The Shuttle Part 84

"My splendid Betty! My own fine girl!" he said.

And when she cried out "Father! Father!" she bent and kissed the breast of his coat.

He knew who the big young man was before she turned to present him.

"This is Lord Mount Dunstan, father," she said. "Since Nigel was brought home, he has been very good to us."

Reuben S. Vanderpoel looked well into the man's eyes, as he shook hands with him warmly, and this was what he said to himself:

"Yes, she's safe. This is quite safe. It is to be trusted with the whole thing."

Not many days after her husband's arrival at Stornham Court, Mrs.

Vanderpoel travelled down from London, and, during her journey, scarcely saw the wintry hedges and bare trees, because, as she sat in her cushioned corner of the railway carriage, she was inwardly offering up gentle, pathetically ardent prayers of grat.i.tude. She was the woman who prays, and the many sad pet.i.tions of the past years were being answered at last. She was being allowed to go to Rosy--whatsoever happened, she could never be really parted from her girl again. She asked pardon many times because she had not been able to be really sorry when she had heard of her son-in-law's desperate condition. She could feel pity for him in his awful case, she told herself, but she could not wish for the thing which perhaps she ought to wish for. She had confided this to her husband with innocent, penitent tears, and he had stroked her cheek, which had always been his comforting way since they had been young things together.

"My dear," he said, "if a tiger with hydrophobia were loose among a lot of decent people--or indecent ones, for the matter of that--you would not feel it your duty to be very sorry if, in springing on a group of them, he impaled himself on an iron fence. Don't reproach yourself too much." And, though the realism of the picture he presented was such as to make her exclaim, "No! No!" there were still occasional moments when she breathed a request for pardon if she was hard of heart--this softest of creatures human.

It was arranged by the two who best knew and loved her that her meeting with Rosalie should have no spectators, and that their first hour together should be wholly unbroken in upon.

"You have not seen each other for so long," Betty said, when, on her arrival, she led her at once to the morning-room where Rosy waited, pale with joy, but when the door was opened, though the two figures were swept into each other's arms by one wild, tremulous rush of movement, there were no sounds to be heard, only caught breaths, until the door had closed again.

The talks which took place between Mr. Vanderpoel and Lord Mount Dunstan were many and long, and were of absorbing interest to both. Each presented to the other a new world, and a type of which his previous knowledge had been but incomplete.

"I wonder," Mr. Vanderpoel said, in the course of one of them, "if my world appeals to you as yours appeals to me. Naturally, from your standpoint, it scarcely seems probable. Perhaps the up-building of large financial schemes presupposes a certain degree of imagination. I am becoming a romantic New York man of business, and I revel in it.

Kedgers, for instance," with the smile which, somehow, suggested Betty, "Kedgers and the Lilium Giganteum, Mrs. Welden and old Doby threaten to develop into quite necessary factors in the scheme of happiness. What Betty has felt is even more comprehensible than it seemed at first."

They walked and rode together about the countryside; when Mount Dunstan itself was swept clean of danger, and only a few convalescents lingered to be taken care of in the huge ballroom, they spent many days in going over the estate. The desolate beauty of it appealed to and touched Mr.

Vanderpoel, as it had appealed to and touched his daughter, and, also, wakened in him much new and curious delight. But Mount Dunstan, with a touch of his old obstinacy, insisted that he should ignore the beauty, and look closely at less admirable things.

"You must see the worst of this," he said. "You must understand that I can put no good face upon things, that I offer nothing, because I have nothing to offer."

If he had not been swept through and through by a powerful and rapturous pa.s.sion, he would have detested and abhorred these days of deliberate proud laying bare of the nakedness of the land. But in the hours he spent with Betty Vanderpoel the pa.s.sion gave him knowledge of the things which, being elemental, do not concern themselves with pride and obstinacy, and do not remember them. Too much had ended, and too much begun, to leave s.p.a.ce or thought for poor things. In their eyes, when they were together, and even when they were apart, dwelt a glow which was deeply moving to those who, looking on, were sufficiently profound of thought to understand.

Watching the two walking slowly side by side down the leafless avenue on a crystal winter day, Mr. Vanderpoel conversed with the vicar, whom he greatly liked.

"A young man of the name of Selden," he remarked, "told me more of this than he knew."

"G. Selden," said the vicar, with affectionate smiling. "He is not aware that he was largely concerned in the matter. In fact, without G. Selden, I do not know how, exactly, we should have got on. How is he, nice fellow?"

"Extremely well, and in these days in my employ. He is of the honest, indefatigable stuff which makes its way."

His own smiles, as he watched the two tall figures in the distance, settled into an expression of speculative absorption, because he was reflecting upon profoundly interesting matters.

"There is a great primeval thing which sometimes--not often, only sometimes--occurs to two people," he went on. "When it leaps into being, it is well if it is not thwarted, or done to death. It has happened to my girl and Mount Dunstan. If they had been two young tinkers by the roadside, they would have come together, and defied their beggary. As it is, I recognise, as I sit here, that the outcome of what is to be may reach far, and open up broad new ways."

"Yes," said the vicar. "She will live here and fill a strong man's life with wonderful human happiness--her splendid children will be born here, and among them will be those who lead the van and make history."

For some time Nigel Anstruthers lay in his room at Stornham Court, surrounded by all of aid and luxury that wealth and exalted medical science could gather about him. Sometimes he lay a livid unconscious mask, sometimes his nurses and doctors knew that in his hollow eyes there was the light of a raging half reason, and they saw that he struggled to utter coherent sounds which they might comprehend. This he never accomplished, and one day, in the midst of such an effort, he was stricken dumb again, and soon afterwards sank into stillness and died.

And the Shuttle in the hand of Fate, through every hour of every day, and through the slow, deep breathing of all the silent nights, weaves to and fro--to and fro--drawing with it the threads of human life and thought which strengthen its web: and trace the figures of its yet vague and uncompleted design.