Chapter 1. Bettina

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_ CHAPTER I. BETTINA

The girl knelt on the floor, feverishly packing a shabby little trunk.

Outside was a streaming April storm, and the rain, rushing against the square, small-paned windows, shut out the view of the sea, shut out the light, and finally brought such darkness that the girl stood up with a sigh, brushed off her black dress with thin white hands, and groped her way to the door.

Beyond the door was the blackness of an upper hall in a tall century-old house. A spiral stairway descended into a well of gloom. An ancient iron lantern, attached to a chain, hung from the low ceiling.

The girl lighted the lantern, and the faint illumination made deeper the shadows below.

And from the shadows came a man's voice.

"May I come up?"

As the girl bent over the railing, the glow of the lantern made of her hair a shining halo. "Oh," she cried, radiantly, "I'm so glad you've come. I--I was afraid----"

The thunder rolled, the waves pounded on the rocks, and the darkness grew more dense, but now the girl did not heed, for what mattered a mere storm, when, ascending the stairs, was one who knew fear neither of life nor of death, nor of the things which come after death?

When at last her visitor emerged from the gloom, he showed himself beyond youthful years, with hair slightly touched with gray, not tall, but of a commanding presence, with clear, keen blue eyes, and with cheeks which were tanned by out-of-door exercise, and reddened by the prevailing weather.

"I just had to come," he said, as he took her hand. "I knew you'd be frightened."

"Yes," she said, "Miss Matthews is at school, and I am alone----"

"And unhappy?"

Her lips quivered, but she drew her hand from his, and went on into the shabby room, where she lighted a candle in a brass holder, and touched a match to a fire which was laid in the blackened brick fireplace.

The doctor's quick eye noted the preparations for departure.

"What does that mean?" he asked, and pointed to the trunk.

"I--I am going away----"

"Away?"

"Yes," nervously; "I--I can't stay here, doctor."

"Why not?"

"Oh," tremulously, "it was all right when I had mother, because she was so sick that I was too busy to realize how deadly lonely it was here. I knew she needed the sea air, and she could get it better in the top of this old house than anywhere else. But now that she's gone--I can't stand it. I'm young, and Miss Matthews is away all day teaching--and when she comes home at night we have nothing in common, and there's the money left from the insurance--and so--I'm going away."

He looked at her, with her red-gold hair in high relief against the worn leather of the chair in which she sat, at the flower-like face, the slender figure, the tiny feet in childish strapped slippers.

"You aren't fit to fight the world," he said; "you aren't fit."

"Perhaps it won't be such a fight," she said. "I could get something to do in the city, and----"

He shook his head. "You don't know--you can't know----" Then he broke off to ask, "What would you do with your furniture?"

"Miss Matthews would be glad to take the rooms just as they are. She was delighted when you asked her to stay with me after mother died. She loves our old things, the mahogany and the banjo clock, and the embroidered peacocks, and the Venetian heirlooms that belonged to Dad's family. But I hate them."

"Hate them--why?"

"Because, oh, you know, because Dad treated mother so dreadfully. He broke her heart."

His practiced eye saw that she was speaking tensely.

"I wish you'd get me a cup of tea," he said, suddenly. "I'm just from the sanatorium. I operated on a bad case--and, well, that's sufficient excuse, isn't it, for me to want to drink a cup of tea with you?"

She was busy in a moment with her hospitality.

"Oh, why didn't you tell me? And you're wet." Her hand touched his coat lightly as she passed him.

"The rain came so suddenly that I couldn't get the window of my car closed; it's an awful storm.

"And now," he said, when she had brought the tea on an old Sheffield tray, and had set it on a little folding table which he placed between them on the hearth, "and now let's talk about it."

"Please don't try to make me stay----"

"Why not?"

"Because, oh, because you can't know what I suffer here; it isn't just because I've lost mother, but the people--they all know about her and about Dad, and they aren't nice to me."

"My dear child!"

"Perhaps it's because father was a singer and an Italian, and mother came of good old Puritan stock. They seem to think she lowered herself by marrying him. They can't understand that though he was unkind to her, he belonged to an aristocratic Venetian family----"

"It's from those wonderful women of Venice, then, that you get that hair. Do you remember Browning's:

"'Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.'"

There was no response to his thought in her young eyes.

"I've never read Browning," she said, negligently, "and I hate to think of 'dear dead women.' I want to think of live things, of bright things, of gay things. It seems sometimes as if I should die here among the shadows."

She was sobbing now, with her head on the table.

"Bettina," the doctor bent over her, "poor child, poor little child."

"Please let me go," she whispered.

"I can't keep you, of course. I wish I knew what to do. I wish Diana were here."

"Diana?"

"I forgot that you did not know her. She has been away for two years. She's rather wonderful, Bettina."

The girl raised her head. The man was gazing straight into the fire. All the eager light that had made his face seem young had gone, and he looked worn and tired. Bettina had no worldly intuitions to teach her the reason for the change a woman's name had wrought, and so absorbed was she in her own trouble that she viewed the transformation with unseeing eyes.

"What could she do if she were here?" she asked with childish directness.

"She would find some way out of it--she is very wise." He spoke with some hesitation, as a man speaks who holds a subject sacred. "She has had to decide things for herself all her life--her father and mother died when she was a little girl; now she is over thirty and the mistress of a large fortune. She spends her winters in the city and her summers down here by the sea--but for the past two years she has been staying in Europe with a widowed friend who was a schoolmate of hers in Berlin."

"When is she coming back?"

Out of a long silence, he answered, "I am not sure that she will come back. Her engagement was announced last fall--to a German, Ulric Van Rosen--she is to be married in June."

The fact, to him so pregnant of woeful possibilities, meant little to Bettina.

"Of course if she's not here, she can't do anything--and anyhow most people don't care to do practical things to help, do they?"

She looked so childish, so appealing, so altogether exquisite and young in her black-robed slenderness, that he answered her as he would have answered a child.

"It's too bad that the world should hurt you."

"But I'm going to do wonderful things in the city."

"Wonderful things--poor little girl----"

As he brought his eyes back from the fire to her face, he seemed to bring his thoughts back from an uneasy reverie.

"You ought," he said, "to marry----"

The color flamed into the girl's cheeks. "Mother was always saying that, in those last days. But I hated to have her; it seemed so dreadful to talk of marriage--without love. I know she didn't mean it that way, poor darling! She married for love and her life was such a failure. But I couldn't--not just to get married, could I--not just to have some one take care of me?"

He stood up, and thrust his hands in his pockets. "No," he agreed bluffly, "you couldn't, of course."

"And there's never been any one in love with me," was her naive confession, "and I've never been in love, not really----"

He was looking down at her with smiling eyes. "There's plenty of time."

"Yes--that's what I always told mother--but she dreaded to think of me--alone."

The eager, dying woman had said the same thing to the doctor, and it had seemed to him, sometimes, that her burning eyes had begged of him a favor which he could not grant.

For there had always been--Diana!

He straightened his shoulders. "I'm going to ask you to stay here," he said, "instead of going to the city. I haven't any real right to keep you, for I'm not legally your guardian, but I promised your mother to look after you. I can find work for you. We need some one at the sanatorium to look after the office----"

For a moment she set her will against his. "But I'd rather go to the city."

He put his strong hands on her shoulders. "Little child, look at me," he said, and when she flashed up at him a startled glance, he went on, gently, "Your mother wanted me to take care of you--to keep you from harm. In the city you'll be too far away. I want you to stay here. Will you?"

And presently she whispered, "I will stay."

Outside the rain was rushing and the wind was blowing, and plain little Miss Matthews battled with the storm. Miss Matthews, who, every day in the year, taught a class of tumultuous children, and whose life dealt always with the commonplace. And it was plain little Miss Matthews who, having weathered the storm and climbed the winding stairs, came in, rain-coated and soft-hatted, to find by the fire the doctor drawing on his gloves and Bettina hovering about him like a gold-tipped butterfly.

"It's a dreadful storm," said Miss Matthews, superfluously, as Bettina went to get boiling water. "There's a young man down-stairs who wants to speak to you, Dr. Blake. He said that he couldn't find you at the sanatorium. He saw your car in front of the house and knew you were here. But the bell wouldn't ring, and so he waited. I told him the bell was broken and that you'd come down at once. He's hurt his hand."

"They would have fixed him up at the sanatorium."

"He said he wanted you, and nobody else, and that he came into the hall because he was like a pussy cat and hated the rain. He is a queer looking creature in a leather cap and leather leggins."

The doctor gave an amused laugh. "That's Justin Ford," he said; "the pussy-cat speech sounds like him, and he wears the leather costume when he flies."

Bettina, coming back with fresh tea for Miss Matthews, asked, "How does he fly?"

"In an aeroplane. He's to try out his hydro-aeroplane to-morrow. He's probably been at work on the machinery and hurt his hand."

Bettina sparkled. "Think of a man who can fly," she said. "Doesn't it sound incredible?"

"It's the most marvelous thing in the world," said the big-hearted surgeon, not knowing that he, as a man of healing, was more marvelous, for he had to do with the mechanics of flesh and blood, while Justin had to do only with steel and aluminum and canvas, which are, at best, unimportant things when compared with nerves and ligaments and bones.

"Would you mind if Ford came up?" the doctor asked. "I've got to go straight to my old man with the pneumonia after I leave here, and I could look at his hand."

Bettina shivered. "Shall I have to look at it?" she asked in a little voice.

He laughed. "Of course not. You can go in the other room."

But when the young man, who had answered the doctors call, entered, she did not go, for the face which was framed by the leather cap was that of a youth whose beauty matched her own, and whose mocking eyes, as he acknowledged the introduction, seemed to beat against the door of her maiden heart and demand admission. _

Read next: Chapter 2. In The Shadowy Room


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