me up in her arms and hide her face in my pinafore. Sometimes she stuffed it into her mouth and bit it to keep herself from screaming. Once— before I was seven—I ran into their room and shouted out, and tried to fight for her. He was going out, and had his riding whip in his hand, and he caught hold of me and struck me with it—until he was tired.”
Betty stood upright.
“What! What! What!” she cried out.
He merely nodded his head shortly. She saw what the thing had been by the way his face lost colour.
“Of course he said it was because I was impudent, and needed punishment,” he said. “He said she had encouraged me in American impudence. It was worse for her than for me. She kneeled down and screamed out as if she was crazy, that she would give him what he wanted if he would stop.”
“Wait,” said Betty, drawing in her breath sharply. ” `He,’ is Sir Nigel? And he wanted something.”
He nodded again
“Tell me,” she demanded, “has he ever struck her?”
“Once,” he answered slowly, “before I was born—he struck her and she fell against something. That is why I am like this.” And he touched his shoulder.
The feeling which surged through Betty Vanderpoel’s being forced her to go and stand with her face turned towards the windows, her hands holding each other tightly behind her back.
“I must keep still,” she said. “I must make myself keep still.”
She spoke unconsciously half aloud, and Ughtred heard her and replied hurriedly.
“Yes,” he said, “you must make yourself keep still. That is what we have to do whatever happens. That is one of the things mother wanted you to know. She is afraid. She daren’t let you–-“
She turned from the window, standing at her full height and looking very tall for a girl.
“She is afraid? She daren’t? See—that will come to an end now. There are things which can be done.”
He flushed nervously.
“That is what she was afraid you would say,” he spoke fast and his hands trembled. “She is nearly wild about it, because she knows he will try to do something that will make you feel as if she does not want you.”
“She is afraid of that?” Betty exclaimed.
“He’d do it! He’d do it—if you did not know beforehand.”
“Oh!” said Betty, with unflinching clearness. “He is a liar, is he?”
The helpless rage in the unchildish eyes, the shaking voice, as he cried out in answer, were a shock. It was as if he wildly rejoiced that she had spoken the word.
“Yes, he’s a liar—a liar!” he shrilled. “He’s a liar and a bully and a coward. He’d—he’d be a murderer if he dared —but he daren’t.” And his face dropped on his arms folded on his crutch, and he broke into a passion of crying. Then Betty knew she might go to him. She went and knelt down and put her arm round him.
“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 I must 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. “I shall 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
