so well that it has been a pleasure to be taken about by you. I have never seen anything so beautiful—and so sad. Thank you —thank you.” And she put a goldpiece in his palm.
His fingers closed over it quietly. Why it was to her great relief she did not know—because something in the simple act annoyed her, even while she congratulated herself that her hesitance had been absurd. The next moment she wondered if it could be possible that he had expected a larger fee. He opened his hand and looked at the money with a grim steadiness.
“Thank you, miss,” he said, and touched his cap in the proper manner.
He did not look gracious or grateful, but he began to put it in a small pocket in the breast of his worn corduroy shooting jacket. Suddenly he stopped, as if with abrupt resolve. He handed the coin back without any change of his glum look.
“Hang it all,” he said, “I can’t take this, you know. I suppose I ought to have told you. It would have been less awkward for us both. I am that unfortunate beggar, Mount Dunstan, myself.”
A pause was inevitable. It was a rather long one. After it, Betty took back her half-sovereign and returned it to her bag, but she pleased a certain perversity in him by looking more annoyed than confused.
“Yes,” she said. “You ought to have told me, Lord Mount Dunstan.”
He slightly shrugged his big shoulders.
“Why shouldn’t you take me for a keeper? You crossed the Atlantic with a fourth-rate looking fellow separated from you by barriers of wood and iron. You came upon him tramping over a nobleman’s estate in shabby corduroys and gaiters, with a gun over his shoulder and a scowl on his ugly face. Why should you leap to the conclusion that he is the belted Earl himself? There is no cause for embarrassment.”
“I am not embarrassed,” said Bettina.
“That is what I like,” gruffly.
“I am pleased,” in her mellowest velvet voice, “that you like it.”
Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling, and Mount Dunstan slightly frowned.
“I beg pardon,” he said. “You are quite right. It had a deucedly patronising sound.”
As he stood before her Betty was given her opportunity to see him as she had not seen him before, to confront the sum total of his physique. His red-brown eyes looked out from rather fine heavy brows, his features were strong and clear, though ruggedly cut, his build showed weight of bone, not of flesh, and his limbs were big and long. He would have wielded a battle-axe with power in centuries in which men hewed their way with them. Also it occurred to her he would have looked well in a coat of mail. He did not look ill in his corduroys and gaiters.
“I am a self-absorbed beggar,” he went on. “I had been slouching about the place, almost driven mad by my thoughts, and when I saw you took me for a servant my fancy was for letting the thing go on. If I had been a rich man instead of a pauper I would have kept your half-sovereign.”
“I should not have enjoyed that when I found out the truth,” said Miss Vanderpoel
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. But I should not have cared.”
He was looking at her straightly and summing her up as she had summed him up. A man and young, he did not miss a line or a tint of her chin or cheek, shoulder, or brow, or dense, lifted hair. He had already, even in his guise of keeper, noticed one thing, which was that while at times her eyes were the blue of steel, sometimes they melted to the colour of bluebells under water. They had been of this last hue when she had stood in the sunken garden, forgetting him and crying low:
“Oh, if it were mine! If it were mine!”
He did not like American women with millions, but while he would not have said that he liked her, he did not wish her yet to move away. And she, too, did not wish, just yet, to move away. There was something dramatic and absorbing in the situation. She looked over the softly stirring grass and saw the sunshine was deepening its gold and the shadows were growing long. It was not a habit of hers to ask questions, but she asked one.
“Did you not like America?” was what she said.
“Hated it! Hated it! I went there lured by a belief that a man like myself, with muscle and will, even without experience, could make a fortune out of small capital on a sheep ranch. Wind and weather and disease played the devil with me. I lost the little I had and came back to begin over again— on nothing—here!” And he waved his hand over the park with its sward and coppice and bracken and the deer cropping in the late afternoon gold.
“To begin what again?” said Betty. It was an extraordinary enough thing, seen in the light of conventions, that they should stand and talk like this. But the spark had kindled between eye and eye, and because of it they suddenly had forgotten that they were strangers.
“You are an American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it would to others. To begin to build up again, in one man’s life, what has taken centuries to grow—and fall into this.”
“It would be a splendid thing to do,” she said slowly, and as she said it her eyes took on their colour of bluebells, because what she had seen had moved her. She had not looked at him, but at the cropping deer as she spoke, but at her next sentence she turned to him again.
“Where should you begin?” she asked, and in saying it thought of Stornham.
He laughed shortly.
“That is American enough,” he said. “Your people have not finished their beginnings yet and live in the spirit of them.
I tell you of a wild fancy, and you accept it as a possibility and turn on me with, `Where should you begin?’ “
“That is one way of beginning,” said Bettina. “In fact, it is the only way.”
He did not tell her that he liked that, but he knew that he did like it and that her mere words touched him like a spur. It was, of course, her lifelong breathing of the atmosphere of millions which made for this fashion of moving at once in the direction of obstacles presenting to the rest of the world barriers seemingly insurmountable. And yet
