It seemed upon the whole even absurd that after a shock so awful and a panic wild enough to cause people to expose their very souls—for there were, of course, endless anecdotes1 to be related afterwards, illustrative of grotesque2 terror, cowardice3, and utter abandonment of all shadows of convention—that all should end in an anticlimax4 of trifling5 danger, upon which, in a day or two, jokes might be made. Even the tramp steamer had not been seriously injured, though its injuries were likely to be less easy of repair than those of the Meridiana.
“Still,” as a passenger remarked, when she steamed into the dock at Liverpool, “we might all be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean this morning. Just think what columns there would have been in the newspapers. Imagine Miss Vanderpoel's being drowned.”
“I was very rude to Louise, when I found her wringing6 her hands over you, and I was rude to Blanche,” Bettina said to Mrs. Worthington. “In fact I believe I was rude to a number of people that night. I am rather ashamed.”
“You called me a donkey,” said Blanche, “but it was the best thing you could have done. You frightened me into putting on my shoes, instead of trying to comb my hair with them. It was startling to see you march into the stateroom, the only person who had not been turned into a gibbering idiot. I know I was gibbering, and I know Marie was.”
“We both gibbered at the red-haired man when he came in,” said Marie. “We clutched at him and gibbered together. Where is the red-haired man, Betty? Perhaps we made him ill. I've not seen him since that moment.”
“He is in the second cabin, I suppose,” Bettina answered, “but I have not seen him, either.”
“We ought to get up a testimonial and give it to him, because he did not gibber,” said Blanche. “He was as rude and as sensible as you were, Betty.”
They did not see him again, in fact, at that time. He had reasons of his own for preferring to remain unseen. The truth was that the nearer his approach to his native shores, the nastier, he was perfectly7 conscious, his temper became, and he did not wish to expose himself by any incident which might cause him stupidly and obviously to lose it.
The maid, Louise, however, recognised him among her companions in the third-class carriage in which she travelled to town. To her mind, whose opinions were regulated by neatly8 arranged standards, he looked morose9 and shabbily dressed. Some of the other second-cabin passengers had made themselves quite smart in various, not too distinguished10 ways. He had not changed his dress at all, and the large valise upon the luggage rack was worn and battered11 as if with long and rough usage. The woman wondered a little if he would address her, and inquire after the health of her mistress. But, being an astute12 creature, she only wondered this for an instant, the next she realised that, for one reason or another, it was clear that he was not of the tribe of second-rate persons who pursue an accidental acquaintance with their superiors in fortune, through sociable13 interchange with their footmen or maids.
When the train slackened its speed at the platform of the station, he got up, reaching down his valise and leaving the carriage, strode to the nearest hansom cab, waving the porter aside.
“Charing Cross,” he called out to the driver, jumped in, and was rattled14 away.
. . . . .
During the years which had passed since Rosalie Vanderpoel first came to London as Lady Anstruthers, numbers of huge luxurious15 hotels had grown up, principally, as it seemed, that Americans should swarm16 into them and live at an expense which reminded them of their native land. Such establishments would never have been built for English people, whose habit it is merely to “stop” at hotels, not to LIVE in them. The tendency of the American is to live in his hotel, even though his intention may be only to remain in it two days. He is accustomed to doing himself extremely well in proportion to his resources, whether they be great or small, and the comforts, as also the luxuries, he allows himself and his domestic appendages17 are in a proportion much higher in its relation to these resources than it would be were he English, French, German, or Italians. As a consequence, he expects, when he goes forth18, whether holiday-making or on business, that his hostelry shall surround him, either with holiday luxuries and gaiety, or with such lavishness19 of comfort as shall alleviate20 the wear and tear of business cares and fatigues21. The rich man demands something almost as good as he has left at home, the man of moderate means something much better. Certain persons given to regarding public wants and desires as foundations for the fortune of business schemes having discovered this, the enormous and sumptuous22 hotel evolved itself from their astute knowledge of common facts. At the entrances of these hotels, omnibuses and cabs, laden23 with trunks and packages frequently bearing labels marked with red letters “S. S. So-and-So, Stateroom—Hold—Baggage-room,” drew up and deposited their contents and burdens at regular intervals24. Then men with keen, and often humorous faces or almost painfully anxious ones, their exceedingly well-dressed wives, and more or less attractive and vivacious-looking daughters, their eager little girls, and un-English-looking little boys, passed through the corridors in flocks and took possession of suites25 of rooms, sometimes for twenty-four hours, sometimes for six weeks.
The Worthingtons took possession of such a suite26 in such a hotel. Bettina Vanderpoel's apartments faced the Embankment. From her windows she could look out at the broad splendid, muddy Thames, slowly rolling in its grave, stately way beneath its bridges, bearing with it heavy lumbering27 barges28, excited tooting little penny steamers and craft of various shapes and sizes, the errand or burden of each meaning a different story.
It had been to Bettina one of her pleasures of the finest epicurean flavour to reflect that she had never had any brief and superficial knowledge of England, as she had never been to the country at all in those earlier years, when her knowledge of places must necessarily have been always the incomplete one of either a schoolgirl traveller or a schoolgirl resident, whose views were limited by the walls of restriction29 built around her.
If relations of the usual ease and friendliness30 had existed between Lady Anstruthers and her family, Bettina would, doubtless, have known her sister's adopted country well. It would have been a thing so natural as to be almost inevitable31, that she would have crossed the Channel to spend her holidays at Stornham. As matters had stood, however, the child herself, in the days when she had been a child, had had most definite private views on the subject of visits to England. She had made up her young mind absolutely that she would not, if it were decently possible to avoid it, set her foot upon English soil until she was old enough and strong enough to carry out what had been at first her passionately32 romantic plans for discovering and facing the truth of the reason for the apparent change in Rosy33. When she went to England, she would go to Rosy. As she had grown older, having in the course of education and travel seen most Continental34 countries, she had liked to think that she had saved, put aside for less hasty consumption and more delicate appreciation35 of flavours, as it were, the country she was conscious she cared for most.
“It is England we love, we Americans,” she had said to her father. “What could be more natural? We belong to it—it belongs to us. I could never be convinced that the old tie of blood does not count. All nationalities have come to us since we became a nation, but most of us in the beginning came from England. We are touching36 about it, too. We trifle with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalise over Italy and ecstacise over Spain—but England we love. How it moves us when we go to it, how we gush37 if we are simple and effusive38, how we are stirred imaginatively if we are of the perceptive39 class. I have heard the commonest little half-educated woman say the prettiest, clumsy, emotional things about what she has seen there. A New England schoolma'am, who has made a Cook's tour, will almost have tears in her voice as she wanders on with her commonplaces about hawthorn40 hedges and thatched cottages and white or red farms. Why are we not unconsciously pathetic about German cottages and Italian villas<............