"It began that time when he struck her.He said then that it was not decent that a woman who was married should keep her own money.He made her give him almost everything she had, but she wants to keep some for me.He tries to make her get more from grandfather, but she will not write begging letters, and she won't give him what she is saving for me."It was a simple and sordid enough explanation in one sense, and it was one of which Bettina had known, not one parallel, but several.Having married to ensure himself power over unquestioned resources, the man had felt himself disgustingly taken in, and avenged himself accordingly.In him had been born the makings of a domestic tyrant who, even had he been favoured by fortune, would have wreaked his humours upon the defenceless things made his property by ties of blood and marriage, and who, being unfavoured, would do worse.Betty could see what the years had held for Rosy, and how her weakness and timidity had been considered as positive assets.Awoman who will cry when she is bullied, may be counted upon to submit after she has cried.Rosy had submitted up to a certain point and then, with the stubbornness of a weak creature, had stood at timid bay for her young.
What Betty gathered was that, after the long and terrible illness which had followed Ughtred's birth, she had risen from what had been so nearly her deathbed, prostrated in both mind and body.Ughtred did not know all that he revealed when he touched upon the time which he said his mother could not quite remember--when she had sat for months staring vacantly out of her window, trying to recall something terrible which had happened, and which she wanted to tell her mother, if the day ever came when she could write to her again.She had never remembered clearly the details of the thing she had wanted to tell, and Nigel had insisted that her fancy was part of her past delirium.He had said that at the beginning of her delirium she had attacked and insulted his mother and himself but they had excused her because they realised afterwards what the cause of her excitement had been.For a long time she had been too brokenly weak to question or disbelieve, but, later she had vaguely known that he had been lying to her, though she could not refute what he said.She recalled, in course of time, a horrible scene in which all three of them had raved at each other, and she herself had shrieked and laughed and hurled wild words at Nigel, and he had struck her.That she knew and never forgot.She had been ill a year, her hair had fallen out, her skin had faded and she had begun to feel like a nervous, tired old woman instead of a girl.Girlhood, with all the past, had become unreal and too far away to be more than a dream.Nothing had remained real but Stornham and Nigel and the little hunchbacked baby.She was glad when the Dowager died and when Nigel spent his time in London or on the Continent and left her with Ughtred.When he said that he must spend her money on the estate, she had acquiesced without comment, because that insured his going away.She saw that no improvement or repairs were made, but she could do nothing and was too listless to make the attempt.She only wanted to be left alone with Ughtred, and she exhibited will-power only in defence of her child and in her obstinacy with regard to asking money of her father.
"She thought, somehow, that grandfather and grandmother did not care for her any more--that they had forgotten her and only cared for you," Ughtred explained."She used to talk to me about you.She said you must be so clever and so handsome that no one could remember her.Sometimes she cried and said she did not want any of you to see her again, because she was only a hideous, little, thin, yellow old woman.
When I was very little she told me stories about New York and Fifth Avenue.I thought they were not real places--Ithough they were places in fairyland."
Betty patted his shoulder and looked away for a moment when he said this.In her remote and helpless loneliness, to Rosy's homesick, yearning soul, noisy, rattling New York, Fifth Avenue with its traffic and people, its brown-stone houses and ricketty stages, had seemed like THAT--so splendid and bright and heart-filling, that she had painted them in colours which could belong only to fairyland.It said so much.
The thing she had suspected as she had talked to her sister was, before the interview ended, made curiously clear.The first obstacle in her pathway would be the shrinking of a creature who had been so long under dominion that the mere thought of seeing any steps taken towards her rescue filled her with alarm.One might be prepared for her almost praying to be let alone, because she felt that the process of her salvation would bring about such shocks and torments as she could not endure the facing of.
"She will have to get used to you," Ughtred kept saying.
"She will have to get used to thinking things.""I will be careful," Bettina answered."She shall not be troubled.I did not come to trouble her,"