The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

to her self-pitiful mood, that futile half-year of semi-starvation. How Madame Valiere must have gorged on the sly, the rich eccentric! She crossed a bridge to the Ile de la Cite, and came to the gargoyled portals of Notre Dame, and let herself be drawn through the open door, and all the gloom and glory of the building fell around her like a soothing caress. She dropped before an altar and poured out her grief to the Mother of Sorrows. At last she arose, and tottered up the aisle, and the great rose-window glowed like the window of heaven. She imagined her husband and the dead children looking through it. Probably they wondered, as they gazed down, why her head remained so young.

Ah! but she was old, so very old. Surely God would take her soon. How should she endure the long years of loneliness and social ignominy?

As she stumbled out of the Cathedral, the cold, hard day smote her full in the face. People stared at her, and she knew it was at the brown wig. But could they expect her to starve herself for a whole year?

'Mon Dieu! Starve yourselves, my good friends. At my age, one needs fuel.'

She escaped from them, and ran, muttering, across the road, and almost into the low grey shed.

Ah! the Morgue! Blessed idea! That should be the end of her. A moment's struggle, and then-the rose-window of heaven! Hell? No, no; the Madonna would plead for her; she who always looked so beautiful, so convenable.

She would peep in. Let her see how she would look when they found her. Would they clap a grey wig upon her, or expose her humiliation even in death?

'A-a-a-h!' A long scream tore her lips apart. There, behind the glass, in terrible waxen peace, a gash on her forehead, lay the 'Princess,' so uncanny-looking without any wig at all, that she would not have recognised her but for that moment of measurement at the hairdresser's. She fell sobbing before the cold glass wall of the death- chamber. Ah, God! Her first fear had been right; her brooch had but added to the murderer's temptation. And she had just traduced this martyred saint to the police.

'Forgive me, ma cherie, forgive me,' she moaned, not even conscious that the attendant was lifting her to her feet with professional interest.

For in that instant everything passed from her but the great yearning for love and reconciliation, and for the first time a grey wig seemed a petty and futile aspiration.

CHASSE-CROISE

I. SET TO PARTNERS

'Oh, look, dear, there's that poor Walter Bassett.'

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 Bassett,' Lady Chelmer repeated. 'I knew his mother.'

'Where?' Amber asked again.

'In Huntingdonshire, 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 Bassett!' 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 assisting 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 Bassett,' 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 Bassett 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 amusement. '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 Bassett,' 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 massive smile, acknowledged her recognition with respectful superiority, whereupon her Ladyship 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