The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 10

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 Ba.s.sett had spoken truly. He did not admire love--that blind force. Women seemed to him delightfully aesthetic objects--to be kept at a distance, however closely one embraced them. They were unreasoning beings at the best, even when unbia.s.sed 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 Ba.s.sett 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 Ba.s.sett.

"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

CROISe

"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 Ba.s.sett'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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 Mediaeval British etiquette."

"Who goes first to-night?" said her husband, watching her movements from a voluptuous arm-chair.