOMENT
     XLIX.    AT STORNHAM AND AT BROADMORLANDS
     L.       THE PRIMEVAL THING





THE SHUTTLE




CHAPTER I

THE WEAVING OF THE SHUTTLE

No man knew when the Shuttle began its slow and heavy weaving from shore
to shore, that it was held and guided by the great hand of Fate. Fate
alone saw the meaning of the web it wove, the might of it, and its place
in the making of a world's history. Men thought but little of either web
or weaving, calling them by other names and lighter ones, for the time
unconscious of the strength of the thread thrown across thousands of
miles of leaping, heaving, grey or blue ocean.

Fate and Life planned the weaving, and it seemed mere circumstance
which guided the Shuttle to and fro between two worlds divided by a gulf
broader and deeper than the thousands of miles of salt, fierce sea--the
gulf of a bitter quarrel deepened by hatred and the shedding of
brothers' blood. Between the two worlds of East and West there was no
will to draw nearer. Each held apart. Those who had rebelled against
that which their souls called tyranny, having struggled madly and
shed blood in tearing themselves free, turned stern backs upon their
unconquered enemies, broke all cords that bound them to the past,
flinging off ties of name, kinship and rank, beginning with fierce
disdain a new life.

Those who, being rebelled against, found the rebels too passionate
in their determination and too desperate in their defence of their
strongholds to be less than unconquerable, sailed back haughtily to the
world which seemed so far the greater power. Plunging into new battles,
they added new conquests and splendour to their land, looking back with
something of contempt to the half-savage West left to build its own
civilisation without other aid than the strength of its own strong right
hand and strong uncultured brain.

But while the two worlds held apart, the Shuttle, weaving slowly in the
great hand of Fate, drew them closer and held them firm, each of them
all unknowing for many a year, that what had at first been mere threads
of gossamer, was forming a web whose strength in time none could
compute, whose severance could be accomplished but by tragedy and
convulsion.

The weaving was but in its early and slow-moving years when this
story opens. Steamers crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, but they
accomplished the journey at leisure and with heavy rollings and all such
discomforts as small craft can afford. Their staterooms and decks were
not crowded with people to whom the voyage was a mere incident--in many
cases a yearly one. "A crossing" in those days was an event. It was
planned seriously, long thought of, discussed and re-discussed, with and
among the various members of the family to which the voyager belonged.
A certain boldness, bordering on recklessness, was almost to be
presupposed in the individual who, turning his back upon New York,
Philadelphia, Boston, and like cities, turned his face towards "Europe."
In those days when the Shuttle wove at leisure, a man did not lightly
run over to London, or Paris, or Berlin, he gravely went to "Europe."

The journey being likely to be made once in a lifetime, the traveller's
intention was to see as much as possible, to visit as many cities
cathedrals, ruins, galleries, as his time and purse would allow. People
who could speak with any degree of familiarity of Hyde Park, the Champs
Elysees, the Pincio, had gained a certain dignity. The ability to touch
with an intimate bearing upon such localities was a raison de plus for
being asked out to tea or to dinner. To possess photographs and relics
was to be of interest, to have seen European celebrities even at a
distance, to have wandered about the outside of poets' gardens and
philosophers' houses, was to be entitled to respect. The period was a
far cry from the time when the Shuttle, having shot to and fro, faster
and faster, week by week, month by month, weaving new threads into its
web each year, has woven warp and woof until they bind far shore to
shore.

It was in comparatively early days that the first thread we follow
was woven into the web. Many such have been woven since and have
added greater strength than any others, twining the cord of sex and
home-building and race-founding. But this was a slight and weak
one, being only the thread of the life of one of Reuben Vanderpoel's
daughters--the pretty little simple one whose name was Rosalie.

They were--the Vanderpoels--of the Americans whose fortunes were a
portion of the history of their country. The building of these fortunes
had been a part of, or had created epochs and crises. Their millions
could scarcely be regarded as private property. Newspapers bandied them
about, so to speak, employing them as factors in argument, using them
as figures of speech, incorporating them into methods of calculation.
Literature touched upon them, moral systems considered them, stories for
the young treated them gravely as illustrative.

The first Reuben Vanderpoel, who in early days of danger had traded with
savages for the pelts of wild animals, was the lauded hero of stories
of thrift and enterprise. Throughout his hard-working life he had been
irresistibly impelled to action by an absolute genius of commerce,
expressing itself at the outset by the exhibition of courage in mere
exchange and barter. An alert power to perceive the potential value of
things and the possible malleability of men and circumstances, had stood
him in marvellous good stead. He had bought at low prices things which
in the eyes of the less discerning were worthless, but, having obtained
possession of such things, the less discerning had almost invariably
awakened to the fact that, in his hands, values increased, and methods
of remunerative disposition, being sought, were found. Nothing remained
unutilisable. The practical, sordid, uneducated little man developed the
power to create demand for his own supplies. If he was betrayed into
an error, he quickly retrieved it. He could live upon nothing and
consequently could travel anywhere in search of such things as he
desired. He could barely read and write, and could not spell, but he was
daring and astute. His untaught brain was that of a financier, his blood
burned with the fever of but one desire--the desire to accumulate. Money
expressed to his nature, not expenditure, but investment in such small
or large properties as could be resold at profit in the near or far
future. The future held fascinations for him. He bought nothing for his
own pleasure or comfort, nothing which could not be sold or bartered
again. He married a woman who was a trader's daughter and shared his
passion for gain. She was of North of England blood, her father having
been a hard-fisted small tradesman in an unimportant town, who had been
daring enough to emigrate when emigration meant the facing of unknown
dangers in a half-savage land. She had excited Reuben Vanderpoel's
admiration by taking off her petticoat one bitter winter's day to sell
it to a squaw in exchange for an ornament for which she chanced to know
another squaw would pay with a skin of value. The first Mrs. Vanderpoel
was as wonderful as her husband. They were both wonderful. They were
the founders of the fortune which a century and a half later was the
delight--in fact the piece de resistance--of New York society reporters,
its enormity being restated in round figures when a blank space must be
filled up. The method of statement lent itself to infinite variety and
was always interesting to a particular class, some elements of which
felt it encouraging to be assured that so much money could be a personal
possession, some elements feeling the fact an additional argument to be
used against the infamy of monopoly.

The first Reuben Vanderpoel transmitted to his son his accumulations and
his fever for gain. He had but one child. The second Reuben built upon
the foundations this afforded him, a fortune as much larger than the
first as the rapid growth and increasing capabilities of the country
gave him enlarging opportunities to acquire. It was no longer necessary
to deal with savages: his powers were called upon to cope with those
of white men who came to a new country to struggle for livelihood and
fortune. Some were shrewd, some were desperate, some were dishonest. But
shrewdness never outwitted, desperation never overcame, dishonesty never
deceived the second Reuben Vanderpoel. Each characteristic ended by
adapting itself to his own purposes and qualities, and as a result of
each it was he who in any business transaction was the gainer. It was
the common saying that the Vanderpoels were possessed of a money-making
spell. Their spell lay in their entire mental and physical absorption in
one idea. Their peculiarity was not so much that they wished to be rich
as that Nature itself impelled them to collect wealth as the load-stone
draws towards it iron. Having possessed nothing, they became rich,
having become rich they became richer, having founded their fortunes
on small schemes, they increased them by enormous ones. In time they
attained that omnipotence of wealth which it would seem no circumstance
can control or limit. The first Reuben Vanderpoel could not spell, the
second could, the third was as well educated as a man could be whose
sole profession is money-making. His children were taught all that
expensive teachers and expensive opportunities could teach them. After
the second generation the meagre and mercantile physical type of the
Vanderpoels improved upon itself. Feminine good looks appeared and were
made the most of. The Vanderpoel element invested even good looks to an
advantage. The fourth Reuben Vanderpoel had no son and two daughters.
They were brought up in a brown-stone mansion built upon a fashionable
New York thoroughfare roaring with traffic. To the farthest point of
the Rocky Mountains the number of dollars this "mansion" (it was always
called so) had cost, was known. There may have existed Pueblo Indians
who had heard rumours of the price of it. All the shop-keepers and
farmers in the United States had read newspaper descriptions of its
furnishings and knew the value of the brocade which hung in the bedrooms
and boudoirs of the Misses Vanderpoel. It was a fact much cherished that
Miss Rosalie's bath was of Carrara marble, and to good souls actively
engaged in doing their own washing in small New England or Western
towns, it was a distinct luxury to be aware that the water in the
Carrara marble bath was perfumed with Florentine Iris. Circumstances
such as these seemed to become personal possessions and even to lighten
somewhat the burden of toil.

Rosalie Vanderpoel married an Englishman of title, and part of the
story of her married life forms my prologue. Hers was of the early
international marriages, and the republican mind had not yet adjusted
itself to all that such alliances might imply. It was yet ingenuous,
imaginative and confiding in such matters. A baronetcy and a manor house
reigning over an old English village and over villagers in possible
smock frocks, presented elements of picturesque dignity to people whose
intimacy with such allurements had been limited by the novels of Mrs.
Oliphant and other writers. The most ordinary little anecdotes in which
vicarages, gamekeepers, and dowagers figured, were exciting in these
early days. "Sir Nigel Anstruthers," when engraved upon a visiting card,
wore an air of distinction almost startling. Sir Nigel himself was
not as picturesque as his name, though he was not entirely without
attraction, when for reasons of his own he chose to aim at agreeableness
of bearing. He was a man with a good figure and a good voice, and but
for a heaviness of feature the result of objectionable living, might
have given the impression of being better looking than he really was.
New York laid amused and at the same time, charmed stress upon the fact
that he spoke with an "English accent." His enunciation was in fact
clear cut and treated its vowels well. He was a man who observed with an
air of accustomed punctiliousness such social rules and courtesies as he
deemed it expedient to consider. An astute worldling had remarked that
he was at once more ceremonious and more casual in his manner than men
bred in America.

"If you invite him to dinner," the wording said, "or if you die,
or marry, or meet with an accident, his notes of condolence or
congratulation are prompt and civil, but the actual truth is that he
cares nothing whatever about you or your relations, and if you don't
please him he does not hesitate to sulk or be astonishingly rude, which
last an American does not allow himself to be, as a rule."

By many people Sir Nigel was not analysed, but accepted. He was of the
early English who came to New York, and was a novelty of interest, with
his background of Manor House and village and old family name. He was
very much talked of at vivacious ladies' luncheon parties, he was very
much talked to at equally vivacious afternoon teas. At dinner parties he
was furtively watched a good deal, but after dinner when he sat with
the men over their wine, he was not popular. He was not perhaps exactly
disliked, but men whose chief interest at that period lay in stocks
and railroads, did not find conversation easy with a man whose sole
occupation had been the shooting of birds and the hunting of foxes,
when he was not absolutely loitering about London, with his time on his
hands. The stories he told--and they were few--were chiefly anecdotes
whose points gained their humour by the fact that a man was a comically
bad shot or bad rider and either peppered a gamekeeper or was thrown
into a ditch when his horse went over a hedge, and such relations
did not increase in the poignancy of their interest by being filtered
through brains accustomed to applying their powers to problems of
speculation and commerce. He was not so dull but that he perceived
this at an early stage of his visit to New York, which was probably the
reason of the infrequency of his stories.

He on his side was naturally not quick to rise to the humour of a "big
deal" or a big blunder made on Wall Street--or to the wit of jokes
concerning them. Upon the whole he would have been glad to have
understood such matters more clearly. His circumstances were such as
had at last forced him to contemplate the world of money-makers with
something of an annoyed respect. "These fellows" who had neither
titles nor estates to keep up could make money. He, as he acknowledged
disgustedly to himself, was much worse than a beggar. There was Stornham
Court in a state of ruin--the estate going to the dogs, the farmhouses
tumbling to pieces and he, so to speak, without a sixpence to bless
himself with, and head over heels in debt. Englishmen of the rank which
in bygone times had not associated itself with trade had begun at least
to trifle with it--to consider its potentialities as factors possibly
to be made useful by the aristocracy. Countesses had not yet spiritedly
opened milliners' shops, nor belted Earls adorned the stage, but certain
noblemen had dallied with beer and coquetted with stocks. One of
the first commercial developments had been the discovery of
America--particularly of New York--as a place where if one could make up
one's mind to the plunge, one might marry one's sons profitably. At
the outset it presented a field so promising as to lead to rashness and
indiscretion on the part of persons not given to analysis of character
and in consequence relying too serenely upon an ingenuousness which
rather speedily revealed that it had its limits. Ingenuousness combining
itself with remarkable alertness of perception on occasion, is
rather American than English, and is, therefore, to the English mind,
misleading.

At first younger sons, who "gave trouble" to their families, were sent
out. Their names, their backgrounds of castles or manors, relatives of
distinction, London seasons, fox hunting, Buckingham Palace and Goodwood
Races, formed a picturesque allurement. That the castles and manors
would belong to their elder brothers, that the relatives of distinction
did not encourage intimacy with swarms of the younger branches of their
families; that London seasons, hunting, and racing were for their elders
and betters, were facts not realised in all their importance by the
republican mind. In the course of time they were realised to the full,
but in Rosalie Vanderpoel's nineteenth year they covered what was at
that time almost unknown territory. One may rest assured Sir Nigel
Anstruthers said nothing whatsoever in New York of an interview he had
had before sailing with an intensely disagreeable great-aunt, who was
the wife of a Bishop. She was a horrible old woman with a broad face,
blunt features and a raucous voice, whose tones added acridity to
her observations when she was indulging in her favourite pastime of
interfering with the business of her acquaintances and relations.

"I do not know what you are going chasing off to America for, Nigel,"
she commented. "You can't afford it and it is perfectly ridiculous of
you to take it upon yourself to travel for pleasure as if you were a man
of means instead of being in such a state of pocket that Maria tells me
you cannot pay your tailor. Neither the Bishop nor I can do anything
for you and I hope you don't expect it. All I can hope is that you know
yourself what you are going to America in search of, and that it is
something more practical than buffaloes. You had better stop in New
York. Those big shopkeepers' daughters are enormously rich, they say,
and they are immensely pleased by attentions from men of your class.
They say they'll marry anything if it has an aunt or a grandmother with
a title. You can mention the Marchioness, you know. You need not refer
to the fact that she thought your father a blackguard and your mother an
interloper, and that you have never been invited to Broadmere since you
were born. You can refer casually to me and to the Bishop and to the
Palace, too. A Palace--even a Bishop's--ought to go a long way with
Americans. They will think it is something royal." She ended her remarks
with one of her most insulting snorts of laughter, and Sir Nigel became
dark red and looked as if he would like to knock her down.

It was not, however, her sentiments which were particularly revolting to
him. If she had expressed them in a manner more flattering to himself he
would have felt that there was a good deal to be said for them. In
fact, he had put the same thing to himself some time previously, and, in
summing up the American matter, had reached certain thrifty decisions.
The impulse to knock her down surged within him solely because he had a
brutally bad temper when his vanity was insulted, and he was furious at
her impudence in speaking to him as if he were a villager out of work
whom she was at liberty to bully and lecture.

"For a woman who is supposed to have been born of gentle people," he
said to his mother afterwards, "Aunt Marian is the most vulgar old beast
I have ever beheld. She has the taste of a female costermonger." Which
was entirely true, but it might be added that his own was no better and
his points of view and morals wholly coincided with his taste.

Naturally Rosalie Vanderpoel knew nothing of this side of the matter.
She had been a petted, butterfly child, who had been pretty and admired
and indulged from her infancy; she had grown up into a petted, butterfly
girl, pretty and admired and surrounded by inordinate luxury. Her world
had been made up of good-natured, lavish friends and relations, who
enjoyed themselves and felt a delight in her girlish toilettes and
triumphs. She had spent her one season of belledom in being whirled from
festivity to festivity, in dancing in rooms festooned with thousands of
dollars' worth of flowers, in lunching or dining at tables loaded with
roses and violets and orchids, from which ballrooms or feasts she had
borne away wonderful "favours" and gifts, whose prices, being recorded
in the newspapers, caused a thrill of delight or envy to pass over the
land. She was a slim little creature, with quantities of light feathery
hair like a French doll's. She had small hands and small feet and a
small waist--a small brain also, it must be admitted, but she was an
innocent, sweet-tempered girl with a childlike simpleness of mind.
In fine, she was exactly the girl to find Sir Nigel's domineering
temperament at once imposing and attractive, so long as it was cloaked
by the ceremonies of external good breeding.

Her sister Bettina, who was still a child, was of a stronger and less
susceptible nature. Betty--at eight--had long legs and a square but
delicate small face. Her well-opened steel-blue eyes were noticeable
for rather extravagant ink-black lashes and a straight young stare
which seemed to accuse if not to condemn. She was being educated at
a ruinously expensive school with a number of other inordinately rich
little girls, who were all too wonderfully dressed and too lavishly
supplied with pocket money. The school considered itself especially
refined and select, but was in fact interestingly vulgar.

The inordinately rich little girls, who had most of them pretty and
spiritual or pretty and piquant faces, ate a great many bon bons and
chattered a great deal in high unmodulated voices about the parties
their sisters and other relatives went to and the dresses they wore.
Some of them were nice little souls, who in the future would emerge from
their chrysalis state enchanting women, but they used colloquialisms
freely, and had an ingenuous habit of referring to the prices of
things. Bettina Vanderpoel, who was the richest and cleverest and most
promisingly handsome among them, was colloquial to slanginess, but she
had a deep, mellow, child voice and an amazing carriage.

She could not endure Sir Nigel Anstruthers, and, being an American
child, did not hesitate to express herself with force, if with some
crudeness. "He's a hateful thing," she said, "I loathe him. He's stuck
up and he thinks you are afraid of him and he likes it."

Sir Nigel had known only English children, little girls who lived in
that discreet corner of their parents' town or country houses known
as "the schoolroom," apparently emerging only for daily walks with
governesses; girls with long hair and boys in little high hats and with
faces which seemed curiously made to match them. Both boys and girls
were decently kept out of the way and not in the least dwelt on except
when brought out for inspection during the holidays and taken to the
pantomime.

Sir Nigel had not realised that an American child was an absolute factor
to be counted with, and a "youngster" who entered the drawing-room when
she chose and joined fearlessly in adult conversation was an element he
considered annoying. It was quite true that Bettina talked too much
and too readily at times, but it had not been explained to her that
the opinions of eight years are not always of absorbing interest to the
mature. It was also true that Sir Nigel was a great fool for interfering
with what was clearly no affair of his in such a manner as would have
made him an enemy even had not the child's instinct arrayed her against
him at the outset.

"You American youngsters are too cheeky," he said on one of the
occasions when Betty had talked too much. "If you were my sister and
lived at Stornham Court, you would be learning lessons in the schoolroom
and wearing a pinafore. Nobody ever saw my sister Emily when she was
your age."

"Well, I'm not your sister Emily," retorted Betty, "and I guess I'm glad
of it."

It was rather impudent of her, but it must be confessed that she was
not infrequently rather impudent in a rude little-girl way, but she was
serenely unconscious of the fact.

Sir Nigel flushed darkly and laughed a short, unpleasant laugh. If she
had been his sister Emily she would have fared ill at the moment, for
his villainous temper would have got the better of him.

"I 'guess' that I may be congratulated too," he sneered.

"If I was going to be anybody's sister Emily," said Betty, excited a
little by the sense of the fray, "I shouldn't want to be yours."

"Now Betty, don't be hateful," interposed Rosalie, laughing, and her
laugh was nervous. "There's Mina Thalberg coming up the front steps. Go
and meet her."

Rosalie, poor girl, always found herself nervous when Sir Nigel and
Betty were in the room together. She instinctively recognised their
antagonism and was afraid Betty would do something an English baronet
would think vulgar. Her simple brain could not have explained to her
why it was that she knew Sir Nigel often thought New Yorkers vulgar. She
was, however, quite aware of this but imperfectly concealed fact, and
felt a timid desire to be explanatory.

When Bettina marched out of the room with her extraordinary carriage
finely manifest, Rosy's little laugh was propitiatory.

"You mustn't mind her," she said. "She's a real splendid little thing,
but she's got a quick temper. It's all over in a minute."

"They wouldn't stand that sort of thing in England," said Sir Nigel.
"She's deucedly spoiled, you know."

He detested the child. He disliked all children, but this one awakened
in him more than mere dislike. The fact was that though Betty herself
was wholly unconscious of the subtle truth, the as yet undeveloped
intellect which later made her a brilliant and captivating personality,
vaguely saw him as he was, an unscrupulous, sordid brute, as remorseless
an adventurer and swindler in his special line, as if he had been
engaged in drawing false cheques and arranging huge jewel robberies,
instead of planning to entrap into a disadvantageous marriage a girl
whose gentleness and fortune could be used by a blackguard of reputable
name. The man was cold-blooded enough to see that her gentle weakness
was of value because it could be bullied, her money was to be counted on
because it could be spent on himself and his degenerate vices and on his
racked and ruined name and estate, which must be rebuilt and restocked
at an early date by someone or other, lest they tumbled into ignominious
collapse which could not be concealed. Bettina of the accusing eyes did
not know that in the depth of her yet crude young being, instinct was
summing up for her the potentialities of an unusually fine specimen of
the British blackguard, but this was nevertheless the interesting truth.
When later she was told that her sister had become engaged to Sir
Nigel Anstruthers, a flame of colour flashed over her face, she stared
silently a moment, then bit her lip and burst into tears.

"Well, Bett," exclaimed Rosalie, "you are the queerest thing I ever
saw."

Bettina's tears were an outburst, not a flow. She swept them away
passionately with her small handkerchief.

"He'll do something awful to you," she said. "He'll nearly kill you. I
know he will. I'd rather be dead myself."

She dashed out of the room, and could never be induced to say a word
further about the matter. She would indeed have found it impossible to
express her intense antipathy and sense of impending calamity. She had
not the phrases to make herself clear even to herself, and after all
what controlling effort can one produce when one is only eight years
old?




CHAPTER II

A LACK OF PERCEPTION

Mercantile as Americans were proclaimed to be, the opinion of Sir
Nigel Anstruthers was that they were, on some points, singularly
unbusinesslike. In the perfectly obvious and simple matter of the
settlement of his daughter's fortune, he had felt that Reuben Vanderpoel
was obtuse to the point of idiocy. He seemed to have none of the
ordinary points of view. Naturally there was to Anstruthers' mind but
one point of view to take. A man of birth and rank, he argued, does not
career across the Atlantic to marry a New York millionaire's daughter
unless he anticipates deriving some advantage from the alliance. Such
a man--being of Anstruthers' type--would not have married a rich woman
even in his own country with out making sure that advantages were to
accrue to himself as a result of the union. "In England," to use his
own words, "there was no nonsense about it." Women's fortunes as well as
themselves belonged to their husbands, and a man who was master in his
own house could make his wife do as he chose. He had seen girls with
money managed very satisfactorily by fellows who held a tight rein, and
were not moved by tears, and did not allow talking to relations. If
he had been desirous of marrying and could have afforded to take a
penniless wife, there were hundreds of portionless girls ready to thank
God for a decent chance to settle themselves for life, and one need not
stir out of one's native land to find them.

But Sir Nigel had not in the least desired to saddle himself with a
domestic encumbrance, in fact nothing would have induced him to consider
the step if he had not been driven hard by circumstances. His fortunes
had reached a stage where money must be forthcoming somehow--from
somewhere. He and his mother had been living from hand to mouth, so to
speak, for years, and they had also been obliged to keep up appearances,
which is sometimes embittering even to persons of amiable tempers. Lady
Anstruthers, it is true, had lived in the country in as niggardly
a manner as possible. She had narrowed her existence to absolute
privation, presenting at the same time a stern, bold front to the
persons who saw her, to the insufficient staff of servants, to the
village to the vicar and his wife, and the few far-distant neighbours
who perhaps once a year drove miles to call or leave a card. She was an
old woman sufficiently unattractive to find no difficulty in the way
of limiting her acquaintances. The unprepossessing wardrobe she had
gathered in the passing years was remade again and again by the village
dressmaker. She wore dingy old silk gowns and appalling bonnets, and
mantles dripping with rusty fringes and bugle beads, but these mitigated
not in the least the unflinching arrogance of her bearing, or the
simple, intolerant rudeness which she considered proper and becoming
in persons like herself. She did not of course allow that there existed
many persons like herself.

That society rejoiced in this fact was but the stamp of its inferiority
and folly. While she pinched herself and harried her few hirelings at
Stornham it was necessary for Sir Nigel to show himself in town and
present as decent an appearance as possible. His vanity was far too
arrogant to allow of his permitting himself to drop out of the world to
which he could not afford to belong. That he should have been forgotten
or ignored would have been intolerable to him. For a few years he was
invited to dine at good houses, and got shooting and hunting as part
of the hospitality of his acquaintances. But a man who cannot afford to
return hospitalities will find that he need not expect to avail himself
of those of his acquaintances to the end of his career unless he is an
extremely engaging person. Sir Nigel Anstruthers was not an engaging
person. He never gave a thought to the comfort or interest of any other
human being than himself. He was also dominated by the kind of nasty
temper which so reveals itself when let loose that its owner cannot
control it even when it would be distinctly to his advantage to do so.

Finding that he had nothing to give in return for what he took as if it
were his right, society gradually began to cease to retain any lively
recollection of his existence. The tradespeople he had borne himself
loftily towards awakened to the fact that he was the kind of man it was
at once safe and wise to dun, and therefore proceeded to make his life
a burden to him. At his clubs he had never been a member surrounded and
rejoiced over when he made his appearance. The time came when he began
to fancy that he was rather edged away from, and he endeavoured to
sustain his dignity by being sulky and making caustic speeches when he
was approached. Driven occasionally down to Stornham by actual pressure
of circumstances, he found the outlook there more embittering still.

Lady Anstruthers laid the bareness of the land before him without any
effort to palliate unpleasantness. If he chose to stalk about and look
glum, she could sit still and call his attention to revolting truths
which he could not deny. She could point out to him that he had no
money, and that tenants would not stay in houses which were tumbling to
pieces, and work land which had been starved. She could tell him just
how long a time had elapsed since wages had been paid and accounts
cleared off. And she had an engaging, unbiassed way of seeming to drive
these maddening details home by the mere manner of her statement.

"You make the whole thing as damned disagreeable as you can," Nigel
would snarl.

"I merely state facts," she would reply with acrid serenity.

A man who cannot keep up his estate, pay his tailor or the rent of his
lodgings in town, is in a strait which may drive him to desperation.
Sir Nigel Anstruthers borrowed some money, went to New York and made his
suit to nice little silly Rosalie Vanderpoel.

But the whole thing was unexpectedly disappointing and surrounded by
irritating circumstances. He found himself face to face with a state of
affairs such as he had not contemplated. In England when a man married,
certain practical matters could be inquired into and arranged by
solicitors, the amount of the prospective bride's fortune, the
allowances and settlements to be made, the position of the bridegroom
with regard to pecuniary matters. To put it simply, a man found out
where he stood and what he was to gain. But, at first to his sardonic
entertainment and later to his disgusted annoyance, Sir Nigel gradually
discovered that in the matter of marriage, Americans had an ingenuous
tendency to believe in the sentimental feelings of the parties
concerned. The general impression seemed to be that a man married purely
for love, and that delicacy would make it impossible for him to ask
questions as to what his bride's parents were in a position to hand
over to him as a sort of indemnity for the loss of his bachelor freedom.
Anstruthers began to discover this fact before he had been many weeks
in New York. He reached the realisation of its existence by processes of
exclusion and inclusion, by hearing casual remarks people let drop, by
asking roundabout and careful questions, by leading both men and women
to the innocent expounding of certain points of view. Millionaires, it
appeared, did not expect to make allowances to men who married their
daughters; young women, it transpired, did not in the least realise that
a man should be liberally endowed in payment for assuming the duties
of a husband. If rich fathers made allowances, they made them to their
daughters themselves, who disposed of them as they pleased. In this
case, of course, Sir Nigel privately argued with fine acumen, it became
the husband's business to see that what his wife pleased should be what
most agreeably coincided with his own views and conveniences.

His most illuminating experience had been the hearing of some men,
hard-headed, rich stockbrokers with a vulgar sense of humour, enjoying
themselves quite uproariously one night at a club, over a story one
of them was relating of an unsatisfactory German son-in-law who had
demanded an income. He was a man of small title, who had married the
narrator's daughter, and after some months spent in his father-in-law's
house, had felt it but proper that his financial position should be put
on a practical footing.

"He brought her back after the bridal tour to make us a visit," said the
storyteller, a sharp-featured man with a quaint wry mouth, which seemed
to express a perpetual, repressed appreciation of passing events. "I had
nothing to say against that, because we were all glad to see her home
and her mother had been missing her. But weeks passed and months passed
and there was no mention made of them going over to settle in the
Slosh we'd heard so much of, and in time it came out that the Slosh
thing"--Anstruthers realised with gall in his soul that the "brute,"
as he called him, meant "Schloss," and that his mispronunciation was
at once a matter of humour and derision--"wasn't his at all. It was his
elder brother's. The whole lot of them were counts and not one of them
seemed to own a dime. The Slosh count hadn't more than twenty-five cents
and he wasn't the kind to deal any of it out to his family. So Lily's
count would have to go clerking in a dry goods store, if he promised to
support himself. But he didn't propose to do it. He thought he'd got on
to a soft thing. Of course we're an easy-going lot and we should have
stood him if he'd been a nice fellow. But he wasn't. Lily's mother used
to find her crying in her bedroom and it came out by degrees that it was
because Adolf had been quarrelling with her and saying sneering things
about her family. When her mother talked to him he was insulting. Then
bills began to come in and Lily was expected to get me to pay them. And
they were not the kind of bills a decent fellow calls on another man to
pay. But I did it five or six times to make it easy for her. I didn't
tell her that they gave an older chap than himself sidelights on the
situation. But that didn't work well. He thought I did it because I had
to, and he began to feel free and easy about it, and didn't try to cover
up his tracks so much when he sent in a new lot. He was always working
Lily. He began to consider himself master of the house. He intimated
that a private carriage ought to be kept for them. He said it was
beggarly that he should have to consider the rest of the family when he
wanted to go out. When I got on to the situation, I began to enjoy it.
I let him spread himself for a while just to see what he would do. Good
Lord! I couldn't have believed that any fellow could have thought any
other fellow could be such a fool as he thought I was. He went perfectly
crazy after a month or so and ordered me about and patronised me as if I
was a bootblack he meant to teach something to. So at last I had a talk
with Lily and told her I was going to put an end to it. Of course she
cried and was half frightened to death, but by that time he had ill-used
her so that she only wanted to get rid of him. So I sent for him and had
a talk with him in my office. I led him on to saying all he had on his
mind. He explained to me what a condescension it was for a man like
himself to marry a girl like Lily. He made a dignified, touching picture
of all the disadvantages of such an alliance and all the advantages they
ought to bring in exchange to the man who bore up under them. I rubbed
my head and looked worried every now and then and cleared my throat
apologetically just to warm him up. I can tell you that fellow felt
happy, downright happy when he saw how humbly I listened to him. He
positively swelled up with hope and comfort. He thought I was going to
turn out well, real well. I was going to pay up just as a vulgar New
York father-in-law ought to do, and thank God for the blessed privilege.
Why, he was real eloquent about his blood and his ancestors and the
hoary-headed Slosh. So when he'd finished, I cleared my throat in
a nervous, ingratiating kind of way again and I asked him kind of
anxiously what he thought would be the proper thing for a base-born New
York millionaire to do under the circumstances--what he would approve of
himself."

Sir Nigel was disgusted to see the narrator twist his mouth into a
sweet, shrewd, repressed grin even as he expectorated into the nearest
receptacle. The grin was greeted by a shout of laughter from his
companions.

"What did he say, Stebbins?" someone cried.

"He said," explained Mr. Stebbins deliberately, "he said that an
allowance was the proper thing. He said that a man of his rank must have
resources, and that it wasn't dignified for him to have to ask his wife
or his wife's father for money when he wanted it. He said an allowance
was what he felt he had a right to expect. And then he twisted his
moustache and said, 'what proposition' did I make--what would I allow
him?"

The storyteller's hearers evidently knew him well. Their laughter was
louder than before.

"Let's hear the rest, Joe! Let's hear it!"

"Well," replied Mr. Stebbins almost thoughtfully, "I just got up and
said, 'Well, it won't take long for me to answer that. I've always
been fond of my children, and Lily is rather my pet. She's always had
everything she wanted, and she always shall. She's a good girl and she
deserves it. I'll allow you----" The significant deliberation of his
drawl could scarcely be described. "I'll allow you just five minutes to
get out of this room, before I kick you out, and if I kick you out of
the room, I'll kick you down the stairs, and if I kick you down the
stairs, I shall have got my blood comfortably warmed up and I'll kick
you down the street and round the block and down to Hoboken, because
you're going to take the steamer there and go back to the place you came
from, to the Slosh thing or whatever you call it. We haven't a damned
bit of use for you here.' And believe it or not, gentlemen----" looking
round with the wry-mouthed smile, "he took that passage and back he
went. And Lily's living with her mother and I mean to hold on to her."

Sir Nigel got up and left the club when the story was finished. He took
a long walk down Broadway, gnawing his lip and holding his head in the
air. He used blasphemous language at intervals in a low voice. Some of
it was addressed to his fate and some of it to the vulgar mercantile
coarseness and obtuseness of other people.

"They don't know what they are talking of," he said. "It is unheard of.
What do they expect? I never thought of this. Damn it! I'm like a rat in
a trap."

It was plain enough that he could not arrange his fortune as he had
anticipated when he decided to begin to make love to little pink and
white, doll-faced Rosy Vanderpoel. If he began to demand monetary
advantages in his dealing with his future wife's people in their
settlement of her fortune, he might arouse suspicion and inquiry. He
did not want inquiry either in connection with his own means or his past
manner of living. People who hated him would be sure to crop up with
stories of things better left alone. There were always meddling fools
ready to interfere.

His walk was long and full of savage thinking. Once or twice as he
realised what the disinterestedness of his sentiments was supposed to
be, a short laugh broke from him which was rather like the snort of the
Bishopess.

"I am supposed to be moonstruck over a simpering American
chit--moonstruck! Damn!" But when he returned to his hotel he had made
up his mind and was beginning to look over the situation in evil cold
blood. Matters must be settled without delay and he was shrewd enough to
realise that with his temper and its varied resources a timid girl
would not be difficult to manage. He had seen at an early stage of their
acquaintance that Rosy was greatly impressed by the superiority of
his bearing, that he could make her blush with embarrassment when he
conveyed to her that she had made a mistake, that he could chill her
miserably when he chose to assume a lofty stiffness. A man's domestic
armoury was filled with weapons if he could make a woman feel gauche,
inexperienced, in the wrong. When he was safely married, he could pave
the way to what he felt was the only practical and feasible end.

If he had been marrying a woman with more brains, she would be more
difficult to subdue, but with Rosalie Vanderpoel, processes were
not necessary. If you shocked, bewildered or frightened her with
accusations, sulks, or sneers, her light, innocent head was set in such
a whirl that the rest was easy. It was possible, upon the whole, that
the thing might not turn out so infernally ill after all. Supposing that
it had been Bettina who had been the marriageable one! Appreciating to
the full the many reasons for rejoicing that she had not been, he walked
in gloomy reflection home.



CHAPTER III

YOUNG LADY ANSTRUTHERS

When the marriage took place the event was accompanied by an ingenuously
elate flourish of trumpets. Miss Vanderpoel's frocks were multitudinous
and wonderful, as also her jewels purchased at Tiffany's. She carried
a thousand trunks--more or less--across the Atlantic. When the ship
steamed away from the dock, the wharf was like a flower garden in the
blaze of brilliant and delicate attire worn by the bevy of relatives and
intimates who stood waving their handkerchiefs and laughingly calling
out farewell good wishes.

Sir Nigel's mental attitude was not a sympathetic or admiring one as
he stood by his bride's side looking back. If Rosy's half happy,
half tearful excitement had left her the leisure to reflect on his
expression, she would not have felt it encouraging.

"What a deuce of a row Americans make," he said even before they were
out of hearing of the voices. "It will be a positive rest to be in a
country where the women do not cackle and shriek with laughter."

He said it with that simple rudeness which at times professed to be
almost impersonal, and which Rosalie had usually tried to believe was
the outcome of a kind of cool British humour. But this time she started
a little at his words.

"I suppose we do make more noise than English people," she admitted
a second or so later. "I wonder why?" And without waiting for an
answer--somewhat as if she had not expected or quite wanted one--she
leaned a little farther over the side to look back, waving her small,
fluttering handkerchief to the many still in tumult on the wharf. She
was not perceptive or quick enough to take offence, to realise that the
remark was significant and that Sir Nigel had already begun as he meant
to go on. It was far from being his intention to play the part of an
American husband, who was plainly a creature in whom no authority vested
itself. Americans let their women say and do anything, and were capable
of fetching and carrying for them. He had seen a man run upstairs for
his wife's wrap, cheerfully, without the least apparent sense that
the service was the part of a footman if there was one in the house, a
parlour maid if there was not. Sir Nigel had been brought up in the good
Early Victorian days when "a nice little woman to fetch your slippers
for you" figured in certain circles as domestic bliss. Girls were
educated to fetch slippers as retrievers were trained to go into the
water after sticks, and terriers to bring back balls thrown for them.

The new Lady Anstruthers had, it supervened, several opportunities to
obtain a new view of her bridegroom's character before their voyage
across the Atlantic was over. At this period of the slower and more
cumbrous weaving of the Shuttle, the world had not yet awakened even to
the possibilities of the ocean greyhound. An Atlantic voyage at times
was capable of offering to a bride and bridegroom days enough to begin
to glance into their future with a premonition of the waning of the
honeymoon, at least, and especially if they were not sea-proof, to wish
wearily that the first half of it were over. Rosalie was not weary, but
she began to be bewildered. As she had never been a clever girl or quick
to perceive, and had spent her life among women-indulging American men,
she was not prepared with any precedent which made her situation clear.
The first time Sir Nigel showed his temper to her she simply stared at
him, her eyes looking like those of a puzzled, questioning child. Then
she broke into her nervous little laugh, because she did not know what
else to do. At his second outbreak her stare was rather startled and she
did not laugh.

Her first awakening was to an anxious wonderment concerning certain
moods of gloom, or what seemed to be gloom, to which he seemed prone. As
she lay in her steamer chair he would at times march stiffly up and
down the deck, apparently aware of no other existence than his own,
his features expressing a certain clouded resentment of whose very
unexplainableness she secretly stood in awe. She was not astute enough,
poor girl, to leave him alone, and when with innocent questionings she
endeavoured to discover his trouble, the greatest mystification she
encountered was that he had the power to make her feel that she was in
some way taking a liberty, and showing her lack of tact and perspicuity.

"Is anything the matter, Nigel?" she asked at first, wondering if she
were guilty of silliness in trying to slip her hand into his. She was
sure she had been when he answered her.

"No," he said chillingly.

"I don't believe you are happy," she returned. "Somehow you seem so--so
different."

"I have reasons for being depressed," he replied, and it was with a
stiff finality which struck a note of warning to her, signifying that it
would be better taste in her to put an end to her simple efforts.

She vaguely felt herself put in the wrong, and he preferred that it
should be so. It was the best form of preparation for any mood he might
see that it might pay him to show her in the future. He was, in fact,
confronting disdainfully his position. He had her on his hands and he
was returning to his relations with no definite advantage to exhibit as
the result of having married her. She had been supplied with an income
but he had no control over it. It would not have been so if he had
not been in such straits that he had been afraid to risk his chance by
making a stand. To have a wife with money, a silly, sweet temper and no
will of her own, was of course better than to be penniless, head over
heels in debt and hemmed in by difficulties on every side. He had seen
women trained to give in to anything rather than be bullied in public,
to accede in the end to any demand rather than endure the shame of
a certain kind of scene made before servants, and a certain kind of
insolence used to relatives and guests. The quality he found
most maddeningly irritating in Rosalie was her obviously absolute
unconsciousness of the fact that it was entirely natural and proper that
her resources should be in her husband's hands. He had, indeed, even
in these early days, made a tentative effort or so in the form of a
suggestive speech; he had given her openings to give him an opening to
put things on a practical basis, but she had never had the intelligence
to see what he was aiming at, and he had found himself almost
floundering ungracefully in his remarks, while she had looked at him
without a sign of comprehension in her simple, anxious blue eyes. The
creature was actually trying to understand him and could not. That was
the worst of it, the blank wall of her unconsciousness, her childlike
belief that he was far too grand a personage to require anything. These
were the things he was thinking over when he walked up and down the deck
in unamiable solitariness. Rosy awakened to the amazed consciousness of
the fact that, instead of being pleased with the luxury and prettiness
of her wardrobe and appointments, he seemed to dislike and disdain them.

"You American women change your clothes too much and think too much of
them," was one of his first amiable criticisms. "You spend more than
well-bred women should spend on mere dresses and bonnets. In New York it
always strikes an Englishman that the women look endimanche at whatever
time of day you come across them."

"Oh, Nigel!" cried Rosy woefully. She could not think of anything more
to say than, "Oh, Nigel!"

"I am sorry to say it is true," he replied loftily. That she was an
American and a New Yorker was being impressed upon poor little Lady
Anstruthers in a new way--somehow as if the mere cold statement of the
fact put a fine edge of sarcasm to any remark. She was of too innocent a
loyalty to wish that she was neither the one nor the other, but she did
wish that Nigel was not so prejudiced against the places and people she
cared for so much.

She was sitting in her stateroom enfolded in a dressing gown covered
with cascades of lace, tied with knots of embroidered ribbon, and her
maid, Hannah, who admired her greatly, was brushing her fair long hair
with a gold-backed brush, ornamented with a monogram of jewels.

If she had been a French duchess of a piquant type, or an English one
with an aquiline nose, she would have been beyond criticism; if she had
been a plump, over-fed woman, or an ugly, ill-natured, gross one, she
would have looked vulgar, but she was a little, thin, fair New
Yorker, and though she was not beyond criticism--if one demanded high
distinction--she was pretty and nice to look at. But Nigel Anstruthers
would not allow this to her. His own tailors' bills being far in
arrears and his pocket disgustingly empty, the sight of her ingenuous
sumptuousness and the gay, accustomed simpleness of outlook with which
she accepted it as her natural right, irritated him and roused his
venom. Bills would remain unpaid if she was permitted to spend her money
on this sort of thing without any consideration for the requirements of
other people.

He inhaled the air and made a gesture of distaste.

"This sachet business is rather overpowering," he said. "It is the sort
of thing a woman should be particularly discreet about."

"Oh, Nigel!" cried the poor girl agitatedly. "Hannah, do go and call
the steward to open the windows. Is it really strong?" she implored as
Hannah went out. "How dreadful. It's only orris and I didn't know Hannah
had put it in the trunks."

"My dear Rosalie," with a wave of the hand taking in both herself and
her dressing case, "it is all too strong."

"All--wh--what?" gaspingly.

"The whole thing. All that lace and love knot arrangement, the
gold-backed brushes and scent bottles with diamonds and rubies sticking
in them."

"They--they were wedding presents. They came from Tiffany's. Everyone
thought them lovely."

"They look as if they belonged to the dressing table of a French woman
of the demi-monde. I feel as if I had actually walked into the apartment
of some notorious Parisian soubrette."

Rosalie Vanderpoel was a clean-minded little person, her people were of
the clean-minded type, therefore she did not understand all that this
ironic speech implied, but she gathered enough of its significance to
cause her to turn first red and then pale and then to burst into tears.
She was crying and trying to conceal the fact when Hannah returned.
She bent her head and touched her eyes furtively while her toilette was
completed.

Sir Nigel had retired from the scene, but he had done so feeling that he
had planted a seed and bestowed a practical lesson. He had, it is true,
bestowed one, but again she had not understood its significance and was
only left bewildered and unhappy. She began to be nervous and uncertain
about herself and about his moods and points of view. She had never been
made to feel so at home. Everyone had been kind to her and lenient to
her lack of brilliancy. No one had expected her to be brilliant, and she
had been quite sweet-temperedly resigned to the fact that she was not
the kind of girl who shone either in society or elsewhere. She did not
resent the fact that she knew people said of her, "She isn't in the
least bit bright, Rosy Vanderpoel, but she's a nice, sweet little
thing." She had tried to be nice and sweet and had aspired to nothing
higher.

But now that seemed so much less than enough. Perhaps Nigel ought to
have married one of the clever ones, someone who would have known how to
understand him and who would have been more entertaining than she could
be. Perhaps she was beginning to bore him, perhaps he was finding her
out and beginning to get tired. At this point the always too ready
tears would rise to her eyes and she would be overwhelmed by a sense of
homesickness. Often she cried herself silently to sleep, longing for
her mother--her nice, comfortable, ordinary mother, whom she had several
times felt Nigel had some difficulty in being unreservedly polite
to--though he had been polite on the surface.

By the time they landed she had been living under so much strain in her
effort to seem quite unchanged, that she had lost her nerve. She did not
feel well and was sometimes afraid that she might do something silly and
hysterical in spite of herself, begin to cry for instance when there was
really no explanation for her doing it. But when she reached London the
novelty of everything so excited her that she thought she was going to
be better, and then she said to herself it would be proved to her that
all her fears had been nonsense. This return of hope made her quite
light-spirited, and she was almost gay in her little outbursts of
delight and admiration as she drove about the streets with her husband.
She did not know that her ingenuous ignorance of things he had known all
his life, her rapture over common monuments of history, led him to say
to himself that he felt rather as if he were taking a housemaid to see a
Lord Mayor's Show.

Before going to Stornham Court they spent a few days in town. There had
been no intention of proclaiming their presence to the world, and they
did not do so, but unluckily certain tradesmen discovered the fact that
Sir Nigel Anstruthers had returned to England with the bride he had
secured in New York. The conclusion to be deduced from this circumstance
was that the particular moment was a good one at which to send in bills
for "acct. rendered." The tradesmen quite shared Anstruthers' point
of view. Their reasoning was delightfully simple and they were wholly
unaware that it might have been called gross. A man over his head and
ears in debt naturally expected his creditors would be paid by the young
woman who had married him. America had in these days been so little
explored by the thrifty impecunious well-born that its ingenuous
sentimentality in certain matters was by no means comprehended.

By each post Sir Nigel received numerous bills. Sometimes letters
accompanied them, and once or twice respectful but firm male persons
brought them by hand and demanded interviews which irritated Sir Nigel
extremely. Given time to arrange matters with Rosalie, to train her to
some sense of her duty, he believed that the "acct. rendered" could be
wiped off, but he saw he must have time. She was such a little fool.
Again and again he was furious at the fate which had forced him to take
her.

The truth was that Rosalie knew nothing whatever about unpaid bills.
Reuben Vanderpoel's daughters had never encountered an indignant
tradesman in their lives. When they went into "stores" they were
received with unfeigned rapture. Everything was dragged forth to be
displayed to them, attendants waited to leap forth to supply their
smallest behest. They knew no other phase of existence than the one in
which one could buy anything one wanted and pay any price demanded for
it.

Consequently Rosalie did not recognise signs which would have been
obviously recognisable by the initiated. If Sir Nigel Anstruthers had
been a nice young fellow who had loved her, and he had been honest
enough to make a clean breast of his difficulties, she would have thrown
herself into his arms and implored him effusively to make use of all
her available funds, and if the supply had been insufficient, would have
immediately written to her father for further donations, knowing that
her appeal would be responded to at once. But Sir Nigel Anstruthers
cherished no sentiment for any other individual than himself, and he
had no intention of explaining that his mere vanity had caused him to
mislead her, that his rank and estate counted for nothing and that he
was in fact a pauper loaded with dishonest debts. He wanted money, but
he wanted it to be given to him as if he conferred a favour by receiving
it. It must be transferred to him as though it were his by right. What
did a man marry for? Therefore his wife's unconsciousness that she was
inflicting outrage upon him by her mere mental attitude filled his being
with slowly rising gall.

Poor Rosalie went joyfully forth shopping after the manner of all newly
arrived Americans. She bought new toilettes and gewgaws and presents
for her friends and relations in New York, and each package which was
delivered at the hotel added to Sir Nigel's rage.

That the little blockhead should be allowed to do what she liked with
her money and that he should not be able to forbid her! This he said
to himself at intervals of five minutes through the day--which led to
another small episode.

"You are spending a great deal of money," he said one morning in his
condemnatory manner. Rosalie looked up from the lace flounce which
had just been delivered and gave the little nervous laugh, which was
becoming entirely uncertain of propitiating.

"Am I?" she answered. "They say all Americans spend a good deal."

"Your money ought to be in proper hands and properly managed," he went
on with cold precision. "If you were an English woman, your husband
would control it."

"Would he?" The simple, sweet-tempered obtuseness of her tone was an
infuriating thing to him. There was the usual shade of troubled surprise
in her eyes as they met his. "I don't think men in America ever do that.
I don't believe the nice ones want to. You see they have such a pride
about always giving things to women, and taking care of them. I believe
a nice American man would break stones in the street rather than take
money from a woman--even his wife. I mean while he could work. Of course
if he was ill or had ill luck or anything like that, he wouldn't be so
proud as not to take it from the person who loved him most and wanted
to help him. You do sometimes hear of a man who won't work and lets his
wife support him, but it's very seldom, and they are always the low kind
that other men look down on."

"Wanted to help him." Sir Nigel selected the phrase and quoted it
between puffs of the cigar he held in his fine, rather cruel-looking
hands, and his voice expressed a not too subtle sneer. "A woman is not
'helping' her husband when she gives him control of her fortune. She
is only doing her duty and accepting her proper position with regard to
him. The law used to settle the thing definitely."

"Did-did it?" Rosy faltered weakly. She knew he was offended again and
that she was once more somehow in the wrong. So many things about her
seemed to displease him, and when he was displeased he always reminded
her that she was stupidly, objectionably guilty of not being an English
woman.

Whatsoever it happened to be, the fault she had committed out of her
depth of ignorance, he did not forget it. It was no habit of his to
endeavour to dismiss offences. He preferred to hold them in possession
as if they were treasures and to turn them over and over, in the mental
seclusion which nourishes the growth of injuries, since within its
barriers there is no chance of their being palliated by the apologies or
explanations of the offender.

During their journey to Stornham Court the next day he was in one of his
black moods. Once in the railway carriage he paid small attention to
his wife, but sat rigidly reading his Times, until about midway to their
destination he descended at a station and paid a visit to the buffet in
the small refreshment room, after which he settled himself to doze in
an exceedingly unbecoming attitude, his travelling cap pulled down,
his rather heavy face congested with the dark flush Rosalie had not yet
learned was due to the fact that he had hastily tossed off two or three
whiskies and sodas. Though he was never either thick of utterance or
unsteady on his feet, whisky and soda formed an important factor in his
existence. When he was annoyed or dull he at once took the necessary
precautions against being overcome by these feelings, and the effect
upon a constitutionally evil temper was to transform it into an infernal
one. The night had been a bad one for Rosy. Such floods of homesick
longing had overpowered her that she had not been able to sleep. She had
risen feeling shaky and hysterical and her nervousness had been added to
by her fear that Nigel might observe her and make comment. Of course
she told herself it was natural that he should not wish her to appear at
Stornham Court looking a pale, pink-nosed little fright. Her efforts
to be cheerful had indeed been somewhat touching, but they had met with
small encouragement.

She thought the green-clothed country lovely as the train sped through
it, and a lump rose in her small throat because she knew she might have
been so happy if she had not been so frightened and miserable. The thing
which had been dawning upon her took clearer, more awful form. Incidents
she had tried to explain and excuse to herself, upon all sorts of
futile, simple grounds, began to loom up before her in something like
their actual proportions. She had heard of men who had changed their
manner towards girls after they had married them, but she did not know
they had begun to change so soon. This was so early in the honeymoon to
be sitting in a railway carriage, in a corner remote from that occupied
by a bridegroom, who read his paper in what was obviously intentional,
resentful solitude. Emily Soame's father, she remembered it against her
will, had been obliged to get a divorce for Emily after her two years
of wretched married life. But Alfred Soames had been quite nice for six
months at least. It seemed as if all this must be a dream, one of those
nightmare things, in which you suddenly find yourself married to
someone you cannot bear, and you don't know how it happened, because you
yourself have had nothing to do with the matter. She felt that presently
she must waken with a start and find herself breathing fast, and panting
out, half laughing, half crying, "Oh, I am so glad it's not true! I am
so glad it's not true!"

But this was true, and there was Nigel. And she was in a new, unexplored
world. Her little trembling hands clutched each other. The happy, light
girlish days full of ease and friendliness and decency seemed gone
forever. It was not Rosalie Vanderpoel who pressed her colourless face
against the glass of the window, looking out at the flying trees; it was
the wife of Nigel Anstruthers, and suddenly, by some hideous magic, she
had been snatched from the world to which she belonged and was being
dragged by a gaoler to a prison from which she did not know how to
escape. Already Nigel had managed to convey to her that in England a
woman who was married could do nothing to defend herself against her
husband, and that to endeavour to do anything was the last impossible
touch of vulgar ignominy.

The vivid realisation of the situation seized upon her like a possession
as she glanced sideways at her bridegroom and hurriedly glanced away
again with a little hysterical shudder. New York, good-tempered,
lenient, free New York, was millions of miles away and Nigel was so
loathly near and--and so ugly. She had never known before that he was so
ugly, that his face was so heavy, his skin so thick and coarse and his
expression so evilly ill-tempered. She was not sufficiently analytical
to be conscious that she had with one bound leaped to the appalling
point of feeling uncontrollable physical abhorrence of the creature
to whom she was chained for life. She was terrified at finding herself
forced to combat the realisation that there were certain expressions
of his countenance which made her feel sick with repulsion. Her
self-reproach also was as great as her terror. He was her husband--her
husband--and she was a wicked girl. She repeated the words to herself
again and again, but remotely she knew that when she said, "He is my
husband," that was the worst thing of all.

This inward struggle was a bad preparation for any added misery, and
when their railroad journey terminated at Stornham Station she was met
by new bewilderment.

The station itself was a rustic place where wild roses climbed down a
bank to meet the very train itself. The station master's cottage had
roses and clusters of lilies waving in its tiny garden. The station
master, a good-natured, red-faced man, came forward, baring his head,
to open the railroad carriage door with his own hand. Rosy thought him
delightful and bowed and smiled sweet-temperedly to him and to his
wife and little girls, who were curtseying at the garden gate. She was
sufficiently homesick to be actually grateful to them for their air of
welcoming her. But as she smiled she glanced furtively at Nigel to see
if she was doing exactly the right thing.

He himself was not smiling and did not unbend even when the station
master, who had known him from his boyhood, felt at liberty to offer a
deferential welcome.

"Happy to see you home with her ladyship, Sir Nigel," he said; "very
happy, if I may say so."

Sir Nigel responded to the respectful amiability with a half-military
lifting of his right hand, accompanied by a grunt.

"D'ye do, Wells," he said, and strode past him to speak to the footman
who had come from Stornham Court with the carriage.

The new and nervous little Lady Anstruthers, who was left to trot after
her husband, smiled again at the ruddy, kind-looking fellow, this time
in conscious deprecation. In the simplicity of her republican sympathy
with a well-meaning fellow creature who might feel himself snubbed,
she could have shaken him by the hand. She had even parted her lips to
venture a word of civility when she was startled by hearing Sir Nigel's
voice raised in angry rating.

"Damned bad management not to bring something else," she heard. "Kind of
thing you fellows are always doing."

She made her way to the carriage, flurried again by not knowing whether
she was doing right or wrong. Sir Nigel had given her no instructions
and she had not yet learned that when he was in a certain humour there
was equal fault in obeying or disobeying such orders as he gave.

The carriage from the Court--not in the least a new or smart
equipage--was drawn up before the entrance of the station and Sir Nigel
was in a rage because the vehicle brought for the luggage was too small
to carry it all.

"Very sorry, Sir Nigel," said the coachman, touching his hat two or
three times in his agitation. "Very sorry. The omnibus was a little out
of order--the springs, Sir Nigel--and I thought----"

"You thought!" was the heated interruption. "What right had you to
think, damn it! You are not paid to think, you are paid to do your
work properly. Here are a lot of damned boxes which ought to go with us
and--where's your maid?" wheeling round upon his wife.

Rosalie turned towards the woman, who was approaching from the waiting
room.

"Hannah," she said timorously.

"Drop those confounded bundles," ordered Sir Nigel, "and show James the
boxes her ladyship is obliged to have this evening. Be quick about it
and don't pick out half a dozen. The cart can't take them."

Hannah looked frightened. This sort of thing was new to her, too. She
shuffled her packages on to a seat and followed the footman to the
luggage. Sir Nigel continued rating the coachman. Any form of violent
self-assertion was welcome to him at any time, and when he was irritated
he found it a distinct luxury to kick a dog or throw a boot at a cat.
The springs of the omnibus, he argued, had no right to be broken when
it was known that he was coming home. His anger was only added to by the
coachman's halting endeavours in his excuses to veil a fact he knew his
master was aware of, that everything at Stornham was more or less out of
order, and that dilapidations were the inevitable result of there being
no money to pay for repairs. The man leaned forward on his box and spoke
at last in a low tone.

"The bus has been broken some time," he said. "It's--it's an expensive
job, Sir Nigel. Her ladyship thought it better to----" Sir Nigel turned
white about the mouth.

"Hold your tongue," he commanded, and the coachman got red in the face,
saluted, biting his lips, and sat very stiff and upright on his box.

The station master edged away uneasily and tried to look as if he were
not listening. But Rosalie could see that he could not help hearing, nor
could the country people who had been passengers by the train and who
were collecting their belongings and getting into their traps.

Lady Anstruthers was ignored and remained standing while the scene
went on. She could not help recalling the manner in which she had been
invariably received in New York on her return from any journey, how she
was met by comfortable, merry people and taken care of at once. This was
so strange, it was so queer, so different.

"Oh, never mind, Nigel dear," she said at last, with innocent
indiscretion. "It doesn't really matter, you know."

Sir Nigel turned upon her a blaze of haughty indignation.

"If you'll pardon my saying so, it does matter," he said. "It matters
confoundedly. Be good enough to take your place in the carriage."

He moved to the carriage door, and not too civilly put her in. She
gasped a little for breath as she sat down. He had spoken to her as if
she had been an impertinent servant who had taken a liberty. The poor
girl was bewildered to the verge of panic. When he had ended his tirade
and took his place beside her he wore his most haughtily intolerant air.

"May I request that in future you will be good enough not to interfere
when I am reproving my servants," he remarked.

"I didn't mean to interfere," she apologised tremulously.

"I don't know what you meant. I only know what you did," was his
response. "You American women are too fond of cutting in. An Englishman
can think for himself without his wife's assistance."

The tears rose to her eyes. The introduction of the international
question overpowered her as always.

"Don't begin to be hysterical," was the ameliorating tenderness with
which he observed the two hot salt drops which fell despite her. "I
should scarcely wish to present you to my mother bathed in tears."

She wiped the salt drops hastily away and sat for a moment silent in the
corner of the carriage. Being wholly primitive and unanalytical, she was
ashamed and began to blame herself. He was right. She must not be silly
because she was unused to things. She ought not to be disturbed by
trifles. She must try to be nice and look cheerful. She made an effort
and did no speak for a few minutes. When she had recovered herself she
tried again.

"English country is so pretty," she said, when she thought she was quite
sure that her voice would not tremble. "I do so like the hedges and the
darling little red-roofed cottages."

It was an innocent tentative at saying something agreeable which might
propitiate him. She was beginning to realise that she was continually
making efforts to propitiate him. But one of the forms of unpleasantness
most enjoyable to him was the snubbing of any gentle effort at
palliating his mood. He condescended in this case no response whatever,
but merely continued staring contemptuously before him.

"It is so picturesque, and so unlike America," was the pathetic little
commonplace she ventured next. "Ain't it, Nigel?"

He turned his head slowly towards her, as if she had taken a new liberty
in disturbing his meditations.

"Wha--at?" he drawled.

It was almost too much for her to sustain herself under. Her courage
collapsed.

"I was only saying how pretty the cottages were," she faltered. "And
that there's nothing like this in America."

"You ended your remark by adding, 'ain't it,'" her husband
condescended. "There is nothing like that in England. I shall ask you to
do me the favour of leaving Americanisms out of your conversation when
you are in the society of English ladies and gentlemen. It won't do."

"I didn't know I said it," Rosy answered feebly.

"That is the difficulty," was his response. "You never know, but
educated people do."

There was nothing more to be said, at least for a girl who had never
known what it was to be bullied. This one felt like a beggar or a
scullery maid, who, being rated by her master, had not the refuge of
being able to "give warning." She could never give warning. The Atlantic
Ocean was between her and those who had loved and protected her all
her short life, and the carriage was bearing her onwards to the home in
which she was to live alone as this man's companion to the end of her
existence.

She made no further propitiatory efforts, but sat and stared in simple
blankness at the country, which seemed to increase in loveliness at each
new point of view. Sometimes she saw sweet wooded, rolling lands made
lovelier by the homely farmhouses and cottages enclosed and sheltered by
thick hedges and trees; once or twice they drove past a park enfolding
a great house guarded by its huge sentinel oaks and beeches; once the
carriage passed through an adorable little village, where children
played on the green and a square-towered grey church seemed to watch
over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage. If she had
been a happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable
friends, she would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of
admiration every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that
to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her rapture would
merely represent the crudeness which had existed in contentment in a
brown-stone house on a noisy thoroughfare, through a life which had been
passed tramping up and down numbered streets and avenues.

They approached at last a second village with a green, a grass-grown
street and the irregular red-tiled cottages, which to the unaccustomed
eye seemed rather to represent studies for sketches than absolute
realities. The bells in the church tower broke forth into a chime and
people appeared at the doors of the cottages. The men touched their
foreheads as the carriage passed, and the children made bobbing
curtsies. Sir Nigel condescended to straighten himself a trifle in his
seat, and recognised the greetings with the stiff, half-military salute.
The poor girl at his side felt that he put as little feeling as possible
into the movement, and that if she herself had been a bowing villager
she would almost have preferred to be wholly ignored. She looked at him
questioningly.

"Are they--must _I_?" she began.

"Make some civil recognition," answered Sir Nigel, as if he were
instructing an ignorant child. "It is customary."

So she bowed and tried to smile, and the joyous clamour of the bells
brought the awful lump into her throat again. It reminded her of
the ringing of the chimes at the New York church on that day of her
marriage, which had been so full of gay, luxurious bustle, so crowded
with wedding presents, and flowers, and warm-hearted, affectionate
congratulations, and good wishes uttered in merry American voices.

The park at Stornham Court was large and beautiful and old. The trees
were magnificent, and the broad sweep of sward and rich dip of ferny
dell all that the imagination could desire. The Court itself was old,
and many-gabled and mellow-red and fine. Rosalie had learned from no
precedent as yet that houses of its kind may represent the apotheosis
of discomfort and dilapidation within, and only become more beautiful
without. Tumbled-down chimneys and broken tiles, being clambered over by
tossing ivy, are pictures to delight the soul.

As she descended from the carriage the girl was tremulous and uncertain
of herself and much overpowered by the unbending air of the man-servant
who received her as if she were a parcel in which it was no part of his
duty to take the smallest interest. As she mounted the stone steps she
caught a glimpse of broad gloom within the threshold, a big, square,
dingy hall where some other servants were drawn up in a row. She had
read of something of the sort in English novels, and she was suddenly
embarrassed afresh by her realisation of the fact that she did not know
what to do and that if she made a mistake Nigel would never forgive her.

An elderly woman came out of a room opening into the hall. She was an
ugly woman of a rigid carriage, which, with the obvious intention of
being severely majestic, was only antagonistic. She had a flaccid
chin, and was curiously like Nigel. She had also his expression when he
intended to be disagreeable. She was the Dowager Lady Anstruthers,
and being an entirely revolting old person at her best, she objected
extremely to the transatlantic bride who had made her a dowager, though
she was determinedly prepared to profit by any practical benefit likely
to accrue.

"Well, Nigel," she said in a deep voice. "Here you are at last."

This was of course a statement not to be refuted. She held out a
leathern cheek, and as Sir Nigel also presented his, their caress of
greeting was a singular and not effusive one.

"Is this your wife?" she asked, giving Rosalie a bony hand. And as he
did not indignantly deny this to be the fact, she added, "How do you
do?"

Rosalie murmured a reply and tried to control herself by making another
effort to swallow the lump in her throat. But she could not swallow
it. She had been keeping a desperate hold on herself too long. The
bewildered misery of her awakening, the awkwardness of the public row
at the station, the sulks which had filled the carriage to repletion
through all the long drive, and finally the jangling bells which had
so recalled that last joyous day at home--at home--had brought her to
a point where this meeting between mother and son--these two stony,
unpleasant creatures exchanging a reluctant rub of uninviting cheeks--as
two savages might have rubbed noses--proved the finishing impetus to
hysteria. They were so hideous, these two, and so ghastly comic and
fantastic in their unresponsive glumness, that the poor girl lost all
hold upon herself and broke into a trembling shriek of laughter.

"Oh!" she gasped in terror at what she felt to be her indecent madness.
"Oh! how--how----" And then seeing Nigel's furious start, his mother's
glare and all the servants' alarmed stare at her, she rushed staggering
to the only creature she felt she knew--her maid Hannah, clutched her
and broke down into wild sobbing.

"Oh, take me away!" she cried. "Oh, do! Oh, do! Oh, Hannah! Oh,
mother--mother!"

"Take your mistress to her room," commanded Sir Nigel. "Go downstairs,"
he called out to the servants. "Take her upstairs at once and throw
water in her face," to the excited Hannah.

And as the new Lady Anstruthers was half led, half dragged, in
humiliated hysteric disorder up the staircase, he took his mother by the
elbow, marched her into the nearest room and shut the door. There they
stood and stared at each other, breathing quick, enraged breaths and
looking particularly alike with their heavy-featured, thick-skinned,
infuriated faces.

It was the Dowager who spoke first, and her whole voice and manner
expressed all she intended that they should, all the derision, dislike
and scathing resignment to a grotesque fate.

"Well," said her ladyship. "So THIS is what you have brought home from
America!"



CHAPTER IV

A MISTAKE OF THE POSTBOY'S

As the weeks passed at Stornham Court the Atlantic Ocean seemed to
Rosalie Anstruthers to widen endlessly, and gay, happy, noisy New York
to recede until it was as far away as some memory of heaven. The girl
had been born in the midst of the rattling, rumbling bustle, and it
had never struck her as assuming the character of noise; she had only
thought of it as being the cheerful confusion inseparable from town. She
had been secretly offended and hurt when strangers said that New York
was noisy and dirty; when they called it vulgar, she never wholly
forgave them. She was of the New Yorkers who adore their New York
as Parisians adore Paris and who feel that only within its beloved
boundaries can the breath of life be breathed. People were often too hot
or too cold there, but there was usually plenty of bright glaring sun,
and the extremes of the weather had at least something rather dramatic
about them. There were dramatic incidents connected with them, at any
rate. People fell dead of sunstroke or were frozen to death, and the
newspapers were full of anecdotes during a "cold snap" or a "torrid
wave," which all made for excitement and conversation.

But at Stornham the rain seemed to young Lady Anstruthers to descend
ceaselessly. The season was a wet one, and when she rose in the morning
and looked out over the huge stretch of trees and sward she thought she
always saw the rain falling either in hopeless sheets or more hopeless
drizzle. The occasions upon which this was a dreary truth blotted out or
blurred the exceptions, when in liquid ultramarine deeps of sky, floated
islands and mountains of snow-white fleece, of a beauty of which she had
before had no conception.

In the English novels she had read, places such as Stornham Court were
always filled with "house parties," made up of wonderful town wits and
beauties, who provided endless entertainment for each other, who played
games, who hunted and shot pheasants and shone in dazzling amateur
theatricals. There were, however, no visitors at Stornham, and there
were in fact, no accommodations for any. There were numberless bedrooms,
but none really fit for guests to occupy. Carpets and curtains were
ancient and ragged, furniture was dilapidated, chimneys would not draw,
beds were falling to pieces. The Dowager Lady Anstruthers had never
either attracted desired, or been able to afford company. Her son's wife
suffered from the resulting boredom and unpopularity without being able
to comprehend the significance of the situation.

As the weeks dragged by a few heavy carriages deposited at the Court
a few callers. Some of the visitors bore imposing titles, which made
Rosalie very nervous and caused her hastily to array herself to receive
them in toilettes much too pretty and delicate for the occasion. Her
innocent idea was that she must do her husband credit by appearing as
"stylish" as possible.

As a result she was stared at, either with open disfavour, or with
well-bred, furtive criticism, and was described afterwards as being
either "very American" or "very over-dressed." When she had lived in
huge rooms in Fifth Avenue, Rosalie had changed her attire as many times
a day as she had changed her fancy; every hour had been filled with
engagements and amusements; the Vanderpoel carriages had driven up
to the door and driven away again and again through the mornings and
afternoons and until midnight and later. Someone was always going out or
coming in. There had been in the big handsome house not much more of an
air of repose than one might expect to find at a railway station; but
the flurry, the coming and going, the calling and chatting had all been
cheery, amiable. At Stornham, Rosalie sat at breakfast before unchanging
boiled eggs, unfailing toast and unalterable broiled bacon, morning
after morning. Sir Nigel sat and munched over the newspapers, his
mother, with an air of relentless disapproval from a lofty height of
both her food and companions, disposed of her eggs and her rasher at
Rosalie's right hand. She had transferred to her daughter-in-law her
previously occupied seat at the head of the table. This had been
done with a carefully prepared scene of intense though correct
disagreeableness, in which she had managed to convey all the rancour of
her dethroned spirit and her disapproval and disdain of international
alliances.

"It is of course proper that you should sit at the head of your
husband's table," she had said, among other agreeable things. "A woman
having devoted her life to her son must relinquish her position to the
person he chooses to marry. If you should have a son you will give
up your position to his wife. Since Nigel has married you, he has, of
course, a right to expect that you will at least make an effort to learn
something of what is required of women of your position."

"Sit down, Rosalie," said Nigel. "Of course you take the head of the
table, and naturally you must learn what is expected of my wife, but
don't talk confounded rubbish, mother, about devoting your life to your
son. We have seen about as little of each other as we could help. We
never agreed." They were both bullies and each made occasional efforts
at bullying the other without any particular result. But each could at
least bully the other into intensified unpleasantness.

The vicar's wife having made her call of ceremony upon the new
Lady Anstruthers, followed up the acquaintance, and found her quite
exotically unlike her mother-in-law, whose charities one may be sure had
neither been lavish nor dispensed by any hand less impressive than her
own. The younger woman was of wholly malleable material. Her sympathies
were easily awakened and her purse was well filled and readily opened.
Small families or large ones, newly born infants or newly buried ones,
old women with "bad legs" and old men who needed comforts, equally
touched her heart. She innocently bestowed sovereigns where an
Englishwoman would have known that half-crowns would have been
sufficient. As the vicaress was her almoner that lady felt her
importance rapidly on the increase. When she left a cottage saying,
"I'll speak to young Lady Anstruthers about you," the good woman of the
house curtsied low and her husband touched his forehead respectfully.

But this did not advance the fortunes of Sir Nigel, who personally
required of her very different things. Two weeks after her arrival at
Stornham, Rosalie began to see that somehow she was regarded as a person
almost impudently in the wrong. It appeared that if she had been an
English girl she would have been quite different, that she would have
been an advantage instead of a detriment. As an American she was a
detriment. That seemed to go without saying. She tried to do everything
she was told, and learn something from each cold insinuation. She did
not know that her very amenability and timidity were her undoing. Sir
Nigel and his mother thoroughly enjoyed themselves at her expense. They
knew they could say anything they chose, and that at the most she would
only break down into crying and afterwards apologise for being so badly
behaved. If some practical, strong-minded person had been near to defend
her she might have been rescued promptly and her tyrants routed. But she
was a young girl, tender of heart and weak of nature. She used to cry a
great deal when she was alone, and when she wrote to her mother she was
too frightened to tell the truth concerning her unhappiness.

"Oh, if I could just see some of them!" she would wail to herself. "If
I could just see mother or father or anybody from New York! Oh, I know
I shall never see New York again, or Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Central
Park--I never--never--never shall!" And she would grovel among her
pillows, burying her face and half stifling herself lest her sobs should
be heard. Her feeling for her husband had become one of terror and
repulsion. She was almost more afraid of his patronising, affectionate
moments than she was of his temper.

His conjugal condescensions made her feel vaguely--without knowing
why--as if she were some lower order of little animal.

American women, he said, had no conception of wifely duties and
affection. He had a great deal to say on the subject of wifely duty.
It was part of her duty as a wife to be entirely satisfied with his
society, and to be completely happy in the pleasure it afforded her. It
was her wifely duty not to talk about her own family and palpitatingly
expect letters by every American mail. He objected intensely to this
letter writing and receiving, and his mother shared his prejudices.

"You have married an Englishman," her ladyship said. "You have put it
out of his power to marry an Englishwoman, and the least consideration
you can show is to let New York and Nine-hundredth street remain upon
the other side of the Atlantic and not insist on dragging them into
Stornham Court."

The Dowager Lady Anstruthers was very fine in her picture of her mental
condition, when she realised, as she seemed periodically to do, that it
was no longer possible for her son to make a respectable marriage with
a woman of his own nation. The unadorned fact was that both she and
Sir Nigel were infuriated by the simplicity which made Rosalie slow in
comprehending that it was proper that the money her father allowed
her should be placed in her husband's hands, and left there with no
indelicate questioning. If she had been an English girl matters would
have been made plain to her from the first and arranged satisfactorily
before her marriage. Sir Nigel's mother considered that he had played
the fool, and would not believe that New York fathers were such touchy,
sentimental idiots as not to know what was expected of them.

They wasted no time, however, in coming to the point, and in a measure
it was the vicaress who aided them. Not she entirely, however.

Since her mother-in-law's first mention of a possible son whose wife
would eventually thrust her from her seat at the head of the table,
Rosalie had several times heard this son referred to. It struck her
that in England such things seemed discussed with more freedom than in
America. She had never heard a young woman's possible family arranged
for and made the subject of conversation in the more crude atmosphere
of New York. It made her feel rather awkward at first. Then she began
to realise that the son was part of her wifely duty also; that she was
expected to provide one, and that he was in some way expected to provide
for the estate--to rehabilitate it--and that this was because her
father, being a rich man, would provide for him. It had also struck her
that in England there was a tendency to expectation that someone
would "provide" for someone else, that relatives even by marriage were
supposed to "make allowances" on which it was quite proper for other
persons to live. Rosalie had been accustomed to a community in which
even rich men worked, and in which young and able-bodied men would have
felt rather indignant if aunts or uncles had thought it necessary to
pension them off as if they had been impotent paupers. It was Rosalie's
son who was to be "provided for" in this case, and who was to "provide
for" his father.

"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 eye-glasses 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!"

She who had been the mildest of sweet-tempered creatures all her life
had suddenly gone almost insane with heartbroken, hysteric grief and
rage. She did not know what she was saying and doing; she only realised
in an agony of despair that she was a thing caught in a trap; that these
people had her in their power, and that they had tricked and lied to her
and kept her apart from what her girl's heart so cried out to and longed
for. Her father, her mother, her little sister; they had been near her
and had been lied to and sent away.

"You are quite mad, you violent, uncontrolled creature!" cried the
Dowager furiously. "You ought to be put in a straitjacket and drenched
with cold water."

Then the door opened again and Nigel strode in. He was in riding dress
and was breathless and livid with anger. He was in a nice mood to
confront a wife on the verge of screaming hysterics. After a bad half
hour with his steward, who had been talking of impending disasters,
he had heard by chance of Wilson's conflagration and the hundred-pound
cheque. He had galloped home at the top of his horse's speed.

"Here is your wife raving mad," cried out his mother.

Rosalie staggered across the room to him. She held up her hand clenching
the letter and shook it at him.

"My mother and father have been here," she shrieked. My mother has been
ill. They wanted to come to see me. You knew and you kept it from me.
You told my father lies--lies--hideous lies! You said I was away in
Scotland--enjoying myself--when I was here and dying with homesickness.
You made them think I did not care for them--or for New York! You have
killed me! Why did you do such a wicked thing!

He looked at her with glaring eyes. If a man born a gentleman is ever in
the mood to kick his wife to death, as costermongers do, he was in that
mood. He had lost control over himself as completely as she had, and
while she was only a desperate, hysteric girl, he was a violent man.

"I did it because I did not mean to have them here," he said. "I did it
because I won't have them here."

"They shall come," she quavered shrilly in her wildness. "They shall
come to see me. They are my own father and mother, and I will have
them."

He caught her arm in such a grip that she must have thought he would
break it, if she could have thought or felt anything.

"No, you will not have them," he ground forth between his teeth. "You
will do as I order you and learn to behave yourself as a decent married
woman should. You will learn to obey your husband and respect his wishes
and control your devilish American temper."

"They have gone--gone!" wailed Rosalie. "You sent them away! My father,
my mother, my sister!"

"Stop your indecent ravings!" ordered Sir Nigel, shaking her. "I will
not submit to be disgraced before the servants."

"Put your hand over her mouth, Nigel," cried his mother. "The very
scullery maids will hear."

She was as infuriated as her son. And, indeed, to behold civilised human
beings in the state of uncontrolled violence these three had reached was
a sight to shudder at.

"I won't stop," cried the girl. "Why did you take me away from
everything--I was quite happy. Everybody was kind to me. I loved people,
I had everything. No one ever--ever--ever ill-used anyone----"

Sir Nigel clutched her arm more brutally still and shook her with
absolute violence. Her hair broke loose and fell about her awful little
distorted, sobbing face.

"I did not take you to give you an opportunity to display your vulgar
ostentation by throwing away hundred-pound cheques to villagers," he
said. "I didn't take you to give you the position of a lady and be made
a fool of by you."

"You have ruined him," burst forth his mother. "You have put it out of
his power to marry an Englishwoman who would have known it was her duty
to give something in return for his name and protection."

Her ladyship had begun to rave also, and as mother and son were of equal
violence when they had ceased to control themselves, Rosalie began to
find herself enlightened unsparingly. She and her people were vulgar
sharpers. They had trapped a gentleman into a low American marriage and
had not the decency to pay for what they had got. If she had been an
Englishwoman, well born, and of decent breeding, all her fortune would
have been properly transferred to her husband and he would have had the
dispensing of it. Her husband would have been in the position to control
her expenditure and see that she did not make a fool of herself. As it
was she was the derision of all decent people, of all people who had
been properly brought up and knew what was in good taste and of good
morality.

First it was the Dowager who poured forth, and then it was Sir
Nigel. They broke in on each other, they interrupted one another with
exclamations and interpolations. They had so far lost themselves that
they did not know they became grotesque in the violence of their fury.
Rosalie's brain whirled. Her hysteria mounted and mounted. She stared
first at one and then at the other, gasping and sobbing by turns; she
swayed on her feet and clutched at a chair.

"I did not know," she broke forth at last, trying to make her voice
heard in the storm. "I never understood. I knew something made you
hate me, but I didn't know you were angry about money." She laughed
tremulously and wildly. "I would have given it to you--father would have
given you some--if you had been good to me." The laugh became hysterical
beyond her management. Peal after peal broke from her, she shook all
over with her ghastly merriment, sobbing at one and the same time.

"Oh! oh! oh!" she shrieked. "You see, I thought you were so
aristocratic. I wouldn't have dared to think of such a thing. I thought
an English gentleman--an English gentleman--oh! oh! to think it was
all because I did not give you money--just common dollars and cents
that--that I daren't offer to a decent American who could work for
himself."

Sir Nigel sprang at her. He struck her with his open hand upon the
cheek, and as she reeled she held up her small, feverish, shaking hand,
laughing more wildly than before.

"You ought not to strike me," she cried. "You oughtn't! You don't know
how valuable I am. Perhaps----" with a little, crazy scream--"perhaps I
might have a son."

She fell in a shuddering heap, and as she dropped she struck heavily
against the protruding end of an oak chest and lay upon the floor, her
arms flung out and limp, as if she were a dead thing.




CHAPTER V

ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC

In the course of twelve years the Shuttle had woven steadily and--its
movements lubricated by time and custom--with increasing rapidity.
Threads of commerce it caught up and shot to and fro, with threads of
literature and art, threads of life drawn from one shore to the other
and back again, until they were bound in the fabric of its weaving.
Coldness there had been between both lands, broad divergence of taste
and thought, argument across seas, sometimes resentment, but the web in
Fate's hands broadened and strengthened and held fast. Coldness faintly
warmed despite itself, taste and thought drawn into nearer contact,
reflecting upon their divergences, grew into tolerance and the knowledge
that the diverging, seen more clearly, was not so broad; argument
coming within speaking distance reasoned itself to logical and practical
conclusions. Problems which had stirred anger began to find solutions.
Books, in the first place, did perhaps more than all else. Cheap,
pirated editions of English works, much quarrelled over by authors and
publishers, being scattered over the land, brought before American eyes
soft, home-like pictures of places which were, after all was said and
done, the homes of those who read of them, at least in the sense of
having been the birthplaces of fathers or grandfathers. Some subtle,
far-reaching power of nature caused a stirring of the blood, a vague,
unexpressed yearning and lingering over pages which depicted sweet,
green lanes, broad acres rich with centuries of nourishment and care;
grey church towers, red roofs, and village children playing before
cottage doors. None of these things were new to those who pondered over
them, kinsmen had dwelt on memories of them in their fireside talk,
and their children had seen them in fancy and in dreams. Old grievances
having had time to fade away and take on less poignant colour, the
stirring of the blood stirred also imaginations, and wakened something
akin to homesickness, though no man called the feeling by its name. And
this, perhaps, was the strongest cord the Shuttle wove and was the true
meaning of its power. Being drawn by it, Americans in increasing numbers
turned their faces towards the older land. Gradually it was discovered
that it was the simplest affair in the world to drive down to the
wharves and take a steamer which landed one, after a more or less
interesting voyage, in Liverpool, or at some other convenient port.
From there one went to London, or Paris, or Rome; in fact, whithersoever
one's fancy guided, but first or last it always led the traveller to
the treading of green, velvet English turf. And once standing on
such velvet, both men and women, looking about them, felt, despite
themselves, the strange old thrill which some of them half resented and
some warmly loved.

In the course of twelve years, a length of time which will transform a
little girl wearing a short frock into a young woman wearing a long one,
the pace of life and the ordering of society may become so altered as
to appear amazing when one finds time to reflect on the subject. But one
does not often find time. Changes occur so gradually that one scarcely
observes them, or so swiftly that they take the form of a kind of amazed
shock which one gets over as quickly as one experiences it and realises
that its cause is already a fixed fact.

In the United States of America, which have not yet acquired the serene
sense of conservative self-satisfaction and repose which centuries of
age may bestow, the spirit of life itself is the aspiration for change.
Ambition itself only means the insistence on change. Each day is to be
better than yesterday fuller of plans, of briskness, of initiative. Each
to-day demands of to-morrow new men, new minds, new work. A to-day which
has not launched new ships, explored new countries, constructed new
buildings, added stories to old ones, may consider itself a failure,
unworthy even of being consigned to the limbo of respectable yes