"I was afraid not," said Betty.
"An old woman in the lane near Bartyon Wood was ill. Mr. Ffolliott had asked me to go to see her, and I used to go. She suffered a great deal and clung to us both. He comforted her, as he comforted me. Sometimes when he was called away he would send a note to me, asking me to go to her. One day he wrote hastily, saying that she was dying, and asked if I would go with him to her cottage at once. I knew it would save time if I met him in the path which was a short cut. So I wrote a few words and gave them to the messenger. I said, "Do not come to the house. I will meet you in Bartyon Wood.""
Betty made a slight movement, and in her face there was a dawning of mingled amazement and incredulity. The thought which had come to her seemed--as Ughtred"s locking of the door had seemed--too wild for modern days.
Lady Anstruthers saw her expression and understood it. She made a hopeless gesture with her small, bony hand.
"Yes," she said, "it is just like that. No one would believe it. The worst cleverness of the things he does, is that when one tells of them, they sound like lies. I have a bewildered feeling that I should not believe them myself if I had not seen them. He met the boy in the park and took the note from him. He came back to the house and up to my room, where I was dressing quickly to go to Mr. Ffolliott."
She stopped for quite a minute, rather as if to recover breath.
"He closed the door behind him and came towards me with the note in his hand. And I saw in a second the look that always terrifies me, in his face. He had opened the note and he smoothed out the paper quietly and said, "What is this. I could not help it--I turned cold and began to shiver. I could not imagine what was coming."
""Is it my note to Mr. Ffolliott?" I asked.
""Yes, it is your note to Mr. Ffolliott," and he read it aloud. "Do not come to the house. I will meet you in Bartyon Wood." That is a nice note for a man"s wife to have written, to be picked up and read by a stranger, if your confessor is not cautious in the matter of letters from women----"
"When he begins a thing in that way, you may always know that he has planned everything--that you can do nothing--I always know. I knew then, and I knew I was quite white when I answered him:
""I wrote it in a great hurry, Mrs. Farne is worse. We are going together to her. I said I would meet him--to save time."
"He laughed, his awful little laugh, and touched the paper.
""I have no doubt. And I have no doubt that if other persons saw this, they would believe it. It is very likely.
""But you believe it," I said. "You know it is true. No one would be so silly--so silly and wicked as to----" Then I broke down and cried out.
"What do you mean? What could anyone think it meant?" I was so wild that I felt as if I was going crazy. He clenched my wrist and shook me.
""Don"t think you can play the fool with me," he said. "I have been watching this thing from the first. The first time I leave you alone with the fellow, I come back to find you have been giving him an emotional scene. Do you suppose your simpering good spirits and your imbecile pink cheeks told me nothing? They told me exactly this. I have waited to come upon it, and here it is. "Do not come to the house--I will meet you in the wood.""
"That was the unexpected thing. It was no use to argue and try to explain. I knew he did not believe what he was saying, but he worked himself into a rage, he accused me of awful things, and called me awful names in a loud voice, so that he could be heard, until I was dumb and staggering. All the time, I knew there was a reason, but I could not tell then what it was. He said at last, that he was going to Mr.
Ffolliott. He said, "I will meet him in the wood and I will take your note with me."
"Betty, it was so shameful that I fell down on my knees. "Oh, don"t--don"t--do that," I said. "I beg of you, Nigel. He is a gentleman and a clergyman. I beg and beg of you. If you will not, I will do anything--anything." And at that minute I remembered how he had tried to make me write to father for money. And I cried out--catching at his coat, and holding him back. "I will write to father as you asked me. I will do anything. I can"t bear it.""
"That was the whole meaning of the whole thing," said Betty with eyes ablaze. "That was the beginning, the middle and the end. What did he say?"
"He pretended to be made more angry. He said, "Don"t insult me by trying to bribe me with your vulgar money. Don"t insult me." But he gradually grew sulky instead of raging, and though he put the note in his pocket, he did not go to Mr. Ffolliott. And--I wrote to father."
"I remember that," Betty answered. "Did you ever speak to Mr. Ffolliott again?"
"He guessed--he knew--I saw it in his kind, brown eyes when he pa.s.sed me without speaking, in the village. I daresay the villagers were told about the awful thing by some servant, who heard Nigel"s voice.
Villagers always know what is happening. He went away a few weeks later.
The day before he went, I had walked through the wood, and just outside it, I met him. He stopped for one minute--just one--he lifted his hat and said, just as he had spoken them that first night--just the same words, "G.o.d will help you. He will. He will.""
A strange, almost unearthly joy suddenly flashed across her face.
"It must be true," she said. "It must be true. He has sent you, Betty.
It has been a long time--it has been so long that sometimes I have forgotten his words. But you have come!"
"Yes, I have come," Betty answered. And she bent forward and kissed her gently, as if she had been soothing a child.
There were other questions to ask. She was obliged to ask them. "The unexpected thing" had been used as an instrument for years. It was always efficacious. Over the yearningly homesick creature had hung the threat that her father and mother, those she ached and longed for, could be told the story in such a manner as would brand her as a woman with a shameful secret. How could she explain herself? There were the awful, written words. He was her husband. He was remorseless, plausible. She dared not write freely. She had no witnesses to call upon. She had discovered that he had planned with composed steadiness that misleading impressions should be given to servants and village people. When the Brents returned to the vicarage, she had observed, with terror, that for some reason they stiffened, and looked askance when the Ffolliotts were mentioned.
"I am afraid, Lady Anstruthers, that Mr. Ffolliott was a great mistake,"
Mrs. Brent said once.
Lady Anstruthers had not dared to ask any questions. She had felt the awkward colour rising in her face and had known that she looked guilty.
But if she had protested against the injustice of the remark, Sir Nigel would have heard of her words before the day had pa.s.sed, and she shuddered to think of the result. He had by that time reached the point of referring to Ffolliott with sneering lightness, as "Your lover."
"Do you defend your lover to me," he had said on one occasion, when she had entered a timid protest. And her white face and wild helpless eyes had been such evidence as to the effect the word had produced, that he had seen the expediency of making a point of using it.
The blood beat in Betty Vanderpoel"s veins.
"Rosy," she said, looking steadily in the faded face, "tell me this. Did you never think of getting away from him, of going somewhere, and trying to reach father, by cable, or letter, by some means?"
Lady Anstruthers" weary and wrinkled little smile was a pitiably illuminating thing.
"My dear" she said, "if you are strong and beautiful and rich and well dressed, so that people care to look at you, and listen to what you say, you can do things. But who, in England, will listen to a shabby, dowdy, frightened woman, when she runs away from her husband, if he follows her and tells people she is hysterical or mad or bad? It is the shabby, dowdy woman who is in the wrong. At first, I thought of nothing else but trying to get away. And once I went to Stornham station. I walked all the way, on a hot day. And just as I was getting into a third-cla.s.s carriage, Nigel marched in and caught my arm, and held me back. I fainted and when I came to myself I was in the carriage, being driven back to the Court, and he was sitting opposite to me. He said, "You fool! It would take a cleverer woman than you to carry that out." And I knew it was the awful truth."
"It is not the awful truth now," said Betty, and she rose to her feet and stood looking before her, but with a look which did not rest on chairs and tables. She remained so, standing for a few moments of dead silence.
"What a fool he was!" she said at last. "And what a villain! But a villain is always a fool."
She bent, and taking Rosy"s face between her hands, kissed it with a kiss which seemed like a seal. "That will do," she said. "Now I know.
One must know what is in one"s hands and what is not. Then one need not waste time in talking of miserable things. One can save one"s strength for doing what can be done."
"I believe you would always think about DOING things," said Lady Anstruthers. "That is American, too."
"It is a quality Americans inherited from England," lightly; "one of the results of it is that England covers a rather large share of the map of the world. It is a practical quality. You and I might spend hours in talking to each other of what Nigel has done and what you have done, of what he has said, and of what you have said. We might give some hours, I daresay, to what the Dowager did and said. But wiser people than we are have found out that thinking of black things past is living them again, and it is like poisoning one"s blood. It is deterioration of property."
She said the last words as if she had ended with a jest. But she knew what she was doing.
"You were tricked into giving up what was yours, to a person who could not be trusted. What has been done with it, scarcely matters. It is not yours, but Sir Nigel"s. But we are not helpless, because we have in our hands the most powerful material agent in the world.
"Come, Rosy, and let us walk over the house. We will begin with that."
CHAPTER XVII
TOWNLINSON & SHEPPARD
During the whole course of her interesting life--and she had always found life interesting--Betty Vanderpoel decided that she had known no experience more absorbing than this morning spent in going over the long-closed and deserted portions of the neglected house. She had never seen anything like the place, or as full of suggestion. The greater part of it had simply been shut up and left to time and weather, both of which had had their effects. The fine old red roof, having lost tiles, had fallen into leaks that let in rain, which had stained and rotted walls, plaster, and woodwork; wind and storm had beaten through broken window panes and done their worst with such furniture and hangings as they found to whip and toss and leave damp and spotted with mould. They pa.s.sed through corridors, and up and down short or long stairways, with stained or faded walls, and sometimes with cracked or fallen plastering and wainscotting. Here and there the oak flooring itself was uncertain.
The rooms, whether large or small, all presented a like aspect of potential beauty and comfort, utterly uncared for and forlorn. There were many rooms, but none more than scantily furnished, and a number of them were stripped bare. Betty found herself wondering how long a time it had taken the belongings of the big place to dwindle and melt away into such bareness.
"There was a time, I suppose, when it was all furnished," she said.