The Shuttle Part 18

"Twelve years is not such a long time." Betty took her hand and drew her to a sofa. "Let us sit down and talk about it."

"There is nothing much to talk about. This is it----" taking in the room with a wave of her hand. "I am it. Ughtred is it."

"Then let us talk about England," was Bettina's light skim over the thin ice.

A red spot grew on each of Lady Anstruthers' cheek bones and made her faded eyes look intense.

"Let us talk about America," her little birdclaw of a hand clinging feverishly. "Is New York still--still----"

"It is still there," Betty answered with one of the adorable smiles which showed a deep dimple near her lip. "But it is much nearer England than it used to be."

"Nearer!" The hand tightened as Rosy caught her breath.

Betty bent rather suddenly and kissed her. It was the easiest way of hiding the look she knew had risen to her eyes. She began to talk gaily, half laughingly.

"It is quite near," she said. "Don't you realise it? Americans swoop over here by thousands every year. They come for business, they come for pleasure, they come for rest. They cannot keep away. They come to buy and sell--pictures and books and luxuries and lands. They come to give and take. They are building a bridge from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e of their work, and their thoughts, and their plannings, out of the lives and souls of them. It will be a great bridge and great things will pa.s.s over it."

She kissed the faded cheek again. She wanted to sweep Rosy away from the dreariness of "it." Lady Anstruthers looked at her with faintly smiling eyes. She did not follow all this quite readily, but she felt pleased and vaguely comforted.

"I know how they come here and marry," she said. "The new d.u.c.h.ess of Downes is an American. She had a fortune of two million pounds."

"If she chooses to rebuild a great house and a great name," said Betty, lifting her shoulders lightly, "why not--if it is an honest bargain? I suppose it is part of the building of the bridge."

Little Lady Anstruthers, trying to pull up the sleeves of the gauzy bodice slipping off her small, sharp bones, stared at her half in wondering adoration, half in alarm.

"Betty--you--you are so handsome--and so clever and strange," she fluttered. "Oh, Betty, stand up so that I can see how tall and handsome you are!"

Betty did as she was told, and upon her feet she was a young woman of long lines, and fine curves so inspiring to behold that Lady Anstruthers clasped her hands together on her knees in an excited gesture.

"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" she cried. "You are just as wonderful as you looked when I turned and saw you under the trees. You almost make me afraid."

"Because I am wonderful?" said Betty. "Then I will not be wonderful any more."

"It is not because I think you wonderful, but because other people will.

Would you rebuild a great house?" hesitatingly.

The fine line of Betty's black brows drew itself slightly together.

"No," she said.

"Wouldn't you?"

"How could the man who owned it persuade me that he was in earnest if he said he loved me? How could I persuade him that I was worth caring for and not a mere ambitious fool? There would be too much against us."

"Against you?" repeated Lady Anstruthers.

"I don't say I am fair," said Betty. "People who are proud are often not fair. But we should both of us have seen and known too much."

"You have seen me now," said Lady Anstruthers in her listless voice, and at the same moment dinner was announced and she got up from the sofa, so that, luckily, there was no time for the impersonal answer it would have been difficult to invent at a moment's notice. As they went into the dining-room Betty was thinking restlessly. She remembered all the material she had collected during her education in France and Germany, and there was added to it the fact that she HAD seen Rosy, and having her before her eyes she felt that there was small prospect of her contemplating the rebuilding of any great house requiring reconstruction.

There was fine panelling in the dining-room and a great fireplace and a few family portraits. The service upon the table was shabby and the dinner was not a bounteous meal. Lady Anstruthers in her girlish, gauzy dress and looking too small for her big, high-backed chair tried to talk rapidly, and every few minutes forgot herself and sank into silence, with her eyes unconsciously fixed upon her sister's face. Ughtred watched Betty also, and with a hungry questioning. The man-servant in the worn livery was not a sufficiently well-trained and experienced domestic to make any effort to keep his eyes from her. He was young enough to be excited by an innovation so unusual as the presence of a young and beautiful person surrounded by an unmistakable atmosphere of ease and fearlessness. He had been talking of her below stairs and felt that he had failed in describing her. He had found himself barely supported by the suggestion of a housemaid that sometimes these dresses that looked plain had been made in Paris at expensive places and had cost "a lot." He furtively examined the dress which looked plain, and while he admitted that for some mysterious reason it might represent expensiveness, it was not the dress which was the secret of the effect, but a something, not altogether mere good looks, expressed by the wearer. It was, in fact, the thing which the second-cla.s.s pa.s.senger, Salter, had been at once attracted and stirred to rebellion by when Miss Vanderpoel came on board the Meridiana.

Betty did not look too small for her high-backed chair, and she did not forget herself when she talked. In spite of all she had found, her imagination was stirred by the surroundings. Her sense of the fine s.p.a.ces and possibilities of dignity in the barren house, her knowledge that outside the windows there lay stretched broad views of the park and its heavy-branched trees, and that outside the gates stood the neglected picturesqueness of the village and all the rural and--to her--interesting life it slowly lived--this pleased and attracted her.

If she had been as helpless and discouraged as Rosalie she could see that it would all have meant a totally different and depressing thing, but, strong and spirited, and with the power of full hands, she was remotely rejoicing in what might be done with it all. As she talked she was gradually learning detail. Sir Nigel was on the Continent.

Apparently he often went there; also it revealed itself that no one knew at what moment he might return, for what reason he would return, or if he would return at all during the summer. It was evident that no one had been at any time encouraged to ask questions as to his intentions, or to feel that they had a right to do so.

This she knew, and a number of other things, before they left the table.

When they did so they went out to stroll upon the moss-grown stone terrace and listened to the nightingales throwing 'm into the air silver fountains of trilling song. When Bettina paused, leaning against the bal.u.s.trade of the terrace that she might hear all the beauty of it, and feel all the beauty of the warm spring night, Rosy went on making her effort to talk.

"It is not much of a neighbourhood, Betty," she said. "You are too accustomed to livelier places to like it."

"That is my reason for feeling that I shall like it. I don't think I could be called a lively person, and I rather hate lively places."

"But you are accustomed--accustomed----" Rosy harked back uncertainly.

"I have been accustomed to wishing that I could come to you," said Betty. "And now I am here."

Lady Anstruthers laid a hand on her dress.

"I can't believe it! I can't believe it!" she breathed.

"You will believe it," said Betty, drawing the hand around her waist and enclosing in her own arm the narrow shoulders. "Tell me about the neighbourhood."

"There isn't any, really," said Lady Anstruthers. "The houses are so far away from each other. The nearest is six miles from here, and it is one that doesn't count.

"Why?"

"There is no family, and the man who owns it is so poor. It is a big place, but it is falling to pieces as this is.

"What is it called?"

"Mount Dunstan. The present earl only succeeded about three years ago.

Nigel doesn't know him. He is queer and not liked. He has been away."

"Where?"

"No one knows. To Australia or somewhere. He has odd ideas. The Mount Dunstans have been awful people for two generations. This man's father was almost mad with wickedness. So was the elder son. This is a second son, and he came into nothing but debt. Perhaps he feels the disgrace and it makes him rude and ill-tempered. His father and elder brother had been in such scandals that people did not invite them.

"Do they invite this man?"

"No. He probably would not go to their houses if they did. And he went away soon after he came into the t.i.tle."

"Is the place beautiful?"

"There is a fine deer park, and the gardens were wonderful a long time ago. The house is worth looking at--outside."

"I will go and look at it," said Betty.