Chapter IV. A Mistake of the Postboy's

The Shuttle

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

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.

"I just feel as if she was beginning not to care about us at
all, Betty," she said. "I couldn't have believed it of Rosy. She
was always such an affectionate girl."

"I don't believe it now," replied Betty sharply. "Rosy couldn't
grow hateful and stuck up. It's that nasty Nigel I know it is."

Sir Nigel's intention was that there should be as little
intercourse between Fifth Avenue and Stornham Court as was possible.
Among other things, he did not intend that a lot of American
relations should come tumbling in when they chose to cross the
Atlantic. He would not have it, and took discreet steps to prevent
any accident of the sort. He wrote to America occasionally himself,
and knowing well how to make himself civilly repellent, so subtly
chilled his parents-in-law as to discourage in them more than once
their half-formed plan of paying a visit to their child in her new
home. He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to and from New
York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find that Rosalie
never condescended to make any response to her tentatives concerning
her possible visit, Rosalie herself was mystified by the fact that
the journey "to Europe" was never spoken of.

"I don't see why they never seem to think of coming over," she
said plaintively one day. "They used to talk so much about it."

"They?" ejaculated the Dowager Lady Anstruthers. "Whom may you
mean?"

"Mother and father and Betty and some of the others."

Her mother-in-law put up her eye-glasses to stare at her.

"The whole family?" she inquired.

"There are not so many of them," Rosalie answered.

"A family is always too many to descend upon a young woman when
she is married," observed her ladyship unmovedly. Nigel glanced over
the top of his Times.

"I may as well tell you that it would not do at all," he put
in.

"Why--why not?" exclaimed Rosalie, aghast.

"Americans don't do in English society," slightingly.

"But they are coming over so much. They like London so-- all
Americans like London."

"Do they?" with a drawl which made Rosalie blush until the tears
started to her eyes. "I am afraid the sentiment is scarcely
mutual."

Rosalie turned and fled from the room. She turned and fled
because she realised that she should burst out crying if she waited
to hear another word, and she realised that of late she seemed always
to be bursting out crying before one or the other of those two. She
could not help it. They always seemed to be implying something
slighting or scathing. They were always putting her in the wrong and
hurting her feelings.

The day was damp and chill, but she put on her hat and ran out
into the park. She went down the avenue and turned into a coppice.
There, among the wet bracken, she sank down on the mossy trunk of a
fallen tree and huddled herself in a small heap, her head on her
arms, actually wailing.

"Oh, mother! Oh, mother!" she cried hysterically. "Oh, I do
wish you would come. I'm so cold, mother; I'm so ill! I can't bear
it! It seems as if you'd forgotten all about me! You're all so
happy in New York that perhaps you have forgotten-- perhaps you have!
Oh, don't, mother--don't! "

It was a month later that through the vicar's wife she reached a
discovery and a climax. She had heard one morning from this lady of
a misfortune which had befallen a small farmer. It was a misfortune
which was an actual catastrophe to a man in his position. His house
had caught fire during a gale of wind and the fire had spread to the
outbuildings and rickyard and swept away all his belongings, his
house, his furniture, his hayricks, and stored grain, and even his
few cows and horses. He had been a poor, hard-working fellow, and
his small insurance had lapsed the day before the fire. He was
absolutely ruined, and with his wife and six children stood face to
face with beggary and starvation.

Rosalie Anstruthers entered the vicarage to find the poor woman
who was his companion in calamity sobbing in the hall. A child of a
few weeks was in her arms, and two small creatures clung crying to
her skirts.

"We've worked hard," she wept; "we have, ma'am. Father, he's
always been steady, an' up early an' late. P'r'aps it's the Lord's
'and, as you say, ma'am, but we've been decent people an' never
missed church when we could 'elp it--father didn't deserve it--that
he didn't."

She was heartbroken in her downtrodden hopelessness. Rosalie
literally quaked with sympathy. She poured forth her pity in such
words as the poor woman had never heard spoken by a great lady to a
humble creature like herself. The villagers found the new Lady
Anstruthers' interviews with them curiously simple and suggestive of
an equality they could not understand. Stornham was a conservative
old village, where the distinction between the gentry and the
peasants was clearly marked. The cottagers were puzzled by Sir
Nigel's wife, but they decided that she was kind, if unusual.

As Rosalie talked to the farmer's wife she longed for her
father's presence. She had remembered a time when a man in his
employ had lost his all by fire, the small house he had just made his
last payment upon having been burned to the ground. He had lost one
of his children in the fire, and the details had been heartrending.
The entire Vanderpoel household had wept on hearing them, and Mr.
Vanderpoel had drawn a cheque which had seemed like a fortune to the
sufferer. A new house had been bought, and Mrs. Vanderpoel and her
daughters and friends had bestowed furniture and clothing enough to
make the family comfortable to the verge of luxury.

"See, you poor thing," said Rosalie, glowing with memories of
this incident, her homesick young soul comforted by the mere likeness
in the two calamities. "I brought my cheque book with me because I
meant to help you. A man worked for my father had his house burned,
just as yours was, and my father made everything all right for him
again. I'll make it all right for you; I'll make you a cheque for a
hundred pounds now, and then when your husband begins to build I'll
give him some more."

The woman gasped for breath and turned pale. She was
frightened. It really seemed as if her ladyship must have lost her
wits a little. She could not mean this. The vicaress turned pale
also.

"Lady Anstruthers," she said, "Lady Anstruthers, it--it is too
much. Sir Nigel----"

"Too much!" exclaimed Rosalie. "They have lost everything, you
know; their hayricks and cattle as well as their house; I guess it
won't be half enough."

Mrs. Brent dragged her into the vicar's study and talked to her.
She tried to explain that in English villages such things were not
done in a manner so casual, as if they were the mere result of
unconsidered feeling, as if they were quite natural things, such as
any human person might do. When Rosalie cried: "But why not--why
not? They ought to be." Mrs. Brent could not seem to make herself
quite clear. Rosalie only gathered in a bewildered way that there
ought to be more ceremony, more deliberation, more holding off,
before a person of rank indulged in such munificence. The recipient
ought to be made to feel it more, to understand fully what a great
thing was being done.

"They will think you will do anything for them."

"So I will," said young Lady Anstruthers, "if I have the money
when they are in such awful trouble. Suppose we lost everything in
the world and there were people who could easily help us and
wouldn't?"

"You and Sir Nigel--that is quite different," said Mrs. Brent.
"I am afraid that if you do not discuss the matter and ask advice
from your husband and mother-in-law they will be very much
offended."

"If I were doing it with their money they would have the right
to be," replied Rosalie, with entire ingenuousness. "I wouldn't
presume to do such a thing as that. That wouldn't be right, of
course."

"They will be angry with me," said the vicaress awkwardly. This
queer, silly girl, who seemed to see nothing in the right light,
frequently made her feel awkward. Mrs. Brent told her husband that
she appeared to have no sense of dignity or proper appreciation of
her position.

The wife of the farmer, John Wilson, carried away the cheque,
quite stunned. She was breathless with amazement and turned rather
faint with excitement, bewilderment and her sense of relief. She had
to sit down in the vicarage kitchen for a few minutes and drink a
glass of the thin vicarage beer.

Rosalie promised that she would discuss the matter and ask
advice when she returned to the Court. Just as she left the house
Mrs. Brent suddenly remembered something she had forgotten.

"The Wilson trouble completely drove it out of my mind," she
said. "It was a stupid mistake of the postboy's. He left a letter
of yours among mine when he came this morning. It was most careless.
I shall speak to his father about it. It might have been important
that you should receive it early."

When she saw the letter Rosalie uttered an exclamation. It was
addressed in her father's handwriting.

"Oh!" she cried. "It's from father! And the postmark is Havre.
What does it mean?"

She was so excited that she almost forgot to express her thanks.
Her heart leaped up in her throat. Could they have come over from
America--could they? Why was it written from Havre? Could they be
near her?

She walked along the road choked with ecstatic, laughing sobs.
Her hand shook so that she could scarcely tear open the envelope; she
tore a corner of the letter, and when the sheet was spread open her
eyes were full of wild, delighted tears, which made it impossible for
her to see for the moment. But she swept the tears away and read
this:

DEAR DAUGHTER:

It seems as if we had had pretty bad luck in not seeing you. We
had counted on it very much, and your mother feels it all the more
because she is weak after her illness. We don't quite understand why
you did not seem to know about her having had diphtheria in Paris.
You did not answer Betty's letter. Perhaps it missed you in some
way. Things do sometimes go wrong in the mail, and several times
your mother has thought a letter has been lost. She thought so
because you seemed to forget to refer to things. We came over to
leave Betty at a French school and we had expected to visit you
later. But your mother fell ill of diphtheria and not hearing from
you seemed to make her homesick, so we decided to return to New York
by the next steamer. I ran over to London, however, to make some
inquiries about you, and on the first day I arrived I met your
husband in Bond Street. He at once explained to me that you had gone
to a house party at some castle in Scotland, and said you were well
and enjoying yourself very much, and he was on his way to join you.
I am sorry, daughter, that it has turned out that we could not see
each other. It seems a long time since you left us. But I am very
glad, however, that you are so well and really like English life. If
we had time for it I am sure it would be delightful. Your mother
sends her love and wants very much to hear of all you are doing and
enjoying. Hoping that we may have better luck the next time we
cross--
Your affectionate father,

REUBEN L. VANDERPOEL.

Rosalie found herself running breathlessly up the avenue. She
was clutching the letter still in her hand, and staggering from side
to side. Now and then she uttered horrible little short cries, like
an animal's. She ran and ran, seeing nothing, and now and then with
the clenched hand in which the letter was crushed striking a sharp
blow at her breast.

She stumbled up the big stone steps she had mounted on the day
she was brought home as a bride. Her dress caught her feet and she
fell on her knees and scrambled up again, gasping; she dashed across
the huge dark hall, and, hurling herself against the door of the
morning room, appeared, dishevelled, haggard-eyed, and with scarlet
patches on her wild, white face, before the Dowager, who started
angrily to her feet:

"Where is Nigel? Where is Nigel?" she cried out frenziedly.

"What in heaven's name do you mean by such manners?" demanded
her ladyship. "Apologise at once!"

"Where is Nigel? Nigel! Nigel!" the girl raved. "I will see
him--I will--I will see him!"

She who had been the mildest of sweet-tempered creatures all her
life had suddenly gone almost insane with heartbroken, hysteric grief
and rage. She did not know what she was saying and doing; she only
realised in an agony of despair that she was a thing caught in a
trap; that these people had her in their power, and that they had
tricked and lied to her and kept her apart from what her girl's heart
so cried out to and longed for. Her father, her mother, her little
sister; they had been near her and had been lied to and sent away

"You are quite mad, you violent, uncontrolled creature!" cried
the Dowager furiously. "You ought to be put in a straitjacket and
drenched with cold water."

Then the door opened again and Nigel strode in. He was in
riding dress and was breathless and livid with anger. He was in a
nice mood to confront a wife on the verge of screaming hysterics.
After a bad half hour with his steward, who had been talking of
impending disasters, he had heard by chance of Wilson's conflagration
and the hundred-pound cheque. He had galloped home at the top of his
horse's speed.

"Here is your wife raving mad," cried out his mother.

Rosalie staggered across the room to him. She held up her hand
clenching the letter and shook it at him.

"My mother and father have been here," she shrieked. My mother
has been ill. They wanted to come to see me. You knew and you kept
it from me. You told my father lies --lies--hideous lies! You said
I was away in Scotland-- enjoying myself--when I was here and dying
with homesickness. You made them think I did not care for them--or
for New York! You have killed me! Why did you do such a wicked
thing!

He looked at her with glaring eyes. If a man born a gentleman
is ever in the mood to kick his wife to death, as costermongers do,
he was in that mood. He had lost control over himself as completely
as she had, and while she was only a desperate, hysteric girl, he was
a violent man.

"I did it because I did not mean to have them here," he said.
"I did it because I won't have them here."

"They shall come," she quavered shrilly in her wildness. "They
shall come to see me. They are my own father and mother, and I will
have them."

He caught her arm in such a grip that she must have thought he
would break it, if she could have thought or felt anything.

"No, you will not have them," he ground forth between his teeth.
"You will do as I order you and learn to behave yourself as a decent
married woman should. You will learn to obey your husband and
respect his wishes and control your devilish American temper."

"They have gone--gone!" wailed Rosalie. "You sent them away!
My father, my mother, my sister!"

"Stop your indecent ravings!" ordered Sir Nigel, shaking her.
"I will not submit to be disgraced before the servants."

"Put your hand over her mouth, Nigel," cried his mother. "The
very scullery maids will hear."

She was as infuriated as her son. And, indeed, to behold
civilised human beings in the state of uncontrolled violence these
three had reached was a sight to shudder at.

"I won't stop," cried the girl. "Why did you take me away from
everything--I was quite happy. Everybody was kind to me. I loved
people, I had everything. No one ever-- ever--ever ill-used
anyone----"

Sir Nigel clutched her arm more brutally still and shook her
with absolute violence. Her hair broke loose and fell about her
awful little distorted, sobbing face.

"I did not take you to give you an opportunity to display your
vulgar ostentation by throwing away hundred-pound cheques to
villagers," he said. "I didn't take you to give you the position of
a lady and be made a fool of by you."

"You have ruined him," burst forth his mother. "You have put it
out of his power to marry an Englishwoman who would have known it was
her duty to give something in return for his name and protection."

Her ladyship had begun to rave also, and as mother and son were
of equal violence when they had ceased to control themselves, Rosalie
began to find herself enlightened unsparingly. She and her people
were vulgar sharpers. They had trapped a gentleman into a low
American marriage and had not the decency to pay for what they had
got. If she had been an Englishwoman, well born, and of decent
breeding, all her fortune would have been properly transferred to her
husband and he would have had the dispensing of it. Her husband
would have been in the position to control her expenditure and see
that she did not make a fool of herself. As it was she was the
derision of all decent people, of all people who had been properly
brought up and knew what was in good taste and of good morality.

First it was the Dowager who poured forth, and then it was Sir
Nigel. They broke in on each other, they interrupted one another
with exclamations and interpolations. They had so far lost
themselves that they did not know they became grotesque in the
violence of their fury. Rosalie's brain whirled. Her hysteria
mounted and mounted. She stared first at one and then at the other,
gasping and sobbing by turns; she swayed on her feet and clutched at
a chair.

"I did not know," she broke forth at last, trying to make her
voice heard in the storm. "I never understood. I knew something
made you hate me, but I didn't know you were angry about money." She
laughed tremulously and wildly. "I would have given it to
you--father would have given you some--if you had been good to me."
The laugh became hysterical beyond her management. Peal after peal
broke from her, she shook all over with her ghastly merriment,
sobbing at one and the same time.

"Oh! oh! oh!" she shrieked. "You see, I thought you were so
aristocratic. I wouldn't have dared to think of such a thing. I
thought an English gentleman--an English gentleman-- oh! oh! to think
it was all because I did not give you money--just common dollars and
cents that--that I daren't offer to a decent American who could work
for himself."

Sir Nigel sprang at her. He struck her with his open hand upon
the cheek, and as she reeled she held up her small, feverish, shaking
hand, laughing more wildly than before.

"You ought not to strike me," she cried. "You oughtn't! You
don't know how valuable I am. Perhaps----" with a little, crazy
scream--"perhaps I might have a son."

She fell in a shuddering heap, and as she dropped she struck
heavily against the protruding end of an oak chest and lay upon the
floor, her arms flung out and limp, as if she were a dead thing.