The Incomplete Amorist Part 10

"I am glad I struck him," the Reverend Cecil told himself again and again; "_that_ brought it home to him. He was quite cowed. He could do nothing but bow and cringe away. Yes, I am glad."

But the girl? The serpent had asked him to be gentle with her--had dared to ask him. He could think of no way gentle enough for dealing with this crisis. The habit of prayer caught him. He prayed for guidance.

Then quite suddenly he saw what to do.

"That will be best," he said; "she will feel that less."

He rang and ordered the fly from the Peal of Bells, went to his room to change his old coat for a better one, since appearances must be kept up, even if the heart be breaking. His thin hair was disordered, and his tie, he noticed, was oddly crumpled, as though strange hands had been busy with his throat. He put on a fresh tie, smoothed his hair, and went down again. As he pa.s.sed, he lingered a moment outside her door.

Betty watching with red eyes and swollen lips saw him enter the fly, saw him give an order, heard the door bang. The old coachman clambered clumsily to his place, and the carriage lumbered down the drive.

"Oh, how cruel he is! He might have spoken to me _now_! I suppose he's going to keep me waiting for days, as a penance. And I haven't really done anything wrong. It's a shame! I've a good mind to run away!"

Running away required consideration. In the meantime, since he was out of the house, there was no reason why she should not go downstairs.

She was not a child to be kept to her room in disgrace. She bathed her distorted face, powdered it, and tried to think that the servants, should they see her, would notice nothing.

Where had he gone? For no goal within his parish would a hired carriage be needed. He had gone to Sevenoaks or to the station.

Perhaps he had gone to Westerham--there was a convent there, a Protestant sisterhood. Perhaps he was going to make arrangements for shutting her up there! Never!--Betty would die first. At least she would run away first. But where could one run to?

The aunts? Betty loved the aunts, but she distrusted their age. They were too old to sympathise really with her. They would most likely understand as little as her step-father had done. An Inward Monitor told Betty that the story of the fortune-telling, of the seven stolen meetings with no love-making in them, would sound very unconvincing to any ears but those of the one person already convinced. But she would not be shut up in a convent--no, not by fifty aunts and a hundred step-fathers!

She would go to Him. He would understand. He was the only person who ever had understood. She would go straight to him and ask him what to do. He would advise her. He was so clever, so good, so n.o.ble. Whatever he advised would be _right_.

Trembling and in a cold white rage of determination, Betty fastened on her hat, found her gloves and purse. The mackintosh she remembered had been left in the shed. She pictured her step-father trampling fiercely upon it as he told Mr. Vernon what he thought of him. She took her golf cape.

At the last moment she hesitated. Mr. Vernon would not be idle. What would he be doing? Suppose he should send a note? Suppose he had watched Mr. Underwood drive away and should come boldly up and ask for her? Was it wise to leave the house? But perhaps he would be hanging about the church yard, or watching from the park for a glimpse of her.

She would at least go out and see.

"I'll leave a farewell letter," she said, "in case I never come back."

She found her little blotting-book--envelopes, but no paper. Of course! One can't with dignity write cutting farewells on envelopes.

She tore a page from her diary.

"You have driven me to this," she wrote. "I am going away, and in time I shall try to forgive you all the petty meannesses and cruelties of all these years. I know you always hated me, but you might have had some pity. All my life I shall bear the marks on my soul of the bitter tyranny I have endured here. Now I am going away out into the world, and G.o.d knows what will become of me."

She folded, enveloped, and addressed the note, stuck a long hat-pin fiercely through it, and left it, patent, speared to her pin-cushion, with her step-father's name uppermost.

"Good-bye, little room," she said. "I feel I shall never see you again."

Slowly and sadly she crossed the room and turned the handle of the door. The door was locked.

Once, years ago, a happier man than the Reverend Cecil had been Rector of Long Barton. And in the room that now was Betty's he had had iron bars fixed to the two windows, because that room was the nursery.

That evening, after dinner, Mr. Vernon sat at his parlour window looking idly along the wet bowling-green to the belt of lilacs and the pale gleams of watery sunset behind them. He had pa.s.sed a disquieting day. He hated to leave things unfinished. And now the idyll was ruined and the picture threatened,--and Betty's portrait was not finished, and never would be.

"Come in," he said; and his landlady heavily followed up her tap on his door.

"A lady to see you, Sir," said she with a look that seemed to him to be almost a wink.

"A lady? To see me? Good Lord!" said Vernon. Among all the thoughts of the day this was the one thought that had not come to him.

"Shall I show her in?" the woman asked, and she eyed him curiously.

"A lady," he repeated. "Did she give her name?"

"Yes, Sir. Miss Desmond, Sir. Shall I shew her in?"

"Yes; shew her in, of course," he answered irritably.

And to himself he said:

"The Devil!"

CHAPTER VI.

THE CRIMINAL.

If you have found yourself, at the age of eighteen, a prisoner in your own bedroom you will be able to feel with Betty. Not otherwise. Even your highly strung imagination will be impotent to present to you the ecstasy of rage, terror, resentment that fills the soul when locked door and barred windows say, quite quietly, but beyond appeal: "Here you are, and here, my good child, you stay."

All the little familiar objects, the intimate a.s.sociations of the furniture of a room that has been for years your boudoir as well as your sleeping room, all the decorations that you fondly dreamed gave to your room a _cachet_--the mark of a distinctive personality,--these are of no more comfort to you than would be strange bare stone walls and a close unfamiliar iron grating.

Betty tried to shake the window bars, but they were immovable. She tried to force the door open, but her silver b.u.t.tonhook was an insufficient lever, and her tooth-brush handle broke when she pitted it in conflict against the heavy, old-fashioned lock. We have all read how prisoners, outwitting their gaolers, have filed bars with their pocket nail-scissors, and cut the locks out of old oak doors with the small blade of a penknife. Betty's door was only of pine, but her knife broke off short; and the file on her little scissors wore itself smooth against the first unmoved bar.

She paced the room like a caged lioness. We read that did the lioness but know her strength her bars were easily shattered by one blow of her powerful paw. Betty's little pink paws were not powerful like the lioness's, and when she tried to make them help her, she broke her nails and hurt herself.

It was this moment that Let.i.tia chose for rapping at the door.

"You can't come in. What is it?" Betty was prompt to say.

"Mrs. Edwardes's Albert, Miss, come for the Maternity bag."

"It's all ready in the school-room cupboard," Betty called through the door. "Number three."

She resisted an impulse to say that she had broken the key in the lock and to send for the locksmith. No: there should be no scandal at Long Barton,--at least not while she had to stay in it.

She did not cry. She was sick with fury, and anger made her heart beat as Vernon had never had power to make it.

"I will be calm. I won't lose my head," she told herself again and again. She drank some water. She made herself eat the neglected breakfast. She got out her diary and wrote in it, in a handwriting that was not Betty's, and with a hand that shook like totter-gra.s.s.

"What will become of me? What has become of _him_? My step-father must have done something horrible to him. Perhaps he has had him put in prison; of course he couldn't do that in these modern times, like in the French revolution, just for talking to some one he hadn't been introduced to, but he may have done it for trespa.s.sing, or damage to the crops, or something. I feel quite certain something has happened to him. He would never have deserted me like this in my misery if he were free. And I can do nothing to help him--nothing. How shall I live through the day? How can I bear it? And this awful trouble has come upon him just because he was kind to another artist. The world is very, very, very cruel. I wish I were dead!" She blotted the words and locked away the book. Then she burnt that farewell note and went and sat in the window-seat to watch for her step-father's return.

The time was long. At last he came. She saw him open the carriage door and reach out a flat foot, feeling for the carriage step. He stepped out, turned and thrust a hand back into the cab. Was he about to hand out a stern-faced Protestant sister, who would take her to Westerham, and she would never be heard of again? Betty set her teeth and waited anxiously to see if the sister seemed strong. Betty was, and she would fight for her liberty. With teeth and nails if need were.