"Forgive me, ma cherie, forgive me," she moaned, not even conscious that the attendant was lifting her to her feet with professional interest.
For in that instant everything passed from her but the great yearning for love and reconciliation, and for the first time a grey wig seemed a petty and futile aspiration.
CHASSE-CROISE
I. SET TO PARTNERS
"Oh, look, dear, there's that poor Walter Bassett."
Amber Roan looked down from the roof of the drag at the crossing restless shuttles, weaving with feminine woof and masculine warp the multi-coloured web of Society in London's cricket Coliseum.
"Where?" she murmured, her eye wandering over the little tract of sunlit green between the coaches with their rival Eton and Harrow favours. Before Lady Chelmer had time to bend her pink parasol a little more definitely, a thunder of applause turned Amber Roan's face back towards the wickets, with a piqued expression.
"It's real mean," she said. "What have I missed now?"
"Only a good catch," said the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy, whose eyes had never faltered from her face.
"My, that's just the one thing I've been dying for," she pouted self-mockingly.
"Poor Walter Bassett," Lady Chelmer repeated. "I knew his mother."
"Where?" Amber asked again.
"In Huntingdonshire, before the property went to Algy-"
"No, no, Lady Chelmer; I mean, where is poor Walter Whatsaname now?"
"Why, right here," said Lady Chelmer, involuntarily borrowing from the vocabulary of her young American protegee.
"Walter Bassett!" said the Hon. Tolshunt, languidly. "Isn't that the chap that's always getting chucked out of Parliament?"
"But his name doesn't sound Irish?" queried Amber.
"What are you talking about, Amber!" cried Lady Chelmer. "Why, he comes of a good old Huntingdon family. If he had been his own elder brother, he'd have got in long ago."
"Oh, you mean he never gets into Parliament," said Amber.
"Serve him right. I believe he's one of those independent nuisances," said the old Marquis of Woodham. "How is one ever to govern the country, if every man is a party unto himself?" He said "one," but only out of modesty; for having once accepted a minor post in a Ministry that the Premier in posse had not succeeded in forming, he had retained a Cabinet air ever since.
"Well, the beggar will scarcely come up at Highmead for a third licking," observed the Hon. Tolshunt.
"No, poor Walter," said Lady Chelmer. "He thought he'd be sure to get in this time, but he's quite crushed now. Wasn't it actually two thousand votes less than last time?"
"Two thousand and thirty-three," replied Lord Woodham, with punctilious inaccuracy.
Involuntarily Amber's eyes turned in search of the crushed candidate whom she almost saw flattened beneath the 2033 votes, and whom it would scarcely have been a surprise to find asquat under a carriage, humbly assisting the footmen to pack the dirty plates. But before she had time to decide which of the unlively men, loitering round the carriages or helping stout old dowagers up slim iron ladders, was sufficiently lugubrious to be identified as the martyr of the ballot-box, she was absorbed by a tall, masterful figure, whose face had the radiance of easeful success, and whose hands were clapping at some nuance of style which had escaped the palms of the great circular mob.
"I can't see any Walter Bassett," she murmured absently.
"Why, you are staring straight at him," said Lady Chelmer.
Miss Roan did not reply, but her face was eloquent of her astonishment, and when her face spoke, it was with that vivacity which is the American accent of beauty. What wonder if the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy paid heed to it, although he liked what it said less than the form of expression! As he used to put it in after days, "She gave one look, and threw herself away from the top of that drag." The more literal truth was that she drew Walter Bassett up to the top of that drag.
Lady Chelmer protested in vain that she could not halloo to the man.
"You knew his mother," Amber replied. "And he's got no seat."
"Quite symbolical! He, he, he!" and the old Marquis chuckled and cackled in solitary amusement. "Let's offer him one," he went on, half to enjoy the joke a little longer, half to utilise the opportunity of bringing his Ministerial wisdom to bear upon this erratic young man.
"I don't see where there's room," said the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy, sulkily.
"There's room on the front bench," cackled the Marquis, shaking his sides.
"Oh, I don't want you to roll off for him," said Miss Roan, who treated Ministerial Marquises with a contempt that bred in them a delightful sense of familiarity. "Tolshunt can sit opposite me-he's stared at the cricket long enough."
Tolshunt blushed with apparent irrelevance. But even the prospect of staring at Amber more comfortably did not reconcile him to displacement. "It's so awkward meeting a fellow who's had a tumble," he grumbled. "It's like having to condole with a man fresh from a funeral."
"There doesn't seem much black about Walter Bassett," Amber laughed. And at this moment-the dull end of a "maiden over"-the radiant personage in question turned his head, and perceiving Lady Chelmer's massive smile, acknowledged her recognition with respectful superiority, whereupon her Ladyship beckoned him with her best parasol manner.
"I want to introduce you to my friend, Miss Roan," she said, as he climbed to her side.
"I've been reading so much about you," said that young lady, with a sweet smile. "But you shouldn't be so independent, you know, you really shouldn't."
He smiled back. "I'm only independent till they come to my way of thinking."
Lady Chelmer gasped. "Then you still have hopes of Highmead!"
"I won a moral victory there each time, Lady Chelmer."
"How so, sir?" put in the Marquis. "Your opponent increased the Government majority-"
"And my reputation. A tiresome twaddler. Unfortunately," and he smiled again, "two moral victories are as bad as a defeat. On the other hand, a defeat at a bye-election equals a victory at a general. You play a solo-and on your own trumpet." A burst of cheering rounded off these remarks. This time Amber did not even inquire what it indicated-she was almost content to take it as an endorsement of Walter Bassett's epigrams. But Lord Woodham eagerly improved the situation. "A fine stroke that," he said, "but a batsman outside a team doesn't play the game."
"It will be a good time for the country, Lord Woodham," Mr. Bassett returned quietly, "when people cease to regard the Parliamentary session as a cricket match, one side trying to bowl over or catch out the other. But then England always has been a sporting nation."
"Ah, you allow some good in the old country," said Lady Chelmer, pleased. "Look at the trouble we all take to come here to encourage the dear boys;" and the words ended with a tired sigh.
"Yes, of course, that is the side on which they need encouragement," he rejoined drily. "Majuba was lost on the playing-field of Lord's."
There was a moment of shocked surprise. Lady Chelmer, herself a martyr to the religion of sport thus blasphemed-of which she understood as little as of any other religion-hastily tried to pour tea on the troubled waters. But they had been troubled too deeply. For full eight minutes the top of the drag became a political platform for Marquis-Ministerial denunciations of Mr. Gladstone, to a hail of repartee from the profane young man.
At the end of those eight minutes-when Lady Chelmer was at last able to reinsinuate tea into the discussion-Miss Amber Roan realised with a sudden shock that she had not "chipped in" once, and that "poor Walter Bassett" had commanded her ear for all that time without pouring into it a single compliment, or, indeed, addressing to it any observation whatever. For the first time since her debut in the Milwaukee parlour at the age of five, this spoiled daughter of the dollar had lost sight of herself. As they walked towards the tea-tent, through the throng of clergymen and parasols and tanned men with field-glasses, and young bloods and pretty girls, she noted uneasily that his eyes wandered from her to t
hese types of English beauty, these flower-faces under witching hats. Indeed, he had led her out of the way to plough past a row of open carriages. "The shortest cut," he said, "is past the prettiest woman."
But he had to face her at the tea-table, where she blocked his view of the tables beyond and plied him with strawberries and smiles under the sullen glances of the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy and the timid cough of her chaperon.
"I wonder you waste your time on the silly elections," she said. "We don't take much stock in Senators in America."
"It's just because M.P.'s are at such a discount that I want to get in. In the realm of the blind the one-eyed is a king."
"They must be blind not to let you in," she answered with equal frankness.
"No, they see too well, if you mean the voters. They've got their eye on the price of their vote."
"What!" she cried. "You can't buy votes in England!"
"Oh, can't you-"
"But I'm sure I read about it in the English histories-it was all abolished."
"A good many things were abolished by the Decalogue even earlier," he replied grimly. "Half an hour before the poll closed I could have bought a thousand votes at a shilling each."
"Well, that seems reasonable enough," said Lady Chelmer.
"It was beyond my pocket."
"What! Fifty pounds?" cried Amber, incredulously.
The blush that followed was hers, not his. "But what became of the thousand votes?" she asked hurriedly.
He laughed. "Half an hour before the poll closed they had gone down to sixpence apiece-like fish that wouldn't keep."
"My! And were they all wasted?"
"No. My rival bought them up. Vide the newspapers-'the polling was unusually heavy towards the close.'"
"Really!" intervened Lady Chelmer. "Then at that rate you can unseat him for bribery."
"At that rate-or higher," he replied drily. "To unseat another is even more expensive than to seat oneself."
"Why, it seems all a question of money," said Miss Amber Roan, naively.
II. CHASSE
Lady Chelmer was glad when the season came to an end and the dancing mice had no longer to spin dizzyingly in their gilded cage. "The Prisoner of Pleasure" was Walter Bassett's phrase for her. Even now she was a convict on circuit. Some of the dungeons were in ancient castles, from which Bassett was barred, but all of which opened to Amber's golden keys, though only because Lady Chelmer knew how to turn them. He, however, penetrated the ducal doors through the letter-box.
The Hon. Tolshunt and Lord Woodham, in their apprehension of the common foe, began to find each other endurable. If it was politics that attracted her, Tolshunt felt he too could stoop to a career. As for the Marquis, he began to meditate resuming office. Both had freely hinted to her Ladyship that to give a millionaire bride to a man who hadn't a penny savoured of Socialism.
Galled by such terrible insinuations, Lady Chelmer had dared to sound the girl.
"I love his letters," gushed Amber, bafflingly. "He writes such cute things."
"He doesn't dress very well," said Lady Chelmer, feebly fighting.
"Oh, of course, he doesn't bother as much as Tolly, who looks as if he had been poured into his clothes-"
"Yes, the mould of fashion," quoted Lady Chelmer, vaguely.
An eruption of Walter Bassett in the Press did not tend to allay her Ladyship's alarm, especially as Amber began to dally with the morning paper and the evening.
Opening a new People's Library at Highmead-in the absence abroad of the successful candidate-he had contrived to set the newspapers sneering. He had told the People that although they might temporarily accept such gifts as "Capital's conscience-money," yet it was as much the duty of the parish to supply light as to supply street-lamps; which was considered both ungracious and unsound. The donor he described as "a millionaire of means," which was considered wilfully paradoxical by those who did not know how great capitals are locked up in industries. But what worked up the Press most was his denunciation of modern journalism, in malodorous comparison with the literature this Library would bring the People. "The journalist," he said tersely, "is Satan's secretary." No shorter cut to notoriety could have been devised, for it was the "Silly Season," and Satan found plenty of mischief for his idle hands to do.
"Oh, you poor man!" Amber wrote Walter. "Why don't you say you were thinking of America-yellow journalism, and all that? The yellow is, of course, Satan's sulphur. You would hardly believe what his secretaries have written even of poor little me! And you should see the pictures of 'The Milwaukee Millionairess' in the Sunday numbers!"
Walter Bassett did not reply regularly and punctually to Amber's letters, and it was a novel sensation to the jaded beauty who had often thrown aside masculine missives after a glance at the envelope, to find herself eagerly shuffling her morning correspondence in the hope of turning up a trump-card. A card, indeed, it often proved, though never a postcard, and Amber meekly repaid it fourfold. She found it delicious to pour herself out to him; it had the pleasure of abandonment without its humiliation. Verbally, this was the least flirtatious correspondence she had ever maintained with the opposite sex.
So when at last, towards the end of the holiday season, the pair met in the flesh at a country house (Lady Chelmer still protests it was a coincidence), Walter Bassett had no apprehension of danger, and his expression of pleasure at the coincidence was unfeigned, for he felt his correspondence would be lightened. In nothing did he feel the want of pence more keenly than in his inability to keep a secretary for his public work. "Money is time," he used to complain; "the millionaire is your only Methuselah."
The house had an old-world garden, and it was here they had their first duologue. Amber had quickly discovered that Walter was interested in the apiaries that lay at the foot of its slope, and so he found her standing in poetic grace among the tall sweet-peas, with their whites and pinks and faint purples, a basket of roses in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.
As he came to her under the quaint trellised arch, "I always feel like a croquet ball going through the hoop," he said.
"But the ball is always driven," she said.
"Oh, I dare say it has the illusion of freewill. Doubtless the pieces in that chess game, which Eastern monarchs are said to play with human figures, come to think they move of themselves. The knight chuckles as he makes his tortuous jump at the queen, and the bishop swoops down on the castle with holy joy."
She came imperceptibly closer to him. "Then you don't think any of us move of ourselves?"
"One or two of us in each generation. They make the puppets dance."
"You admire Bismarck, I see."
"Yes. A pity he didn't emigrate to your country, like so many Germans."
"Do you think we need him? But he couldn't have been President. You must be born in America."
"True. Then I shall remain on here."
"You're terrible ambitious, Mr. Bassett."
"Yes, terrible," he repeated mockingly.
"Then come and help me pick blackberries," she said, and caught him by his own love of the unexpected. They left the formal garden, and came out into the rabbit-warren, and toiled up and down hillocks in search of ripe bushes, paying, as Walter said, "many pricks to the pint." And when Amber urged him to scramble to the back of tangled bushes, through coils of bristling briars, "You were right," he laughed; "this is terrible ambitious." The best of the blackberries plucked, Amber began a new campaign against mushrooms, and had frequent opportunities to rebuke his clumsiness in crumbling the prizes he uprooted. She knelt at his side to teach him, and once laid her deft fingers instructively upon his.
And just at that moment he irritatingly discovered a dead mole, and fell to philosophising upon it and its soft, velvet, dainty skin-as if a girl's fingers were not softer and daintier! "Look at its poor little pale-red mouth," he went on, "gaspingly open, as in surprise at the strange great forces that had made and killed it."
"I dare say it had
a good time," said Amber, pettishly.
After the harvest had been carried indoors they scarcely exchanged a word till she found him watching the bees the next morning.
"Are you interested in bees?" she inquired in tones of surprise.
"Yes," he said. "They are the most striking example of Nature's Bismarckism-her habit of using her creatures to work her will through their own. Sic vos non vobis."
"I learnt enough Latin at College to understand that," she said; "but I don't see how one finds out anything by just watching them hover over their hives. I've never even been able to find the queen bee. Won't you come and see what beautiful woods there are behind the house? Lady Chelmer is walking there, and I ought to be joining her."
"You ought to be taking her an umbrella," he said coldly. Amber looked up at the sky. Had it been blue, she would have felt it grey. As it was grey, she felt it black.
"Oh, if you're afraid of a drop of rain-" And Amber walked on witheringly. It was a clever move.
Walter followed in silence. Amber did not become aware of him till she was in the middle of an embryonic footpath through tall bracken that made way, courtseying, for the rare pedestrian.
"Oh!" She gave a little scream. "I thought you were studying the bees-or the moles."
"I have only been studying your graceful back."
"How mean! Behind my back!" She laughed, pleased. "I hope you haven't discovered anything Bismarckian about my back."
"Only in the sense that I followed it, and must follow-till the path widens."
"Ah, how you must hate following-you, so terrible ambitious."
"The path will widen," he said composedly.
She planted her feet firm on Mother Earth-as though it were literally her own mother-and turned a mocking head over a tantalising shoulder. "I shall stay still right here."
The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Page 4