The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

II. CHASSE

Lady Chelmer was glad when the season came to an end and the dancing mice had no longer to spin dizzyingly in their gilded cage. "The Prisoner of Pleasure" was Walter Bassett's phrase for her. Even now she was a convict on circuit. Some of the dungeons were in ancient castles, from which Bassett was barred, but all of which opened to Amber's golden keys, though only because Lady Chelmer knew how to turn them. He, however, penetrated the ducal doors through the letter-box.

The Hon. Tolshunt and Lord Woodham, in their apprehension of the common foe, began to find each other endurable. If it was politics that attracted her, Tolshunt felt he too could stoop to a career. As for the Marquis, he began to meditate resuming office. Both had freely hinted to her Ladyship that to give a millionaire bride to a man who hadn't a penny savoured of Socialism.

Galled by such terrible insinuations, Lady Chelmer had dared to sound the girl.

"I love his letters," gushed Amber, bafflingly. "He writes such cute things."

"He doesn't dress very well," said Lady Chelmer, feebly fighting.

"Oh, of course, he doesn't bother as much as Tolly, who looks as if he had been poured into his clothes-"

"Yes, the mould of fashion," quoted Lady Chelmer, vaguely.

An eruption of Walter Bassett in the Press did not tend to allay her Ladyship's alarm, especially as Amber began to dally with the morning paper and the evening.

Opening a new People's Library at Highmead-in the absence abroad of the successful candidate-he had contrived to set the newspapers sneering. He had told the People that although they might temporarily accept such gifts as "Capital's conscience-money," yet it was as much the duty of the parish to supply light as to supply street-lamps; which was considered both ungracious and unsound. The donor he described as "a millionaire of means," which was considered wilfully paradoxical by those who did not know how great capitals are locked up in industries. But what worked up the Press most was his denunciation of modern journalism, in malodorous comparison with the literature this Library would bring the People. "The journalist," he said tersely, "is Satan's secretary." No shorter cut to notoriety could have been devised, for it was the "Silly Season," and Satan found plenty of mischief for his idle hands to do.

"Oh, you poor man!" Amber wrote Walter. "Why don't you say you were thinking of America-yellow journalism, and all that? The yellow is, of course, Satan's sulphur. You would hardly believe what his secretaries have written even of poor little me! And you should see the pictures of 'The Milwaukee Millionairess' in the Sunday numbers!"

Walter Bassett did not reply regularly and punctually to Amber's letters, and it was a novel sensation to the jaded beauty who had often thrown aside masculine missives after a glance at the envelope, to find herself eagerly shuffling her morning correspondence in the hope of turning up a trump-card. A card, indeed, it often proved, though never a postcard, and Amber meekly repaid it fourfold. She found it delicious to pour herself out to him; it had the pleasure of abandonment without its humiliation. Verbally, this was the least flirtatious correspondence she had ever maintained with the opposite sex.

So when at last, towards the end of the holiday season, the pair met in the flesh at a country house (Lady Chelmer still protests it was a coincidence), Walter Bassett had no apprehension of danger, and his expression of pleasure at the coincidence was unfeigned, for he felt his correspondence would be lightened. In nothing did he feel the want of pence more keenly than in his inability to keep a secretary for his public work. "Money is time," he used to complain; "the millionaire is your only Methuselah."

The house had an old-world garden, and it was here they had their first duologue. Amber had quickly discovered that Walter was interested in the apiaries that lay at the foot of its slope, and so he found her standing in poetic grace among the tall sweet-peas, with their whites and pinks and faint purples, a basket of roses in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.

As he came to her under the quaint trellised arch, "I always feel like a croquet ball going through the hoop," he said.

"But the ball is always driven," she said.

"Oh, I dare say it has the illusion of freewill. Doubtless the pieces in that chess game, which Eastern monarchs are said to play with human figures, come to think they move of themselves. The knight chuckles as he makes his tortuous jump at the queen, and the bishop swoops down on the castle with holy joy."

She came imperceptibly closer to him. "Then you don't think any of us move of ourselves?"

"One or two of us in each generation. They make the puppets dance."

"You admire Bismarck, I see."

"Yes. A pity he didn't emigrate to your country, like so many Germans."

"Do you think we need him? But he couldn't have been President. You must be born in America."

"True. Then I shall remain on here."

"You're terrible ambitious, Mr. Bassett."

"Yes, terrible," he repeated mockingly.

"Then come and help me pick blackberries," she said, and caught him by his own love of the unexpected. They left the formal garden, and came out into the rabbit-warren, and toiled up and down hillocks in search of ripe bushes, paying, as Walter said, "many pricks to the pint." And when Amber urged him to scramble to the back of tangled bushes, through coils of bristling briars, "You were right," he laughed; "this is terrible ambitious." The best of the blackberries plucked, Amber began a new campaign against mushrooms, and had frequent opportunities to rebuke his clumsiness in crumbling the prizes he uprooted. She knelt at his side to teach him, and once laid her deft fingers instructively upon his.

And just at that moment he irritatingly discovered a dead mole, and fell to philosophising upon it and its soft, velvet, dainty skin-as if a girl's fingers were not softer and daintier! "Look at its poor little pale-red mouth," he went on, "gaspingly open, as in surprise at the strange great forces that had made and killed it."

"I dare say it had a good time," said Amber, pettishly.

After the harvest had been carried indoors they scarcely exchanged a word till she found him watching the bees the next morning.

"Are you interested in bees?" she inquired in tones of surprise.

"Yes," he said. "They are the most striking example of Nature's Bismarckism-her habit of using her creatures to work her will through their own. Sic vos non vobis."

"I learnt enough Latin at College to understand that," she said; "but I don't see how one finds out anything by just watching them hover over their hives. I've never even been able to find the queen bee. Won't you come and see what beautiful woods there are behind the house? Lady Chelmer is walking there, and I ought to be joining her."

"You ought to be taking her an umbrella," he said coldly. Amber looked up at the sky. Had it been blue, she would have felt it grey. As it was grey, she felt it black.

"Oh, if you're afraid of a drop of rain-" And Amber walked on witheringly. It was a clever move.

Walter followed in silence. Amber did not become aware of him till she was in the middle of an embryonic footpath through tall bracken that made way, courtseying, for the rare pedestrian.

"Oh!" She gave a little scream. "I thought you were studying the bees-or the moles."

"I have only been studying your graceful back."

"How mean! Behind my back!" She laughed, pleased. "I hope you haven't discovered anything Bismarckian about my back."

"Only in the sense that I followed it, and must follow-till the path widens."

"Ah, how you must hate following-you, so terrible ambitious."

"The path will widen," he said composedly.

She planted her feet firm on Mother Earth-as though it were literally her own mother-and turned a mocking head over a tantalising shoulder. "I shall stay still right here."

He smiled maliciously. "And I, too; I follow you no farther."

"Oh, you are just too cute," she said with a laugh of vexation and pleasure. "You make me go on just to make you follow; but it is really you that make me lead. That's what you mean by Bismarckism, isn't it?"

"You put it beautifully."

She swung round to face him. "Is there nothing you admire but Force?"

"Not Force-Power!"

"What's the difference?"

"Force is blind."

"So is love," she said. "Do you scorn that?" And her smile was daring and dazzling.

Ere he could reply Nature outdid her in dazzlement, and superadded a crash of thunder.

"Yes," he said, as though there had been no interruption. "I scorn all that is blind-even this storm that may strike you and me. Ah! the rain," as the great drops began to fall. "Poor Lady Chelmer-without an umbrella."

"We can shelter by these shrubs." In an instant she was crouching amid the ferns on a carpet of autumn leaves, making space for him beside her.

"Thank you-I will stand," he said coldly. "But I don't know if you're aware these are oak-shrubs."

"What of it?"

"I was only thinking of the Swiss proverb about lightning, 'Vor den Eichen sollst du weichen.' We ought to make for the beeches."

"I'm not going to leave my umbrella. I am sorry you won't accept a bit of it." And she bent the tall ferns invitingly towards him.

"I don't like cowering even before the rain," he laughed. "How it brings out the beautiful earthy smell."

"One enjoys the beautiful earthy smell the better for being nearer to the earth."

He did not reply.

"Oh, you dear fool," she thought. Hadn't she had heaps of Power from childhood-over her stern old father, over her weakling mother, over her governesses, and later over the whole tribe of "the boys," and now in Europe over Marquises and Honourables-and could it all compare in intensity to this delicious, poignant sense of being caught up into a masterful personality! No, not Power but Powerlessness was life's central reality; not to turn with iron hand the great wheels of Fate, but to faint at a dear touch, to be sucked up as a moth in the flame. And for him, too, it were surely as sweet to leave this strenuous quest for dominance, or to be content with dominating her alone. Oh, she would bring him to clear vision, to live for nothing but her, even as she asked for nothing but him.

The harsh scream of a bluejay struck a discord through her reverie. She remembered that he had yet to be won.

"But didn't you tell me people can't get power without money?" she said, forgetting the hiatus in the conversation.

"Nor with it generally," he replied, without surprise. "Money is but a lever. You cannot move the earth unless you have force and fulcrum, too."

"But I guess a man like you must get real mad to see so many levers lying about idle."

"Oh, I shall get on without a lever, like primitive man. I have muscles."

"But it seems too bad not to be able to afford machinery."

"I shall be hand-made."

"Yes, and by your own hand. But won't it be slow?"

"It will be sure."

Every one of his speeches rang like the stroke of a hammer. Yes, indeed he had muscles.

"But how much surer with money! You ought to turn your career into a company. Surely it would pay a dividend to its promoters."

"The directors would interfere."

"You could be chairman-with a veto."

He shook his head. "The rain is dripping through your umbrella. Don't you think we might run to the house?"

"It's only an old hat." It was fresh from Paris, broad-brimmed, beautiful, and bewitching. "Why don't you find"-she smiled nervously-"a millionaire of means?"

"And what would be his reward?"

"Just Virtue's. Won't you be a light to England? And isn't it the duty of parishes and millionaires to supply light?" She was plucking a fern-leaf to pieces.

"Millionaires' minds don't run that way."

"Not male millionaires, perhaps," she said, turning her face from him so jerkily that she shook the oak-shrub and it became a shower-bath.

He looked at her, slightly startled. It was the first emotion she had ever provoked in him, and her heart beat faster.

"I really do think it is giving over now," he said, gazing at her sopping hat.

'Twas as if he had shaken the shrub again and drenched her with cold water. He was mocking her, her and her dollars and her love.

"It is quite over," she said savagely, springing up, and growing even angrier when she found the rain had really stopped, so that her indignation sounded only like acquiescence. She strode ahead of him, silent, through the wet bracken, her frock growing a limp rag as it brushed aside the glistening ferns.

As she struck the broader path to the house, the cackling laugh of a goat chained to a roadside log followed her cynically. Where had she heard this bleat before? Ah, yes, from the Marquis of Woodham.