UGHTRED
Bettina stood alone in her bedroom a couple of hours later.
Lady Anstruthers had taken her to it, preparing her for its limitations by explaining that she would find it quite different from her room in New York.She had been pathetically nervous and flushed about it, and Bettina had also been aware that the apartment itself had been hastily, and with much moving of objects from one chamber to another, made ready for her.
The room was large and square and low.It was panelled in small squares of white wood.The panels were old enough to be cracked here and there, and the paint was stained and yellow with time, where it was not knocked or worn off.
There was a small paned, leaded window which filled a large part of one side of the room, and its deep seat was an agreeable feature.Sitting in it, one looked out over several red-walled gardens, and through breaks in the trees of the park to a fair beyond.Bettina stood before this window for a few moments, and then took a seat in the embrasure, that she might gaze out and reflect at leisure.
Her genius, as has before been mentioned, was the genius for living, for being vital.Many people merely exist, are kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the persistent action of normal functions will allow of their doing no less.Bettina Vanderpoel had lived vividly, and in the midst of a self-created atmosphere of action from her first hour.It was not possible for her to be one of the horde of mere spectators.Wheresoever she moved there was some occult stirring of the mental, and even physical, air.Her pulses beat too strongly, her blood ran too fast to allow of inaction of mind or body.When, in passing through the village, she had seen the broken windows and the hanging palings of the cottages, it had been inevitable that, at once, she should, in thought, repair them, set them straight.Disorder filled her with a sort of impatience which was akin to physical distress.If she had been born a poor woman she would have worked hard for her living, and found an interest, almost an exhilaration, in her labour.Such gifts as she had would have been applied to the tasks she undertook.It had frequently given her pleasure to imagine herself earning her livelihood as a seamstress, a housemaid, a nurse.She knew what she could have put into her service, and how she could have found it absorbing.Imagination and initiative could make any service absorbing.The actual truth was that if she had been a housemaid, the room she set in order would have taken a character under her touch; if she had been a seamstress, her work would have been swiftly done, her imagination would have invented for her combinations of form and colour; if she had been a nursemaid, the children under her care would never have been sufficiently bored to become tiresome or intractable, and they also would have gained character to which would have been added an undeniable vividness of outlook.
She could not have left them alone, so to speak.In obeying the mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated them.
Unconsciously she had stimulated her fellow pupils at school;when she was his companion, her father had always felt himself stirred to interest and enterprise.
"You ought to have been a man, Betty," he used to say to her sometimes.
But Betty had not agreed with him.
"You say that," she once replied to him, "because you see I am inclined to do things, to change them, if they need changing.Well, one is either born like that, or one is not.
Sometimes I think that perhaps the people who must ACT are of a distinct race.A kind of vigorous restlessness drives them.
I remember that when I was a child I could not see a pin lying upon the ground without picking it up, or pass a drawer which needed closing, without giving it a push.But there has always been as much for women to do as for men."There was much to be done here of one sort of thing and another.That was certain.As she gazed through the small panes of her large windows, she found herself overlooking part of a wilderness of garden, which revealed itself through an arch in an overgrown laurel hedge.She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had lost its original form.Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring.In the park beyond a cuckoo was calling.
She was conscious both of the forlorn beauty and significance of the neglected garden, and of the clear quaintness of the cuckoo call, as she thought of other things.
"Her spirit and her health are broken," was her summing up."Her prettiness has faded to a rag.She is as nervous as an ill-treated child.She has lost her wits.I do not know where to begin with her.I must let her tell me things as gradually as she chooses.Until I see Nigel I shall not know what his method with her has been.She looks as if she had ceased to care for things, even for herself.What shall I write to mother?"She knew what she should write to her father.With him she could be explicit.She could record what she had found and what it suggested to her.She could also make clear her reason for hesitance and deliberation.His discretion and affection would comprehend the thing which she herself felt and which affection not combined with discretion might not take in.He would understand, when she told him that one of the first things which had struck her, had been that Rosy herself, her helplessness and timidity, might, for a period at least, form obstacles in their path of action.He not only loved Rosy, but realised how slight a sweet thing she had always been, and he would know how far a slight creature's gentleness might be overpowered and beaten down.
There was so much that her mother must be spared, there was indeed so little that it would be wise to tell her, that Bettina sat gently rubbing her forehead as she thought of it.