CHAPTER XVI
The construction of the intermediate pieces of line which were to connect Liverpool with Southampton by a direct route were finished by July, and, running powers over the lines of other existing companies having been acquired, the new service was open for traffic by the beginning of August. As Mr. Palmer had foreseen, the immense saving of time and convenience of transport effected by this direct linking together of the two ports had been, as soon as the Bill for the projected line had passed the Houses of Parliament, instantly recognised by the various fleets that used these ports, and its success was assured long before its completion. Added to this, the economical and businesslike methods of running trains which were adopted by him, based on American systems, enabled the line to cut down rates, while it secured for its customers far more rapid transport, so that it obtained from the first practically a monopoly of the goods traffic between the ports. A quantity of gentlemen, who in some vague sort of manner considered that they were acting in the sacred name of patriotism, wrote hundreds of violent letters to the papers, protesting against this fresh American invasion; while others, equally vaguely, in the sacred name of Art, ranted themselves hoarse over the steel-girder bridges that desecrated the most lovely spots in the rural fortresses of England, and the black, squat, but eminently efficient, engines that drew the trains of unlovely merchandise. But this vox, et præterea nihil, soon died away, and the only influence it had on traffic was perhaps to call added attention to the eminent advantages enjoyed by the customers of Mr. Palmer's line. Consequently, neither he nor they had any quarrel with it.
All this he had foreseen, and more. It became practically necessary, as he had known all along, for Swansea and Cardiff to put themselves into communication with this system, and as early as June, as we have seen, surveyors were busy on the Molesworth estate over the route. The winter before Mr. Palmer had purchased both it and the adjoining Wyfold estate, knowing that the line of direct communication must pass through one or the other; and when towards the end of July the experts pronounced very strongly in favour of the Molesworth route, he forwarded their recommendation to Amelie, with the request that she would come and talk matters over with him before she left town.
The last month had not passed very happily for her; it lacked, at least, that wonderful edge of happiness which May and June had given her. The little rift which had opened between her and Bertie had not closed again, and, if anything, it had become rather wider. She had obeyed his request, and not asked Mrs. Emsworth to lunch, but she had done so unwillingly, rebelling in her mind against this arbitrariness which expected to be obeyed and yet would give no reason for what it wished done. In consequence—for her protest, though mute, was very obvious—the spirit of her compliance was almost as irritating to him as her disobedience would have been. Furthermore, at that interview she had had with him suspicion, vague and darkling, she knew lurked in the shadow of her mind; the piece of him she did not know irresistibly connected itself with Mrs. Emsworth. There it had grown like some mushroom, and, though she did not officially, so to speak, recognise its existence, it was there. Other things, too, had tended to separate them, and in particular the treatment (or so she called it) of her mother by the world of London. She had expected to see and saw that London in general flocked to Mrs. Palmer's new house, where the entertainments, if not quite so wildly improbable as those which awoke the echoes in the glades of Long Island, were on the most lavish and exuberant scale. Consequently London, with its keen eye for the buttered side of the bread, went there in its crowds, drank Mrs. Palmer's champagne, danced to her fiddles, won her money at bridge, and enjoyed the performances of all the most notable singers and pianists in the world with the greatest contentment. But what Amelie saw also was the half-shrugged shoulders, the instantaneous glance of the eye, the raised eyebrow, the just-not-genuine smile of those who were the most constant habitués there. Mrs. Palmer, in fact, was in London, not of London. This Amelie resented, and, by way of retaliation, she had, as was perfectly natural, her mother constantly in her own house, and filled it with Americans perhaps rather more than was perfectly natural. For the rest, there had been nothing the least resembling an open breach between her and Bertie; he accepted the continual presence of her countrymen without the slightest protest, and never, even by the smallest inflection of voice or manner, was other than absolutely civil to everyone she asked. Indeed, the perfect evenness of his manner added its quota to the constraint that lay between them; in her heart of hearts she knew that he often found neither interest nor entertainment in her guests, and the chilled perfection of his mode of conducting himself towards them but served as a barrier the more.
But what most stood between them was her undefinable suspicion about Mrs. Emsworth. On that day the cankerworm had entered, and since then she had again and again asked herself whether Bertie's affection for her had ever been of the same quality as the love she had felt for him. She remembered with horrible distinctness his words, ' I want to be fire,' and they, which at the moment had seemed to her but an expression of the ever unsatisfied yearning of love, which always, however perfect, still desires to go yet deeper, now wore a more sinister interpretation, and were to her the kindling of a secret heart-burning. What if this natural and simplest interpretation was true? What if he had never really felt fire for her?
Such was the abbreviated reading of her spiritual diary down to the day when she drove to see her father. Though he had been in London all this last month, she had scarcely set eyes on him, so immersed had he been in the railroad business, and it was with a childish eagerness that she looked forward to having a long talk with him. In the trouble of her mind she felt great longing for that kind, unwearied affection which he ever had for her—an affection not very demonstrative, but extraordinarily real and solid. The effusiveness of her mother's love just now was less satisfying to her, for Mrs. Palmer had been for the last six weeks a mere whirling atom in the mill of social success; and while one hand, so to speak, was entwined round Amelie's neck in a maternal embrace, the other would be scribbling notes of invitation and regret to the flower of England's nobility.
She got to the house rather late for lunch, and was struck by the resemblance which the moral atmosphere of the dining-room bore to that of Basle railway-station. There was the same sense that everybody was just going to catch a train; that they were exchanging last words as they took their hurried meal. Her father, next whom she sat, was an exception, for he ate his thin slices of toasted Hovis bread and drank his milk with the deliberateness which his digestion demanded; but everyone else seemed to be unable to attend to what was going on at this moment, because they all were thinking of what they would be doing the next. Even her father, too, seemed rather preoccupied, and from time to time she saw that his eyes were fixed on herself with a certain anxious look, which was removed as soon as he saw she observed it.
With regard to the railroad scheme, his explanation after lunch was very short. A big ordnance map showed her where the line would enter the park, where it would enter the tunnel, not to appear again till it had passed outside the precinct. Its whole course would be quite remote from the house—remote also from the wooded side of the park; they would be as unconscious of its presence there as if it was in the next county. The Wyfold route, on the other hand, which perhaps might be adopted if Amelie put serious obstacles in the company's way, would actually be very much closer to the house and the forested piece of the park than the other.
Mr. Palmer made these explanations as if he anticipated some opposition on Amelie's part, and he was pleased to find none.
' It seems to me much the most sensible plan,' she said; ' and, as you say, the railway will really interfere with us less if it is in Molesworth than if it was in Wyfold. I must just tell Bertie about it, and I will send you my formal consent this evening. I will leave everything connected with the sale in your hands.'
She pushed the maps away from her with rather a weary air.
' And how are you, pápa,' she said, falling into her old habit of addressing him. ' I haven't set eyes on you for weeks.'
Mr. Palmer gave a moment's consideration to how he was before he answered.
' Well, I guess I'm a bit out of condition in the brain,' he said. ' From the business point of view, England is the most enervating place I ever came to. These directors and business men here are about as much use as nursery-maids. They go down to their offices round about eleven, and sit there till one. Then they eat a heavy lunch, and stroll back about two to see if anything has happened. Of course it hasn't; things don't happen unless you make them happen. So they light a big cigar, and go down to Woking for an evening round of golf after the fatigues of the day. Saturdays they don't put in an appearance at all. That's their idea of business. And it tells on me rather; it's difficult to keep up ordinary high pressure when you're surrounded by so many flabby bits of chewed string. I guess I'll go back to America in the fall, and get braced {[rsquo|up.}}
' It don't affect mámma,' said Amehe, falling more and more into her native vernacular. ' She just flies around same as ever. She's having a real daisy of a time, she says.'
Mr. Palmer did not listen to this; he was pursuing his own melancholy reflections on English business methods.
' It reminds me of a poultry-yard,' he said. ' An Englishman, on the rare occasions when he lays an egg, has to flap his wings and crow over it, instead of sitting down to hatch it. Why, I suppose they've given fifty lunches to boards of the directors over this twopenny-halfpenny line of mine already. There was a luncheon on the formation of the board; there was a luncheon to celebrate their determination to set to work at once; there was a luncheon to celebrate their doing so. There was a dinner on the occasion of the cutting of the first sod of earth; they brought down some fool-sort of Highness to do it. They had a week at the seaside when the Bill passed through the House, and when the first train runs next month, they'll all go and have a rest-cure on the completion of their labours. What they want is something to cure them of their habit of always resting.'
He got up from his chair in some impatience, folded up the maps, and stood looking at his daughter in silence for a moment.
' Say, Amelie,' he said, ' and what kind of time have you been having? All going serene and domestically? Bertie been behaving himself? Do either of you want anything? You look a bit down, somehow—kind of tired about the eyes.'
Amelie looked up at him; the ' tired about the eyes ' seemed to be a wonderfully true interpretation of how she felt.
' Oh, we trot along,' she said. ' I suppose everyone has their bits of worries. Mámma has when she accepts three dinner invitations for the same evening. You have when your directors give luncheon-parties instead of doing business. We all have.'
' Can't see why you should,' he said. ' I don't like you to worry, Amelie. What's it all about?'
He paused a moment.
' Have you heard anything about Bertie which bothers you?' he asked; ' or hasn't he been good to you?'
She did not answer at once, for, in her rather super-sensitized frame of mind, it seemed to her that her father's first question was not vague or general, but that he had some special, definite reason for asking. From that it was but the shortest of links necessary to couple the question with that which grew mushroom-like in the shadow of her mind.
' No; he has been perfectly good to me, and I have heard nothing that bothers me,' she said.
She looked up at her father as she spoke. He was standing close to her—a short, gray-whiskered man, insignificant in face and features except for those wonderful eyes. In his hand, the hand which by a stroke of the pen, a signing of the name, could set in motion the force of millions, was a little silver paper-knife which she had once given him. Even now, as she knew—for he had said he could only give her five minutes after lunch—there were waiting for him a hundred schemes to be considered, a hundred more levers to move the world as he chose. But he stood there, waiting with a woman's infinite patience for any impulse towards confidence she might feel—just a tender, solicitous father, grasping in his hand a daughter's insignificant gift.
' We have always been chums, Amelie,' he said, with a sort of appealing wistfulness. ' When you were quite little, you always used to bring me your little worries for us to smooth out together. I used to be pretty smart at it; I used to be devilish proud of the way I could take the frown out of your little forehead.'
She held out her hand to him.
' You are an old darling,' she said, with unshed tears springing to her eyes. ' But I tell you this truth: it is only I who have been worrying. I have been imagining all sorts of things, so that I have got to believe them. That is the matter with me.'
' You have heard nothing specific?' he asked.
Again that question arrested her, awoke her imaginings, and she made up her mind on what had long been a pondered idea.
She got up at once.
' Nothing whatever,' she said, with a resumption of her usual manner. ' Now I am going. Take care of yourself, pápa darling, and wake this sleepy old county up. I adore its sleepiness myself, and I know you can never rouse it, otherwise I should not suggest it.'
The carriage was waiting for her, and she got briskly in.
' Mrs. Emsworth's,' she said to the footman.
As she drove there, she tried to stifle thought, for she knew that her design was to confirm or dispel a suspicion that should never have been hers. She was doing a thing which was based on a wrong done to her husband in thought. That she knew, but she combated it by saying to herself, ' What if it is true?'
She found Mrs. Emsworth at home and delighted to see her, and for a little they just interchanged the generalities which, between two people who have not seen each other for some time, are the necessary ushers to real talk. The day was very hot, and Dorothy, catlike, basked and purred in it. There was something rather décolleté about her appearance, and something in her general atmosphere was equally so. She was, in fact, very different, so she struck Amelie, from the woman who told the gardener's son the fairy-story on the dewy lawn at Long Island.
' I am charmed to see you,' she said for the second time, when Amelie was seated; ' and I was furious the other day when you put me off coming to see you at Molesworth. Had you a prim party? If so, it was kind of you. Priggish, prim, and prudish—those are the qualities I dislike — probably,' she added with admirable candour, ' because I do not happen to be fortunate enough to possess them.'
She paused a moment; then an idea seemed to strike her.
' And where and how is Bertie?' she asked. ' I haven't set eyes on him for months—not since the party in Long Island, in fact.'
' He said he hadn't seen you since then the other day,' said Amelie.
' No; I'm rather hurt, because at one time, you know, we were the greatest friends. I used to see him every day nearly. Then——— '
She got up with her slow, catlike movements, and stretched herself luxuriously, and laughed a lazy laugh of somewhat animal enjoyment. Something about Amelie's attitude—her reserve, her stiffness, which was altogether unlike what she remembered of her in Long Island—rather irritated her, and woke in her that gamin spirit of mischief which was a very sensible ingredient in her nature. Amelie was putting her nose in the air, giving herself airs, and if there was one thing in the world Dorothy could not stand, it was that. Then, to fortify the mischievous spirit, she remembered the unexplained return of her present to Bertie. He, too, was giving himself airs; his nose was in the air. And when Dorothy saw a nose in the air, it was her habit to very rudely lay hold of it, so to speak, and rub it in the mud. Then, as a coping-stone to her nose-in-air theory, had come Amelie's refusal to let her come over to Molesworth. Decidedly this was a case for treatment. Also her love of making mischief—an occupation, we are led to infer, specially designed by Satan—was rather strong in her. So she laughed her laugh, and continued.
' Then he dropped me,' she said—' just opened his fingers and let me drop. I suppose I ought to have been broken, but I wasn't.'
She had sat down again in a very long, low chair opposite Amelie, and noticed, with great inward amusement, the tense interest with which Amelie listened to her.
' I suppose Bertie's been playing about again,' she thought to herself. ' An amorous young man, but it isn't playing the game now he's married.' And, with only three-quarters of her mind bent on mischief, she went on:
' Yes, I suppose I ought to have been broken, but one gets tough, you know. But when I sent him a really charming wedding-present, and had it sent back without a word, I thought it was rather strong. That was being dropped with a vengeance.'
' Did Bertie do that?' asked Amelie.
' Yes, dear, unless you did. Back it came, anyhow. Now, if I had not been the sweetest-tempered, meekest little Moses that ever lived, I should have—well, made it unpleasant.'
Amelie flushed; her manner was still far from pleasing Dorothy, for she sat as upright in her chair as if the plague lurked in the back or arms of it.
' I don't understand you,' she said; ' how could you make it unpleasant for Bertie?'
Mrs. Emsworth laughed; Amelie really was too stately for words.
' My dear, you are new to London, of course, but I wonder that no candid friend has ever told you. Bertie was once just madly in love with me. It was a great bore though I liked him well enough. But such classical ardour was beyond me. His letter—has he never confessed to you about the letter he wrote me? It was quite a lyrical letter, and it made me scream. I was just the only thing on God's earth.'
' Can you show it me?' asked Amelie very quietly. ' I should think it must be amusing.'
She made a rather pitiful attempt to laugh.
' I wish I could,' said the other, still maliciously; ' I am sure you would shriek over it. But I tore it up ages ago—last autumn, to be accurate, the first time I saw Bertie in America. It was rather kind of me—rather excessively kind, I have sometimes thought; I might have had some fun over it.'
She glanced carelessly across to Amelie. The girl had grown quite pale, even to the lips, and her hands were trembling. Instantly a compunction as quick as all her emotions seized the other.
' Ah! you mustn't mind my nonsense, dear Amelie,' she cried, jumping up. ' I have been talking very foolishly; I did not think it would make you mind like that.'
She took the girl's hand, but Amelie withdrew it.
' But there was this letter,' she said. ' And Bertie did make love to you?'
' Yes; why not? Show me the man, the most respectable married man, who says he has never kissed another girl in his life, and I will show you a liar. What does it matter?'
' A lyrical letter?' said Amelie.
' Yes, I wish I had kept it; I would show it you.'
Suddenly a wave almost of physical nausea swept over Amelie. She had all the stainless purity of thought of a girl who has been married young to the first man she has ever loved, and in the first moment of her knowing definitely that Bertie at one time had made love to this woman she felt sick—simply sick. She rose from her chair, and put on her gloves, while Dorothy watched her, conscious that some emotion which she herself had so long forgotten, had she ever experienced it, that she no longer comprehended it, mastered her. And, with the best intentions in the world, not recognising that any further allusion to her own friendship with Bertie would only further disgust and sicken his wife, she said:
' That was all. There was never anything more—anything wrong.'
Amelie turned on her a marble face.
' How am I to know?' she asked. ' What prevented it? His morals, the lyrical letter-writer, or yours?'
Dorothy felt a strong though momentary impulse to box her ears. It would probably have been a good thing if she had yielded to it. She herself had felt for Amelie a sort of wondering pity that a matter so long dead could possibly be bitter still, and, acting under that, she had done her best to reassure her. But Amelie had slapped that generous impulse in the face; she had also chosen to express doubt as to the truth of what she had been told; and a rather more pronounced felinity awoke in Dorothy's face.
' You had better go and talk it out with Bertie,' she said. ' Ask him to repeat what he remembers of that letter. He is sure to have some recollection of it even now that he is so happily married. You can then draw your own conclusions, and, as far as I am concerned, you are perfectly free to do so. Oh yes, and tell him that I constantly use the dressing-bag he so kindly returned, and think of him.'
Amelie went out, feeling as if her world had fallen in ruins about her head. Possibilities which she had been ashamed of harbouring in her mind suddenly leapt out into flaring certainties, and they enveloped her. She could not think as yet coherently or connectedly; wherever she turned her thoughts, a flame flashed in her eyes. All her secret doubts were justified: Bertie had loved this woman; it was she who had called out the notes of his lyre, while she herself was given the shillings and pence—all the small change of the dower of love which he had once showered on Mrs. Emsworth. She could get no further than this; in this circle her thoughts ran round and round, like a squirrel in a revolving cage. Wherever she tried to go, she was still pawing round that one circle; she could get no further; the range of her mental processes was limited to that. And she now knew at once that she had to go on her way, whatever it was, unattended, uncomforted; and even in the exaggerated desolation of these first moments she could make the one resolve that no one, not even her father, should ever know. This her pride imperatively demanded: whatever she had to bear, she would bear in silence. And she could bear anything except pity.
' I want to be fire '—that was explained now, and that he should want that seemed to her an added insult.
' My dear Amelie,' he seemed to say, ' you are a charming girl, but you don't interest me—like that. I wish you did; I really wish you did.'
She bit her under-lip till it was white with the pressure of her teeth, and clasped her hands so tightly in her lap that the sharp facets of the stones in her rings dinted her fingers. The future spelt impossibility. There were hours daily to be gone through with Bertie; what of them? What of the little lover-like caresses that were still constant between them? What, indeed, of the whole tissue of his simulated love—of his wish to be fire? For the moment, whether it was true or not that the acme of his relationship with Mrs. Emsworth culminated actually in that ' lyrical letter ' or not, she hardly cared; it was there, in any case, that his fire had burned—had burned itself out.
For a moment the spinning cage of her thoughts paused, and she moved forward in a straight and horrible line. Since her engagement to Bertie those two had not met. Bertie had returned her wedding-present; he had refused to have her at the house. Why? Because he was afraid of seeing her, lest——— The fire had burned for her; what if it had not yet burned itself out?