"Ughtred," she said, "cry, if you like, I should do it, if I were you.But I tell you it can all be altered--and it shall be."He seemed quite like a little boy when he put out his hand to hers and spoke sobbingly:
"She--she says--that because you have only just come from America--and in America people--can do things--you will think you can do things here--and you don't know.He will tell lies about you lies you can't bear.She sat wringing her hands when she thought of it.She won't let you be hurt because you want to help her." He stopped abruptly and clutched her shoulder.
"Aunt Betty! Aunt Betty--whatever happens--whatever he makes her seem like--you are to know that it is not true.
Now you have come--now she has seen you it would KILL her if you were driven away and thought she wanted you to go.""I shall not think that," she answered, slowly, because she realised that it was well that she had been warned in time.
"Ughtred, are you trying to tell me that above all things Imust not let him think that I came here to help you, because if he is angry he will make us all suffer--and your mother most of all?""He'll find a way.We always know he will.He would either be so rude that you would not stay here--or he would make mother seem rude--or he would write lies to grandfather.
Aunt Betty, she scarcely believes you are real yet.If she won't tell you things at first, please don't mind." He looked quite like a child again in his appeal to her, to try to understand a state of affairs so complicated."Could you--could you wait until you have let her get--get used to you?""Used to thinking that there may be someone in the world to help her?" slowly."Yes, I will.Has anyone ever tried to help her?""Once or twice people found out and were sorry at first, but it only made it worse, because he made them believe things.""I shall not TRY, Ughtred," said Betty, a remote spark kindling in the deeps of the pupils of her steel-blue eyes."Ishall not TRY.Now I am going to ask you some questions."Before he left her she had asked many questions which were pertinent and searching, and she had learned things she realised she could have learned in no other way and from no other person.But for his uncanny sense of the responsibility he clearly had assumed in the days when he wore pinafores, and which had brought him to her room to prepare her mind for what she would find herself confronted with in the way of apparently unexplainable obstacles, there was a strong likelihood that at the outset she might have found herself more than once dangerously at a loss.Yes, she would have been at a loss, puzzled, perhaps greatly discouraged.She was face to face with a complication so extraordinary.
That one man, through mere persistent steadiness in evil temper and domestic tyranny, should have so broken the creatures of his household into abject submission and hopelessness, seemed too incredible.Such a power appeared as remote from civilised existence in London and New York as did that which had inflicted tortures in the dungeons of castles of old.
Prisoners in such dungeons could utter no cry which could reach the outside world; the prisoners at Stornham Court, not four hours from Hyde Park Corner, could utter none the world could hear, or comprehend if it heard it.Sheer lack of power to resist bound them hand and foot.And she, Betty Vanderpoel, was here upon the spot, and, as far as she could understand, was being implored to take no steps, to do nothing.
The atmosphere in which she had spent her life, the world she had been born into, had not made for fearfulness that one would be at any time defenceless against circumstances and be obliged to submit to outrage.To be a Vanderpoel was, it was true, to be a shining mark for envy as for admiration, but the fact removed obstacles as a rule, and to find one's self standing before a situation with one's hands, figuratively speaking, tied, was new enough to arouse unusual sensations.She recalled, with an ironic sense of bewilderment, as a sort of material evidence of her own reality, the fact that not a week ago she had stepped on to English soil from the gangway of a solid Atlantic liner.It aided her to resist the feeling that she had been swept back into the Middle Ages.
"When he is angry," was one of the first questions she put to Ughtred, "what does he give as his reason? He must profess to have a reason.""When he gets in a rage he says it is because mother is silly and common, and I am badly brought up.But we always know he wants money, and it makes him furious.He could kill us with rage.""Oh!" said Betty."I see."