As Lady Alanby's opinion of Mrs.Manners was but a poor one, and as Mrs.Manners was stricken dumb by her combined dislike and awe of Lady Alanby, a slight stiffness might have settled upon the gathering if Betty had not made an effort.She applied herself to Lady Alanby and Mrs.Manners at once, and ended by ****** them talk to each other.
When they left the tea table under the trees to look at the gardens, she walked between them, playing upon the primeval horticultural passions which dominate the existence of all respectable and normal country ladies, until the gulf between them was temporarily bridged.This being achieved, she adroitly passed them over to Lady Anstruthers, who, Nigel observed with some curiosity, accepted the casual responsibility without manifest discomfiture.
To the aching Tommy the manner in which, a few minutes later, he found himself standing alone with Jane Lithcom in a path of clipped laurels was almost bewilderingly ******.
At the end of the laurel walk was a pretty peep of the country, and Miss Vanderpoel had brought him to see it.Nigel Anstruthers had been loitering behind with Jane and Mary.As Miss Vanderpoel turned with him into the path, she stooped and picked a blossom from a clump of speedwell growing at the foot of a bit of wall.
"Lady Jane's eyes are just the colour of this flower," she said.
"Yes, they are," he answered, glancing down at the lovely little blue thing as she held it in her hand.And then, with a thump of the heart, "Most people do not think she is pretty, but I--" quite desperately--"I DO." His mood had become rash.
"So do I," Betty Vanderpoel answered.
Then the others joined them, and Miss Vanderpoel paused to talk a little--and when they went on she was with Mary and Nigel Anstruthers, and he was with Jane, walking slowly, and somehow the others melted away, turning in a perfectly natural manner into a side path.Their own slow pace became slower.In fact, in a few moments, they were standing quite still between the green walls.Jane turned a little aside, and picked off some small leaves, nervously.He saw the muslin on her chest lift quiveringly.
"Oh, little Jane!" he said in a big, shaky whisper.The following eyes incontinently brimmed over.Some shining drops fell on the softness of the blue muslin.
"Oh, Tommy," giving up, "it's no use--talking at all.""You mustn't think--you mustn't think--ANYTHING," he falteringly commanded, drawing nearer, because it was impossible not to do it.
What he really meant, though he did not know how decorously to say it, was that she must not think that he could be moved by any tall beauty, towards the splendour of whose possessions his revered grandmother might be driving him.
"I am not thinking anything," cried Jane in answer."But she is everything, and I am nothing.Just look at her--and then look at me, Tommy.""I'll look at you as long as you'll let me," gulped Tommy, and he was boy enough and man enough to put a hand on each of her shoulders, and drown his longing in her brimming eyes.
.....
Mary and Miss Vanderpoel were talking with a curious intimacy, in another part of the garden, where they were together alone, Sir Nigel having been reattached to Lady Alanby.
"You have known Sir Thomas a long time?" Betty had just said.
"Since we were children.Jane reminded me at the Dunholms' ball that she had played cricket with him when she was eight.""They have always liked each other?" Miss Vanderpoel suggested.
Mary looked up at her, and the meeting of their eyes was frank to revelation.But for the clear girlish liking for herself she saw in Betty Vanderpoel's, Mary would have known her next speech to be of imbecile bluntness.She had heard that Americans often had a queer, delightful understanding of unconventional things.This splendid girl was understanding her.
"Oh! You SEE!" she broke out."You left them together on purpose!""Yes, I did." And there was a comprehension so deep in her look that Mary knew it was deeper than her own, and somehow founded on some subtler feeling than her own.
"When two people want so much--care so much to be together," Miss Vanderpoel added quite slowly--even as if the words rather forced themselves from her, "it seems as if the whole world ought to help them--everything in the world--the very wind, and rain, and sun, and stars--oh, things have no RIGHT to keep them apart."Mary stared at her, moved and fascinated.She scarcely knew that she caught at her hand.
"I have never been in the state that Jane is," she poured forth."And I can't understand how she can be such a fool, but--but we care about each other more than most girls do--perhaps because we have had no people.And it's the kind of thing there is no use talking against, it seems.It's killing the youngness in her.If it ends miserably, it will be as if she had had an illness, and got up from it a faded, done-for spinster with a stretch of hideous years to live.Her blue eyes will look like boiled gooseberries, because she will have cried all the colour out of them.Oh! You UNDERSTAND! Isee you do."
Before she had finished both Miss Vanderpoel's hands were holding hers.
"I do! I do," she said.And she did, as a year ago she had not known she could."Is it Lady Alanby?" she ventured.
"Yes.Tommy will be helplessly poor if she does not leave him her money.And she won't if he makes her angry.She is very determined.She will leave it to an awful cousin if she gets in a rage.And Tommy is not clever.He could never earn his living.Neither could Jane.They could NEVER marry.
You CAN'T defy relatives, and marry on nothing, unless you are a character in a book.""Has she liked Lady Jane in the past?" Miss Vanderpoel asked, as if she was, mentally, rapidly going over the ground, that she might quite comprehend everything.
