It did not take her long to pass the Customs. A small grip constituted her entire baggage. Having left this in the keeping of the amiable proprietor of a near-by delicatessen store, she made her way to the ferry.
Her first enquiry brought her to the cottage. Mrs. Oakley was a celebrity on Staten Island.
At the door she paused for a moment, then knocked.
The Swede servant, she who had been there at her former visit, twelve years ago, received her stolidly. Mrs. Oakley was dusting her clocks.
“Ask her if she can see me,” said Betty. “I’m—” great step-niece sounded too ridiculous—”I’m her niece,” she said.
The handmaid went and returned, stolid as ever. “Ay tal her vat yu say about niece, and she say she not knowing any niece,” she announced.
Betty amended the description, and presently the Swede returned once more, and motioned her to enter.
Like so many scenes of childhood, the room of the clocks was sharply stamped on Betty’s memory, and, as she came into it now, it seemed to her that nothing had changed. There were the clocks, all round the walls, of every shape and size, the big clocks with the human faces and the small, perky clocks. There was the dingy, medium- sized clock that held the trumpeter. And there, looking at her with just the old sandy-cat expression in her pale eyes, was Mrs. Oakley.
Even the possession of an income of eighteen million dollars and a unique collection of clocks cannot place a woman above the making of the obvious remark.
“How you have grown!” said Mrs. Oakley.
The words seemed to melt the chill that had gathered around Betty’s heart. She had been prepared to enter into long explanations, and the knowledge that these would not be required was very comforting.
“Do you remember me?” she exclaimed.
“You are the little girl who clapped her hands at the trumpeter, but you are not little now.”
“I’m not so very big,” said Betty, smiling. She felt curiously at home, and pity for the loneliness of this strange old woman caused her to forget her own troubles.
“You look pretty when you smile,” said Mrs. Oakley thoughtfully. She continued to look closely at her. “You are in trouble,” she said.
Betty met her eyes frankly.
“Yes,” she said.
The old woman bent her head over a Sevres china clock, and stroked it tenderly with her feather duster.
“Why did you run away?” she asked without looking up.
Betty had a feeling that the ground was being cut from beneath her feet. She had expected to have to explain who she was and why she had come, and behold, both were unnecessary. It was uncanny. And then the obvious explanation occurred to her.
“Did my stepfather cable?” she asked.
Mrs. Oakley laid down the feather duster and, opening a drawer, produced some sheets of paper—to the initiated eye plainly one of Mr. Scobell’s lengthy messages.
“A wickedly extravagant cable,” she said, frowning at it. “He could have expressed himself perfectly well at a quarter of the expense.”
Betty began to read. The dimple on her chin appeared for a moment as she did so. The tone of the message was so obsequious. There was no trace of the old peremptory note in it. The words “dearest aunt” occurred no fewer than six times in the course of the essay, its author being apparently reckless of the fact that it was costing him half a dollar a time. Mrs. Oakley had been quite right in her criticism. The gist of the cable was, “
Mrs. Oakley watched her with a glowering eye. “If Bennie Scobell,” she soliloquized, “imagines that he can dictate to me—” She ceased, leaving an impressive hiatus. Unhappy Mr. Scobell, convicted of dictation even after three dollars’ worth of “dearest aunt!”
Betty handed back the cable. Her chin, emblem of war, was tilted and advanced.
“I’ll tell you why I ran away, Aunt,” she said.
Mrs. Oakley listened to her story in silence. Betty did not relate it at great length, for with every word she spoke, the thought of John stabbed her afresh. She omitted much that has been told in this chronicle. But she disclosed the essential fact, that Napoleonic Mr. Scobell had tried to force her into a marriage with a man she did not—she hesitated at the word—did not respect, she concluded.
Mrs. Oakley regarded her inscrutably for a while before replying.
“Respect!” she said at last. “I have never met a man in my life whom I could respect. Harpies! Every one of them! Every one of them! Every one of them!”
She was muttering to herself. It is possible that her thoughts were back with those persevering young aristocrats of her second widowhood. Certainly, if she had sometimes displayed a touch of the pirate in her dealings with man, man, it must be said in fairness, had not always shown his best side to her.
“Respect!” she muttered again. “Did you like him, this Prince of yours?”
Betty’s eyes filled. She made no reply.
“Well, never mind,” said Mrs. Oakley. “Don’t cry, child! I’m not going to press you. You must have hated him or else loved him very much, or you would never have run away…. Dictate to me!” she broke off, half-aloud, her mind evidently once more on Mr. Scobell’s unfortunate cable.
