The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 7

"Oh, look, dear, there's that poor Walter Ba.s.sett."

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 Ba.s.sett," Lady Chelmer repeated. "I knew his mother."

"Where?" Amber asked again.

"In Huntingdons.h.i.+re, 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 protegee.

"Walter Ba.s.sett!" 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 a.s.sisting 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 Ba.s.sett," 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 Ba.s.sett 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. "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 Ba.s.sett," 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 ma.s.sive smile, acknowledged her recognition with respectful superiority, whereupon her Ladys.h.i.+p 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 endors.e.m.e.nt of Walter Ba.s.sett'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. Ba.s.sett 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 Ba.s.sett" 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 debut 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-gla.s.ses, 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."