The Shuttle Part 39

She made a list of the things, and added some extras as an idea of her own. Life had not afforded her this kind of thing before, she realised.

She felt for the first time the joy of reckless extravagance, and thrilled with the excitement of it.

"You need not think of Brexley Union any more," she said, when she, having risen to go, stood at the cottage door with old Mrs. Welden.

"The things I have written down here shall be sent to you every Sat.u.r.day night. I will pay your rent."

"Miss--miss!" Mrs. Welden looked affrighted. "It's too much, miss. An'

coals eighteen pence a hundred!"

"Never mind," said her ladyship's sister, and the old woman, looking up into her eyes, found there the colour Mount Dunstan had thought of as being that of bluebells under water. "I think we can manage it, Mrs.

Welden. Keep yourself as warm as you like, and sometime I will come and have a cup of tea with you and see if the tea is good."

"Oh! Deary me!" said Mrs. Welden. "I can't think what to say, miss. It lifts everythin'--everythin'. It's not to be believed. It's like bein'

left a fortune."

When the wicket gate swung to and the young lady went up the lane, the old woman stood staring after her. And here was a piece of news to run into Charley Jenkins' cottage and tell--and what woman or man in the row would quite believe it?

CHAPTER XXV

"WE BEGAN TO MARRY THEM, MY GOOD FELLOW!"

Lord Dunholm and his eldest son, Lord Westholt, sauntered together smoking their after-dinner cigars on the broad-turfed terrace overlooking park and gardens which seemed to sweep without boundary line into the purplish land beyond. The grey ma.s.s of the castle stood clear-cut against the blue of a sky whose twilight was still almost daylight, though in the purity of its evening stillness a star already hung, here and there, and a young moon swung low. The great s.p.a.ces about them held a silence whose exquisite entirety was marked at intervals by the distant bark of a shepherd dog driving his master's sheep to the fold, their soft, intermittent plaints--the mother ewes' mellow answering to the tender, fretful lambs--floated on the air, a lovely part of the ending day's repose. Where two who are friends stroll together at such hours, the great beauty makes for silence or for thoughtful talk. These two men--father and son--were friends and intimates, and had been so from Westholt's first memory of the time when his childish individuality began to detach itself from the background of misty and indistinct things. They had liked each other, and their liking and intimacy had increased with the onward moving and change of years.

After sixty sane and decently spent active years of life, Lord Dunholm, in either country tweed or evening dress, was a well-built and handsome man; at thirty-three his son was still like him.

"Have you seen her?" he was saying.

"Only at a distance. She was driving Lady Anstruthers across the marshes in a cart. She drove well and----" he laughed as he flicked the ash from his cigar--"the back of her head and shoulders looked handsome."

"The American young woman is at present a factor which is without doubt to be counted with," Lord Dunholm put the matter without lightness. "Any young woman is a factor, but the American young woman just now--just now----" He paused a moment as though considering. "It did not seem at all necessary to count with them at first, when they began to appear among us. They were generally curiously exotic, funny little creatures with odd manners and voices. They were often most amusing, and one liked to hear them chatter and see the airy lightness with which they took superfluous, and sometimes unsuperfluous, conventions, as a hunter takes a five-barred gate. But it never occurred to us to marry them. We did not take them seriously enough. But we began to marry them--we began to marry them, my good fellow!"

The final words broke forth with such a suggestion of sudden anxiety that, in spite of himself, Westholt laughed involuntarily, and his father, turning to look at him, laughed also. But he recovered his seriousness.

"It was all rather a muddle at first," he went on. "Things were not fairly done, and certain bad lots looked on it as a paying scheme on the one side, while it was a matter of silly, little ambitions on the other.

But that it is an extraordinary country there is no sane denying--huge, fabulously resourceful in every way--area, variety of climate, wealth of minerals, products of all sorts, soil to grow anything, and sun and rain enough to give each thing what it needs; last, or rather first, a people who, considered as a nation, are in the riot of youth, and who began by being English--which we Englishmen have an innocent belief is the one method of 'owning the earth.' That figure of speech is an Americanism I carefully committed to memory. Well, after all, look at the map--look at the map! There we are."

They had frequently discussed together the question of the development of international relations. Lord Dunholm, a man of far-reaching and clear logic, had realised that the oddly unaccentuated growth of intercourse between the two countries might be a subject to be reflected on without lightness.

"The habit we have of regarding America and Americans as rather a joke,"

he had once said, "has a sort of parallel in the condescendingly amiable amus.e.m.e.nt of a parent at the precocity or whimsicalness of a child. But the child is shooting up amazingly--amazingly. In a way which suggests divers possibilities."

The exchange of visits between Dunholm and Stornham had been rare and formal. From the call made upon the younger Lady Anstruthers on her marriage, the Dunholms had returned with a sense of puzzled pity for the little American bride, with her wonderful frock and her uneasy, childish eyes. For some years Lady Anstruthers had been too delicate to make or return calls. One heard painful accounts of her apparent wretched ill-health and of the condition of her husband's estate.

"As the relations between the two families have evidently been strained for years," Lord Dunholm said, "it is interesting to hear of the sudden advent of the sister. It seems to point to reconciliation. And you say the girl is an unusual person.

"From what one hears, she would be unusual if she were an English girl who had spent her life on an English estate. That an American who is making her first visit to England should seem to see at once the practical needs of a neglected place is a thing to wonder at. What can she know about it, one thinks. But she apparently does know. They say she has made no mistakes--even with the village people. She is managing, in one way or another, to give work to every man who wants it. Result, of course--unbounded rustic enthusiasm."

Lord Dunholm laughed between the soothing whiffs of his cigar.

"How clever of her! And what sensible good feeling! Yes--yes! She evidently has learned things somewhere. Perhaps New York has found it wise to begin to give young women professional training in the management of English estates. Who knows? Not a bad idea."

It was the rustic enthusiasm, Westholt explained, which had in a manner spread her fame. One heard enlightening and ill.u.s.trative anecdotes of her. He related several well worth hearing. She had evidently a sense of humour and unexpected perceptions.

"One detail of the story of old Doby's meerschaum," Westholt said, "pleased me enormously. She managed to convey to him--without hurting his aged feelings or overwhelming him with embarra.s.sment--that if he preferred a clean churchwarden or his old briarwood, he need not feel obliged to smoke the new pipe. He could regard it as a trophy. Now, how did she do that without filling him with fright and confusion, lest she might think him not sufficiently grateful for her present? But they tell me she did it, and that old Doby is rapturously happy and takes the meerschaum to bed with him, but only smokes it on Sundays--sitting at his window blowing great clouds when his neighbours are coming from church. It was a clever girl who knew that an old fellow might secretly like his old pipe best."

"It was a deliciously clever girl," said Lord Dunholm. "One wants to know and make friends with her. We must drive over and call. I confess, I rather congratulate myself that Anstruthers is not at home."

"So do I," Westholt answered. "One wonders a little how far he and his sister-in-law will 'foregather' when he returns. He's an unpleasant beggar."

A few days later Mrs. Brent, returning from a call on Mrs. Charley Jenkins, was pa.s.sed by a carriage whose liveries she recognised half way up the village street. It was the carriage from Dunholm Castle. Lord and Lady Dunholm and Lord Westholt sat in it. They were, of course, going to call at the Court. Miss Vanderpoel was beginning to draw people. She naturally would. She would be likely to make quite a difference in the neighbourhood now that it had heard of her and Lady Anstruthers had been seen driving with her, evidently no longer an unvisitable invalid, but actually decently clothed and in her right mind. Mrs. Brent slackened her steps that she might have the pleasure of receiving and responding gracefully to salutations from the important personages in the landau.

She felt that the Dunholms were important. There were earldoms AND earldoms, and that of Dunholm was dignified and of distinction.

A common-looking young man on a bicycle, who had wheeled into the village with the carriage, riding alongside it for a hundred yards or so, stopped before the Clock Inn and dismounted, just as Mrs. Brent neared him. He saw her looking after the equipage, and lifting his cap spoke to her civilly.

"This is Stornham village, ain't it, ma'am?" he inquired.

"Yes, my man." His costume and general aspect seemed to indicate that he was of the cla.s.s one addressed as "my man," though there was something a little odd about him.

"Thank you. That wasn't Miss Vanderpoel's eldest sister in that carriage, was it?"

"Miss Vanderpoel's----" Mrs. Brent hesitated. "Do you mean Lady Anstruthers?"

"I'd forgotten her name. I know Miss Vanderpoel's eldest sister lives at Stornham--Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter."

"Lady Anstruthers' younger sister is a Miss Vanderpoel, and she is visiting at Stornham Court now." Mrs. Brent could not help adding, curiously, "Why do you ask?"

"I am going to see her. I'm an American."

Mrs. Brent coughed to cover a slight gasp. She had heard remarkable things of the democratic customs of America. It was painful not to be able to ask questions.

"The lady in the carriage was the Countess of Dunholm," she said rather grandly. "They are going to the Court to call on Miss Vanderpoel."

"Then Miss Vanderpoel's there yet. That's all right. Thank you, ma'am,"

and lifting his cap again he turned into the little public house.

The Dunholm party had been accustomed on their rare visits to Stornham to be received by the kind of man-servant in the kind of livery which is a manifest, though unwilling, confession. The men who threw open the doors were of regulation height, well dressed, and of trained bearing.

The entrance hall had lost its hopeless shabbiness. It was a complete and picturesquely luxurious thing. The change suggested magic. The magic which had been used, Lord Dunholm reflected, was the simplest and most powerful on earth. Given surroundings, combined with a gift for knowing values of form and colour, if you have the power to spend thousands of guineas on tiger skins, Oriental rugs, and other beauties, barrenness is easily transformed.

The drawing-room wore a changed aspect, and at a first glance it was to be seen that in poor little Lady Anstruthers, as she had generally been called, there was to be noted alteration also. In her case the change, being in its first stages, could not perhaps be yet called transformation, but, aided by softly pretty arrangement of dress and hair, a light in her eyes, and a suggestion of pink under her skin, one recalled that she had once been a pretty little woman, and that after all she was only about thirty-two years old.

That her sister, Miss Vanderpoel, had beauty, it was not necessary to hesitate in deciding. Neither Lord Dunholm nor his wife nor their son did hesitate. A girl with long limbs an alluring profile, and extraordinary black lashes set round lovely Irish-blue eyes, possesses physical capital not to be argued about.

She was not one of the curious, exotic little creatures, whose thin, though sometimes rather sweet, and always gay, high-pitched young voices Lord Dunholm had been so especially struck by in the early days of the American invasion. Her voice had a tone one would be likely to remember with pleasure. How well she moved--how well her black head was set on her neck! Yes, she was of the new type--the later generation.

These amazing, oddly practical people had evolved it--planned it, perhaps, bought--figuratively speaking--the architects and material to design and build it--bought them in whatever country they found them, England, France, Italy Germany--pocketing them coolly and carrying them back home to develop, complete, and send forth into the world when their invention was a perfected thing. Struck by the humour of his fancy, Lord Dunholm found himself smiling into the Irish-blue eyes. They smiled back at him in a way which warmed his heart. There were no pauses in the conversation which followed. In times past, calls at Stornham had generally held painfully blank moments. Lady Dunholm was as pleased as her husband. A really charming girl was an enormous acquisition to the neighbourhood.

Westholt, his father saw, had found even more than the story of old Doby's pipe had prepared him to expect.