The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 8

"What!" she cried. "You can't buy votes in England!"

"Oh, can't you--"

"But I'm sure I read about it in the English histories--it was all abolished."

"A good many things were abolished by the Decalogue even earlier,"

he replied grimly. "Half an hour before the poll closed I could have bought a thousand votes at a shilling each."

"Well, that seems reasonable enough," said Lady Chelmer.

"It was beyond my pocket."

"What! Fifty pounds?" cried Amber, incredulously.

The blush that followed was hers, not his. "But what became of the thousand votes?" she asked hurriedly.

He laughed. "Half an hour before the poll closed they had gone down to sixpence apiece--like fish that wouldn't keep."

"My! And were they all wasted?"

"No. My rival bought them up. _Vide_ the newspapers--'the polling was unusually heavy towards the close.'"

"Really!" intervened Lady Chelmer. "Then at that rate you can unseat him for bribery."

"At that rate--or higher," he replied drily. "To unseat another is even more expensive than to seat oneself."

"Why, it seems all a question of money," said Miss Amber Roan, naively.

II

CHa.s.se

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 Ba.s.sett's phrase for her. Even now she was a convict on circuit. Some of the dungeons were in ancient castles, from which Ba.s.sett 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 Ba.s.sett 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 Ba.s.sett 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 s.e.x.

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 Ba.s.sett 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. Ba.s.sett."

"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 p.r.i.c.ks 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."