Chapter XI. "I Thought You Had All Forgotten "

The Shuttle

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

As, after a singular half hour spent among the bracken under the
trees, they began their return to the house, Bettina felt that her
sense of adventure had altered its character. She was still in the
midst of a remarkable sort of exploit, which might end anywhere or in
anything, but it had become at once more prosaic in detail and more
intense in its significance. What its significance might prove
likely to be when she faced it, she had not known, it is true. But
this was different from-- from anything. As they walked up the
sun-dappled avenue she kept glancing aside at Rosy, and endeavouring
to draw useful conclusions. The poor girl's air of being a plain,
insignificant frump, long past youth, struck an extraordinary and,
for the time, unexplainable note. Her ill-cut, out-of- date dress,
the cheap suit of the hunchbacked boy, who limped patiently along,
helped by his crutch, suggested possible explanations which were
without doubt connected with the thought which had risen in Bettina's
mind, as she had been driven through the broken-hinged entrance gate.
What extraordinary disposal was being made of Rosy's money? But her
each glance at her sister also suggested complication upon
complication.

The singular half hour under the trees by the pool, spent, after
the first hysteric moments were over, in vague exclaimings and
questions, which seemed half frightened and all at sea, had
gradually shown her that she was talking to a creature wholly other
than the Rosalie who had so well known and loved them all, and whom
they had so well loved and known. They did not know this one, and
she did not know them, she was even a little afraid of the stir and
movement of their life and being. The Rosy they had known seemed to
be imprisoned within the wall the years of her separated life had
built about her. At each breath she drew Bettina saw how long the
years had been to her, and how far her home had seemed to lie away,
so far that it could not touch her, and was only a sort of dream, the
recalling of which made her suddenly begin to cry again every few
minutes. To Bettina's sensitively alert mind it was plain that it
would not do in the least to drag her suddenly out of her prison, or
cloister, whichsoever it might be. To do so would be like forcing a
creature accustomed only to darkness, to stare at the blazing sun.
To have burst upon her with the old impetuous, candid fondness would
have been to frighten and shock her as if with something bordering on
indecency. She could not have stood it; perhaps such fondness was so
remote from her in these days that she had even ceased to be able to
understand it.

"Where are your little girls?" Bettina asked, remembering that
there had been notice given of the advent of two girl babies.

"They died," Lady Anstruthers answered unemotionally. "They
both died before they were a year old. There is only Ughtred."

Betty glanced at the boy and saw a small flame of red creep up
on his cheek. Instinctively she knew what it meant, and she put out
her hand and lightly touched his shoulder.

"I hope you'll like me, Ughtred," she said.

He almost started at the sound of her voice, but when he turned
his face towards her he only grew redder, and looked awkward without
answering. His manner was that of a boy who was unused to the
amenities of polite society, and who was only made shy by them.

Without warning, a moment or so later, Bettina stopped in the
middle of the avenue, and looked up at the arching giant branches of
the trees which had reached out from one side to the other, as if to
clasp hands or encompass an interlacing embrace. As far as the eye
reached, they did this, and the beholder stood as in a high stately
pergola, with breaks of deep azure sky between. Several mellow,
cawing rooks were floating solemnly beneath or above the branches,
now wand then settling in some highest one or disappearing in the
thick greenness.

Lady Anstruthers stopped when her sister did so, and glanced at
her in vague inquiry. It was plain that she had outlived even her
sense of the beauty surrounding her.

"What are you looking at, Betty?" she asked.

"At all of it," Betty answered. "It is so wonderful."

"She likes it," said Ughtred, and then rather slunk a step
behind his mother, as if he were ashamed of himself.

"The house is just beyond those trees," said Lady
Anstruthers.

They came in full view of it three minutes later. When she saw
it, Betty uttered an exclamation and stopped again to enjoy
effects.

"She likes that, too," said Ughtred, and, although he said it
sheepishly, there was imperfectly concealed beneath the awkwardness a
pleasure in the fact.

"Do you?" asked Rosalie, with her small, painful smile.

Betty laughed.

"It is too picturesque, in its special way, to be quite
credible," she said.

"I thought that when I first saw it," said Rosy.

"Don't you think so, now?"

"Well," was the rather uncertain reply, "as Nigel says, there's
not much good in a place that is falling to pieces."

"Why let it fall to pieces?" Betty put it to her with impartial
promptness.

"We haven't money enough to hold it together," resignedly.

As they climbed the low, broad, lichen-blotched steps, whose
broken stone balustrades were almost hidden in clutching, untrimmed
ivy, Betty felt them to be almost incredible, too. The uneven stones
of the terrace the steps mounted to were lichen- blotched and broken
also. Tufts of green growths had forced themselves between the
flags, and added an untidy beauty. The ivy tossed in branches over
the red roof and walls of the house. It had been left unclipped,
until it was rather an endlessly clambering tree than a creeper. The
hall they entered had the beauty of spacious form and good, old oaken
panelling. There were deep window seats and an ancient high-backed
settle or so, and a massive table by the fireless hearth. But there
were no pictures in places where pictures had evidently once hung,
and the only coverings on the stone floor were the faded remnants of
a central rug and a worn tiger skin, the head almost bald and a glass
eye knocked out.

Bettina took in the unpromising details without a quiver of the
extravagant lashes. These, indeed, and the eyes pertaining to them,
seemed rather to sweep the fine roof, and a certain minstrel's
gallery and staircase, than which nothing could have been much finer,
with the look of an appreciative admirer of architectural features
and old oak. She had not journeyed to Stornham Court with the
intention of disturbing Rosy, or of being herself obviously
disturbed. She had come to observe situations and rearrange them
with that intelligence of which unconsidered emotion or exclamation
form no part.

"It is the first old English house I have seen," she said, with
a sigh of pleasure. "I am so glad, Rosy--I am so glad that it is
yours."

She put a hand on each of Rosy's thin shoulders--she felt
sharply defined bones as she did so--and bent to kiss her. It was
the natural affectionate expression of her feeling, but tears started
to Rosy's eyes, and the boy Ughtred, who had sat down in a window
seat, turned red again, and shifted in his place.

"Oh, Betty!" was Rosy's faint nervous exclamation, "you seem so
beautiful and--so--so strange--that you frighten me."

Betty laughed with the softest possible cheerfulness, shaking
her a little.

"I shall not seem strange long," she said, "after I have stayed
with you a few weeks, if you will let me stay with you."

"Let you! Let you!" in a sort of gasp.

Poor little Lady Anstruthers sank on to a settle and began to
cry again. It was plain that she always cried when things occurred.
Ughtred's speech from his window seat testified at once to that.

"Don't cry, mother," he said. "You know how we've talked that
over together. It's her nerves," he explained to Bettina. "We know
it only makes things worse, but she can't stop it."

Bettina sat on the settle, too. She herself was not then aware
of the wonderful feeling the poor little spare figure experienced, as
her softly strong young arms curved about it. She was only aware
that she herself felt that this was a heart-breaking thing, and that
she must not--must not let it be seen how much she recognised its
woefulness. This was pretty, fair Rosy, who had never done a harm in
her happy life--this forlorn thing was her Rosy.

"Never mind," she said, half laughing again. "I rather want to
cry myself, and I am stronger than she is. I am immensely
strong."

"Yes! Yes!" said Lady Anstruthers, wiping her eyes, and making
a tremendous effort at self-respecting composure. "You are strong.
I have grown so weak in--well, in every way. Betty, I'm afraid this
is a poor welcome. You see--I'm afraid you'll find it all so
different from--from New York."

"I wanted to find it different," said Betty.

"But--but--I mean--you know----" Lady Anstruthers turned
helplessly to the boy. Bettina was struck with the painful truth
that she looked even silly as she turned to him. "Ughtred--tell
her," she ended, and hung her head.

Ughtred had got down at once from his seat and limped forward.
His unprepossessing face looked as if he pulled his childishness
together with an unchildish effort.

"She means," he said, in his awkward way, "that she doesn't know
how to make you comfortable. The rooms are all so shabby--everything
is so shabby. Perhaps you won't stay when you see."

Bettina perceptibly increased the firmness of her hold on her
sister's body. It was as if she drew it nearer to her side in a kind
of taking possession. She knew that the moment had come when she
might go this far, at least, without expressing alarming things.

"You cannot show me anything that will frighten me," was the
answer she made. "I have come to stay, Rosy. We can make things
right if they require it. Why not?"

Lady Anstruthers started a little, and stared at her. She knew
ten thousand reasons why things had not been made right, and the
casual inference that such reasons could be lightly swept away as if
by the mere wave of a hand, implied a power appertaining to a time
seeming so lost forever that it was too much for her.

"Oh, Betty, Betty!" she cried, "you talk as if--you are
so----!"

The fact, so simple to the members of the abnormal class to
which she of a truth belonged, the class which heaped up its
millions, the absolute knowledge that there was a great deal of money
in the world and that she was of those who were among its chief
owners, had ceased to seem a fact, and had vanished into the region
of fairy stories.

That she could not believe it a reality revealed itself to
Bettina, as by a flash, which was also a revelation of many things.
There would be unpleasing truths to be learned, and she had not made
her pilgrimage for nothing. But--in any event--there were advantages
without doubt in the circumstance which subjected one to being
perpetually pointed out as a daughter of a multi-millionaire. As
this argued itself out for her with rapid lucidity, she bent and
kissed Rosy once more. She even tried to do it lightly, and not to
allow the rush of love and pity in her soul to betray her.

"I talk as if--as if I were Betty," she said. "You have
forgotten. I have not. I have been looking forward to this for
years. I have been planning to come to you since I was eleven years
old. And here we sit."

"You didn't forget? You didn't?" faltered the poor wreck of
Rosy. "Oh! Oh! I thought you had all forgotten
me--quite--quite!"

And her face went down in her spare, small hands, and she began
to cry again.