"He is not a pretty child," sighed Mrs.Vanderpoel."Ishould have thought Rosy would have had pretty babies.
Ughtred is more like his father than his mother."She spoke to her husband later, of what Betty had said.
"What do you think she has in her mind, Reuben?" she asked.
"What Betty has in her mind is usually good sense," was his response."She will begin to talk to me about it presently.
I shall not ask questions yet.She is probably thinking: things over."She was, in truth, thinking things over, as she had been doing for some time.She had asked questions on several occasions of English people she had met abroad.But a school-girl cannot ask many questions, and though she had once met someone who knew Sir Nigel Anstruthers, it was a person who did not know him well, for the reason that she had not desired to increase her slight acquaintance.This lady was the aunt of one of Bettina's fellow pupils, and she was not aware of the girl's relationship to Sir Nigel.What Betty gathered was that her brother-in-law was regarded as a decidedly bad lot, that since his marriage to some American girl he had seemed to have money which he spent in riotous living, and that the wife, who was said to be a silly creature, was kept in the country, either because her husband did not want her in London, or because she preferred to stay at Stornham.About the wife no one appeared to know anything, in fact.
"She is rather a fool, I believe, and Sir Nigel Anstruthers is the kind of man a simpleton would be obliged to submit to,"Bettina had heard the lady say.
Her own reflections upon these comments had led her through various paths of thought.She could recall Rosalie's girlhood, and what she herself, as an unconsciously observing child, had known of her character.She remembered the simple impressionability of her mind.She had been the most amenable little creature in the world.Her yielding amiability could always be counted upon as a factor by the calculating;sweet-tempered to weakness, she could be beguiled or distressed into any course the desires of others dictated.An ill-tempered or self-pitying person could alter any line of conduct she herself wished to pursue.
"She was neither clever nor strong-minded," Betty said to herself." A man like Sir Nigel Anstruthers could make what he chose of her.I wonder what he has done to her?"Of one thing she thought she was sure.This was that Rosalie's aloofness from her family was the result of his design.
She comprehended, in her maturer years, the dislike of her childhood.She remembered a certain look in his face which she had detested.She had not known then that it was the look of a rather clever brute, who was malignant, but she knew now.
"He used to hate us all," she said to herself."He did not mean to know us when he had taken Rosalie away, and he did not intend that she should know us."She had heard rumours of cases somewhat parallel, cases in which girls' lives had become swamped in those of their husbands, and their husbands' families.And she had also heard unpleasant details of the means employed to reach the desired results.Annie Butterfield's husband had forbidden her to correspond with her American relatives.He had argued that such correspondence was disturbing to her mind, and to the domestic duties which should be every decent woman's religion.One of the occasions of his beating her had been in consequence of his finding her writing to her mother a letter blotted with tears.Husbands frequently objected to their wives' relatives, but there was a special order of European husband who opposed violently any intimacy with American relations on the practical ground that their views of a wife's position, with regard to her husband, were of a revolutionary nature.
Mrs.Vanderpoel had in her possession every letter Rosalie or her husband had ever written.Bettina asked to be allowed to read them, and one morning seated herself in her own room before a blazing fire, with the collection on a table at her side.She read them in order.Nigel's began as they went on.
They were all in one tone, formal, uninteresting, and requiring no answers.There was not a suggestion of human feeling in one of them.
"He wrote them," said Betty, "so that we could not say that he had never written."Rosalie's first epistles were affectionate, but timid.At the outset she was evidently trying to conceal the fact that she was homesick.Gradually she became briefer and more constrained.In one she said pathetically, "I am such a bad letter writer.I always feel as if I want to tear up what Ihave written, because I never say half that is in my heart.
Mrs.Vanderpoel had kissed that letter many a time.She was sure that a mark on the paper near this particular sentence was where a tear had fallen.Bettina was sure of this, too, and sat and looked at the fire for some time.
That night she went to a ball, and when she returned home, she persuaded her mother to go to bed.
"I want to have a talk with father," she exclaimed."Iam going to ask him something."
She went to the great man's private room, where he sat at work, even after the hours when less seriously engaged people come home from balls.The room he sat in was one of the apartments newspapers had with much detail described.It was luxuriously comfortable, and its effect was sober and rich and fine.
When Bettina came in, Vanderpoel, looking up to smile at her in welcome, was struck by the fact that as a background to an entering figure of tall, splendid girlhood in a ball dress it was admirable, throwing up all its whiteness and grace and sweep of line.He was always glad to see Betty.The rich strength of the life radiating from her, the reality and glow of her were good for him and had the power of detaching him from work of which he was tired.
She smiled back at him, and, coming forward took her place in a big armchair close to him, her lace-frilled cloak slipping from her shoulders with a soft rustling sound which seemed to convey her intention to stay.