The Shuttle Part 22

"I am not embarra.s.sed," said Bettina.

"That is what I like," gruffly.

"I am pleased," in her mellowest velvet voice, "that you like it."

Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark pa.s.sed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling, and Mount Dunstan slightly frowned.

"I beg pardon," he said. "You are quite right. It had a deucedly patronising sound."

As he stood before her Betty was given her opportunity to see him as she had not seen him before, to confront the sum total of his physique. His red-brown eyes looked out from rather fine heavy brows, his features were strong and clear, though ruggedly cut, his build showed weight of bone, not of flesh, and his limbs were big and long. He would have wielded a battle-axe with power in centuries in which men hewed their way with them. Also it occurred to her he would have looked well in a coat of mail. He did not look ill in his corduroys and gaiters.

"I am a self-absorbed beggar," he went on. "I had been slouching about the place, almost driven mad by my thoughts, and when I saw you took me for a servant my fancy was for letting the thing go on. If I had been a rich man instead of a pauper I would have kept your half-sovereign."

"I should not have enjoyed that when I found out the truth," said Miss Vanderpoel.

"No, I suppose you wouldn't. But I should not have cared."

He was looking at her straightly and summing her up as she had summed him up. A man and young, he did not miss a line or a tint of her chin or cheek, shoulder, or brow, or dense, lifted hair. He had already, even in his guise of keeper, noticed one thing, which was that while at times her eyes were the blue of steel, sometimes they melted to the colour of bluebells under water. They had been of this last hue when she had stood in the sunken garden, forgetting him and crying low:

"Oh, if it were mine! If it were mine!"

He did not like American women with millions, but while he would not have said that he liked her, he did not wish her yet to move away. And she, too, did not wish, just yet, to move away. There was something dramatic and absorbing in the situation. She looked over the softly stirring gra.s.s and saw the suns.h.i.+ne was deepening its gold and the shadows were growing long. It was not a habit of hers to ask questions, but she asked one.

"Did you not like America?" was what she said.

"Hated it! Hated it! I went there lured by a belief that a man like myself, with muscle and will, even without experience, could make a fortune out of small capital on a sheep ranch. Wind and weather and disease played the devil with me. I lost the little I had and came back to begin over again--on nothing--here!" And he waved his hand over the park with its sward and coppice and bracken and the deer cropping in the late afternoon gold.

"To begin what again?" said Betty. It was an extraordinary enough thing, seen in the light of conventions, that they should stand and talk like this. But the spark had kindled between eye and eye, and because of it they suddenly had forgotten that they were strangers.

"You are an American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it would to others. To begin to build up again, in one man's life, what has taken centuries to grow--and fall into this."

"It would be a splendid thing to do," she said slowly, and as she said it her eyes took on their colour of bluebells, because what she had seen had moved her. She had not looked at him, but at the cropping deer as she spoke, but at her next sentence she turned to him again.

"Where should you begin?" she asked, and in saying it thought of Stornham.

He laughed shortly.

"That is American enough," he said. "Your people have not finished their beginnings yet and live in the spirit of them. I tell you of a wild fancy, and you accept it as a possibility and turn on me with, 'Where should you begin?'"

"That is one way of beginning," said Bettina. "In fact, it is the only way."

He did not tell her that he liked that, but he knew that he did like it and that her mere words touched him like a spur. It was, of course, her lifelong breathing of the atmosphere of millions which made for this fas.h.i.+on of moving at once in the direction of obstacles presenting to the rest of the world barriers seemingly insurmountable. And yet there was something else in it, some quality of nature which did not alone suggest the omnipotence of wealth, but another thing which might be even stronger and therefore carried conviction. He who had raged and clenched his hands in the face of his knowledge of the aspect his dream would have presented if he had revealed it to the ordinary practical mind, felt that a point of view like this was good for him. There was in it stimulus for a fleeting moment at least.

"That is a good idea," he answered. "Where should you begin?"

She replied quite seriously, though he could have imagined some girls rather simpering over the question as a casual joke.

"One would begin at the fences," she said. "Don't you think so?"

"That is practical."

"That is where I shall begin at Stornham," reflectively.

"You are going to begin at Stornham?"

"How could one help it? It is not as large or as splendid as this has been, but it is like it in a way. And it will belong to my sister's son.

No, I could not help it."

"I suppose you could not." There was a hint of wholly unconscious resentment in his tone. He was thinking that the effect produced by their boundless wealth was to make these people feel as a race of giants might--even their women unknowingly revealed it.

"No, I could not," was her reply. "I suppose I am on the whole a sort of commercial working person. I have no doubt it is commercial, that instinct which makes one resent seeing things lose their value."

"Shall you begin it for that reason?"

"Partly for that one--partly for another." She held out her hand to him.

"Look at the length of the shadows. I must go. Thank you, Lord Mount Dunstan, for showing me the place, and thank you for undeceiving me."

He held the side gate open for her and lifted his cap as she pa.s.sed through. He admitted to himself, with some reluctance, that he was not content that she should go even yet, but, of course, she must go. There pa.s.sed through his mind a remote wonder why he had suddenly unbosomed himself to her in a way so extraordinarily unlike himself. It was, he thought next, because as he had taken her about from one place to another he had known that she had seen in things what he had seen in them so long--the melancholy loneliness, the significance of it, the lost hopes that lay behind it, the touching pain of the stateliness wrecked. She had shown it in the way in which she tenderly looked from side to side, in the very lightness of her footfall, in the bluebell softening of her eyes. Oh, yes, she had understood and cared, American as she was! She had felt it all, even with her hideous background of Fifth Avenue behind her.

When he had spoken it had been in involuntary response to an emotion in herself.

So he stood, thinking, as he for some time watched her walking up the sunset-glowing road.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT

Betty Vanderpoel's walk back to Stornham did not, long though it was, give her time to follow to its end the thread of her thoughts. Mentally she walked again with her uncommunicative guide, through woodpaths and gardens, and stood gazing at the great blind-faced house. She had not given the man more than an occasional glance until he had told her his name. She had been too much absorbed, too much moved, by what she had been seeing. She wondered, if she had been more aware of him, whether his face would have revealed a great deal. She believed it would not. He had made himself outwardly stolid. But the thing must have been bitter.

To him the whole story of the splendid past was familiar even if through his own life he had looked on only at gradual decay. There must be stories enough of men and women who had lived in the place, of what they had done, of how they had loved, of what they had counted for in their country's wars and peacemakings, great functions and law-building. To be able to look back through centuries and know of one's blood that sometimes it had been shed in the doing of great deeds, must be a thing to remember. To realise that the courage and honour had been lost in ign.o.ble modern vices, which no sense of dignity and reverence for race and name had restrained--must be bitter--bitter! And in the role of a servant to lead a stranger about among the ruins of what had been--that must have been bitter, too. For a moment Betty felt the bitterness of it herself and her red mouth took upon itself a grim line. The worst of it for him was that he was not of that strain of his race who had been the "bad lot." The "bad lot" had been the weak lot, the vicious, the self-degrading. Scandals which had shut men out from their cla.s.s and kind were usually of an ugly type. This man had a strong jaw, a powerful, healthy body, and clean, though perhaps hard, eyes. The First Man of them, who hewed his way to the front, who stood fierce in the face of things, who won the first lands and laid the first stones, might have been like him in build and look.

"It's a disgusting thing," she said to herself, "to think of the corrupt weaklings the strong ones dwindled down to. I hate them. So does he."

There had been many such of late years, she knew. She had seen them in Paris, in Rome, even in New York. Things with thin or over-thick bodies and receding chins and foreheads; things haunting places of amus.e.m.e.nt and finding inordinate entertainment in strange jokes and horseplay. She herself had hot blood and a fierce strength of rebellion, and she was wondering how, if the father and elder brother had been the "bad lot,"

he had managed to stand still, looking on, and keeping his hands off them.

The last gold of the sun was mellowing the grey stone of the terrace and enriching the green of the weeds thrusting themselves into life between the uneven flags when she reached Stornham, and pa.s.sing through the house found Lady Anstruthers sitting there. In sustenance of her effort to keep up appearances, she had put on a weird little muslin dress and had elaborated the dressing of her thin hair. It was no longer dragged back straight from her face, and she looked a trifle less abject, even a shade prettier. Bettina sat upon the edge of the bal.u.s.trade and touched the hair with light fingers, ruffling it a little becomingly.

"If you had worn it like this yesterday," she said, "I should have known you."

"Should you, Betty? I never look into a mirror if I can help it, but when I do I never know myself. The thing that stares back at me with its pale eyes is not Rosy. But, of course, everyone grows old."

"Not now! People are just discovering how to grow young instead."

Lady Anstruthers looked into the clear courage of her laughing eyes.

"Somehow," she said, "you say strange things in such a way that one feels as if they must be true, however--however unlike anything else they are."