LADY JANE GREY
It seemed upon the whole even absurd that after a shock so awful and a
panic wild enough to cause people to expose their very souls--for
there were, of course, endless anecdotes to be related afterwards,
illustrative of grotesque terror, cowardice, and utter abandonment
of all shadows of convention--that all should end in an anticlimax of
trifling danger, upon which, in a day or two, jokes might be made. Even
the tramp steamer had not been seriously injured, though its injuries
were likely to be less easy of repair than those of the Meridiana.
“Still,” as a passenger remarked, when she steamed into the dock at
Liverpool, “we might all be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean
this morning. Just think what columns there would have been in the
newspapers. Imagine Miss Vanderpoel's being drowned.”
“I was very rude to Louise, when I found her wringing her hands over
you, and I was rude to Blanche,” Bettina said to Mrs. Worthington. “In
fact I believe I was rude to a number of people that night. I am rather
ashamed.”
“You called me a donkey,” said Blanche, “but it was the best thing you
could have done. You frightened me into putting on my shoes, instead of
trying to comb my hair with them. It was startling to see you march into
the stateroom, the only person who had not been turned into a gibbering
idiot. I know I was gibbering, and I know Marie was.”
“We both gibbered at the red-haired man when he came in,” said Marie.
“We clutched at him and gibbered together. Where is the red-haired man,
Betty? Perhaps we made him ill. I've not seen him since that moment.”
“He is in the second cabin, I suppose,” Bettina answered, “but I have
not seen him, either.”
“We ought to get up a testimonial and give it to him, because he did
not gibber,” said Blanche. “He was as rude and as sensible as you were,
Betty.”
They did not see him again, in fact, at that time. He had reasons of his
own for preferring to remain unseen. The truth was that the nearer his
approach to his native shores, the nastier, he was perfectly conscious,
his temper became, and he did not wish to expose himself by any incident
which might cause him stupidly and obviously to lose it.
The maid, Louise, however, recognised him among her companions in the
third-class carriage in which she travelled to town. To her mind, whose
opinions were regulated by neatly arranged standards, he looked morose
and shabbily dressed. Some of the other second-cabin passengers had made
themselves quite smart in various, not too distinguished ways. He had
not changed his dress at all, and the large valise upon the luggage
rack was worn and battered as if with long and rough usage. The woman
wondered a little if he would address her, and inquire after the health
of her mistress. But, being an astute creature, she only wondered this
for an instant, the next she realised that, for one reason or another,
it was clear that he was not of the tribe of second-rate persons who
pursue an accidental acquaintance with their superiors in fortune,
through sociable interchange with their footmen or maids.
When the train slackened its speed at the platform of the station, he
got up, reaching down his valise and leaving the carriage, strode to the
nearest hansom cab, waving the porter aside.
“Charing Cross,” he called out to the driver, jumped in, and was rattled
away.
. . . . .
During the years which had passed since Rosalie Vanderpoel first came to
London as Lady Anstruthers, numbers of huge luxurious hotels had grown
up, principally, as it seemed, that Americans should swarm into them
and live at an expense which reminded them of their native land. Such
establishments would never have been built for English people, whose
habit it is merely to “stop” at hotels, not to LIVE in them. The
tendency of the American is to live in his hotel, even though his
intention may be only to remain in it two days. He is accustomed to
doing himself extremely well in proportion to his resources, whether
they be great or small, and the comforts, as also the luxuries, he
allows himself and his domestic appendages are in a proportion much
higher in its relation to these resources than it would be were he
English, French, German, or Italians. As a consequence, he expects, when
he goes forth, whether holiday-making or on business, that his hostelry
shall surround him, either with holiday luxuries and gaiety, or with
such lavishness of comfort as shall alleviate the wear and tear of
business cares and fatigues. The rich man demands something almost as
good as he has left at home, the man of moderate means something much
better. Certain persons given to regarding public wants and desires as
foundations for the fortune of business schemes having discovered
this, the enormous and sumptuous hotel evolved itself from their astute
knowledge of common facts. At the entrances of these hotels,
omnibuses and cabs, laden with trunks and packages frequently
bearing labels marked with red letters “S. S. So-and-So,
Stateroom--Hold--Baggage-room,” drew up and deposited their contents
and burdens at regular intervals. Then men with keen, and often humorous
faces or almost painfully anxious ones, their exceedingly well-dressed
wives, and more or less attractive and vivacious-looking daughters,
their eager little girls, and un-English-looking little boys, passed
through the corridors in flocks and took possession of suites of rooms,
sometimes for twenty-four hours, sometimes for six weeks.
The Worthingtons took possession of such a suite in such a hotel.
Bettina Vanderpoel's apartments faced the Embankment. From her windows
she could look out at the broad splendid, muddy Thames, slowly rolling
in its grave, stately way beneath its bridges, bearing with it heavy
lumbering barges, excited tooting little penny steamers and craft
of various shapes and sizes, the errand or burden of each meaning a
different story.
It had been to Bettina one of her pleasures of the finest epicurean
flavour to reflect that she had never had any brief and superficial
knowledge of England, as she had never been to the country at all in
those earlier years, when her knowledge of places must necessarily have
been always the incomplete one of either a schoolgirl traveller or
a schoolgirl resident, whose views were limited by the walls of
restriction built around her.
If relations of the usual ease and friendliness had existed between Lady
Anstruthers and her family, Bettina would, doubtless, have known her
sister's adopted country well. It would have been a thing so natural
as to be almost inevitable, that she would have crossed the Channel to
spend her holidays at Stornham. As matters had stood, however, the child
herself, in the days when she had been a child, had had most definite
private views on the subject of visits to England. She had made up her
young mind absolutely that she would not, if it were decently possible
to avoid it, set her foot upon English soil until she was old enough
and strong enough to carry out what had been at first her passionately
romantic plans for discovering and facing the truth of the reason for
the apparent change in Rosy. When she went to England, she would go to
Rosy. As she had grown older, having in the course of education and
travel seen most Continental countries, she had liked to think that
she had saved, put aside for less hasty consumption and more delicate
appreciation of flavours, as it were, the country she was conscious she
cared for most.
“It is England we love, we Americans,” she had said to her father. “What
could be more natural? We belong to it--it belongs to us. I could never
be convinced that the old tie of blood does not count. All nationalities
have come to us since we became a nation, but most of us in the
beginning came from England. We are touching about it, too. We trifle
with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalise over Italy and
ecstacise over Spain--but England we love. How it moves us when we go
to it, how we gush if we are simple and effusive, how we are stirred
imaginatively if we are of the perceptive class. I have heard the
commonest little half-educated woman say the prettiest, clumsy,
emotional things about what she has seen there. A New England
schoolma'am, who has made a Cook's tour, will almost have tears in her
voice as she wanders on with her commonplaces about hawthorn hedges and
thatched cottages and white or red farms. Why are we not unconsciously
pathetic about German cottages and Italian villas? Because we have not,
in centuries past, had the habit of being born in them. It is only
an English cottage and an English lane, whether white with hawthorn
blossoms or bare with winter, that wakes in us that little yearning,
grovelling tenderness that is so sweet. It is only nature calling us
home.”
Mrs. Worthington came in during the course of the morning to find her
standing before her window looking out at the Thames, the Embankment,
the hansom cabs themselves, with an absolutely serious absorption. This
changed to a smile as she turned to greet her.
“I am delighted,” she said. “I could scarcely tell you how much. The
impression is all new and I am excited a little by everything. I am so
intensely glad that I have saved it so long and that I have known it
only as part of literature. I am even charmed that it rains, and that
the cabmen's mackintoshes are shining and wet.” She drew forward a
chair, and Mrs. Worthington sat down, looking at her with involuntary
admiration.
“You look as if you were delighted,” she said. “Your eyes--you have
amazing eyes, Betty! I am trying to picture to myself what Lady
Anstruthers will feel when she sees you. What were you like when she
married?”
Bettina sat down, smiling and looking, indeed, quite incredibly lovely.
She was capable of a warmth and a sweetness which were as embracing as
other qualities she possessed were powerful.
“I was eight years old,” she said. “I was a rude little girl, with
long legs and a high, determined voice. I know I was rude. I remember
answering back.”
“I seem to have heard that you did not like your brother-in-law, and
that you were opposed to the marriage.”
“Imagine the undisciplined audacity of a child of eight 'opposing' the
marriage of her grown-up sister. I was quite capable of it. You see in
those days we had not been trained at all (one had only been allowed
tremendous liberty), and interfered conversationally with one's elders
and betters at any moment. I was an American little girl, and American
little girls were really--they really were!” with a laugh, whose musical
sound was after all wholly non-committal.
“You did not treat Sir Nigel Anstruthers as one of your betters.”
“He was one of my elders, at all events, and becomingness of bearing
should have taught me to hold my little tongue. I am giving some thought
now to the kind of thing I must invent as a suitable apology when I find
him a really delightful person, full of virtues and accomplishments.
Perhaps he has a horror of me.”
“I should like to be present at your first meeting,” Mrs. Worthington
reflected. “You are going down to Stornham to-morrow?”
“That is my plan. When I write to you on my arrival, I will tell you if
I encountered the horror.” Then, with a swift change of subject and a
lifting of her slender, velvet line of eyebrow, “I am only deploring
that I have not time to visit the Tower.”
Mrs. Worthington was betrayed into a momentary glance of uncertainty,
almost verging in its significance on a gasp.
“The Tower? Of London? Dear Betty!”
Bettina's laugh was mellow with revelation.
“Ah!” she said. “You don't know my point of view; it's plain enough.
You see, when I delight in these things, I think I delight most in my
delight in them. It means that I am almost having the kind of feeling
the fresh American souls had who landed here thirty years ago and
revelled in the resemblance to Dickens's characters they met with in
the streets, and were historically thrilled by the places where people's
heads were chopped off. Imagine their reflections on Charles I., when
they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that poor last
word was uttered--'Remember.' And think of their joy when each crossing
sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones in
the slightest disguise.”
“You don't mean to say----” Mrs. Worthington was vaguely awakening to
the situation.
“That the charm of my visit, to myself, is that I realise that I am
rather like that. I have positively preserved something because I have
kept away. You have been here so often and know things so well, and you
were even so sophisticated when you began, that you have never really
had the flavours and emotions. I am sophisticated, too, sophisticated
enough to have cherished my flavours as a gourmet tries to save the
bouquet of old wine. You think that the Tower is the pleasure of
housemaids on a Bank Holiday. But it quite makes me quiver to think
of it,” laughing again. “That I laugh, is the sign that I am not
as beautifully, freshly capable of enjoyment as those genuine first
Americans were, and in a way I am sorry for it.”
Mrs. Worthington laughed also, and with an enjoyment.
“You are very clever, Betty,” she said.
“No, no,” answered Bettina, “or, if I am, almost everybody is clever in
these days. We are nearly all of us comparatively intelligent.”
“You are very interesting at all events, and the Anstruthers will exult
in you. If they are dull in the country, you will save them.”
“I am very interested, at all events,” said Bettina, “and interest like
mine is quite passe. A clever American who lives in England, and is the
pet of duchesses, once said to me (he always speaks of Americans as if
they were a distant and recently discovered species), 'When they first
came over they were a novelty. Their enthusiasm amused people, but now,
you see, it has become vieux jeu. Young women, whose specialty was to be
excited by the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, are not novelties
any longer. In fact, it's been done, and it's done FOR as a specialty.'
And I am excited about the Tower of London. I may be able to restrain
my feelings at the sight of the Beef Eaters, but they will upset me a
little, and I must brace myself, I must indeed.”
“Truly, Betty?” said Mrs. Worthington, regarding her with curiosity,
arising from a faint doubt of her entire seriousness, mingled with a
fainter doubt of her entire levity.
Betty flung out her hands in a slight, but very involuntary-looking,
gesture, and shook her head.
“Ah!” she said, “it was all TRUE, you know. They were all horribly
real--the things that were shuddered over and sentimentalised about.
Sophistication, combined with imagination, makes them materialise again,
to me, at least, now I am here. The gulf between a historical figure and
a man or woman who could bleed and cry out in human words was broad when
one was at school. Lady Jane Grey, for instance, how nebulous she was
and how little one cared. She seemed invented merely to add a detail
to one's lesson in English history. But, as we drove across Waterloo
Bridge, I caught a glimpse of the Tower, and what do you suppose I began
to think of? It was monstrous. I saw a door in the Tower and the stone
steps, and the square space, and in the chill clear, early morning a
little slender, helpless girl led out, a little, fair, real thing like
Rosy, all alone--everyone she belonged to far away, not a man near
who dared utter a word of pity when she turned her awful, meek, young,
desperate eyes upon him. She was a pious child, and, no doubt, she
lifted her eyes to the sky. I wonder if it was blue and its blueness
broke her heart, because it looked as if it might have pitied such a
young, patient girl thing led out in the fair morning to walk to the
hacked block and give her trembling pardon to the black-visored man with
the axe, and then 'commending her soul to God' to stretch her sweet slim
neck out upon it.”
“Oh, Betty, dear!” Mrs. Worthington expostulated.
Bettina sprang to her and took her hand in pretty appeal.
“I beg pardon! I beg pardon, I really do,” she exclaimed. “I did
not intend deliberately to be painful. But that--beneath the
sophistication--is something of what I bring to England.”