After this Bettina went about her preparations for departure with a
spirit of calm and collectedness which came from the knowledge of
herself, which she had at last fully accepted. Hundreds of times in
these last few days her mother's words had come back to her: "The day
will come when you will know what you are incapable even of imagining
now--what is the one perfect love and complete union that can ever be
between two human beings.... Test the world, if you will--and your
nature demands that you shall test it--but you will live to say one
day: 'My mother knew. My mother's words have come true.'"
It was even so. She knew now, at last, and the knowledge had come to
her when inexorable necessity compelled her to separate herself
forever from the man who, not suddenly, but by a system of gradual
evolution--from the crude emotions of her girlhood through the
growing consciousness of later years--had now manifested himself to
her as all her heart could desire, all her spirit could crave, all
her mature womanhood could need. She realized that he had long been
this to her, but with a thick veil between herself and him which had
hid the truth from her. The reading of the letter given her by Mr.
Cortlin had torn that veil apart, and she saw him as he was, the man
of her ideal. She did not, at the same moment, see her own heart as
it was. This vision had come to her with her renewed intercourse with
Horace, who had appeared before her now the ripe product of the noble
possibilities which she had vaguely perceived in him once, when she
had cared too little to think deeply of him in any way.
Oh, to have kept the place she had once had at his dear side! To have
shared with him the privations of a life that would have been narrow
and obscure indeed compared with the one which she had known in its
stead, but, oh, how rich in the way she had now come to count riches!
Thoughts like these she had to fight against. Perhaps in the end they
would conquer, and would hunt her to the death; but now, until she
could get out of the country, she must put them down.
She had only a few days left, and she determined to devote a part of
these to some farewell visits among the tenants. As far as she had
been able to do, she had made friends with these poor folk, and had
given what she could to relieve their necessities; but, in comparison
with what was needed, the money at her command had seemed pitifully
small.
When Lady Hurdly, dressed in her deep widow's mourning, descended the
steps of her stately residence and entered the waiting carriage,
whose black-liveried servants saluted her respectfully, she had a
consciousness that servants and tenants alike must feel a certain
commiseration for the great lady, such as they had known her, now
sunk to poverty as well as obscurity. This feeling made her manner a
little colder and prouder then usual as she sat alone in the sunshine
of a lovely autumn morning and was driven between the beautiful
English hedgerows and through the fertile fields which she had
learned to love. How soon would all be changed for her! And changed
to what? The isolated exile of a place filled with the haunting
memories of the past--her mother, whom she had lost forever, and her
young lover, who was as absolutely lost to her.
Strangely to herself, it was the latter that she felt to be the
keener pain. To the former she was reconciled; as we do, sooner or
later, reconcile ourselves to the inevitable; but the supreme sting
of this other grief was that she felt it need not have been. Sitting
there in her carriage, the object of much eager attention, she felt
so desolate and wretched that it was with difficulty that she kept
back her tears.
She dreaded the ordeal before her. She felt that she must take leave
of these people and say a word of kindness to them, since she was so
miserably unable to do more; but these visits were always depressing.
Since the tenants had discovered that they had a sympathetic listener
in her, they had luxuriated in the pouring out of their sorrows. Of
course they had not ventured to accuse her husband of being connected
with them, but the lesson was one that he who ran might read.
So, when the carriage stopped at the door of the first cottage, she
had made up her mind that she could not stand much in the way of
these miserable confidences to-day, and would make her visits short.
But when she entered the house she was conscious of a total change of
atmosphere. Every creature in the room gave proof of this, according
to his or her kind. The old woman who sat knitting by the hearth
looked up at her with a dim twinkle in the eyes that had heretofore
expressed nothing but a consciousness that things were bad and
getting worse; and the children, who, indeed, had taken little count
of the depression of their elders, now manifestly shared their relief
from it. It was their mother who, with a strange smile of hope on her
careworn face and a fervent clasping together of her work-worn hands,
made the explanation to the visitor.
But this explanation, when it had been heard, was almost more of an
ordeal to Bettina than the one which she had feared. Certainly it
made a stronger demand upon her power of self-control. For the
key-note of it all was Horace. He had been here before her, and had
done, or promised to have done, all that she had so passionately
wished to do. His name was on their lips continually; even the little
children lisped it. It was "his lordship this" and "his lordship
that," in a way that furnished a strange contrast to the studied
avoidance of the word under former conditions.
Somehow, glad as she was, it was hard for Bettina to bear. In the
midst of the accounts of what his lordship had done and said, and
how he was to right all their wrongs and make everybody happy, she
got up and took a hurried leave.
What was the use of her staying here? What was a little sympathetic
feeling, more or less, to these wretchedly poor creatures? It was
their material needs that they wished satisfied, and a stronger hand
than hers was at work on these. And if--as seemed so plain, as she
could so well imagine from her own knowledge of him--he was able and
willing to give them the sympathy and interest as well as the
practical help they needed, where was any use for her? There was
none--nobody needed her, she told herself, desperately, and the
sooner she lost herself in the oblivion of America the better.
Each cottage that she visited showed the same metamorphosis in its
inmates. A lame boy to whom she had once given a pair of crutches had
a new wheel-chair, and the crutches were thrown in a corner. A sick
child for whom she had bought some prepared food, which it had not
been able to take, had been sent off to a hospital for regular
treatment, and its poor mother was enjoying the first rest of many
years, with a consciousness that the child was better off than it
could possibly be with her. An old man who had been long bedridden,
and to whom she had sent some clean bedclothes, had been moved into
another room with complete new furnishings, while the occupant of
this room had been sent elsewhere, so that the distressing sense of
over-crowdedness for sick and well was entirely gone from the house.
In almost every cottage that she visited she saw the same evidences.
How pitiful her own efforts seemed beside these! What was heart
compared with hand? What was sympathy compared with money? And was
she so sure that she gave even the sympathy? She felt in her breast
now no sense of pity for their suffering, no consciousness even of
rejoicing in their relief. The only feeling there--and it seemed to
fill her whole heart--was pity for her own numb, gnawing
wretchedness, for which there could be no relief.
When the last hurried visit was ended, she drove home, completely
unnerved. Her black veil was lowered before her face, and though she
sat erect and composed to outward seeming, the tears rained down her
cheeks.
Her remaining days at Kingdon Hall were spent in a state of such
listlessness and inertia that Nora began to fear that she was going
to be ill. She urged her mistress to send for the doctor; but, for
answer, Bettina burst into tears, declaring that she was not ill, and
begging Nora to do everything for her that was necessary to get her
off on the steamer on which she had taken passage, as she felt unable
to do anything herself.
How the intervening hours passed she never knew; but, as if taking
part in a dream, she went through them all, and at last found herself
settled in her state-room, with Nora to take care of her, and no one
to spy on her or notice what she did. Asking Nora, as piteously as a
child, to help her to undress, she went to bed, and from that bed she
did not rise until the ship had touched another shore, and the
breadth of the world lay between herself and Horace.
How glad she would have been to lie there and sail on forever, freed
from her responsibility to the future, as she was from that to the
past!