“I just feel as if she was beginning not to care about us at all, Betty,” she said. “I couldn't have believed it of Rosy. She was always such an affectionate girl.”
“I don't believe it now,” replied Betty sharply. “Rosy couldn't grow hateful and stuck up. It's that nasty Nigel I know it is.”
Sir Nigel's intention was that there should be as little intercourse between Fifth Avenue and Stornham Court as was possible. Among other things, he did not intend that a lot of American relations should come tumbling in when they chose to cross the Atlantic. He would not have it, and took discreet steps to prevent any accident of the sort. He wrote to America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to make himself civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law as to discourage in them more than once their half-formed plan of paying a visit to their child in her new home. He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to and from New York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find that Rosalie never condescended to make any response to her tentatives concerning her possible visit, Rosalie herself was mystified by the fact that the journey “to Europe” was never spoken of.
“I don't see why they never seem to think of coming over,” she said plaintively one day. “They used to talk so much about it.”
“They?” ejaculated the Dowager Lady Anstruthers. “Whom may you mean?”
“Mother and father and Betty and some of the others.”
Her mother-in-law put up her eye-glasses to stare at her.
“The whole family?” she inquired.
“There are not so many of them,” Rosalie answered.
“A family is always too many to descend upon a young woman when she is married,” observed her ladyship unmovedly. Nigel glanced over the top of his Times.
“I may as well tell you that it would not do at all,” he put in.
“Why—why not?” exclaimed Rosalie, aghast.
“Americans don't do in English society,” slightingly.
“But they are coming over so much. They like London so—all Americans like London.”
“Do they?” with a drawl which made Rosalie blush until the tears started to her eyes. “I am afraid the sentiment is scarcely mutual.”
Rosalie turned and fled from the room. She turned and fled because she realised that she should burst out crying if she waited to hear another word, and she realised that of late she seemed always to be bursting out crying before one or the other of those two. She could not help it. They always seemed to be implying something slighting or scathing. They were always putting her in the wrong and hurting her feelings.
The day was damp and chill, but she put on her hat and ran out into the park. She went down the avenue and turned into a coppice. There, among the wet bracken, she sank down on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree and huddled herself in a small heap, her head on her arms, actually wailing.
“Oh, mother! Oh, mother!” she cried hysterically. “Oh, I do wish you would come. I'm so cold, mother; I'm so ill! I can't bear it! It seems as if you'd forgotten all about me! You're all so happy in New York that perhaps you have forgotten—perhaps you have! Oh, don't, mother—don't!”
It was a month later that through the vicar's wife she reached a discovery and a climax. She had heard one morning from this lady of a misfortune which had befallen a small farmer. It was a misfortune which was an actual catastrophe to a man in his position. His house had caught fire during a gale of wind and the fire had spread to the outbuildings and rickyard and swept away all his belongings, his house, his furniture, his hayricks, and stored grain, and even his few cows and horses. He had been a poor, hard-working fellow, and his small insurance had lapsed the day before the fire. He was absolutely ruined, and with his wife and six children stood face to face with beggary and starvation.
Rosalie Anstruthers entered the vicarage to find the poor woman who was his companion in calamity sobbing in the hall. A child of a few weeks was in her arms, and two small creatures clung crying to her skirts.
“We've worked hard,” she wept; “we have, ma'am. Father, he's always been steady, an' up early an' late. P'r'aps it's the Lord's 'and, as you say, ma'am, but we've been decent people an' never missed church when we could 'elp it—father didn't deserve it—that he didn't.”
She was heartbroken in her downtrodden hopelessness. Rosalie literally quaked with sympathy. She poured forth her pity in such words as the poor woman had never heard spoken by a great lady to a humble creature like herself. The villagers found the new Lady Anstruthers' interviews with them curiously simple and suggestive of an equality they could not understand. Stornham was a conservative old village, where the distinction between the gentry and the peasants was clearly marked. The cottagers were puzzled by Sir Nigel's wife, but they decided that she was kind, if unusual.
As Rosalie talked to the farmer's wife she longed for her father's presence. She had remembered a time when a man in his employ had lost his all by fire, the small house he had just made his last payment upon having been burned to the ground. He had lost one of his children in the fire, and the details had been heartrending. The entire Vanderpoel household had wept on hearing them, and Mr. Vanderpoel had drawn a cheque which had seemed like a fortune to the sufferer. A new house had been bought, and Mrs. Vanderpoel and her daughters and friends had bestowed furniture and clothing enough to make the family comfortable to the verge of luxury.
“See, you poor thing,” said Rosalie, glowing with memories of this incident, her homesick young soul comforted by the mere likeness in the two calamities. “I brought my cheque book with me because I meant to help you. A man worked for my father had his house burned, just as yours was, and my father made everything all right for him again. I'll make it all right for you; I'll make you a cheque for a hundred pounds now, and then when your husband begins to build I'll give him some more.”
The woman gasped for breath and turned pale. She was frightened. It really seemed as if her ladyship must have lost her wits a little. She could not mean this. The vicaress turned pale also.
“Lady Anstruthers,” she said, “Lady Anstruthers, it—it is too much. Sir Nigel——”
“Too much!” exclaimed Rosalie. “They have lost everything, you know; their hayricks and cattle as well as their house; I guess it won't be half enough.”
Mrs. Brent dragged her into the vicar's study and talked to her. She tried to explain that in English villages such things were not done in a manner so casual, as if they were the mere result of unconsidered feeling, as if they were quite natural things, such as any human person might do. When Rosalie cried: “But why not—why not? They ought to be.” Mrs. Brent could not seem to make herself quite clear. Rosalie only gathered in a bewildered way that there ought to be more ceremony, more deliberation, more holding off, before a person of rank indulged in such munificence. The recipient ought to be made to feel it more, to understand fully what a great thing was being done.
“They will think you will do anything for them.”
“So I will,” said young Lady Anstruthers, “if I have the money when they are in such awful trouble. Suppose we lost everything in the world and there were people who could easily help us and wouldn't?”
“You and Sir Nigel—that is quite different,” said Mrs. Brent. “I am afraid that if you do not discuss the matter and ask advice from