'Think it all over,' he had said, 'and tell me to-morrow. Young men will be young men as long as women are women. I don't mean that. What I do mean is whether anyone can rake things up afterwards. If anyone can, I should like to know about it. I needn't ask you to be straight with me. I guess you are straight without being asked.'
Now, it had not occurred to Bertie to tell him about Mrs. Emsworth, for the very simple reason that he was quite innocent. That he had been foolish—mad, if you will—was perfectly true, but morally he was clean. And now, at this moment, she was on tour in America—where, he had no notion. Bilton, no doubt, knew, but Bilton had been instructed to admit no discussion of any kind. And to-morrow would be January 7.
His second impulse was also short-lived—namely, to go straight with the letter to Scotland Yard. But what did that mean? An action for blackmail against Mrs. Emsworth, a dragging into the public view all that had happened, a feast for the carrion-crows of London, and for him—well, celibacy. For Mrs. Emsworth, clever woman as she was, knew well what justice is done by the world to those who invoke the justice of the law. The verdict of the world is always the same: 'There must have been something in it;' and though every judge and jury in the land might testify to his innocence, the world would simply shrug its shoulders: 'There must have been something in it.' For it is not in the least necessary to touch pitch to be defiled; it is quite sufficient if somebody points a casual finger at you and merely says 'Pitch.'
Yes, it was on this that she, the blackmailer, counted; here lay her security—namely, that his bringing her to justice meant that he must lay himself open to the justice of the world. And what justice in that case would Mr. Palmer give him? If he was to know at all, it must be Bertie who told him. And Bertie knew he could not, after the assurance he had given him.
For a moment his brain deserted the question of what to do, and put in as a parenthesis that the blackmail scheme had been brilliantly planned. It was excellently timed; it gave him quite long enough to think the matter over, and not rush, as he might possibly have done, in desperation to Mr. Palmer or Scotland Yard, if he had only been given an hour or so to decide, and, at the same time, it did not give him an opportunity of communicating with Mrs. Emsworth. The extracts, too, were cleverly chosen, their genuineness he could not doubt, and they gave him a very fair idea of the impression that the whole letter would make on an unbiassed mind. Then suddenly he sprang to his feet.
'But I am not guilty!' he cried. 'My God, I am not guilty!'
His fit of passion subsided as suddenly as it had sprung up, and his thoughts turned to Dorothy. He remembered with great distinctness his interview with her on the morning after her debut in New York, and the uneasiness with which what his sober self thought was mere chaff had inspired him. But afterwards, at their various meetings in New York and down at Long Island, he had been quite at his ease again, and ashamed of his momentary suspicions. She was a better actress than he knew, it appeared, for never did anything seem to him more genuine than her kindliness towards him. She had made friends with Amelie, too; for Amelie had told him of their meeting in the dewy gardens, of her entrancing way with children, which had quite won her heart. Then—this.
Then a third alternative struck him. What if he did nothing, just waited to see if anything would happen, if by to-morrow evening he had not paid this hideous sum to his blackmailer? But again he turned back daunted. The whole plot had been too elaborately, too neatly laid to allow him to think that the threat would not be carried out. If in a sudden passion Dorothy had threatened to send the letter to Mr. Palmer, he might, so he thought, have reasoned with her, appealed to her pity, appealed, above all, to her knowledge of his innocence. He might even have threatened, have coolly and seriously told her that he would lay information against her unless she gave up his letter to him. But he was not dealing, he felt, with a woman in a passion; he was dealing with a cold, well-planned plot, conceived perhaps in anger, but thought out by a very calm and calculating brain. There was not, he felt, even an outside chance that, having worked it out so carefully, she would hold her hand at the last moment. True, he held now in his own hand evidence against her for blackmail sufficient to secure her, if he chose, a severe sentence. Only he could not do it; he had not nerve enough to take that step. She had calculated on that, no doubt. She had calculated correctly.
Then this money must be raised somehow; there was no way out. In order to silence a false accusation against himself he had to pay £10,000. It was this question of how to get it that he carried about with him all the morning, and this that had sat beside him at lunch. Gallio might possibly lend it him, but it would entail telling Gallio the whole story, which he did not in the least wish to do. However, if no better means offered itself he determined to telegraph to him that evening. And so at a quarter to four, his brain still going its dreary rounds from point to point of his difficulties, he again presented himself at the Carlton.
He was shown by the noiseless valet through the noiseless door of Mr. Palmer's sitting-room. The latter had not heard him enter, and Bertie, in the strangeness of the sight that met his eye, forgot for a moment his own entanglements. For Lewis Palmer was seated in an easy-chair by the window, doing nothing. His arms hung limply by his side, his head was half sunk into his chest, and his whole attitude expressed a lassitude that was indescribable. But next minute he half turned his head languidly towards the door, and saw Bertie standing there.
'Ah, come in, come in,' he said. 'I was waiting for you. No, you are not late.'
He rose.
'Bertie, never be a very rich man,' he said. 'It is a damnable slavery. You can't stop; you have to go on. You can't rest; you are in the mill, and the mill keeps on turning.'
He stood silent a moment, then pulled himself together.
'I hope nobody overheard,' he said. 'They would think I was mad. Now and then, just now and then, I get like that, and then I would give all I have to get somebody to press out the wrinkles in my brain, and let it rest. I should be quite content to be poor, if I could forget all this fever in which my life has been spent. I might even do something as an art critic. There, it's all over. Sit down. There are the cigars by you.
'Now you talked to me straight enough once before,' he went on, 'and told me, I believe, the exact truth. I wanted you to start with Amelie with a clean sheet in that direction, and I want you to have a clean sheet in another. I want you to pay off all your debts. All, mind; don't come to me with more afterwards. I know it's difficult to state the whole. Please try to do so. Take time.'
Bertie sat quite still a moment, with a huge up-leap of relief in his mind.
'I can't tell you accurately,' he said. 'But I am afraid they are rather large.'
'Well, a million pounds,' suggested Mr. Palmer dryly. Bertie laughed; already he could laugh.
'No, not quite,' he said. 'But between ten thousand and twenty. About twelve I should say.'
'Confiding people, English tradesmen,' remarked Mr. Palmer. 'Been going to the Jews?'
'No.'
'Well, don't. My house doesn't charge so high. Now, I'm not going to give you the money. I shall deduct it from the settlement I am going to make, the amount of which I have already determined on. Only I shall give you that at once, and ask you to pay them at once.'
'You are most generous,' said Bertie. 'I can't thank you.'
'Don't, then. Are you sure thirteen thousand will cover them? Mind, it doesn't matter to me; it is all deducted.'
'I am sure it will.'
Mr. Palmer did not answer, but drew a chair to the table and wrote the cheque.
'Pay them at once, then,' he said. 'Now, you looked worried at lunch. Anything wrong?'
'It was,' said Bertie. 'It isn't now.'
Mr. Palmer looked at him a moment with strong approval.
'I like you,' he said. 'Now go away. The mill has to commence again.'
The relief was as profound as the oppression had been, and now that the strain was over Bertie was conscious of a luxurious relaxation; the tension and strain on his nerves had passed, and a feeling of happy weariness, as when a dreaded operation is well over, set in. He could scarcely yet find it in his mind to be bitter or angry even with Mrs. Emsworth; she had done a vile thing, but he would not any longer be in her power, and being free from it, he scarcely resented it, so strong was his relief. Mr. Palmer, he knew, had designed to make some settlement of money on him; what it was to be he did not yet know, but the fact that this had been deducted from it prevented his feeling that he had come by the money in any crooked fashion. As it was, a certain payment to be made to him had been partly anticipated, and he looked forward to paying his blackmail almost with eagerness.
He made an appointment by telegraph with Bilton for the next morning, and at the hour waited on him at his office in Pall Mall. He had always rather liked the man; his practical shrewdness, the entire absence of what might be called 'nonsense' about him, a certain hard, definite clearness about him and his ways, was somehow satisfactory to the mind. And this morning these characteristics were peculiarly developed.
He gave Bertie a blunt and genuine welcome.
'Delighted to see you,' he said. 'Just come over, haven't you? Smoke?'
Bertie took a cigarette.
'I've called about some business connected with Mrs. Emsworth,' he said. 'I am here to settle it.'
Bilton looked puzzled a moment.
'Mrs. Emsworth?' he said. 'Business with Mrs. Emsworth? Ah, I remember. She sent me certain instructions some time ago. Let's see; where did I put them?' He took down an alphabetical letter-case from a shelf, and after a short search drew out a packet.
'That's it,' he said. 'Ah, I see there is no discussion to pass between us. Curious love of mystery a woman has, especially when there is nothing to make a mystery about, as I dare say is the case here.'
'You don't know what the business is?' asked Bertie.
'I only know these instructions, and one of them, if you will pardon me reminding you, is that no discussion is to pass between us. You are to deliver to me a cheque, which I am to place to her account, and I am to deliver to you a sealed packet. This is it, is it not? Yes. You are also to deliver to me a certain letter which I am to verify, and then destroy in your presence.'
'I heard nothing of that,' said Bertie.
'It is in my instructions,' said Bilton.
'I can't give up that letter,' said Bertie. 'It——' He stopped.
Bilton got up.
'I am afraid I can do nothing, then,' he said, 'except fulfil the rest of Mrs. Emsworth's directions, and, if this is not done by the evening of January 7, to-day, give the packet to Mr. Palmer.'
He referred again to one of the papers he had taken out.
'Yes, give the packet to Mr. Palmer,' he repeated.
'Which you intend to do?' Bertie asked.
'Certainly. At the same time, I may tell you that I have written a very strong letter to Mrs. Emsworth, protesting against her making use of me in—in private matters of this kind. I am a busy man'—and he looked at his watch—'I have no taste for other people's intrigues.'
Bertie thought intently for a moment. If he gave up the letter, he would be powerless in the future to prove anything with regard to the blackmail. The fact that he had drawn a cheque for £10,000 to Bilton was in itself nothing to show that he had done so under threats, especially if, as it suddenly occurred to him, Bilton was, if not in league with Mrs. Emsworth, at any rate cognizant of her action. On the other hand, if he refused, he had to risk that letter of his being sent to Mr. Palmer. He had been unable to face that risk before, and it was as unfaceable now. But the idea that Bilton was concerned in this was interesting. It had been suggested by the slight over-emphasizing of the fact that he was busy, by the looking at his watch. That was, however vaguely, threatening; it implied time was short, or that he himself was concerned in Bertie's acceptation of the ultimatum.
Bilton sat down again and tapped with his fingers on the table.
'Excuse me, Lord Keynes,' he said, 'but no purpose is served by our sitting here like this. You will, of course, please yourself in this matter. Here is the packet for you if you decide one way; there is the letter-box if you decide the other.' The speech was well-chosen, and left no room for doubt in Bertie's mind that the letter-box would be used. He took the desired document from his pocket.
'Here is the cheque,' he said, 'and here is the letter. The latter, you say, you are going to verify. I, on my side, I suppose, may verify what you give me.'
Bilton appeared to consider this for a moment.
'There was nothing said about that,' he remarked, 'but I feel certain that the lady would be willing to let you receive proof of her honourable dealing with you.'
'Did you say honourable dealing?' asked Bertie in a tone which required no answer.
Bilton opened the letter Bertie gave him, referred to a paper out of the alphabetical case, looked at the cheque, and handed him the packet. Bertie glanced at it, saw enough, and put it in his pocket.
'That's correct, then,' said Bilton.
Bertie rose.
'Next time you see Mrs. Emsworth, pray congratulate her for me,' he said. 'She has missed her vocation by going on the stage.'
'I am inclined to disagree with you,' said Bilton. 'It has developed her sense of plot. Must you be going? Good-bye. I suppose you are off to America again in a month. You may meet her there.'
'That is not possible,' said Bertie.
Bilton's smile which sped the parting guest did not at once fade when the guest had gone. It remained, a smile of amusement, on his face for a considerable time.
'God, what a fool!' he permitted himself to remark as he settled down to his work again.
Some three weeks after this Ginger was occupying the whole of the most comfortable sofa in the rooms of his father occupied by Bertie, and was conversing to him in his usual amiable manner. The rooms wore the look of those belonging to a man shortly to take a journey; there were packets and parcels lying about, a bag gaped open-mouthed on a chair, and Bertie himself was sorting and tearing up papers at a desk, listening with half an ear to the equable flow of Ginger's conversation. He had a good deal to say, and a good deal to ask about, but, with the instinct of the skilled conversationalist, he did not bring out his news in spate, nor ask a succession of questions, but ambled easily, so to speak, up and down the lanes and byways of intercourse, only occasionally emerging on to the highroads.
'It may appear odd,' he was just saying, 'but I never was in these rooms before. Gallio has never asked me here. I am glad to see that he appears to make himself fairly comfortable. I suppose he is at Monte Carlo still. Heard from him, Bertie?'
'Yes, a letter of extreme approbation at my marriage, and a regret that he will be unable to visit America for it. Also a cheque for £500 as a wedding-present. Out of his hardly lost losings, he says.'
'Gallio's in funds now, or was till he went to Monte Carlo,' remarked Ginger. 'He got two hundred thousand for the sale of Molesworth. But he has to settle half of it on you, doesn't he? And where do I come in?'
'You don't, I'm afraid.'
'I think Gallio made a very good bargain,' said Ginger; 'but I think it remains to be seen whether Mr. Palmer didn't make a better.'
'How's that?'
'Whether, with his American spirit of enterprise, he won't begin digging for the fabulous coal which was supposed to exist.'
Bertie looked up.
'Turn Molesworth into a colliery? He won't find it very easy. You see, he has settled it on Amelie, or, rather, is going to on our marriage.'
'By Gad! he does things in style,' said Ginger. 'And you think Amelie would not allow it?'
'I think she would attach some weight to my wishes.'
'Do you feel strongly about it? I thought you were rather in favour of its being done when it was spoken of before.'
'I know; there was an awful need of money. It is a necessity before which sentiment must give way. But now there is not. And my sentiment is rather strong. After all, it has been ours a good long time; and now we can afford to keep the coal underfoot, if it is there at all. Besides, do you know for certain that he has any thought of it?'
'No; Bilton put it into my head,' said Ginger. 'He hinted that Mr. Palmer had made a good bargain. He seemed rather elated at something, so I did not question him further. I don't like elated people. I suppose he had made some good bargain, or done somebody in the eye; that is the American idea of humour. He went off to Davos the other day.'
Bertie again looked up.
'Hasn't he realized the fruitlessness of that yet?' he asked. 'Sybil refused him point-blank, I know; and really, when she follows that up by going out to Davos to coax Charlie back to life, you would have thought that a third party was not—well, exactly of the party.'
'Sybil is an enigma,' said Ginger. 'She went to America in the autumn with the avowed intention of getting married, with Bilton indicated. She comes back in a scurry, refuses him, and instantly constitutes herself life-preserver to Charlie, whom she had also refused. What is she playing at? That's what I want to know.'
Bertie took up a quantity of waste-papers, and thrust them down into the basket.
'She's not playing at anything just now,' he said. 'She's just being a human woman, trying to save the life of a friend. Judy talked to me about it. The only interest in life to Charlie was she, and she is trying to get him to take an interest in life that isn't her!'
'That will require some delicacy of touch,' remarked Ginger.
'It will. She has it—whether enough remains to be seen. Charlie had one foot in the grave when she came back, I'm told; she has taken that out, anyhow.'
'But does she mean to marry him?' asked Ginger. 'I can't believe she will succeed in getting him back to life without, anyhow, holding that out as a prospect.'
'It's really a delicate position,' said Bertie; 'and it is made more interesting by the fact that physically Charlie is so like Bilton. In other respects,' he added, 'they are remarkably dissimilar.'
'Do you like him?'
'No; I have got an awful distaste for him. Why I don't quite know. That rather accentuates it.'
Ginger sat up from his reclining attitude.
'Bertie, I'm awfully interested in one thing, and I haven't seen you since you came back,' he said. 'Was there any—well, any difficulty with Dorothy Emsworth?'
Bertie paused in his labours, divided in his mind as to whether he should tell Ginger or not. He had a great opinion of his shrewdness, but, having himself managed his crisis, paid up, and got back the letter, he did not consider that there was any need for advice or counsel from anybody. So he decided not to tell him.
'She was quite friendly in America,' he said; 'I saw her several times; she even stayed down at Port Washington.'
Ginger, as has been seen, was immensely interested in other people's affairs, having none, as he said, of his own which could possibly interest anybody. On this occasion he could not quite stifle his curiosity.
'I remember you telling me that you once wrote her a very—very friendly letter,' he said.
'Certainly. It is in my possession now. I keep it as an interesting memento.'
Ginger shuddered slightly.
'I should as soon think of keeping a corpse,' he said.
'Burn it. She's rather a brick to have given it you back, though. Sort of wedding-present?'
'Yes, a valuable one.'
'Does she still carry on with Bilton?' asked Ginger.
'I don't know.'
'Well, I hope she didn't show it him before she returned it,' said the other.
January in London, with few exceptions, had been a month of raw and foggy days—days that were bitter cold, with the coldness of a damp cloth, and stuffy with the airlessness of that which a damp cloth covers. Far otherwise was it at Davos, where morning after morning, after nights of still, intense cold, the sun rose over the snow-covered hills, and flamed like a golden giant, rejoicing in his strength, through the arc of crystalline blue. Much snow had fallen in December, but when the fall was past, the triumphant serenity of the brilliant climate reasserted itself. The pines above the long, one-streeted village had long ago shaken themselves clear of their covering, and stood out like large black holes burned in the hillside of white. Day after day the divine windlessness of the high Alpine valley had communicated something of its briskness to those fortunate enough to be there, and the exhilaration of the atmosphere seemed to percolate into minds of not more than ordinary vivacity.
The village itself lies on a gentle down gradient of road, some mile in length, where Alpine chalets jostle with huge modern hotels. Below lies the puffy little railway which climbs through the pinewoods above the town, and communicates in many loops and detours with the larger routes; and straight underneath the centre of the village is the skating-rink, where happy folk all day slide with set purpose on the elusive material, and with great content perform mystic evolutions of the most complicated order. Others, by the aid of the puffy railway, mount to the top of the hills above the town, and spend enraptured days in sliding down again on toboggans to the village of Klosters. Motion, in fact, of any other sort than that of walking is the aim and object of Davos life—an instinct dictated and rendered necessary by the keen exhilaration of the air. At no other place in the world, perhaps, is the sluggard so goaded to physical activity; at no other, perhaps, is the active brain so lulled or intoxicated into quiescence. It lies, in fact, basking and smiling, while the rejuvenated body, free from the low and cramping effects of thought, goes rejoicing on its way.
Charlie, by reason of his malady, had been debarred from taking either much or violent exercise; he had been told to be out always and to be idle usually. This he found extremely easy, for his mother was there to be idle with him, and Sybil was there to furnish entertainment for both. With her usual decision and eye for fitness, she had seen at once that for the present there was only one thing in the world worth doing—namely, skating. She skated extremely badly, but with an enjoyment that was almost pathetic, in consideration of the persistence of 'frequent fall.' Thus, morning after morning, she, setting out at earlier hours, would be followed down to the rink by Charlie and his mother, where they would lunch together, returning to the hotel before dark fell for the cosy brightness of the long winter evenings.
Mrs. Brancepeth was a widow, cultivated, intelligent, and gifted with a discernment that was at times really rather awkward to herself, though never to those to whom she applied it, since she never used what her intuition had enabled her to see, to their discomfort. This gift put her into very accurate possession of the state of affairs between Charlie and Sybil; it was clear to her, that is to say, that Sybil was wiling him back into the desire to live, waking his dormant interests, as if by oft-repeated little electric shocks of her own vitality, charming him back into life. She knew, of course, the state of her son's feelings towards Sybil, and did her the justice of allowing that, not byword or look, direct or indirect, did she ever hold herself out as the prize for which life was worth living. Indeed, Mrs. Brancepeth admired with all the highly-developed power of appreciation that was in her the constant effacement of herself which Sybil practised—effacement, that is, of the personal element, while by all healthy and impersonal channels she tried to rekindle his love for life. Whatever was—so Sybil's gospel appeared to run—was worth attention. Her own falls on the ice were matters for amused comment; the outside edge wasper sea thing of beauty; the stately march of the sun was enough to turn one Parsee. Enthusiastic, vitally active as Sybil always had been, it required less penetration than Mrs. Brancepeth possessed to see that her amazing flood of vitality was deliberately outpoured for the sake of Charlie. This was the more evident to her by the fact that Sybil, when alone with her, subsided, sank into herself, and rested from an effort. At times, indeed, when Charlie was not there, she was almost peevish, which, in a woman of equable temper, is a sure sign of some overtaxed function. Such an instance occurred, so Mrs. Brancepeth thought, on an evening shortly before Bilton arrived at Davos. In the six weeks that they had now spent there, the elder woman had got to know the younger very well, to like her immensely, and to respect, with almost a sense of awe, the extreme cleverness with which she managed her affair. The 'affair' was briefly, to her mind, to make Charlie take a normal interest in life again, without exciting an abnormal interest in herself—to transfer his affection, in fact, from herself to life.
They had dined together that evening at their small table at the Beau Site, and Sybil had traced loops on the tablecloth with a wineglass, and sketched threes and brackets to a centre with the prong of a fork.
'Yes, it sounds silly,' she said, 'but it is the most fascinating thing in the world to try to do anything which you at present believe yourself incapable of doing. I have no eye for colour at all, therefore two years ago I took violently, as Charlie remembers, to painting. I have no eye for balance, therefore now I spend my day in trying to execute complicated movements which depend entirely on it.'
Charlie's eye lit up.
'The quest of the impossible,' he said. 'How I sympathize!'
This 'was direct enough; with returning health he had got far greater directness. Mrs. Brancepeth waited for Sybil's reply; it came as direct as his.
'Oh, Charlie, you always confuse things,' she said. 'You do not mean the quest of the impossible, but the quest of the improbable. The quest of the improbable is the secret of our striving. Anyone can grasp the impossible; it is merely an affair of the imagination. I can amuse myself by planning out what my life would be if I were a man. What I cannot do is to plan out for myself a successful career as a woman.'
'Surely you have plans enough,' said Mrs. Brancepeth.
'No, no plans,' said Sybil—' desires merely. I have lots of desires. One is control of the outside edge; that is unrealized. Dear Charlie, you look so well this evening; that is another of my plans. It is getting on.'
'He gained two pounds last week,' said his mother.
'How nice! I lost a hundred, because I speculated on the Stock Exchange. It sounds rather grand to speculate, but it wasn't at all grand. What happened was that a pleasant young gentleman here, whose name I don't know, said two days ago to me, "Buy East Rands." I bought a hundred. They went down a point. I sold. But I bought many emotions with my hundred pounds. One was that one could get interested in anything, whether one knew what it was or not, as long as one put money into it. And if money interests you, surely anything else will.' This, too—so Mrs. Brancepeth interpreted it—was a successful red herring drawn across the path. Charlie appeared equally interested.
'Ah, you are wrong there, Sybil,' he said. 'Moneyin excelsismust be the most interesting thing in the world; there is nothing it cannot do.'
'Oh, it can do everything that is not worth doing,' interrupted Sybil; 'I grant that.'
'And most things that are,' he continued. 'For, except content, which it will not bring you, there is nothing which is not in its sphere.'
'Toothache,' said Sybil promptly. 'I had three minutes' toothache yesterday, and was miserable.'
'Painless extraction.'
'But not the courage for extraction,' said she. 'I always think that extraction is at the root of it. One can get along all right with what one has not got; what one cannot do is to part with something that one has which gives pain.'
Mrs. Brancepeth tapped with the handle of her fork on the table.
'This is irrelevant,' she said; 'the question before the house is the power of money.'
'Dear Mrs. Brancepeth,' said Sybil, 'please don't let us discuss; let us babble. "In a little while our lips are dumb," as some depressing poet says. Poets are so often depressing.'
'Sybil is the most prosaic poet I know,' said Charlie.
'She casts her thought really in the mould of poetry, and before it is cold she hammers it to prose. She is the only person I know who has the romantic temperament and is ashamed of it.'
'Not ashamed of it,' cried she; 'but it is not current coin. I hammer the metal into currency. And he calls me prosaic.' The ice was thin here, so thought Mrs. Brancepeth.
'Everyone has the same difficulty,' she said. 'One has either to hammer one's poetry into prose before it is current or trick out one's prose into poetry. The raw product of any of us—that is what it comes to—does not pass.'
'Ah, but what is the raw product?' said Charlie. 'If one knew, one would use it. But no one knows about himself. "Know thyself"—the first of mottoes, and, like all mottoes, impossible to act upon.'
'If you know other people, it is a good working basis about one's self,' said Sybil; 'one is very average—that is the important thing to remember.'
'But if everybody is average, why does A single out B?' asked Charlie. 'Why not C or D, up to Z?'
Sybil finished her pudding.
'I don't know,' she said. 'Probably because B comes first—is next to A. About money—of course it will not give you content. Content is a matter of temperament. But it will give you the power to gratify any taste; and, considering how many beautiful things there are in the world, it is a confession of idiocy or of want of taste, which is the same thing, not to be able to be absorbed in some one of them.'
'That is quite true,' said Mrs. Brancepeth; 'and it matters hardly at all what one is absorbed in so long as one is absorbed.
Charlie responded to this.
'And one's power of absorption depends almost entirely on health,' said he.
The evening post came in on this, and not long after Charlie went upstairs to answer certain letters which had come for him, leaving the other two together. Since the arrival of the post, Sybil had become very silent and preoccupied; one letter, in fact, she read three times over, with silent frownings between each perusal. At length she rose, took a turn or two up the room, and spoke.
'I have had disquieting news,' she said; 'and I want advice.'
'Do tell me, dear,' said Mrs. Brancepeth. 'I will do my best.'
'I don't know if you know Mr. Bilton,' she said. 'I have just heard from him; he is starting to-morrow for Davos.'
'Charlie has mentioned him,' said the other.
'You know who he is, then,' said Sybil. 'Shortly before I left England he proposed to me. I refused him. I don't want him to come here; but how is it possible for me to stop him?'
She faced about, and stood opposite the elder woman.
'What am I to do?' she asked. 'He is strong, masterful; I am afraid of him, and it will take a great deal of nervous force out of me. Now, I can't spare that.'
She paused a moment.
'Perhaps I had better say straight out what I mean,' she said. 'I am having rather a hard time as it is; that I take on myself very willingly. But every day leaves me more and more tired when the need for playing up is over. But it is worth it: I should be a very feeble creature if I did not feel that. Because he is getting better, is he not?'
Mrs. Brancepeth laid her hand on Sybil.
'Every day I thank God for what you are doing,' she said, 'and I thank you; but—but I suppose I have been more sanguine than I should. Is there no chance for Charlie?'
Sybil threw her arms out with a hopeless gesture.
'I don't know—literally I don't know. I like him so much that I can't offer him only liking; and I don't know that I have anything more to offer him. It is all very difficult. I don't suppose there is a woman in the world who knows herself so badly as I do. And I used to think I was so decisive, so clear cut. What is happening to me?'
Mrs. Brancepeth looked at her with a wonderful tenderness and pity. She had often noticed how completely she was in the clutch of her temperament, how the mood of the moment completely blotted out all other landmarks and guiding-posts which experience from without and her own character from within might have been supposed to be of some directing value in perplexities. But it was not so with her; in such things she was a child, ruled by the impulse—not led by the reason, nor steered by any formed character. With her the present moment so blotted out the past that all precedents, all warnings, all points which ninety-nine grown-up people out of a hundred have to help their decisions, were with her simply non-existent. If the present moment was pleasant, she abandoned herself to childish delight; if perplexing, she was the prey of in-soluble doubts. She had a passion for analysis, but her analysis, brilliant as it often was, was as fruitless as the Japanese cherry. It was the process of thought which she loved to dissect, and having dissected it, she threw it away. All this Mrs. Brancepeth saw—saw, too, that Sybil's was a nature to which it was no use to preach principles; the practical dealing with the concrete instance was all that could help her.
'Tell me more about Mr. Bilton,' she said.
'He is dominating,' said Sybil. 'I was greatly attracted by him. Then he did something disgusting, or so I thought it, and I was disillusioned. I even began to dislike him. But he has force, and it will need force on my part to fight him. What will the result be? I shall have less force to fight Charlie's microbes for him.'
'Yes, that is what you are doing,' said Mrs. Brancepeth softly.
'And even here, even when I see most clearly how much better he is getting, I ask myself whether I am doing wisely or not,' continued Sybil. 'What will the end be? Is he filled with certain hopes which I cannot say will ever be realized? And what if he is disappointed of them?'
There was no reply, and after a minute she went on.
'Mr. Bilton will arrive in two days,' she said; 'he will come to this hotel. It is impossible for me to cut him, not to recognise him. He is quite extraordinarily like Charlie, by the way. I must speak to him when he speaks to me. I must behave decently. And I know—oh, how well I know it!—he will interest me again. I shall be forced to be interested. There is that about him—some force, some relentless sort of machinery that goes grinding on, pulverizing what gets in its way.'
Mrs. Brancepeth rose.
'Now, dear, be quiet,' she said. 'You are working yourself up about it. Don't do that. Don't whip up your imagination on the subject. You take things too vividly.' Sybil smiled rather hopelessly.
'That does not help matters,' she said; 'some people take them not vividly enough. I am myself, you are yourself; the broad lines of each of us are inexorably laid down for us. All we can do is not to make a very shocking mess of them. We are all unsatisfactory. No, I don't think you are; you are very nice and restful. Now, what am I to do—not about Bilton, I mean, but now this minute. That is always so important.'
Mrs. Brancepeth laughed.
'And that is so like you,' she said. 'Go to bed, dear, and dream as vividly as you can of the outside edge.'
Bilton arrived two days afterwards, and, as was quite natural, paid a call on his friends before dinner in their sitting-room. As chance would have it, neither Charlie nor his mother were in, and he found Sybil alone. She rose and shook hands with him as he entered, but gave him no smile.
'I was surprised to get your letter,' she said; 'I thought you were too busy to come out to this very idle place.'
'I chose it for its idleness,' he said. 'I was very tired, and I have a busy time ahead of me again. It is economical to spend a fortnight in complete idleness rather than let your work suffer for a year.'
He paused a moment.
'That was my excuse,' he said; 'I had also a reason.' Sybil felt a sudden anger with him, which flared up and died down again as he went on.
'I am glad to find you alone,' he said, 'because I wanted to see you. I had to see you; I was thirsty for the sight of you. But do not be afraid; I shall not make myself importunate; I shall say nothing to offend you; I shall not entreat you by word or look. I just wanted—wanted to see you: that is all.'
He spoke rather low, and rather more slowly than his wont; but next moment he resumed the ordinary tone of his speech.
'I came here a couple of years ago,' said he; 'and I carried away with me an extraordinary sense of coolness and rest. I think one's brain goes to sleep here. We Americans need that; we have awful insomnia of the brain. I want to go sliding on a silly sledge down a steep place; I want to fall about on skates, and not read the paper.'
Sybil laughed; there had been a certain modesty and good taste in his first speech that had rather touched her, and from that he had gone straight to ordinary converse. The assurance of the harmlessness of his intentions seemed to her very genuine. As a matter of fact, it was profoundly calculated, and produced just the effect he wanted; for he particularly desired to be admitted without embarrassment or delay into the others' party.
To Charlie's mind, this addition—for though Bilton never seemed to intrude himself, yet he usually was there—was nothing more at first than a slight nuisance. More than that, it could not be called, since he knew of Sybil's complete and final rejection of Bilton as a lover, and it was not consonant with the sweetness of his own nature to be rendered jealous and exacting about her friends. But by degrees—so gradual that he could not notice the growth of the feeling, but only register the fact that it had grown—he became aware of uneasiness of mind, which, as it increased, diminished from the great content in which he had passed the earlier weeks of their stay at Davos. Also he began to realize that in the shade of his mind there had grown up unconsciously a hope—or, if not a hope, the possibility of the hope—that he himself might find in her some day more than a friend. He had often asked himself before whether he still cherished and watered the tender seedling, and as often he had honestly told himself that he did not. But Bilton's coming, and the terms he was on with Sybil, cast a light into his own dark places, and he knew that that hops was still not rooted up from his mind. And, realizing this, he realized how vital such a hope was to him.
Sybil, too, during the ten days following Bilton's arrival, had insensibly changed in her attitude towards him. Having definitely decided that he should not be her lover, she speedily began to find in him excellences as a friend which she had scarcely realized before. As a lover, she had found him wanting; a certain coarseness of nature in him prevented her from receiving him on that footing. But once off that ground, this coarseness almost ceased to offend her; at any rate, transferred on to the less intimate plane, it ranked a 'minus' of the same calibre as one of his numerous 'pluses.' Among these, his practical qualities greatly appealed to her—his quickness at grasping the salient points of any question; his very firm hold on concrete affairs, from the quickest and securest way of tying a bootlace to his lucid exposition of American finance, as typified in that Napoleon, Lewis Palmer, or his knowledge in his own business of what constituted a play that would draw. On a hundred occasions every day she had some exhibition of this brought to her notice; in whatever he did or said he showed efficiency. That quality, as she had settled, was not one to be loved, but socially she delighted in it. Moreover, the force she had feared seemed to be in abeyance. He made no demands on her nervous energies that she recognised as demands.
Now, love, though proverbially blind, is often very prone to see something which has no existence whatever, and before long Charlie began to conjure up a very complete phantom, which would have done credit to a much finer imagination than he really possessed, had not he viewed the situation through the eyes of a lover, to whose vision all is intensified. He saw, what was true, that Sybil listened with very genuine interest to what Bilton had to say; he saw her an eager pupil of that excellent skater; he saw, if some expedition was projected, that she left all the arrangements of sleighs and food in his hands. To the unbiassed observer nothing could have been more natural, for he talked well on subjects that interested her, he gave her valuable aid towards accomplishing the elusive outside back edge, and his arrangements in expeditions were admirable; for sleighs were punctual, and nothing was forgotten out of the luncheon-basket. But Charlie was not unbiassed, and the conclusions that slowly and silently formed themselves in his mind were both untrue in the abstract and in the concrete unjust to her. He was still sufficiently young to have an attack of childishness, and he was quite sufficiently in love with her to be a prey to jealousy.
The second week of Bilton's stay had passed, and still he dropped no hint about his imminent return, and on this particular morning, after a rather worried week, rendered not more easy because he kept his worries strictly to himself, Charlie had just returned rather gloomily from a visit to his doctor.
During the last ten days he had gone down a little in weight, and, though the doctor would have preferred it otherwise, he reminded him that he must have ups and downs; no cure was uninterrupted progress. But this, piled on the top of his other cares, which were rendered harder to bear by a couple of days of south wind, instead of the cold purity of windlessness, unduly depressed him, and Sybil, coming out of the hotel to the sheltered corner of the veranda which he usually occupied in the morning, found him somewhat listless and dejected. But, with tact which had often succeeded before, she affected not to notice it, and discoursed on indifferent subjects.
'Such a bore!' she said. 'The road down the valley is too soft for sleighing, and the rink is too sloppy for skating.'
Charlie brightened up a little; he seemed to have seen much less of her lately.
'So you're going to have an idle day,' he said. 'Sit and talk to me.'
'Well, we are going out almost immediately,' she said, 'just to go down the Schwester toboggan-run, which they say is still possible. I wish you could come, Charlie, but there's no way of getting up except walking.'
Charlie instantly froze into himself.
'I'm afraid that's quite impossible,' he said. 'You're going with Bilton, I suppose.'
'Yes; I rather think he's waiting for me.'
Charlie registered to himself the fact that she had not asked for the doctor's report of him, though Monday was his regular day for being overhauled.
'Never keep people waiting,' he said, and opened a book. Then his better disposition came to his aid.
'I hope it will be possible for you to get a good run,' he said cordially. 'It is horrid, this weather, is it not?'
'Horrid—quite horrid!' she said. 'Well, good-bye; your mother will be out directly.'
He sat there after she had left him, with book open, but not reading. A pale, watery sun, instead of the golden monarch enthroned in cloudless blue, peered like a white plate through the clouds blown up by the south wind, and, instead of a dry and vivifying air, the atmosphere was loaded with moisture, the eaves dripped with the melting snow, and every now and then, with a whisper and a thud, some sheet would detach itself form a house-roof and plunge into the roadway below. Instead of presenting an expanse of crystalline whiteness, the snow-fields were stained and yellowish to the eye; hideous corners of corrugated roofs showed where the coverlet of white had slipped; all the raw discomfort of a thaw was in the air. To Charlie, both owing to his physical condition and his unspoken trouble, the heavy chilliness of the day was peculiarly oppressive; his mother also was detained indoors, and for an hour he was prey to the gloomiest reflections. It was all no use, so lie told himself; since October he had heartily tried with all his power both to get better and to recapture the normal joy of living. But now, as so often happened, he had begun to slip back again; next week no doubt would tell a further tale of hardly-earned ground lost, and week would follow week, and he would slip back and back. Even if he pulled through, even if he became strong again, what was there in life for him worth recovering for? He had thought—deluded himself into thinking—that perhaps Sybil might come to care for him, but with sudden bitter intuition he guessed that he was really no nearer winning her love than he had been before he had been taken ill. Great compassion, the divine womanly instinct to help a man, had brought her out here; the improvement in his health, the successful combating of his disease, was due to that. But it was but a bitter gift she had brought him; it was as if she had brought him through some illness only to give him over to the hangman at the last. And she had not asked about the doctor's report. That seemed to him in his dis-ordered frame of mind to clinch the matter. Instead she had gone off tobogganing with Bilton. True, she had refused him in the autumn, but how many marriages have been prefaced by that?
Charlie shivered slightly, and looked about him for a rug, for the damp of the day made a man chilly, where the dryness of far greater cold would have been but warming and invigorating. But he had not brought one out, and, saying to himself that he would go in to fetch one in a minute, he still sat on, looking for a break in the clouds that encompassed him. But he could not find one; the taste had gone out of the world again.
The Schwester run had been in unexpectedly good order, and Sybil did not get back to the hotel till late in the afternoon. The weather had cleared since noon, and about twilight the curtain of clouds had been dispersed, the south wind had ceased, and the splendid frosty stars again hung embroidered on the velvet of the night. Instead of plunging through the snow, before they reached the hotel their footsteps went crisply on the crackly crust, and the steel runners of their trailing toboggans sang like tea-kettles as they slid over the re-frozen surface. Already her spirits had been high, and, with the increased exhilaration of the air, they rose to nonsense point.
'Climate, climate,' she was saying—'how is it that people worship money and brains and beauty, and never worship climate, which is the one thing in the world that matters? Of course, you don't think that, because you live in New York, which is unbearable three-quarters of the year and intolerable the rest—isn't that it?—and get accustomed to doing without climate, just as you train oysters to live out of water until you are ready to eat them. But to me nothing but climate is really of any importance. I am so much better than when I came here; and I was quite well when I came,' she added.
'It seems to have suited Charlie Brancepeth very well,' said Bilton.
'Yes, he's much better; soon he'll be quite well. He gets more like you, Mr. Bilton, as he regains his health, every day. It really is very odd, because I don't suppose two people were ever so unlike in character. But the climate here has been good for your character as well as Charlie's lungs.'
'Have I improved? I'm delighted to hear it. I thought I was a hopeless case.'
'Not at all—no more hopeless than Charlie. You have developed a side your character which I hardly suspected you of having, and are beginning to take perfectly frivolous pursuits with great seriousness. You were much more annoyed at losing ten seconds to-day in that spill than you were at losing your cigarette-case.'
'I have been a pupil, that's all,' he said; 'I have been well taught since I have been here.'
'Tanti complimenti,' said she. 'Really, when you came I was afraid you would be absorbed in telegrams and bargains and bulls and bears. But you have not; you have played very nicely. How much longer do you stop?'
They had come to the hotel, and were passing the big squares of light cast by the hall windows. He dropped the rope of his toboggan as she asked this, and stopped to pick it up, looking her full in the face.
'I shall go when I am told,' he said—' not a day before.' She looked at him, and understood. It was the first personal word he had said to her since the little interview on her arrival, but it was so modest again, so self-obliterating, that it did not offend her with a sense that he had broken his word when he promised not to speak to her again on intimate subjects. It was sufficient to remind him of it very gently, just to cool him off, so to speak.
'We should all miss you, I am sure,' she said.
Charlie did not appear at dinner that evening. He had caught a little chill, it appeared, in the morning, and had gone to bed in a good deal of discomfort, with a somewhat high temperature. Mrs. Brancepeth, though she would not confess to any anxiety, yet felt anxious, and as soon as dinner was over went off to see how he was. She came back before many minutes were over, and signalled to Sybil across the salon, who got up at once and followed her.
'Is there anything wrong?' she asked.
'Yes; I have asked Dr. Thaxter to come and see him. His temperature has risen again. But he asked me if he could see you for a moment; I wish you would go. He is very restless, and I think you might quiet him; for you know,' she said, looking at her, 'I think you can do more for him than any doctor.'
Sybil stood there a minute, biting her lip. She had a physical repulsion to illness, which, though it shocked her that she should feel it, yet dominated her. Since she had taken Charlie in hand, she had had daily to wrestle with it, and though, owing to his very satisfactory progress, it had become easier to overcome, yet it was always there. But she decided almost immediately.
'Yes, I will go,' she said, then paused. 'Does he look terrible? Will it shock me?' she asked.
Mrs. Brancepeth's eyes lit up with a momentary indignation.
'Ah, what does that matter?' she exclaimed involuntarily. 'No, dear, I did not mean to say that. I know your horror of illness. But go to him; it will not shock you. He is looking rather flushed; his eyes are very bright.'
She took Sybil's hands in hers.
'Oh, make him better, make him better!' she said; 'make him want to live!'
Entreaty vibrated in her voice, and her hands trembled. Sybil felt immensely sorry for her, and her sorrow overcame her repugnance at what lay before her. Her horror for illness was of the same character as a child's fear of the dark—unreasonable, but overmastering. But in the presence of this mother's anxiety it was conquered for the moment.
'I will do what I can,' she said—' I will do what I honestly can. Are you coming with me?'
'No; he wants to see you alone.' And, as she spoke, a sudden pang of jealousy and rebellion struck her. Why should she who would give her life for him with thankful willingness be powerless to help him, while half that love from another woman might prove so efficacious, could she but exert its strength? But next moment that was gone; no other thought but the mother's yearning for her son was there.
Sybil went from her up the passage to Charlie's room, and entered softly. At that moment, hearing perhaps the rustle of her dress, he turned his head on his pillow, and looked towards the door, and in dead silence for a moment their eyes met. His face was very much flushed; his eyes, as his mother had said, were very bright, but bright with the burning of fever; and the indescribable sharpness and hardness of feature that comes with illness was there. But as Sybil looked, no horror was hers, and no shrinking. All she knew was that a man, suffering and ill, lay there—a man to whom she was the reason of living and the sun of life; a man whom she had known long, liked always, loved never. In his eyes there burned not only fever, but, as he saw her, the unquenchable light of love in all its dumb faithfulness. She had seen it often before, and had rejected it, but now it smote upon her heart. Something within her melted; and as a butterfly cracks its chrysalis, and emerges weak, hardly yet conscious of the new life, of the iridescence of its own wings, of the sunlight which till now has been hidden from it by that sheath of its shell, so something new trembled on the threshold of her heart—pity—which knew not yet that with which it was entwined. And with the waking of herself within her came the knowledge of what to do and say intuitively, because she was at last a woman.
She came quickly across the room, smiling at him.
'Charlie, Charlie, this will never do,' she said. 'I leave you alone for one day, and you instantly behave naughtily like this. I am ashamed of you.'
'Sybil, it is good of you to come and see me,' he said; 'I wanted to see you so much.'
Then the inevitable querulousness of illness mastered him.
'Oh, I am so uncomfortable,' he said—' so hot and feverish.' And he flung-his arm outside the bedclothes.
'Poor old Charlie!' she said; 'poor old fellow! It is a bore. Now, put that arm back at once. There. Now, you are not going to talk to me now, but I am going to make you ever so much more comfortable, put the pillow for you so, and you are going to see the doctor, and then you are going to sleep. Headache? Poor old boy! And I shall sit here and talk to you till the doctor comes.'
She drew a chair to the bedside, and he turned more over in bed so that he looked directly at her.
'Oh, I'm ill, I'm ill,' he said; 'and it was quite my own fault. I sat outside this morning without a rug, and I knew I was catching a chill. And I didn't care. You see, you didn't care. You never asked me what the doctor's report was this morning, and I—I determined not to care either. I am sorry; I shouldn't have said that.'
Sybil's hand trembled as she arranged the bedclothes, which he had thrown off.
'I was a brute,' said she, 'and——' She paused. 'Charlie, you must get well,' she cried suddenly.
He lay quite still a moment, with breath coming quickly.
'You said that as if you cared,' he said.
The marriage of Bertie Keynes and Amelie was to be celebrated at New York towards the end of February, and bade fair to be thecombleup to date (not even excepting the famous pearl fishery) of Mrs. Palmer's social successes. It was to take place in St. Luke's Church, Fifth Avenue, and for days beforehand the ordinary services had been altogether suspended, because the church had to be made fit to be the theatre of the ceremony, and a perfect army of furniture-men, upholsterers, carpenters, and plumbers occupied it. The ordinary square-backed wooden pews were removed from the body of the church, which was carpeted from wall to wall with purple felt, and rows offauteuilsin scarlet morocco, like the stalls of an opera-house, occupied their places. To complete the resemblance, each chair was marked with its particular number in its own row, and the occupants, who gave up their tickets at the church door, retaining only the tallies, were shown to their places, where they found in each chair a copy of the service printed on vellum and bound by Riviere, by scarlet-coated footmen. Similarly, the free seats in the gallery were cleared out in order to make room for the very magnificent orchestra, which beguiled the hours of waiting for the guests with inspiriting and purely secular pieces, and during the choral part of the service accompanied the choir.
In front of the altar, where the actual ceremony would take place, there had been constructed, hanging from the roof, an immense bell-shaped frame made of wood and canvas, which was completely covered inside and out with white flowers, and reached from side to side of what the reporters called the sacred edifice. It had been quite impossible, even for Mrs. Palmer, to procure at this time of year sufficient real flowers, and, as a matter of fact, they were largely artificial, like everything else. Round the edge of this large bell, suspended by invisible wires, but appearing to float in the air, were life-size baby figures ofamorini, made of wood and beautifully tinted, winged, and almost completely nude, who discharged gilded arrows from their gilded bows towards the pair who were to stand in the centre of the bell. Numbers of others peeped from the banks of flowers that lined the walls, all aiming in the same direction, so that the bridegroom, one would have thought, might reasonably compare himself to a modern St. Sebastian. Framed in these banks of flowers also were several pictures belonging to Lewis Palmer, all bearing on what might be called classical matrimony: a Titian of Europa and the Bull, a Veronese of Bacchus and Ariadne, and a more than doubtful Rubens of Leda and the Swan. Gilded harps twined with flowers leaned about in odd corners, and the general impression was that one had come, not into a church, but, by some deplorable mistake, into the Venusberg as depicted in the first act of 'Tannhauser.'
The ceremony, of course, had been many times rehearsed, and for days beforehand the dummy bridegroom's procession had crossed Fifth Avenue (the house exactly opposite was to be Bertie's domicile for the night preceding the marriage), and taken up its position, chalked out, at the church door. That event was signalled to thechef d'orchestrein the gallery, who was thereupon to begin the Mendelssohn wedding-march, and to the bride's procession, which was to start at the same moment from Mr. Lewis Palmer's house four blocks off. This, proceeding at walking speed, should reach the church door exactly at the conclusion of the wedding-march, whereupon the two processions, dummy-Bertie attended by his usher, dummy-Amelie by her bridesmaids, moved up the church to right and left of the bell, at such a pace that the voice which breathed o'er Eden ceased breathing as they reached their places. Then—this was a startling innovation—Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, arm in arm, were to have an unattended progress up the aisle to two very suitable golden chairs, which at this moment would be the only unoccupied places in the church, while the choir in their honour were to sing a short hymn specially written for the occasion, and addressed to them, beginning:
'Blessed parents here who seeThis bright hour arriving.'
Then the bride and bridegroom took their places under the bell, and the service proceeded in the usual manner. One rehearsal was rudely interrupted by the fall of one of the woodenamoriniat this point, which narrowly missed the dummy-bridegroom's head, and fell with a loud crash, splintering itself into match-wood on, the floor of the chancel. So another one was procured, and they were all more securely wired. Immense baskets of white flowers were to be carried by the bridesmaids, which they were to strew in the path of the bride both as she entered and left the church with her husband; and from the belfry outside, as they emerged, a shower of sham satin slippers with little parachute wings, so that they should float in the air and sink very gradually on to the heads of the amazed crowd, was to be discharged. These had been tested privately, and were not used in the rehearsals.
Bertie had arrived in New York some fortnight before the marriage, leaving Mr. Palmer, who was very much occupied, in England, to follow a week later. Wedding-presents for both of them had begun arriving, and were still doing so in shoals, and every day he was occupied for several hours in writing letters of gratitude. He soon got a certain facility at this, but one morning there arrived for him a present which astonished him. The present itself was a charming dressing-bag (there was nothing surprising in this, for it was the eleventh he had received), and the donor was Mrs. Emsworth. She wrote with it a characteristic little note, saying that she was unable to come to the ceremony, as she was at Chicago, and begging him to forget her and not acknowledge the gift. She was making a great success with her tour, and was getting quite rich. Considering what had happened, this seemed to him one of the most superb pieces of impertinence ever perpetrated. 'She was getting quite rich!' Quite so; she had made a considerable sum lately apart from her theatrical business; she could well afford to give him a dressing-bag.
But the impertinence of it, the irresistible impertinence! How like thegaminwho puts his tongue in his cheek and says 'Yah!' He almost laughed when he thought of it. But the laughter died at the memory of those sickening hours in London on the day he had received the blackmailing letter, and in a sudden spasm of anger against her, not pausing to consider whether it was wise or not, he gave orders that the bag should be packed up again and sent back to her at Chicago, without word of any kind. She would understand quite well.
This incident, small though it was in itself, served to increase a certain depression and uneasiness that beset him during this fortnight. The appalling apparatus and dis-play which was to be made over the wedding was intolerable to him; never before, as he read and re-read the instructions which had been sent him as to the timing of his own movements in what he mentally termed 'the show,' had the huge, preposterous vulgarity of the American mind fully struck him. The thought of what his wedding-day would be like was unfaceable, and the unextinguishable mirth of Ginger, who had come over as his best man, was not consoling.
'Here the bridegroom, crowned with garlands and ribands, shall be led underneath the largestamorino, which at a given signal shall descend upon his head, while the orchestra plays the Dead March from "Saul,"' had been his comment when the accident in rehearsal happened, and Bertie, though he laughed, groaned inwardly.
All this, however, was, as he recognised, but a temporary worry, and did not seriously affect him. More intimately disquieting was the perpetual sense of his nerves being jarred by the voices, manners, aims, mode of looking at life of the society into which he was to marry. Not for a moment did he even hint to himself that his manner of living and conducting himself, traditional to him, English, was in the smallest degree better or wiser than the manner of living and conducting themselves practised by these people, traditional (though less so) to them, American. Only there was an enormous difference, which had been seen by him in the autumn and dismissed as unessential, since it concerned only their manners, and had nothing to do with their immense kindliness of heart, which he never doubted or questioned for a moment. What he questioned now was whether manners did not spring, after all, from something which might be essential, something, the lack of which in one case, the presence of it in another, might make you find a man or a woman tolerable or intolerable if brought into continuous contact. He was going to marry this charming American girl, whose friends, interests, companions, pursuits, were American. It was reasonable and natural for her—indeed, it would have shown a certain heartlessness had it not been so—that she should wish to continue to be in touch with her friends and interests. For no human being can be plucked up, like a plant, and have its roots buried in an alien soil; transplant it without a lump of its own earth, and it will infallibly wither. Nor had Bertie the least intention of making the attempt to transplant her like that. All along he had known that the American invasion would come to his house; he no more expected Amelie to give up her Americanmilieuthan she would have expected him to give up his Englishmilieu.Indeed, when Mr. Palmer had presented him with a charming littlebijouflat in New York, he had accepted the implication that he would pay from time to time a visit there with the same unquestioning acquiescence.
But now in his second visit he found to his dismay that, so far from ceasing to mind or notice the difference between the two peoples, the difference was accentuated as far as notice went, and doubled as far as minding went. His nerves, no doubt, were a little out of order, and what would have scarcely affected him in a serener frame of mind was in his present mood like the squeak of a slate pencil.
Yet behind all this, even as the sky extends for millions of miles behind a stormy and cloudy foreground, lay his feeling for Amelie herself. True, once in his life the passion for a woman had burned in him with so absorbing and fierce a flame that for more than two years afterwards he had soberly believed that he never again could feel any touch of passion for another. His adoration for Dorothy Emsworth had been his firstgrande passion; it was therefore probably his last, for such a thing does not come twice. Men whose lives are morally unedifying might doubt it, so he said to himself, but merely because they have never experienced it at all. To them has come a succession of strong desires, but this never. And though he did not give, nor did he make pretence of giving, to Amelie that which Mrs. Emsworth could find no use for, yet he gave her very honestly another way of love: he gave her very strong and honest affection; he gave her immense admiration; lie gave her as much, for he was of ardent nature, as many men have ever felt. All the chords of his lyre sounded for her. But once there had been another chord; that he could not give her, for it was gone.
Consequently, when he wondered whether continuous contact with Americanmilieumight not prove absolutely intolerable, he did not include in his misgivings his continuous contact with Amelie. He had deliberately set out in the quest of a wealthy wife, and he had found one in all ways so charming, so lovable, that the mercenary side of his quest was out of sight. That quest, he admitted to himself, was not a very exalted one; but as his father had pointed out, he could not, practically speaking, marry a poor girl—at least, without marrying a great deal of discomfort—and it was therefore more sensible to look for his wife among wealth. He had been quite prepared, in fact, for marrying a girl who 'would do,' provided she saw the matter in the same light. Amelie did much more than 'do.'
Two nights before his marriage he had been to a very ingenious party, the author and inventor of which had been Reggie Armstrong. It was called a 'Noah's Ark' party, for he had caused his stable-yard to be flooded, and erected in the centre of it a huge wooden building in shape and form exactly like the Noah's arks which children play with. It had false painted windows on it, the whole was in crude and glaring colours, and it was approached up a gang-plank across the stable-yard. At the door stood Reggie Armstrong on a little wooden stand, dressed like Noah in a brown ulster, with a stiff wide-awake hat and a false black beard, and by him the four other people who were the joint hosts. Mrs. Palmer was one, representing Mrs. Noah, and three young New York bachelors were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. A confused noise came from within the ark, and as the astonished guests entered they saw that all round the walls were cages containing real live animals. A pair of elephants occupied the top end, a snarling tiger was in the next cage; there were giraffes, lions, pumas, antelopes, all sorts of birds in diminishing order of size, and at the tail a small glass-covered box containing fleas. Shrill cries of excited admiration greeted this striking piece of genius, and in the rather pungent menagerie atmosphere, to the snarling of the tiger, the growling of lions, the mewing of cats, the barking of dogs, and the neighing of the equine species, the banquet, at which each guest sat on a wooden stool, and ate off wooden plates, in order to accentuate the primitive nature of the surroundings, ran its appointed course, and took rank among the brilliant entertainments of the world.
After dinner, bridge and normality followed, and it was natural that Bertie should find a corner as quiet as possible to have a talk with Amelie. They had wandered together round the cages, had tried to make themselves heard at the lion's end, but that monarch of the forest roared so continuously that it was impossible to catch a word anyone else was saying unless he shouted. And as their conversation was not naturally adapted to shouting, they sought the comparative quiet of the end which harboured the meaner insects.
Amelie had looked at the last case of all, and turned to Bertie.
'It's very complete,' she said.
'Very,' said he, and their eyes met, and both laughed.
'Now, tell me exactly what you think of it,' she went on, turning her back on the fleas and sitting down. 'I really want to know what you think of it, Bertie.'
Bertie looked round to see that they were alone.
'It appears to me absolutely idiotic,' he said.
She did not reply at once.
'Mamma—ah, you like me to say mother—mother was one of the hosts,' she observed.
'I know. But you asked me what I thought.'
'Reggie's very rich,' she said. 'It doesn't make any difference to him. I suppose a beggar would think me idiotic to wear jewels, which might be converted into cash. At least, I suppose it is that you mean—the senseless expenditure.'
'No; one can't say any expenditure is senseless,' said he, 'since it is a matter of degree, a matter of how much you have to spend. If a man spent all his capital on such an entertainment, or indeed on any, it would be senseless, but, as you say, Armstrong is very rich.'