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Chasse-Croise
by
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.”
“What!” she cried. “You can’t buy votes in England!”
“Oh, can’t you–“
“But I’m sure I read about it in the English histories–it was all abolished.”
“A good many things were abolished by the Decalogue even earlier,” he replied grimly. “Half an hour before the poll closed I could have bought a thousand votes at a shilling each.”
“Well, that seems reasonable enough,” said Lady Chelmer.
“It was beyond my pocket.”
“What! Fifty pounds?” cried Amber, incredulously.
The blush that followed was hers, not his. “But what became of the thousand votes?” she asked hurriedly.
He laughed. “Half an hour before the poll closed they had gone down to sixpence apiece–like fish that wouldn’t keep.”
“My! And were they all wasted?”
“No. My rival bought them up. Vide the newspapers–‘the polling was unusually heavy towards the close.'”
“Really!” intervened Lady Chelmer. “Then at that rate you can unseat him for bribery.”
“At that rate–or higher,” he replied drily. “To unseat another is even more expensive than to seat oneself.”
“Why, it seems all a question of money,” said Miss Amber Roan, naively.
II
CHASSE
Lady Chelmer was glad when the season came to an end and the dancing mice had no longer to spin dizzyingly in their gilded cage. “The Prisoner of Pleasure” was Walter Bassett’s phrase for her. Even now she was a convict on circuit. Some of the dungeons were in ancient castles, from which Bassett was barred, but all of which opened to Amber’s golden keys, though only because Lady Chelmer knew how to turn them. He, however, penetrated the ducal doors through the letter-box.
The Hon. Tolshunt and Lord Woodham, in their apprehension of the common foe, began to find each other endurable. If it was politics that attracted her, Tolshunt felt he too could stoop to a career. As for the Marquis, he began to meditate resuming office. Both had freely hinted to her Ladyship that to give a millionaire bride to a man who hadn’t a penny savoured of Socialism.
Galled by such terrible insinuations, Lady Chelmer had dared to sound the girl.
“I love his letters,” gushed Amber, bafflingly. “He writes such cute things.”
“He doesn’t dress very well,” said Lady Chelmer, feebly fighting.
“Oh, of course, he doesn’t bother as much as Tolly, who looks as if he had been poured into his clothes–“
“Yes, the mould of fashion,” quoted Lady Chelmer, vaguely.
An eruption of Walter Bassett in the Press did not tend to allay her Ladyship’s alarm, especially as Amber began to dally with the morning paper and the evening.
Opening a new People’s Library at Highmead–in the absence abroad of the successful candidate–he had contrived to set the newspapers sneering. He had told the People that although they might temporarily accept such gifts as “Capital’s conscience-money,” yet it was as much the duty of the parish to supply light as to supply street-lamps; which was considered both ungracious and unsound. The donor he described as “a millionaire of means,” which was considered wilfully paradoxical by those who did not know how great capitals are locked up in industries. But what worked up the Press most was his denunciation of modern journalism, in malodorous comparison with the literature this Library would bring the People. “The journalist,” he said tersely, “is Satan’s secretary.” No shorter cut to notoriety could have been devised, for it was the “Silly Season,” and Satan found plenty of mischief for his idle hands to do.