The Shuttle

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Four days Anstruthers lay in bed in a room at the Inn. No one saw him
but the man who brought him food. He did not send for a doctor, because
he did not wish to see one. He sent for such remedies as were needed by
a man who had been bruised by a fall from his horse. He made no remark
which could be considered explanatory, after he had said irritably that
a man was a fool to go loitering along on a nervous brute who needed
watching. Whatsoever happened was his own damned fault.

Through hours of day and night he lay staring at the whitewashed beams
or the blue roses on the wall paper. They were long hours, and filled
with things not pleasant enough to dwell on in detail. Physical misery
which made a man writhe at times was not the worst part of them. There
were a thousand things less endurable. More than once he foamed at the
mouth, and recognised that he gibbered like a madman.

There was but one memory which saved him from feeling that this was the
very end of things. That was the memory of Broadmorlands. While a man
had a weapon left, even though it could not save him, he might pay up
with it--get almost even. The whole Vanderpoel lot could be plunged neck
deep in a morass which would leave mud enough sticking to them, even
if their money helped them to prevent its entirely closing over their
heads. He could attend to that, and, after he had set it well going, he
could get out. There were India, South Africa, Australia--a dozen places
that would do. And then he would remember Betty Vanderpoel, and curse
horribly under the bed clothes. It was the memory of Betty which outdid
all others in its power to torment.

On the morning of the fifth day the Duke of Broadmorlands received a
note, which he read with somewhat annoyed curiosity. A certain Sir Nigel
Anstruthers, whom it appeared he ought to be able to recall, was in the
neighbourhood, and wished to see him on a parochial matter of interest.
"Parochial matter" was vague, and so was the Duke's recollection of the
man who addressed him. If his memory served him rightly, he had met
him in a country house in Somersetshire, and had heard that he was the
acquaintance of the disreputable eldest son. What could a person of that
sort have to say of parochial matters? The Duke considered, and then, in
obedience to a rigorous conscience, decided that one ought, perhaps, to
give him half an hour.

There was that in the intruder's aspect, when he arrived in the
afternoon, which produced somewhat the effect of shock. In the first
place, a man in his unconcealable physical condition had no right to be
out of his bed. Though he plainly refused to admit the fact, his manner
of bearing himself erect, and even with a certain touch of cool swagger,
was, it was evident, achieved only by determined effort. He looked like
a man who had not yet recovered from some evil fever. Since the meeting
in Somersetshire he had aged more than the year warranted. Despite his
obstinate fight with himself it was obvious that he was horribly shaky.
A disagreeable scratch or cut, running from cheek to neck, did not
improve his personal appearance.

He pleased his host no more than he had pleased him at their first
encounter; he, in fact, repelled him strongly, by suggesting a degree
of abnormality of mood which was smoothed over by an attempt at entire
normality of manner. The Duke did not present an approachable front as,
after Anstruthers had taken a chair, he sat and examined him with bright
blue old eyes set deep on either side of a dominant nose and framed over
by white eyebrows. No, Nigel Anstruthers summed him up, it would not be
easy to open the matter with the old fool. He held himself magnificently
aloof, with that lack of modernity in his sense of place which, even at
this late day, sometimes expressed itself here and there in the manner
of the feudal survival.

"I am afraid you have been ill," with rigid civility.

"A man feels rather an outsider in confessing he has let his horse throw
him into a hedge. It was my own fault entirely. I allowed myself to
forget that I was riding a dangerously nervous brute. I was thinking of
a painful and absorbing subject. I was badly bruised and scratched, but
that was all."

"What did your doctor say?"

"That I was in luck not to have broken my neck."

"You had better have a glass of wine," touching a bell. "You do not look
equal to any exertion."

In gathering himself together, Sir Nigel felt he was forced to use
enormous effort. It had cost him a gruesome physical struggle to endure
the drive over to Broadmorlands, though it was only a few miles from
Medham. There had been something unnatural in the exertion necessary to
sit upright and keep his mind decently clear. That was the worst of it.
The fever and raging hours of the past days and nights had so shaken him
that he had become exhausted, and his brain was not alert. He was not
thinking rapidly, and several times he had lost sight of a point it was
important to remember. He grew hot and cold and knew his hands and
voice shook, as he answered. But, perhaps--he felt desperately--signs of
emotion were not bad.

"I am not quite equal to exertion," he began slowly. "But a man cannot
lie on his bed while some things are undone--a MAN cannot."

As the old Duke sat upright, the blue eyes under his bent brows were
startled, as well as curious. Was the man going out of his mind about
something? He looked rather like it, with the dampness starting out on
his haggard face, and the ugly look suddenly stamped there. The fact was
that the insensate fury which had possessed and torn Anstruthers as he
had writhed in his inn bedroom had sprung upon him again in full force,
and his weakness could not control it, though it would have been wiser
to hold it in check. He also felt frightfully ill, which filled him
with despair, and, through this fact, he lost sight of the effect he
produced, as he stood up, shaking all over.

"I come to you because you are the one man who can most easily
understand the thing I have been concealing for a good many years."

The Duke was irritated. Confound the objectionable idiot, what did he
mean by taking that intimate tone with a man who was not prepared to
concern himself in his affairs?

"Excuse me," he said, holding up an authoritative hand, "are you going
to make a confession? I don't like such things. I prefer to be excused.
Personal confidences are not parochial matters."

"This one is." And Sir Nigel was sickeningly conscious that he was
putting the statement rashly, while at the same time all better words
escaped him. "It is as much a parochial matter," losing all hold on his
wits and stammering, "as was--as was--the affair of--your wife."

It was the Duke who stood up now, scarlet with anger. He sprang from
his chair as if he had been a young man in whom some insult had struck
blazing fire.

"You--you dare!" he shouted. "You insolent blackguard! You force your
way in here and dare--dare----!" And he clenched his fist, wildly
shaking it.

Nigel Anstruthers, staggering on his uncertain feet, would have shouted
also, but could not, though he tried, and he heard his own voice come
forth brokenly.

"Yes, I dare! I--your--my own--my----!"

Swaying and tottering, he swung round to the chair he had left, and fell
into it, even while the old Duke, who stood raging before him, started
back in outraged amazement. What was the fellow doing? Was he making
faces at him? The drawn malignant mouth and muscles suggested it. Was
he a lunatic, indeed? But the sense of disgusted outrage changed all at
once to horror, as, with a countenance still more hideously livid and
twisted, his visitor slid helplessly from his seat and lay a huddling
heap of clothes on the floor.



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.