CHASSÉ-CROISÉ
I
SET TO PARTNERS
"Oh, look, dear, there's that poor Walter Bassett."
Amber Roan looked down from the roof of the drag at the crossing restless shuttles, weaving with feminine woof and masculine warp the multi-coloured web of Society in London's cricket Coliseum.
"Where?" she murmured, her eye wandering over the little tract of sunlit green between the coaches with their rival Eton and Harrow favours. Before Lady Chelmer had time to bend her pink parasol a little more definitely, a thunder of applause turned Amber Roan's face back towards the wickets, with a piqued expression.
"It's real mean," she said. "What have I missed now?"
"Only a good catch," said the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy, whose eyes had never faltered from her face.
"My, that's just the one thing I've been dying for," she pouted self-mockingly.
"Poor Walter Bassett," Lady Chelmer repeated. "I knew his mother."
"Where?" Amber asked again,
"In Huntingdonshire, before the property went to Algy-"
"No, no, Lady Chelmer; I mean, where is poor Walter Whatsaname now? "
"Why, right here," said Lady Chelmer, involuntarily borrowing from the vocabulary of her young American protégée.
"Walter Bassett!" said the Hon. Tolshunt, languidly. "Isn't that the chap that's always getting chucked out of Parliament?"
"But his name doesn't sound Irish?" queried Amber.
"What are you talking about, Amber!" cried Lady Chelmer. "Why, he comes of a good old Huntingdon family. If he had been his own elder brother, he'd have got in long ago."
"Oh, you mean he never gets into Parliament," said Amber.
"Serve him right. I believe he's one of those independent nuisances," said the old Marquis of Woodham. "How is one ever to govern the country, if every man is a party unto himself?" He said "one," but only out of modesty; for having once accepted a minor post in a Ministry that the Premier in posse had not succeeded in forming, he had retained a Cabinet air ever since.
"Well, the beggar will scarcely come up at Highmead for a third licking," observed the Hon. Tolshunt.
"No, poor Walter," said Lady Chelmer. "He thought he'd be sure to get in this time, but he's quite crushed now. Wasn't it actually two thousand votes less than last time?"
"Two thousand and thirty-three," replied Lord Woodham, with punctilious inaccuracy.
Involuntarily Amber's eyes turned in search of the crushed candidate whom she almost saw flattened beneath the 2033 votes, and whom it would scarcely have been a surprise to find asquat under a carriage, humbly assisting the footmen to pack the dirty plates. But before she had time to decide which of the unlively men, loitering round the carriages or helping stout old dowagers up slim iron ladders, was sufficiently lugubrious to be identified as the martyr of the ballot-box, she was absorbed by a tall, masterful figure, whose face had the radiance of easeful success, and whose hands were clapping at some nuance of style which had escaped the palms of the great circular mob.
"I can't see any Walter Bassett," she murmured absently.
"Why, you are staring straight at him," said Lady Chelmer.
Miss Roan did not reply, but her face was eloquent of her astonishment, and when her face spoke, it was with that vivacity which is the American accent of beauty. What wonder if the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy paid heed to it, although he liked what it said less than the form of expression! As he used to put it in after days, "She gave one look, and threw herself away from the top of that drag." The more literal truth was that she drew Walter Bassett up to the top of that drag.
Lady Chelmer protested in vain that she could not halloo to the man.
"You knew his mother," Amber replied. "And he's got no seat."
"Quite symbolical! He, he, he!" and the old Marquis chuckled and cackled in solitary amusement. "Let's offer him one," he went on, half to enjoy the joke a little longer, half to utilise the opportunity of bringing his Ministerial wisdom to bear upon this erratic young man.
"I don't see where there's room," said the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy, sulkily.
"There's room on the front bench," cackled the Marquis, shaking his sides.
"Oh, I don't want you to roll off for him," said Miss Roan, who treated Ministerial Marquises with a contempt that bred in them a delightful sense of familiarity. "Tolshunt can sit opposite me—he's stared at the cricket long enough."
Tolshunt blushed with apparent irrelevance. But even the prospect of staring at Amber more comfortably did not reconcile him to displacement. "It's so awkward meeting a fellow who's had a tumble," he grumbled. "It's like having to condole with a man fresh from a funeral."
"There doesn't seem much black about Walter Bassett," Amber laughed. And at this moment—the dull end of a "maiden over"—the radiant personage in question turned his head, and perceiving Lady Chelmer's massive smile, acknowledged her recognition with respectful superiority, whereupon her Ladyship beckoned him with her best parasol manner.
"I want to introduce you to my friend, Miss Roan," she said, as he climbed to her side.
"I've been reading so much about you," said that young lady, with a sweet smile. "But you shouldn't be so independent, you know, you really shouldn't."
He smiled back. "I'm only independent till they come to my way of thinking."
Lady Chelmer gasped. "Then you still have hopes of Highmead!"
"I won a moral victory there each time, Lady Chelmer."
"How so, sir?" put in the Marquis. "Your opponent increased the Government majority—"
"And my reputation. A tiresome twaddler. Unfortunately," and he smiled again, "two moral victories are as bad as a defeat. On the other hand, a defeat at a bye-election equals a victory at a general. You play a solo—and on your own trumpet." A burst of cheering rounded off these remarks. This time Amber did not even inquire what it indicated—she was almost content to take it as an endorsement of Walter Bassett's epigrams. But Lord Woodham eagerly improved the situation. "A fine stroke that," he said, "but a batsman outside a team doesn't play the game."
"It will be a good time for the country, Lord Woodham," Mr. Bassett returned quietly, "when people cease to regard the Parliamentary session as a cricket match, one side trying to bowl over or catch out the other. But then England always has been a sporting nation."
"Ah, you allow some good in the old country," said Lady Chelmer, pleased. "Look at the trouble we all take to come here to encourage the dear boys;" and the words ended with a tired sigh.
"Yes, of course, that is the side on which they need encouragement," he rejoined drily. "Majuba was lost on the playing-field of Lord's."
There was a moment of shocked surprise. Lady Chelmer, herself a martyr to the religion of sport thus blasphemed—of which she understood as little as of any other religion—hastily tried to pour tea on the troubled waters. But they had been troubled too deeply. For full eight minutes the top of the drag became a political platform for Marquis-Ministerial denunciations of Mr. Gladstone, to a hail of repartee from the profane young man.
At the end of those eight minutes—when Lady Chelmer was at last able to reinsinuate tea into the discussion—Miss Amber Roan realised with a sudden shock that she had not "chipped in" once, and that "poor Walter Bassett" had commanded her ear for all that time without pouring into it a single compliment, or, indeed, addressing to it any observation whatever. For the first time since her début in the Milwaukee parlour at the age of five, this spoiled daughter of the dollar had lost sight of herself. As they walked towards the tea-tent, through the throng of clergymen and parasols and tanned men with field-glasses, and young bloods and pretty girls, she noted uneasily that his eyes wandered from her to these types of English beauty, these flower-faces under witching hats. Indeed, he had led her out of the way to plough past a row of open carriages. "The shortest cut," he said, "is past the prettiest woman."
But he had to face her at the tea-table, where she blocked his view of the tables beyond and plied him with strawberries and smiles under the sullen glances of the Hon. Tolshunt Darcy and the timid cough of her chaperon.
"I wonder you waste your time on the silly elections," she said. "We don't take much stock in Senators in America."
"It's just because M.P.'s are at such a discount that I want to get in. In the realm of the blind the one-eyed is a king."
"They must be blind not to let you in," she answered with equal frankness.
"No, they see too well, if you mean the voters. They've got their eye on the price of their vote."
"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, naïvely.
II
CHASSÉ
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.
III
BALANCEZ
Walter Bassett had spoken truly. He did not admire love—that blind force. Women seemed to him delightfully æsthetic objects—to be kept at a distance, however closely one embraced them. They were unreasoning beings at the best, even when unbiassed by that supreme prejudice—love.
It was not his conception of the strong man that he must needs become as water at some woman's touch and go dancing and babbling like a sylvan brook. Women were the light of life—he was willing enough to admit it, but one must be able to switch the light on and off at will. All these were reasons for not falling in love—they were not reasons for not marrying. And so, Amber being determined to marry him, there was really less difficulty than if it had been necessary for him to fall in love with her.
It took, however, many letters and interviews, full of the subtlest comedy, infinite advancing and retiring, and recrossing and bowing, and courtesying and facing and half-turning, before this leap-year dance could end in the solemn Wedding March.
"You know," she said once, "how I should love the fun of seeing you plough your way through all the mediocrities."
"That is the means, not the end," he reminded her, rebukingly. "One only wants the world to swallow one's pills for the world's sake."
"I don't believe you," she said frankly. "Else you'd move mountains to get the money for the pills, not turn up your nose at the mountain when it comes to you."
He laughed heartily. "What a delightful confusion of metaphors! I'm sure you've got Irish blood somewhere."
"Of course I have. Did I never tell you I am descended from the kings of Ireland?"
He took off his hat mockingly. "I salute Miss Brian Boru."
"You're an awfully good fellow," he told her on a later occasion. "I almost believe I'd take your money if you were not a woman."
"If I were not a woman I should not offer it to you—I should want a career of my own."
"And my career would content you?" he asked, touched.
"Absolutely," she lied. "The interest I should take in it—wouldn't that be sufficient interest on the loan?"
"There is one thing you have taught me," he said slowly—"how conventional I am! But every prejudice in me shrinks from your proposition, much as I admire your manliness."
"Perhaps it could be put on more conventional lines—superficially," she suggested in a letter that harked back to this conversation. "One might go through conventional forms. That adorable Disraeli—I have just been reading his letters. How right he was not to marry for love!"
The penultimate stage of the pre-nuptial comedy was reached in the lobby of the Opera, while Society was squeezing to its carriage. It was after the Rheingold, and poor Lady Chelmer could hardly keep her eyes open, and actually dozed off as she leaned against a wall, in patient martyrdom. Walter Bassett had been specially irritating, for he had not come up to the box once, and everybody knows (as the Hon. Tolshunt had said, with unwonted brilliance) the Rheingold is in heavy bars.
"I didn't know you admired Wagner so much," Amber said scathingly, as Walter pushed through the grooms. "Such a rapt devotee!"
"Wagner is the greatest man of the century. He alone has been able to change London's dinner-hour."
Amber could not help smiling. "Poor Lady Chelmer!" she said, nodding towards the drowsing dowager. "Since half-past six!"
"Is that our carriage?" said the "Prisoner of Pleasure," opening her eyes.
"No, dear—I guess we are some fifty behind. Tolly and the Marquis are watching from the pavement."
The poor lady sighed and went to sleep again.
"Behold the compensations of poverty," observed Walter Bassett. "The gallery-folk have to wait and squeeze before the opera; the carriage-folk after the opera."
"You forget the places they occupy during the opera. Poor Wagner! What a fight! I wish I could have helped his career." And Amber set a wistful smile in the becoming frame of her white hood.
"The form of the career appears to be indifferent to you," he said, with a little laugh.
"As indifferent as the man," she replied, meeting his eyes calmly.
The faint scent of her hair mingled with his pleasurable sense of her frank originality. For the first time the bargain really appealed to him. He could not but see that she was easily the fairest of that crush of fair women, and to have her prostrated at the foot of his career was more subtly delicious than to have her surrender to his person. The ball was at his foot in surely the most tempting form that a ball could take. And the fact that he must leave her hurriedly to write the musical criticism that was the price of his stall, was not calculated to diminish his appreciation of all the kingdoms of the world which his temptress was showing him from her high mountain.
"Alas! I must go and write a notice," he sighed.
"Satan's Secretary?" she queried mischievously.
He started. Had he not been just thinking of her as a Satan in skirts?
"En attendant that I become Satan's master," he replied ambiguously, as he raised his hat.
"Oh, to drive off with him into the peace and solitude of Love—away from the grinding paths of ambition," thought Amber, when the horses pranced up.
IV
CROISÉ
"Women, not measures," said the reigning wit anent the administration which Amber's Salon held together, and in which her husband occupied a position quite disproportionate to his nominal office, and still more so to the almost unparalleled brevity of his career as a private member.
Few, indeed, were the recalcitrants who could resist Amber's smiles, or her still more seductive sulkiness. Walter Bassett's many enemies declared that the young Cabinet Minister owed his career entirely to his wife. His admirers indignantly pointed out that he had represented Highmead for two sessions before he met Miss Roan. The germ of truth in this was that he had stipulated to himself that he would not accept the contract unless Amber, too, must admit "Value received," and in contributing a career already self-launched, and a good old Huntingdon name, his pride was satisfied. This, however, had wasted a year or so, while the Government was getting itself turned out, and it never entered his brain that his crushing victory at the General Election could owe anything to a corner in votes—at five dollars a head—secretly made by a fair American financier.
It was in the thick of the season, and Amber had just said good-bye to the Bishop, the last of her dinner-guests. "I always say grace when the church goes," she laughed, as she turned to her budget of unread correspondence and shuffled the letters, as in the old days, when she hoped to draw a letter of Walter's. But her method had become more scientific. Recognising the writers by their crests or mottoes, she would arrange the letters in order of precedence, alleging it was to keep her hand in, otherwise she would always be making the most horrible mistakes in "your Mediæval British etiquette."
"Who goes first to-night?" said her husband, watching her movements from a voluptuous arm-chair.
"Only Lady Chelmer," Amber yawned, as she broke the seal.
"Didn't I see the scrawl of the Honourable Tolly?"
"Yes, poor dear. I do so want to know if he is happy in British Honduras. But he must take his turn."
"If he had taken his turn," Walter laughed, "he never would have got the appointment there."
"No, poor dear; it was very good of you."
"Of me?" Walter's tone was even more amused. His eyes roved round the vast drawing-room, as if with the thought that he had as little to do with its dignified grandeur. Then his gaze rested once more on his wife; she seemed a delicious harmony of silks and flowers and creamy flesh-tones.
"Mrs. Bassett," he said softly, lingering on the proprietorial term.
"Yes, Walter," she said, not looking up from her letter.
"Do you realise this is the first time we have been alone together this month?"
"No? Really?" She glanced up absently.
"Never mind that muddle-headed old Chelmer. I dare say she only wants another hundred or two." He came over, took the letter and her hand with it. "I have a great secret to tell you."
Now he had captured her attention as well as her hand. Her eyes sparkled. "A Cabinet Secret?" she said.
"Yes. At this moment every newspaper office is in a fever—to-morrow all England will be ringing with the news. It is a thunderbolt."
She started up, snatching her hand away, every nerve a-quiver with excitement. "And you kept this from me all through dinner?"
"I hadn't a chance, darling—I came straight from the scrimmage."
"You won't gloss it over by calling me novel names. I hate stale thunderbolts. You might have breathed a word in my ear."
"I shall make amends by beginning with the part that is only for your ear. Do you know what next Monday is?"
"The day you address your constituents, of course. Oh, I see, this thunderbolt is going to change your speech."
"Is going to change my speech altogether. Next Monday is the seventh anniversary of our wedding."
"Is it? But what has that to do with your speech at Highmead?"
"Everything." He smiled mysteriously, then went on softly, "Amber, do you remember our honeymoon?"
She smiled faintly. "Oh, I haven't quite forgotten."
"If you had quite forgotten the misery of it, I should be glad."
"I have quite forgotten."
"You are kinder than I deserve. But I was so startled to find my career was less to you than a kiss that I was more churlish than I need have been. I even wished that you might have a child, so that you might be taken up with it instead of with me."
She blushed. "Yes, I dare say I showed my hand clumsily as soon as it held all the aces."
"Ah, Amber, you were an angel and I was a beast. How gallantly you swallowed your disappointment in your bargain, how loyally you worked heart and soul that I might gain my one ideal—Power!"
"It was a labour of love," she said deprecatingly.
"My noble Amber. But did you think, selfishly engrossed though I have been with the Fight for Power, that this love-labour of yours was lost on me? No, 'terrible ambitious' as I was, I could still see I got the blackberries and you little more than the scratches, and the less you began to press your claim upon my heart, the more my heart was opening out with an answering passion. I began to watch the play of your eyes, the shimmer of light across your cheek, the roguish pout of your lips, the lock that strayed across your temple—as it is straying now."
She pushed it back impatiently. "But what has all this to do with the Cabinet Secret?"
"Patience, darling! How much nicer to listen to you than to the Opposition."
"I shall be in the Opposition unless you get along faster."
"That is what I want—your face opposite me always, instead of bald-headed babblers. Ah, if you knew how often, of late, it has floated before me in the House, reducing historic wrangles to the rocking of children's boats in stormy ponds, accentuating the ponderous futility." He took her hand again, and a great joy filled him as he felt its gentle responsive pressure.
"Ponderous, perhaps," she said, smiling faintly; "but not futile, Walter."
"Futile, so far as I am concerned, dearest. Ah, you are right. Love is the only reality—everything else a game played with counters. What are our winnings? A few cheers drowned in the roar that greets the winning jockey, a few leading articles, stale as yesterday's newspaper."
"But the good to the masses—" she reminded him.
"Don't mock me with my own phrases, darling. The masses have done me more good than I can ever do them. Next Monday, dear Amber Roan, we'll try our honeymoon over again." And his lips sought hers.
She drew back. "Yes, yes, after the Speech. But now—the Secret!"
"There will be no speech—that is the secret."
She drew away from him altogether. "No speech!" she gasped.
"None save to your adorable ear—and the moonlit waters. Woodham has lent us his yacht—"
"In the middle of a Cabinet Crisis?"
"Which concerns me less than anybody." And he beamed happily.
"Less than anybody?" she repeated.
"Yes—since it is my resignation that makes the crisis."
She fell back into a chair, white and trembling. "You have resigned!"
"For ever. And now, hey for the great round, wonderful world! Don't you hear our keel cutting the shimmering waters?"
"No," she said savagely. "I hear only Woodham's mocking laughter! ... And it sounds like a goat bleating."
"Darling!" he cried in amaze.
"I told you not to 'darling' me. How dared you change our lives without a word of consultation?"
"Amber!" His voice was pained now. "I prepared a surprise for the anniversary of our wedding. One can't consult about surprises."
"Keep your quibbles for the House! But perhaps there is no House, either."
"Naturally. I have done with it all. I have written for the Chiltern Hundreds."
"You are mad, Walter. You must take it all back."
"I can't, Amber. I have quarrelled hopelessly with the Party. The Prime Minister will never forgive what I said at the Council to-day. The luxury of speaking one's mind is expensive. I ought never to have joined any Party. I am only fit to be Independent."
"Independence leads nowhere." She rose angrily. "And this is to be the end of your Career! The Career you married me for!"
"I did wrong, Amber. But before one finds the true God, one worships idols."
"And what is the true God, pray?"
"The one whose angel and minister you have always been, Amber "—he lowered his voice reverently—"Love."
"Love!" Her voice was bitter. "Any bench in the Park, any alley in Highmead, swarms with Love." 'Twas as if Cæsar had skipped from his imperial chariot to a sociable.
All her childish passion for directing the life of the household, all her girlish relish in keeping lovers in leading strings, all that unconscious love of Power which—inversely—had attracted her to Walter Bassett, and which had found so delightful a scope in her political activities, leapt—now that her Salon was threatened with extinction—into agonised consciousness of itself.
Through this brilliant husband of hers, she had touched the destinies of England, pulled the strings of Empire. Oh, the intoxication of the fight—the fight for which she had seconded and sponged him! Oh, the rapture of intriguing against his enemies—himself included—the feminine triumph of managing Goodman Waverer or Badman Badgerer!
And now—oh, she could no longer control her sobs!
He tried to soothe her, to caress her, but she repulsed him.
"Go to your yacht—to your miserable shimmering waters. I shall spend my honeymoon here alone. ... You discovered I was Irish."