第15章

"That is the difficulty," was his response."You never know, but educated people do."There was nothing more to be said, at least for a girl who had never known what it was to be bullied.This one felt like a beggar or a scullery maid, who, being rated by her master, had not the refuge of being able to "give warning."She could never give warning.The Atlantic Ocean was between her and those who had loved and protected her all her short life, and the carriage was bearing her onwards to the home in which she was to live alone as this man's companion to the end of her existence.

She made no further propitiatory efforts, but sat and stared in simple blankness at the country, which seemed to increase in loveliness at each new point of view.Sometimes she saw sweet wooded, rolling lands made lovelier by the homely farm-houses and cottages enclosed and sheltered by thick hedges and trees; once or twice they drove past a park enfolding a great house guarded by its huge sentinel oaks and beeches; once the carriage passed through an adorable little village, where children played on the green and a square-towered grey church seemed to watch over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage.If she had been a happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable friends, she would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of admiration every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her rapture would merely represent the crudeness which had existed in contentment in a brown-stone house on a noisy thoroughfare, through a life which had been passed tramping up and down numbered streets and avenues.

They approached at last a second village with a green, a grass-grown street and the irregular red-tiled cottages, which to the unaccustomed eye seemed rather to represent studies for sketches than absolute realities.The bells in the church tower broke forth into a chime and people appeared at the doors of the cottages.The men touched their foreheads as the carriage passed, and the children made bobbing curtsies.Sir Nigel condescended to straighten himself a trifle in his seat, and recognised the greetings with the stiff, half-military salute.The poor girl at his side felt that he put as little feeling as possible into the movement, and that if she herself had been a bowing villager she would almost have preferred to be wholly ignored.She looked at him questioningly.

"Are they--must _I_?" she began.

"Make some civil recognition," answered Sir Nigel, as if he were instructing an ignorant child."It is customary."So she bowed and tried to smile, and the joyous clamour of the bells brought the awful lump into her throat again.It reminded her of the ringing of the chimes at the New York church on that day of her marriage, which had been so full of gay, luxurious bustle, so crowded with wedding presents, and flowers, and warm-hearted, affectionate congratulations, and good wishes uttered in merry American voices.

The park at Stornham Court was large and beautiful and old.The trees were magnificent, and the broad sweep of sward and rich dip of ferny dell all that the imagination could desire.The Court itself was old, and many-gabled and mellow-red and fine.Rosalie had learned from no precedent as yet that houses of its kind may represent the apotheosis of discomfort and dilapidation within, and only become more beautiful without.Tumbled-down chimneys and broken tiles, being clambered over by tossing ivy, are pictures to delight the soul.