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."