“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 I have 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. “I am 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.
“Are you too busy to be interrupted?” she asked, her mellow voice caressing him. “I want to talk to you about something I am going to do.” She put out her hand and laid it on his with a clinging firmness which meant strong feeling. “At least, I am going to do it if you will help me,” she ended.
“What is it, Betty?” he inquired, his usual interest in her accentuated by her manner.
She laid her other hand on his and he clasped both with his own.
“When the Worthingtons sail for England next month,” she explained, “I want to go with them. Mrs. Worthington is very kind and will be good enough to take care of me until I reach London.”
Mr. Vanderpoel moved slightly in his chair. Then their eyes met comprehendingly. He saw what hers held.
“From there you are going to Stornham Court!” he exclaimed.
“To see Rosy,” she answered, leaning a little forward. “To SEE her.
“You believe that what has happened has not been her fault?” he said. There was a look in her face which warmed his blood.
“I have always been sure that Nigel Anstruthers arranged it.”
“Do you think he has been unkind to her?”
“I am going to see,” she answered.
“Betty,” he said, “tell me all about it.”
He knew that this was no suddenly-formed plan, and he knew it would be well worth while to hear the details of its growth. It was so interestingly like her to have remained silent through the process of thinking a thing out, evolving her final idea without having disturbed him by bringing to him any chaotic uncertainties.
“It’s a sort of confession,” she answered. “Father, I have been thinking about it for years. I said nothing because for so long I knew I was only a child, and a child’s judgment might be worth so little. But through all those years I was learning things and gathering evidence. When I was at school, first in one country and then another, I
