Small families or large ones, newly born infants or newly buried ones, old women with "bad legs" and old men who needed comforts, equally touched her heart.She innocently bestowed sovereigns where an Englishwoman would have known that half-crowns would have been sufficient.As the vicaress was her almoner that lady felt her importance rapidly on the increase.When she left a cottage saying, "I'll speak to young Lady Anstruthers about you," the good woman of the house curtsied low and her husband touched his forehead respectfully.
But this did not advance the fortunes of Sir Nigel, who personally required of her very different things.Two weeks after her arrival at Stornham, Rosalie began to see that somehow she was regarded as a person almost impudently in the wrong.
It appeared that if she had been an English girl she would have been quite different, that she would have been an advantage instead of a detriment.As an American she was a detriment.
That seemed to go without saying.She tried to do everything she was told, and learn something from each cold insinuation.She did not know that her very amenability and timidity were her undoing.Sir Nigel and his mother thoroughly enjoyed themselves at her expense.They knew they could say anything they chose, and that at the most she would only break down into crying and afterwards apologise for being so badly behaved.If some practical, strong-minded person had been near to defend her she might have been rescued promptly and her tyrants routed.But she was a young girl, tender of heart and weak of nature.She used to cry a great deal when she was alone, and when she wrote to her mother she was too frightened to tell the truth concerning her unhappiness.
"Oh, if I could just see some of them!" she would wail to herself."If I could just see mother or father or anybody from New York! Oh, I know I shall never see New York again, or Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Central Park--I never --never--never shall!" And she would grovel among her pillows, burying her face and half stifling herself lest her sobs should be heard.Her feeling for her husband had become one of terror and repulsion.She was almost more afraid of his patronising, affectionate moments than she was of his temper.
His conjugal condescensions made her feel vaguely--without knowing why--as if she were some lower order of little animal.
American women, he said, had no conception of wifely duties and affection.He had a great deal to say on the subject of wifely duty.It was part of her duty as a wife to be entirely satisfied with his society, and to be completely happy in the pleasure it afforded her.It was her wifely duty not to talk about her own family and palpitatingly expect letters by every American mail.He objected intensely to this letter writing and receiving, and his mother shared his prejudices.
"You have married an Englishman," her ladyship said.
"You have put it out of his power to marry an Englishwoman, and the least consideration you can show is to let New York and Nine-hundredth street remain upon the other side of the Atlantic and not insist on dragging them into Stornham Court."The Dowager Lady Anstruthers was very fine in her picture of her mental condition, when she realised, as she seemed periodically to do, that it was no longer possible for her son to make a respectable marriage with a woman of his own nation.The unadorned fact was that both she and Sir Nigel were infuriated by the simplicity which made Rosalie slow in comprehending that it was proper that the money her father allowed her should be placed in her husband's hands, and left there with no indelicate questioning.If she had been an English girl matters would have been made plain to her from the first and arranged satisfactorily before her marriage.Sir Nigel's mother considered that he had played the fool, and would not believe that New York fathers were such touchy, sentimental idiots as not to know what was expected of them.
They wasted no time, however, in coming to the point, and in a measure it was the vicaress who aided them.Not she entirely, however.
Since her mother-in-law's first mention of a possible son whose wife would eventually thrust her from her seat at the head of the table, Rosalie had several times heard this son referred to.It struck her that in England such things seemed discussed with more freedom than in America.She had never heard a young woman's possible family arranged for and made the subject of conversation in the more crude atmosphere of New York.It made her feel rather awkward at first.Then she began to realise that the son was part of her wifely duty also; that she was expected to provide one, and that he was in some way expected to provide for the estate--to rehabilitate it--and that this was because her father, being a rich man, would provide for him.It had also struck her that in England there was a tendency to expectation that someone would "provide" for someone else, that relatives even by marriage were supposed to "make allowances" on which it was quite proper for other persons to live.Rosalie had been accustomed to a community in which even rich men worked, and in which young and able-bodied men would have felt rather indignant if aunts or uncles had thought it necessary to pension them off as if they had been impotent paupers.It was Rosalie's son who was to be "provided for" in this case, and who was to "provide for" his father.