CHAPTER L
THE PRIMEVAL THING
When Mr. Vanderpoel landed in England his wife was with
him. This quiet-faced woman, who was known to be on
her way to join her daughter in England, was much discussed,
envied, and glanced at, when she promenaded the deck with
her husband, or sat in her chair softly wrapped in wonderful
furs. Gradually, during the past months, she had been told
certain modified truths connected with her elder daughter's
marriage. They had been painful truths, but had been so
softened and expurgated of their worst features that it had
been possible to bear them, when one realised that they did
not, at least, mean that Rosy had forgotten or ceased to love
her mother and father, or wish to visit her home. The steady
clearness of foresight and readiness of resource which were
often spoken of as being specially characteristic of Reuben S.
Vanderpoel, were all required, and employed with great
tenderness, in the management of this situation. As little as it
was possible that his wife should know, was the utmost she
must hear and be hurt by. Unless ensuing events compelled
further revelations, the rest of it should be kept from her. As
further protection, her husband had frankly asked her to content
herself with a degree of limited information.
"I have meant all our lives, Annie, to keep from you the
unpleasant things a woman need not be troubled with," he
had said. "I promised myself I would when you were a girl.
I knew you would face things, if I needed your help, but you
were a gentle little soul, like Rosy, and I never intended that
you should bear what was useless. Anstruthers was a blackguard,
and girls of all nations have married blackguards before.
When you have Rosy safe at home, and know nothing can hurt
her again, you both may feel you would like to talk it over.
Till then we won't go into detail. You trust me, I know, when
I tell you that you shall hold Rosy in your arms very soon.
We may have something of a fight, but there can only be one
end to it in a country as decent as England. Anstruthers isn't
exactly what I should call an Englishman. Men rather like
him are to be found in two or three places." His good-looking,
shrewd, elderly face lighted with a fine smile. "My handsome
Betty has saved us a good deal by carrying out her
fifteen-year-old plan of going to find her sister," he ended.
Before they landed they had decided that Mrs. Vanderpoel
should be comfortably established in a hotel in London, and
that after this was arranged, her husband should go to Stornham
Court alone. If Sir Nigel could be induced to listen to logic,
Rosalie, her child, and Betty should come at once to town.
"And, if he won't listen to logic," added Mr. Vanderpoel,
with a dry composure, "they shall come just the same, my
dear." And his wife put her arms round his neck and kissed
him because she knew what he said was quite true, and she
admired him--as she had always done--greatly.
But when the pilot came on board and there began to stir
in the ship the agreeable and exciting bustle of the delivery
of letters and welcoming telegrams, among Mr. Vanderpoel's
many yellow envelopes he opened one the contents of which
caused him to stand still for some moments--so still, indeed,
that some of the bystanders began to touch each other's elbows
and whisper. He certainly read the message two or three
times before he folded it up, returned it to its receptacle, and
walked gravely to his wife's sitting-room.
"Reuben!" she exclaimed, after her first look at him,
"have you bad news? Oh, I hope not!"
He came and sat down quietly beside her, taking her hand.
"Don't be frightened, Annie, my dear," he said. "I have
just been reminded of a verse in the Bible--about vengeance not
belonging to mere human beings. Nigel Anstruthers has had
a stroke of paralysis, and it is not his first. Apparently, even
if he lies on his back for some months thinking of harm, he
won't be able to do it. He is finished."
When he was carried by the express train through the
country, he saw all that Betty had seen, though the summer
had passed, and there were neither green trees nor hedges.
He knew all that the long letters had meant of stirred emotion
and affection, and he was strongly moved, though his mind
was full of many things. There were the farmhouses, the
square-towered churches, the red-pointed hop oasts, and the
village children. How distinctly she had made him see them!
His Betty--his splendid Betty! His heart beat at the thought
of seeing her high, young black head, and holding her safe
in his arms again. Safe! He resented having used the word,
because there was a shock in seeming to admit the possibility
that anything in the universe could do wrong to her. Yet
one man had been villain enough to mean her harm, and to
threaten her with it. He slightly shuddered as he thought of
how the man was finished--done for.
The train began to puff more loudly, as it slackened its pace.
It was drawing near to a rustic little station, and, as it passed
in, he saw a carriage standing outside, waiting on the road, and
a footman in a long coat, glancing into each window as the
train went by. Two or three country people were watching it
intently. Miss Vanderpoel's father was coming up from London
on it. The stationmaster rushed to open the carriage door,
and the footman hastened forward, but a tall lovely thing
in grey was opposite the step as Mr. Vanderpoel descended
it to the platform. She did not recognise the presence of any
other human being than himself. For the moment she seemed
to forget even the broad-shouldered man who had plainly
come with her. As Reuben S. Vanderpoel folded her in his
arms, she folded him and kissed him as he was not sure she
had ever kissed him before.
"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 gratitude. She was the woman who prays,
and the many sad petitions 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 passion, 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 passion 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 space 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.
