So the interesting survival made his groping way westwards, in order to dress for dinner. The fog was extremely dense, and the light from the street-lamps was not sufficient to pierce the thickness that lay between them, so that a man following the curb of the pavement had passed out of range of one before he came within range of the next. Dim shadows of people suddenly loomed large and close, and as suddenly vanished into the fog. In the roadway omnibuses and cabs proceeded at a foot-pace, some drivers even leading their horses; here a hansom had gone utterly astray, and was at a standstill on the pavement, being backed slowly off into the road. Through the dense air sound also came muffled and subaqueously; it was like a city in a dream.
At the corner of Bond Street a man, walking faster than is usual in a fog, ran into Ginger just below a gas-lamp, and apologized in a voice that struck him as familiar. The next moment he saw who it was.
'Pray don't mention it,' he said. 'I thought you were in America, Mr. Bilton.'
Bilton peered at him a moment, and recognised him also. 'Really, Lord Henry, if it was necessary for me to run into someone, I should have chosen you. At the present moment I may be in Australia for all I know. Is this London, and if so, what part?'
'Corner of Bond Street,' said Ginger. 'Which way are you going?'
'South Audley Street,' said the other; 'I'm going to see your father, in fact, about the sale of Molesworth.'
'Are you going to buy it?' asked Ginger.
'No; but I have been asked to communicate direct with him about it. The intending purchaser wants me to see about doing it up.'
'I am going that way too,' said Ginger; 'let us go together. Walking is the only way. You know, we don't know who the intending purchaser is.'
'That so?' asked Bilton. 'Well, there's no reason any longer for secrecy; it's Lewis S. Palmer.'
'Lewis Palmer?' asked Ginger.
'Yes; pity your father didn't ask an extra ten thousand.'
'He would have, if he had known who the purchaser was,' said Ginger candidly. 'Do you know if Mr. Palmer means to live there?' he asked.
'No more than he means to live on the new Liverpool and Southampton line.'
'Ah! he hasn't got that through yet,' said Ginger, with a sudden feeling of satisfaction that there had been considerable difficulties in getting the Bill through the House last session. There had really been no reason why it should not have been passed, except that the Commons objected to it merely because the line was practically to belong to a man who was not English.
Bilton laughed a short, rather shoulder-shrugging laugh.
'London is the last place to know what happens in London,' he said. 'The Bill was passed this afternoon. Lewis S. Palmer owns that line as much as I own my walking-stick. He could sit down on the up-track and Mrs. Palmer on the down-track, and stop all traffic if he chose. You don't seem to like it.'
Ginger rather resented this, chiefly because it was true.
'Why should I not like it?' he said.
'Can't say, I'm sure,' said Bilton. 'I guess your country ought to be very grateful. Palmer will show you how to run a line properly. He won't give you engines which are so pretty that they ought to be hung on the wall, and he won't give you cars covered with gilt and mirrors. But he'll run you trains quicker than you ever had them run yet; he'll give you express freight rates that will be as cheap as transport by sea, and he'll pull the two ports together like stringing beads, instead of letting them roll about unconnected. Of course, he'll get his bit out of it, but all the benefit of rapid transport and cheap fares will be yours. I guess your House of Commons was annoyed they didn't think of it themselves.'
They had got to Hyde Park Corner, and the fog had suddenly grown less dense and the darkness was clarified. Across the open square they could see the dark mass of the arch at the top of Constitution Hill, and farther on the dim shapes of the houses in Grosvenor Place. Hansoms no longer passed as if going to a funeral, but jingled merrily by to the cheerful beat of the horses' hoofs on the road. All the traffic was resuscitated; buses swayed and nodded; silent-footed electric broughams made known their advent by their clear metallic bells, and the two turned more briskly up Hamilton Place.
'And what has brought you to England so suddenly?' asked Ginger. 'I thought you intended to stop in America throughout Mrs. Emsworth's tour.'
'Circumstances altered my plan,' said Bilton. 'I had several pieces of business here; for instance, Lewis S. Palmer wished me to conduct the negotiations of Molesworth, as his agent seemed to be a sort of fool-man, and tell him what must be done to make it liveable in.'
'It is going to be lived in?' said Ginger, quite unable to stifle the curiosity he felt.
'Oh, certainly it is going to be lived in. Then I wanted to secure—I have secured—the lease of the Coronation Theatre for next summer.'
'I thought Mrs. Emsworth had taken it,' said Ginger.
'No; she meant to, but she did not complete her contract before leaving for America. In fact, she let an excellent chance slip.'
'You have cut her out?'
'Certainly. Then there was another thing. Now, do you know, Lord Henry, whether Mrs. Massington has arrived in London yet? She sailed the day before I did, but we made a very fast voyage. She was in theOceanic.'
'She arrives this evening,' said Ginger.
'And goes to her sister's, to Miss Farady's?' asked Bilton.
'Yes. Here we are. Won't you come in with me? I will see if my father is at home.'
Gallio was in, and very much at Bilton's service. Personally, he detested the man, but he liked his way of doing business, and he particularly liked the business he had come to do. Bertie's consent had been received by cable that afternoon, and a short half-hour was sufficient to draw up the extremely simple deed by virtue of which Molesworth, the house and park, and all that was within, house and park passed into the possession of Lewis S. Palmer on payment of the sum of two hundred thousand pounds.
'And I'll cable to Lewis right along,' said Bilton at the conclusion, 'and you'll find the sum standing to your credit to-morrow morning. By the way, Lewis expressly told me to ask you whether you had any wishes of any sort with regard to Molesworth—any small thing you wanted out of it, or anything you wanted kept exactly as it is.'
Gallio considered a moment.
'Ah, there's the visitors' book,' he said; 'I should rather like to have that. I don't think it could be of any value to Mrs. Palmer, as it only contains the names of friends of mine who have stayed there.'
'Distinguished names?' asked Bilton.
'I suppose you might call some of them distinguished.'
'I guess Mrs. Palmer might like to keep it on,' said Bilton.
'But I'll ask. Anything else?'
'I should rather like the oak avenue left as it is,' said Gallio. 'It was planted in the reign of Henry VIII., and several what you would call distinguished people—James I. and George I. among them—planted trees there.'
'Mrs. Palmer will have a gold fence put round it,' said Bilton, with a touch of sarcasm.
'That will add very greatly to the beauty of the sylvan scene,' Gallio permitted himself to remark. 'In fact, if I ever have the pleasure of seeing Molesworth again, I shall expect to find it improved out of all recognition.'
'I expect Mrs. Palmer will smarten it up a bit,' said Bilton, quite unmoved.
That excellent man of business went down to Molesworth next day in order to inspect it generally, with a view to estimating what would have to be spent on it to make it habitable. He had sufficient taste to see the extraordinary dignity of the plain Elizabethan house; and though he felt that Mrs. Palmer would probably have called it a mouldy old ruin, he did not propose, even though he got a percentage on the sale and the costs of renovation, to recommend any scheme of gilding and mirrors. The tapestries were admirable, the Sheraton and Chippendale furniture was excellently suited to the thoroughly English character of the place, and the gardens wanted nothing but gardeners. Bilton's extremely quiet and businesslike mind had its perceptive side, and though he did not care for, yet he appreciated, the leisurely solidity, the leisurely beauty of the place, so characteristic of England, so innate with the genius of the Anglo-Saxon. The red, lichen-toned house had grown there as surely as its stately oaks and lithe beeches had grown there out of the English soil—indigenous, not bought and planted. Cedar-trees with broad fans of leaves, and starred by the ripe cones, made a spacious shade on the lawn, and whispered gently to the stirring of the warm autumn wind, as they bathed themselves in the mellow floods of October sunshine. Below the lawn ran a dimpling trout-stream, and within the precincts of the park stood the small Gothic church, grown gray in its patient, unremitting service, gathering slowly round it the sons of the soil. Attached to one aisle was the chapel of the family, and marble effigies of Scartons knelt side by side, or, reclining on their tombs, raised dumb hands of prayer. One had hung up his armour by him; by the feet of another his hunting dogs lay stretched in sleep. One, but a beardless lad, the second of the race, had been killed in the hunting-field; his wife, so ran the inscription, was delivered of a child the same day, and died within twenty-four hours of her lord. And over all was the air of distinction, of race, of culture that could not be bought, though Lewis S. Palmer, by right of purchase, was entitled to it all. Bilton felt this, but dismissed it as an unprofitable emotion, and made a note on his shirt-cuff to inquire whether the right of presentation to the living belonged to the family.
Sybil Massington, in the meantime, had arrived in London, and while Bilton was engaged in appraising the Molesworth estate, was herself in the confessional of the wisest spinster in London. All her life she had been accustomed to knowing what she wanted, and, knowing, to getting it. But now, for the first time in matters of importance, she did not know what she wanted, and was afraid of not getting anything at all. Things in America, in fact, had gone quite stupendously awry; she was upset, angry at herself and others, and, what to her was perhaps most aggravating of all, uncertain of herself. To one usually so lucid, so intensely reasonable as she was, this was of the nature of an idiocy; it was as if she—the essential Sybil—stood by, while a sort of wraith of herself sat feeble and indifferent in a chair, unable to make up its mind about anything. She longed to take this phantom by the shoulders and shake it into briskness and activity again, open its head and dust its brain for it. But perhaps Judy could do it for her; anyhow, the need, not so much of consultation, but of confession, was urgent. She did not in the least want absolution, because she had done nothing wrong; indeed, she wanted to confess because she was incapable of doing anything at all. She had to make up her mind, and she could not; perhaps stating the problem of her indecision very clearly might, even if it did not elicit a suggestion from Judy, help her, at any rate, to see what her difficulties were more clearly. And, though indecisive, she still retained her candour, and told Judy all that had happened, exactly as it had happened.
'Oh, I know it,' she said in answer to some question of Judy's. 'A woman feels in her bones when a man is going to propose to her; only I wasn't quite ready for it, and for two days I kept him from actually asking me. Then, on the night that Mrs. Emsworth was acting there, I went upstairs with her to her room. Two minutes afterwards Bilton came in—strolled in.'
'You mean he didn't knock?' asked Judy.
'Oh, my dear, what does it matter whether he knocked or not? As a matter of fact, I think he did, but he came in on the top of his knock. Anyhow, there was no doubt in my mind as to what their relations were; but, to make sure, I asked Mrs. Emsworth. It was a horrible thing to do, but I did it. I like that woman; she is what she is, but she is extremelybon enfant, a nice, straightforward boy. And she told me. I was perfectly right: he had been living with her for the last two years.'
Sybil got up, and began walking up and down the room. 'It hurt me,' she went on; 'it hurt me intolerably. It hurt my self-respect that he should come to me like that. No, he had not broken with her—at any rate, not definitely. She was perfectly straightforward with me, and in a curious sort of way she was sorry for me, as one is sorry for a pain one does not understand. She could not see, I think, that it made any difference.'
Judy's rather short nose went in the air.
'Luckily, it does not matter much what that sort of woman thinks,' she said.
Sybil did not reply for a moment.
'You don't see my difficulty, then,' she said; 'my difficulty, my indecision, is that I am not certain whether she is right or not. Look at it this way: I was attracted by Mr. Bilton; I felt for him that which I believe in me does duty for love. I liked him and I admired him; I liked the fact that he admired me. Now, all the time that I liked and admired him this thing had happened. I liked the man who had done that. What difference, then, can my knowing it make?'
Judy looked at her in surprise.
'If he had happened to be a murderer?' she said.
'I should not ever have liked him.'
'I don't know what to say to you,' said Judy, really perplexed. 'What you tell me is so unlike you.'
'I know it is. I have changed, I suppose. I think America changed me. What has happened? Is it that I have become hard or that I have learned common-sense? What I cannot make out is whether I would sooner have learned this or not. If I had not learned it, I should be now engaged to him; but, knowing it, shall I marry him?'
'Have you seen him since?'
'No. He has behaved very typically, very cleverly. He neither tried to see me again nor wrote to me. He has very quick perceptions, I am sure. I am sure he reasoned it out with himself, and came to the conclusion that it was better not to approach me in any way for a time. He was quite right; if he had tried to explain things away, or had even assured me that there was nothing to explain, I should have had nothing more to say to him. I should have told him that he and all that concerned him was a matter of absolute indifference to me. He has been wise: he simply effaced himself, and he has therefore made me think about him.'
Sybil paused in front of the looking-glass, and smoothed her hair with an absent hand. Then she turned round again.
'You will see,' she said. 'He will follow me to England. I don't think you like him, Judy,' she added.
'My approbation is not necessary to you.'
'Not in the least; but why don't you?'
'Because I am old-fashioned—because we belong to totally different generations, you and I. I don't like motor-cars, either, you see; and a person's feeling for motor-cars is a very good criterion as to the generation to which he belongs.'
Sybil laughed.
'How odd you are!' she said; 'they are fast and convenient. But about Mr. Bilton: he is a very remarkable man. He can do anything he chooses to do, and whatever he chooses to do turns into gold. He owns half the theatres in New York; he has a big publishing business there; he furnishes houses for people; he has made a fortune on the Stock Exchange. Some of those Americans are like spiders sitting in the middle of their webs, which extend in all directions, and whatever wind blows, it blows some fly into their meshes. Just as a great artist like Michael Angelo can write a sonnet, or hew a statue out of the marble, or paint a picture, fitting the artistic sense like a handle to any knife, so with a man like him. He sees money everywhere. He is very efficient.'
'Is he quite unscrupulous?' asked Judy.
'Not unscrupulous exactly, but relentless; that is the spirit of America: it fascinates me, and it repels me. Some of them remind me of destiny—Mr. Palmer does. By the way, he asked me, when I was over there, if Molesworth was for sale. Have you heard anything about it?'
'Yes; Ginger told me that negotiations were going on. He didn't know, nor did Gallio, who the possible purchaser was. No doubt it was Mr. Palmer.'
Sybil put her head on one side, considering.
'What was the price?' she asked.
'Two hundred thousand.'
'Of course, money does not mean anything particular to the Palmers,' she said; 'but I rather wonder why they bought it. Mr. Palmer has been looking out for an English house, I know, but I should have thought Molesworth was too remote.'
'I expect they paid for the spirit of ancestry which clings to the place,' said Judy. 'Molesworth seemed to me, the only time I saw it, to be the most typically English house I had ever seen. Mrs. Palmer can't procure ancestors, but she can procure the frame for them.'
'That is not charitably said, dear Judy,' said her sister; 'besides, I am sure that is not it. Ah, I know! They have bought it to give to Bertie on his marriage; that must be it.'
'If so, there is a large-leaved, coarse sort of delicacy about it,' said Judy.
'There again you are not charitable. Besides, you have not seen Amelie. She is charming, simply charming—a girl, too, a real flesh and blood girl. And she adores him; she adores him with all her splendid vitality.'
'And Bertie?' asked Judy.
'Oh, they will be very happy,' said Sybil. 'It will be a great success. He admires her immensely; he likes her immensely. Dear Judy, there are many ways of love; one way of love is Bertie's and mine. That is all.'
'Did he adore Mrs. Emsworth like that?' asked Judy.
'Well, no, I imagine not; that was the other way of love.'
She took up the morning paper. Then a sudden thought seemed to strike her, and she laid it down again.
'By the way, is Charlie in town?' she asked. 'I heard from him just before I left America; he said he had not been well. His letter made me feel rather anxious. There was an undercurrent of—of keeping something back.'
'Did he tell you no more than that?' asked Judy.
Sybil glanced up, and, seeing Judy's face, knitted her brows into a frown.
'Judy, what is it?' she asked quickly; 'tell me at once.'
'I can't, dear; he wished to tell you himself. I promised him I wouldn't.'
'But is there something wrong—something really wrong?'
Judy nodded.
'Where is he?'
'Down at Brighton with his mother.'
'Judy, you must tell me,' said her sister; 'it is merely saving me a couple of hours of horrid anxiety. I shall go down to see him this afternoon. Now, what is it? Is it lungs? I will tell Charlie I forced you to tell me.'
'There is no use in my not answering you,' said Judy.
'Yes, it is that.'
'Serious?'
'Consumption is always serious.'
Sybil said nothing for a moment.
'I shall go down this afternoon,' she said. 'Why is he at Brighton? Why is he not at some proper place?'
'He went to Sheringham for a time, but he left it.'
'But he has got to get better,' said Sybil quickly. 'He must do what is sensible.'
Judy glanced up at her a moment.
'As things at present stand, he does not much want to get better,' she said.
Sybil turned, and looked at her long and steadily.
'You mean me?' she asked.
There was silence. Sybil went to the writing-table and wrote a telegram, while her sister took up the paper she had dropped and looked at it mechanically. Almost immediately a short paragraph struck her eye, but her mind, dwelling on other things, did not at once take in its significance.
'Yet you advised me yourself not to marry him,' said Sybil, as she rang the bell.
'I know I did; nor have I really changed my mind. But it is in your power to make him want to live.'
Sybil turned on her rather fiercely.
'You have no right to load me with such responsibilities,' she said. 'It is not my fault that he loves me; it is not my fault that I am as I am.'
'I know it is not,' said Judy; 'but, Sybil, be wise—be very wise. I don't know what you can do, but certainly nobody else can do anything. I am very sorry for you.' Sybil gave the telegram, asking Charlie if she could come, to the servant, and stood in silence again by the fire. After a pause Judy took up the paper again.
'There is something here that concerns you,' she said; 'it is that Mr. Bilton arrived in London yesterday.'
Sybil turned, then suddenly threw her arms wide.
'Oh, Judy, Judy,' she cried, 'I am unutterably unhappy! I am perplexed, puzzled; I don't know what I feel.'
And she flung herself down on the sofa by Judy's side, and burst into uncontrollable sobs.
Charlie Brancepeth was sitting in a wooden summer-house on the lawn of his mother's house at Brighton. It was set upon a pivot in the centre of its floor, so that it could be turned with little effort to any point of the compass, so as to face the sun and avoid the wind. In it—so much, at any rate, he practised of the treatment which he had compared to the fattening of a Strasburg goose—he passed the whole day, only sleeping indoors. But this he did because it seemed to him a very rational and sensible mode of life, soothing to the nerves, and producing in him a certain outdoor stagnation of the brain. He did not want to think; he wanted merely to be as quiet and drowsed as he could, and not to live very long; for, since Sybil's final rejection of him, the taste had gone out of life—temporarily it might be only—but while that was still very new and bitter within him had come this fresh blow, the discovery that he was suffering from tubercular disease of the lungs. For some months before he had suspected this; then, soon after the departure of Sybil and Bertie for America, he had had an attack of influenza from which he did not rally well; he had a daily rise of temperature, a daily intolerable lassitude, and his doctor, seeking for the cause of this, had found it. Then, following his advice, he tried a cure on the east coast of England, in which he had to get up at the sound of a bell and proceed out of doors, there to remain all day till a bell summoned him and the other patients in again. At frequent intervals he had to eat large quantities of fattening food; at other hours he had to walk quietly along a road. Work of all sorts, even more than an hour or two's reading, was discouraged, and the days had been to him a succession of nightmares, all presenting the same dull hopelessness. So, after a fortnight of it, he decided to persevere with it no more, and, if he had to die, to die. He had talked the thing out once with his mother, and had promised to go to Davos for the winter, if it was recommended to him, and in the interval to lead a mode of life that was rational for his case without being unbearable. They both agreed finally to dwell on the subject as little as possible in their thoughts, and dismiss it altogether from their conversation.
Just now she was away for a day or two, and he was alone as he waited for Sybil's arrival. That he was alone he had felt himself bound to tell her, but he felt certain that she would come all the same. And though he waited for her in a sort of anguish of expectation, he felt that life, for the first time since the Sunday at Haworth at the end of July, was interesting. What she would say to him, how he would take it, even the vaguest predication of their intercourse, was beyond him to guess. Indeed, it was scarcely worth while, he thought, trying to conjecture what it would be. For Love and Death were near to him, august guests.
The shelter was lit by an electric light, and he had just turned this on when he heard the wheels of her cab drive up. He went in through the garden-door to meet her, his heart beating wildly, found her in the moment of arrival, and advanced to her with outstretched hands.
'Ah, this is charming of you,' he said; 'I am delighted to see you!'
But she had involuntarily paused a moment as she saw him, for, though his disease had made no violent inroads on him, yet the whole manner of his face, his walk, his appearance, was changed. His eyes were always large, they now perhaps looked ever so little larger; his face was always thin, it was perhaps a shade thinner; he always stooped, he stooped perhaps a little more. But, even as one can look at a portrait and say 'I see no point on which it is not like, yet it really has no resemblance to the man,' so, though Charlie was changed so little, yet he was not like him with whom she had walked on the hot Sunday afternoon of July last. Then it was summer, now it was autumn; and, instead of the broad brightness of sun, a little bitter wind stirred among the trees. For the flame of life there was substituted the shadow of death, intangible, indescribable, untranslatable into definite thought, but unmistakable.
But her pause was only momentary; the quick, practical part of her nature leaped instinctively to the surface to do its duty. She was here, if possible, to help, and she came quickly forward to meet him.
'My dear Charlie,' she said, 'it is good to see you again.'
She took both his hands in hers.
'You bad boy,' she said, 'to get ill. Judy told me. It was not her fault; I made her.'
'I meant to tell you myself,' said he; 'but it does not matter. Now, that is enough of that subject; my mother and I never talk of it—we hardly ever think of it. Now, will you take off your things?'
Sybil drew her cloak round her.
'No, certainly not,' said she. 'Judy told me you lived in a summer-house. Well, I did not come down here to see you through the window; lead on to the summer-house.'
'It will be too cold for you,' said he.
'It will be nothing of the kind.'
They talked till dinner on indifferent subjects; she sketched New York for him with a brilliant, if not a very flattering, touch; she did her best for the Revels, but suddenly in the middle broke down.
'It really is awful what a beast one is!' she said. 'But there, somehow, where what I am describing to you is natural, where everyone is so extraordinarily kind and so entirely uncultured, the vulgarity did not strike me. I like the people, and, as you know, I like the sense of wealth. Who is it who talks about moral geography? Burke, I think. Well, that is a very suggestive expression. You can do in New York what you cannot possibly conceive doing in England, just as you can grow plants in the South which will not stand our climate.'
Charlie shook his head.
'I don't think I could stand that anywhere,' he said.
'Oh yes, you could.Milieu, environment is everything; but now, as I sit here and look at the big trees in the garden, covered with that wash of moonlight, it is different. You too—you are so very un-American. I always told you you were old-fashioned.'
Charlie looked at her in silence a moment.
'And you,' he said at length—' you yourself? Have you changed, as Ginger prophesied? Do I seem to you more old-fashioned than ever? I am a very good test question, I imagine.'
'Why?'
'Because you have seen, have you not? a good deal of my double, Bilton. The contrast of our natures ought to be all the more apparent for the similarity of our appearance.' She got up.
'I have a great deal to talk to you about, Charlie,' she said; 'but it is after-dinner talk. A good deal is about you; the rest is about myself. I have also made another discovery: I am a more profound egotist than I knew. Did I always strike you as egotistic?'
'Dominant people are always egotistic,' said he.
'Dominant? Am I dominant? You will not think so when you have heard.'
'Have things gone wrong?' he asked.
'Yes—or right; I do not know which. Anyhow, they have gone differently to what I—well, planned. Now, the plans of dominant people go as they expect them to go.'
'Until they meet a more dominant person,'
She shook her head.
'No, if my plans have been upset, anyhow, I have upset others,' she said.
They dined rather silently, for both of them were thinking of the talk which was coming, and Sybil again was conscious of her own indecision. Then, after dinner, since delay only made her more heavily conscious of it, she went straight to the subject.
'Judy told me you had left Sheringham,' she said—'that you had practically taken yourself out of the hands of doctors who, humanly speaking, could probably have cured you. Do you think you have any right to do that?'
'My life is my own,' said he.
'Ah, I dispute that. One does not belong to one's self—at any rate, not wholly. One belongs to one's friends—to those who care for one.'
'Who cares for me? Bertie Keynes, I suppose, cares for me, but I entirely deny his right to any disposal of what I do.'
'Your mother, then.'
'In the main she agrees with me. Supposing I had cancer, she would not urge me for a moment to have an operation which was uncertain of success; and my case is similar.'
Sybil was silent a moment.
'I, then,' she said. 'I entirely disapprove of your action. I care for you; you should consider me as well. It is in that sense your life is not your own; you have made yourself a niche, so to speak, in other people's lives; you have put an image of yourself there—given it them—and you have no right to take it away.'
He took a cigarette from a box near him.
'And you are not allowed to smoke,' she added.
He laughed and lit it.
'We have got to talk,' he said. 'If you convince me I have no right to—well, to commit what will probably be a very lengthy suicide, I will smoke no more. If you don't, I shall continue to smoke, and in the interval I can talk more easily. Now you have spoken so frankly to me, I shall use the same frankness.'
She nodded.
'A man's life,' he said, 'belongs to himself until he has given it to a woman, and she has accepted it. Then it is no longer his, but hers, and she may dispose of it. No woman has accepted mine.'
She made a little movement in her chair, as if wincing, and he saw it.
'Shall I not go on?' he said.
'No, go on; it is this for which I came here.'
'So everybody,' said he, 'has about the same weight with me, and that combined weight is less than my right to do as I choose. Bertie Keynes, you, Judy, Ginger—you all want me to be what you call sensible, and live as long as possible. But my indifference to life is stronger than your desire that I should live. My mother alone wishes me to do as I choose, because she understands.'
He paused, and saw that Sybil was looking, not at him, but into the fire, and that unshed tears stood in her eyes, fighting with some emotion that would not let them fall.
'I understand too,' she said in a whisper; and it looked as if the tears would have their way. Then they were checked again as she continued: 'But you are grossly unfair to me—both you and Judy. You saddle me with this responsibility. You say it is my fault that you are indifferent to life. Indeed it is not fair. I am what I am. You may hate me or love me, but it is me. I am hard, I dare say, without the power to love; that is me too. And you say to me, "Alter that, please, and become exceedingly tender and devoted." And because I don't—ah, there is your mistake; it is because I can't. I could pray and think and agonize, and yet not add an inch to my stature; and do you think, then, it is likely that I could alter what is so vastly moremethan my height?'
'Ah, I don't blame you,' said he, 'and I don't saddle you with any responsibility.'
'But if I loved you, you would care to live.'
'Yes; but I don't say that it is your fault that you don't. That would be interfering in your life—a thing which I am deprecating in regard to my own.'
She made a hopeless gesture with her hands.
'We are talking in a circle,' she said. 'Leave it for a moment; I have something else to tell you.'
He sat very upright in his chair, grasping the arms in his hands, feeling that he knew for certain what this was.
'You mean you are going to marry Harold Bilton?'
'No, I mean exactly the opposite; I mean that I am not.' He dropped the cigarette he had just lit into the fireplace. With her woman's quickness, she instantly saw the symbolical application of this, and, with her passion for analysis, could not resist casting a fly, as it were, over it. She pointed to the grate.
'You have dropped your cigarette,' she said.
He looked at her for one half-second, and then, with rather slower-moving mind, recalled what he had said about not smoking any more.
'Yes, the doctors told me not to,' he said, feeling again the thrill of even this infinitesimal piece of fencing with her.
'They said it was a bad habit for me.'
She got up.
'Charlie, I don't know if I was right to tell you that,' she said.
'You mean it may lead me to hope that—I assure you it shall not. But it leaves things less utterly hopeless.'
She shook her head.
'You mustn't even think that,' she said.
'I can't help thinking that. While there is life, you know——I was lying'—and his eye brightened with a sudden excitement—' with throat ready for the guillotine. I could see it; they had not bandaged my eyes—but they have taken the knife away. No, I don't ask "What next?" The knife is gone: that is sufficient for the moment.'
She stood close to him by the fire, with eyes that strayed from him to a picture, down to the fire again, and again back to him.
'It is late,' she said at length; 'I must go to bed, and so must you. I have got to go back to-morrow. I shall see you in the morning. Good-night.'
He lit a candle for her, and she went to the foot of the stairs, then paused a moment, with her back to him.
'You will stop to smoke another cigarette before you come up,' she said.
She heard him take a couple of steps inside the room she had just left, and then a vague sort of rustle.
'I have thrown them all into the fire,' said he.
'Oh, Charlie, how wasteful!' she cried, beginning to ascend the stairs; 'and how——' And she paused at the corner.
He appeared in the doorway on the instant.
'How?' he asked.
'Nothing.'
'What were you going to say, Sybil?' said he. 'On oath, mind.'
She leaned over the banisters.
'Premature,' she whispered, and rustled up the remaining steps.
Charlie did not smoke another cigarette after she had gone, for the simplest of all reasons, but he broke another rule of health by sitting up much later than he should. He listened, in the way a man does, for the sound of the closing of her door, hoping, for some hopeless, groundless reason, that she would come back. Then, because the room was hot, and to him, in his open-air sojournings, airless with the closed windows, he opened one and sat by it, looking out into the still, starry night. And even as the coolness and breeze of air refreshed his body, so the thought of the talk he had had with her refreshed and was wine to his soul. At present he hoped for nothing; it was not necessary for him to tell himself not to be sanguine, for she had done nothing for him that she would not have done for a hundred other friends. She had, in fact, told him no more than others when she had said that his life did not belong entirely to himself; and she had told him no more than a penny newspaper might have told him when she had said she was not going to marry Bilton. Yet the imminent knife had gone; whether her mere presence again was tonic to him, or whether it was that there was again for him a loophole for hope—something possibly his to win—he did not stop to inquire. The upshot was that life (his life, that is to say, which is all that the most altruistic philosophers really mean when they talk of life) was again interesting, worthy of smiles or tears, as the case might be. Whether it was to be smiles or tears he did not at this moment care; the fact that it merited emotion was enough. 'The chequer-board of nights and days' was still in movement; he was not yet a taken piece. For the last three months he had thought of himself as exactly that, and simultaneously with that conviction had come the conviction that the chequer-board and the game played thereon was utterly without interest. His part in it was over; he no longer cared. And, as has been said, even the most altruistic and the most philosophical cannot do much better. 'Quelle perte irréparable!' was Comte's exclamation when he was told that he had to die.
'How premature!' Was not that, too, an indication, however veiled, that it was not premature? She would not have said that his holocaust of the cigarettes was premature if it was so; she would merely have thought to herself, 'Poor fellow!' But the hopelessness of the thought was neutralized by its announcement. Not the most matter-of-fact physicians broke news of fatal illness like that.... And again he reminded himself that he must not be sanguine. Anyhow, she had reminded him (like everybody else, no doubt) that his life was not entirely his own. She had told him also (there was nothing secret about it) that she was not going to marry Harold Bilton. But it was she who had told him.
Bilton, meantime, with the speed of his race, had completed his contract for the lease of the Coronation Theatre for the next season, and had finished, on behalf of Lewis S. Palmer, the purchase of the Molesworth property. It was quite characteristic of him that he should postpone for these affairs which were really imminent the piece of private business which had, more than either of them, perhaps more than both, brought him to England. Consequently, it was not till the afternoon of the next day that he called at Judy's and asked to see Mrs. Massington. Sybil had spent the morning at Brighton, and had arrived only some half-hour before he called. But, with the instinct of the autumn perhaps strong in her, she had said she would see him, rejecting Judy's offer to put herself in the way of atête-à-tête.
He was shown into the room where Judy usually sat, a sitting-room off the drawing-room. It had been furnished with her unerring bizarre taste, and looked like nothing whatever except Judy's room. There was a bearskin on the floor because somebody had given it her.' Two execrable water-colours were on the wall for the same reason, and on the same walls were three wonderful prints of Reynolds' engraved by Smith. There was a grand piano there, making locomotion difficult, because Judy played much and badly, and Steinway, so she always said, knew what she meant better than anybody. There was some good French furniture there because it was hers, and some hopeless English armchairs because they were comfortable. Finally, there was Sybil there because she was her sister, and at this moment there had entered Harold Bilton because she had said she would see him.
She got up, and advanced to him.
'This is quite unexpected,' she said. 'I thought you were in America. Pray sit down. What has happened? Has Mrs. Emsworth also come back?'
Bilton sat down. He brought his hat and stick with him, according to the custom of his countrymen, and Sybil, who had never noticed it there, noticed it in London. She noticed it more particularly since the stick fell down from the angle where he had propped it with a loud clatter.
'No; Mrs. Emsworth is still in America,' he said. 'She has left New York, and gone on tour. I think her tour will be very successful.'
'So glad,' said Sybil. 'Tea?'
'I guess I won't, thank you,' said Bilton; 'I don't want anything. I want just to talk to you.'
Sybil pulled herself together. In other words, she tried to remember that a man in New York, if he crosses an insignificant ocean, is the same man who lands at Liverpool. She succeeded moderately well.
'And how is everybody?' she asked. 'How is Mrs. Palmer, and Amelie, and all the Long Island party?'
'They're all right,' said Bilton. 'Mrs. Palmer's giving a woodland fête this week; it will be very complete, and I guess the sea will come and swallow up Newport. But I didn't come here to talk about Mrs. Palmer.'
He finished taking off his gloves, threw them into his hat, and took a chair exactly opposite her, so that they faced each other as in a waggonette, which to Sybil was an odious vehicle for locomotion. His likeness to Charlie was somehow strangely obliterated to-day; she thought of the latter as of something suffering, in need of protection, whereas the same-featured man who sat opposite her looked particularly capable of self-defence, and, if necessary, of aggression. For the first time she rather feared him, and dislike looked hazily out through the tremor of fear.
'You ran away from America in a great hurry,' he said. 'You left us very desolate.'
Something in this quite harmless speech displeased Sybil immensely.
'Ran away?' she asked.
'Yes, ran away; but only incidentally from America. You ran away from me; I came after you.'
Sybil got up.
'Really, Mr. Bilton,' she said, 'you have left your manners the other side of the Atlantic.'
She went half-way across the room with the intention of ringing the bell, but she stopped before she got there; curiosity about the development of this situation conquered, and she sat down again.
He took no notice of her remark about his manners.
'I have come to ask you to marry me,' he said. 'You are the woman I have been looking for all my life. I will try to make you very happy.'
She answered him without pause.
'I am very grateful to you,' she said; 'but I cannot.'
'You led me to suppose you would,' said he.
'I am very sorry for it.'
There was a moment's silence.
'You changed your mind when you saw me come into Dorothy Emsworth's room,' he said. 'Now, I always meant to tell you about that. It is perfectly true that for nearly two years——'
She held up her hand.
'You need not trouble,' she said. 'I know.'
Bilton paused a half-second to arrange his reply in the way he wished.
'I always supposed she would tell you,' he said.
Her silence admitted it, and he had scored a side-point. He wished to know whether Dorothy had told her.
'I think you are hard on me,' he said; 'or perhaps I do not understand. You were, before you knew that, prepared to accept my devotion. Do you reject it now because I have led that sort of life?'
Sybil frowned.
'I can't discuss the question with you,' she said. 'I will just suggest to you this, that you went to see your mistress while I, to whom you had expressed devotion, was staying in the house. If you can't understand my feeling about that, I can't explain it to you.'
'I will promise never to see her again,' said Bilton.
Suddenly and almost with the vividness of actual hallucination the figure of the man who was so like him rose up before Sybil, and she all but saw Charlie taking Bilton's place there, and imagined that it was he who was saying what Bilton said. For a moment she invested him with the grossness of his double, and loathed and shuddered at the picture she had conjured up. Charlie behaving like Bilton was an image so degrading and humiliating that she could not contemplate it. The very thought was to do him dishonour. But Bilton, so she recognised, was acting now up to his very best; it was the best of his nature which promised not to see Mrs. Emsworth again. But Charlie in a corresponding position was unthinkable. Against this grossness all Sybil's fineness, all her taste, ran up like a wave against a stone sea-jetty, and was broken against it, and the jetty did not know what it had done. She rose, conscious that she was trembling.
'It is a matter of entire indifference to me,' she said, 'when or where or how soon you see her again. I want you to understand that.'
Bilton sat quite unmoved.
'If you were quite certain of yourself, you would not be so violent,' he said. 'You are overstating your feelings; that is because you are rather perplexed as to what they are.'
Sybil turned quickly round to him. She could not help showing her appreciation of this.
'Ah, you are frightfully clever,' she said; 'I do you that justice.'
He rose.
'I shall not give up hope,' he said.
'That is as you please,' she said. 'I have stated as clearly as I can that I can give you none.'
'It is not your fault that you don't convince me,' said he; 'it is the fault of my own determination. Good-bye.'
Sybil shook hands with him.
'What are your movements?' she asked.
'I return to America almost immediately to collect my company for the Coronation Theatre.'
'Ah, you are going to have an American company, then?' she asked.
'Certainly—two companies, rather. I shall have two pieces running simultaneously, with two performances a day. No one has yet thought of producing entertainments to last from about five till eight in the evening.'
When he had gone, she sat down without book, paper, or work, simply to think. Despite herself, and despite the disgust for him which, sown by that moment in Mrs. Emsworth's room, had grown up fungus-like in her mind, this unhurrying, relentless activity, so typical of him and of the nation to which he belonged, which had so stirred her in America, stirred her again. The practical side of her nature responded to it, as an exhausted man responds to alcohol. It woke in her the need to do something definite with her life; it reminded her that the mere observation of other people was not to her, as it was to Ginger, a sufficient excuse for her existence. She felt that her quick brain, her sure analytic grasp, could not find its permanent fruition in mere quickness or in mere analysis. Something of the passion for deeds, for accomplishment, that instinct which blindly spurs on bees to labour and men to work, had got hold of her. But what was she to do? She refused to marry Bilton, for, apart from the fungus of disgust, this very need for activity rejected him. That niche for herself, in front of which should burn in her honour the thick incense of wealth, no longer attracted her. She wanted to accomplish, to make; to be, in however small a degree, an active, creating force. So strong at the present moment was the impulse that she wondered, probably correctly, whether her refusal of Bilton did not dip some root-fibre into this soil.
The thought stirred within her till sitting still became impossible, and she rose and walked up and down the room. Soon her eye fell on the great nosegay of Michaelmas daisies which she had gathered in Charlie's garden that morning before leaving, and, with her keen dislike of waste, her unwillingness that anything should perish without having got the best out of itself, she busied herself for a few moments in filling a tall Venetian vase with water to place them in. The stalks were a little dry and sapless at the ends, and she made another journey to her room in order to get some scissors to cut off the dry pieces. Even a flower should be made to do its best, to look its best, and last as long as possible. Even flowers should be strenuous, and here was she and nine-tenths of her nation drifting like thistledown on a moor wherever the wind happened to carry it. To work—that was the impulse she had brought back with her from America—not to scheme merely with her busy brain, to intrigue, to find, as she always had found, endless amusement and entertainment in watching others, even though she exerted her intellect to its fullest in intelligently watching them; but to make some plan, and carry it out—to find some work to do, and do it.
Suddenly, in the middle of her neat, decisive clipping of the flower-stalks, she stopped and laid the scissors down. Surely there was a piece of work that lay very ready to her hand, though twice in the last day or two she had resented the responsibility being laid on her. But if she took it on herself—if she led Charlie back to interest in life, if she coaxed from him his apathy—was not that worth doing?
There were difficulties in the way sufficient to rouse enthusiasm in one who was much less on fire with the desire for production than she. She would be quite honest with him; she would not hold out any hope of which the fulfilment was not sure; she would not let him think for a moment that she would ever marry him. If the thing was to be done at all, she would do it by inciting him to live for the sake of life, by making him feel the unworthiness of giving in—the unworthiness, too, of the only condition on which he at present cared to live. She was not in love with him, but even if she had been, that would have made but a poor motive. The vitality that was hers was so abundant that surely she could impart some of it to him—make something of it bubble in his veins. His nature, his perception, were of a fine order, and though disappointment first and then disease might have dulled their sensibilities for the time, yet surely their numbness was only temporary—a passing anaesthesia. Anyhow, here lay a work worth doing.
Mr. Lewis S. Palmer was sitting at his table in the sitting-room of the quiet, modest little suite he had taken at the Carlton Hotel, and was studying with some minuteness a large ordnance map of Worcestershire. He had some dozen of the sheets arranged in front of him, and the Molesworth estate, which he had been down to see only the day before, occupied a considerable portion of the central one of them. By him was seated Bilton, who answered, usually monosyllabically, the questions which Mr. Palmer asked him from time to time. 'Yes' or 'No' was generally sufficient; occasionally he thought a moment and then said, 'I don't remember.' Of the answers he received, Lewis Palmer sometimes made a short note.
Finally, he studied the map for a considerable time in silence, and then folded up each sheet separately, and replaced them in the bookstand that stood on the table. Then he read his notes through twice and tore them up.
'Complete the purchase of the Wyfold estate as soon as possible, literally as soon as possible,' he said. 'If you can do it by half-past four this afternoon, let it be done by then, not by five.'
'It's a huge price,' remarked Bilton, 'for half a dozen unproductive farms.'
'It is a necessity,' said the other, 'and a necessity is cheap at any price. But the fact that they ask so much leads me to think they have some kind of inkling as to what I am going to do. That's why I want you to do it at once.'
He rose, and sipped the glass of milk that stood on the side-table.
'There is one more thing,' he said. 'I want someone who will give a general supervision to my affairs here, which are growing important to me. I offer you the place because I like your way of doing business.'
'How much time do you want me to give to it?' he asked.
'Roughly, two days a week, anything of emergency to be dealt with separately.'
Bilton smiled.
'You chiefly deal in emergencies,' he said.
Mr. Palmer tapped the table rather impatiently.
'What do you make a year?' he asked.
'Round about two hundred thousand dollars.'
'I guarantee you a hundred thousand,' he said, 'on the two days a week basis. If it takes you longer than that, let me know. Only my affairs come first.'
Bilton considered this a moment without the slightest trace of exultation or pleasure.
'That's right, then,' he said. 'I guess I'll go off over the Wyfold business.'
'Yes, do. I'm going to look at Seaton House. I shall be in by two. Will you lunch with me?'
'Can't say,' said Bilton. 'I'm rather busy to-day.'
Lewis Palmer continued sipping his milk in a regular, methodical manner till he had finished it, and then put on some rather shabby dogskin gloves, an extremely shiny and obviously perfectly new tall hat, and rang his hand-bell. Almost before it sounded his bedroom door opened noiselessly, and his valet stood there.
'Lunch at two,' he said. 'If Lord Keynes gets here before me, ask him to wait.'
'Lunch for how many, sir?' asked his servant.
'I don't know.'
Mr. Palmer's progress out of the Carlton was made easy for him. Doors flew open as he neared them, and by the time he had reached the pavement his motor had drawn up exactly opposite the entrance, and the door was being held open for him.
Mrs. Palmer had had her eye—or part of an eye—on Seaton House for some time. Quite a year ago her husband had given her to understand that London might very possibly be the headquarters of his business for a considerable time, and when she spent her season there last summer she had considered London as a residence. On general principles, it was highly attractive—Americans, as she knew from experience, could command all that was worth having there, with, on the whole, a less expenditure than was necessary to keep up the same position in New York. Prince Fritz, for instance, in the autumn, had been a very heavy item, and though Prince Fritz had yielded high social dividends in America, yet it was easily possible to 'run' a royalty of the same class in England at a far lower figure. On the other hand, Prince Fritz in London would not be worth exploiting at all—that she recognised—but her conclusions had been that social success of a first-rate order in London could be done on less than the same article in New York. In both towns it was necessary to stand up among the ruck of ordinary hostesses like a mountain-peak; you had in any case to spend much more than most other people. Since, therefore, most other people spent less in London than in New York, the mountain-peak need not be so high. She saw also, with her very clear-sighted eye, that England, the professedly aristocratic, was far more democratic than the professedly democratic America. Lady A——, Duchess B——, Countess C——, she saw, as regards their titles alone, were quite valueless socially in England except among suburban and provincial people. That was natural—the prophet has no honour in his own country. Again, England, or rather that small section of English society which, in her mind, was equivalent to England, was rapidly conforming to the American ideal. It no longer cared for birth or breeding; it wanted to be greatly and continuously amused; a hostess was worth her power of entertainment. Nobody cared here in the least whether her grandfather was a butcher or a boot-black; all they cared was whether they were sufficiently lavishly entertained.
So far she had seen clearly and correctly enough; dimly, she had seen a little farther, and knew that for a reason she could not grasp there were in England some few families who had acachetaltogether independent of wealth. She could have named some half-dozen who floated on the very tip-top of everything, to whose houses Kings and Queens drove up, so to speak, in hansoms, and played about in the garden. They might be poor, they might apparently have no particular power or accomplishment which could account for it, but it was into that circle that Mrs. Palmer now desired to get. To one of these families Bertie Keynes belonged. Anyhow, she had secured him as a son-in-law, she had cut a step on the steep ice-wall. Furthermore, it could not be a disadvantage to have one of the few really fine houses in London for one's own. That was why Mr. Palmer had bought Seaton House.
He drove there now in his noiseless motor-brougham, looking out with his piercing gray eyes on to the grimy splendour of Pall Mall. It was a brilliant winter day, and primrose-coloured sunshine flooded the town, giving an almost Southern gaiety to the streets. As usual, a large extent of the pavement was up for repairs, and it vexed his sense of speed and efficiency to see the leisurely manner in which the work was done. Frankly, England seemed to him in a very bad way; her railways, her trade, her shipping, all the apparatus of her commerce, was haphazard, unconcentrated, uneconomical, just like her mode of making repairs to her streets. Personally, except that at this moment his motor was stopped, he did not at all object to it, since it gave him the opportunity which he had been preparing for of stepping in in the matter of her railways, and introducing American methods. He had, now three months ago, got through his Bill for a direct railway between Liverpool and Southampton, and the work of construction was going on with a speed that fairly took away the breath of contractors who were accustomed to think that slowness was essential to solidity. That boast of solidity, so characteristic of the English, had long amused Lewis Palmer.
'What they call solid,' he had once said to Bilton, 'I call stodgy. They make a brick wall three feet thick, that would bear the weight of the world, when all they want is a two-inch steel girder riveted to an upright. And when they have spent a couple of months in building it, they think they have done better than the man who puts up the steel girder. It is false economy to put up what is not necessary, just as it is false economy not to put up what is. And they think that to paper their railroad cars with looking-glasses in gold frames will console the shareholders for an absence of dividends. No, before we financed the Liverpool and Southampton we made certain of getting the line built the proper way.'
But this line was by no means all the control he meant to get in English railways. Its success, his financial knowledge told him, was certain; it was as sure that the traffic between the ports would come by a directer and faster route than that which already existed as that the sun would rise to-morrow; it was equally sure that facility of communication would lead to increased traffic. What followed?
Cardiff would be forced to get direct communication with his line instead of letting her trade 'walk about in country lanes,' as he expressed it. To do that, a new line from there must join the Liverpool and Southampton at the nearest possible point. That point lay, allowing ample margin, somewhere within the borders of the Molesworth estate, which he had purchased in the autumn, and the Wyfold estate, which he had given orders to Bilton to purchase that day. There was another thing as well. Geologically, it seemed most probable that there was coal on the Molesworth estate. It had been suspected half a dozen years ago, but Gallio, out of a mixture of reasons, partly indifference, partly want of cash, partly repugnance to turn the park into a colliery, had never made so much as a boring for it. But Lewis Palmer was neither indifferent nor bankrupt. He also had no particular feeling about parks. And his gray eyes brightened, and the momentary stoppage of his motor, owing to the slovenly and dilatory way in which the street was being repaired, irritated him no longer. One could not say he was lost in reverie. He was rather picking his way through his reverie with very firm and decisive steps, directing his course to a well-defined goal.
An assemblage of upholsterers, paperers, carpenters, plumbers, furniture dealers, and painters, were awaiting his arrival, for he had promised his wife to get the house into habitable shape before Easter, and, to save time to himself, he took them all round in his inspection and gave orders to each as they went along.
'I shall want a large brocade screen to stand straight in front of the door of the inner hall,' he said. 'Let it be at least seven feet high. Send me the patterns first. Don't put much furniture into the hall; a big plain mahogany table there for cards and small things. A long line of hat-racks there with an umbrella rack below it. Don't think you can make a hat-rack pretty, so make it plain. Half a dozen Chippendale chairs, and an old English steel fender with dogs. I will choose the rugs and stair carpet myself, but polish the whole of the staircase. Put a bigvitrinefor china in that corner. Cut a circularlouvrewindow above the front—door, and copy the mouldings round it from the north door of the Erechtheum. You will find the drawings in Schultz's book. Big candelabra will stand at the bottom of the stairs. I will send them here. Fit them with electric light, but do not pierce them. There will be six lamps in each of eight candle-power.'
It was extremely characteristic of Mr. Palmer that he went thus into everything himself. Nothing escaped him; he grasped at once the difficulty of bringing the dining-room into directer communication with the kitchen, a problem that had puzzled his architect, and solved it in five minutes by a lift and shutter arrangement so simple that it seemed mere idiocy not to have thought of it. He went into every servant's bedroom, every bathroom, into the sculleries, the coal-hole, the wine-cellar, and knew immediately what was wanted. And the more he saw of the house the better it pleased him; the big oak staircase to the reception-rooms was admirable, and more than admirable was the circular dining-room, with its walls panelled in excellent Italianboiseries, and its cupola-shaped roof, with carved converging wreaths of fruit and flowers. With his amazing knowledge of furniture and decoration, he had in an hour's time chosen the scheme for every room in the house, and provided the dealers, the paperers, the painters, with a week's work in looking out and bringing for his inspection the kind of thing he wanted. But it was not his way to allow a week for a week's work, and these gentleman were appointed to meet him there again in three days' time to submit for his approval carpets, papers, rugs, tables, chairs, kitchen ranges, refrigerators, wardrobes, and specimens of carving. Then, at exactly three minutes to two, he again stepped into his motor to go back to the Carlton, where Bertie Keynes was to lunch with him.
There were other people there as well, he found, waiting for him when he got back, and it was not possible for him to talk privately, as he intended to do, to his future son-in-law. He had observed him once or twice during lunch, not eating much, and apparently rather silent and abstracted, and wondered vaguely if anything was the matter. He guessed indeed that some money difficulty or accumulation of debts might be bothering him, but as his talk with him was to be partly on that subject, he considered that if that was the cause, Bertie's evident pre-occupation would not last very long. He had seen a good deal of him in America, and was very well-disposed towards him, partly because Bertie was such an eminently likeable young man, but mainly because Amelie was so fond of him. For Lewis Palmer—a thing which most people would have been inclined to doubt—had a heart. His business, which occupied him, it is true, more than anything else in the world, was to him a thing quite apart from his human life and human affections. In it he was as relentless and as hard as it is possible for a man to be; as far as an affair was business, he was without pity or compassion, for business is as inhuman a science as algebra, and as unemotional, if properly conducted, as quadratic equations. A heart in such spheres would be anomalous—almost an impropriety. Had Bertie—a thing which he had no thought of doing—crossed Lewis Palmer's path in such a connection, he would have had not the slightest compunction in obliterating him, if he was of the nature of an obstacle, however minute. But as the affianced of Amelie, he was something of an object even of tenderness.
He had a few words with him after lunch.
'Arrived last night, Bertie?' he asked. 'Glad to see you. How are they all?'
Bertie pulled himself together, and smiled.
'All sorts of messages to you,' he said. 'They miss you awfully.'
'I guess I'm not missed most,' remarked Mr. Palmer. 'Can you wait here half an hour or so? I want to talk to you, but I've got other things that won't wait.'
Bertie looked at his watch.
'I can be back in an hour,' he said, 'if that will do.'
'Yes, an hour from now. Quarter to four, then,' and he nodded to him, shut up his heart again, and dismissed him from his thoughts as completely as he had left the room.
Bertie, as Mr. Palmer had supposed, had arrived in London only the evening before, and since Gallio was out of town, spending, in point of fact, a most unremunerative fortnight at Monte Carlo, on a system which lost infallibly, though slowly, had at his invitation taken possession of his chambers in Jermyn Street. He had come down to breakfast in as happy and contented a frame of mind as any young man, gifted with good digestion and a charming girl to whom he was engaged, need hope ever to find himself, and had seen with some satisfaction that there was only one letter waiting for him. He had expected rather to find creditors clamouring round him, for he had a respectable number of them waiting for his leisure cash, and had supposed that they would very politely have notified him of their existence as soon as he arrived. But there was only one letter for him. He opened it; its purport was as simple as a statement of accounts, and type-written. It began:
'DEAR SIR,'I have the honour to remind you of a document, from which I have extracted the following.'
'DEAR SIR,
'I have the honour to remind you of a document, from which I have extracted the following.'
Then in neat marks of quotation were appended certain sentences.
'Why did you bewitch me if it was not for this?''When I am with you I am tongue-tied. Even now my hand halts as I think of you.''You are the only woman in the world for me. I offer you all I am and have, and shall be and shall have.'
'Why did you bewitch me if it was not for this?'
'When I am with you I am tongue-tied. Even now my hand halts as I think of you.'
'You are the only woman in the world for me. I offer you all I am and have, and shall be and shall have.'
There was a decent space left after these and other quotations—a silence of good manners. Then the letter continued:
'Mrs. Emsworth has reason to believe that you are about to marry Miss Amelie Palmer. She therefore offers you the chance of regaining possession of the letter, from which we have given you extracts, for the sum of ten thousand pounds (£10,000). Should you decide to accept her offer, you are requested to draw a cheque for the above-mentioned sum to the account of her present manager, Mr. Harold Bilton, who, on receipt of it, will forward to you a sealed envelope containing the complete letter from which the above are extracts. Should this not reach you within twenty-four hours, you are at liberty to stop the cheque. If, however, such cheque does not reach Mr. Harold Bilton by the evening of January 7, he will post the sealed packet in his possession (of the contents of which he has no idea), containing the original letter from which the above are extracts, to Mr. Lewis S. Palmer, Carlton Hotel, London. He has been instructed to do this on behalf of Mrs. Emsworth without admitting any discussion or temporizing on your part.'We are, sir,'Your respectful, obedient servants,'A. B. C.'
'Mrs. Emsworth has reason to believe that you are about to marry Miss Amelie Palmer. She therefore offers you the chance of regaining possession of the letter, from which we have given you extracts, for the sum of ten thousand pounds (£10,000). Should you decide to accept her offer, you are requested to draw a cheque for the above-mentioned sum to the account of her present manager, Mr. Harold Bilton, who, on receipt of it, will forward to you a sealed envelope containing the complete letter from which the above are extracts. Should this not reach you within twenty-four hours, you are at liberty to stop the cheque. If, however, such cheque does not reach Mr. Harold Bilton by the evening of January 7, he will post the sealed packet in his possession (of the contents of which he has no idea), containing the original letter from which the above are extracts, to Mr. Lewis S. Palmer, Carlton Hotel, London. He has been instructed to do this on behalf of Mrs. Emsworth without admitting any discussion or temporizing on your part.
'We are, sir,'Your respectful, obedient servants,'A. B. C.'
The postmark on the envelope was London, W., and the envelope was type-written in purple ink.
Bertie's mouth, when he read this, got suddenly dry, and with a hand that he observed was quite steady, he poured himself out a cup of tea and sipped it, reading the letter through again. Also he had a horrible feeling of emptiness inside him, resembling great hunger, but of some sickly kind, for, so far from being hungry, he could not touch the eggs and bacon to which he had just helped himself. He could not yet even begin to think; but again he filled his cup with tea, again drank it, and again read the letter. Then he suddenly felt hot, stifled, and though the morning was of a brisk chilliness, he went to the window and leaned out. He was aware that a cold sweat had gathered on his forehead, and he wiped it away. Then all at once his feeling of physical faintness and thirst left him altogether, and he was back in his room, lighted a cigarette, and sat down squarely on his sofa to think the matter out.
His first impulse—namely, to go straight to Mr. Palmer with the letter—did not last long. He had told him, after Amelie had accepted him, in answer to questions which were very delicately put, that there were no pages in his past life which he feared. Mr. Palmer, with the tact and finesse which is inseparable from great ability, had indicated his meaning with absolute precision and clearness. He had not hinted that he wished Bertie to confess any liaisons he might ever have had, he only asked him with considerable solemnity to assure him that he had done nothing which, coming to light at a future time, could, humanly speaking, bring unhappiness to, and possibly rupture between, him and Amelie. He had not pressed him for an answer immediately.