Instantly she sprang to her feet and stood there, slight and tall and straight in her long black wrap, the image of pallid woe. All the blood had left her face, and her eyes were wide and terrified.

It was so that she appeared to the man who, parting the branches of the thick foliage, stood silent and surprised before her. She might have been the very spirit of widowhood, so desolate she looked.

Raising his hat automatically, he said, in a strained, unnatural voice, "Can I do anything for you?"

She tried to speak, but speech eluded her.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "but can I do anything for you, Lady Hurdly?"

Oh, that name! She had had an instinct to free herself at last from the burden she had borne, and to tell him, in answer to his question, that he could do this for her--he could hear her tell of the wretched treachery by which she had been led to do him such a wrong, and of the misery of its consequences in her life. But the utterance of that name recalled her to herself. It reminded her not only who she was, but also who and by what means he was also.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE VERY SPIRIT OF WIDOWHOOD"]

"Leave me," she said, throwing out her hand with a repellent gesture.

"I have gone through much, and I am not strong. If you have any mercy, any kindness, leave me to myself. It is not proper, perhaps, that I should ask any favor of you, but I do. I beg you not to speak or write to me again until I have done what must be done here, and gone away from this place and this country forever."

There was an instant's silence, during which Comrade nestled close to her and tried to lick her hand, all the time looking longingly at Horace. Then a voice, constrained and low, said, sadly: "I will grant your favor, Lady Hurdly. What of the favor I have asked of you?"

"I cannot. It is impossible," she cried. "Surely I have been humiliated enough without that. It is the one thing you have in your power to do for me, never to mention that subject again."

"I shall obey you," he said; "but in return I ask that you will not forget my request of you, though you have forced me to silence. While a wrong so gross as that goes unrepaired I can never rest. Remember this, and that you have it in your power to relieve me of this burden. Now I will go."

He turned and vanished through the shrubbery, Comrade after him.

Bettina sank upon the ground, covering her face with the long drapery of her cape. Suddenly she felt a touch. Her heart leaped, and she uncovered her head, showing the light of a great hope in her eyes.

But it was only Comrade, nestling close to her, with human-eyed compa.s.sion. She threw her arms around him, and pressed her face against his s.h.a.ggy side.

"Did he send you to me, Comrade," she whispered, "because he knew that I was miserable and alone?"

The gentle creature whined and wagged his tail as if in desperate effort to reply.

"I know he did! I know he did!" she cried. "Oh, how kind and good and unrevengeful he is! And I can never tell him the truth. I can never tell that to any human being, Comrade, but I'll tell it to you." She drew his head close to her lips and whispered a few words in his ear.

Then she sprang to her feet, a great light in her eyes, as she threw her arms upward with an exultant movement, and cried, as if to some unseen witness up above, "I have said it!"

CHAPTER XIV

After this Bettina went about her preparations for departure with a spirit of calm and collectedness which came from the knowledge of herself, which she had at last fully accepted. Hundreds of times in these last few days her mother's words had come back to her: "The day will come when you will know what you are incapable even of imagining now--what is the one perfect love and complete union that can ever be between two human beings.... Test the world, if you will--and your nature demands that you shall test it--but you will live to say one day: 'My mother knew. My mother's words have come true.'"

It was even so. She knew now, at last, and the knowledge had come to her when inexorable necessity compelled her to separate herself forever from the man who, not suddenly, but by a system of gradual evolution--from the crude emotions of her girlhood through the growing consciousness of later years--had now manifested himself to her as all her heart could desire, all her spirit could crave, all her mature womanhood could need. She realized that he had long been this to her, but with a thick veil between herself and him which had hid the truth from her. The reading of the letter given her by Mr.

Cortlin had torn that veil apart, and she saw him as he was, the man of her ideal. She did not, at the same moment, see her own heart as it was. This vision had come to her with her renewed intercourse with Horace, who had appeared before her now the ripe product of the n.o.ble possibilities which she had vaguely perceived in him once, when she had cared too little to think deeply of him in any way.

Oh, to have kept the place she had once had at his dear side! To have shared with him the privations of a life that would have been narrow and obscure indeed compared with the one which she had known in its stead, but, oh, how rich in the way she had now come to count riches!

Thoughts like these she had to fight against. Perhaps in the end they would conquer, and would hunt her to the death; but now, until she could get out of the country, she must put them down.

She had only a few days left, and she determined to devote a part of these to some farewell visits among the tenants. As far as she had been able to do, she had made friends with these poor folk, and had given what she could to relieve their necessities; but, in comparison with what was needed, the money at her command had seemed pitifully small.

When Lady Hurdly, dressed in her deep widow's mourning, descended the steps of her stately residence and entered the waiting carriage, whose black-liveried servants saluted her respectfully, she had a consciousness that servants and tenants alike must feel a certain commiseration for the great lady, such as they had known her, now sunk to poverty as well as obscurity. This feeling made her manner a little colder and prouder then usual as she sat alone in the sunshine of a lovely autumn morning and was driven between the beautiful English hedgerows and through the fertile fields which she had learned to love. How soon would all be changed for her! And changed to what? The isolated exile of a place filled with the haunting memories of the past--her mother, whom she had lost forever, and her young lover, who was as absolutely lost to her.

Strangely to herself, it was the latter that she felt to be the keener pain. To the former she was reconciled; as we do, sooner or later, reconcile ourselves to the inevitable; but the supreme sting of this other grief was that she felt it need not have been. Sitting there in her carriage, the object of much eager attention, she felt so desolate and wretched that it was with difficulty that she kept back her tears.

She dreaded the ordeal before her. She felt that she must take leave of these people and say a word of kindness to them, since she was so miserably unable to do more; but these visits were always depressing.

Since the tenants had discovered that they had a sympathetic listener in her, they had luxuriated in the pouring out of their sorrows. Of course they had not ventured to accuse her husband of being connected with them, but the lesson was one that he who ran might read.

So, when the carriage stopped at the door of the first cottage, she had made up her mind that she could not stand much in the way of these miserable confidences to-day, and would make her visits short.

But when she entered the house she was conscious of a total change of atmosphere. Every creature in the room gave proof of this, according to his or her kind. The old woman who sat knitting by the hearth looked up at her with a dim twinkle in the eyes that had heretofore expressed nothing but a consciousness that things were bad and getting worse; and the children, who, indeed, had taken little count of the depression of their elders, now manifestly shared their relief from it. It was their mother who, with a strange smile of hope on her careworn face and a fervent clasping together of her work-worn hands, made the explanation to the visitor.

But this explanation, when it had been heard, was almost more of an ordeal to Bettina than the one which she had feared. Certainly it made a stronger demand upon her power of self-control. For the key-note of it all was Horace. He had been here before her, and had done, or promised to have done, all that she had so pa.s.sionately wished to do. His name was on their lips continually; even the little children lisped it. It was "his lordship this" and "his lordship that," in a way that furnished a strange contrast to the studied avoidance of the word under former conditions.

Somehow, glad as she was, it was hard for Bettina to bear. In the midst of the accounts of what his lordship had done and said, and how he was to right all their wrongs and make everybody happy, she got up and took a hurried leave.

What was the use of her staying here? What was a little sympathetic feeling, more or less, to these wretchedly poor creatures? It was their material needs that they wished satisfied, and a stronger hand than hers was at work on these. And if--as seemed so plain, as she could so well imagine from her own knowledge of him--he was able and willing to give them the sympathy and interest as well as the practical help they needed, where was any use for her? There was none--n.o.body needed her, she told herself, desperately, and the sooner she lost herself in the oblivion of America the better.

Each cottage that she visited showed the same metamorphosis in its inmates. A lame boy to whom she had once given a pair of crutches had a new wheel-chair, and the crutches were thrown in a corner. A sick child for whom she had bought some prepared food, which it had not been able to take, had been sent off to a hospital for regular treatment, and its poor mother was enjoying the first rest of many years, with a consciousness that the child was better off than it could possibly be with her. An old man who had been long bedridden, and to whom she had sent some clean bedclothes, had been moved into another room with complete new furnishings, while the occupant of this room had been sent elsewhere, so that the distressing sense of over-crowdedness for sick and well was entirely gone from the house.

In almost every cottage that she visited she saw the same evidences.

How pitiful her own efforts seemed beside these! What was heart compared with hand? What was sympathy compared with money? And was she so sure that she gave even the sympathy? She felt in her breast now no sense of pity for their suffering, no consciousness even of rejoicing in their relief. The only feeling there--and it seemed to fill her whole heart--was pity for her own numb, gnawing wretchedness, for which there could be no relief.

When the last hurried visit was ended, she drove home, completely unnerved. Her black veil was lowered before her face, and though she sat erect and composed to outward seeming, the tears rained down her cheeks.

Her remaining days at Kingdon Hall were spent in a state of such listlessness and inertia that Nora began to fear that she was going to be ill. She urged her mistress to send for the doctor; but, for answer, Bettina burst into tears, declaring that she was not ill, and begging Nora to do everything for her that was necessary to get her off on the steamer on which she had taken pa.s.sage, as she felt unable to do anything herself.

How the intervening hours pa.s.sed she never knew; but, as if taking part in a dream, she went through them all, and at last found herself settled in her state-room, with Nora to take care of her, and no one to spy on her or notice what she did. Asking Nora, as piteously as a child, to help her to undress, she went to bed, and from that bed she did not rise until the ship had touched another sh.o.r.e, and the breadth of the world lay between herself and Horace.

How glad she would have been to lie there and sail on forever, freed from her responsibility to the future, as she was from that to the past!

CHAPTER XV

It was when Bettina was a matter of three hours out at sea that Lord Hurdly arrived at Kingdon Hall, and, on being admitted, ordered the servant to say to Lady Hurdly that he wished to see her. His surprise was great when the man informed him that Lady Hurdly had that day sailed for America.

Dismissing the servant, he went to the library and shut himself up there alone. How strangely was this house altered to him in one moment's time! Just now he had felt a presence in it which had made every atom of it significant. Now, how dead, empty, meaningless, it had suddenly become!

The effect of this change was almost startling to him, and for the first time he had the courage to face himself and to demand of his own soul an explanation.

He was a man of a peculiarly uncomplex nature. When, on meeting Bettina, he for the first time fell deeply in love, he had looked upon the matter as a finality, and he had never ceased so to regard it. When she deserted him, without giving him a chance to speak, he had, in the overwhelming bitterness of his heart, forsworn all women.

It had never occurred to him to put another in Bettina's place. For a long time a pa.s.sionate resentment possessed him. When he knew that Bettina had married his cousin, this resentment had had two objects to feed upon instead of one; but at first the bitterness of his anger against the being in whom he had supremely believed greatly outweighed that against the being in whom he had never believed. Lord Hurdly had never had it in his power to wound and anger him as Bettina could. So, when he got transferred from St. Petersburg to Simla, it was with the instinct of removing himself as far as possible from Bettina. Of the other he scarcely thought.