Chapter L. The Primeval Thing

The Shuttle

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

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.