The Shuttle

F >> Frances Hodgson Burnett >> The Shuttle


"And, by God, I will!" he raged. "And you cannot stop me, if----"

"I do not know whether I can stop you or not, though you may be sure
I will try," she interrupted him, "but that is not what I was going to
say." She drew a step nearer, and there was something in the intensity
of her look which fascinated and held him for a moment. She was
curiously grave. "Nigel, I believe in certain things you do not believe
in. I believe black thoughts breed black ills to those who think them.
It is not a new idea. There is an old Oriental proverb which says,
'Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.' I believe also that
the worst--the very worst CANNOT be done to those who think
steadily--steadily--only of the best. To you that is merely superstition
to be laughed at. That is a matter of opinion. But--don't go on with
this thing--DON'T GO ON WITH IT. Stop and think it over."

He stared at her furiously--tried to laugh outright, and failed because
the look in her eyes was so odd in its strength and stillness.

"You think you can lay some weird spell upon me," he jeered
sardonically.

"No, I don't," she answered. "I could not if I would. It is no affair of
mine. It is your affair only--and there is nothing weird about it. Don't
go on, I tell you. Think better of it."

She turned about without further speech, and walked away from him with
light swiftness over the marsh. Oddly enough, he did not even attempt to
follow her. He felt a little weak--perhaps because a certain thing she
had said had brought back to him a familiar touch of the horrors. She
had the eyes of a falcon under the odd, soft shade of the extraordinary
lashes. She had seen what he thought no one but himself had realised.
Having watched her retreating figure for a few seconds, he sat down--as
suddenly as before--on the mound near the tree.

"Oh, damn her!" he said, his damp forehead on his hands. "Damn the whole
universe!"

. . . . .

When Betty and Roland reached Stornham, the wicker-work pony chaise from
the vicarage stood before the stone entrance steps. The drawing-room
door was open, and Mrs. Brent was standing near it saying some last
words to Lady Anstruthers before leaving the house, after a visit
evidently made with an object. This Betty gathered from the solemnity of
her manner.

"Betty," said Lady Anstruthers, catching sight of her, "do come in for a
moment."

When Betty entered, both her sister and Mrs. Brent looked at her
questioningly.

"You look a little pale and tired, Miss Vanderpoel," Mrs. Brent said,
rather as if in haste to be the first to speak. "I hope you are not at
all unwell. We need all our strength just now. I have brought the most
painful news. Malignant typhoid fever has broken out among the hop
pickers on the Mount Dunstan estate. Some poor creature was evidently
sickening for it when he came from London. Three people died last
night."



CHAPTER XLI

SHE WOULD DO SOMETHING

Sir Nigel's face was not a good thing to see when he appeared at the
dinner table in the evening. As he took his seat the two footmen glanced
quickly at each other, and the butler at the sideboard furtively thrust
out his underlip. Not a man or woman in the household but had learned
the signal denoting the moment when no service would please, no word
or movement be unobjectionable. Lady Anstruthers' face unconsciously
assumed its propitiatory expression, and she glanced at her sister more
than once when Betty was unaware that she did so.

Until the soup had been removed, Sir Nigel scarcely spoke, merely making
curt replies to any casual remark. This was one of his simple and most
engaging methods of at once enjoying an ill-humour and making his wife
feel that she was in some way to blame for it.

"Mount Dunstan is in a deucedly unpleasant position," he condescended at
last. "I should not care to stand in his shoes."

He had not returned to the Court until late in the afternoon, but having
heard in the village the rumour of the outbreak of fever, he had made
inquiries and gathered detail.

"You are thinking of the outbreak of typhoid among the hop pickers?"
said Lady Anstruthers. "Mrs. Brent thinks it threatens to be very
serious."

"An epidemic, without a doubt," he answered. "In a wretched unsanitary
place like Dunstan village, the wretches will die like flies."

"What will be done?" inquired Betty.

He gave her one of the unpleasant personal glances and laughed
derisively.

"Done? The county authorities, who call themselves 'guardians,' will be
frightened to death and will potter about and fuss like old women, and
profess to examine and protect and lay restrictions, but everyone will
manage to keep at a discreet distance, and the thing will run riot and
do its worst. As far as one can see, there seems no reason why the whole
place should not be swept away. No doubt Mount Dunstan has wisely taken
to his heels already."

"I think that, on the contrary, there would be much doubt of that,"
Betty said. "He would stay and do what he could."

Sir Nigel shrugged his shoulders.

"Would he? I think you'll find he would not."

"Mrs. Brent tells me," Rosalie broke in somewhat hurriedly, "that the
huts for the hoppers are in the worst possible condition. They are so
dilapidated that the rain pours into them. There is no proper shelter
for the people who are ill, and Lord Mount Dunstan cannot afford to take
care of them."

"But he WILL--he WILL," broke forth Betty. Her head lifted itself and
she spoke almost as if through her small, shut teeth. A wave of intense
belief--high, proud, and obstinate, swept through her. It was a feeling
so strong and vibrant that she felt as if Mount Dunstan himself must be
reached and upborne by it--as if he himself must hear her.

Rosalie looked at her half-startled, and, for the moment held fascinated
by the sudden force rising in her and by the splendid spark of light
under her lids. She was reminded of the fierce little Betty of long ago,
with her delicate, indomitable small face and the spirit which even at
nine years old had somehow seemed so strong and straitly keen of sight
that one had known it might always be trusted. Actually, in one way, she
had not changed. She saw the truth of things. The next instant, however,
inadvertently glancing towards her husband, she caught her breath
quickly. Across his heavy-featured face had shot the sudden gleam of a
new expression. It was as if he had at the moment recognised something
which filled him with a rush of fury he himself was not prepared for.
That he did not wish it to be seen she knew by his manner. There was
a brief silence in which it passed away. He spoke after it, with
disagreeable precision.

"He has had an enormous effect on you--that man," he said to Betty.

He spoke clearly so that she might have the pleasure of being certain
that the menservants heard. They were close to the table, handing
fruit--professing to be automatons, eyes down, faces expressing nothing,
but as quick of hearing as it is said that blind men are. He knew that
if he had been in her place and a thing as insultingly significant
had been said to him, he should promptly have hurled the nearest
object--plate, wineglass, or decanter--in the face of the speaker.
He knew, too, that women cannot hurl projectiles without looking like
viragos and fools. The weakly-feminine might burst into tears or into a
silly rage and leave the table. There was a distinct breath's space
of pause, and Betty, cutting a cluster from a bunch of hothouse grapes
presented by the footman at her side, answered as clearly as he had
spoken himself.

"He is strong enough to produce an effect on anyone," she said. "I think
you feel that yourself. He is a man who will not be beaten in the end.
Fortune will give him some good thing."

"He is a fellow who knows well enough on which hand of him good things
lie," he said. "He will take all that offers itself."

"Why not?" Betty said impartially.

"There must be no riding or driving in the neighbourhood of the place,"
he said next. "I will have no risks run." He turned and addressed the
butler. "Jennings, tell the servants that those are my orders."

He sat over his wine but a short time that evening, and when he joined
his wife and sister-in-law in the drawing-room he went at once to Betty.
In fact, he was in the condition when a man cannot keep away from
a woman, but must invent some reason for reaching her whether it is
fatuous or plausible.

"What I said to Jennings was an order to you as well as to the people
below stairs. I know you are particularly fond of riding in the
direction of Mount Dunstan. You are in my care so long as you are in my
house."

"Orders are not necessary," Betty replied. "The day is past when one
rushed to smooth pillows and give the wrong medicine when one's friends
were ill. If one is not a properly-trained nurse, it is wiser not to
risk being very much in the way."

He spoke over her shoulder, dropping his voice, though Lady Anstruthers
sat apart, appearing to read.

"Don't think I am fool enough not to understand. You have yourself under
magnificent control, but a woman passionately in love cannot keep a
certain look out of her eyes."

He was standing on the hearth. Betty swung herself lightly round, facing
him squarely. Her full look was splendid.

"If it is there--let it stay," she said. "I would not keep it out of my
eyes if I could, and, you are right, I could not if I would--if it is
there. If it is--let it stay."

The daring, throbbing, human truth of her made his brain whirl. To a man
young and clean and fit to count as in the lists, to have heard her say
the thing of a rival would have been hard enough, but base, degenerate,
and of the world behind her day, to hear it while frenzied for her, was
intolerable. And it was Mount Dunstan she bore herself so highly for.
Whether melodrama is out of date or not there are, occasionally, some
fine melodramatic touches in the enmities of to-day.

"You think you will reach him," he persisted. "You think you will help
him in some way. You will not let the thing alone."

"Excuse my mentioning that whatsoever I take the liberty of doing will
encroach on no right of yours," she said.

But, alone in her room, after she went upstairs, the face reflecting
itself in the mirror was pale and its black brows were drawn together.

She sat down at the dressing-table, and, seeing the paled face, drew the
black brows closer, confronting a complicating truth.

"If I were free to take Rosalie and Ughtred home to-morrow," she
thought, "I could not bear to go. I should suffer too much."

She was suffering now. The strong longing in her heart was like
a physical pain. No word or look of this one man had given
her proof that his thoughts turned to her, and yet it was
intolerable--intolerable--that in his hour of stress and need they were
as wholly apart as if worlds rolled between them. At any dire moment it
was mere nature that she should give herself in help and support. If, on
the night at sea, when they had first spoken to each other, the ship
had gone down, she knew that they two, strangers though they were, would
have worked side by side among the frantic people, and have been among
the last to take to the boats. How did she know? Only because, he being
he, and she being she, it must have been so in accordance with the
laws ruling entities. And now he stood facing a calamity almost as
terrible--and she with full hands sat still.

She had seen the hop pickers' huts and had recognised their condition.
Mere brick sheds in which the pickers slept upon bundles of hay or straw
in their best days; in their decay they did not even provide shelter. In
fine weather the hop gatherers slept well enough in them, cooking their
food in gypsy-fashion in the open. When the rain descended, it must
run down walls and drip through the holes in the roofs in streams which
would soak clothes and bedding. The worst that Nigel and Mrs. Brent had
implied was true. Illness of any order, under such circumstances, would
have small chance of recovery, but malignant typhoid without shelter,
without proper nourishment or nursing, had not one chance in a
million. And he--this one man--stood alone in the midst of the
tragedy--responsible and helpless. He would feel himself responsible
as she herself would, if she were in his place. She was conscious that
suddenly the event of the afternoon--the interview upon the marshes, had
receded until it had become an almost unmeaning incident. What did the
degenerate, melodramatic folly matter----!

She had restlessly left her chair before the dressing-table, and was
walking to and fro. She paused and stood looking down at the carpet,
though she scarcely saw it.

"Nothing matters but one thing--one person," she owned to herself
aloud. "I suppose it is always like this. Rosy, Ughtred, even father and
mother--everyone seems less near than they were. It is too strong--too
strong. It is----" the words dropped slowly from her lips, "the
strongest thing--in the world."

She lifted her face and threw out her hands, a lovely young half-sad
smile curling the deep corners of her mouth. "Sometimes one feels so
disdained," she said--"so disdained with all one's power. Perhaps I am
an unwanted thing."

But even in this case there were aids one might make an effort to give.
She went to her writing-table and sat thinking for some time. Afterwards
she began to write letters. Three or four were addressed to London--one
was to Mr. Penzance.

. . . . .

Mount Dunstan and his vicar were walking through the village to the
vicarage. They had been to the hop pickers' huts to see the people
who were ill of the fever. Both of them noticed that cottage doors and
windows were shut, and that here and there alarmed faces looked out from
behind latticed panes.

"They are in a panic of fear," Mount Dunstan said, "and by way of
safeguard they shut out every breath of air and stifle indoors.
Something must be done."

Catching the eye of a woman who was peering over her short white dimity
blind, he beckoned to her authoritatively. She came to the door and
hesitated there, curtsying nervously.

Mount Dunstan spoke to her across the hedge.

"You need not come out to me, Mrs. Binner. You may stay where you are,"
he said. "Are you obeying the orders given by the Guardians?"

"Yes, my lord. Yes, my lord," with more curtsys.

"Your health is very much in your own hands," he added.

"You must keep your cottage and your children cleaner than you have ever
kept them before, and you must use the disinfectant I sent you. Keep
away from the huts, and open your windows. If you don't open them,
I shall come and do it for you. Bad air is infection itself. Do you
understand?"

"Yes, my lord. Thank your lordship."

"Go in and open your windows now, and tell your neighbours to do the
same. If anyone is ill let me know at once. The vicar and I will do our
best for everyone."

By that time curiosity had overcome fear, and other cottage doors had
opened. Mount Dunstan passed down the row and said a few words to each
woman or man who looked out. Questions were asked anxiously and he
answered them. That he was personally unafraid was comfortingly plain,
and the mere sight of him was, on the whole, an unexplainable support.

"We heard said your lordship was going away," put in a stout mother
with a heavy child on her arm, a slight testiness scarcely concealed
by respectful good-manners. She was a matron with a temper, and that a
Mount Dunstan should avoid responsibilities seemed highly credible.

"I shall stay where I am," Mount Dunstan answered. "My place is here."

They believed him, Mount Dunstan though he was. It could not be said
that they were fond of him, but gradually it had been borne in upon them
that his word was to be relied on, though his manner was unalluring and
they knew he was too poor to do his duty by them or his estate. As
he walked away with the vicar, windows were opened, and in one or two
untidy cottages a sudden flourishing of mops and brooms began.

There was dark trouble in Mount Dunstan's face. In the huts they had
left two men stiff on their straw, and two women and a child in a state
of collapse. Added to these were others stricken helpless. A number of
workers in the hop gardens, on realising the danger threatening them,
had gathered together bundles and children, and, leaving the harvest
behind, had gone on the tramp again. Those who remained were the weaker
or less cautious, or were held by some tie to those who were already
ill of the fever. The village doctor was an old man who had spent his
blameless life in bringing little cottagers into the world, attending
their measles and whooping coughs, and their father's and grandfather's
rheumatics. He had never faced a village crisis in the course of his
seventy-five years, and was aghast and flurried with fright. His methods
remained those of his youth, and were marked chiefly by a readiness
to prescribe calomel in any emergency. A younger and stronger man was
needed, as well as a man of more modern training. But even the most
brilliant practitioner of the hour could not have provided shelter and
nourishment, and without them his skill would have counted as nothing.
For three weeks there had been no rain, which was a condition of the
barometer not likely to last. Already grey clouds were gathering and
obscuring the blueness of the sky.

The vicar glanced upwards anxiously.

"When it comes," he said, "there will be a downpour, and a persistent
one."

"Yes," Mount Dunstan answered.

He had lain awake thinking throughout the night. How was a man to sleep!
It was as Betty Vanderpoel had known it would be. He, who--beggar though
he might be--was the lord of the land, was the man to face the strait of
these poor workers on the land, as his own. Some action must be taken.
What action? As he walked by his friend's side from the huts where the
dead men lay it revealed itself that he saw his way.

They were going to the vicarage to consult a medical book, but on the
way there they passed a part of the park where, through a break in the
timber the huge, white, blind-faced house stood on view. Mount Dunstan
laid his hand on Mr. Penzance's shoulder and stopped him,

"Look there!" he said. "THERE are weather-tight rooms enough."

A startled expression showed itself on the vicar's face.

"For what?" he exclaimed

"For a hospital," brusquely "I can give them one thing, at
least--shelter."

"It is a very remarkable thing to think of doing," Mr. Penzance said.

"It is not so remarkable as that labourers on my land should die at my
gate because I cannot give them decent roofs to cover them. There is a
roof that will shield them from the weather. They shall be brought to
the Mount."

The vicar was silent a moment, and a flush of sympathy warmed his face.

"You are quite right, Fergus," he said, "entirely right."

"Let us go to your study and plan how it shall be done," Mount Dunstan
said.

As they walked towards the vicarage, he went on talking.

"When I lie awake at night, there is one thread which always winds
itself through my thoughts whatsoever they are. I don't find that I can
disentangle it. It connects itself with Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter.
You would know that without my telling you. If you had ever struggled
with an insane passion----"

"It is not insane, I repeat," put in Penzance unflinchingly.

"Thank you--whether you are right or wrong," answered Mount Dunstan,
striding by his side. "When I am awake, she is as much a part of my
existence as my breath itself. When I think things over, I find that I
am asking myself if her thoughts would be like mine. She is a creature
of action. Last night, as I lay awake, I said to myself, 'She would DO
something. What would she do?' She would not be held back by fear of
comment or convention. She would look about her for the utilisable, and
she would find it somewhere and use it. I began to sum up the village
resources and found nothing--until my thoughts led me to my own house.
There it stood--empty and useless. If it were hers, and she stood in my
place, she would make it useful. So I decided."

"You are quite right," Mr. Penzance said again.

They spent an hour in his library at the vicarage, arranging practical
methods for transforming the great ballroom into a sort of hospital
ward. It could be done by the removal of pieces of furniture from the
many unused bedrooms. There was also the transportation of the patients
from the huts to be provided for. But, when all this was planned out,
each found himself looking at the other with an unspoken thought in his
mind. Mount Dunstan first expressed it.

"As far as I can gather, the safety of typhoid fever patients depends
almost entirely on scientific nursing, and the caution with which even
liquid nourishment is given. The woman whose husband died this morning
told me that he had seemed better in the night, and had asked for
something to eat. She gave him a piece of bread and a slice of cold
bacon, because he told her he fancied it. I could not explain to her, as
she sat sobbing over him, that she had probably killed him. When we have
patients in our ward, what shall we feed them on, and who will know how
to nurse them? They do not know how to nurse each other, and the women
in the village would not run the risk of undertaking to help us."

But, even before he had left the house, the problem was solved for them.
The solving of it lay in the note Miss Vanderpoel had written the night
before at Stornham.

When it was brought to him Mr. Penzance glanced up from certain
calculations he was making upon a sheet of note-paper. The accumulating
difficulties made him look worn and tired. He opened the note and read
it gravely, and then as gravely, though with a change of expression,
handed it to Mount Dunstan.

"Yes, she is a creature of action. She has heard and understood at
once, and she has done something. It is immensely practical--it is
fine--it--it is lovable."

"Do you mind my keeping it?" Mount Dunstan asked, after he had read it.

"Keep it by all means," the vicar answered. "It is worth keeping."

But it was quite brief. She had heard of the outbreak of fever among the
hop pickers, and asked to be allowed to give help to the people who were
suffering. They would need prompt aid. She chanced to know something of
the requirements of such cases, and had written to London for certain
supplies which would be sent to them at once. She had also written for
nurses, who would be needed above all else. Might she ask Mr. Penzance
to kindly call upon her for any further assistance required.

"Tell her we are deeply grateful," said Mount Dunstan, "and that she has
given us greater help than she knows."

"Why not answer her note yourself?" Penzance suggested.

Mount Dunstan shook his head.

"No," he said shortly. "No."



CHAPTER XLII

IN THE BALLROOM

Though Dunstan village was cut off, by its misfortune, from its usual
intercourse with its neighbours, in some mystic manner villages even at
twenty miles' distance learned all it did and suffered, feared or hoped.
It did not hope greatly, the rustic habit of mind tending towards a
discouraged outlook, and cherishing the drama of impending calamity.
As far as Yangford and Marling inmates of cottages and farmhouses were
inclined to think it probable that Dunstan would be "swep away,"
and rumours of spreading death and disaster were popular. Tread, the
advanced blacksmith at Stornham, having heard in his by-gone, better
days of the Great Plague of London, was greatly in demand as a narrator
of illuminating anecdotes at The Clock Inn.

Among the parties gathered at the large houses Mount Dunstan himself
was much talked of. If he had been a popular man, he might have become
a sort of hero; as he was not popular, he was merely a subject for
discussion. The fever-stricken patients had been carried in carts to
the Mount and given beds in the ballroom, which had been made into a
temporary ward. Nurses and supplies had been sent for from London, and
two energetic young doctors had taken the place of old Dr. Fenwick, who
had been frightened and overworked into an attack of bronchitis which
confined him to his bed. Where the money came from, which must be spent
every day under such circumstances, it was difficult to say. To the
simply conservative of mind, the idea of filling one's house with dirty
East End hop pickers infected with typhoid seemed too radical. Surely
he could have done something less extraordinary. Would everybody
be expected to turn their houses into hospitals in case of village
epidemics, now that he had established a precedent? But there were
people who approved, and were warm in their sympathy with him. At the
first dinner party where the matter was made the subject of argument,
the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel, who was present, listened silently to the
talk with such brilliant eyes that Lord Dunholm, who was in an elderly
way her staunch admirer, spoke to her across the table:

"Tell us what YOU think of it, Miss Vanderpoel," he suggested.