“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 illused 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.
CHAPTER V
ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC
In the course of twelve years the Shuttle had woven steadily and—its movements lubricated by time and custom—with increasing rapidity. Threads of commerce it caught up and shot to and fro, with threads of literature and art, threads of life drawn from one shore to the other and back again, until they were bound in the fabric of its weaving. Coldness there had been between both lands, broad divergence of taste and thought, argument across seas, sometimes resentment, but the web in Fate’s hands broadened and strengthened and held fast. Coldness faintly warmed despite itself, taste and thought drawn into nearer contact, reflecting upon their divergences, grew into tolerance and the knowledge that the diverging, seen more clearly, was not so broad; argument coming within speaking distance reasoned itself to logical and practical conclusions. Problems which had stirred anger began to find solutions. Books, in the first place, did perhaps more than all else. Cheap, pirated editions of English works, much quarrelled over by authors and publishers, being scattered over the land, brought before American eyes soft, home-like pictures of places which were, after all was said and done, the homes of those who read of them, at least in the sense of having been the birthplaces of fathers or grandfathers. Some subtle, far-reaching power of nature caused a stirring of the blood, a vague, unexpressed yearning and lingering over pages which depicted sweet, green lanes, broad acres rich with centuries of nourishment and care; grey church towers, red roofs, and village children playing before cottage doors. None of these things were new to those who pondered over them, kinsmen had dwelt on memories of them in their fireside talk, and their children had seen them in fancy and in dreams. Old grievances having had time to fade away and take on less poignant colour, the stirring of the blood stirred also imaginations, and wakened something akin to homesickness, though no man called the feeling by its name. And this, perhaps, was the strongest cord the Shuttle wove and was the true meaning of its power. Being drawn by it, Americans in increasing numbers turned their faces towards the older land. Gradually it was discovered that it was the simplest affair in the world to drive down to the wharves and take a steamer which landed one, after a more or less interesting voyage, in Liverpool, or at some other convenient port. From there one went to London, or Paris, or Rome; in fact, whither-soever one’s fancy guided, but first or last it always led the traveller to the treading of green, velvet English turf. And once standing on such velvet, both men and women, looking about them, felt, despite themselves, the strange old thrill which some of them half resented and some warmly loved.