"You look as if you were delighted," she said. "Your eyes--you have amazing eyes, Betty! I am trying to picture to myself what Lady Anstruthers will feel when she sees you. What were you like when she married?"
Bettina sat down, smiling and looking, indeed, quite incredibly lovely.
She was capable of a warmth and a sweetness which were as embracing as other qualities she possessed were powerful.
"I was eight years old," she said. "I was a rude little girl, with long legs and a high, determined voice. I know I was rude. I remember answering back."
"I seem to have heard that you did not like your brother-in-law, and that you were opposed to the marriage."
"Imagine the undisciplined audacity of a child of eight "opposing" the marriage of her grown-up sister. I was quite capable of it. You see in those days we had not been trained at all (one had only been allowed tremendous liberty), and interfered conversationally with one"s elders and betters at any moment. I was an American little girl, and American little girls were really--they really were!" with a laugh, whose musical sound was after all wholly non-committal.
"You did not treat Sir Nigel Anstruthers as one of your betters."
"He was one of my elders, at all events, and becomingness of bearing should have taught me to hold my little tongue. I am giving some thought now to the kind of thing I must invent as a suitable apology when I find him a really delightful person, full of virtues and accomplishments.
Perhaps he has a horror of me."
"I should like to be present at your first meeting," Mrs. Worthington reflected. "You are going down to Stornham to-morrow?"
"That is my plan. When I write to you on my arrival, I will tell you if I encountered the horror." Then, with a swift change of subject and a lifting of her slender, velvet line of eyebrow, "I am only deploring that I have not time to visit the Tower."
Mrs. Worthington was betrayed into a momentary glance of uncertainty, almost verging in its significance on a gasp.
"The Tower? Of London? Dear Betty!"
Bettina"s laugh was mellow with revelation.
"Ah!" she said. "You don"t know my point of view; it"s plain enough.
You see, when I delight in these things, I think I delight most in my delight in them. It means that I am almost having the kind of feeling the fresh American souls had who landed here thirty years ago and revelled in the resemblance to d.i.c.kens"s characters they met with in the streets, and were historically thrilled by the places where people"s heads were chopped off. Imagine their reflections on Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that poor last word was uttered--"Remember." And think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones in the slightest disguise."
"You don"t mean to say----" Mrs. Worthington was vaguely awakening to the situation.
"That the charm of my visit, to myself, is that I realise that I am rather like that. I have positively preserved something because I have kept away. You have been here so often and know things so well, and you were even so sophisticated when you began, that you have never really had the flavours and emotions. I am sophisticated, too, sophisticated enough to have cherished my flavours as a gourmet tries to save the bouquet of old wine. You think that the Tower is the pleasure of housemaids on a Bank Holiday. But it quite makes me quiver to think of it," laughing again. "That I laugh, is the sign that I am not as beautifully, freshly capable of enjoyment as those genuine first Americans were, and in a way I am sorry for it."
Mrs. Worthington laughed also, and with an enjoyment.
"You are very clever, Betty," she said.
"No, no," answered Bettina, "or, if I am, almost everybody is clever in these days. We are nearly all of us comparatively intelligent."
"You are very interesting at all events, and the Anstruthers will exult in you. If they are dull in the country, you will save them."
"I am very interested, at all events," said Bettina, "and interest like mine is quite pa.s.se. A clever American who lives in England, and is the pet of d.u.c.h.esses, once said to me (he always speaks of Americans as if they were a distant and recently discovered species), "When they first came over they were a novelty. Their enthusiasm amused people, but now, you see, it has become vieux jeu. Young women, whose specialty was to be excited by the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, are not novelties any longer. In fact, it"s been done, and it"s done FOR as a specialty."
And I am excited about the Tower of London. I may be able to restrain my feelings at the sight of the Beef Eaters, but they will upset me a little, and I must brace myself, I must indeed."
"Truly, Betty?" said Mrs. Worthington, regarding her with curiosity, arising from a faint doubt of her entire seriousness, mingled with a fainter doubt of her entire levity.
Betty flung out her hands in a slight, but very involuntary-looking, gesture, and shook her head.
"Ah!" she said, "it was all TRUE, you know. They were all horribly real--the things that were shuddered over and sentimentalised about.
Sophistication, combined with imagination, makes them materialise again, to me, at least, now I am here. The gulf between a historical figure and a man or woman who could bleed and cry out in human words was broad when one was at school. Lady Jane Grey, for instance, how nebulous she was and how little one cared. She seemed invented merely to add a detail to one"s lesson in English history. But, as we drove across Waterloo Bridge, I caught a glimpse of the Tower, and what do you suppose I began to think of? It was monstrous. I saw a door in the Tower and the stone steps, and the square s.p.a.ce, and in the chill clear, early morning a little slender, helpless girl led out, a little, fair, real thing like Rosy, all alone--everyone she belonged to far away, not a man near who dared utter a word of pity when she turned her awful, meek, young, desperate eyes upon him. She was a pious child, and, no doubt, she lifted her eyes to the sky. I wonder if it was blue and its blueness broke her heart, because it looked as if it might have pitied such a young, patient girl thing led out in the fair morning to walk to the hacked block and give her trembling pardon to the black-visored man with the axe, and then "commending her soul to G.o.d" to stretch her sweet slim neck out upon it."
"Oh, Betty, dear!" Mrs. Worthington expostulated.
Bettina sprang to her and took her hand in pretty appeal.
"I beg pardon! I beg pardon, I really do," she exclaimed. "I did not intend deliberately to be painful. But that--beneath the sophistication--is something of what I bring to England."
CHAPTER X
"IS LADY ANSTRUTHERS AT HOME?"
All that she had brought with her to England, combined with what she had called "sophistication," but which was rather her exquisite appreciation of values and effects, she took with her when she went the next day to Charing Cross Station and arranged herself at her ease in the railway carriage, while her maid bought their tickets for Stornham.
What the people in the station saw, the guards and porters, the men in the book stalls, the travellers hurrying past, was a striking-looking girl, whose colouring and carriage made one turn to glance after her, and who, having bought some periodicals and papers, took her place in a first-cla.s.s compartment and watched the pa.s.sersby interestedly through the open window. Having been looked at and remarked on during her whole life, Bettina did not find it disturbing that more than one corduroy-clothed porter and fresh-coloured, elderly gentleman, or freshly attired young one, having caught a glimpse of her through her window, made it convenient to saunter past or hover round. She looked at them much more frankly than they looked at her. To her they were all specimens of the types she was at present interested in. For practical reasons she was summing up English character with more deliberate intention than she had felt in the years when she had gradually learned to know Continental types and differentiate such peculiarities as were significant of their ranks and nations. As the first Reuben Vanderpoel had studied the countenances and indicative methods of the inhabitants of the new parts of the country in which it was his intention to do business, so the modernity of his descendant applied itself to observation for reasons parallel in nature though not in actual kind.
As he had brought beads and firewater to bear as agents upon savages who would barter for them skins and products which might be turned into money, so she brought her nineteenth-century beauty, steadfastness of purpose and alertness of brain to bear upon the matter the practical dealing with which was the end she held in view. To bear herself in this matter with as practical a control of situations as that with which her great-grandfather would have borne himself in making a trade with a previously unknown tribe of Indians was quite her intention, though it had not occurred to her to put it to herself in any such form. Still, whether she was aware of the fact or not, her point of view was exactly what the first Reuben Vanderpoel"s had been on many very different occasions. She had before her the task of dealing with facts and factors of which at present she knew but little. Astuteness of perception, self-command, and adaptability were her chief resources. She was ready, either for calm, bold approach, or equally calm and wholly non-committal retreat.
The perceptions she had brought with her filled her journey into Kent with delicious things, delicious recognition of beauties she had before known the existence of only through the reading of books, and the dwelling upon their charms as reproduced, more or less perfectly, on canvas. She saw roll by her, with the pa.s.sing of the train, the loveliness of land and picturesqueness of living which she had saved for herself with epicurean intention for years. Her fancy, when detached from her thoughts of her sister, had been epicurean, and she had been quite aware that it was so. When she had left the suburbs and those villages already touched with suburbanity behind, she felt herself settle into a glow of luxurious enjoyment in the freshness of her pleasure in the familiar, and yet unfamiliar, objects in the thick-hedged fields, whose broad-branched, thick-foliaged oaks and beeches were more embowering in their shade, and sweeter in their green than anything she remembered that other countries had offered her, even at their best. Within the fields the hawthorn hedges beautifully enclosed were groups of resigned mother sheep with their young lambs about them. The curious pointed tops of the red hopkilns, piercing the trees near the farmhouses, wore an almost intentional air of adding picturesque detail. There were cl.u.s.ters of old buildings and dots of cottages and cottage gardens which made her now and then utter exclamations of delight. Little inarticulate Rosy had seen and felt it all twelve years before on her hopeless bridal home-coming when Nigel had sat huddled unbecomingly in the corner of the railway carriage. Her power of expression had been limited to little joyful gasps and obvious laudatory adjectives, smothered in their birth by her first glance at her bridegroom. Betty, in seeing it, knew all the exquisiteness of her own pleasure, and all the meanings of it.
Yes, it was England--England. It was the England of Constable and Morland, of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot.
The land which softly rolled and clothed itself in the rich verdure of many trees, sometimes in lovely cl.u.s.ters, sometimes in covering copse, was Constable"s; the ripe young woman with the fat-legged children and the farmyard beasts about her, as she fed the hens from the wooden piggin under her arm, was Morland"s own. The village street might be Miss Mitford"s, the well-to-do house Jane Austen"s own fancy, in its warm brick and comfortable decorum. She laughed a little as she thought it.
"That is American," she said, "the habit of comparing every stick and stone and breathing thing to some literary parallel. We almost invariably say that things remind us of pictures or books--most usually books. It seems a little crude, but perhaps it means that we are an intensely literary and artistic people."
She continued to find comparisons revealing to her their appositeness, until her journey had ended by the train"s slackening speed and coming to a standstill before the rural-looking little station which had presented its quaint aspect to Lady Anstruthers on her home-coming of years before.
It had not, during the years which certainly had given time for change, altered in the least. The station master had grown stouter and more rosy, and came forward with his respectful, hospitable air, to attend to the unusual-looking young lady, who was the only first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger.
He thought she must be a visitor expected at some country house, but none of the carriages, whose coachmen were his familiar acquaintances, were in waiting. That such a fine young lady should be paying a visit at any house whose owners did not send an equipage to attend her coming, struck him as unusual. The brougham from the "Crown," though a decent country town vehicle, seemed inadequate. Yet, there it stood drawn up outside the station, and she went to it with the manner of a young lady who had ordered its attendance and knew it would be there.
Wells felt a good deal of interest. Among the many young ladies who descended from the first-cla.s.s compartments and pa.s.sed through the little waiting-room on their way to the carriages of the gentry they were going to visit, he did not know when a young lady had "caught his eye," so to speak, as this one did. She was not exactly the kind of young lady one would immediately cla.s.s mentally as "a foreigner," but the blue of her eyes was so deep, and her hair and eyelashes so dark, that these things, combining themselves with a certain "way" she had, made him feel her to be of a type unfamiliar to the region, at least.
He was struck, also, by the fact that the young lady had no maid with her. The truth was that Bettina had purposely left her maid in town. If awkward things occurred, the presence of an attendant would be a sort of complication. It was better, on the first approach, to be wholly unenc.u.mbered.
"How far are we from Stornham Court?" she inquired.
"Five miles, my lady," he answered, touching his cap. She expressed something which to the rural and ingenuous, whose standards were defined, demanded a recognition of probable rank.
"I"d like to know," was his comment to his wife when he went home to dinner, "who has gone to Stornham Court to-day. There"s few enough visitors go there, and none such as her, for certain. She don"t live anywhere on the line above here, either, for I"ve never seen her face before. She was a tall, handsome one--she was, but it isn"t just that made you look after her. She was a clever one with a spirit, I"ll be bound. I was wondering what her ladyship would have to say to her."
"Perhaps she was one of HIS fine ladies?" suggestively.
"That she wasn"t, either. And, as for that, I wonder what he"d have to say to such as she is."
There was complexity of element enough in the thing she was on her way to do, Bettina was thinking, as she was driven over the white ribbon of country road that unrolled over rise and hollow, between the sheep-dotted greenness of fields and the scented hedges. The soft beauty enclosing her was a little shut out from her by her mental att.i.tude. She brought forward for her own decisions upon suitable action a number of possible situations she might find herself called upon to confront.
The one thing necessary was that she should be prepared for anything whatever, even for Rosy"s not being pleased to see her, or for finding Sir Nigel a thoroughly reformed and amiable character.
"It is the thing which seemingly CANNOT happen which one is most likely to find one"s self face to face with. It will be a little awkward to arrange, if he has developed every domestic virtue, and is delighted to see me."