The Relentless City

'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.