as bettina had found the london season delightful, and yet had been quite content to see it close, and as the same had been true of her experience, both as hostess and as guest, at the country-house parties which had followed the season, so it was also with her foreign travels, although she found much to interest and delight her in the various cities which she visited with lord hurdly. he was received with distinction everywhere—a fact partly due to his prominent position in parliament, and partly to his social importance and the acknowledged beauty of his wife.
bettina enjoyed it, certainly, and found it very helpful to her in carrying out her resolve to banish the agitating thoughts which would recur whenever she thought of horace. she had managed to stop thinking of him almost entirely, and to live only for the satisfaction of each day as it passed.
after a while, however, she began to feel that there was a certain flatness in the sort of pleasure which consisted so largely in being an object of admiration, for she had not been able herself to feel much enthusiasm for the people whom she met. she did not make friends easily, perhaps because she did not greatly care to have friends. her mother’s delicate health had left her little time for other companionships, even if she had desired them, and since the loss of her mother her heart had seemed to close up, and her capacity for caring for people, never very great, was lessening every day.
several times during her travels she had heard horace spoken of. on these occasions she had not betrayed the fact that she had any knowledge of him, and so the talk about him had been quite unrestrained. she had heard it said by one man that “he was turning out a very earnest fellow”; by another that “his pamphlets were making quite a stir”; and, again, that he “might do something worth while in diplomacy if he’d let philanthropy alone.” another man had said that “all he needed was to marry money, and he’d have a great career before him.”
when bettina returned from her travels these [pg 85]few remarks, overheard at dinner-tables or in public places, seemed in some unaccountable way to be the most important things she had secured out of her late experiences. certainly they were the most insistently recurring, and the idea was forced upon her that the way in which men spoke of horace spotswood was a strong contrast to the tone of the letter from lord hurdly’s friend.
all this was a source of distress to her. she would have preferred to believe the letter, for such a belief would have rid her of the sting of self-reproach; but, try as she might, she could not wholly get her consent to it.
on her way back to england she stopped in paris to choose her costumes for the coming season. it was a pleasure to her to try on these beautiful things, which she bought without any thought of the cost of them; but it was a pleasure which she had become accustomed to, and so its keenness was gone. besides this, she had nothing to look forward to except the london season, and custom had also detracted from the zest of that. she was in the attitude of always looking beyond. surely, with such a position and such a fortune as she had attained to, there must be something to satisfy the vague longing [pg 86]within her which she called desire for happiness.
it was decided that they were to stay at kingdon hall a short time before going up to town, and bettina had looked forward to the freedom of the country life with a hopefulness which reality disappointed. here again she thought of horace, and the possible injustice she had done him forced its way into her consciousness, and so disturbed her with doubts and misgivings that she determined to overcome her reluctance to mention horace’s name to her husband, and ask boldly whether he had actually received the sum of money which she had been promised that he should have. it had become so essential to her to know about this that she determined to use her very first opportunity of asking.
not ten minutes after she had made this resolution she unexpectedly encountered lord hurdly, in crossing a hall. he had been out on horseback, and still wore his riding-clothes. the correct and carefully fitted leggings showed legs that were thin and shapeless. beneath them were small feet, on which their owner did not step very firmly. the somewhat showy waistcoat and short coat had an air of displaying themselves and concealing the form beneath [pg 87]them, which was perhaps a high tribute to his tailor’s art. his chest looked narrower, his face more wrinkled, his hair thinner, than bettina had before noticed them to be, and there was a certain loose-jointedness in his figure which, as he moved toward her on his narrow and closely booted feet, gave him the sort of teetering motion of the elderly beau. his face, neutral and cold as ever, showed the signs of age less, yet bettina felt that it masked the inadequacy of his soul as distinctively as his clothes masked that of his body.
as they came toward each other—this man and this woman, whose marriage was supposed to be a union of two into one—the face of each might, by an eye sensitive to the subtleties of human expression, have been seen to harden slightly. lord hurdly took off his hat with an automatic motion which might have prompted the thought that the action arose from his ideal of himself rather than from any association with the woman before him.
“excuse me for detaining you a moment,” said bettina, “but i want to know whether horace spotswood actually received the money which you made over to him at the time of your marriage to me. i have heard that he is leading a [pg 88]very active life, on lines where money will be of great use to him. naturally i am anxious to be sure of the fact that he has suffered no injury, however indirectly, through me.”
she had been able to control both her voice and expression entirely—a fact on which she fervently congratulated herself.
“you may feel quite at ease on that score, i assure you,” lord hurdly answered, in his cold, incisive tones. “he received the money, and has probably used it for the furtherance of these ridiculous and sentimental schemes of his. this should give you the gratifying assurance that he has been bettered, and not worsted, by reason of his connection with you.”
the tone in which he spoke was galling to bettina, but she made no answer, though no words which she could have spoken would have conveyed a greater resentment of his speech than did her disdainful silence. she made a motion to move away, but he deliberately placed himself in front of her, saying, in the same hard tone:
“it occurred to me, from time to time while we were abroad, that you were rather eager in gleaning information about the person we have been speaking of, and i want to tell you that what has been evident to me may be evident to others. [pg 89]you may not care how the thing looks, but as i do, perhaps you will be more careful in the future.”
his use of the word “eager” in connection with her attitude in this affair gave bettina swift offence, and this feeling was heightened by the suggestion that she had made herself liable to criticism on such a subject.
“you cannot, i think,” she answered, in a tone of proud resentment, “be more careful than i am that i shall act with propriety as your wife. since there is so little besides the form to be complied with, i see the greater necessity for punctiliousness in observing that. the rebuke you have just given me is utterly unmerited, and i shall therefore not change my manner of conducting myself in any particular.”
“perhaps you will think better of that decision, and will oblige me by not making yourself conspicuous by holding your breath to listen whenever that person chances to be mentioned. you are not unlikely to hear him alluded to during the coming season, as he has been making a bid for popularity at his new post by taking up the matter of the famine, and,” he added with a sneering smile, “relieving it with the money i paid him.”
[pg 90]
the word cut into bettina’s heart.
“paid him?” she said, scrutinizing him with a glance before which even his hard eyes faltered. “paid him for what?”
“oh, for keeping himself out of my way!”
she felt that she had compelled him to this response, and that he would have liked to put it more brutally. as it was, there lurked a sting in it which provoked her to reply.
“did he hold the privilege of your proximity at so large a price?”
a smile of quiet irony accompanied the words. as it curved her lips alluringly, lord hurdly felt himself touched with the sudden sense of her powerful charm. no one else on earth would have dared to say this to him, or anything remotely comparable with it. there was something very piquant to his jaded palate in the flavor of this audacious speech. instead of scowling, therefore, he smiled.
“i have heard,” he said, amiably, “that america was the land of the free and the home of the brave, and certainly you seem to warrant one in accepting that belief.”
bettina, a good deal relieved at this turn of affairs, took the opportunity that the moment gave her to say, gravely:
[pg 91]
“no; i do not consider myself free. i have bound myself, in my marriage to you, and i have no intention or desire to forget the duties which i owe you. but i tell you frankly, lord hurdly, that i am not accustomed to either surveillance or tyranny, and i shall not tamely submit to them. in the carrying out of this resolution, at least, you will find that i can be brave.”
she looked more than ordinarily beautiful as she stood erect before him and said these words, and he had not gazed so fully into her eyes for a long time. he had almost forgotten their magnetic loveliness. at sight of them now his pulses beat quicker. a desire for the mastery of this splendid creature returned to him with a force he would not have believed possible.
“bettina,” he said, in a voice which showed an emotion most unusual to him, “have you ever known what it was to love, i wonder?”
“once—once only,” she answered, a quaver in her voice and a sudden suffusion of tears in her eyes. “i loved my mother. no one that ever lived could have loved more truly and more ardently than i loved her; but there it began and ended. i never deceived you as to that. i promised you duty and good faith, and i have [pg 92]not failed in these. i never shall so fail. but love, no! i haven’t it to give.”
she made a movement to go forward, and he stood aside and let her pass him. she avoided meeting his gaze, and perhaps it was well that she did. for slowly its expression changed. a look of hardness that was almost significant of dislike came into his eyes and compressed his lips. from the day of their marriage this woman had thwarted and baffled him. he had tried to get the mastery of her, but he had failed, and the sense of that failure angered him. he had been used to dominating every one with whom he came into any sort of close contact. he had married this american girl with the determination to dominate her, and he had found himself as powerless as if she had been a mist maiden. there was no way in which he could lay hold upon her.
concerning bettina’s attitude toward him he had a theory. he believed that she had really loved horace. she was too absolutely in the shadow of the sorrow of her mother’s death to give full play to any other feeling, but he had always felt, in every effort that he had made to win her, that it was the image of horace spotswood in her mind which put him in total eclipse. [pg 93]this theory time had deepened. his suspicious watchfulness over her every word and look had made him aware that she listened with interest when horace’s name was mentioned, and his imagination heightened the effect of her interest, and caused him to conjecture as to what she might have heard and felt at such times as he was not by. moreover, a certain secret consciousness in his own soul stimulated him in his suspicions.
