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.
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 budges 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.