Chapter IX. Lady Jane Grey

The Shuttle

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

It seemed upon the whole even absurd that after a shock so awful
and a panic wild enough to cause people to expose their very
souls--for there were, of course, endless anecdotes to be related
afterwards, illustrative of grotesque terror, cowardice, and utter
abandonment of all shadows of convention-- that all should end in an
anticlimax of trifling danger, upon which, in a day or two, jokes
might be made. Even the tramp steamer had not been seriously
injured, though its injuries were likely to be less easy of repair
than those of the Meridiana.

"Still," as a passenger remarked, when she steamed into the dock
at Liverpool, "we might all be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
this morning. Just think what columns there would have been in the
newspapers. Imagine Miss Vanderpoel's being drowned."

"I was very rude to Louise, when I found her wringing her hands
over you, and I was rude to Blanche," Bettina said to Mrs.
Worthington. "In fact I believe I was rude to a number of people
that night. I am rather ashamed."

"You called me a donkey," said Blanche, "but it was the best
thing you could have done. You frightened me into putting on my
shoes, instead of trying to comb my hair with them. It was startling
to see you march into the stateroom, the only person who had not been
turned into a gibbering idiot. I know I was gibbering, and I know
Marie was."

"We both gibbered at the red-haired man when he came in," said
Marie. "We clutched at him and gibbered together. Where is the
red-haired man, Betty? Perhaps we made him ill. I've not seen him
since that moment."

"He is in the second cabin, I suppose," Bettina answered, "but I
have not seen him, either."

"We ought to get up a testimonial and give it to him, because he
did not gibber," said Blanche. "He was as rude and as sensible as
you were, Betty."

They did not see him again, in fact, at that time. He had
reasons of his own for preferring to remain unseen. The truth was
that the nearer his approach to his native shores, the nastier, he
was perfectly conscious, his temper became, and he did not wish to
expose himself by any incident which might cause him stupidly and
obviously to lose it.

The maid, Louise, however, recognised him among her companions
in the third-class carriage in which she travelled to town. To her
mind, whose opinions were regulated by neatly arranged standards, he
looked morose and shabbily dressed. Some of the other second-cabin
passengers had made themselves quite smart in various, not too
distinguished ways. He had not changed his dress at all, and the
large valise upon the luggage rack was worn and battered as if with
long and rough usage. The woman wondered a little if he would
address her, and inquire after the health of her mistress. But,
being an astute creature, she only wondered this for an instant, the
next she realised that, for one reason or another, it was clear that
he was not of the tribe of second-rate persons who pursue an
accidental acquaintance with their superiors in fortune, through
sociable interchange with their footmen or maids.

When the train slackened its speed at the platform of the
station, he got up, reaching down his valise and leaving the
carriage, strode to the nearest hansom cab, waving the porter
aside.

"Charing Cross," he called out to the driver, jumped in, and was
rattled away.

  .  .  .  .  .

During the years which had passed
since Rosalie Vanderpoel first came to London as Lady Anstruthers,
numbers of huge luxurious hotels had grown up, principally, as it
seemed, that Americans should swarm into them and live at an expense
which reminded them of their native land. Such establishments would
never have been built for English people, whose habit it is merely to
"stop" at hotels, not to live in them. The tendency of the American
is to live in his hotel, even though his intention may be only to
remain in it two days. He is accustomed to doing himself extremely
well in proportion to his resources, whether they be great or small,
and the comforts, as also the luxuries, he allows himself and his
domestic appendages are in a proportion much higher in its relation
to these resources than it would be were he English, French, German,
or Italians. As a consequence, he expects, when he goes forth,
whether holiday-making or on business, that his hostelry shall
surround him, either with holiday luxuries and gaiety, or with such
lavishness of comfort as shall alleviate the wear and tear of
business cares and fatigues. The rich man demands something almost
as good as he has left at home, the man of moderate means something
much better. Certain persons given to regarding public wants and
desires as foundations for the fortune of business schemes having
discovered this, the enormous and sumptuous hotel evolved itself from
their astute knowledge of common facts. At the entrances of these
hotels, omnibuses and cabs, laden with trunks and packages frequently
bearing labels marked with red letters "S. S. So-and-So,
Stateroom--Hold--Baggage- room," drew up and deposited their contents
and burdens at regular intervals. Then men with keen, and often
humorous faces or almost painfully anxious ones, their exceedingly
well-dressed wives, and more or less attractive and vivacious-looking
daughters, their eager little girls, and un- English-looking little
boys, passed through the corridors in flocks and took possession of
suites of rooms, sometimes for twenty-four hours, sometimes for six
weeks.

The Worthingtons took possession of such a suite in such a
hotel. Bettina Vanderpoel's apartments faced the Embankment. From
her windows she could look out at the broad splendid, muddy Thames,
slowly rolling in its grave, stately way beneath its bridges, bearing
with it heavy lumbering barges, excited tooting little penny steamers
and craft of various shapes and sizes, the errand or burden of each
meaning a different story.

It had been to Bettina one of her pleasures of the finest
epicurean flavour to reflect that she had never had any brief and
superficial knowledge of England, as she had never been to the
country at all in those earlier years, when her knowledge of places
must necessarily have been always the incomplete one of either a
schoolgirl traveller or a schoolgirl resident, whose views were
limited by the walls of restriction built around her.

If relations of the usual ease and friendliness had existed
between Lady Anstruthers and her family, Bettina would, doubtless,
have known her sister's adopted country well. It would have been a
thing so natural as to be almost inevitable, that she would have
crossed the Channel to spend her holidays at Stornham. As matters
had stood, however, the child herself, in the days when she had been
a child, had had most definite private views on the subject of visits
to England. She had made up her young mind absolutely that she would
not, if it were decently possible to avoid it, set her foot upon
English soil until she was old enough and strong enough to carry out
what had been at first her passionately romantic plans for
discovering and facing the truth of the reason for the apparent
change in Rosy. When she went to England,she would go to Rosy. As
she had grown older, having in the course of education and travel
seen most Continental countries, she had liked to think that she had
saved, put aside for less hasty consumption and more delicate
appreciation of flavours, as it were, the country she was conscious
she cared for most.

"It is England we love, we Americans," she had said to her
father. "What could be more natural? We belong to it--it belongs to
us. I could never be convinced that the old tie of blood does not
count. All nationalities have come to us since we became a nation,
but most of us in the beginning came from England. We are touching
about it, too. We trifle with France and labour with Germany, we
sentimentalise over Italy and ecstacise over Spain--but England we
love. How it moves us when we go to it, how we gush if we are simple
and effusive, how we are stirred imaginatively if we are of the
perceptive class. I have heard the commonest little half-educated
woman say the prettiest, clumsy, emotional things about what she has
seen there. A New England schoolma'am, who has made a Cook's tour,
will almost have tears in her voice as she wanders on with her
commonplaces about hawthorn hedges and thatched cottages and white or
red farms. Why are we not unconsciously pathetic about German
cottages and Italian villas? Because we have not, in centuries past,
had the habit of being born in them. It is only an English cottage
and an English lane, whether white with hawthorn blossoms or bare
with winter, that wakes in us that little yearning, grovelling
tenderness that is so sweet. It is only nature calling us home."

Mrs. Worthington came in during the course of the morning to
find her standing before her window looking out at the Thames, the
Embankment, the hansom cabs themselves, with an absolutely serious
absorption. This changed to a smile as she turned to greet her.

"I am delighted," she said. "I could scarcely tell you how
much. The impression is all new and I am excited a little by
everything. I am so intensely glad that I have saved it so long and
that I have known it only as part of literature. I am even charmed
that it rains, and that the cabmen's mackintoshes are shining and
wet." She drew forward a chair, and Mrs. Worthington sat down,
looking at her with involuntary admiration.

"You look as if you were delighted," she said. "Your eyes--you
have amazing eyes, Betty! I am trying to picture to myself what Lady
Anstruthers will feel when she sees you. What were you like when she
married?"

Bettina sat down, smiling and looking, indeed, quite incredibly
lovely. She was capable of a warmth and a sweetness which were as
embracing as other qualities she possessed were powerful.

"I was eight years old," she said. "I was a rude little girl,
with long legs and a high, determined voice. I know I was rude. I
remember answering back."

"I seem to have heard that you did not like your brother-
in-law, and that you were opposed to the marriage."

"Imagine the undisciplined audacity of a child of eight
`opposing' the marriage of her grown-up sister. I was quite capable
of it. You see in those days we had not been trained at all (one had
only been allowed tremendous liberty), and interfered
conversationally with one's elders and betters at any moment. I was
an American little girl, and American little girls were really--they
really were!" with a laugh, whose musical sound was after all wholly
non-committal.

"You did not treat Sir Nigel Anstruthers as one of your
betters."

"He was one of my elders, at all events, and becomingness of
bearing should have taught me to hold my little tongue. I am giving
some thought now to the kind of thing I must invent as a suitable
apology when I find him a really delightful person, full of virtues
and accomplishments. Perhaps he has a horror of me."

"I should like to be present at your first meeting," Mrs.
Worthington reflected. "You are going down to Stornham
to-morrow?"

"That is my plan. When I write to you on my arrival, I will
tell you if I encountered the horror." Then, with a swift change of
subject and a lifting of her slender, velvet line of eyebrow, "I am
only deploring that I have not time to visit the Tower."

Mrs. Worthington was betrayed into a momentary glance of
uncertainty, almost verging in its significance on a gasp.

"The Tower? Of London? Dear Betty!"

Bettina's laugh was mellow with revelation.

"Ah!" she said. "You don't know my point of view; it's plain
enough. You see, when I delight in these things, I think I delight
most in my delight in them. It means that I am almost having the
kind of feeling the fresh American souls had who landed here thirty
years ago and revelled in the resemblance to Dickens's characters
they met with in the streets, and were historically thrilled by the
places where people's heads were chopped off. Imagine their
reflections on Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the
very spot where that poor last word was uttered--`Remember.' And
think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave
disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones in the slightest
disguise."

"You don't mean to say----" Mrs. Worthington was vaguely
awakening to the situation.

"That the charm of my visit, to myself, is that I realise that I
am rather like that. I have positively preserved something because I
have kept away. You have been here so often and know things so well,
and you were even so sophisticated when you began, that you have
never really had the flavours and emotions. I am sophisticated, too,
sophisticated enough to have cherished my flavours as a gourmet tries
to save the bouquet of old wine. You think that the Tower is the
pleasure of housemaids on a Bank Holiday. But it quite makes me
quiver to think of it," laughing again. "That I laugh, is the sign
that I am not as beautifully, freshly capable of enjoyment as those
genuine first Americans were, and in a way I am sorry for it."

Mrs. Worthington laughed also, and with an enjoyment.

"You are very clever, Betty," she said.

"No, no," answered Bettina, "or, if I am, almost everybody is
clever in these days. We are nearly all of us comparatively
intelligent."

"You are very interesting at all events, and the Anstruthers
will exult in you. If they are dull in the country, you will save
them."

"I am very interested, at all events," said Bettina, "and
interest like mine is quite passe. A clever American who lives in
England, and is the pet of duchesses, once said to me (he always
speaks of Americans as if they were a distant and recently discovered
species), `When they first came over they were a novelty. Their
enthusiasm amused people, but now, you see, it has become vieux jeu.
Young women, whose specialty was to be excited by the Tower of London
and Westminster Abbey, are not novelties any longer. In fact, it's
been done, and it's done for as a specialty.' And I am excited about
the Tower of London. I may be able to restrain my feelings at the
sight of the Beef Eaters, but they will upset me a little, and I must
brace myself, I must indeed."

"Truly, Betty?" said Mrs. Worthington, regarding her with
curiosity, arising from a faint doubt of her entire
seriousness,mingled with a fainter doubt of her entire levity.

Betty flung out her hands in a slight, but very involuntary-
looking, gesture, and shook her head.

"Ah!" she said, "it was all true, you know. They were all
horribly real--the things that were shuddered over and
sentimentalised about. Sophistication, combined with imagination,
makes them materialise again, to me, at least, now I am here. The
gulf between a historical figure and a man or woman who could bleed
and cry out in human words was broad when one was at school. Lady
Jane Grey, for instance, how nebulous she was and how little one
cared. She seemed invented merely to add a detail to one's lesson in
English history. But, as we drove across Waterloo Bridge, I caught a
glimpse of the Tower, and what do you suppose I began to think of?
It was monstrous. I saw a door in the Tower and the stone steps, and
the square space, and in the chill clear, early morning a little
slender, helpless girl led out, a little, fair, real thing like Rosy,
all alone--everyone she belonged to far away, not a man near who
dared utter a word of pity when she turned her awful, meek, young,
desperate eyes upon him. She was a pious child, and, no doubt, she
lifted her eyes to the sky. I wonder if it was blue and its blueness
broke her heart, because it looked as if it might have pitied such a
young, patient girl thing led out in the fair morning to walk to the
hacked block and give her trembling pardon to the black-visored man
with the axe, and then `commending her soul to God' to stretch her
sweet slim neck out upon it."

"Oh, Betty, dear!" Mrs. Worthington expostulated.

Bettina sprang to her and took her hand in pretty appeal.

"I beg pardon! I beg pardon, I really do," she exclaimed. "I
did not intend deliberately to be painful. But that-- beneath the
sophistication--is something of what I bring to England."