'What do you mean, then?'
'I mean that it is idiotic, because it doesn't give one any real pleasure. It gives one real pleasure to see those pearls lying on your neck.'
'Oh, but it does give pleasure, though perhaps not to you,' she said. 'Lots of people here think it's just exquisite. I suppose that means they are idiots.'
She paused a moment.
'You've been very frank,' she said; 'I will be, too. When I see you here, when I see that darling Ginger here, I think it is idiotic. But I don't otherwise. You see, I've been brought up in it all. You have been brought up differently. All my life I have been in the middle of this -this senseless expenditure. You have been in gray old houses, and big green parks, and quiet places, among people with low voices.'
He made a gesture to stop her. It was no use saying these things.
'No, I want to say this,' she said; 'I have meant to say it often, and I haven't been able. I have chosen, you see—I have chosen you. And I have seen often that we have grated on you; I have seen you thinking how senseless this all is. But, Bertie, I can't give up my friends, and I don't suppose I can change my nature. I can't promise to become English. I can't promise even to try. But I love you.'
She looked up at him with those great gray eyes, and for a moment something rose in his breast, till he almost thought that the intolerable joy of a passion he had once felt was about to burn again within him. But it rose, stayed short of the point, and sank again.
'I don't ask you to, Amelie,' he said. 'I am not so unreasonable or unfair as to ask you to change. And you left to say last what was best of all.'
Suddenly he felt an impulse almost overwhelming to tell her all, to tell her that, tender and strong as was his affection for her, he had known once a love that was different in kind from this, a love which he thought a man can only feel once, and when he felt it, it was not for her. Yet how could he do it? How define a moonbeam? And what good would it be when done? It might perhaps vaguely distress and disquiet her, but it could serve no other purpose, except that it would satisfy a certain demand for honesty felt by himself. The impulse, he dimly felt, was of a momentous nature; it involved principle which lies behind expediency, but though for a space it was very strong, it soon passed, and the want of practical purpose in telling her took its place. To minimize pain and to multiply pleasure was one of Bertie's maxims; suffering of any sort was repugnant to him, whether he or another was the sufferer. Such a desire is part always of a kindly nature, but when, as in his case, it is a dominant factor, one of the dominant lords of conduct, it is the sign of a nature not only kindly, but emphatically lazy—one which will always drift as long as possible, one which in a moral sense will never go to the dentist before its teeth ache, and will then not try to have them saved, but take gas and part with them.
His last words to Amelie made the girl's cheek glow and her eye brighten. She loved her lover's lack of effusiveness, for to her it indicated the depth of still waters. In everything she found him as she would have him, and when he said 'you left till last the best of all,' she felt that no torrent of words, no battery of impassioned looks, could have been so convincingly genuine as the dry simplicity of his words. Like every other woman or man who has ever loved, she had imagined for herself the ideal lover, and enshrined it in some human tabernacle. To her Bertie was the one and only tabernacle wherein her love could dwell. He had told her with a limpid directness in the early days of their engagement that when he came a-wooing he had come, of set purpose, to a wealthy house, and this declaration, which would in a nature less sweet and generous than hers have prompted, in case of a lover's quarrel, the stifled whisper 'you wished to marry me for my money,' had not the most shadowy existence in her. She knew otherwise; the fortunate accident of her wealth had been no more, so she believed, than the mere master of the ceremonies who had introduced them.
The completeness of his reply so satisfied her that, after a short pause, she spoke at once of other things.
'Father has settled Molesworth on me,' she said. 'He has made it my own.'
'Will you ask me there sometimes?' said Bertie.
'Yes, perhaps. Are you very fond of it?'
'Yes, somehow right inside me I am. I think one gets a very strong, though not at all a violent, feeling for a place where one has been brought up. One's father was brought up there, too, you see, and one's grandfather. The feeling isn't worth much; we have tried to sell it for years, and whistled for a buyer in vain.'
She sighed.
'We Americans have no sense of home at all,' she said. 'Really, we all live in hotels for preference. I don't suppose I shall ever get it, or even understand it. Is it—is it worth having, that sense of home?'
'I don't know that it is. It is a comfortable feeling, that is all. "My own fireside"; it is a domestic sort of joy, which rather reminds one of Cowper's poems.'
'I shall read them,' remarked Amelie with decision. Bertie laughed.
'You will certainly go to sleep over them,' he said.
'That will be domestic too. Come, Bertie, I'm going to jabber like the others.'
'Jabber to me.'
'I can't jabber to you. You are not jabberable. Look at me once; that must be our good-night.'
Mr. Palmer had arrived in New York some week or so before, and had occupied himself for a whole day over the matter of settlements. Molesworth he had given to Amelie, had settled a million pounds sterling on her, and on Bertie two hundred and thirty-seven thousand, the curious exactitude of this sum being due to the fact that he had intended to settle a quarter of a million on him, of which he had already received thirteen thousand. He also recommended him a few suitable investments for it, while Mrs. Palmer, after getting rid of the first high pressure of satisfaction by sending to Amelie a perfect packing-case of diamonds, directed a torrent of different objects, chiefly mounted in gold, at both of them.
Bertie went home that night in a more settled and buoyant frame of mind than had been his since his arrival in America. Never before had he felt so certain of a happy and harmonious future. What Amelie's feeling for him was he dimly guessed from his knowledge of what once had been his for another, while for his part he gave her all he had to give—admiration, affection, desire. Only—and this, as far as he knew, was no longer among the capabilities of his nature—he did not give her their fusion into one white flame; he only offered, as it were, packets of the separate ingredients. But, as Sybil Massington had said, there are many ways of love; he took the best he knew. The knowledge of this, and the straight and honest acceptation of it by himself, was tranquillizing, and possibly a sedative to his conscience, for his thoughts as he strolled down Fifth Avenue on that night, strangely warm for the earliness of the month, strayed slowly, like his footsteps, to past years, and it would have surprised anyone who looked on his extraordinarily youthful and untroubled face to know how very old he was feeling as his mind drifted with the quiet strength of some ocean-tide back,viawedding-presents, to Dorothy. How absolutely she had dominated his every thought and feeling, how completely for those months he had ceased to have any independent will of his own, being absorbed and melted into her. He remembered one June in particular; they had both been in London, and day after day he had gone to see her in her house in Curzon Street. The weather was very hot, and she had a craze for living in nearly empty rooms; all her carpets had been taken up, and all her floors polished—everything not essential to comfort had been stacked in garrets, and the rooms were empty except for flowers. Lilacs had been magnificent that year—they were her favourite flowers—and the smell of lilac to him now meant that he lived once again, in the flash of a moment, that month of beautiful days when he had been so exquisitely unhappy with the unsatisfied yearning of his first passion. All that month she had kept him in a sort of rapturous agony of suspense, which kept ever growing nearer to certainty. Then, at the end, to bring matters to a crisis, he had written her that letter, and not gone near her for two days. Then, having no answer, he went, and she laughed at him and sent him away. Well, he had paid dearly for that letter, both in the desolating inability to care for anything in the months that followed, and also in other ways. What it cost him in hard cash did not trouble him. After all, he was infinitely her debtor; it was she who had let him see (though she had plucked the vision away again) to what height of ecstasy his own average human nature could rise.
What must a woman of that kind be made of? he wondered to himself. Was she so grossly stupid that she never had a glimpse of what she meant to him, or was she so utterly hard that, having seen that, she had not the decency anyhow to go into mourning, as it were, for him just for a little? Stupidity he could not accuse her of; there was no one of such lightning-like power of intuition to divine the mood of a man. No; she must have seen it and known it, and brushed it from her, as one brushes a fly off one's coat. For not a month after that she had left London with Bilton, whom she never professed to care for. But he was rich, and certainly he had done a great deal for her, for he had taken her from her position of 'pretty woman' actress, seen her capability of dramatic impersonation, and got her play after play where she had to behave like herself, till now, in a certain sort of rôle, there was no woman who touched her. Also, he had somehow made her the fashion; he had gauged his age correctly, and given it what it wanted. He had seen the trend of society both in England and America—seen its hardness, its heartlessness, its imperative need of being amused, its passion for money, and for its stage he had given it Mrs. Emsworth, an incarnation of itself.
Yes; she was hard, hard, hard as her own diamonds, and as brilliant, as many-faceted. Sometimes out of her, as out of them, a divinely soft light would shine, but if you tried to warm yourself in that mellow blaze there was no heat there; if in the excellent splendour and softness of the light you would think for a moment that there was a heart there, you would find only the cold, clear-cut edges. Had she not proved it—she who, not satisfied with leading him on, with letting him fall passionately in love with her, only to divert herself a little in watching that storm of passion which she observed from behind her shut window, only to draw the blind down when she had looked enough, had even used the letter he wrote her to make money out of it? How well she knew him, his weakness, his ineradicable instinct to save trouble, avoid disturbances, so that, when she wrote, or caused to be written, the letter of blackmail, she did it probably without the least fear that she was putting herself in a dangerous position. Nor was she—secure in the knowledge of Bertie's engagement, she was certain to get her money. And, as no doubt she also knew well, against her he could not have taken legal steps, for the memory of the love he once bore her. No; she was safe, quite safe.
He let himself into his flat with his latch-key, and saw several letters lying on the table. The English mail had come in, and Ginger, who had got home before him, was busy with his own correspondence, and only looked up and nodded at Bertie as he entered. For Bertie himself there were several English letters, chiefly congratulatory, a parcel from Tiffany's, 'by order of Mrs. Palmer,' containing a gold sapphire-starred cigarette-case, and two or three letters from America, one of which was type-written. For some reason, which he hardly formulated to himself, he took it up, and examined on front and back before opening it. Then he laid it down again, mixed a whisky and soda, and, returning to it, tore it open. It contained one square sheet, and ran as follows:
'DEAR SIR,'Hearing that you are about to be married to Miss Amelie Palmer, it may interest you to learn that we are in possession of an autograph letter of yours to Mrs. Emsworth. The following phrases may recall it to your mind:'"I loved you more than ever last night, though I thought I could not have loved you more than I really did."'"Lilac, lilac; it reminds me of you more than any picture of you could."'"You know my devotion to you. For me there is no other in the world."'
'DEAR SIR,
'Hearing that you are about to be married to Miss Amelie Palmer, it may interest you to learn that we are in possession of an autograph letter of yours to Mrs. Emsworth. The following phrases may recall it to your mind:
'"I loved you more than ever last night, though I thought I could not have loved you more than I really did."
'"Lilac, lilac; it reminds me of you more than any picture of you could."
'"You know my devotion to you. For me there is no other in the world."'
(Then, as before, followed a space.)
'Should you care to possess yourself of this, we will let you have it for £5,000. The money should be sent to Mr. Harold Bilton at his business office, 1,324a, Broadway, for Mrs. Emsworth's account, by to-morrow (Tuesday) evening. In the event of its not being to hand, we shall presume that you do not wish to have the letter, which we shall thereupon forward by special messenger that evening to Mr. Lewis S. Palmer.'Mr. Bilton, who has lately arrived in New York, is authorized to receive the above-mentioned sum from you, should you settle to adopt this course, but to permit no discussion of any kind referring to the matter in hand.'We are, dear Sir,'Your faithful, obedient servants,'A. B. C.'
'Should you care to possess yourself of this, we will let you have it for £5,000. The money should be sent to Mr. Harold Bilton at his business office, 1,324a, Broadway, for Mrs. Emsworth's account, by to-morrow (Tuesday) evening. In the event of its not being to hand, we shall presume that you do not wish to have the letter, which we shall thereupon forward by special messenger that evening to Mr. Lewis S. Palmer.
'Mr. Bilton, who has lately arrived in New York, is authorized to receive the above-mentioned sum from you, should you settle to adopt this course, but to permit no discussion of any kind referring to the matter in hand.
'We are, dear Sir,'Your faithful, obedient servants,'A. B. C.'
Bertie read it through, folded it neatly up, replaced it in its envelope, and walked across to where Ginger was sitting absorbed in a letter.
'Any news?' he asked.
'Yes, a good deal.'
Ginger finished the sheet he was reading, got up briskly, and helped himself to whisky.
'Noah's Ark,' he observed. 'Great and merciful God!'
'You seemed to be enjoying yourself,' said his brother.
'I was, enormously. But it's great and merciful, all the same. That's all. Oh no, one thing more. Bertie, I think your girl is worth the rest of this continent. News? Yes, news from Davos. Charlie is better, ever so much better, and his nurse throughout has been Sybil. In fact, there is going to be love in a cottage, I think. Charlie writes. He seems to like the idea of a cottage.'
'She's going to marry him?' asked Bertie.
Ginger smiled.
'Now I come to think of it, he doesn't mention the word,' he observed.
'You're rather coarse,' remarked Bertie.
'I am. I thought it might cheer you up. You look rather down. Anything wrong?'
'Nothing whatever.'
Ginger strolled back to his chair, put his whisky on one arm, a little heap of cigarettes on the other, and curled himself up between them.
'The young folk are all growing up and being married,' he said. 'It makes me feel extremely old, and it is a little uncomfortable. I've done nothing—but that might happen to anybody—and I've felt nothing. What is it like to feel things, Bertie?'
'Depends what they are.'
'No, I mean independently of what they are. I don't know what strong emotion is. I don't know what it is to be carried off one's feet. I am much interested in many things, but impersonally. Now, you—you have adored, and you have been adored. I have sat and looked on. Does it leave you duller, do you think, to feel a thing, and then cease to feel it, than you would have been if you never felt it at all?'
Bertie considered this a moment.
'You never cease to feel things,' he said. 'A thing that has been exquisitely sweet becomes bitter, and continues bitter. You taste the jam first, and the powder afterwards.'
He turned to the mantelpiece, took up a cigarette, and then, with a sudden trembling hand, threw it into the grate.
'And you pay for it all,' he said—' you pay over and over again. Good-night, Ginger.'
It was a glorious blue and golden morning in early June, and the soft brilliant sunshine of English summer weather flooded the glades of the park at Molesworth, where Amelie, intent on the finishing of a water-colour sketch, sat on a fallen tree-trunk, and Bertie lay on the grass by her side reading at intervals to her from a volume of Tennyson he had brought out with him. She was almost too busy with her painting to follow very clearly what he read, but the sound of his voice thrilled her with a big, quiet happiness, and when he was silent, the consciousness of his presence by her was hardly less vivid. All the same, she was attending very closely to what she was doing, and her brush industriously recorded what the upward sweep of her gray eyes had noted before she bent them again with bowed head on her sketch.
Indeed, that which lay before her was very well worth her attention. In front of them lay a sward of fine-woven turf, and from under the shade of the huge oak which spread its living canopies of green above them they looked through aisles of noble trees into the open, heathery ground of the far distance. The cool greenness, dim and subaqueous in tone, stretched to right and left of them in all shades of colour; here underneath the oak it was dark and almost sombre; there, where a clean-limbed, slender beech foamed up in the freshness of its pale foliage into the blue cup of heaven, the colour was enchantingly vivid and delicate, as if to match, even as the rose-colour of youthful cheeks matches the slender litheness of the frame, the girlish grace of the tree itself. Flecks of sunlight lay like spangles on the grass below the trees, and in spaces between them the blue blaze of the June day poured down on to the flower-decked grass. The last of the bluebells still lingered in shady places, as if pieces of sky had fallen there; tall fox-gloves rose in spires of blossoms through thickets of bramble; buttercups made a sunlight of their own, and in the shelter of scattered coppices the pale wind-flowers still dreamed in whiteness.
Not far in front of them, the centre point of Amelie's sketch, rose a huge thorn, covered with clusters of crimson blossom, standing in full sunlight, so throbbing and bursting with colour that she almost fancied she could see on the pale green of the slender-fingered birches that grew near some red reflection of that glorious blaze. To the right of it one could see through the tree-trunks the gray palings of an enclosed cover, where the ground tumbled upwards under pines, and the velvet of the turf was riddled and sandy with rabbit-holes. A fringe of elders, with the white umbrella of their flowers, grew there, and tawny honeysuckle added one more note to the great symphony of delicate woodland smell.
And even more entrancing than the woodland smell, more subtly mingled than that bouquet of coolness and greenness, of the aroma of pines, the drowsiness of the honeysuckle, the languor of the elders, was the symphony of woodland sound, the forest murmur that filled the ear even as the greenness filled and refreshed the eye. The hum of insects, of bees at their fragrant labour, was the bourdon note that pervaded everything; a light breeze stirred in the trees, calling out of each its own distinctive note—from the pines the sound of waves very far off, from the birches a thin, sibilant murmur, from the beech something a little lower in the scale, and from the tall grasses a whisper and a sigh. A late cuckoo chimed, still mellow-throated, doves moaned softly, thrushes fluted their repeated notes from bush to bush, calling to one another in the joy of the great vigorous life that filled these enchanted glades, and out in the open larks, black specks against the blue, hung over the nests of their mates, and towered in the triumph of their song. But best of all, pervasive even as the hum of bees, was the ripple and gurgle and chuckle and pouring of water, that one note more liquid than the nightingale's.
Right down the centre of the glade came the stream, brimmed with the rains of spring, and filling its bed from edge to edge. Here its course lay over gravel-beds, and the pebbles glanced and glimmered with the living light that the sun poured down through the pellucid transparency of the water. Then came a sharp elbow in its course, and it fretted its way, with sound of melodious outpouring, through the tangled roots of some tree that stood bare in the angle of the turning. Then for a space the ground was more clayey, and a carpet of green water-weeds were combed and waved by the woven ropes of water. Deeper pools lay here, and under the protection of the banks, where some promontory of rocky stuff made a breakwater, the broad fans of water-lilies and the golden crown of their blossoms found anchorage for their sappy stems. Dragon-flies, as if revisiting the scenes of their childhood, where they had nosed in the mud, or lain, blind, pupre, till the spring of their awakening, hovered iridescent and flashed like jewels flying through the air over the sunlit shallows; white-throated swallows skimmed up-stream, and companies of swifts chided together. Rushes waded knee-deep into the water, loose-strife stepped gingerly to the brink, and to all the stream prattled and sang and went on its sweet way.
Amelie laid down her brushes, and held out her sketch to Bertie.
'Criticise,' she said.
He looked at it a moment in silence.
'It's very good,' he said; 'but you still want the—the big softness of it all. It is still a little hard.'
She sighed.
'I knew you would say that,' she said, 'and it's perfectly true. Perhaps I shall get to be able to do it in time. It's all very well to say that a sketch is merely a matter of line and colour, but it isn't; there is a "feeling" which is beyond either.'
She took it back from him.
'Anyone could see it was painted by an American,' she observed.
Bertie laughed.
'That's where you are wrong,' he said; 'most Americans would say it was done by an Englishwoman.'
She smiled to herself with a secret pleasure, laid her sketch by her to dry, slid off the trunk where she had been sitting, and sat down on the grass by her husband.
'Read to me again,' she said. 'Read that song that ends:
'"The moan of doves in immemorial elms,And murmur of innumerable bees."'
She leaned her head on his shoulder, and sat with eyes half-closed, as in his low, gentle voice he read through the exquisite passage.
'It is English,' she said, when he had finished; 'and, oh, Bertie, that means a lot to me. Bertie, are you happy?'
He closed the book, and sat thinking a moment before he answered her. It was true that he had never supposed that he was capable of being so happy as he had been in these last three months. It was true also that his affection for his wife had grown with every day they had passed together, yet the question was a difficult one to answer. A few months ago, had she asked him in his present mood the same question, he would instantly have said 'Yes'; but with the growth of his capacity for happiness and for loving her had grown the demand for happiness and love which his nature made. Instead of acquiescing in the conclusion that he never again could possibly love as he had once loved, he had begun to want that again; he was no longer content with this limitation.
'Ah, my dearest,' he said, 'happiness is not in your power or mine. No, I am not quite happy; I want something more.'
He sat up as her eyes questioned him.
'I want the impossible, I suppose,' he said; 'I want to be fire. You have made me want that.'
For a moment some shadow of vague trouble crossed her eyes.
'I don't think I understand,' she said.
Bertie plucked a long feather of grass, and chewed the juicy end of it. He had not meant to say quite so much.
'I'm not sure that I understand either,' he said. 'It is quite easy to understand complicated things, but when one gets to the plain, simple things like love and death, then one realizes how little one understands. Is it not so?'
The trouble grew.
'I never ask for confidences,' she said, 'so you mustn't think I am doing so; but, Bertie, sometimes I feel that there is a piece of you which I do not know—some locked room, or—or it is like that haunted house we went to the other day, where there is a space unaccounted for. One goes into all the rooms, but by the measurements there is yet another room which one cannot find.'
The intuition of this rather startled and shocked him.
'So you credit me with a Bluebeard's chamber?' he asked. 'It is far more likely to be a cupboard for lumber.'
'Have you some lumber, then?' she asked quickly.
The bitter taste of that which had been exquisitely sweet was at this moment very present to him—more bitter, perhaps, than it had ever been. For he regretted now, not that which was past, but its absence from the present; and the curious persistence of Amelie rather vexed him.
'Ah, we all must have a little lumber,' he said, with an unconscious touch of impatience in his voice. 'In this rough and tumble of a world we all get some bits of things broken—ideas, ideals, desires, what you will. They are our lumber; and it is wiser to turn the key on them—not bring them out and try to mend them.'
Amelie noticed the impatience of which he was unconscious.
'Cannot I help you to mend them, Bertie?' she asked, with a wonderful wistfulness in her voice. 'And have I vexed you?'
He threw the grass spearwise down the wind.
'I think you could not really vex me,' he said. 'But you can't help me to mend them; nobody can—not even you.'
She picked up her sketching things in silence, washed out her brushes, and closed her sketch-book.
'Let us forget it all, then,' she said briskly. 'Let us put the hands of the clock back ten minutes, and go on from then. "The murmur of innumerable bees." All June is in that line, is it not? Bertie, what a beautiful June we have had!'
'And it is not over yet,' said he.
'No; but people come to us this evening, you know, and on Monday we go up to town. Come, we must go back to the house; it is lunch-time, and the post will be in.'
But for both of them the huge blue of the day was flecked with a little cloud.
After lunch Amelie had a few calls to make, and some little business to transact in the village, and Bertie, who sturdily refused to accompany her, ordered his horse, and went for a rambling ride through the park. Somehow the vague conversation of that ten minutes in the morning had dimly but rather deeply upset him. In any case, it had the effect, so to speak, of smashing open his lumber-room door, on which he had so carefully turned the key. Twice before had it been rudely opened—on those occasions by Mrs. Emsworth herself, when she had got from him first ten thousand pounds for what was only a copy of his letter, and, secondly, five thousand more, two evenings before his marriage. It was with a sense of shame that even now made his cheeks burn when he thought of it, that he recalled his own utter weakness, his dread of possible exposure. Even at the time he knew that the wise thing to do would have been to have gone straight to Mr. Palmer with the letter for which he had paid ten thousand pounds and the second blackmailing letter, and have, with these proofs in his hand of the vileness of the scheme, told him the whole truth. But his nerves could no more face it than they could have allowed him to pull out a tooth or a nail of his own, and next day he had gone, cursing his own flabbiness, to Bilton's office, and obediently paid the second levy. Bilton himself was not there, but a young and rather insolently-mannered clerk, who addressed him as 'Earl Keynes,' had been authorized to receive his cheque and the type-written letter in exchange for a small packet which contained, as he satisfied himself, a couple of sheets in his own handwriting, torn half across. He had, of course, kept the first letter which he had bought back, and, comparing the two, he came to the conclusion that the first was a very careful forgery, the second the genuine letter.
But this afternoon it was not so much his own weakness in having been so easy a prey to the blackmailer, and in having been incapable of forcing himself to tell the whole thing to Mr. Palmer, that lay like a shadow on him, as his present inability to feel as he once felt. He had unlocked the despatch-box where he kept the letters on his return this morning with Amelie, and read one through again. Passion vibrated there—a passion which had once been his; he could recall it perfectly; he could remember with the most vivid distinctness the rapture of desire in which he had written those sheets of adoration. It had seemed to him then that life wasthis: that the whole world, and whatever it contained that was lovely and worth the worship of man, found in her its completion. The best and the worst of him—for it was all of him that wrote thus—was hers, in the passionate self-abandonment of love. For that gift she had in return called him a pretty boy, and told him not to talk nonsense; but for the faculty of feeling that nonsense again for his wife he would have given everything he had. He saw and fully recognised the exquisite quality of Amelie's beauty, and the beautiful and generous soul that dwelt therein. Day by day he saw the sweet unfolding of her nature—an unfolding as silent and as perfect as the blossoming of a rose. He admired her, he felt passion for her, but a passion that never was lost and blinded by itself, as his passion for Dorothy had been. Often in that June of lilacs he had come home from seeing her, and sat for hours, as if intoxicated or stupefied, unable to speak or think even, only lie with mind open under the eye of his sun. It was that power he would have given the world to recapture.
His ramblings had led him into an outlying piece of the park which he seldom visited—a somewhat bleak, heathery upland, not more than a mile or so from the house, but away from the beauty of the wooded glades where he and Amelie had spent the morning. He was about to turn, when, at some little distance off, he saw a couple of men standing by a tall red rod planted in the ground, one of whom apparently was taking observations through some sort of telescopic instrument. About a couple of hundred yards further on was another rod, and, following the line with his eye, he saw that between them and the park paling was yet another. He rode up to them, and, with a certain resentment, inquired what they were doing, and got for answer that they were under orders to survey this piece of country for the projected railway. They further explained that the line, when it reached the ridge over which he had ridden, would probably enter a tunnel, and emerge again only outside the park. Her ladyship, one of the men remarked in a rather insolent tone, had given permission for the survey.
Bertie turned his horse round, and rode back homewards, doing his honest best not to think what he thought. In his heart he was very much hurt that Amelie had not told him, and somehow the idea that the park was apparently to be invaded and cut up by a railway-line was extraordinarily repugnant to him. A couple of years ago, it is true, both he and his father would have welcomed any scheme which should turn that white elephant, the Molesworth property, into cash, at whatever violation of its forest glades; yet now, when only the bare, outlying portions were to be given to the invader, he intensely disliked the thought of it. Money was no longer needful; the railroad might go hang.
He found Amelie in the garden when he got back, and, instead of giving her the little caress which was still usual between them after only an hour or two's separation, he began abruptly.
'I found some men surveying on the far warrens,' he said. 'They told me they had your permission.'
Amelie frowned slightly, as if puzzled.
'Yes, I believe the agent did say something about it two days ago,' she said. 'It is only a survey they are making; there is nothing settled.'
'I think you might have told me,' said he. 'But of course the place is yours; you will please yourself.'
This hurt her; he had rather intended it should. But she answered with admirable gentleness.
'I am sorry,' she said; 'I quite forgot to tell you. The thing seemed to me immaterial. Of course, I should have consulted you before settling anything.'
Bertie felt rather ashamed of his ill-temper, and, remembering the omission of their usual little ceremony, he picked up her hand as it lay on the arm of her chair, and pressed it.
'Yes, dear, I am stupid to have made anything of it,' he said. 'But tell me, Amelie, what is the proposed line?'
'A branch line from Cardiff, joining the Liverpool and Southampton. It is only a preliminary survey, I believe. Of course, I meant to talk to you about it as soon as they opened negotiations with us; I may as well now. It will cross the far warren for about a mile, I believe, and then tunnel under the ridge. It will not interfere with us in any way. It is completely cut off from the house and the woods. And I suppose they would pay something substantial. I had meant to give you that.'
Bertie's feeling of shame grew a little hotter.
'I am a cross-grained brute,' he said. 'Am I forgiven?' She smiled at him.
'Do you ask that?' she said. 'But oh, Bertie, don't hurt me even ever so little. A little hurt from you hurts so much.'
So another cloud flecked the blue of June.
That afternoon their guests began to arrive for the week-end party. It was the first they had given, and Amelie somehow felt a little nervous, for it was her debut as hostess. Lord Bolton was coming, and, in a way, it seemed to her hardly decent that she should be receiving him in this house. She had met him once or twice before, and was vaguely terrified at him. Sybil Massington was coming too, with Charlie, to whom she was to be married in July. Ginger was accompanying his father; other friends of Bertie's raised their numbers to a dozen, and both her own parents, with Reggie Armstrong as gentleman-in-waiting to Mrs. Palmer, were to make a sort of family party. This consciousness that she was on trial made her the least bit in the world self-conscious, and deep down in her mind, tucked away in its darkest corner, but still there, was a sort of haunting anxiety about her mother. Again and again she tried to picture to herself Mrs. Palmer and Gallio engaged in friendly desultory conversation, but as often she abandoned this projected situation as unthinkable. She even hoped—hoped in a whisper, that is to say—that for some reason her mother would be prevented from coming. That whisper she stifled as often as it sounded, thoroughly ashamed of it; but it was there.
But Providence declined to have any special dealings on this point, and Mrs. Palmer's entry into the house was clearly audible to her as she sat in the garden with those of her guests who had arrived. Gallio was already there, his thin but fresh-coloured face and flossy white hair, his general air of great distinction and complete imperturtability, seeming admirably suited to the dignified stability of the gray house and the spaciousness of the ancestral lawns. He had been most affectionate and gentle to her, had called her 'his dear daughter,' had kissed her hand with a courtly grace, and made her feel intensely ill at ease. Then came the sound of screamings from the house, and if the simile of a substantial butterfly with a shrill voice discharged from a catapult conveys anything to the reader, it was in such manner that Mrs. Palmer came through the open French windows of the drawing-room, and with outstretched arms swooped swiftly across the lawn to Amelie.
'My dearest, sweetest angel child,' she cried—screams of emotion mingled with kissing—' why, if I haven't been just dreaming day and night of seeing you again!'—more screams—' Why, you look so well; you look just too lovely for words. I've been just crazy to see you!'
Lord Bolton had in the previous year firmly declined the honour of Mrs. Palmer's acquaintance, saying he did not wish to be deaf for the remainder of a misspent life; and Amelie introduced her to him.
'Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Lord Bolton,' she said; 'and to have the pleasure of meeting you here makes it just too complete.'
Gallio shook hands.
'I have looked forward to this,' he said with his best paternal air. 'Bertie, dear Amelie, you, and my unworthy self—the family group in the family frame.' And his eye wandered over the great gray façade of the house.
'Well, I think that's too beautifully put,' said Mrs. Palmer; 'that's a real poetical thought. Lewis,' she called to her husband, 'Lord Bolton's been too poetical for words. Well, I'm sure!'
Gallio's thin lips tightened a little.
'How are you, Mr. Palmer?' he said. 'I am most fortunate to have been able to come down to-day. I was afraid I should not be able to, but when my dear daughter said you were both coming, I could not let anything stand in the way.'
'Why, that was just lovely of you,' said Mrs. Palmer, as she moved to Amelie's side at the tea-table, and went on in a loud aside, as Gallio engaged Mr. Palmer in conversation. 'Dearest child,' she said, 'you look simply too sweet. And I've lost my heart to Lord Bolton. I think he's just lovely, with his white hair and all—just the old nobleman I used to dream about before I married Lewis. Now, give me some tea, poured out with your own hands at your own house, you darling Countess of Keynes. Well, I'm sure, I'm just crazy with pleasure!'
Mrs. Palmer flowed on in a shrill and equable torrent of conversation. Her particular timbre of voice made talking in her vicinity as difficult as talking in a rail way-tunnel, for it echoed and reverberated in a manner which rendered all else inaudible.
'I read all about your presentation in theNew York Herald,' she went on—'"the new American beauty, the young and charming Countess of Keynes"; and you'll laugh, Amelie, but I ordered a special edition with all about you printed in gilt letters, and just flooded Newport with the copies. I guess Newport will find it as hard to beat you as it did to beat the pearl-party. Newport will just curl up and die; I guess you've done for Newport. And there's one thing I want to ask: Do I, Lord Bolton, take any rank as mother of a countess? I could find nothing about it in your Debrett.'
Gallio turned to her with his most courtly air.
'Ah, Mrs. Palmer,' he said, 'we have no rank in England to equal that which a charming and beautiful woman enjoys in her own right.'
The famous cry resounded over the lawns, and beat in echo against the house.
'Why, if that isn't just too sweet of you!' she cried. 'Lewis, here's Lord Bolton saying such things to me as you never thought of saying. And where's Reggie Armstrong? Reggie, did you hear what Lord Bolton said? You did, though you pretend you didn't. You're just green with jealousy. I can see the greenness reflected on your strawberries. Well, I never!'
Sybil Massington and others had arrived already, and the assembled party, some fifteen or sixteen, were now all gathered on the lawn, drinking tea and eating strawberries with a slight air of constraint, as if social thunder of some kind was in the air. Bertie, who had been receiving his guests indoors and bringing them out, was in a low chair just opposite Mrs. Palmer, listening with rather less than half an ear to what Sybil was saying to him. Quite involuntarily, at this speech he raised a deprecating eyebrow, looked up, and caught Amelie's eye. She flushed slightly, and looked away again. Some rather heavy rejoinder on the part of Reggie Armstrong followed, and Gallio sat down opposite Bertie and Sybil.
'Charming woman,' he said in his very low, gentle voice; 'she has all the brightness of the Western civilization.'
Bertie could not help smiling, and, looking up again, caught Amelie's glance, and felt guilty. The resounding voice went on:
'It's just my idea of the English country house,' she said; 'it's just ancestral. Why, Lewis might go and establish his office right here under these trees, and give Vanderbilt fits, as he did last year, and the trees wouldn't care. That's what I've just lain awake and coveted till three in the morning. Why, I was at Windsor last week, and I assure you Windsor looks like a mushroom beside this. It's just English. Lord Bolton, however you could let Lewis have it I can't think. Come and sit by me, and pay me some more compliments. Why, it tickles me to death to sit here and talk to you. I think you're just lovely.'
Gallio rose obediently.
'Tact, too,' he observed to Mrs. Massington, as he turned to comply with Mrs. Palmer's frank and direct request.
In fact, for the time things could not have been worse, and Mrs. Palmer's voluble shrillness, bawling all sorts of things which were neither wicked nor stupid nor anything objectionable, except that they were simply impossible, at Gallio, who sat beside her, and encouraged her by his exquisite courtliness of manner into imagining that she was being the most brilliant success, was too much for the nerves of some of the English section, who strolled away about the lawn with fine deliberation, and carefully abstained from any comment. But in process of time Amelie took her mother away to see her room, and Gallio, suave to the last, made her his best bow, as she declared for the twentieth time that she considered him the loveliest man she had ever met. Bertie had strolled away with Charlie and Sybil Massington, feeling that in its small way the situation was unbearable. It was one of the hideous, bitter little comedies of life, where everyone is ridiculous, yet it is impossible to laugh for fear of crying. He knew so well how Mrs. Palmer felt, how Gallio felt, how he himself felt, and he was afraid he knew how Amelie felt.
Sybil had much to say.
'It is quite like a fairy-story, Bertie. Here are Charlie and I—the poor young man who proposed to drop into an early grave, and who proposed to me instead, who has now no more idea of dropping into a grave than I have—and here are you and Amelie, with Molesworth once more your home. Bertie, if you hadn't fallen in love with Amelie, you would have argued yourself the most obtuse young man in the world. Why she fell in love with you is harder to say. She has got extraordinary charm; I felt it as soon as I saw her. You were in luck when you went a-wooing. So were you, Charlie—why didn't you say that?'
'You really didn't give me much time,' said Charlie in self-justification.
'No, that's true. Bertie, what fun we had in Long Island! Really, that time was most amusing. And we all meet again here—all but Mrs. Emsworth, that is to say. By the way, she has come back; she is staying somewhere in the neighbourhood. Did her tour end as successfully as it began?'
'She wrote to me just before my marriage saying she was getting quite rich,' said Bertie, wincing a little.
'How nice! I wish I was. Charlie, they are all rich except you and me. Never mind; we will stay with them all a great deal, which will be charming for them. And the Palmers' house in London—have you seen it? Really, it is magnificent. Who did it? Mrs. Palmer or her husband? It can't have been done by a firm; the taste is too individual, too certain.'
'Mr. Palmer did it,' said Bertie. 'I fancy he ordered every individual thing, down to the smallest details.'
'I fancied it must be he; Mrs. Palmer is a little morevoulu—more bird of Paradise.'
She laughed.
'I can't help laughing,' she said. 'To anyone with any eye for human comedy the scene at tea was delicious. She is a great dear, and I am very fond of her; but, frankly, she and Gallio together were extraordinarily funny. I love contrasts—notes of jarring colour.'
Bertie did not laugh.
'I was furious with Gallio,' he said; 'he tried to make a fool of her.'
'Assuredly he did not succeed,' said Sybil. 'Mrs. Palmer was delighted with him. Anyhow, he had to be polite or rude; he chose to be extremely polite.'
'Amelie saw,' said Bertie briefly, and the subject dropped.
They strolled back in the enveloping light of the sunset, which flooded and pervaded the air with level rays. The glades where he had sat with his wife that morning were full of the soft luminousness of the sun, which entered below the leafy boughs of the thick trees and lit them from end to end with a wonderful glory. Birds were busy with their evensong in the bushes, and, as at noonday, the countless hum of insects was still in the air. Bertie, still rather disturbed for Amelie's sake at the little tea-time comedy, felt soothed by the leisurely tranquillity of the hour, and the two others, a little apart, passed from time to time some whispered confidence. But the mellow call of the bell from the Elizabethan turret warned them that the minutes to dinner-time were numbered, and they briskened their steps back to the house. The other two went upstairs, but Bertie turned for a moment to his sitting-room in quest of evening news, and found Amelie there waiting for him. Her face was a little flushed, and some shadow of trouble clouded it.
'I wanted to see you a moment before dinner,' she said. 'I——' And she stopped.
'What is it, dear?' said he gently.
'You know. He, your father, was laughing at her; he made other people laugh at her; he made you laugh. I don't think it was a good joke. There are many sorts of bad breeding; I think he showed one of the worst.'
'I am sorry you take it like that, Amelie,' said he. 'It is true I laughed, but I did not laugh at your mother; I laughed at the comedy of the situation.'
'He made a fool of her,' continued Amelie; 'but I think he made a cad of himself.'
'That is rather strong language,' said Bertie.
'I think it is suitable language. I think you ought to ask him to behave with courtesy to my guests—not with exaggerated courtesy.'
Bertie thought for a moment.
'I will tell him that he hurt your feelings, if you wish,' said he at length.
'That is not the point,' said she.
'For me it is.'
She turned on him a long, luminous look.
'Then you don't understand,' she said. 'My meaning is that I will not have my mother insulted in my house.'
He frowned.
'You make too much of it,' he said.
'You won't do as I ask, then?' she said.
'If you think it over, you will see that it would serve no good purpose.'
She left the window where she was standing, and began to move towards the door.
'I never ask twice,' she said. 'By the way, Mrs. Emsworth has telegraphed to know whether she may come over to lunch to-morrow. She is staying at Midhurst.'
'Please make some excuse,' said Bertie quickly; 'I do not wish her to come here.'
'Why not?'
'I desire you to make her some excuse,' he repeated.
She looked up, started at the quiet peremptoriness of his tone, and again there flashed into her mind the thought that had been there this morning, when she told him that there was a piece of him she did not know. At this moment she felt she localized it.
'What reason do you give me?' she asked. 'You used to be quite friendly with her last autumn.'
'Quite true; but I am not now.'
'Have you seen her since?' asked Amelie, not quite recognising from what that question really sprang.
'No, I have not.'
He paused.
'Why did you ask that?' he said quietly.
'It was a reasonable question,' she said. 'Mrs. Emsworth is a friend of mine too; I have every right to ask her to the house, unless you give me good reason.'
'I ask you not to exercise that right,' said Bertie.
Suddenly, and almost audibly in its distinctness, Amelie's mind said to her, 'We are quarrelling.' Her love for him, frightened, ran, as it were, towards him, but stumbled over her pride. She did not answer him, but left the room, feeling sick at heart.
The construction of the intermediate pieces of line which were to connect Liverpool with Southampton by a direct route were finished by July, and, running powers over the lines of other existing companies having been acquired, the new service was open for traffic by the beginning of August. As Mr. Palmer had foreseen, the immense saving of time and convenience of transport effected by this direct linking together of the two ports had been, as soon as the Bill for the projected line had passed the Houses of Parliament, instantly recognised by the various fleets that used these ports, and its success was assured long before its completion. Added to this, the economical and businesslike methods of running trains which were adopted by him, based on American systems, enabled the line to cut down rates, while it secured for its customers far more rapid transport, so that it obtained from the first practically a monopoly of the goods traffic between the ports. A quantity of gentlemen, who in some vague sort of manner considered that they were acting in the sacred name of patriotism, wrote hundreds of violent letters to the papers, protesting against this fresh American invasion; while others, equally vaguely, in the sacred name of Art, ranted themselves hoarse over the steel-girder budges that desecrated the most lovely spots in the rural fortresses of England, and the black, squat, but eminently efficient, engines that drew the trains of unlovely merchandise. But thisvox,et præterea nihil, soon died away, and the only influence it had on traffic was perhaps to call added attention to the eminent advantages enjoyed by the customers of Mr. Palmer's line. Consequently, neither he nor they had any quarrel with it.
'All this he had foreseen, and more. It became practically necessary, as he had known all along, for Swansea and Cardiff to put themselves into communication with this system, and as early as June, as we have seen, surveyors were busy on the Molesworth estate over the route. The winter before Mr. Palmer had purchased both it and the adjoining Wyfold estate, knowing that the line of direct communication must pass through one or the other; and when towards the end of July the experts pronounced very strongly in favour of the Molesworth route, he forwarded their recommendation to Amelie, with the request that she would come and talk matters over with him before she left town.
The last month had not passed very happily for her; it lacked, at least, that wonderful edge of happiness which May and June had given her. The little rift which had opened between her and Bertie had not closed again, and, if anything, it had become rather wider. She had obeyed his request, and not asked Mrs. Emsworth to lunch, but she had done so unwillingly, rebelling in her mind against this arbitrariness which expected to be obeyed and yet would give no reason for what it wished done. In consequence—for her protest, though mute, was very obvious—the spirit of her compliance was almost as irritating to him as her disobedience would have been. Furthermore, at that interview she had had with him suspicion, vague and darkling, she knew lurked in the shadow of her mind; the piece of him she did not know irresistibly connected itself with Mrs. Emsworth. There it had grown like some mushroom, and, though she did not officially, so to speak, recognise its existence, it was there. Other things, too, had tended to separate them, and in particular the treatment (or so she called it) of her mother by the world of London. She had expected to see and saw that London in general flocked to Mrs. Palmer's new house, where the entertainments, if not quite so wildly improbable as those which awoke the echoes in the glades of Long Island, were on the most lavish and exuberant scale. Consequently London, with its keen eye for the buttered side of the bread, went there in its crowds, drank Mrs. Palmer's champagne, danced to her fiddles, won her money at bridge, and enjoyed the performances of all the most notable singers and pianists in the world with the greatest contentment. But what Amelie saw also was the half-shrugged shoulders, the instantaneous glance of the eye, the raised eyebrow, the just-not-genuine smile of those who were the most constanthabituésthere. Mrs. Palmer, in fact, was in London, not of London. This Amelie resented, and, by way of retaliation, she had, as was perfectly natural, her mother constantly in her own house, and filled it with Americans perhaps rather more than was perfectly natural. For the rest, there had been nothing the least resembling an open breach between her and Bertie; he accepted the continual presence of her countrymen without the slightest protest, and never, even by the smallest inflection of voice or manner, was other than absolutely civil to everyone she asked. Indeed, the perfect evenness of his manner added its quota to the constraint that lay between them; in her heart of hearts she knew that he often found neither interest nor entertainment in her guests, and the chilled perfection of his mode of conducting himself towards them but served as a barrier the more.
But what most stood between them was her undefinable suspicion about Mrs. Emsworth. On that day the cankerworm had entered, and since then she had again and again asked herself whether Bertie's affection for her had ever been of the same quality as the love she had felt for him. She remembered with horrible distinctness his words, 'I want to be fire,' and they, which at the moment had seemed to her but an expression of the ever unsatisfied yearning of love, which always, however perfect, still desires to go yet deeper, now wore a more sinister interpretation, and were to her the kindling of a secret heart-burning. What if this natural and simplest interpretation was true? What if he had never really felt fire for her?
Such was the abbreviated reading of her spiritual diary down to the day when she drove to see her father. Though he had been in London all this last month, she had scarcely set eyes on him, so immersed had he been in the railroad business, and it was with a childish eagerness that she looked forward to having a long talk with him. In the trouble of her mind she felt great longing for that kind, unwearied affection which he ever had for her—an affection not very demonstrative, but extraordinarily real and solid. The effusiveness of her mother's love just now was less satisfying to her, for Mrs. Palmer had been for the last six weeks a mere whirling atom in the mill of social success; and while one hand, so to speak, was entwined round Amelie's neck in a maternal embrace, the other would be scribbling notes of invitation and regret to the flower of England's nobility.
She got to the house rather late for lunch, and was struck by the resemblance which the moral atmosphere of the dining-room bore to that of Basle railway-station. There was the same sense that everybody was just going to catch a train; that they were exchanging last words as they took their hurried meal. Her father, next whom she sat, was an exception, for he ate his thin slices of toasted Hovis bread and drank his milk with the deliberateness which his digestion demanded; but everyone else seemed to be unable to attend to what was going on at this moment, because they all were thinking of what they would be doing the next. Even her father, too, seemed rather preoccupied, and from time to time she saw that his eyes were fixed on herself with a certain anxious look, which was removed as soon as he saw she observed it.
With regard to the railroad scheme, his explanation after lunch was very short. A big ordnance map showed her where the line would enter the park, where it would enter the tunnel, not to appear again till it had passed outside the precinct. Its whole course would be quite remote from the house—remote also from the wooded side of the park; they would be as unconscious of its presence there as if it was in the next county. The Wyfold route, on the other hand, which perhaps might be adopted if Amelie put serious obstacles in the company's way, would actually be very much closer to the house and the forested piece of the park than the other.
Mr. Palmer made these explanations as if he anticipated some opposition on Amelie's part, and he was pleased to find none.
'It seems to me much the most sensible plan,' she said; 'and, as you say, the railway will really interfere with us less if it is in Molesworth than if it was in Wyfold. I must just tell Bertie about it, and I will send you my formal consent this evening. I will leave everything connected with the sale in your hands.'
She pushed the maps away from her with rather a weary air.
'And how are you, papá,' she said, falling into her old habit of addressing him. 'I haven't set eyes on you for weeks.'
Mr. Palmer gave a moment's consideration to how he was before he answered.
'Well, I guess I'm a bit out of condition in the brain,' he said. 'From the business point of view, England is the most enervating place I ever came to. These directors and business men here are about as much use as nursery-maids. They go down to their offices round about eleven, and sit there till one. Then they eat a heavy lunch, and stroll back about two to see if anything has happened. Of course it hasn't; things don't happen unless you make them happen. So they light a big cigar, and go down to Woking for an evening round of golf after the fatigues of the day. Saturdays they don't put in an appearance at all. That's their idea of business. And it tells on me rather; it's difficult to keep up ordinary high pressure when you're surrounded by so many flabby bits of chewed string. I guess I'll go back to America in the fall, and get braced up.' 'It don't affect mamma,' said Amelie, falling more and more into her native vernacular. 'She just flies around same as ever. She's having a real daisy of a time, she says.' Mr. Palmer did not listen to this; he was pursuing his own melancholy reflections on English business methods.
'It reminds me of a poultry-yard,' he said. 'An Englishman, on the rare occasions when he lays an egg, has to flap his wings and crow over it, instead of sitting down to hatch it. Why, I suppose they've given fifty lunches to boards of the directors over this twopenny-halfpenny line of mine already. There was a luncheon on the formation of the board; there was a luncheon to celebrate their determination to set to work at once; there was a luncheon to celebrate their doing so. There was a dinner on the occasion of the cutting of the first sod of earth; they brought down some fool-sort of Highness to do it. They had a week at the seaside when the Bill passed through the House, and when the first train runs next month, they'll all go and have a rest-cure on the completion of their labours. What they want is something to cure them of their habit of always resting.' He got up from his chair in some impatience, folded up the maps, and stood looking at his daughter in silence for a moment.
'Say, Amelie,' he said, 'and what kind of time have you been having? All going serene and domestically? Bertie been behaving himself? Do either of you want anything? You look a bit down, somehow—kind of tired about the eyes.'
Amelie looked up at him; the 'tired about the eyes' seemed to be a wonderfully true interpretation of how she felt.
'Oh, we trot along,' she said. 'I suppose everyone has their bits of worries. Mamma has when she accepts three dinner invitations for the same evening. You have when your directors give luncheon-parties instead of doing business. We all have.'
'Can't see why you should,' he said. 'I don't like you to worry, Amelie. What's it all about?'
He paused a moment.
'Have you heard anything about Bertie which bothers you?' he asked; 'or hasn't he been good to you?'
She did not answer at once, for, in her rather super-sensitized frame of mind, it seemed to her that her father's first question was not vague or general, but that he had some special, definite reason for asking. From that it was but the shortest of links necessary to couple the question with that which grew mushroom-like in the shadow of her mind.
'No; he has been perfectly good to me, and I have heard nothing that bothers me,' she said.
She looked up at her father as she spoke. He was standing close to her—a short, gray-whiskered man, insignificant in face and features except for those wonderful eyes. In his hand, the hand which by a stroke of the pen, a signing of the name, could set in motion the force of millions, was a little silver paper-knife which she had once given him. Even now, as she knew—for he had said he could only give her five minutes after lunch—there were waiting for him a hundred schemes to be considered, a hundred more levers to move the world 'as he chose. But he stood there, waiting with a woman's infinite patience for any impulse towards confidence she-might feel—just a tender, solicitous father, grasping in his hand a daughter's insignificant gift.
'We have always been chums, Amelie,' he said, with a sort of appealing wistfulness. 'When you were quite little, you always used to bring me your little worries for us to smooth out together. I used to be pretty smart at it; I used to be devilish proud of the way I could take the frown out of your little forehead.'
She held out her hand to him.
'You are an old darling,' she said, with unshed tears springing to her eyes. 'But I tell you this truth: it is only I who have been worrying. I have been imagining all sorts of things, so that I have got to believe them. That is the matter with me.'
'You have heard nothing specific?' he asked.
Again that question arrested her, awoke her imaginings, and she made up her mind on what had long been a pondered idea.
She got up at once.
'Nothing whatever,' she said, with a resumption of her usual manner. 'Now I am going. Take care of yourself, papa darling, and wake this sleepy old county up. I adore its sleepiness myself, and I know you can never rouse it, otherwise I should not suggest it.'
The carriage was waiting for her, and she got briskly in.
'Mrs. Emsworth's,' she said to the footman.
As she drove there, she tried to stifle thought, for she knew that her design was to confirm or dispel a suspicion that should never have been hers. She was doing a thing which was based on a wrong done to her husband in thought. That she knew, but she combated it by saying to herself.
'What if it is true?'
She found Mrs. Emsworth at home and delighted to see her, and for a little they just interchanged the generalities which, between two people who have not seen each other for some time, are the necessary ushers to real talk. The day was very hot, and Dorothy, catlike, basked and purred in it. There was something ratherdécolletéabout her appearance, and something in her general atmosphere was equally so. She was, in fact, very different, so she struck Amelie, from the woman who told the gardener's son the fairy-story on the dewy lawn at Long Island.
'I am charmed to see you,' she said for the second time, when Amelie was seated; 'and I was furious the other day when you put me off coming to see you at Molesworth. Had you a prim party? If so, it was kind of you. Priggish, prim, and prudish—those are the qualities I dislike—probably,' she added with admirable candour, 'because I do not happen to be fortunate enough to possess them.' She paused a moment; then an idea seemed to strike her. 'And where and how is Bertie?' she asked. 'I haven't set eyes on him for months—not since the party in Long Island, in fact.'
'He said he hadn't seen you since then the other day,' said Amelie.
'No; I'm rather hurt, because at one time, you know, we were the greatest friends. I used to see him every day nearly. Then—-'
She got up with her slow, catlike movements, and stretched herself luxuriously, and laughed a lazy laugh of somewhat animal enjoyment. Something about Amelie's attitude—her reserve, her stiffness, which was altogether unlike what she remembered of her in Long Island—rather irritated her, and woke in her thatgaminspirit of mischief which was a very sensible ingredient in her nature. Amelie was putting her nose in the air, giving herself airs, and if there was one thing in the world Dorothy could not stand, it was that. Then, to fortify the mischievous spirit, she remembered the unexplained return of her present to Bertie. He, too, was giving himself airs; his nose was in the air. And when Dorothy saw a nose in the air, it was her habit to very rudely lay hold of it, so to speak, and rub it in the mud. Then, as a coping-stone to her nose-in-air theory, had come Amelie's refusal to let her come over to Molesworth. Decidedly this was a case for treatment. Also her love of making mischief—an occupation, we are led to infer, specially designed by Satan—was rather strong in her. So she laughed her laugh, and continued.
'Then he dropped me,' she said—' just opened his fingers and let me drop. I suppose I ought to have been broken, but I wasn't.'
She had sat down again in a very long, low chair opposite Amelie, and noticed, with great inward amusement, the tense interest with which Amelie listened to her.
'I suppose Bertie's been playing about again,' she thought to herself. 'An amorous young man, but it isn't playing the game now he's married.' And, with only three-quarters of her mind bent on mischief, she went on:
'Yes, I suppose I ought to have been broken, but one gets tough, you know. But when I sent him a really charming wedding-present, and had it sent back without a word, I thought it was rather strong. That was being dropped with a vengeance.'
'Did Bertie do that?' asked Amelie.
'Yes, dear, unless you did. Back it came, anyhow. Now, if I had not been the sweetest-tempered, meekest little Moses that ever lived, I should have—well, made it unpleasant.'
Amelie flushed; her manner was still far from pleasing Dorothy, for she sat as upright in her chair as if the plague lurked in the back or arms of it.
'I don't understand you,' she said; 'how could you make it unpleasant for Bertie?'
Mrs. Emsworth laughed; Amelie really was too stately for words.
'My dear, you are new to London, of course, but I wonder that no candid friend has ever told you. Bertie was once just madly in love with me. It was a great bore though I liked him well enough. But such classical ardour was beyond me. His letter—has he never confessed to you about the letter he wrote me? It was quite a lyrical letter, and it made me scream. I was justtheonly thing on God's earth.'
'Can you show it me?' asked Amelie very quietly. 'I should think it must be amusing.'
She made a rather pitiful attempt to laugh.
'I wish I could,' said the other, still maliciously; 'I am sure you would shriek over it. But I tore it up ages ago—last autumn, to be accurate, the first time I saw Bertie in America. It was rather kind of me—rather excessively kind, I have sometimes thought; I might have had some fun over it.'
She glanced carelessly across to Amelie. The girl had grown quite pale, even to the lips, and her hands were trembling. Instantly a compunction as quick as all her emotions seized the other.
'Ah! you mustn't mind my nonsense, dear Amelie,' she cried, jumping up. 'I have been talking very foolishly; I did not think it would make you mind like that.'
She took the girl's hand, but Amelie withdrew it.
'But there was this letter,' she said. 'And Bertie did make love to you?'
'Yes; why not? Show me the man, the most respectable married man, who says he has never kissed another girl in his life, and I will show you a liar. What does it matter?'
'A lyrical letter?' said Amelie.
'Yes, I wish I had kept it; I would show it you.'
Suddenly a wave almost of physical nausea swept over Amelie. She had all the stainless purity of thought of a girl who has been married young to the first man she has ever loved, and in the first moment of her knowing definitely that Bertie at one time had made love to this woman she felt sick—simply sick. She rose from her chair, and put on her gloves, while Dorothy watched her, conscious that some emotion which she herself had so long forgotten, had she ever experienced it, that she no longer comprehended it, mastered her. And, with the best intentions in the world, not recognising that any further allusion to her own friend-ship with Bertie would only further disgust and sicken his wife, she said:
'That was all. There was never anything more—anything wrong.'
Amelie turned on her a marble face.
'How am I to know?' she asked. 'What prevented it? His morals, the lyrical letter-writer, or yours?'
Dorothy felt a strong though momentary impulse to box her ears. It would probably have been a good thing if she had yielded to it. She herself had felt for Amelie a sort of wondering pity that a matter so long dead could possibly be bitter still, and, acting under that, she had done her best to reassure her. But Amelie had slapped that generous impulse in the face; she had also chosen to express doubt as to the truth of what she had been told; and a rather more pronounced felinity awoke in Dorothy's face.
'You had better go and talk it out with Bertie,' she said.
'Ask him to repeat what he remembers of that letter. He is sure to have some recollection of it even now that he is so happily married. You can then draw your own conclusions, and, as far as I am concerned, you are perfectly free to do so. Oh yes, and tell him that I constantly use the dressing-bag he so kindly returned, and think of him.'
Amelie went out, feeling as if her world had fallen in ruins about her head. Possibilities which she had been ashamed of harbouring in her mind suddenly leapt out into flaring certainties, and they enveloped her. She could not think as yet coherently or connectedly; wherever she turned her thoughts, a flame flashed in her eyes. All her secret doubts were justified: Bertie had loved this woman; it was she who had called out the notes of his lyre, while she herself was given the shillings and pence—all the small change of the dower of love which he had once showered on Mrs. Emsworth. She could get no further than this; in this circle her thoughts ran round and round, like a squirrel in a revolving cage. Wherever she tried to go, she was still pawing round that one circle; she could get no further; the range of her mental processes was limited to that. And she now knew at once that she had to go on her way, whatever it was, unattended, uncomforted; and even in the exaggerated desolation of these first moments she could make the one resolve that no one, not even her father, should ever know. This her pride imperatively demanded: whatever she had to bear, she would bear in silence. And she could bear anything except pity.