"All these rooms were shut up when I came here," Rosy answered. "I suppose things worth selling have been sold. When pieces of furniture were broken in one part of the house, they were replaced by things brought from another. No one cared. Nigel hates it all. He calls it a rathole. He detests the country everywhere, but particularly this part of it. After the first year I had learned better than to speak to him of spending money on repairs."
"A good deal of money should be spent on repairs," reflected Betty, looking about her.
She was standing in the middle of a room whose walls were hung with the remains of what had been chintz, covered with a pattern of loose cl.u.s.ters of moss rosebuds. The dampness had rotted it until, in some places, it had fallen away in strips from its fastenings. A quaint, embroidered couch stood in one corner, and as Betty looked at it, a mouse crept from under the tattered valance, stared at her in alarm and suddenly darted back again, in terror of intrusion so unusual. A cas.e.m.e.nt window swung open, on a broken hinge, and a strong branch of ivy, having forced its way inside, had thrown a covering of leaves over the deep ledge, and was beginning to climb the inner woodwork. Through the cas.e.m.e.nt was to be seen a heavenly spread of country, whose rolling lands were clad softly in green pastures and thick-branched trees.
"This is the Rosebud Boudoir," said Lady Anstruthers, smiling faintly.
"All the rooms have names. I thought them so delightful, when I first heard them. The Damask Room--the Tapestry Room--the White Wainscot Room--My Lady"s Chamber. It almost broke my heart when I saw what they looked like."
"It would be very interesting," Betty commented slowly, "to make them look as they ought to look."
A remote fear rose to the surface of the expression in Lady Anstruthers"
eyes. She could not detach herself from certain recollections of Nigel--of his opinions of her family--of his determination not to allow it to enter as a factor in either his life or hers. And Betty had come to Stornham--Betty whom he had detested as a child--and in the course of two days, she had seemed to become a new part of the atmosphere, and to make the dead despair of the place begin to stir with life. What other thing than this was happening as she spoke of making such rooms as the Rosebud Boudoir "look as they ought to look," and said the words not as if they were part of a fantastic vision, but as if they expressed a perfectly possible thing?
Betty saw the doubt in her eyes, and in a measure, guessed at its meaning. The time to pause for argument had, however not arrived. There was too much to be investigated, too much to be seen. She swept her on her way. They wandered on through some forty rooms, more or less; they opened doors and closed them; they unbarred shutters and let the sun stream in on dust and dampness and cobwebs. The comprehension of the situation which Betty gained was as valuable as it was enlightening.
The descent into the lower part of the house was a new experience. Betty had not before seen huge, flagged kitchens, vaulted servants" halls, stone pa.s.sages, b.u.t.teries and dairies. The substantial masonry of the walls and arched ceilings, the stone stairway, and the seemingly endless offices, were interestingly remote in idea from such domestic modernities as chance views of up-to-date American household workings had provided her.
In the huge kitchen itself, an elderly woman, rolling pastry, paused to curtsy to them, with stolid curiosity in her heavy-featured face. In her character as "single-handed" cook, Mrs. Noakes had sent up uninviting meals to Lady Anstruthers for several years, but she had not seen her ladyship below stairs before. And this was the unexpected arrival--the young lady there had been "talk of" from the moment of her appearance.
Mrs. Noakes admitted with the grudgingness of a person of uncheerful temperament, that looks like that always would make talk. A certain degree of vague mental illumination led her to agree with Robert, the footman, that the stranger"s effectiveness was, perhaps, also, not altogether a matter of good looks, and certainly it was not an affair of clothes. Her brightish blue dress, of rough cloth, was nothing particular, notwithstanding the fit of it. There was "something else about her." She looked round the place, not with the casual indifference of a fine young lady, carelessly curious to see what she had not seen before, but with an alert, questioning interest.
"What a big place," she said to her ladyship. "What substantial walls!
What huge joints must have been roasted before such a fireplace."
She drew near to the enormous, antiquated cooking place.
"People were not very practical when this was built," she said. "It looks as if it must waste a great deal of coal. Is it----?" she looked at Mrs. Noakes. "Do you like it?"
There was a practical directness in the question for which Mrs. Noakes was not prepared. Until this moment, it had apparently mattered little whether she liked things or not. The condition of her implements of trade was one of her grievances--the ancient fireplace and ovens the bitterest.
"It"s out of order, miss," she answered. "And they don"t use "em like this in these days."
"I thought not," said Miss Vanderpoel.
She made other inquiries as direct and significant of the observing eye, and her pa.s.sage through the lower part of the establishment left Mrs.
Noakes and her companions in a strange but not unpleasurable state of ferment.
"Think of a young lady that"s never had nothing to do with kitchens, going straight to that shameful old fireplace, and seeing what it meant to the woman that"s got to use it. "Do you like it?" she says. If she"d been a cook herself, she couldn"t have put it straighter. She"s got eyes."
"She"s been using them all over the place," said Robert. "Her and her ladyship"s been into rooms that"s not been opened for years."
"More shame to them that should have opened "em," remarked Mrs. Noakes.
"Her ladyship"s a poor, listless thing--but her spirit was broken long ago.
"This one will mend it for her, perhaps," said the man servant. "I wonder what"s going to happen."
"Well, she"s got a look with her--the new one--as if where she was things would be likely to happen. You look out. The place won"t seem so dead and alive if we"ve got something to think of and expect."
"Who are the solicitors Sir Nigel employs?" Betty had asked her sister, when their pilgrimage through the house had been completed.
Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard, a firm which for several generations had transacted the legal business of much more important estates than Stornham, held its affairs in hand. Lady Anstruthers knew nothing of them, but that they evidently did not approve of the conduct of their client. Nigel was frequently angry when he spoke of them. It could be gathered that they had refused to allow him to do things he wished to do--sell things, or borrow money on them.
"I think we must go to London and see them," Betty suggested.
Rosy was agitated. Why should one see them? What was there to be spoken of? Their going, Betty explained would be a sort of visit of ceremony--in a measure a precaution. Since Sir Nigel was apparently not to be reached, having given no clue as to where he intended to go, it might be discreet to consult Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard with regard to the things it might be well to do--the repairs it appeared necessary to make at once. If Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard approved of the doing of such work, Sir Nigel could not resent their action, and say that in his absence liberties had been taken. Such a course seemed businesslike and dignified.
It was what Betty felt that her father would do. Nothing could be complained of, which was done with the knowledge and under the sanction of the family solicitors.
"Then there are other things we must do. We must go to shops and theatres. It will be good for you to go to shops and theatres, Rosy."
"I have nothing but rags to wear," answered Lady Anstruthers, reddening.
"Then before we go we will have things sent down. People can be sent from the shops to arrange what we want."
The magic of the name, standing for great wealth, could, it was true, bring to them, not only the contents of shops, but the people who showed them, and were ready to carry out any orders. The name of Vanderpoel already stood, in London, for inexhaustible resource. Yes, it was simple enough to send for politely subservient saleswomen to bring what one wanted.
The being reminded in every-day matters of the still real existence of the power of this magic was the first step in the rebuilding of Lady Anstruthers. To realise that the wonderful and yet simple necromancy was gradually encircling her again, had its parallel in the taking of a tonic, whose effect was c.u.mulative. She herself did not realise the working of it. But Betty regarded it with interest. She saw it was good for her, merely to look on at the unpacking of the New York boxes, which the maid, sent for from London, brought down with her.
As the woman removed, from tray after tray, the tissue-paper-enfolded layers of garments, Lady Anstruthers sat and watched her with normal, simply feminine interest growing in her eyes. The things were made with the absence of any limit in expenditure, the freedom with delicate stuffs and priceless laces which belonged only to her faint memories of a lost past.
Nothing had limited the time spent in the embroidering of this apparently simple linen frock and coat; nothing had restrained the hand holding the scissors which had cut into the lace which adorned in appliques and filmy frills this exquisitely charming ball dress.
"It is looking back so far," she said, waving her hand towards them with an odd gesture. "To think that it was once all like--like that."
She got up and went to the things, turning them over, and touching them with a softness, almost expressing a caress. The names of the makers stamped on bands and collars, the names of the streets in which their shops stood, moved her. She heard again the once familiar rattle of wheels, and the rush and roar of New York traffic.
Betty carried on the whole matter with lightness. She talked easily and casually, giving local colour to what she said. She described the abnormally rapid growth of the places her sister had known in her teens, the new buildings, new theatres, new shops, new people, the later mode of living, much of it learned from England, through the unceasing weaving of the Shuttle.
"Changing--changing--changing. That is what it is always doing--America.
We have not reached repose yet. One wonders how long it will be before we shall. Now we are always hurrying breathlessly after the next thing--the new one--which we always think will be the better one. Other countries built themselves slowly. In the days of their building, the pace of life was a march. When America was born, the march had already begun to hasten, and as a nation we began, in our first hour, at the quickening speed. Now the pace is a race. New York is a kaleidoscope.
I myself can remember it a wholly different thing. One pa.s.ses down a street one day, and the next there is a great gap where some building is being torn down--a few days later, a tall structure of some sort is touching the sky. It is wonderful, but it does not tend to calm the mind. That is why we cross the Atlantic so much. The sober, quiet-loving blood our forbears brought from older countries goes in search of rest.
Mixed with other things, I feel in my own being a resentment against newness and disorder, and an insistence on the atmosphere of long-established things."
But for years Lady Anstruthers had been living in the atmosphere of long-established things, and felt no insistence upon it. She yearned to hear of the great, changing Western world--of the great, changing city.
Betty must tell her what the changes were. What were the differences in the streets--where had the new buildings been placed? How had Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and Broadway altered? Were not Gramercy Park and Madison Square still green with gra.s.s and trees? Was it all different? Would she not know the old places herself? Though it seemed a lifetime since she had seen them, the years which had pa.s.sed were really not so many.
It was good for her to talk and be talked to in this manner Betty saw.
Still handling her subject lightly, she presented picture after picture.
Some of them were of the wonderful, feverish city itself--the place quite pa.s.sionately loved by some, as pa.s.sionately disliked by others.
She herself had fallen into the habit, as she left childhood behind her, of looking at it with interested wonder--at its riot of life and power, of huge schemes, and almost superhuman labours, of fortunes so colossal that they seemed monstrosities in their relation to the world. People who in Rosalie"s girlhood had lived in big ugly brownstone fronts, had built for themselves or for their children, houses such as, in other countries, would have belonged to n.o.bles and princes, spending fortunes upon their building, filling them with treasures brought from foreign lands, from palaces, from art galleries, from collectors. Sometimes strange people built such houses and lived strange lavish, ostentatious lives in them, forming an overstrained, abnormal, pleasure-chasing world of their own. The pa.s.sing of even ten years in New York counted itself almost as a generation; the fashions, customs, belongings of twenty years ago wore an air of almost picturesque antiquity.
"It does not take long to make an "old New Yorker,"" she said. "Each day brings so many new ones."
There were, indeed, many new ones, Lady Anstruthers found. People who had been poor had become hugely rich, a few who had been rich had become poor, possessions which had been large had swelled to unnatural proportions. Out of the West had risen fortunes more monstrous than all others. As she told one story after another, Bettina realised, as she had done often before, that it was impossible to enter into description of the life and movements of the place, without its curiously involving some connection with the huge wealth of it--with its influence, its rise, its swelling, or waning.
"Somehow one cannot free one"s self from it. This is the age of wealth and invention--but of wealth before all else. Sometimes one is tired--tired of it."
"You would not be tired of it if--well, if you were I, said Lady Anstruthers rather pathetically.
"Perhaps not," Betty answered. "Perhaps not."