The Shuttle

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"I don't know what you meant. I only know what you did," was his
response. "You American women are too fond of cutting in. An Englishman
can think for himself without his wife's assistance."

The tears rose to her eyes. The introduction of the international
question overpowered her as always.

"Don't begin to be hysterical," was the ameliorating tenderness with
which he observed the two hot salt drops which fell despite her. "I
should scarcely wish to present you to my mother bathed in tears."

She wiped the salt drops hastily away and sat for a moment silent in the
corner of the carriage. Being wholly primitive and unanalytical, she was
ashamed and began to blame herself. He was right. She must not be silly
because she was unused to things. She ought not to be disturbed by
trifles. She must try to be nice and look cheerful. She made an effort
and did no speak for a few minutes. When she had recovered herself she
tried again.

"English country is so pretty," she said, when she thought she was quite
sure that her voice would not tremble. "I do so like the hedges and the
darling little red-roofed cottages."

It was an innocent tentative at saying something agreeable which might
propitiate him. She was beginning to realise that she was continually
making efforts to propitiate him. But one of the forms of unpleasantness
most enjoyable to him was the snubbing of any gentle effort at
palliating his mood. He condescended in this case no response whatever,
but merely continued staring contemptuously before him.

"It is so picturesque, and so unlike America," was the pathetic little
commonplace she ventured next. "Ain't it, Nigel?"

He turned his head slowly towards her, as if she had taken a new liberty
in disturbing his meditations.

"Wha--at?" he drawled.

It was almost too much for her to sustain herself under. Her courage
collapsed.

"I was only saying how pretty the cottages were," she faltered. "And
that there's nothing like this in America."

"You ended your remark by adding, 'ain't it,'" her husband
condescended. "There is nothing like that in England. I shall ask you to
do me the favour of leaving Americanisms out of your conversation when
you are in the society of English ladies and gentlemen. It won't do."

"I didn't know I said it," Rosy answered feebly.

"That is the difficulty," was his response. "You never know, but
educated people do."

There was nothing more to be said, at least for a girl who had never
known what it was to be bullied. This one felt like a beggar or a
scullery maid, who, being rated by her master, had not the refuge of
being able to "give warning." She could never give warning. The Atlantic
Ocean was between her and those who had loved and protected her all
her short life, and the carriage was bearing her onwards to the home in
which she was to live alone as this man's companion to the end of her
existence.

She made no further propitiatory efforts, but sat and stared in simple
blankness at the country, which seemed to increase in loveliness at each
new point of view. Sometimes she saw sweet wooded, rolling lands made
lovelier by the homely farmhouses and cottages enclosed and sheltered by
thick hedges and trees; once or twice they drove past a park enfolding
a great house guarded by its huge sentinel oaks and beeches; once the
carriage passed through an adorable little village, where children
played on the green and a square-towered grey church seemed to watch
over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage. If she had
been a happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable
friends, she would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of
admiration every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that
to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her rapture would
merely represent the crudeness which had existed in contentment in a
brown-stone house on a noisy thoroughfare, through a life which had been
passed tramping up and down numbered streets and avenues.

They approached at last a second village with a green, a grass-grown
street and the irregular red-tiled cottages, which to the unaccustomed
eye seemed rather to represent studies for sketches than absolute
realities. The bells in the church tower broke forth into a chime and
people appeared at the doors of the cottages. The men touched their
foreheads as the carriage passed, and the children made bobbing
curtsies. Sir Nigel condescended to straighten himself a trifle in his
seat, and recognised the greetings with the stiff, half-military salute.
The poor girl at his side felt that he put as little feeling as possible
into the movement, and that if she herself had been a bowing villager
she would almost have preferred to be wholly ignored. She looked at him
questioningly.

"Are they--must _I_?" she began.

"Make some civil recognition," answered Sir Nigel, as if he were
instructing an ignorant child. "It is customary."

So she bowed and tried to smile, and the joyous clamour of the bells
brought the awful lump into her throat again. It reminded her of
the ringing of the chimes at the New York church on that day of her
marriage, which had been so full of gay, luxurious bustle, so crowded
with wedding presents, and flowers, and warm-hearted, affectionate
congratulations, and good wishes uttered in merry American voices.

The park at Stornham Court was large and beautiful and old. The trees
were magnificent, and the broad sweep of sward and rich dip of ferny
dell all that the imagination could desire. The Court itself was old,
and many-gabled and mellow-red and fine. Rosalie had learned from no
precedent as yet that houses of its kind may represent the apotheosis
of discomfort and dilapidation within, and only become more beautiful
without. Tumbled-down chimneys and broken tiles, being clambered over by
tossing ivy, are pictures to delight the soul.

As she descended from the carriage the girl was tremulous and uncertain
of herself and much overpowered by the unbending air of the man-servant
who received her as if she were a parcel in which it was no part of his
duty to take the smallest interest. As she mounted the stone steps she
caught a glimpse of broad gloom within the threshold, a big, square,
dingy hall where some other servants were drawn up in a row. She had
read of something of the sort in English novels, and she was suddenly
embarrassed afresh by her realisation of the fact that she did not know
what to do and that if she made a mistake Nigel would never forgive her.

An elderly woman came out of a room opening into the hall. She was an
ugly woman of a rigid carriage, which, with the obvious intention of
being severely majestic, was only antagonistic. She had a flaccid
chin, and was curiously like Nigel. She had also his expression when he
intended to be disagreeable. She was the Dowager Lady Anstruthers,
and being an entirely revolting old person at her best, she objected
extremely to the transatlantic bride who had made her a dowager, though
she was determinedly prepared to profit by any practical benefit likely
to accrue.

"Well, Nigel," she said in a deep voice. "Here you are at last."

This was of course a statement not to be refuted. She held out a
leathern cheek, and as Sir Nigel also presented his, their caress of
greeting was a singular and not effusive one.

"Is this your wife?" she asked, giving Rosalie a bony hand. And as he
did not indignantly deny this to be the fact, she added, "How do you
do?"

Rosalie murmured a reply and tried to control herself by making another
effort to swallow the lump in her throat. But she could not swallow
it. She had been keeping a desperate hold on herself too long. The
bewildered misery of her awakening, the awkwardness of the public row
at the station, the sulks which had filled the carriage to repletion
through all the long drive, and finally the jangling bells which had
so recalled that last joyous day at home--at home--had brought her to
a point where this meeting between mother and son--these two stony,
unpleasant creatures exchanging a reluctant rub of uninviting cheeks--as
two savages might have rubbed noses--proved the finishing impetus to
hysteria. They were so hideous, these two, and so ghastly comic and
fantastic in their unresponsive glumness, that the poor girl lost all
hold upon herself and broke into a trembling shriek of laughter.

"Oh!" she gasped in terror at what she felt to be her indecent madness.
"Oh! how--how----" And then seeing Nigel's furious start, his mother's
glare and all the servants' alarmed stare at her, she rushed staggering
to the only creature she felt she knew--her maid Hannah, clutched her
and broke down into wild sobbing.

"Oh, take me away!" she cried. "Oh, do! Oh, do! Oh, Hannah! Oh,
mother--mother!"

"Take your mistress to her room," commanded Sir Nigel. "Go downstairs,"
he called out to the servants. "Take her upstairs at once and throw
water in her face," to the excited Hannah.

And as the new Lady Anstruthers was half led, half dragged, in
humiliated hysteric disorder up the staircase, he took his mother by the
elbow, marched her into the nearest room and shut the door. There they
stood and stared at each other, breathing quick, enraged breaths and
looking particularly alike with their heavy-featured, thick-skinned,
infuriated faces.

It was the Dowager who spoke first, and her whole voice and manner
expressed all she intended that they should, all the derision, dislike
and scathing resignment to a grotesque fate.

"Well," said her ladyship. "So THIS is what you have brought home from
America!"



CHAPTER IV

A MISTAKE OF THE POSTBOY'S

As the weeks passed at Stornham Court the Atlantic Ocean seemed to
Rosalie Anstruthers to widen endlessly, and gay, happy, noisy New York
to recede until it was as far away as some memory of heaven. The girl
had been born in the midst of the rattling, rumbling bustle, and it
had never struck her as assuming the character of noise; she had only
thought of it as being the cheerful confusion inseparable from town. She
had been secretly offended and hurt when strangers said that New York
was noisy and dirty; when they called it vulgar, she never wholly
forgave them. She was of the New Yorkers who adore their New York
as Parisians adore Paris and who feel that only within its beloved
boundaries can the breath of life be breathed. People were often too hot
or too cold there, but there was usually plenty of bright glaring sun,
and the extremes of the weather had at least something rather dramatic
about them. There were dramatic incidents connected with them, at any
rate. People fell dead of sunstroke or were frozen to death, and the
newspapers were full of anecdotes during a "cold snap" or a "torrid
wave," which all made for excitement and conversation.

But at Stornham the rain seemed to young Lady Anstruthers to descend
ceaselessly. The season was a wet one, and when she rose in the morning
and looked out over the huge stretch of trees and sward she thought she
always saw the rain falling either in hopeless sheets or more hopeless
drizzle. The occasions upon which this was a dreary truth blotted out or
blurred the exceptions, when in liquid ultramarine deeps of sky, floated
islands and mountains of snow-white fleece, of a beauty of which she had
before had no conception.

In the English novels she had read, places such as Stornham Court were
always filled with "house parties," made up of wonderful town wits and
beauties, who provided endless entertainment for each other, who played
games, who hunted and shot pheasants and shone in dazzling amateur
theatricals. There were, however, no visitors at Stornham, and there
were in fact, no accommodations for any. There were numberless bedrooms,
but none really fit for guests to occupy. Carpets and curtains were
ancient and ragged, furniture was dilapidated, chimneys would not draw,
beds were falling to pieces. The Dowager Lady Anstruthers had never
either attracted desired, or been able to afford company. Her son's wife
suffered from the resulting boredom and unpopularity without being able
to comprehend the significance of the situation.

As the weeks dragged by a few heavy carriages deposited at the Court
a few callers. Some of the visitors bore imposing titles, which made
Rosalie very nervous and caused her hastily to array herself to receive
them in toilettes much too pretty and delicate for the occasion. Her
innocent idea was that she must do her husband credit by appearing as
"stylish" as possible.

As a result she was stared at, either with open disfavour, or with
well-bred, furtive criticism, and was described afterwards as being
either "very American" or "very over-dressed." When she had lived in
huge rooms in Fifth Avenue, Rosalie had changed her attire as many times
a day as she had changed her fancy; every hour had been filled with
engagements and amusements; the Vanderpoel carriages had driven up
to the door and driven away again and again through the mornings and
afternoons and until midnight and later. Someone was always going out or
coming in. There had been in the big handsome house not much more of an
air of repose than one might expect to find at a railway station; but
the flurry, the coming and going, the calling and chatting had all been
cheery, amiable. At Stornham, Rosalie sat at breakfast before unchanging
boiled eggs, unfailing toast and unalterable broiled bacon, morning
after morning. Sir Nigel sat and munched over the newspapers, his
mother, with an air of relentless disapproval from a lofty height of
both her food and companions, disposed of her eggs and her rasher at
Rosalie's right hand. She had transferred to her daughter-in-law her
previously occupied seat at the head of the table. This had been
done with a carefully prepared scene of intense though correct
disagreeableness, in which she had managed to convey all the rancour of
her dethroned spirit and her disapproval and disdain of international
alliances.

"It is of course proper that you should sit at the head of your
husband's table," she had said, among other agreeable things. "A woman
having devoted her life to her son must relinquish her position to the
person he chooses to marry. If you should have a son you will give
up your position to his wife. Since Nigel has married you, he has, of
course, a right to expect that you will at least make an effort to learn
something of what is required of women of your position."

"Sit down, Rosalie," said Nigel. "Of course you take the head of the
table, and naturally you must learn what is expected of my wife, but
don't talk confounded rubbish, mother, about devoting your life to your
son. We have seen about as little of each other as we could help. We
never agreed." They were both bullies and each made occasional efforts
at bullying the other without any particular result. But each could at
least bully the other into intensified unpleasantness.

The vicar's wife having made her call of ceremony upon the new
Lady Anstruthers, followed up the acquaintance, and found her quite
exotically unlike her mother-in-law, whose charities one may be sure had
neither been lavish nor dispensed by any hand less impressive than her
own. The younger woman was of wholly malleable material. Her sympathies
were easily awakened and her purse was well filled and readily opened.
Small families or large ones, newly born infants or newly buried ones,
old women with "bad legs" and old men who needed comforts, equally
touched her heart. She innocently bestowed sovereigns where an
Englishwoman would have known that half-crowns would have been
sufficient. As the vicaress was her almoner that lady felt her
importance rapidly on the increase. When she left a cottage saying,
"I'll speak to young Lady Anstruthers about you," the good woman of the
house curtsied low and her husband touched his forehead respectfully.

But this did not advance the fortunes of Sir Nigel, who personally
required of her very different things. Two weeks after her arrival at
Stornham, Rosalie began to see that somehow she was regarded as a person
almost impudently in the wrong. It appeared that if she had been an
English girl she would have been quite different, that she would have
been an advantage instead of a detriment. As an American she was a
detriment. That seemed to go without saying. She tried to do everything
she was told, and learn something from each cold insinuation. She did
not know that her very amenability and timidity were her undoing. Sir
Nigel and his mother thoroughly enjoyed themselves at her expense. They
knew they could say anything they chose, and that at the most she would
only break down into crying and afterwards apologise for being so badly
behaved. If some practical, strong-minded person had been near to defend
her she might have been rescued promptly and her tyrants routed. But she
was a young girl, tender of heart and weak of nature. She used to cry a
great deal when she was alone, and when she wrote to her mother she was
too frightened to tell the truth concerning her unhappiness.

"Oh, if I could just see some of them!" she would wail to herself. "If
I could just see mother or father or anybody from New York! Oh, I know
I shall never see New York again, or Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Central
Park--I never--never--never shall!" And she would grovel among her
pillows, burying her face and half stifling herself lest her sobs should
be heard. Her feeling for her husband had become one of terror and
repulsion. She was almost more afraid of his patronising, affectionate
moments than she was of his temper.

His conjugal condescensions made her feel vaguely--without knowing
why--as if she were some lower order of little animal.

American women, he said, had no conception of wifely duties and
affection. He had a great deal to say on the subject of wifely duty.
It was part of her duty as a wife to be entirely satisfied with his
society, and to be completely happy in the pleasure it afforded her. It
was her wifely duty not to talk about her own family and palpitatingly
expect letters by every American mail. He objected intensely to this
letter writing and receiving, and his mother shared his prejudices.

"You have married an Englishman," her ladyship said. "You have put it
out of his power to marry an Englishwoman, and the least consideration
you can show is to let New York and Nine-hundredth street remain upon
the other side of the Atlantic and not insist on dragging them into
Stornham Court."

The Dowager Lady Anstruthers was very fine in her picture of her mental
condition, when she realised, as she seemed periodically to do, that it
was no longer possible for her son to make a respectable marriage with
a woman of his own nation. The unadorned fact was that both she and
Sir Nigel were infuriated by the simplicity which made Rosalie slow in
comprehending that it was proper that the money her father allowed
her should be placed in her husband's hands, and left there with no
indelicate questioning. If she had been an English girl matters would
have been made plain to her from the first and arranged satisfactorily
before her marriage. Sir Nigel's mother considered that he had played
the fool, and would not believe that New York fathers were such touchy,
sentimental idiots as not to know what was expected of them.

They wasted no time, however, in coming to the point, and in a measure
it was the vicaress who aided them. Not she entirely, however.

Since her mother-in-law's first mention of a possible son whose wife
would eventually thrust her from her seat at the head of the table,
Rosalie had several times heard this son referred to. It struck her
that in England such things seemed discussed with more freedom than in
America. She had never heard a young woman's possible family arranged
for and made the subject of conversation in the more crude atmosphere
of New York. It made her feel rather awkward at first. Then she began
to realise that the son was part of her wifely duty also; that she was
expected to provide one, and that he was in some way expected to provide
for the estate--to rehabilitate it--and that this was because her
father, being a rich man, would provide for him. It had also struck her
that in England there was a tendency to expectation that someone
would "provide" for someone else, that relatives even by marriage were
supposed to "make allowances" on which it was quite proper for other
persons to live. Rosalie had been accustomed to a community in which
even rich men worked, and in which young and able-bodied men would have
felt rather indignant if aunts or uncles had thought it necessary to
pension them off as if they had been impotent paupers. It was Rosalie's
son who was to be "provided for" in this case, and who was to "provide
for" his father.

"When you have a son," her mother-in-law had remarked severely, "I
suppose something will be done for Nigel and the estate."

This had been said before she had been ten days in the house, and had
set her not-too-quick brain working. She had already begun to see that
life at Stornham Court was not the luxurious affair it was in the
house in Fifth Avenue. Things were shabby and queer and not at all
comfortable. Fires were not lighted because a day was chilly and gloomy.
She had once asked for one in her bedroom and her mother-in-law had
reproved her for indecent extravagance in a manner which took her breath
away.

"I suppose in America you have your house at furnace heat in July," she
said. "Mere wastefulness and self-indulgence! That is why Americans are
old women at twenty. They are shrivelled and withered by the unhealthy
lives they lead. Stuffing themselves with sweets and hot bread and never
breathing the fresh air."

Rosalie could not at the moment recall any withered and shrivelled old
women of twenty, but she blushed and stammered as usual.

"It is never cold enough for fires in July," she answered, "but we--we
never think fires extravagant when we are not comfortable without them."

"Coal must be cheaper than it is in England," said her ladyship. "When
you have a daughter, I hope you do not expect to bring her up as girls
are brought up in New York."

This was the first time Rosalie had heard of her daughter, and she was
not ready enough to reply. She naturally went into her room and cried
again, wondering what her father and mother would say if they knew that
bedroom fires were considered vulgarly extravagant by an impressive
member of the British aristocracy.

She was not at all strong at the time and was given to feeling chilly
and miserable on wet, windy days. She used to cry more than ever and was
so desolate that there were days when she used to go to the vicarage for
companionship. On such days the vicar's wife would entertain her with
stories of the villagers' catastrophes, and she would empty her purse
upon the tea table and feel a little consoled because she was the means
of consoling someone else.

"I suppose it gratifies your vanity to play the Lady Bountiful," Sir
Nigel sneered one evening, having heard in the village what she was
doing.

"I--never thought of such a thing," she stammered feebly. "Mrs. Brent
said they were so poor."

"You throw your money about as if you were a child," said her
mother-in-law. "It is a pity it is not put in the hands of some person
with discretion."

It had begun to dawn upon Rosalie that her ladyship was deeply convinced
that either herself or her son would be admirably discreet custodians of
the money referred to. And even the dawning of this idea had frightened
the girl. She was so inexperienced and ignorant that she felt it might
be possible that in England one's husband and one's mother-in-law could
do what they liked. It might be that they could take possession of one's
money as they seemed to take possession of one's self and one's very
soul. She would have been very glad to give them money, and had indeed
wondered frequently if she might dare to offer it to them, if they would
be outraged and insulted and slay her in their wrath at her purse-proud
daring. She had tried to invent ways in which she could approach the
subject, but had not been able to screw up her courage to any sticking
point. She was so overpowered by her consciousness that they seemed
continually to intimate that Americans with money were ostentatious and
always laying stress upon the amount of their possessions. She had no
conception of the primeval simpleness of their attitude in such matters,
and that no ceremonies were necessary save the process of transferring
sufficiently large sums as though they were the mere right of the
recipients. She was taught to understand this later. In the meantime,
however, ready as she would have been to give large sums if she had
known how, she was terrified by the thought that it might be possible
that she could be deprived of her bank account and reduced to the
condition of a sort of dependent upon the humours of her lately acquired
relations. She thought over this a good deal, and would have found
immense relief if she dared have consulted anyone. But she could not
make up her mind to reveal her unhappiness to her people. She had been
married so recently, everybody had thought her marriage so delightful,
she could not bear that her father and mother should be distressed by
knowing that she was wretched. She also reflected with misery that
New York would talk the matter over excitedly and that finally the
newspapers would get hold of the gossip. She could even imagine
interviewers calling at the house in Fifth Avenue and endeavouring
to obtain particulars of the situation. Her father would be angry and
refuse to give them, but that would make no difference; the newspapers
would give them and everybody would read what they said, whether it was
true or not. She could not possibly write facts, she thought, so her
poor little letters were restrained and unlike herself, and to the
warm-hearted souls in New York, even appearing stiff and unaffectionate,
as if her aristocratic surroundings had chilled her love for them. In
fact, it became far from easy for her to write at all, since Sir Nigel
so disapproved of her interest in the American mail. His objections had
indeed taken the form of his feeling himself quite within his rights
when he occasionally intercepted letters from her relations, with a view
of finding out whether they contained criticisms of himself, which would
betray that she had been guilty of indiscreet confidences. He discovered
that she had not apparently been so guilty, but it was evident that
there were moments when Mrs. Vanderpoel was uneasy and disposed to ask
anxious questions. When this occurred he destroyed the letters, and as a
result of this precaution on his part her motherly queries seemed to be
ignored, and she several times shed tears in the belief that Rosy had
grown so patrician that she was capable of snubbing her mother in
her resentment at feeling her privacy intruded upon and an unrefined
effusiveness shown.