The Relentless City

by E. F. Benson

'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.'