Chapter XXV. "We Began to Marry Them, My Good Fellow!"

The Shuttle

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

Lord Dunholm and his eldest son, Lord Westholt, sauntered
together smoking their after-dinner cigars on the broad- turfed
terrace overlooking park and gardens which seemed to sweep without
boundary line into the purplish land beyond. The grey mass of the
castle stood clear-cut against the blue of a sky whose twilight was
still almost daylight, though in the purity of its evening stillness
a star already hung, here and there, and a young moon swung low. The
great spaces about them held a silence whose exquisite entirety was
marked at intervals by the distant bark of a shepherd dog driving his
master's sheep to the fold, their soft, intermittent plaints--the
mother ewes' mellow answering to the tender, fretful lambs-- floated
on the air, a lovely part of the ending day's repose. Where two who
are friends stroll together at such hours, the great beauty makes for
silence or for thoughtful talk. These two men--father and son--were
friends and intimates, and had been so from Westholt's first memory
of the time when his childish individuality began to detach itself
from the background of misty and indistinct things. They had liked
each other, and their liking and intimacy had increased with the
onward moving and change of years. After sixty sane and decently
spent active years of life, Lord Dunholm, in either country tweed or
evening dress, was a well-built and handsome man; at thirty-three his
son was still like him.

"Have you seen her?" he was saying.

"Only at a distance. She was driving Lady Anstruthers across
the marshes in a cart. She drove well and----" he laughed as he
flicked the ash from his cigar--"the back of her head and shoulders
looked handsome."

"The American young woman is at present a factor which is
without doubt to be counted with," Lord Dunholm put the matter
without lightness. "Any young woman is a factor, but the American
young woman just now--just now----" He paused a moment as though
considering. "It did not seem at all necessary to count with them at
first, when they began to appear among us. They were generally
curiously exotic, funny little creatures with odd manners and voices.
They were often most amusing, and one liked to hear them chatter and
see the airy lightness with which they took superfluous, and
sometimes unsuperfluous, conventions, as a hunter takes a five-barred
gate. But it never occurred to us to marry them. We did not take
them seriously enough. But we began to marry them-- we began to
marry them, my good fellow!"

The final words broke forth with such a suggestion of sudden
anxiety that, in spite of himself, Westholt laughed involuntarily,
and his father, turning to look at him, laughed also. But he
recovered his seriousness.

"It was all rather a muddle at first," he went on. "Things were
not fairly done, and certain bad lots looked on it as a paying scheme
on the one side, while it was a matter of silly, little ambitions on
the other. But that it is an extraordinary country there is no sane
denying--huge, fabulously resourceful in every way--area, variety of
climate, wealth of minerals, products of all sorts, soil to grow
anything, and sun and rain enough to give each thing what it needs;
last, or rather first, a people who, considered as a nation, are in
the riot of youth, and who began by being English--which we
Englishmen have an innocent belief is the one method of `owning the
earth.' That figure of speech is an Americanism I carefully
committed to memory. Well, after all, look at the map--look at the
map! There we are."

They had frequently discussed together the question of the
development of international relations. Lord Dunholm, a man of
far-reaching and clear logic, had realised that the oddly
unaccentuated growth of intercourse between the two countries might
be a subject to be reflected on without lightness.

"The habit we have of regarding America and Americans as rather
a joke," he had once said, "has a sort of parallel in the
condescendingly amiable amusement of a parent at the precocity or
whimsicalness of a child. But the child is shooting up
amazingly--amazingly. In a way which suggests divers
possibilities."

The exchange of visits between Dunholm and Stornham had been
rare and formal. From the call made upon the younger Lady
Anstruthers on her marriage, the Dunholms had returned with a sense
of puzzled pity for the little American bride, with her wonderful
frock and her uneasy, childish eyes. For some years Lady Anstruthers
had been too delicate to make or return calls. One heard painful
accounts of her apparent wretched ill-health and of the condition of
her husband's estate.

"As the relations between the two families have evidently been
strained for years," Lord Dunholm said, "it is interesting to hear of
the sudden advent of the sister. It seems to point to
reconciliation. And you say the girl is an unusual person.

"From what one hears, she would be unusual if she were an
English girl who had spent her life on an English estate. That an
American who is making her first visit to England should seem to see
at once the practical needs of a neglected place is a thing to wonder
at. What can she know about it, one thinks. But she apparently does
know. They say she has made no mistakes--even with the village
people. She is managing, in one way or another, to give work to
every man who wants it. Result, of course--unbounded rustic
enthusiasm."

Lord Dunholm laughed between the soothing whiffs of his
cigar.

"How clever of her! And what sensible good feeling! Yes--yes!
She evidently has learned things somewhere. Perhaps New York has
found it wise to begin to give young women professional training in
the management of English estates. Who knows? Not a bad idea."

It was the rustic enthusiasm, Westholt explained, which had in a
manner spread her fame. One heard enlightening and illustrative
anecdotes of her. He related several well worth hearing. She had
evidently a sense of humour and unexpected perceptions.

"One detail of the story of old Doby's meerschaum," Westholt
said, "pleased me enormously. She managed to convey to him--without
hurting his aged feelings or overwhelming him with
embarrassment--that if he preferred a clean churchwarden or his old
briarwood, he need not feel obliged to smoke the new pipe. He could
regard it as a trophy. Now, how did she do that without filling him
with fright and confusion, lest she might think him not sufficiently
grateful for her present? But they tell me she did it, and that old
Doby is rapturously happy and takes the meerschaum to bed with him,
but only smokes it on Sundays--sitting at his window blowing great
clouds when his neighbours are coming from church. It was a clever
girl who knew that an old fellow might secretly like his old pipe
best."

"It was a deliciously clever girl," said Lord Dunholm. "One
wants to know and make friends with her. We must drive over and
call. I confess, I rather congratulate myself that Anstruthers is
not at home."

"So do I," Westholt answered. "One wonders a little how far he
and his sister-in-law will `foregather' when he returns. He's an
unpleasant beggar."

A few days later Mrs. Brent, returning from a call on Mrs.
Charley Jenkins, was passed by a carriage whose liveries she
recognised half way up the village street. It was the carriage from
Dunholm Castle. Lord and Lady Dunholm and Lord Westholt sat in it.
They were, of course, going to call at the Court. Miss Vanderpoel
was beginning to draw people. She naturally would. She would be
likely to make quite a difference in the neighbourhood now that it
had heard of her and Lady Anstruthers had been seen driving with her,
evidently no longer an unvisitable invalid, but actually decently
clothed and in her right mind. Mrs. Brent slackened her steps that
she might have the pleasure of receiving and responding gracefully to
salutations from the important personages in the landau. She felt
that the Dunholms were important. There were earldoms and earldoms,
and that of Dunholm was dignified and of distinction.

A common-looking young man on a bicycle, who had wheeled into
the village with the carriage, riding alongside it for a hundred
yards or so, stopped before the Clock Inn and dismounted, just as
Mrs. Brent neared him. He saw her looking after the equipage, and
lifting his cap spoke to her civilly.

"This is Stornham village, ain't it, ma'am?" he inquired.

"Yes, my man." His costume and general aspect seemed to
indicate that he was of the class one addressed as "my man," though
there was something a little odd about him.

"Thank you. That wasn't Miss Vanderpoel's eldest sister in that
carriage, was it?"

"Miss Vanderpoel's----" Mrs. Brent hesitated. "Do you mean Lady
Anstruthers?"

"I'd forgotten her name. I know Miss Vanderpoel's eldest sister
lives at Stornham--Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter."

"Lady Anstruthers' younger sister is a Miss Vanderpoel, and she
is visiting at Stornham Court now." Mrs. Brent could not help
adding, curiously, "Why do you ask?"

"I am going to see her. I'm an American."

Mrs. Brent coughed to cover a slight gasp. She had heard
remarkable things of the democratic customs of America. It was
painful not to be able to ask questions.

"The lady in the carriage was the Countess of Dunholm," she said
rather grandly. "They are going to the Court to call on Miss
Vanderpoel."

"Then Miss Vanderpoel's there yet. That's all right. Thank
you, ma'am," and lifting his cap again he turned into the little
public house.

The Dunholm party had been accustomed on their rare visits to
Stornham to be received by the kind of man-servant in the kind of
livery which is a manifest, though unwilling, confession. The men
who threw open the doors were of regulation height, well dressed, and
of trained bearing. The entrance hall had lost its hopeless
shabbiness. It was a complete and picturesquely luxurious thing.
The change suggested magic. The magic which had been used, Lord
Dunholm reflected, was the simplest and most powerful on earth.
Given surroundings, combined with a gift for knowing values of form
and colour, if you have the power to spend thousands of guineas on
tiger skins, Oriental rugs, and other beauties, barrenness is easily
transformed.

The drawing-room wore a changed aspect, and at a first glance it
was to be seen that in poor little Lady Anstruthers, as she had
generally been called, there was to be noted alteration also. In her
case the change, being in its first stages, could not perhaps be yet
called transformation, but, aided by softly pretty arrangement of
dress and hair, a light in her eyes, and a suggestion of pink under
her skin, one recalled that she had once been a pretty little woman,
and that after all she was only about thirty-two years old

That her sister, Miss Vanderpoel, had beauty, it was not
necessary to hesitate in deciding. Neither Lord Dunholm nor his wife
nor their son did hesitate. A girl with long limbs an alluring
profile, and extraordinary black lashes set round lovely Irish-blue
eyes, possesses physical capital not to be argued about.

She was not one of the curious, exotic little creatures, whose
thin, though sometimes rather sweet, and always gay, high- pitched
young voices Lord Dunholm had been so especially struck by in the
early days of the American invasion. Her voice had a tone one would
be likely to remember with pleasure. How well she moved--how well
her black head was set on her neck! Yes, she was of the new
type--the later generation.

These amazing, oddly practical people had evolved it-- planned
it, perhaps, bought--figuratively speaking--the architects and
material to design and build it--bought them in whatever country they
found them, England, France, Italy Germany--pocketing them coolly and
carrying them back home to develop, complete, and send forth into the
world when their invention was a perfected thing. Struck by the
humour of his fancy, Lord Dunholm found himself smiling into the
Irish-blue eyes. They smiled back at him in a way which warmed his
heart. There were no pauses in the conversation which followed. In
times past, calls at Stornham had generally held painfully blank
moments. Lady Dunholm was as pleased as her husband. A really
charming girl was an enormous acquisition to the neighbourhood.

Westholt, his father saw, had found even more than the story of
old Doby's pipe had prepared him to expect.

Country calls were not usually interesting or stimulating, and
this one was. Lord Dunholm laid subtly brilliant plans to lead Miss
Vanderpoel to talk of her native land and her views of it. He knew
that she would say things worth hearing. Incidentally one gathered
picturesque detail. To have vibrated between the two continents
since her thirteenth year, to have spent a few years at school in one
country, a few years in another, and yet a few years more in still
another, as part of an arranged educational plan; to have crossed the
Atlantic for the holidays, and to have journeyed thousands of miles
with her father in his private car; to make the visits of a man of
great schemes to his possessions of mines, railroads, and lands which
were almost principalities--these things had been merely details of
her life, adding interest and variety, it was true, but seeming the
merely normal outcome of existence. They were normal to Vanderpoels
and others of their class who were abnormalities in themselves when
compared with the rest of the world.

Her own very lack of any abnormality reached, in Lord Dunholm's
mind, the highest point of illustration of the phase of life she
beautifully represented--for beautiful he felt its rare charms
were.

When they strolled out to look at the gardens he found talk with
her no less a stimulating thing. She told her story of Kedgers, and
showed the chosen spot where thickets of lilies were to bloom, with
the giants lifting white archangel trumpets above them in the
centre.

"He can be trusted," she said. "I feel sure he can be trusted.
He loves them. He could not love them so much and not be able to
take care of them." And as she looked at him in frank appeal for
sympathy, Lord Dunholm felt that for the moment she looked like a
tall, queenly child.

But pleased as he was, he presently gave up his place at her
side to Westholt. He must not be a selfish old fellow and monopolise
her. He hoped they would see each other often, he said charmingly.
He thought she would be sure to like Dunholm, which was really a
thoroughly English old place, marked by all the features she seemed
so much attracted by. There were some beautiful relics of the past
there, and some rather shocking ones--certain dungeons, for instance,
and a gallows mount, on which in good old times the family gallows
had stood. This had apparently been a working adjunct to the
domestic arrangements of every respectable family, and that
irritating persons should dangle from it had been a simple domestic
necessity, if one were to believe old stories.

"It was then that nobles were regarded with respect," he said,
with his fine smile. "In the days when a man appeared with clang of
arms and with javelins and spears before, and donjon keeps in the
background, the attitude of bent knees and awful reverence were the
inevitable results. When one could hang a servant on one's own
private gallows, or chop off his hand for irreverence or
disobedience--obedience and reverence were a rule. Now, a month's
notice is the extremity of punishment, and the old pomp of armed
servitors suggests comic opera. But we can show you relics of it at
Dunholm."

He joined his wife and began at once to make himself so
delightful to Rosy that she ceased to be afraid of him, and ended by
talking almost gaily of her London visit.

Betty and Westholt walked together. The afternoon being lovely,
they had all sauntered into the park to look at certain views, and
the sun was shining between the trees. Betty thought the young man
almost as charming as his father, which was saying much. She had
fallen wholly in love with Lord Dunholm--with his handsome, elderly
face, his voice, his erect bearing, his fine smile, his attraction of
manner, his courteous ease and wit. He was one of the men who stood
for the best of all they had been born to represent. Her own father,
she felt, stood for the best of all such an American as himself
should be. Lord Westholt would in time be what his father was. He
had inherited from him good looks, good feeling, and a sense of
humour. Yes, he had been given from the outset all that the other
man had been denied. She was thinking of Mount Dunstan as "the other
man," and spoke of him.

"You know Lord Mount Dunstan?" she said.

Westholt hesitated slightly.

"Yes--and no," he answered, after the hesitation. "No one knows
him very well. You have not met him?" with a touch of surprise in
his tone.

"He was a passenger on the Meridiana when I last crossed the
Atlantic. There was a slight accident and we were thrown together
for a few moments. Afterwards I met him by chance again. I did not
know who he was."

Lord Westholt showed signs of hesitation anew. In fact, he was
rather disturbed. She evidently did not know anything whatever of
the Mount Dunstans. She would not be likely to hear the details of
the scandal which had obliterated them, as it were, from the decent
world.

The present man, though he had not openly been mixed up with the
hideous thing, had borne the brand because he had not proved himself
to possess any qualities likely to recommend him. It was generally
understood that he was a bad lot also. To such a man the allurements
such a young woman as Miss Vanderpoel would present would be
extraordinary. It was unfortunate that she should have been thrown
in his way. At the same time it was not possible to state the case
clearly during one's first call on a beautiful stranger.

"His going to America was rather spirited," said the mellow
voice beside him. "I thought only Americans took their fates in
their hands in that way. For a man of his class to face a rancher's
life means determination. It means the spirit----" with a low little
laugh at the leap of her imagination--"of the men who were Mount
Dunstans in early days and went forth to fight for what they meant to
have. He went to fight. He ought to have won. He will win some
day."

"I do not know about fighting," Lord Westholt answered. Had the
fellow been telling her romantic stories? "The general impression
was that he went to America to amuse himself."

"No, he did not do that," said Betty, with simple finality. "A
sheep ranch is not amusing----" She stopped short and stood still
for a moment. They had been walking down the avenue, and she stopped
because her eyes had been caught by a figure half sitting, half lying
in the middle of the road, a prostrate bicycle near it. It was the
figure of a cheaply dressed young man, who, as she looked, seemed to
make an ineffectual effort to rise.

"Is that man ill?" she exclaimed. "I think he must be." They
went towards him at once, and when they reached him he lifted a dazed
white face, down which a stream of blood was trickling from a cut on
his forehead. He was, in fact, very white indeed, and did not seem
to know what he was doing.

"I am afraid you are hurt," Betty said, and as she spoke the
rest of the party joined them. The young man vacantly smiled, and
making an unconscious-looking pass across his face with his hand,
smeared the blood over his features painfully. Betty kneeled down,
and drawing out her handkerchief, lightly wiped the gruesome smears
away. Lord Westholt saw what had happened, having given a look at
the bicycle.

"His chain broke as he was coming down the incline, and as he
fell he got a nasty knock on this stone," touching with his foot a
rather large one, which had evidently fallen from some cartload of
building material.

The young man, still vacantly smiling, was fumbling at his
breast pocket. He began to talk incoherently in good, nasal New
York, at the mere sound of which Lady Anstruthers made a little
yearning step forward.

"Superior any other," he muttered. "Tabulator spacer-- marginal
release key--call your 'tention--instantly--'justable --Delkoff--no
equal on market." And having found what he had fumbled for, he
handed a card to Miss Vanderpoel and sank unconscious on her
breast.

"Let me support him, Miss Vanderpoel," said Westholt, starting
forward.

"Never mind, thank you," said Betty. "If he has fainted I
suppose he must be laid flat on the ground. Will you please to read
the card.

It was the card Mount Dunstan had read the day before.

                        J. BURRIDGE & SON,              
         DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO.               BROADWAY, NEW YORK.     
G. SELDEN.

"He is probably G. Selden," said Westholt.
"Travelling in the interests of his firm, poor chap. The clue is not
of much immediate use, however."

They were fortunately not far from the house, and Westholt went
back quickly to summon servants and send for the village doctor. The
Dunholms were kindly sympathetic, and each of the party lent a
handkerchief to staunch the bleeding. Lord Dunholm helped Miss
Vanderpoel to lay the young man down carefully.

"I am afraid," he said; "I am really afraid his leg is broken.
It was twisted under him. What can be done with him?"

Miss Vanderpoel looked at her sister.

"Will you allow him to be carried to the house temporarily,
Rosy?" she asked. "There is apparently nothing else to be done."

"Yes, yes," said Lady Anstruthers. "How could one send him
away, poor fellow! Let him be carried to the house."

Miss Vanderpoel smiled into Lord Dunholm's much approving,
elderly eyes.

"G. Selden is a compatriot," she said. "Perhaps he heard I was
here and came to sell me a typewriter."

Lord Westholt returning with two footmen and a light mattress,
G. Selden was carried with cautious care to the house. The afternoon
sun, breaking through the branches of the ancestral oaks, kindly
touched his keen-featured, white young face. Lord Dunholm and Lord
Westholt each lent a friendly hand, and Miss Vanderpoel, keeping
near, once or twice wiped away an insistent trickle of blood which
showed itself from beneath the handkerchiefs. Lady Dunholm followed
with Lady Anstruthers.

Afterwards, during his convalescence, G. Selden frequently felt
with regret that by his unconsciousness of the dignity of his cortege
at the moment he had missed feeling himself to be for once in a
position he would have designated as "out of sight" in the novelty of
its importance. To have beheld him, borne by nobles and liveried
menials, accompanied by ladies of title, up the avenue of an English
park on his way to be cared for in baronial halls, would, he knew,
have added a joy to the final moments of his grandmother, which the
consolations of religion could scarcely have met equally in
competition. His own point of view, however, would not, it is true,
have been that of the old woman in the black net cap and purple
ribbons, but of a less reverent nature. His enjoyment, in fact,
would have been based upon that transatlantic sense of humour, whose
soul is glee at the incompatible, which would have been full fed by
the incongruity of "Little Willie being yanked along by a bunch of
earls, and Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughters following the funeral."
That he himself should have been unconscious of the situation seemed
to him like "throwing away money."

The doctor arriving after he had been put to bed found slight
concussion of the brain and a broken leg. With Lady Anstruthers'
kind permission, it would certainly be best that he should remain for
the present where he was. So, in a bedroom whose windows looked out
upon spreading lawns and broad-branched trees, he was as comfortably
established as was possible. G. Selden, through the capricious
intervention of Fate, if he had not "got next" to Reuben S.
Vanderpoel himself, had most undisputably "got next" to his favourite
daughter.

As the Dunholm carriage rolled down the avenue there reigned for
a few minutes a reflective silence. It was Lady Dunholm who broke
it. "That," she said in her softly decided voice, "that is a nice
girl."

Lord Dunholm's agreeable, humorous smile flickered into
evidence.

"That is it," he said. "Thank you, Eleanor, for supplying me
with a quite delightful early Victorian word. I believe I wanted it.
She is a beauty and she is clever. She is a number of other
things--but she is also a nice girl. If you will allow me to say so,
I have fallen in love with her."

"If you will allow me to say so," put in Westholt, "so have
I--quite fatally."

"That," said his father, with speculation in his eye, "is more
serious."