"I will not," she answered, recovering herself."But for one moment all the awful hours rushed back.Tell me the rest.""We did not know that the blunder had been made until a messenger from Dole rode over to inquire and bring messages of condolence.Then we understood what had occurred and I own a sort of frenzy seized me.I knew I must see you, and, though the doctors were horribly nervous, they dare not hold me back.The day before it would not have been believed that I could leave my room.You were crying out to me, and though I did not know, I was answering, body and soul.Penzance knew I must have my way when I spoke to him--mad as it seemed.When I rode through Stornham village, more than one woman screamed at sight of me.I shall not be able to blot out of my mind your sister's face.She will tell you what we said to each other.I rode away from the Court quite half mad----" his voice became very gentle, "because of something she had told me in the first wild moments."Lady Anstruthers had spent the night moving restlessly from one room to another, and had not been to bed when they rode side by side up the avenue in the early morning sunlight.An under keeper, crossing the park a few hundred yards above them, after one glance, dashed across the sward to the courtyard and the servants' hall.The news flashed electrically through the house, and Rosalie, like a small ghost, came out upon the steps as they reined in.Though her lips moved, she could not speak aloud, as she watched Mount Dunstan lift her sister from her horse.
"Childe Harold stumbled and I hurt my foot," said Betty, trying to be calm.
"I knew he would find you!" Rosalie answered quite faintly."I knew you would!" turning to Mount Dunstan, adoring him with all the meaning of her small paled face.
She would have been afraid of her memory of what she had said in the strange scene which had taken place before them a few hours ago, but almost before either of the two spoke she knew that a great gulf had been crossed in some one inevitable, though unforeseen, leap.How it had been taken, when or where, did not in the least matter, when she clung to Betty and Betty clung to her.
After a few moments of moved and reverent waiting, the admirable Jennings stepped forward and addressed her in lowered voice.
"There's been little sleep in the village this night, my lady,"he murmured earnestly."I promised they should have a sign, with your permission.If the flag was run up--they're all looking out, and they'd know.""Run it up, Jennings," Lady Anstruthers answered, "at once."When it ran up the staff on the tower and fluttered out in gay answering to the morning breeze, children in the village began to run about shouting, men and women appeared at cottage doors, and more than one cap was thrown up in the air.But old Doby and Mrs.Welden, who had been waiting for hours, standing by Mrs.Welden's gate, caught each other's dry, trembling old hands and began to cry.
The Broadmorlands divorce scandal, having made conversation during a season quite forty years before Miss Vanderpoel appeared at Stornham Court, had been laid upon a lower shelf and buried beneath other stories long enough to be forgotten.Only one individual had not forgotten it, and he was the Duke of Broadmorlands himself, in whose mind it remained hideously clear.He had been a young man, honestly and much in love when it first revealed itself to him, and for a few months he had even thought it might end by being his death, notwithstanding that he was strong and in first-rate physical condition.He had been a fine, hearty young man of clean and rather dignified life, though he was not understood to be brilliant of mind.Privately he had ideals connected with his rank and name which he was not fluent enough clearly to express.After he had realised that he should not die of the public humiliation and disgrace, which seemed to point him out as having been the kind of gullible fool it is scarcely possible to avoid laughing at--or, so it seemed to him in his heart-seared frenzy--he thought it not improbable that he should go mad.He was harried so by memories of lovely little soft ways of Edith's (his wife's name was Edith), of the pretty sound of her laugh, and of her innocent, girlish habit of kneeling down by her bedside every night and morning to say her prayers.This had so touched him that he had sometimes knelt down to say his, too, saying to her, with slight awkward boyishness, that a fellow who had a sort of angel for his wife ought to do his best to believe in the things she believed in.
"And all the time----!" a devil who laughed used to snigger in his ear over and over again, until it was almost like the ticking of a clock during the worst months, when it did not seem probable that a man could feel his brain whirling like a Catherine wheel night and day, and still manage to hold on and not reach the point of howling and shrieking and dashing his skull against wails and furniture.
But that passed in time, and he told himself that he passed with it.Since then he had lived chiefly at Broadmorlands Castle, and was spoken of as a man who had become religious, which was not true, but, having reached the decision that religion was good for most people, he paid a good deal of attention to his church and schools, and was rigorous in the matter of curates.
He had passed seventy now, and was somewhat despotic and haughty, because a man who is a Duke and does not go out into the world to rub against men of his own class and others, but lives altogether on a great and splendid estate, saluted by every creature he meets, and universally obeyed and counted before all else, is not unlikely to forget that he is a quite ordinary human being, and not a sort of monarch.
