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 passionately 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—nobody 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 passage, as she felt unable to do anything herself.
How the intervening hours passed 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 shore, 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!