The Shuttle Part 54

"What do you mean to do?" he questioned as bluntly as before. He knew she would understand what he meant.

"Not much. To see that Rosy is not unhappy any more. We can prevent that. She was out of repair--as the house was. She is being rebuilt and decorated. She knows that she will be taken care of."

"I know her better than you do," with a laugh. "She will not go away.

She is too frightened of the row it would make--of what I should say. I should have plenty to say. I can make her shake in her shoes."

Betty let her eyes rest full upon him, and he saw that she was softly summing him up--quite without prejudice, merely in interested speculation upon the workings of type.

"You are letting the inherited temperament run away with you at this moment," she reflected aloud--her quiet scrutiny almost abstracted. "It was foolish to say that."

He had known it was foolish two seconds after the words had left his lips. But a temper which has been allowed to leap hedges, unchecked throughout life, is in peril of forming a habit of taking them even at such times as a leap may land its owner in a ditch. This last was what her interested eyes were obviously saying. It suited him best at the moment to try to laugh.

"Don't look at me like that," he threw off. "As if you were calculating that two and two make four."

"No prejudice of mine can induce them to make five or six--or three and a half," she said. "No prejudice of mine--or of yours."

The two and two she was calculating with were the likelihoods and unlikelihoods of the inherited temperament, and the practical powers she could absolutely count on if difficulty arose with regard to Rosy.

He guessed at this, and began to make calculations himself.

But there was no further conversation for them, as they were obliged to rise to their feet to receive visitors. Lady Alanby of Dole and Sir Thomas, her grandson, were being brought out of the house to them by Rosalie.

He went forward to meet them--his manner that of the graceful host. Lady Alanby, having been welcomed by him, and led to the most comfortable, tree-shaded chair, found his bearing so elegantly chastened that she gazed at him with private curiosity. To her far-seeing and highly experienced old mind it seemed the bearing of a man who was "up to something." What special thing did he chance to be "up to"? His glance certainly lurked after Miss Vanderpoel oddly. Was he falling in unholy love with the girl, under his stupid little wife's very nose?

She could not, however, give her undivided attention to him, as she wished to keep her eye on her grandson and--outrageously enough fit happened that just as tea was brought out and Tommy was beginning to cheer up and quite come out a little under the spur of the activities of handing bread and b.u.t.ter and cress sandwiches, who should appear but the two Lithcom girls, escorted by their aunt, Mrs. Manners, with whom they lived. As they were orphans without money, if the Manners, who were rather well off, had not taken them in, they would have had to go to the workhouse, or into genteel amateur shops, as they were not clever enough for governesses.

Mary, with her turned-up nose, looked just about as usual, but Jane had a new frock on which was exactly the colour of the big, appealing eyes, with their trick of following people about. She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was not at all. The swaying young thinness of those very slight girls whose soft summer muslins make them look like delicate bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons, has almost invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose characters are chiefly marked by lack of forethought, and Lady Alanby saw Tommy's robust young body give a sort of jerk as the party of three was brought across the gra.s.s. After it he pulled himself together hastily, and looked stiff and pink, shaking hands as if his elbow joint was out of order, being at once too loose and too rigid. He began to be clumsy with the bread and b.u.t.ter, and, ceasing his talk with Miss Vanderpoel, fell into silence.

Why should he go on talking? he thought. Miss Vanderpoel was a cracking handsome girl, but she was too clever for him, and he had to think of all sorts of new things to say when he talked to her. And--well, a fellow could never imagine himself stretched out on the gra.s.s, puffing happily away at a pipe, with a girl like that sitting near him, smiling--the hot turf smelling almost like hay, the hot blue sky curving overhead, and both the girl and himself perfectly happy--chock full of joy--though neither of them were saying anything at all. You could imagine it with some girls--you DID imagine it when you wakened early on a summer morning, and lay in luxurious stillness listening to the birds singing like mad.

Lady Jane was a nicely-behaved girl, and she tried to keep her following blue eyes fixed on the gra.s.s, or on Lady Anstruthers, or Miss Vanderpoel, but there was something like a string, which sometimes pulled them in another direction, and once when this had happened--quite against her will--she was terrified to find Lady Alanby's gla.s.s lifted and fixed upon her.

As Lady Alanby's opinion of Mrs. Manners was but a poor one, and as Mrs. Manners was stricken dumb by her combined dislike and awe of Lady Alanby, a slight stiffness might have settled upon the gathering if Betty had not made an effort. She applied herself to Lady Alanby and Mrs. Manners at once, and ended by making them talk to each other. When they left the tea table under the trees to look at the gardens, she walked between them, playing upon the primeval horticultural pa.s.sions which dominate the existence of all respectable and normal country ladies, until the gulf between them was temporarily bridged. This being achieved, she adroitly pa.s.sed them over to Lady Anstruthers, who, Nigel observed with some curiosity, accepted the casual responsibility without manifest discomfiture.

To the aching Tommy the manner in which, a few minutes later, he found himself standing alone with Jane Lithcom in a path of clipped laurels was almost bewilderingly simple. At the end of the laurel walk was a pretty peep of the country, and Miss Vanderpoel had brought him to see it. Nigel Anstruthers had been loitering behind with Jane and Mary. As Miss Vanderpoel turned with him into the path, she stooped and picked a blossom from a clump of speedwell growing at the foot of a bit of wall.

"Lady Jane's eyes are just the colour of this flower," she said.

"Yes, they are," he answered, glancing down at the lovely little blue thing as she held it in her hand. And then, with a thump of the heart, "Most people do not think she is pretty, but I--" quite desperately--"I DO." His mood had become rash.

"So do I," Betty Vanderpoel answered.

Then the others joined them, and Miss Vanderpoel paused to talk a little--and when they went on she was with Mary and Nigel Anstruthers, and he was with Jane, walking slowly, and somehow the others melted away, turning in a perfectly natural manner into a side path. Their own slow pace became slower. In fact, in a few moments, they were standing quite still between the green walls. Jane turned a little aside, and picked off some small leaves, nervously. He saw the muslin on her chest lift quiveringly.

"Oh, little Jane!" he said in a big, shaky whisper. The following eyes incontinently brimmed over. Some shining drops fell on the softness of the blue muslin.

"Oh, Tommy," giving up, "it's no use--talking at all."

"You mustn't think--you mustn't think--ANYTHING," he falteringly commanded, drawing nearer, because it was impossible not to do it.

What he really meant, though he did not know how decorously to say it, was that she must not think that he could be moved by any tall beauty, towards the splendour of whose possessions his revered grandmother might be driving him.

"I am not thinking anything," cried Jane in answer. "But she is everything, and I am nothing. Just look at her--and then look at me, Tommy."

"I'll look at you as long as you'll let me," gulped Tommy, and he was boy enough and man enough to put a hand on each of her shoulders, and drown his longing in her br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes.

Mary and Miss Vanderpoel were talking with a curious intimacy, in another part of the garden, where they were together alone, Sir Nigel having been reattached to Lady Alanby.

"You have known Sir Thomas a long time?" Betty had just said.

"Since we were children. Jane reminded me at the Dunholms' ball that she had played cricket with him when she was eight."

"They have always liked each other?" Miss Vanderpoel suggested.

Mary looked up at her, and the meeting of their eyes was frank to revelation. But for the clear girlish liking for herself she saw in Betty Vanderpoel's, Mary would have known her next speech to be of imbecile bluntness. She had heard that Americans often had a queer, delightful understanding of unconventional things. This splendid girl was understanding her.

"Oh! You SEE!" she broke out. "You left them together on purpose!"

"Yes, I did." And there was a comprehension so deep in her look that Mary knew it was deeper than her own, and somehow founded on some subtler feeling than her own. "When two people want so much--care so much to be together," Miss Vanderpoel added quite slowly--even as if the words rather forced themselves from her, "it seems as if the whole world ought to help them--everything in the world--the very wind, and rain, and sun, and stars--oh, things have no RIGHT to keep them apart."

Mary stared at her, moved and fascinated. She scarcely knew that she caught at her hand.

"I have never been in the state that Jane is," she poured forth. "And I can't understand how she can be such a fool, but--but we care about each other more than most girls do--perhaps because we have had no people.

And it's the kind of thing there is no use talking against, it seems.

It's killing the youngness in her. If it ends miserably, it will be as if she had had an illness, and got up from it a faded, done-for spinster with a stretch of hideous years to live. Her blue eyes will look like boiled gooseberries, because she will have cried all the colour out of them. Oh! You UNDERSTAND! I see you do."

Before she had finished both Miss Vanderpoel's hands were holding hers.

"I do! I do," she said. And she did, as a year ago she had not known she could. "Is it Lady Alanby?" she ventured.

"Yes. Tommy will be helplessly poor if she does not leave him her money.

And she won't if he makes her angry. She is very determined. She will leave it to an awful cousin if she gets in a rage. And Tommy is not clever. He could never earn his living. Neither could Jane. They could NEVER marry. You CAN'T defy relatives, and marry on nothing, unless you are a character in a book."

"Has she liked Lady Jane in the past?" Miss Vanderpoel asked, as if she was, mentally, rapidly going over the ground, that she might quite comprehend everything.

"Yes. She used to make rather a pet of her. She didn't like me. She was taken by Jane's meek, attentive, obedient ways. Jane was born a sweet little affectionate worm. Lady Alanby can't hate her, even now. She just pushes her out of her path."

"Because?" said Betty Vanderpoel.

Mary prefaced her answer with a brief, half-embarra.s.sed laugh.

"Because of YOU."

"Because she thinks----?"

"I don't see how she can believe he has much of a chance. I don't think she does--but she will never forgive him if he doesn't make a try at finding out whether he has one or not."

"It is very businesslike," Betty made observation.