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 was _this_: 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 the _New 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 more _voulu_--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.