Mammon and Co.
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Title: Mammon and Co.
Author: E. F. Benson
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAMMON AND CO. ***
MAMMON AND CO.
BY E. F. BENSON.
* * * * *
Mammon and Co.
12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
This latest novel by a popular author deals with personages living in
the same society that was characterized by "Dodo" and "The Rubicon." Mr.
Benson is thoroughly acquainted with the society in which he places the
scenes of his novels of London life. In "Mammon and Co." the good genius
of the tale is an American girl. The book will be found to be one of
exceeding interest throughout.
Dodo.
_A Detail of the Day._ 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.
"'Dodo' is a delightfully witty sketch of the 'smart' people of
society.... The writer is a true artist."--_London Spectator._
The Rubicon.
12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.
"The anticipations which must have been formed by all readers of 'Dodo'
will in no wise be disappointed by 'The Rubicon.' The new work is well
written, stimulating, unconventional, and, in a word, characteristic.
Intellectual force is never absent, and the keen observation and
knowledge of character, of which there is abundant evidence, are aided
by real literary power."--_Birmingham Post._
* * * * *
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
MAMMON
AND CO.
By E. F. BENSON
Author of DODO, THE RUBICON
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
CONTENTS
_BOOK I_
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--THE CITY DINNER 1
II.--SUNDAY MORNING 17
III.--AFTER THE GEE-GEE PARTY 34
IV.--KIT'S LITTLE PLAN 48
V.--TOBY 63
VI.--TOBY'S PARTNER 75
VII.--THE SOLITARY FINANCIER 92
VIII.--THE SIMPLY NOBODY 102
IX.--THE PLOT MISCARRIES 116
X.--MRS. MURCHISON'S DIPLOMACY 128
XI.--MR. ALINGTON OPENS CHECK 140
XII.--THE COTTAGE BY THE SEA 159
XIII.--TOBY TO THE RESCUE 174
XIV.--THE CHAIRMAN AND THE DIRECTOR 192
XV.--THE WEEK BY THE SEA 206
_BOOK II_
I.--KIT'S MEDITATIONS 220
II.--THE FIRST DEAL 234
III.--LILY DRAWS A CHEQUE 248
IV.--THE DARKENED HOUSE 262
V.--TOBY ACTS WITHOUT SPEAKING 280
VI.--LILY'S DESIRE 292
VII.--THE SECOND DEAL 304
VIII.--MR. ALINGTON LEAVES LONDON 321
IX.--THE SLUMP 336
X.--TOBY DRAWS THE MORAL 352
_BOOK I_
CHAPTER I
THE CITY DINNER
"Egotism is certainly the first," said Lady Conybeare with admirable
firmness; "and your inclination towards your neighbour is the second."
Now, this was the sort of thing which Alice Haslemere liked; and she
stopped abruptly in the middle of her rather languishing conversation
with nobody in particular to ask for explanations. It sounded promising.
"The first what, and the second what, Kit?" she inquired.
"The first and the second lessons," said Lady Conybeare promptly. "The
first and the second social virtues, if you are particular. I am going
to set up a school for the propagation of social virtues, where I shall
teach the upper classes to be charming. There shall be a special class
for royalty."
Lady Haslemere was not generally known as being particularly particular,
but she took her stand on Kit's conditional, and defended it.
"There is nothing like particularity--nothing," she said earnestly, with
a sort of missionary zeal to disagree with somebody; "though some people
try to get on without it."
Being a great friend of Kit's, she knew that it was sufficient for her
to state a generality of any kind to get it contradicted. She was not
wrong in this instance. Kit sighed with the air of a woman who meant to
do her unpleasant duty like a sister and a Christian.
"Dear Alice," she said, "there is nothing so thoroughly irritating as
particularity. I am not sure what you mean by it, but I suppose you
allude either to people who are prudes or to people who are always
letting fly precise information at one. They always want it back too.
Don't you know how the people who insist on telling one the exact time
are just those who ask one for the exact time. I never know the exact
time, and I never want to be told it. And I hate a prudish woman," she
concluded with emphasis, "as much as I abhor a well-informed man."
"Put it the other way round," said Lady Haslemere, "and I agree with
you. I loathe a prudish man, and I detest a well-informed woman."
"There aren't any of either," said Lady Conybeare.
She sat up very straight in her chair as she made this surprising
assertion, and arranged the lace round her throat. Her attitude gave one
the impression somehow of a rakish frigate clearing for action, and on
the moment came the first shot.
"I am a prude," said a low, bass voice at her elbow.
Kit scarcely glanced round.
"I know you are," she said, replying with a heavy broadside; "but then
you are not a man."
"That depends on what you mean by a man," said the voice again.
The speaker was so hidden by the arms of the low chair in which he sat,
that a knee, shin and foot, in a horizontal line on the invisible
support of another knee, was all that could be seen of him.
"I mean a human being who likes killing things," said Kit without
hesitation.
"I killed a wasp yesterday," said the voice; "at least, I think it died
afterwards. Certainly I disabled it. Oh, I am sure I killed it."
"Yes, and you remembered it to-day," said Lady Conybeare briskly. "You
did not really kill it; it lives in your memory, and--and poisons your
life. In time it will kill you. Do you suppose Jack remembers the grouse
he killed yesterday?"
"Oh, but Jack is like the oldest inhabitant," said Lady Haslemere. "He
never remembers anything, just as the oldest inhabitant never remembers
a flood or a thunderstorm or a famine at all like the one in question.
That means they don't remember anything at all, for one famine is just
like another; so are thunderstorms."
Kit paused a moment, with her head on one side, regarding the speaker.
"No; forgetfulness is not characteristic of Jack," she said, "any more
than memory is. He remembers what he wants to remember, and forgets what
he wants to forget. Now, it's just the opposite with me. I forget what I
want to remember--horrid stories about my friends, for instance--and I
remember the sort of thing I want to forget--like--like Sunday morning.
Isn't it so, Jack?"
A slightly amused laugh came from a man seated in the window, who was no
other than the Jack in question, and, incidentally, Kit's husband.
"It is true I make a point of forgetting unpleasant things," he said;
"that is the only real use of having a memory decently under control. I
forget Kit's milliner's bills----"
"So do I, darling," said Kit with sudden affection.
"No, you don't; you only remind me to forget them. I forget the names
and faces of uninteresting people. I forget--no, I don't forget
that----"
"What don't you forget, Jack?" demanded Kit with some sharpness. "I
don't believe it."
"I don't forget that we've got to dine in the City at half-past seven.
Why ever there was such an hour as half-past seven to put into a
Christian clock I can't conjecture," he said in a tone of regretful
wonder.
"Well, if you forget unpleasant things, and you don't forget that,
perhaps it will be pleasant."
"I am quite certain it will be infernal," said Jack. "Go and dress,
Kit."
Lady Conybeare frowned impatiently.
"Oh, Jack! when will you learn that I cannot do what you ask if you talk
to me in that way?" she cried. "I was just going to dress. Now I can't,
and we shall both be late, which will be very tiresome. You will curse
and swear at me like St. Peter for keeping you waiting. How stupid you
are, and how little you know me!"
Lord Conybeare looked at his watch.
"It is exactly three minutes to six," he said. "You needn't go for half
an hour yet. There is loads of time--loads!"
Kit got up at once.
"That's a dear boy," she said. "Gracious! it's past the half-hour! I
must fly! Good-bye, Alice; Conybeare and I will look in on you after our
dinner. I think you said you were going to have a nice round game with
counters. Good-bye, Tom, and learn not to be a prude."
"I'm sure you would teach me, if anybody could," said Tom rather
viciously.
Kit adjusted the lace round her throat again.
"Thanks for the compliment," she said; "but prudes are born, not made.
You don't shoot, you don't hunt, you remember every wasp you have
possibly killed. Oh, Tom, I am afraid you are hopeless. Don't laugh. I
mean what I say; at least, I think I mean the greater part of it."
"I reserve the less, then," said Tom. "I must go too. So Alice and
Haslemere and I will see you to-night?"
"Yes; we'll escape as soon as we can from the dinner. Mind you take some
money with you, Jack, for the round game. I must fly," she said again,
and took her graceful presence very slowly out of the room.
There was a short silence, broken by Lord Conybeare.
"It is odd how you can tell a man by the hour at which he dines," he
said. "Seven is an impossible hour, and the people who dine at seven are
as impossible as the hour. People who dine at half-past are those who
are trying to dine at eight and cannot manage it. They are also trying
not to be impossible, and cannot."
Lady Haslemere got up.
"I once knew a man who dined at ten minutes to eight," she said, "which
struck me as extremely curious. He was an archdeacon. I believe all
archdeacons dine at ten minutes to eight. And they call it a quarter to,
which is even odder."
"I don't know any archdeacons," said Tom, with a touch of wistfulness in
his voice. "Introduce me to one to-night, Alice."
"Archdeacons don't come to Berkeley Street," said she.
"Why not? How exclusive! Do they expect Berkeley Street to come to
them?"
"Probably. They are trained to believe nothing which is not incredible.
It is exactly that which makes them impossible."
"Extremes meet," said Lord Conybeare. "The sceptic forces himself to
believe everything that is perfectly credible. And he succeeds so well.
Sceptics believe that they once ate nuts--we've all eaten nuts once--and
are descended from apes. And how obvious is their genealogy from their
faces! If I was going to be anything, it should not be a sceptic."
Lady Haslemere wandered once round the room, condemning the china
silently.
"I must positively go," she said.
"Do, Alice!" said Jack; "because I want to dress. But you are rather
like Kit. When she says she must fly, it means she has little intention
of walking, just yet."
Lady Haslemere laughed.
"Come, Tom," she said. "We are not wanted. How deeply pathetic that is!
They will want us some day, as the hangman said. Well, Jack, we shall
see you later. I _am_ going."
Lord Conybeare went upstairs to his dressing-room, revolving with some
intentness the affair of this City dinner. The taking off his coat led
him to wind up his watch, and he was so lost in thought that for a
moment he looked surprisedly at his dress-clothes, which were laid out
for him, as if pyjamas would have been a more likely find. But his
linked and studded shirt was an irresistible reminder that it was
dinner-time, not bedtime, and he proceeded to dress with a certain neat
haste that was clearly characteristic of him. In stature he was somewhat
below the average size, both in height and breadth; but one felt that an
auctioneer of men might most truthfully have said, when he came to him
at a sale: "Here is a rather smaller specimen, gentlemen, but much more
highly finished, and very strong!"
The quick deftness of even unimportant movements certainly gave the
impression of great driving power; everything he did was done
unerringly; he had no fumblings with his studs, and his tie seemed to
fashion a faultless, careless bow under a mere suggestion from his thin,
taper-nailed fingers. He looked extremely well bred, and a certain
Mephistophelian sharpness about his face, though it might have warned
those whom Kit would have called prudes--for this was rather a sweeping
word with her--that he might not be desirable as a friend, would
certainly have warned the prudent that he would assuredly be much more
undesirable as an enemy. On the whole, a prudent prude would have tried
to keep on good terms with him. He appeared, in fact, even on so hasty
and informal a glance as that which we are giving him as he arranges his
tie, to be one of those lucky people to whom it is well to be pleasant,
for it was difficult to imagine that he was afraid of anything or cared
for anybody. Certain happily-constituted folk have never had any doubt
about the purpose of the world, so clearly was it designed to feed and
amuse them. Lord Conybeare was one of these; and in justice to the
world we must say that it performed its altruistic part very decently
indeed.
Jack Conybeare was still on the sunny side of thirty-five. He and Kit
had been married some seven years, and had no children, a privation for
which they were touchingly thankful. They had, both of them, quite
sufficient responsibilities, or, to speak more precisely, liabilities;
and to be in any way responsible for any liabilities beyond their own
would have seemed to them a vicarious burden of the most intolerable
sort. Their own, it is only fair to add, sat but lightly on them; Kit,
in particular, wore hers most gracefully, like a becoming mantle.
Chronic conditions, for the most part, tend to cease being acutely felt,
and both she and Jack would far sooner have had a couple of thousand
pounds in hand, and fifty thousand pounds in debt, than not to have owed
or owned a penny. Kit had once even thought of advertising in the
morning papers that a marchioness of pleasing disposition was willing to
do anything in the world for a thousand pounds, and Jack had agreed that
there was something in the idea, though the flaw in it was cheapness:
you should not give yourself away. He himself had mortgaged every
possible acre of his property, and sold all that was available to sell,
and the close of every day exhibited to a wondering world how it was
possible to live in the very height of fashion and luxury without any
means of living at all. Had he and Kit sat down for a moment by the side
of a road, or loitered in Park Lane, they would probably have been
haled, by the fatherly care of English law, to the nearest magistrate,
for that they had no apparent means of sustenance. Luckily they never
thought of doing anything of the kind, finding it both safer and
pleasanter to entertain princes and give the best balls in London.
A want of money is an amiable failing, common to the saint and the
sinner alike, and does not stand in the way of the _accusé_ acquiring
great popularity. Jack, it is true, had no friends, for the very simple
reason that he did not in the least want them; Kit, on the other hand,
had enough for two.
Her rules of life were very uncomplicated, and they daily became more
so. "You can't be too charming," was the chief of them. She took
infinite pains to make herself almost universally agreeable, and was
amply repaid, for she was almost universally considered to be so. This
embracing desire had its drawbacks, but Kit's remedies for them quite
met the case. For instance, when any woman whom she did not happen to
remember by sight greeted her, as often happened, effusively at some
evening party, Kit always kissed her with a corresponding effusion; if a
man in the same circumstances did the same, she always said
reproachfully, "You _never_ come to see us now." In this way her total
ignorance of who they were became a trivial thing; both were charmed,
and when people are charmed, their names become of notable
insignificance.
The finest inventions of all are the simplest, and the simplicity of
Jack's _modus vivendi_ rivalled its own subtlety and the subtlety of
Kit's. He loudly professed staunch Conservative principles, always voted
with the Bishops in the House of Lords on any question, and had made a
special study of guano and Church ritual. A method exposed always sounds
a little crude, but the crudity often belongs not to the method but to
its exposure. Certainly Jack's method answered, and no method can do
more. The mammon of unrighteousness, not being deceived, but not being
shocked at such duplicity, thought him very clever, and the unmammon of
righteousness, being deceived, was not shocked at other things which
were occasionally in the air about him. With perfect justice they
labelled the world scandal-loving and uncharitable when they were told
these other things, and asked Jack to dinner, to show that they did not
believe them. A further proof of his wisdom may be seen in the fact that
he accepted such invitations, and if he and Kit left early, it was not
because they were going on elsewhere to play round games, but because
the laying of foundation-stones and the opening of bazaars had been so
fatiguing.
But though both he and Kit were fond of appearing other than they were
to sets other than their own, they were on the whole singularly
unsecretive to each other. In the first place, they both knew that the
other was reasonably sharp, and while each respected the other for this
sharpness, they realized that any attempt to deceive would probably be
detected. In the second place, a far better reason, even on the lowest
grounds, on which they took it, they knew that mutual lying is a rotten
basis for married life. Each allowed the other a wide latitude, and in
consequence they were excellent friends, and always lent each other a
helping hand if there was any scheme of mutual aggrandizement to be put
through. There were just a few questions that Kit never put to Jack, nor
he to her; each had a cupboard, a very little one, to which there was
only one key, and they were wise enough never to ask each other for it.
Such, hitherto, had been their married life--a great deal of frankness
and confidence, and an absolute respect for the privacy of the other's
innermost sanctum.
To-night there was a beautiful scheme in the egg ready to be hatched, or
neither of them would have dreamed of dining in the City at half-past
seven. Attention was just beginning to be directed to West Australian
gold-mining, and the public had awoke to the fact that there were large
fortunes to be made, or lost, in that direction. Thus Jack, having no
fortune to lose, went into it with a light heart; he was clearly marked
out as one of those who were destined to win. In pursuance of the
laudable idea of avoiding a really serious financial crisis, they were
dining at the Drapers' Company, where they would meet a Mr. Frank
Alington, who had a whole fleet of little paper companies, it was
understood, ready to be floated. Jack had met him once, and had taken
this opportunity of meeting him again, hoping to find bread upon the
waters. It was to be Kit's business to make herself inimitably
agreeable, ask him to Park Lane, and leave the rest to Jack. She, of
course, would have a finger in the profits.
Kit was delighted to take the part assigned to her. Jack had looked into
her bedroom as she was dressing, and through the half-open door had
said, "Very gorgeous, please, Kit," and she had understood that this was
a really important operation, and that a dazzling wife was part of the
apparatus necessary. She had not meant to dress very particularly; plush
and cairngorms, she had once said to Jack, was the sort of thing the
City really appreciated, but she was always ready, within reason, to do
as Jack wished, and she told her maid to get out a dress that had
arrived from Paris only that morning. But Jack's remark to her as she
was dressing was the sort of hint that Kit always took. It cost so
little to be pleasant in these ways, and how wise it was to obey one's
husband in such matters! She had intended to keep this dress for a royal
dinner a week hence, but she put it on without a murmur, and, indeed,
her wifely devotion had its immediate reward.
For the dress! That surpassing man Jean Worth had said once, not to
herself, but to some other customer, and no friend of hers, that it was
a real pleasure to dress Lady Conybeare; and Lady Conybeare, on her
side, kindly considered it a real pleasure to be dressed by Worth.
Thus the gratification was mutual, and it must have been a consolation
to the dressmaker, if he had to whistle long and loud for his cheque,
to have his artistic pleasure to fall back on. Now Kit--a rare
accomplishment--could stand orange, and to stand orange means to be
admirably suited to orange. She loved it herself, Jean genuinely agreed
with her, and in this dress four tints of orange chiffon, _Dantè_,
_faisan doré_, _Vésuve_, and _pomme d'or_, blazed together. Even Worth,
the greatly daring, had inwardly felt a qualm of audacity, but how
admirably, when Kit was inside the gown, had his audacity succeeded!
"_Réussi!_" he would have sighed had he seen it. Over all was a fine net
of pale mandarin yellow, to which was tacked a cusped acanthus pattern
of sequins; and Kit, looking at herself long and critically in her
wardrobe glass, said "Lor'!" Her glorious red-gold hair, full of dusky
flames, of a tint after which Nature blindly gropes where Paris leads
the way, was the point to which Worth had worked, and his success was
beyond all approval or praise.
Next came the question of jewels, and Hortense, her maid, with the
artist's eye, thought that pearls and pearls only, _pas un diamant_,
would be consummately chic. Kit saw what she meant, and from an artistic
point of view devoutly agreed, but she turned up her nose at the
suggestion. "We don't want to be chic, my good woman," she said. "We
want to hit 'em in the eye. The rubies, Hortense!"
Now, the rubies were really fine, glorious molten lakes of colour,
almost barbarically splendid, and being entailed, they had been forced
to remain in the Conybeare coffers. But if ever a woman and her dress
were designed and built for rubies, Kit and this creation were.
Hortense, moved beyond her wont, ejaculated "_Mon Dieu!_" as the
gorgeous baubles were clasped on Kit's dazzling neck; and her mistress,
being as candid with herself as she was with her husband, smiled
serenely at her own reflection.
"A touch of rouge," she said to Hortense, and when that was unerringly
applied, "There," she murmured, "that will double up the City. And
Jack," she added to herself, "will then proceed to pick its pockets."
She rustled across the floor, and tapped at the door of her husband's
dressing-room.
"Are you ready, Jack?" she asked.
"Yes, just. Come in, Kit."
Kit took from her table the orange-red fan which Worth had sent with the
dress, threw the door open and held her head very high.
"The gold-miner's wife," she remarked.
Her husband looked at her a moment in blank admiration. Seven years'
husband as he was, Kit still occasionally "knocked him over" as he
expressed it, and she knocked him over now. Then he laughed outright.
"That ought to fetch 'em," he said frankly.
"So I think," said Kit; "but really, Jack, it was a sacrifice putting
this on. Remember that, please. I was keeping it for the royalties next
week, but you said 'very gorgeous,' and I obeyed."
"Oh, blow the royalties!" said Jack. "Dress in tartan plaid for them, or
a kilt even. Besides, it is bad form for a hostess to be better dressed
than her guests. That dress wouldn't do at all, Kit, in your own house.
They would think you were an advanced Radical."
The India-rubber-tired brougham, with its little electric lamp in the
roof (Kit's only real extravagance for more than ten days, as she
triumphantly told Jack) was ready when they got downstairs, and they
rolled off into the gaslit roar of the streets. This way and that
flashed the gleaming lights of hansoms and carriages; it was like
passing through an August shower of shooting-stars. Long queues of
waiting folk stretched like snakes from the pit-doors of theatres;
newsboys roared their "'orrible and revoltin'" details; jewellers' shops
with windows a blaze of gems signalled and winked across the streets;
feathered women peacocked along, making eyes at the passers; loungers
lounged; busy little men with black bags made scurrying bee-lines across
the crowded roadway; buses, a plaster of advertisements, swung nodding
on their way; and bicycles glided by them so spare and silent that they
might have been incorporeal things. High up on house-roofs glowed the
changing colours of prima-donna soaps, putting to shame the lesser
lights of heaven; now an invisible gigantic penman would write _Kodak_
with large flowing hand in red ink, then, dissatisfied, delete it,
and try it again in yellow. Here the crystal signs of music-halls
flashed diamonds, or the open door of a restaurant cast a brilliant
square of light on to the street. Then for a moment a strident,
diabolically-precise scale from a street-organ would overscore all other
noises; but the hoofs and wheels which bore the hungry world to the
houses of its friends to be fed reasserted itself with a crash and
trample like some Valkürie-ritt; the whole town was abroad, and humming
like a swarming beehive.
Kit was never tired of the spectacle of life, provided it was gay, and
varied, and full. The incessant movement, the infinite separate
businesses, which went to make up the great major chord of London
streets, the admirable pace at which the world moved, the marvel of its
contrasts, the gas, the glitter, the sordidness and the splendour
rubbing shoulders, all appealed to her tremendous _joie de vivre_, the
best and the most unvarying factor in her very living character. She had
once expressed a wish to be buried, like a suicide at cross-roads, in
the very centre of Piccadilly Circus. "No country churchyards or knells
of parting day for me, thank you," she had said.
All down Piccadilly she was silent, looking devouringly from the window
of the brougham at the kaleidoscope outside, but when they turned out of
Trafalgar Square down Northumberland Avenue, to avoid the Strand, which
at that hour spouts and bubbles with traffic like a weir in spring, she
turned to her husband with a sigh of regret at leaving the fuller
streets.
"The outline of the plot, Jack?" she said.
"Don't know it myself yet," said Jack. "But the _vieux premier_ is
Alington--a heavy, solemn man, like a butler, rather tiresome, I'm
afraid. Very likely you will sit next him; he is a guest of the
Drapers' like ourselves. If not, get hold of him somehow. He might dine
to-morrow."
"But we give a dance to-morrow," said Kit, "and we feed only the very
brightest and best."
"All the more reason for Alington coming, perhaps," said Jack. "I have
heard it said that there are still a few people who care for a duke as
such. It sounds odd, but let us hope he is one."
"Yes, those people are so easy to deal with," said Kit thoughtfully.
"But it will upset the table, Jack."
"Of course, if you put your table as more important than possible
thousands," said Jack.
"It is really a big thing then?" asked Kit.
"It is possibly a very big thing. I know no more than you yet. It may
even run to a Saturday till Monday or more."
"Very good. I'll upset the whole apple-cart for it, as Mr. Rhodes says.
Here we are. Let's get away early, Jack. I said we'd go to Berkeley
Street afterwards."
"We'll go as early as we can," he replied. "But you mustn't risk not
landing your fish because you don't play him long enough."
"Oh, Jack, I am not a fool," she said. "Order the carriage for ten. I'd
undertake in this gown to land the whole house of laymen by ten without
a gaff. Dear Jean Worth! What a lot of money I owe him, and what a lot
of pleasure he gives me! I should be puzzled to say which was the
greater."
CHAPTER II
SUNDAY MORNING
Mr. Frank Alington turned out to be a star of greater magnitude, in fact
a Saturday till Monday star, almost a comet. Lord Conybeare found that
the whirl and bustle of London did not allow of his seeing enough of
him, so he phrased it, and thus it happened that, some ten days after
the dinner at the Drapers' Company (Kit's playing and landing of the
fish having been masterly, for she had him dead-beat long before ten),
Mr. Alington arrived on a Saturday afternoon in June at what Kit called
their "cottage" in Buckinghamshire.
Strictly speaking--though she did not often speak strictly--it was not a
cottage at all; and it was certainly not in Buckinghamshire, but in
Berkshire. But there was a rustic, almost Bohemian, sound to Kit's mind
in Buckinghamshire, whereas Berkshire only reminded one of bacon, and a
few miles either way made a very little difference. "And if I choose to
call Berkshire the Malay Archipelago," said Kit, "who is to stop me?"
However, to adopt Kit's nomenclature, the cottage in question was a
large red-brick Elizabethan house on the banks of the Thames, with a few
acres of conservatories, and a charming flower-garden, leading down by
green degrees and cut yew hedges to the river. But the cottage idea was
not wholly absent, for they always dined in the room which had once
certainly been the kitchen. The range had been removed, leaving an
immense open fireplace, where it was sacrilege to burn anything but
logs, and the most charming dark oak dressers, bearing under the new
_régime_ quantities of old blue Nankin ware, ran round the walls.
Following the same idea, they always sat in the big hall which opened
straight on to the front-door, instead of in the drawing-room. "Quite
like hobnailed day-labourers," said Kit.
The analogy is obvious, and Kit's admirable taste had made the likeness
almost glaring. There was a grandfather's clock there, a couple of large
oak settles on each side of the fireplace, which had bronze dogs for the
fire-irons, and homely Chippendale and basket chairs. A few Persian
rugs, it is true, which it would have tasked a connoisseur to price,
happened to be lying on the floor, but otherwise it was quite
uncarpeted, and you trod on real naked wooden boards of polished oak. In
all the windows but one there were tiny diamond panes of old wavy glass,
which made the features of the landscape outside go up and down like a
switchback as you walked across the room; and in the other window, which
gave light to the serving-up-room (a highly inconvenient arrangement, in
which Kit, in the _rôle_ of labourer, delighted), were real
bottom-of-glasses panes, which looked charming. The roof was gabled and
not even whitewashed (being also of oak), and altogether an unexacting
labourer might have spent very fairly comfortable evenings in this
simple room.
The cottage idea was carried out in the garden also. The beds were all
of old-fashioned flowers, hollyhocks, London-pride, poppies,
wallflowers, dahlias, mignonette, quite rustic and herbaceous, with no
pincushion Italian beds, which Kit said were very expensive and out of
keeping with the prevalent simplicity. They also reminded her of
badly-mixed salads. Stern frugality further showed itself in the
clothing of the red-brick walls which bounded the garden. Here were no
flaunting, flaming creepers, bright and profitless, but homely
pear-trees and apricots, which bore quite excellent fruit. A common
wooden punt lay moored at the end of the garden, useful and homely, fit
for the carrying of the produce of the labourer's garden to market. A
pile of embroidered cushions happened at that moment to be lying in it,
and Kit had also left her jewelled Russian cigarette-case there, but
that was all. Even the cigarette-case was made of simple plaited straw,
and the monogram and coronet set in very blue turquoises at one corner
seemed to have got there by accident, as if they had been chips which
had fallen out of the sky, and might be shortly expected to float back
there again.
It was Sunday morning, obviously Sunday morning, and Nature was
proceeding as usual on her simple but pleasant way. A brilliant sun, a
gentle wind, the smooth, unruffled river, all testified to the
tenderness and benignity of the powers of the air. Spring, the watery,
impetuous spring of the North, had now a month ago definitely given
place to summer, leaving another year in which poets, with their
extraordinary want of correct observation, might forget what it had
really been like, and rhyme it a hundred undeserved and unfounded
courtesies. But summer had come in earnest in the latter days of May,
with a marked desire to make itself pleasant, and give to the sturdy
British yeoman, who had till then complained (with statistics of
rainfall) of the wetness of the spring, another excellent opportunity
of vilifying the dryness of the summer. Over such Providence watches
with a special care, and, knowing that the one thing worse than having a
grievance is to have none, gives them a kindly interchange of wet
springs, dry summers, wet summers, dry springs, secure of never pleasing
anybody.
A soft blue haze of heat and moisture hung over the river and the
low-lying water-meadows on the far side, but as the hills beyond climbed
upwards from the valley, they rose into an atmosphere extraordinarily
clear. Though the day was hot, there was a precision of outline about
the woods that cut the sky almost suggestive of a frosty morning, and
even here below the heat was of a brisk quality. Everything was steeped
in Sunday content, and from the gray church-tower standing guardian
among the huddled hamlet-roofs came the melodious jangle of bells
ringing for the eleven o'clock service. The labourers' garden was in
full luxuriance of midsummer flower (for a bright and cheerful garden
should be within reach of the humblest), and a rainbow of colour bounded
the close-shaven lawn. Nothing, as is right, was ever done on this lawn,
mossy to the foot, restful to the eye; no whitewash lines cut it up into
horrible squares and oblongs, no frenzied tennis-balls ever did
decapitation among the flower-beds that framed it, and you could wander
about it at dusk immune from anxiety as to whether your next step would
be tripped in a croquet-hoop or entangled in the snares of a drooped
tennis-net. During the weeks of spring it had been a star-sown space of
crocuses, like the meadow in Fra Angelico's Annunciation, but these were
over, and it had again become a green, living velvet.
Kit had developed that morning at breakfast a strange unreasoning desire
to go to church, and until Jack saw her eat he was almost afraid she was
going to be ill. To church accordingly she had gone, dragging with her
Alice Haslemere, who was staying with them. They had been put across the
river in the punt, Kit armed with a huge Church service, and it was
evident, so thought Conybeare as he strolled down to the water's edge
after the return of the punt, that Kit had smoked a cigarette as she
went across. This, by the standard of perfection, he considered a
mistake. If you are going to do a thing at all, do it thoroughly, he
argued to himself, and that a woman should smoke just before going to
church was a lapse from the proper level. But he took the cigarette-case
with its turquoise monogram from where it lay on the cushion, and put it
into his pocket. As like as not Kit would step on it when she got into
the punt again.
Jack had enjoyed a long conversation with Mr. Alington after dinner the
evening before, and he was now strolling about the garden expecting him
to come out and continue it. Alington was, as he had told Kit, a
heavy-looking man, but conversationally he had not found him in the
least heavy. He had the air of a solid, intelligent Englishman, whose
mind had been considerably widened by extensive travel abroad, and took
a large uninsular view of things. Had he been disposed to apply for a
situation as a butler, no householder could have reasonably hoped to
find a more trustworthy or respectable-looking man. Sobriety shone from
his large mild eye, and the lines of his firm, somewhat full-lipped,
mouth expressed steadiness in every curve. If as a butler he had been
told that the whole of the Royal Family were coming to high tea in ten
minutes, you would have felt yourself safe to bet that the intelligence
would not flurry him, and that a sufficient high tea would somehow
immediately appear. For so ample and well-furnished a man he had a
curiously small voice, rather suggesting that it came from a distance,
and he spoke his sentences in a precise manner, never correcting a word,
as if he had thought them out before he opened his mouth. Colour was
given to this supposition by the fact that he always paused a moment
before speaking. Such a habit of speech, when worn by the majority,
would predispose towards heaviness; but the result when it arrived was
not, in the case of Mr. Alington, heavy. On the contrary, it was
weighty--a far different thing. In the interval of reminding one of an
admirable butler he irresistibly suggested a member of a Conservative
Cabinet, safe of a peerage. It was only when considered as a floater of
gold mines that his appearance was against him, and even then it was
against him only on the score of probability, for it was impossible that
even an imaginative public could invent a man in whom more _primâ-facie_
confidence should be reposed as a trustee of the moneys of widows and
fatherless.
Jack strolled in the garden for nearly half an hour before he appeared,
chucking pebbles into the Thames and cigarette-ends into the
flower-beds. At breakfast Mr. Alington had been dressed in a black
frock-coat, but now when he made his unhurried exit from the low
drawing-room French window he wore a straw hat and a suit of decorous
tweed, the result, no doubt, of his observation that no one else wore
Sunday clothes. He carried a malacca cane in one hand; in the other a
large tune hymn-book with edges red in one light, gold in another.
"Lady Conybeare has started?" he inquired of Jack.
"Yes; she has gone to church. She went nearly half an hour ago."
Mr. Alington paused a moment.
"I had meant to go with her," he said. "I had no idea it was so late."
"There is the punt here," said Jack. "You can go now if you like. I had
no idea you meant to."
"I thought everyone went to church on Sunday morning in England when
they were in the country," he said. "But I would sooner not go at all
than arrive in the middle of the prayer of St. Chrysostom."
"And I would sooner arrive in the middle of the prayer of St. Chrysostom
than at the beginning of it," remarked Jack.
A slight look of pain crossed Mr. Alington's face, as if he had a twinge
of neuralgia; but he made no further comment on Jack's levity. He leaned
his tune hymn-book carefully against the bottom of his basket-chair,
after feeling that the lawn was dry, and lit a cigarette.
"An exquisite morning," he said, after a moment's reflection. "The hills
look as if they had been painted with cream for a medium, an effect so
rare out of England."
Lord Conybeare did not reply immediately, for he had not waited all this
time in the garden for Alington to hear him talk about cream. Then he
went straight to the point:
"All you said last night interested me very much," he began, "and your
kind offer to invest some money for me in your new group of mines----"
Mr. Alington held up a large white, deprecating hand. On the little
finger was a plain gold signet-ring, bearing the motto, _Fortiter
fideliter feliciter_.
"It is nothing," he replied; "pray don't mention it. Indeed, Lord
Conybeare, if I may say so, I only made that offer as a sort of feeler.
Your reply to me then, your further reference to the subject now, show
me that you are kind enough to be interested in my new undertakings."
"Profoundly," said Lord Conybeare; then, with disarming frankness:
"Money is the most interesting thing in the world and the most
desirable. I often wish," he added, "that I saw more of it."
Alington flicked a morsel of ash off the end of his cigarette.
"That confirms me in what I was thinking of saying to you," he replied.
"Now will you allow me to speak with your own frankness? Ah, observe
that beautiful line traced by that skein of starlings!"
Jack looked up.
"Lovely!" he said. "Pray speak."
"It is this then. My honest belief is that there are immense fortunes to
be made in West Australian mining. I believe also, again with absolute
honesty, that these claims which I own are--some of them, at least,
extremely rich. Now, I wish very much that I was wealthy enough to work
them by myself. I regret to say that I am not. I must therefore form a
company. To form a company I must have directors."
"Surely your name----" began Conybeare politely, but with only the
faintest conjecture of what might be coming.
"My name, as you so kindly suggest, will no doubt be a little
assistance," said Alington, "for I am not wholly unknown in such
matters. But it is not enough. This Company must be English; it must be
formed here; the shareholders should be largely English. Why? For a
variety of reasons. In the first place, you can raise ten thousand
pounds here more easily than you can raise one thousand in Australia.
Again, the British public is getting ready to go mad about West
Australian mining, while in Australia they regard Australian mining
without, well, without any premonitory symptoms of insanity. Perhaps
they underrate its future; I think they do. Perhaps the British public
overrates it; that also is possible. But I bring my wares to the best
market. Now I ask you, Lord Conybeare, will you be on my board? Will you
be my chairman?"
He turned briskly round with the first quick movement that Conybeare had
yet seen him make.
"I," he asked, "on a board of mining directors? I know about mines
exactly what you told me, last night--that is to say, unless I have
forgotten some of it."
The ghost of a smile flickered across Mr. Alington's broad face, and he
laid his large white hand on Jack's knee. The latter seemed to regard it
just as he might have regarded a harmless moth that had settled there.
The poor thing did not hurt.
"You saw that I smiled," he said. "I saw that you saw it. I smiled
because you spoke so far from the point. That is frank enough, is it
not, to show you that I am telling you the truth. There are further
proofs also."
Both in his action with his hand and in his speech the plebeian showed
plain, but Jack did not resent it. He had not asked Alington down to the
cottage to enjoy his refined conversation and his well-bred presence,
but to talk business. That he was doing. Jack was quite pleased with
him.
"I do not follow you," he said.
Mr. Alington lit another cigarette from the stump of his old one before
replying, and rose to deposit the other out of sight in a garden-bed.
"Cigarette-ends are so terribly dissonant with this charming garden," he
said. "Now, I am speaking to you from a purely business point of view. I
supposed--it was natural, was it not?--that you were so kind as to ask
me to your delightful house in order to discuss these mines. You see how
frank I am."
Conybeare let his eye travel slowly down a reach of the Thames.
"Yes, that was the reason why I asked you," he said.
"And I came for exactly the same reason. The pleasure of visiting you at
your 'cottage,' as Lady Conybeare so playfully calls it, is great--very
great; but plain business-men like me have little time for such
pleasures. Frankly, then, I should not have come unless I guessed your
reason. I, too, wished to talk about these mines, Lord Conybeare, and I
ask you again to be a director on my board."
He took off his straw hat--for they were sitting in the shade--and
propped it carefully up against his chair by the side of the large tune
hymn-book. Its removal showed a high white forehead and a circular
baldness in the centre of flossy, light-brown hair, like a tonsure.
"I am a plain business man," he went on, "and when I am engaged in
business I do not offer an advantageous thing to others unless I get an
advantage myself; for to introduce sentiment into business is to make a
pleasure of it and a failure. You must remember, my dear Lord
Conybeare, that England is essentially aristocratic in her ideas. At
least, so far as your nobility is Conservative, she is aristocratic.
Think if Lord Salisbury joined a board how the public would clamour for
allotments! Dear me, yes, the master of Hatfield might be a very rich
man--a very rich man indeed."
Jack Conybeare was completely himself; he was not dazzled or unduly
delighted at the offer. He merely wished to know what he got by it,
taking for granted, and justly, that the man was sincere.
"Marquises still count, then," he said. "I give you my word I had no
idea of it. I am glad I am a marquis. But what," he added, "do I get by
it?"
"A salary," said Mr. Alington, and his usual pause gave the remark
considerable weight. "But we will pass over that," he went on.
"Directors, however, have the privilege of taking a great many shares
before the concern is made public. In fact, in order to qualify for
being a director, you must hold a considerable number."
"I am very poor," said Jack.
"That, fortunately, can be remedied," said Mr. Alington.
Jack was immensely practical, and very quick, and it was obvious at once
that this was capable of two interpretations. He took the right one.
"You mean it is a certainty for me?" he said.
Again Mr. Alington let a perceptible pause intervene before he answered.
"I mean this," he said, "if you want plain speaking, and I think you do;
it also suits me better. You shall be allotted a certain number of
shares, say ten thousand, in my new group of mines. You will probably
only have to pay the first call. You will be a director of these
mines--and, by the way, there is another name I have in my mind, the
owner of which I should also like to have on my board. I had the
pleasure of seeing him at your house in London. Very well, I issue my
prospectus, and my name, as you so kindly observed, counts for
something. I, of course, as vendor, shall join the board after
allotment. Yours and another I hope will be there too. Now, I feel
certain in my own mind that such a board (with certain other names,
which shall be my affair) will be advantageous to me. It will pay. I am
certain also--I say this soberly--that between my prospectus and my
board the shares will at once go up, so that if you choose you can sell
out before the second call. Thus you will not be without your advantage
also. We do no favour to each other; we enter into partnership each for
his own advantage."
"And my duties?" asked Jack.
"Attendance, regular attendance at the meetings of the company. On those
occasions I shall want you to take the chair, read the report of the
manager, if there is one to hand, make the statement of the affairs of
the company, and congratulate the shareholders."
"Or condole?" asked Jack.
"I hope not. I should also ask you to immediately approach Lord
Abbotsworthy, and ask him to be on the board. His is the other name I
mentioned."
"Whatever do you want Tom Abbotsworthy for?" asked Conybeare
surprisedly.
"For much the same reason as I want you. He is already an earl--he will
be a duke. Dear me, if I was not a man of business I should choose to
be a duke."
Jack pondered a moment.
"It is your own concern," he said. "I will ask him with pleasure, and I
think very probably he will consent. Oddly enough, he and I were talking
about this sudden interest in West Australia only yesterday morning."
"I think that many other people will be talking of it before long," said
Alington.
"I consent," said Jack.
Mr. Alington showed neither elation, relief, nor surprise. But he
paused.
"I think you will find it worth your while," he said. "And now, Lord
Conybeare, there is another point. In the working of a big scheme like
this--for, I assure you, this is no cottage-garden affair--there is, as
you may imagine, an enormous deal of business. Somebody has to be
responsible for, or, at any rate, to sanction, all that is done. Whether
we put up fresh stamps, or whether we decide to use the cyanide process
for tailings, or sink a deep level, or abandon a vein, or use the
sulphide reduction, to take only a few obvious instances, somebody has
to be able to answer all questions, difficult ones sometimes, possibly
even awkward ones. Now, are you willing to go into all this, or not? If
you wish to have a voice in such matters you must go into it. On that I
insist. I hear you are a first-rate authority on chemical manures--a
most absorbing subject, I am sure. Are you willing to learn as much
about mines? On the other hand, it is open to you and Lord Abbotsworthy
to leave the whole working of such affairs to me and certain business
men whom I may appoint. But, having left it, you leave it altogether.
You will have no right of being consulted at all about technical points
unless you will make them your study. If you decide to leave these
things to those whose life has been passed in them, good. You put
implicit confidence in them, and if required, you will say so, honestly,
at the meetings. If, on the other hand, you wish to have a voice in
technical affairs, your voice must be justified. You must make mines,
technically, your study. You must go out and see mines. You must
acquire, not a superficial, but a thorough knowledge of them. You must
be able to form some estimate of what relation one ounce of gold to the
ton bears to the cost of working, and the capital on which such a yield
will pay. Now which? Choose!"
And Mr. Alington faced round squarely, a little exhausted on so hot a
morning by a volubility which was rare with him, and looked Jack in the
face.
"Which do you advise?" asked the other.
"I cannot undertake to advise you. I have merely given you the data of
your choice, and I can do no more."
"Then spare me details," said Jack.
Mr. Alington nodded his head gravely.
"I think you are wise," he said, "though I could not take the
responsibility of influencing your own opinion. I pay you for your name.
Your name, to tell you the truth, is what I want. You delegate business
to business men. I hope you will put the matter in the same light to
Lord Abbotsworthy. With regard to your salary as chairman, I cannot make
you a precise offer yet; tentatively, I should suggest five thousand a
year."
Lord Conybeare had to perfection that very useful point of good
breeding, namely, the ability to preserve a perfectly wooden face when
hearing the most surprising news. Mr. Alington, for all the effect this
information apparently had on it, might have been speaking to the leg of
a table.
"That seems to me very handsome," he replied negligently.
"It seems to me about fair," said Mr. Alington.
Lord Conybeare was puzzled, and he wondered whether Kit would understand
it all. How his name on a "front page," as Mr. Alington called it, with
attendance at a few meetings, at which he would read a report, could be
worth five thousand a year, he did not see, though he felt quite certain
that Mr. Alington thought it was. Whether it would turn out to be so or
not, he hardly cared at all; clearly that matter did not concern him. If
anyone was willing to pay five thousand a year for his name they were
perfectly welcome to have it; indeed, he would have taken a much smaller
figure. He had no idea that marquises were at such a premium. His
distinguished ancestry had suddenly become an industrial company, paying
heavily. "The new Esau," he thought to himself, "and a great improvement
on the old. I only lend my birthright, and the pottage I receive is
really considerable."
Some time before they had reached this point in their conversation the
punt had been taken across the river again to fetch Kit and Alice
Haslemere back from church, and as Mr. Alington said his last words it
had returned again with the jaded church-goers. He put on his straw hat,
picked up the big tune hymn-book, and with Conybeare strolled down to
the bottom of the lawn to meet them.
"Devotion is so very fatiguing," said Kit, in a harassed voice, as she
stepped on to the grass. "Alice and I feel as if we had been having the
influenza--don't we, dear? And I've lost my cigarette-case. It is too
tiresome, because I meant to pawn it. I am sure I left it in the punt."
Jack took it out of his pocket and returned it to her.
"Thank your dear husband you didn't step on it," he remarked.
Kit took it petulantly, and lit a cigarette.
"Oh, Jack, I wish you wouldn't be so thoughtful," she said. "Thoughtful
people are such a nuisance. They always remind one of what one is doing
one's best to forget, and put one's cherished things in safe places. Oh,
I'm so glad I'm not a clergyman. I should have to go to church again
this evening. What's that book, Mr. Alington? Oh, I see. Have you and
Jack been singing hymns on the lawn? How dear of you! I didn't know you
thought of going to church, or I would have waited for you. I understood
you were going to talk business with Jack. There is business in the air.
Just a trifle stuffy."
Mr. Alington paused.
"We have been having a long and interesting talk," he replied. "One can
say more on Sunday morning than in the whole of the rest of the week put
together."
"Yes, that's so true," said Kit, walking on ahead with him, and smoking
violently. "The man who preached knew it too. It was like a night
journey, I slept so badly. And was your talk satisfactory?"
"To me, very," said Mr. Alington. "I am convinced it will also prove
satisfactory to Lord Conybeare. He has kindly consented to become my
chairman and a director of my new group of mines, the Carmel mines, as
they will be called."
"What a nice name!" said Kit. "And shall we all make our fortunes?"
Mr. Alington nodded his massive head.
"I shall be very much surprised if we do not get a modest competence out
of the Carmel mines," said he.
CHAPTER III
AFTER THE GEE-GEE PARTY
Lady Haslemere was entertaining what she called the "Gee-gees" or "Great
Grundys" one night at her house in Berkeley Street. The "Gee-gee" party
was an idea borrowed from Jack, and all who were weightiest in society
came to it, a large number of them to dine, and the rest to the evening
party. Just now her brother, Tom Abbotsworthy, was living with them, for
his own house was being done up, and Alice had easily persuaded him to
stay with them, instead of living with the Duke. Indeed to live with the
Duke was nearly an impossibility; three women already had attempted to
support the burden of being his Duchess, but they had all collapsed
before long, leaving him in each case eminently consolable. He could
hurry a person into the grave, so it was said, sooner than any man or
woman in the kingdom. The last time Tom had seen him was about a week
ago, at dinner somewhere, and the whole of his conversation had been to
say loudly to him across the dinner-table at intervals of about two
minutes, "Why don't you marry?"
Tom's presence in the house was a great boon during the season; he
relieved his brother-in-law of his duties as host in an easy,
unostentatious manner, thereby earning his heartfelt gratitude, and
discharging these duties, instead of leaving them undischarged. Lord
Haslemere himself had a habit of being unreckoned with. He was an adept
at doing wire puzzles, and played a remarkably good game at billiards,
but otherwise there was nothing of him. He wore whiskers, spent the
greater part of his day at the club, and was known as Whisky-and-Soda,
not because he had intemperate leanings in that direction, but because
there was really nothing else to call him. When his wife entertained, he
shrank into what there was of himself, and the majority of his guests at
an evening party did not generally know him by sight. His face was one
stamped with the quality of obliviality; to see him once was to insure
forgetting him at least twice. But at the "Gee-gee" parties he was made
tidy, which he usually was not, and put in prominent places. He had been
very prominent this evening, and correspondingly unhappy. He had taken a
parrot-hued Duchess into dinner, and spilt a glass of wine over her new
dress, and as her Grace's temper was as high as the bridge of her nose,
the evening had been unusually bitter.
The "Grundy" dinner-party was succeeded by a vast "Grundy" At Home, to
which flocked all the solid people in London, including those who
"bridle" when a very smart set is mentioned, and flock thirstily to
their houses, like camels to a desert well, whenever they are asked. It
was the usual thing. There had been a little first-rate music--during
which everyone talked their loudest--and a great many pink and
china-blue hydrangeas on the stairs, a positive coruscation of stars and
orders and garters--for two royal princes had been included among the
"Gee-gees"--and about midnight Lady Haslemere was yawning dismally
behind her fan, and wondering when people would begin to go away. In
the intervals of her yawns, which she concealed most admirably, she
spoke excellent and vivacious French to the Hungarian Ambassador, an old
bald-headed little man, who only wanted a stick to make him into a
monkey on one, and laughed riotously at his stuffy little monkey-house
jokes, all of which she had frequently heard before. In consequence, he
considered her an extremely agreeable woman, as indeed she was.
Kit and her husband were not at the dinner, both having refused
point-blank to go, on the ground that they had done their duty to
"Grundy" already; but they turned up, having dined quietly at home, at
about half-past eleven, with Mr. Alington in tow. He was not known to
many people present, but Lady Haslemere instantly left her Ambassador,
having received instructions from Kit, and led him about like a dancing
bear. She introduced him to royalty, which asked him graciously whether
he enjoyed England, or preferred Australia, and other questions of a
highly original and penetrating kind; she presented him to stars and
orders and garters, and to all the finest "Gee-gees" present, as if he
had been the guest of the evening. Kit's eye was on her all the time,
though she was talking to two thousand people, and saw that she did her
duty.
The rooms were as pretty as decorated boxes can be, and hotter than one
would have thought any boxes could possibly get. People stood packed
together like sardines in a tin, cheek to jowl, and appeared to enjoy
it. Anæmic men dropped inaudible questions to robust females, and
ethereal-looking _débutantes_ screamed replies to elderly Conservatives.
Nobody sat down--indeed, there was not room to sit down--and the
happiest of all the crowd, excepting those who had dined there, were
the enviable mortals who had come on from one house, and were able to
announce that they were going on to another. Three small drawing-rooms
opened out the one from the other, and the doorways were inflamed and
congested. Whoever took up most room seemed to stand there, and whoever
took up most room seemed to be dressed in red. Altogether, one could not
imagine a more successful evening. Politicians considered it a political
party, those who were not quite so smart as Lady Haslemere's set
considered it the smartest party of the year, and everybody who was
nobody considered that everybody was there, and looked forward to buying
the next issue of Smart Society, in order to see what "Belle" or "Amy"
thought of it all.
The noise of two or three hundred people all talking at once in small
rooms causes a roar extraordinarily strident, and, as in the case of
rooms full of tobacco-smoke, intolerable unless one contributes to it
oneself. Mr. Alington had to raise his small, precise voice till it
sounded as if he was intoning, and the effort was considerable. This
particular way of passing a pleasant evening in the heat of the summer
was hitherto unknown to him, and he looked about him in mild wonder. He
felt himself reminded of those crates of ducks and fowls which are to be
seen on the decks of ocean-going steamers, the occupants of which are so
cruelly overcrowded, and of whom the most fortunate only can thrust
their beaks through the wicker of their prison-house, and quack
desolately to the breeze of the sea. Lady Haslemere's rooms seemed to
him to resemble these bird-crates, the only difference being that people
sought this suffocating imprisonment of their own free will, because
they liked it, the birds because the passengers had to be fed. One or
two very tall men had their heads free, a few others stood by windows,
and could breathe; but the majority could neither breathe nor hear, nor
see further than their immediate neighbours. They could only quack. And
they quacked.
By degrees the party thinned; an unwilling lane was cut through the
crowd for the exit of the princes, and the great full-blown flowers in
the hedges, so to speak, bobbed down in turn as they passed, like a
field of poppies blown on by a passing wind. After them those lucky folk
who were going on to another house, where they would stand shoulder to
shoulder again with a slightly different crowd, and express extreme
wonder that their neighbours had not been at Lady Haslemere's ("I
thought everyone was there!"), made haste to follow. Outside all down
the street from Berkeley Square at one end to Piccadilly at the other
stretched the lines of carriage-lamps, looking like some gigantic double
necklace. The congestion in the drawing-room developed into a really
alarming inflammation in the cloak-room and the hall, and everyone
wanted her carriage and was waiting for it, except the one unfortunate
lady whose carriage stopped the whole of the way, as a stentorian
policeman studiously informed her, but who could only find attached to
her ticket a small opera hat instead of the cloak which should have
covered her. People trod on each other's toes and heels, and entangled
themselves in other folks' jewels and lace. Rain had begun to fall
heavily, the red carpet from the door to the curbstone was moist and
muddy, contemptuous footmen escorted elderly ladies under carriage
umbrellas to their broughams, and large drops of rain fell chill on the
elderly ladies' backs. Loungers of the streets criticised the outgoers
with point and cockney laughter, but still the well-dressed crowd
jostled and quacked and talked, and said how remarkably pleasant it had
been, and how doubly delightful it was to have come here from somewhere
else, and to go on somewhere else from here.
Half an hour after the departure of the princes, Lady Haslemere, who was
fast ceasing to yawn, manoeuvred the two or three dozen people who
still could not manage to tear themselves away, into the outermost of
the three drawing-rooms, and nodded to a footman who lingered in the
doorway, and had obvious orders to catch her eye. Upon this he and
another impassive giant glided into the innermost room, and took two
green-baize-covered tables from where they had been folded against the
wall, setting them in the middle of the room, and placed a dozen chairs
round them; then, making use of a back staircase, so that they should
not be seen by the remaining "Grundys," they brought up and laid out a
cold supper, consisting chiefly of jelly and frills and froth and glass
and bottles and quails and cigarettes, put cards, counters, and candles
on the green-baize tables, and withdrew. Ten minutes later the last of
the "Grundys" withdrew also, and the rest, some dozen people who had
stood about in attitudes of the deepest dejection for the last
half-hour, while a Bishop played the man of the world to Kit, heaved a
heartfelt sigh of relief, and brightened up considerably. Automatically,
or as if by the action of a current of air or a tide, they drifted into
the inner room, and chalk lines were neatly drawn on the green-baize
cloth.
Baccarat is a game admirably suited to people who have had a long day,
and is believed to be a specific antidote to the gloom induced by huge
"Grundy" parties. It is an effort and a strain on the mind to talk to
very solid people who are interested in great questions and delight in
discussion; but at baccarat the mind, so to speak, lights a cigarette,
throws itself into an armchair, and puts on its slippers. Baccarat
requires no judgment, no calculation, no previous knowledge of anything,
and though it is full of pleasing excitement, it makes no demands
whatever on the strongest or feeblest intellect. The players have only
to put themselves blindly, as ladies dressing for dinner surrender
themselves to a skilful maid, into the hands of Luck, and the austere
elemental forces which manage the winds and waves, and decree in what
order nines and other cards are dealt from packs, do the rest. You buy
your counters, and when they are all gone you buy some more. If, on the
other hand, they behave as counters should, and increase and multiply
like rabbits, you have the pleasure of presenting them to your host at
the end of the evening or the beginning of the morning, as the case may
be, and he very kindly gives you shining sterling gold and rich
crackling bank-notes in exchange.
Tom Abbotsworthy, since he had been staying with his sister, always took
the place of host when this soothing game was being played at Berkeley
Street; for Lord Haslemere, if he were not in bed, was by this time
busily practising nursery cannons on the billiard-table. Occasionally he
looked in, with his fidgety manner, and trifled with the froth and
frills, and if there was anyone present whose greatness demanded his
attendance, he took a hesitating hand. But to-night he was spared; there
was only a small, intimate party, who would have found him a bore. He
was slow at cards, displayed an inordinate greed for his stake, and had
been known at baccarat to consider whether he should have another. This,
as already stated, is unnecessary. With certain numbers you must; with
all the others you must not, and consideration delays the game.
The hours passed much more pleasantly and briskly than during the period
of the "Grundy" party. It was a warm, still night, the windows were
flung wide, and the candles burned unwaveringly. Round the table were a
dozen eager, attentive faces. Luck, like some Pied Piper, was fluting to
the nobility and gentry, and the nobility and gentry followed her like
the children of Hamelin. Now and then one of them would rise and consult
the side-table to the diminishment of frills and froth, or the
crisp-smelling smoke of a cigarette would hold the room for a few
minutes. Most of those present had been idle all day, now they were
employed and serious. Outside the rain had ceased, and for a couple of
hours the never-ending symphony of wheels sank to a pianissimo.
Occasionally, with a sharp-cut noise of hoofs and the jingle of a bell,
a hansom would trot briskly past, and at intervals an iron-shod van made
thunder in the street. But the siesta of noise was short, for time to
the most is precious; barely had the world got home from its parties of
the night, when those whose business it is to rise when their masters
are going to bed, in order that the breakfast-table may not lack its
flowers and fruits, began to get to the morning's work, and the loaded,
fragrant vans went eastward. The candles had once burned down, and had
been replaced by one of the impassive giants, when the hint of dawn, the
same dawn that in the country illuminated with tremulous light the dewy
hollows of untrodden ways, was whispered in the world. Here it but
changed the blank, dark faces of the houses opposite into a more visible
gray; it sucked the fire from the candles, was strangely unbecoming to
Lady Haslemere, who was calculated for artificial light, and out of the
darkness was born day.
There was no longer any need for the carriage-lamps to be lit when Kit
and her husband got into their brougham. A very pale-blue sky, smokeless
and clear, was over the city, and the breath of the morning was
deliciously chill. Kit, whether from superior art or mere nature, did
not look in the least out of keeping with the morning. She was a little
flushed, but her flush was that of a child just awakened from a long
night's rest more than that of a woman of twenty-five, excited by
baccarat and sufficient--in no degree more than sufficient--champagne.
Her constant harmony with her surroundings was her most extraordinary
characteristic; it seemed to be an instinct, acting automatically, just
as the chameleon takes its colour from its surroundings. Set her in a
well-dressed mob of the world, she was the best dressed and most worldly
woman there; among rosy-faced children she would look at the most a
pupil teacher. Just now in Lady Haslemere's drawing-room you would have
called her gambler to her finger-tips; but as she stood for a moment on
the pavement outside waiting for her carriage-door to be opened, she was
a child of morning.
She drew her cloak, lined with the plucked breast feathers that grow on
the mother only in breeding-time, more closely about her, and drew the
window half up.
"You were in luck as well as I, were you not, Jack?" she said. "I
suppose I am mercenary, but I must confess I like winning other
people's money. I feel as if I was earning something."
"Yes, we were both on the win to-night," said Jack.
Then he stopped, but as if he had something more to say, and to Kit as
well as to him the silence was awkward.
"You noticed something?" she asked.
"Yes; Alington."
"So did I. So did Alice, I think. What a bore it is! What is to be
done?"
Jack fidgeted on his seat, lit a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, and
threw it away.
"Perhaps we are wrong," he said. "Perhaps he didn't cheat."
Kit did not find it worth while to reply to so half-hearted a
suggestion.
"It's damned awkward," he continued, abandoning this himself. "I don't
know what to do. You see, Kit, what an awful position I am in. In any
case, do let us have no scandal; that sort of thing has been tried once,
and I don't know that it did any good to anybody."
"Of course we will have no scandal," said Kit quickly. "If there was a
scandal, you would have to break with him, and pop go the gold mines as
far as we are concerned."
Jack started. His thoughts had been so absolutely identical with what
his wife said, that it was as if he had heard a sudden echo. And though
the thoughts had been his own, and Kit had merely stated them, yet when
she did so, so unreasonable is man, he felt inclined to repudiate what
she said. The thing sounded crude when put like that. Kit saw him start,
divined the cause with intuitive accuracy, and felt a sudden impatient
anger at him. She hated hypocritical cowardice of this kind, for, having
plenty of immoral courage herself, she had no sympathy with those who
were defective in it. Jack, she knew very well, had no intention of
breaking with Alington, because the latter had cheated at baccarat.
Then, in Heaven's name, even if you are too squeamish to be frank
yourself, try to make an effort not to wince when somebody else is.
"That is what a man calls his honour," she thought to herself with
amused annoyance. "It is unlike Jack, though."
Meantime her quick brain was spinning threads like a spider.
"Look here, Jack," she said in a moment. "Leave the thing entirely to
me. It was stupid of me to mention it. You saw nothing: I saw nothing.
You know nothing about it. There was no baccarat, no cheating, no
nothing. Come."
"What are you going to do?" asked Jack doubtfully.
He had great confidence in Kit, but this matter required consideration.
"Oh, Jack, I am not a fool," said Kit. "I only want you, officially, so
to speak, to know nothing about this, just in case of accidents; but
there will be no accidents if you let me manage it. If you want to know
what I shall do, it is this: I shall go to Alice to-morrow--to-day,
rather--and tell her what I saw. I am sure she saw it herself, or I
should say nothing to her. I shall also add how lucky it was that only
she and I noticed it. Then the whole thing shall be hushed up, though I
dare say we shall watch Alington play once more to be certain about it,
and if we see him cheat again, make him promise to play no more. Trust
us for not letting it come out. I am in your galley about the mines, you
see."
"She is to understand that I saw nothing?" asked Jack.
"Of course, of course," said Kit. "That is the whole point of it. What
is your scruple? I am really unable to understand. I know it is not nice
to deal with a person who cheats at cards. You have always to be on the
watch. You'll have to keep your eyes open in this business of the mines,
but that is your own affair. Clearly it is much better that Alice should
imagine you know nothing about the cheating. She might think you ought
to break with the man; people are so queer and unexpected."
"What about Tom?" asked he.
They had arrived at Park Lane, and Kit stepped out.
"Jack, will you or will you not leave the whole matter in my hands--the
whole matter, you understand--without interference?"
He paused for a moment, still irresolute.
"Yes," he said at last; "but be careful."
Kit hardly heard this injunction; as soon as he had said "Yes" she
turned quickly from him, and went into the house.
It was already after four, and the tops of the trees in the Park had
caught the first level rays of the eastern sun. The splendid, sordid
town still lay asleep, and the road was glistening from the rain which
had fallen earlier in the night, and empty of passengers. But the birds,
those fit companions of the dawn, were awake, and the twittered morning
hymn of sparrows pricked the air. Kit went straight to her bedroom,
where the rose-coloured blinds, drawn down over the wide-open windows,
filled the room with soft, subdued light, and rang the bell which
communicated with her maid's room. When she was likely to be out very
late she always let her maid go to bed, and rang for her when she was
wanted. Often she even made an effort to get to bed without her help,
but this morning she was preoccupied, and rang before she could
determine whether she needed her. Kit herself was one of those
happily-constituted people who can do with very little sleep, though
they can manage a great deal, and in these London months four or five
hours during the night and a possible half-hour before dinner was
sufficient to make her not only just awake, but excessively so at other
times. In the country, it is true, she made up for unnatural hours by
really bucolic behaviour. She took vigorous exercise every day in any
weather, ate largely of wholesome things, hardly drank any wine, and
slept her eight hours like a child. In this she was wiser than the
majority of her world, who, in order to correct their errors in London,
spend a month of digestive retirement at Carlsbad.
"Live wholesomely six months of the year," said Kit once, "and you will
repair your damages. Why should I listen to German bands and drink salt
water?"
Instead, she fished all August and September, cut down her cigarettes,
and lived, as she said, like a milkmaid. It would have been rather a
queer sort of milkmaid, but people knew what she meant.
Before her maid came (Kit's arrangement that she might go to bed was
partly the result of kindness, partly of her disinclination to be waited
on by a very sleepy attendant) she had taken off her jewels, and put
them into her safe. There also she placed the very considerable sum of
money which she had just won at baccarat, to join the rainy-day fund.
Jack did not know about the rainy-day fund--it was of Kit's very private
possessions; but it is only fair to her to say that if he had been in a
financial _impasse_ it would have been at his disposal. No number of
outstanding bills, however, constituted an _impasse_ till you were
absolutely sued for debt; the simplest way of discharging them, a way
naturally popular, was to continue ordering things at the same shops.
Kit and her husband did not meet at breakfast, but took that plebeian
meal in their own rooms. And she, having told Hortense to open the
windows still wider, and bring her breakfast at half-past ten, put the
key of her jewel-safe under her pillow, and lay down to sleep for five
hours. She would want her victoria at twelve, and she scribbled a note
to Lady Haslemere saying that she would be with her at a quarter past.
Outside the day grew ever brighter, and rivulets of traffic began to
flow down Park Lane. The hour of the starting of the omnibuses brought a
great accession of sound, but Kit fell asleep as soon as she got into
bed, and, the sleep of the just and the healthy being sound, she heard
them not. She dreamed in a vague way that she had won a million pounds,
but that as she was winning the last of them, which would mean eternal
happiness, she cheated some undefined shadow of a penny, which, in the
misty, unexplained fashion of dreams, took away the whole of her
winnings. Then the smell of tea and bacon and a sudden influx of light
scattered these vain and inauspicious imaginings, and she woke to
another day of her worthless, selfish, aimless life.
CHAPTER IV
KIT'S LITTLE PLAN
To many people the events of the day before, and the anticipations of
the day to come, give with the most pedantic exactness an automatic
colour to the waking moments. The first pulse of conscious
consciousness, without apparent cause, is happy, unhappy, or
indifferent. Then comes a backward train of thought, the brain gropes
for the reason of its pleasure or chagrin, something has happened,
something is going to happen, and the instinct of the first moment is
justified. The thing lay in the brain; it gave the colour of itself to
the moment when reasoned thought was yet dormant.
Bacon and tea were the first savours of an outer world to Kit when she
awoke, for she had slept soundly, but simultaneously, and not referring
to these excellent things, her brain said to her, "Not nice!" Now, this
was odd: she shared with her husband his opinion of the paramount
importance of money, and the night before she had locked up in her safe
enough to pay for six gowns at least, and a year's dentist bills, for
her teeth were very good. Indeed, it was generally supposed that they
were false, and though Kit always laughed with an open mouth, she had
been more than once asked who her dentist was. Herein she showed less
than her ordinary wisdom when she replied that she had not got one, for
the malignity of the world, how incomparable she should have known, felt
itself justified.
Yet in spite of that delightful round sum in her jewel-safe, the smell
of bacon woke her to no sense of bliss beyond bacon. For a moment she
challenged her instinct, and told herself that she was going to have tea
with the Carburys, and that Coquelin was coming; that she was dining
with the Arbuthnots, where they were going to play a little French farce
so screaming and curious that the Censor would certainly have had a fit
if he had known that such a piece had been performed within the bounds
of his paternal care. All this was as it should be, yet as the river of
thought began to flow more fully, she was even less pleased with the
colour of the day. Something unpleasant had happened; something
unpleasant was still in the air--ah! that was it, and she sat up in bed
and wondered exactly how she should put it to Lady Haslemere. Anyhow she
had _carte blanche_ from Jack, and if between half-past ten and a
quarter past twelve she could not think of something simple and
sufficient, she was a fool, and that she knew she certainly was not.
With her breakfast came the post. There were half a dozen cards of
invitation to concerts and dinners and garden-parties; an autograph note
from a very great personage about her guests at the banquet next week; a
number of bills making a surprising but uninteresting total; another
note, which she read with interest twice, and then tore into very small
pieces; and a few lines from Jack, scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.
"Do the best you can, Kit," he said; "I am off to the City to see A. I
shall behave as if I knew nothing."
Kit tore up this also, but not into small pieces, with a little sigh of
relief. "Sense cometh in the morning," she said to herself, and ate her
breakfast with a very good appetite.
Whatever she had been doing, however unwisely she had supped, Kit always
"wanted" her breakfast, and as she took it the affair of the night
before seemed to her to assume a somewhat different complexion. In her
heart of hearts she began to be not very sorry for the lapse in social
morality of which Mr. Alington had been guilty on the previous night. It
seemed to her on post-prandial consideration that it might not be
altogether a bad thing that she should have some little check upon him.
It might even be called a blessing, with hardly any disguise at all, and
she put the position to herself thus. When you went careering about in
unexplored goldfields with the owner, a comparative stranger, harnessed
to your cart, it was just as well to have some sort of a break ready to
your hand. Very likely it would be unnecessary to use it; indeed, she
did not want to have to use it at all, but it was certainly preferable
to know that it was there, and that if the comparative stranger took it
into his head to bolt, he would find it suddenly clapped on. The only
drawback was that Alice knew about it too; at least, Kit was morally
certain that she had noticed Mr. Alington's surreptitious pushing
forward of his stake after the declaration of his card, which was very
clumsily done, and she would have preferred, had it been possible, that
only Jack and she should have known, for a secret has only one value,
and the more it is shared the less valuable does each share become, on
the simple arithmetical postulate that if you divide a unit into pieces,
each piece is less than the original unit.
Indeed, the more she thought of it, the more convenient did it appear
that Mr. Alington should have made this little mistake, and that she
should have noticed it. And, after all, perhaps it would save trouble
that Alice should have noticed it too, for in all probability it would
be necessary to make Alington play again and watch him. For this she
must have some accomplice, and as Jack was not to come into the affair
at all, there really was no better accomplice to have than Alice. To lay
this trap for the bland financier did not seem to Kit to be in any way a
discreditable proceeding. She put it to herself that, if a man cheated,
he ought not to be allowed to play cards and win his friends' money, and
that it was in justice to him that it was necessary to verify the
suspicion. But that it was a low and loathsome thing to ask a man as a
friend to play cards in order to see whether he cheated or not did not
present itself to her. Her mind--after all, it is a question of
taste--was not constructed in such a way as to be able to understand
this point of view, and she was not hide-bound or pedantic in her idea
of the obligation entailed by hospitality. To cheat at cards was an
impossible habit, it would not do in the least; for a rich man to cheat
at cards was inexplicable. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that
Kit was really shocked at the latter.
In the course of an hour came an answer from Lady Haslemere. She was
unavoidably out till two, but if Kit would come to lunch then she would
be at home. Haslemere and Tom were both out, and they could be alone.
Kit always found Alice Haslemere excellent company, and during lunch
they blackened the reputations of their more intimate friends with all
the mastery of custom, and a firm though gentle touch. Like some
deductive detective of unreadable fiction, Kit could most plausibly
argue guilt from cigarette ashes, muddy boots, cups of tea--anything, in
fact, wholly innocent in itself. But luckier than he, she had not got to
wrest verdicts from reluctant juries, but only to convince Lady
Haslemere, which was a far lighter task, as she could without the
slightest effort believe anything bad of anybody. Kit, moreover, was a
perfect genius at innuendo; it was one of the greatest charms of her
conversation.
After lunch they sat in the card-room and smoked gold-tipped,
opium-tainted cigarettes, and when the servants had brought coffee and
left them, Kit went straight to the point, and asked Alice whether she
had seen anything irregular as they played baccarat the night before.
Lady Haslemere took a sip of coffee and lit another cigarette; she
intended to enjoy herself very much.
"You mean the Australian," she said. "Well, I had suspicions; that is to
say, last night I felt certain. It is so easy to feel certain about that
sort of thing when one is losing."
Kit laughed a sympathetic laugh.
"It _is_ a bore, losing," she said. "If there is one thing I dislike
more than winning other people's money, it is losing my own. And the
certainty of last night is still a suspicion to-day?"
"Ye-es. But you know a man may mean to stake, and yet not put the
counters quite clear of that dear little chalk line. I am sure, in any
case, that Tom saw nothing, because I threw a hint at him this morning,
which he would have understood if he had seen anything."
"Oh, Tom never sees anything," said Kit; "he is like Jack."
Lady Haslemere's natural conclusion was that Jack had not seen anything
either, and for the moment Kit was saved from a more direct
misstatement. Not that she had any prudish horror of misstatements, but
it was idle to make one unless it was necessary; it is silly to earn a
reputation for habitual prevarication. Lies are like drugs or
stimulants, the more frequent use you make of them, the less effect they
have, both on yourself and on other people.
"Well, then, Kit," continued Lady Haslemere, "we have not yet got much
to go on. You, Tom, Jack, and I are the only four people who could
really have seen: Jack and I because we were sitting directly opposite
Mr. Alington, you and Tom because you were sitting one on each side of
him. And of us four, you alone really think that this--this unfortunate
moral collapse, I think you called it, happened. And Jack is so sharp. I
don't at all agree that he never sees anything; there is nothing,
rather, that he does not see. I attach as much weight to his seeing
nothing as to anybody else seeing anything. You and I see things very
quick, you know, dear," she added with unusual candour.
"Perhaps Jack was lighting a cigarette or something," said Kit. "Indeed,
now I come to think of it, I believe he was."
"Jack can see through cigarette smoke as well as most people," remarked
Alice. "But on the whole I agree with you, Kit; we cannot leave it as it
is. I believe the recognised thing to do is to get him to play again and
watch him."
"I believe so," said Kit, with studied unconcern.
Here she made a mistake; the unconcern was a little overdone, and it
caused Lady Haslemere to look up quickly. At that moment it occurred to
her for the first time that Kit was not being quite ingenuous.
"But I don't like doing that sort of thing," she went on, throwing out a
feeler.
"But what else are we to do?" asked Kit, who since breakfast had evolved
from her inner consciousness several admirable platitudes. "It is really
not fair to Alington himself to leave it like this; to have lurking in
one's mind--one can't help it--a suspicion against the man which may be
quite erroneous. On the other hand, supposing it is not erroneous,
supposing he did cheat, it is not fair on other people that he should be
allowed to go on playing. He either did cheat or else he did not."
There was no gainsaying the common-sense of this, and Lady Haslemere was
silent a moment.
"Tell Jack," she suggested at length, after racking her brains for
something rather awkward to say.
As a rule she and Kit were excellent friends, and treated each other
with immense frankness; but Lady Haslemere this morning had a very
distinct impression that Kit was keeping something back, which annoyed
her. Doubtless it was something quite trivial and unimportant, but she
herself did not relish being kept in the dark about anything by anybody.
But Kit replied immediately.
"I don't see why we should tell anybody, Alice," she said; "and poor
dear Jack would pull his moustache off in his perplexity, if he were to
know," she added, with a fine touch of local colour. "In any case, the
last thing we want is a scandal, for it never looks well to see in the
papers that the 'Marchioness of Conybeare, while entertaining a large
baccarat party last night, detected one of her guests cheating. Her
ladyship now lies in a precarious state.' You know the sort of thing.
Then follow the names of the guests. I hate the public press!" she
observed with dignity.
"Yes; it is like X rays," observed Lady Haslemere; "and enables the
curious public to see one's bones. And however charming one may be,
one's bones are not fit for public inspection. Also the papers would put
the name of one of the guests with dashes for vowels, and the excited
reader would draw his conclusions. Really, the upper class is terribly
ill-used. It is the whipping-boy of the nation. Supposing Smith and
Jones had a baccarat-party, and Smith cheated, no one would care, not
even Robinson."
Kit laughed.
"That is just why I don't want to tell anybody," she said. "If three
people are in a secret, the chances of it getting out are enormously
greater than if only two are. Not that anyone tells it exactly; but the
atmosphere gets impregnated with it. You know what happened before. One
has to keep the windows open, so to speak, and let in plenty of fresh
air, politics, and so on. Other people breathe the secret."
"We can't tackle the man alone," said Alice.
"Why not? A man always hates a scene, because a man is never any good at
a scene; and, personally, I rather like them. I am at my best in a
scene, dear; I really am ripping."
Again Lady Haslemere had a quite distinct sensation that Kit was keeping
something back. She seemed to wish to prove her case against Alington,
yet she did not want anybody else to know. It was puzzling why she
desired a private handle against the man. Perhaps--Lady Haslemere
thought she had an inkling of the truth, and decided to take a shot at
it.
"Of course it would be awkward for Jack," she observed negligently, "to
be connected in business with this man, if it became known that he knew
that Alington had cheated at baccarat."
Kit was off her guard.
"That is just what he feels--what I feel," she said.
She made this barefaced correction with the most silken coolness; she
neither hurried nor hesitated, but Lady Haslemere burst out laughing.
"My dear Kit!" she said.
Kit sat silent a moment, and then perfectly naturally she laughed too.
"Oh, Alice," she said, "how sharp you are! Really, dear, if I had been a
man and had married you, we should have been King and Queen of England
before you could say 'knife.' Indeed, it was very quick of you, because
I didn't correct myself at all badly. I was thinking I had carried my
point, and so I got careless. Now I'll apologize, dear, and I promise
never to try to take you in again, partly because it's no use, and
partly because you owe me one. Jack does know, and he, at my request,
left me to deal with it as if he didn't. It would be very awkward for
him if he knew, so to speak, officially. At present, you see, he has
only his suspicions. He could not be certain any more than you or I. As
you so sensibly said, dear, we have only suspicions. But now, Alice, let
us leave Jack out of it. Don't let him know that you know that he knows.
Dear me, how complicated! You see, he would have to break with Alington
if he knew."
Lady Haslemere laughed.
"I suppose middle-class people would think us wicked?" she observed.
"Probably; and it would be so middle-class of them," said Kit. "That is
the convenient thing about the middle class; they are never anything
else. Now, there is no counting on the upper and lower class; at one
time we both belong to the criminal class, at another we are both honest
labourers. But the middle class preserves a perpetual monopoly of being
shocked and thinking us wicked. And then it puts us in pillories and
throws dirt. Such fun it must be, too, because it thinks we mind. So
don't let us have a scandal."
Lady Haslemere pursed her pretty mouth up, and blew an excellent
smoke-ring. She was a good-humoured woman, and her detection of Kit took
the sting out of the other's attempted deception. She was quite pleased
with herself.
"Very well, I won't tell him," she said.
"That's a dear!" said Kit cordially; "and you must see that it would do
no good to tell anybody else. Jack would have to break with him if it
got about, and when a reduced marquis is really wanting to earn his
livelihood it is cruel to discourage him. So let's get Alington to play
again, and watch him, you and I, like two cats. Then if we see him cheat
again, we'll ask him to lunch and tell him so, and make him sign a
paper, and stamp it and seal it and swear it, to say he'll never play
again, amen."
Lady Haslemere rose.
"The two conspirators swear silence, then," she said. "But how awkward
it will be, Kit, if anyone else notices it on this second occasion!"
"Bluff it out!" said Kit. "You and I will deny seeing anything at all,
and say the thing is absurd. Then we'll tell this Alington that we know
all about it, but that unless he misbehaves or plays again the incident
will be clo-o-o-sed!"
"I should be sorry to trust my money to that man," said Alice.
"Oh, there you make a mistake," said Kit. "You are cautious in the wrong
place, and I shouldn't wonder if you joined us Carmelites before long.
For some reason he thinks that Conybeare's name is worth having on his
'front page,' as he calls it, and I am convinced he will give him his
money's worth. He may even give him more, especially as Jack hasn't got
any. He thinks Jack is very sharp, and he is quite right. You are very
sharp, too, Alice, and so am I. How pleasant for us all, and how right
we are to be friends! Dear me! if you, Jack, and I were enemies, we
should soon make London too hot to hold any of us. As it is, the
temperature is perfectly charming."
"And is this bounder going to make you and Jack very rich?" asked Lady
Haslemere.
"The bounder is going to do his best," laughed Kit; "at least, Jack
thinks so. But it would need a very persevering sort of bounder to make
us rich for long together. Money is so restless; it is always flying
about, and it so seldom flies in my direction."
"It has caught the habit from the world, perhaps," said Alice.
"I dare say. Certainly we are always flying about, and it is so tiresome
having to pay ready money at booking-offices. Jack quite forgot the
other day when we were going to Sandown, and he told the booking-office
man to put it down to him, which he barbarously refused to do."
"How unreasonable, dear!"
"Wasn't it? I'd give a lot to be able to run up a bill with railway
companies. Dear me, it's after three! I must fly. There's a bazaar for
the prevention of something or the propagation of something at
Knightsbridge, and I am going to support Princess Frederick, who is
going to open it, and eat a large tea. How they eat, those people! We
are always propagating or preventing, and one can't cancel them against
each other, because one wants to propagate exactly those things one
wants not to prevent."
"What are you going to propagate to-day?"
"I forget. I believe it is the anti-propagation of prevention in
general. Do you go to the Hungarian ball to-night? Yes? We shall meet
then. _Au revoir!_"
"You are so full of good works, Kit," said Lady Haslemere, with no touch
of regret in her tone.
Kit laughed loudly.
"Yes, isn't it sweet of me?" she said. "Really, bazaars are an excellent
policy, as good as honesty. And they tell so much more. If you have been
to a bazaar it is put in the papers, whereas they don't put it in the
papers if you have been honest. I often have. Bazaars are soon over,
too, and you feel afterwards as if you'd earned your ball, just as you
feel you've earned your dinner after bicycling."
Kit rustled pleasantly downstairs, leaving Alice in the card-room where
they had talked. That lady had as keen a scent for money as Kit herself,
and evidently if Kit denied herself the pleasure of causing a scandal
over this cheating at baccarat (a piquant subject), she must have a
strong reason for doing so. She wanted, so Lady Haslemere reasoned, to
have Alington under her very private thumb, not, so she concluded, to
get anything definite out of him, for blackmail was not in Kit's line,
but as a precautionary measure. She followed her train of thought with
admirable lucidity, and came to the very sensible conclusion that the
interest that the Conybeares had in Alington was large. Indeed, taking
into consideration the utter want of cash in the Conybeare
establishment, it must be immense; for neither of them would have
considered anything less than a fair settled income or a very large sum
of money worth trying for. This being the case, she wished to have a
hand in it, too.
Tom, she knew, had been approached by Mr. Alington and Jack on the
subject of his becoming a director, and she determined to persuade him
to do so. At present he had not decided. Anyhow, to win money out of
mines was fully as respectable as to lose it at cards, and much more
profitable. Besides, the daily papers might become interesting if it was
a personal matter whether Bonanzas were up or Rands down. Tom had a
large interest as it was in Robinsons--whatever they were, and they
sounded vulgar but rich--and she had occasionally read the reports of
the money market from his financial paper, as an idle person may spell
out words in some unknown language. The "ursine operators," "bulls,"
"flatness," "tightness," "realizations"--how interesting all these terms
would become if they applied to one's own money! She had often noticed
that the political outlook affected the money market, and during the
Fashoda time Tom had been like a bear with a sore head. To know
something about politics, to have, as she had, a Conservative leader
ready to whisper to her things that were not officially supposed to be
whispered, would evidently be an advantage if you had an interest in
prices. And the demon of speculation made his introductory bow to her.
It is difficult for those who dwell on the level lands of sanity to
understand the peaks and valleys of mania. To fully estimate the
intolerable depression which ensues on the conviction that you have a
glass leg, or the secret majesty which accompanies the belief that one
is Charles I., is impossible to anyone who does not know the heights and
depths to which such creeds conduct the holder. But the mania for
speculation--as surely a madness as either of these--is easier of
comprehension. Only common-sense of the crudest kind is required; if it
is supposed that your country is on the verge of war, and you happen to
know for certain that reassuring events will be made public to-morrow,
it is a corollary to invest all you can lay hands on in the sunken
consols in the certainty of a rise to-morrow. This is as simple as A B C,
and your gains are only limited by the amount that you can invest. A
step further and you have before you the enchanting plan of not paying
for what you buy at all. Buy merely. Consols (of this you must be sure)
will rise before next settling-day, and before next settling-day sell.
And thus the secret of not taking up shares is yours.
But consols are a slow gamble. They may conceivably rise two points in a
day. Instead of your hundred pounds you will have a hundred and two
(minus brokerage), an inglorious spoil for so many shining sovereigns to
lead home. But for the sake of those who desire to experience this
fascinating form of excitement in less staid a manner there are other
means supplied, and the chiefest and choicest is mines. A single mining
share which, judiciously bought, cost a sterling sovereign may under
advantageous circumstances be worth three or four in a week or two. How
much more stirring an adventure! When we estimate this in hundreds and
thousands, the prospect will be found to dazzle comparatively sober
eyes.
Now, of the people concerned at present in this story, no less than
five, as Kit drove to her bazaar, were pondering these simple things.
Alington was always pondering them and acting on them; Jack had been
pondering them for a full week, Kit for the same period, and Tom
Abbotsworthy was on the point of consenting to become a director. And
Lady Haslemere, thinking over her interview with Kit, said to herself,
with her admirable common-sense, that if there was a cake going, she
might as well have a slice. She had immense confidence in the power of
both Kit and Jack to take care of themselves, and knew well that neither
would have stirred a finger for Mr. Alington, if they had not quite
clearly considered it to be worth their while. And Kit was stirring all
her fingers; she was taking Alington about as constantly as she took her
pocket-handkerchief; she took him not merely to big parties and large
Grundy dinners, but to the intimate gatherings of the brightest and
best. For she was a good wife to Jack, and she at any rate believed that
there was a cake going.
CHAPTER V
TOBY
Lord Evelyn Ronald Anstruther D'Eyncourt Massingbird was not usually
known as all or any of this, but as Toby. It would have been a difficult
matter, requiring a faith of the most preposterous sort, to have stood
in front of him and seriously said, "I believe you to be Lord Evelyn
Ronald Anstruther D'Eyncourt Massingbird," and the results of so doing
might have been quite disconcerting. But having been told he was Toby,
it would have been impossible to forget or to doubt it. The most vivid
imagination could not conceive a more obvious Toby; the identity might
almost have been guessed by a total stranger or an intelligent
foreigner. He was about twenty-four years old (the usual age of Tobys),
and he had a pleasantly ugly face, with a snub nose, slightly freckled.
Blue eyes, in no way beautiful, but very white as to the white and blue
as to the blue, looked honestly out from under a typically
unintellectual forehead, above which was a shock head of sandy hair,
which stood up like a terrier's coat or a doormat, and on which no brush
yet invented had been known to exert a flattening tendency. He was about
five foot ten in height, and broad for that. His hat had a tendency to
tilt towards the back of his head, and he had big, firm hands, callous
on their insides with the constant use of weapons made for the violent
propulsion of balls. He always looked comfortable in his clothes, and
whether he was adorning the streets of London, immaculately dressed and
hot and large, or trudging through heather in homespun, he was never
anything but Toby.
A further incredible fact about him, in addition to his impossible
baptismal name, was that he was Jack Conybeare's younger brother, and
Kit's brother-in-law. Nature, that exquisite humorist who turns so many
dissimilar little figures out of the same moulds, had never shown
herself a more imaginative artist than when she ordained that Jack and
Toby should have the same father and mother. The more you considered
their relationship, the stranger that relationship appeared. Jack, slim,
aquiline, dark, with his fine, taper-fingered hands and the unmistakable
marks of breeding in face and form, was sufficiently remote to all
appearance from Toby--fair, snub-nosed, squat, with his big gloves and
his big boots, and his chair-filling build; but in character they were,
considered as brothers, perfectly irreconcilable. The elder had what we
may call a spider-mind. It wove a thread invisible almost to the eye,
but strong enough to bear the weight of what it was meant to bear.
Obvious issues, the natural consequences of things, Jack passed by in
the manner of an express rushing through a wayside station, and before
Toby, to continue the metaphor, had drawn up, flushed and panting, at
the platform, and read the name on the station board, Jack would be a
gray streamer of smoke on the horizon. But Toby's grasp of the obvious
was as sure as Jack's keen appreciation of subtleties, and though he
made no dragon-fly dartings through the air, nor vanished unaware on
horizon points, he went very steadily along, right in the middle of the
road, and was never in any danger of falling into obvious ditches, or
colliding with anyone who did not unquestionably get in his way, or
where he might be expected to go.
Toby was a person who got continually slapped on the back--a lovable
habit, but one which no amount of diplomacy or thread-spinning will
produce. To slap Jack on the back, for instance, must always, from his
earliest years, have been an impossibility. This was lucky, for he would
have resented it. That nobody ever quarrelled with either of them
appears at first sight a point in common; in reality it illustrates
their dissimilarity. It was dangerous to quarrel with Jack; it was
blankly impossible to quarrel with Toby. You dare not try it with the
one; it was useless to try it with the other.
At the present moment his sister-in-law was trying her utmost to do so,
and failing pitiably. Kit was not accustomed to fail or to be pitiable,
and it irritated her.
"You have no sense, Toby," she was saying. "You cannot see, or you will
not, where your interest lies--yes, and your duty, too."
Now, when Kit talked about duty Toby always smiled. When he smiled his
eyes wrinkled up till they closed, and he showed a row of strong, clean,
useful teeth. Strength, cleanliness, and utility, in fact, were his most
salient features.
Kit leaned back in her chair, waiting for his answer, for Toby got
confused unless you gave him time. They were sitting in the tented
balcony of the Hungarian Embassy, and from within came the rhythm of
dance music and a delicious murmur of voices. It was the evening of the
day of the bazaar, and Kit felt that she had earned her ball. The night
was hot, and as she attempted the hopeless task of quarrelling with Toby
she fanned herself, partly, no doubt, for the sake of the current of
air, but to a psychologist, judging by her face, not without the
intention of fanning the embers of her wrath. She had sat out this dance
with him on purpose, and she was beginning to think that she was wasting
her time.
Toby's smile broadened.
"When did you last do your duty, Kit?" he asked.
"My duty?" said Kit sharply. "We are talking about yours."
"And my duty is----"
"Not to go to that vulgar, stupid music-hall to-morrow night with that
loutish friend of yours from Oxford, but to dine with us, and meet Miss
Murchison. You seem to forget that Jack is your elder brother."
"My duty towards Jack----" began Toby irreverently.
"Don't be profane. You are Jack's only brother, and I tell you plainly
that it is no fun being Lord Conybeare unless you have something to be
Lord Conybeare with. Putting money into the estate," said Kit rather
unwisely, "is like throwing it down a well."
Toby became thoughtful, and his eyes opened again. His mind worked
slowly, but it soon occurred to him that he had never heard that his
brother was famed for putting money into the estate.
"And taking money out of the estate is like taking it out of a well," he
remarked at length, with an air of a person who is sure of his facts,
but does not mean to draw inferences of any kind whatever.
Kit stared at him a moment. It had happened once or twice before that
she had suspected Toby of dark sayings, and this sounded remarkably like
another of them. He was so sensible that sometimes he was not at all
stupid. She made a mental note of how admirable a thing is a perfectly
impenetrable manner if you wish to make an innuendo; there was nothing
so telling.
"Well?" she said at length.
Toby's face expressed nothing whatever. He took off a large eight and
lit a cigarette.
"That's all," he said--"nothing more."
Kit decided to pass on.
"It's all very well for you now," she said, "for you have six or seven
hundred a year, and you happen to like nothing so much as hitting round
balls with pieces of wood and iron. It is an inexpensive taste, and you
are lucky to find it amusing. In your position at present you have no
calls upon you and no barrack of a house to keep up. But when you are
Lord Conybeare you will find how different it is. Besides, you must
marry some time, and when you marry you must marry money. Old bachelors
are more absurd, if possible, than old spinsters. And goodness knows how
ridiculous they are!"
"My sister-in-law is a mercenary woman," remarked Toby. "And aren't we
getting on rather quick?"
"Quick!" screamed Kit. "I am painfully trying to drag you a few steps
forward, and you say we are getting on quick! Now, Toby, you are
twenty-five----"
"Four," said Toby.
"Oh, Toby, you are enough to madden Job! What difference does that
make? I choose that you should be twenty-five! All your people marry
early; they always did; and it is a most proper thing for a young man to
do. Really, young men are getting quite impossible. They won't
dance--you aren't dancing; they won't marry--you aren't married; they
spend all their lazy, selfish lives in amusing themselves and--and
ruining other people."
"It's better to amuse yourself than not to amuse yourself," said Toby.
This, as he knew, was a safe draw. If Kit was at home, out she came.
"That is your view. Thank goodness there are other views," said Kit,
with extraordinary energy. "Why, for instance, do you suppose that I
went down to the wilds of Kensington and opened a bazaar, as I did this
afternoon?"
"I can't think," said Toby. "Wasn't it awfully slow?"
He began to grin again.
"Slow? Yes, of course it was slow; but it is one's duty not to mind what
is slow," continued Kit rapidly, pumping up moral sentiments with
surprising fluency. "Why do you suppose Jack goes to the House whenever
there is a Church Bill on? Why do I come and argue with you and quarrel
with you like this?"
Toby opened his blue eyes as wide as Kit's bazaar.
"Are you quarrelling with me?" he asked. "I didn't know. Try not, Kit."
Kit laughed.
"Dear Toby, don't be so odious and tiresome," she said. "Do be nice. You
can behave so nicely if you like, and the Princess was saying at the
bazaar this afternoon what a dear boy you were."
"So the bazaar wasn't so slow," thought Toby, who knew that Kit had a
decided weakness, quite unaccountable, for Princesses. But he was wise
enough to say nothing.
"And I've taken all the trouble to ask Miss Murchison to dinner just
because of you," continued Kit quickly, seeing her partner out of the
corner of her eye careering wildly about in search of her. "She's
perfectly charming, Toby, and very pretty, and you always like talking
to pretty girls, and quite right, too; and the millions--oh, the
millions! You have no one to look after you but Jack and me, and Jack is
a City man now; and what will happen to the Conybeares if you don't
marry money I don't know. You want money; she wants a Marquis. There it
is!"
"Did you ask her?" said Toby parenthetically.
"No, darling, I did not," said Kit, with pardonable asperity. "I left
that to you."
Toby sighed.
"You go so quick, Kit," he said. "You marry me to a person I've never
yet seen."
Kit drew on her gloves; the partner was imminent.
"Come and see her, Toby--come and see her. That is all I ask. Oh, here
you are, Ted; I've been waiting for you for ages. I thought you had
thrown me over. Good-bye, Toby; to-morrow at half-past eight, and I'll
promise to order iced asparagus, which I know you like."
The two went off, leaving Toby alone. Conversation of this kind with Kit
always reduced him to a state of breathless mental collapse. She caught
him up, so to speak, and whirled him along through endless seas of
prospective alliances, to drop him at the end, a mere lifeless lump, in
unknown localities, with the prospect of iced asparagus as a
restorative. This question of his marriage was not a new one between
them. Many times before Kit had snatched him up like this, and plumped
him down in front of some extraordinarily eligible maiden. But either he
or the extraordinarily eligible maiden, or both, had walked away as soon
as Kit's eye was turned, and made themselves disconcerting to her
schemes. But to-night Kit had shown an unusual vigour and directness.
Selfish and unscrupulous as she was, she had, like everybody else, a
soft spot for Toby, and she could honestly think of nothing more
conducive to his highest advantage than to procure him a wealthy wife.
Wealth was the _sine quâ non_--no other need apply; but in Miss
Murchison she thought she had found very much more. The girl was a
beauty--a real beauty; and though she was not of the type that appealed
personally to Kit, she might easily appeal immensely to Toby. She had
only come out that season, and Kit had met her but once or twice before;
but a very much duller eye than Kit's could have seen that in all
probability she would not be on view in the eligible department very
long. She was American by origin, but had been brought up entirely in
England; and her countrymen observed with pain, and the men of her
adopted country with that patronizing approval over which our
Continental neighbours find it so hard to keep calm, that no one would
have guessed her nationality. Of her father little was known, but that
little was good, for he was understood to be wealthy beyond the dreams
of avarice, having made a colossal pile in some porky or oily manner,
and to have had the good taste not to beget any other children. She and
her mother had been at the bazaar that afternoon, where they had run
across the pervasive Kit, who suddenly saw in her impulsive way that
here at last was the very girl for Toby, wondered at her blindness in
not seeing it before, and engaged them to dine next evening.
Now, Mrs. Murchison had long sighed and pined for an invitation from
Kit, whom she considered to be the topmost flower of the smartest plant
in the pleasant garden of society. At last her wish was fulfilled.
Princes had drunk her champagne, and danced or sat out to her fiddles,
and made themselves agreeable under her palms; but a small and
particular set in society in which Kit most intimately moved had
hitherto had nothing to say to her, and she accepted the invitation with
effusion, though it meant an excuse or a subterfuge to a Countess. But
Mrs. Murchison had picked up the line of London life with astonishing
swiftness and great perspicuity. Her object was to get herself and her
daughter, not into the cleverest or the most amusing, or, as she styled
it, the "ducalest set," in London, but into what she and others, for
want of a better name, called "the smart set," and she had observed, at
first with surprise and pain, but unerringly, that rank counted for
nothing there. She could not have told you, nor perhaps could they, what
did count there, but she knew very well it was not rank.
"Why, we might play kiss-in-the-ring with the Queen and Royal Family,"
she had observed once to her daughter, "but we should be no nearer for
that."
A year ago she would have hoarded a Countess as being a step in the
ladder she proposed to get to the top of, but now she knew that no
Countess, _quâ_ Countess, mattered a straw in the attainment of the goal
for which she aimed; and this particular one, whom she had already
thrown over for Kit, might as well have been a milkmaid in Connecticut
for all the assistance she could give her in her quest. The smart set
was the smart set, here was her creed; Americans had got there before,
and Americans, she fully determined, should get there again. What she
expected to find there she did not know; whether it would be at all
worth the pains she did not care, and she would not be at all
disappointed if it was exactly like everything else, or perhaps duller.
It would be sufficient for her to be there.
In many ways Mrs. Murchison was a remarkable woman, and she had a kind
and excellent heart. She had been the very pretty daughter of a man who
had made a fair fortune in commerce, and had let his children grow up
and get educated as God pleased; but from very early years this daughter
of his had made up her mind that she was not going to revolve for the
remainder of her life in commercial circles, and she had divided her
money fairly evenly between adornments for the body and improvements for
the mind. Thus she had acquired a great fluency in French, and an accent
as remarkable as it was incorrect. In the same way she had read a great
deal of history, and the classical literature of both English tongues;
and though she seldom managed to get her names quite right, both she and
those who heard her were easily able to guess to whom she referred.
Thus, when she alluded to Richard Dent de Lion, though the name sounded
like a yellow flower with a milky stem, there could be no reasonable
doubt that she was speaking of the Crusader; or when she told you that
her husband was as rich as Croesum, those who had ever heard of
Croesus could not fail to see that they were hearing of him now. She
was fond of allusions, and her conversation was as full of plums as a
cake; but as she held the sensible and irrefutable view that
conversation is but a means of making oneself understood, she was quite
satisfied to do so.
Mrs. Murchison was now a big handsome woman of about forty, fresh, of
high colour, and beautifully dressed. In spite of her manifest
absurdities and the surprising nature of her conversation, she was
eminently likeable, and to her friends lovable. There was no mistaking
the honesty and kindliness of her nature; she was a good woman, and in
ways a wise one. Lily, her daughter, who found herself on the verge of
hysterics twenty times a day at her inimitable remarks, had the
intensest affection for her mother, blindly reciprocated; and the
daughter, to whom the wild chase after the smart set seemed perfectly
incomprehensible, was willing that all the world should think her heart
was in it sooner than that her mother should suspect it was not. Mrs.
Murchison herself had begun to forget her French and history a little,
for she was a mere slave to this new accomplishment, social success, and
found it demanded all her time and attention. She worked at it from
morning till night, and from night to morning she dreamed about it. Only
the night before she had thought with extraordinary vividness in her
sleep that her maid had come to her bedside with a note containing a
royal command to sing duets with the Queen quite quietly at 11.30 that
morning, and she had awoke with a pang of rapturous anxiety to find the
vision unsubstantial, and that she need not get up to practise her
scales. She made no secret of her ambitions, but rather paraded them,
and told her dream to the Princess Frederick at the bazaar with huge
_naïveté_. And to see Lily married into the smart set would have caused
her to say her Nunc Dimittis with a sober and grateful heart.
But the smart set was a terribly baffling Will-o'-the-Wisp kind of
affair, or so it had hitherto been to her. A married daughter, an
unmarried daughter even, so she observed, might be steeped in the smart
set, while the mother was, figuratively speaking, in Bloomsbury. You
might robe yourself from head to foot in Balas rubies, you might be a
double Duchess, you might dance a cancan down Piccadilly, you might be
the most amiable of God's creatures, the wittiest, the most corrupt, or
the most correct of the daughters of Eve, and yet never get near it; but
here was Mrs. Lancelot Gordon, who never did anything, was not even an
Honourable, dressed rather worse than Mrs. Murchison's own maid, and yet
was a pivot and centre of that charmed circle. Mrs. Murchison racked her
brain over the problem, and came to the conclusion that no
accomplishment could get you into it, no vice or virtue keep you out.
That was a comfort, for she had no vices. But to-day Kit had asked her
to dinner; the mystic doors perhaps were beginning to turn on their
hinges, and her discarded Countess might continue to revolve on her
unillumined orbit in decent and dull obscurity with her belted Earl.
CHAPTER VI
TOBY'S PARTNER
Toby finished his cigarette when Kit left him, and threw the end over
the balcony into the street. It went flirting through the air like a
small firework, and he saw it pitch on the shoulder of an immense
policeman below, who looked angrily round. And so it was that the
discreet Toby withdrew softly into the ballroom.
It was only a little after one, and the dancing was at its height.
Everyone who intended to come had done so, and no one yet had thought of
going away. From the band in the gallery came the enchanting lilt of the
dance music, with its graceful stress and abatement, making it
impossible not to dance. The light-hearted intoxication of rhythmic
movement entering into the souls of many women whom one would naturally
have supposed to have left their dancing days behind them, for reasons
over which they had no control, had produced the same sort of effect in
them as a warm November day does in the bluebottles who have outlived
the summer, and they were deluding themselves into thinking that "June
was not over, though past her full." The ballroom was ideally occupied;
it was peopled enough, but not overcrowded, and like a whisper
underneath the shouting band you could hear the sibilant rustle of
skirts, and the "sip-sip" of shoes over the well-polished floor.
Kit and her partner were as well matched and graceful a pair as could be
found in London--too well matched, the world said; but the world is
never happy unless it is saying something of the sort, and the wiser
there, among whom even her bitterest friends put Kit, are accustomed to
discount all that is said. To repeat fresh gossip without actually
believing or disbelieving it, and to hear it in the same light-hearted
spirit makes the world as fresh as a daily paper to someone just arrived
from long sea, and Kit's interest in what was said about her was of the
most breezily superficial sort. She never intended that it should be
ever so distantly possible that she should compromise herself, for she
recognised with humble thankfulness how hard she was to compromise. She
had done many risky things in her life, and there was safety in their
very numbers. People would only say that her conduct with So-and-so had
been much riskier, and yet it had come to nothing. Probably, then, this
intimacy with Lord Comber was equally innocent. Other people had merely
looked over hedges and been accused of stealing horses, while Kit, so to
speak, had been found before now with the stolen halter in her hand; and
yet her excellent grace in giving it up at the proper moment to the
proper owner had got her out of what might have been a scrape to a less
accomplished adventurer.
And to-night nobody talked more disagreeably than they had talked scores
of times before. Up to a certain point repetition is the soul of wit; at
least, the point of a joke grows by dwelling on it, but the repetition
in excess is wearisome, and to-night people scarcely said more than
what a beautiful couple they were.
About this there could scarcely be two opinions. Kit was very tall and
slenderly made, and there was a boyish spring and grace about her
dancing which gave a peculiar spontaneousness to this pretty
performance. Ted Comber, a fresh-faced, handsome youth, had no extra
weight on his hands; the two moved with an exquisite unanimity of
motion. Amiable indiscretions and a course of life not indicated in the
educational curriculum had led the authorities both at Eton and Christ
Church to make their parting with him take place sooner than he had
himself intended, but, as Kit said in her best manner, "He was only a
boy then." He was in years not much more than a boy now; in appearance,
especially by artificial light, he was a boy still, and the two numbered
scarcely more than fifty years between them.
But balls are not given in order to furnish a hunting-ground for the
novelist and reformer, and to-night there were few such present. Indeed,
anyone must have had a soul of putty not to have laid criticism aside;
not to have forgotten all that had been said before, and all that might
be said afterwards, in the enchanting moment. This dance had been on the
board some ten minutes when Toby entered; people with winds and what is
known, by an elegant periphrasis, as a superfluity of adipose tissue had
paused; and for a few minutes there were not more than half a dozen
couples on the floor. Kit, secure in the knowledge that no one present
except herself and Jack had been to that City dinner a fortnight before,
had put on again the same orange chiffon creation as she had worn that
night, and she blazed out against the man's dark clothes; she was a
flame in his encircling arm. The room was nearly square, and they danced
not in straight lines up, across and down, but in one big circle, coming
close to the walls only at four points in the middle of the sides of the
room; like some beautiful twin star they moved round a centre, revolving
also on a private axis of their own. Indeed, the sight of them whirling
fast and smoothly in perfect time to the delicious rhythm was so pretty
that no one thought of alluding to their private axis at all. Even the
Hungarian Ambassador, as sprightly a young man of eighty or thereabouts
as you could wish to see, and still accustomed to lead the cotillion,
recognised the superiority of the performance. "Decidedly all the rest
of us cut a poor figure when those two are dancing," he said with
unwonted modesty to Lady Haslemere.
But in a few minutes the room grew crowded again. Recovered couples
sprang up like mushrooms on the floor, and the pace slowed. Lord Comber
steered as no one else could steer, but checks infinitesimal but
infinite could not but occur. It would have been good enough had it not
just now been better.
"We'll wait a moment, Ted," said Kit; "perhaps at the end it will be
emptier again."
She stopped opposite one of the doors.
"Shall we go on to the balcony?" he asked. "There will be no one there."
"Yes. Oh, there is Mrs. Murchison! Take me to her. I'll follow you in a
moment."
Ted swore gently under his breath.
"Oh, leave the Croesum alone," he said. "Do come now, Kit. This is my
last dance with you this evening."
But Kit dropped his arm.
"Fetch Toby," she said under her voice to Lord Comber; "fetch, you
understand, and at once. He is over there." Then, without a pause, "So
we meet again," she said to Mrs. Murchison. "You were right and I was
wrong, for I said, do you remember, that the one way not to meet a
person was to go to the same dance. And did you get all those great
purchases of yours home safely? You were quite too charitable! What will
you do with a hundred and forty fire-screens?--or was it a hundred and
forty-one? Miss Murchison, what magnificent pearls you have! They are
too beautiful! Now, if I wore pearls like yours, people would say they
were not real, and they would be perfectly right."
Miss Murchison was what Kit would have called at first sight an
uncomfortable sort of a girl, very pretty, beautiful indeed, but
uncomfortable. What she should have said to Kit's praise of her pearls
Kit could not have told you, but having made yourself agreeable to
anyone, it is that person's business to reply in the same strain. Else,
what happens to social and festive meetings? But Miss Murchison looked
neither gratified nor embarrassed. Either would have shown a proper
spirit.
"They are good," she said shortly.
Kit kept a weather eye open for Toby. She could see him near, and yet
far, for the room was full, being reluctantly "fetched" by Lord Comber,
who appeared to be expostulating with him. There were still some seconds
to elapse before he could get to them, but Kit had determined to
introduce him then and there to Miss Murchison. Perhaps her beauty would
be more effective than her own arguments.
"It is only quite a little dinner to-morrow," she said to Mrs.
Murchison, in order to fill up the time naturally. "You will have to
take a sort of pot-luck with us. A kind of 'no fish-knife' dinner."
Better and better. This was a promising beginning to the intimacy Mrs.
Murchison craved. It was nothing, she said to herself, to be asked to a
big dinner; the pot-luck dinner was far more to her taste.
"Well, I think that's perfectly charming of you, Lady Conybeare," she
said. "If there's one thing I am _folle_ about, it's those quiet little
dinners, and one gets so little of them. Be it ever so humble, there's
nothing like dining quietly with your friends."
Kit's face dimpled with merriment.
"That's so sweet of you," she said. "Oh, here's Toby. Toby, let me
introduce you to Mrs. Murchison. Oh, what's your name?--I always forget.
It begins with Evelyn. Anyhow, he is Conybeare's brother, you know, Mrs.
Murchison."
Mrs. Murchison did not know, but she was very happy to do so. Also the
informality was charming. But her happiness had a momentary eclipse. She
knew that a man was introduced to a woman, and not the other way about,
but might not some other rule hold when the case was between a plain
miss and the brother of a Marquis? English precedence seemed to her a
fearful and wonderful thing. But Kit relieved her of her difficulty.
"And Miss Murchison, Toby," she said. "Charmed to have seen you again.
Till 8.30 to-morrow;" and she smiled and retreated with Ted.
Blushing honours were raining thick on the enchanted lady. "One thing
leads to another," she said to herself, and here was the brother of
Lord Conybeare endorsing the happy meeting of this afternoon.
Then aloud:
"Very pleased to make your acquaintance," she said, for the phrase was
ineradicable. She had searched in vain for a cisatlantic equivalent, but
could not get hold of one. Like the snake in spring, she had cast off
the slough of many of her transatlanticisms, but "very pleased" was
deeply engrained, and appeared involuntarily and inevitably.
But Toby's inflammable eye had caught the _filia pulchrior_.
"My sister-in-law tells me you are dining with her to-morrow," he said
genially. "That is delightful."
He paused a moment, and racked his brain for another suitable remark;
but, finding none, he turned abruptly to Miss Murchison.
"May I have the pleasure?" he asked. "We shall just have time for a turn
before this is over."
"Of course you may, Lord Evelyn," said her mother precipitately.
Miss Murchison paused for a moment without replying, and Toby, though
naturally modest, told himself that her mother's ready acceptance for
her justified the pause.
"Delighted," she said.
Toby might be described as a good, useful dancer, but no more. People
who persist in describing one thing in terms suitable to another speak
of the poetry and the melody of motion, and the dancing Toby had no more
poetry or melody in his motion than a motor car or a street piano. The
tide of couples, as inexplicable in its ebb and flow as deep
sea-currents, had gone down again, and they had a fairly free floor.
But before they had made the circuit of the room twice Kit and Lord
Comber reappeared, and Kit heaved a thankful sister-in-law's sigh.
"Toby is dancing with the Murchison girl," she said; "and she hardly
ever dances. Now----"
And they glided off on to the floor.
"A design of yours?" asked Ted.
"Yes, all my own. _Ego fecit_, as Mrs. Murchison says. She has millions.
If Jack were dead and I was a man, I should try to marry her myself.
Simply millions, Ted. Don't you wish you had?"
"Certainly; but I am very content dancing with you. I prefer it."
"That is silly," said Kit. "No sane man really prefers dancing
with--with anyone, to having millions."
"Why try the cynical _rôle_? Do you really believe that, Kit?"
"Yes, and I hate compliments. Compliments should always be insincere,
and I'm sure you mean what you say. If they are sincere they are
unnecessary. Oh, it's stopping. What a bore! Six bars more.
Quicker--quicker!"
The coda gathered up the dreamy threads of the valse into a vivid
ever-quickening pattern of sound, and came to an end with a great blare.
The industrious and heated Toby wiped his forehead.
"That was delicious," he said. "Won't you have an ice or something, Miss
Murchison? I say, it is sw--stewing hot, isn't it?"
Lily took his arm.
"Yes, do give me an ice," she said. "Who is that dancing with Lady
Conybeare?"
Toby looked round.
"I don't see them," he said. "But I expect it's Ted Comber. Kit usually
dances with him. They are supposed to be the best dancers in London. Oh
yes, I see them. It is Comber."
"Do you know him?"
"Yes, in the sort of way one knows fifty thousand people. We always say
'Hulloa' to each other, and then we've finished, don't you know."
"You don't like him, apparently."
"I particularly dislike him," said Toby, in a voice that was cheerful
and had the real ring of sincerity.
"Why?"
"Don't know. He doesn't do any of the things he ought. He doesn't shoot,
or ride, or play games. He stays at country houses, you see, and sits
with the women in the drawing-room, or walks with them, and bicycles
with them in the afternoon. Not my sort."
Lily glanced at his ugly, pleasant face.
"I quite agree with you," she said. "I hate men to sit on chairs and
look beautiful. He was introduced to me just now, though I did not catch
his name, and I felt he knew what my dress was made of, and how it was
made, and what it cost."
"Oh, he knows all that sort of thing," said Toby. "You should hear him
and Kit talking chiffon together. And you dislike that sort of
inspection?"
"Intensely. But most women apparently don't."
"No: isn't it funny! So many women don't seem to know a man when they
see him. Certainly Comber is very popular with them. But a man ought to
be liked by men."
Miss Murchison smiled. Toby had got two ices and was sitting opposite
her, devouring his in large mouthfuls, as if it had been porridge. She
had been brought up in the country and the open air, among horses and
dogs, and other nice wholesome things, and this mode of life in London,
as she saw it, under her mother's marchings and manoeuvres to storm
the smart set, seemed to her at times to be little short of insane. If
you were not putting on a dress, you were taking it off, and all this
simply to sit on a chair in the Park, to say half a dozen words to half
a dozen people, to lunch at one house, to dine at another, and dance at
a third. All that was only incidental in life seemed to her to be turned
into its business; everything was topsy-turvy. She understood well
enough that if you lived in the midst of your best friends, it would be
delightful to see them there three times a day, in these pretty
well-dressed settings, but to go to a house simply in order to have been
there was inexplicable. Mrs. Murchison had given a ball only a few weeks
before at her house in Grosvenor Square, about which even after the
lapse of days people had scarcely ceased talking. Royalty had been
there, and Mrs. Murchison, in the true republican spirit, had
entertained them royally. Her cotillion presents had been really
marvellous; there had been so many flowers that it was scarcely possible
to breathe, and so many people that it was quite impossible to dance.
But as success to Mrs. Murchison's and many other minds was measured by
your crowd and your extravagance, she had been ecstatically satisfied,
and had sent across to her husband several elegantly written accounts of
the festivity clipped from society papers. The evening had been to her,
as it were, a sort of signed certificate of her social standing. But to
Lily the ball had been more nearly a nightmare than a certificate:
neither she nor her mother knew by sight half the people who came, and
certainly half the people who came did not know them by sight. The
whole thing seemed to her vulgar, wickedly wasteful, and totally
unenjoyable.
There are those, and her mother was one, who would cheerfully be
asphyxiated in a sufficiently exalted crowd. To be found dead among a
heap of Duchesses would be to her what to a soldier is death in the
forefront of the battle. A mob of fashionable people had eaten and drunk
at her expense, listened to her band and marvelled at her orchids. She
had also to a high degree that excellent though slightly barbarous
virtue which is called hospitality. She liked to feed people. But the
human soul, as poets are unanimous in telling us, is ever aspiring
upwards, and this point reached, Mrs. Murchison, as has been already
stated, desired more. Her tastes became childlike again; she yearned for
simple little dinners with the mystic few, those dinners which never
even appeared in the papers, and were followed by no ball, perhaps not
even by a "few people." Cold roast beef or bits of common bacon on
skewers are sometimes served in the middle of banquets. Mrs. Murchison
longed for her bits of bacon in suitable company. It was very nice to
have the Prince asking after your dachshund's cough, but she had got
past that.
These things passed vaguely through Miss Murchison's mind, as she and
Toby ate their ices. He was like a whiff of fresh air, she thought, to
one who had been breathing a close and vitiated atmosphere. He did not
ask her where she had been last night, and where she had dined to-day,
and who was in the Park in the morning. He seemed to be as little of the
world which danced and capered in the next room, chattering volubly
about itself, as she was herself. On that point she would like
information.
"Do you like London?" she asked, at length, and then thought herself
inane for saying that. It sounded like one of the _banalités_ she found
so desperately stupid.
But Toby understood. He had just finished his ice, and with his spoon he
made a comprehensive circle in the air. "This sort of thing, do you
mean?" he asked. "All these fine people?"
"Yes, just that. All these fine people."
"It seems to me perfectly idiotic," he replied.
"Then why do you come?"
"Why? Oh, because there are a lot of people I really do like--real
friends of mine, you understand, whom I see in this way. And they come
for the same reason, I suppose."
Lily looked at him a moment out of her big dark eyes, and then nodded
gravely.
"Yes, that makes all the difference," she said. "If you have a lot of
friends here, there is a reason for coming. But----" and she stopped
loyally.
Toby guessed what was on the end of her tongue, and with a certain
instinct of delicacy changed the subject, or rather led it away from
what he imagined was in her mind.
"I know what you mean," he said, "and everyone finds it a bore at times.
One goes to a party hoping to see a particular person, and the
particular person is not there. Really, I often wish I was never in
London at all. But, you see, I am private secretary to my cousin
Pangbourne, and while they are in office and the House is sitting I have
to be in town. What would happen to the British Constitution if I
wasn't, I don't dare to think."
Miss Murchison laughed.
"That must be interesting, though," she said. "I should love to be in
the middle of the wheels. I notice in England that a sudden hush always
comes over a room whenever a politician enters. Somebody describes the
English as a race of shopkeepers. It is a very bad definition; they are
much more a race of politicians. The shopkeepers come from America."
Toby shook his head.
"I wish I could notice a hush whenever I came into a room," he said. "I
should feel as if I was making a mark. But I don't."
"But it is interesting, is it not?" asked Miss Murchison--"being
secretary to a Minister, I mean."
Toby considered.
"Last week," he said, "I looked over the bills for the flowers in Hyde
Park. They were immense, so I hope you approve of the flowers. I also
checked the food of the ducks in St. James's Park, so I hope you do not
think they are looking thin. Those ducks are the bane of my existence.
Since then I have done nothing. My cousin comes into the secretaries'
room every morning to see that we are working. He invariably finds us
playing cricket with the fire-shovel. I am usually in."
"That also is interesting," said Miss Murchison. "I love games. Oh,
there's my mother! I think she is looking for me."
"But I may have this dance?" asked Toby.
"I am sure she would allow me," said the girl; and as they both thought
of her mother's feverish acceptance for her of the last, their eyes
met.
"Let us go," said Toby gravely; and he gave her his arm back into the
ballroom.
Miss Murchison, when she left half an hour later with her mother, was
conscious of having enjoyed herself much more than she usually did at
such parties. For the most part they seemed to her sad and strange forms
of amusement. She danced with a certain number of young men, who admired
her pearls or her profile. It is true that both were admirable,
especially her profile. But to talk to them was like talking to order
through a telephone; it seemed impossible to get beyond the _banalités_
of the day. She was labelled, as she knew, as the heiress of the year;
and it was as difficult to forget that as to forget that other people
remembered it. No doubt when she got to know people more intimately it
would be different; but these first weeks of débutancy could not, she
thought, be considered amusing.
But Toby had been a most delightful change. Here was an ordinary human
young man, who did not seem to be merely a weary automaton for going
from one party to another. He was fairly stupid--an unutterable relief;
for if there was one mode of conversation she detested, it was cheap
epigram; and he was quite sensible and natural, a relief more
unutterable.
Her mother drove home with her in a state of elation. The mystic
innermost shrine was going to be unlocked at last.
"Lady Conybeare said that simply no one was coming to-morrow night," she
said. "We shall be six or eight only. Lord Comber, I think, is coming,
and Lord Evelyn. It will be quite an arcanum. She said she would wear
only a tea-gown--I should say a tea-gown only. So _chic_. We will have a
little tea-gown party before the end of the season, dear. You and Lord
Evelyn quite hobnailed together. Did you enjoy yourself, Lily?"
"Yes, very much."
"So glad, darling. I saw no pearls so good as yours. Wear them
to-morrow, dear. Lady Conybeare said she adored pearls. 'Ah,
Margerita!'" And Mrs. Murchison hummed a bar or two of Siebel's song in
a variety of keys. "And the evening after we go to see 'Tristram and
Isolde,'" she continued. "It is a gala night, and Jean de Risky plays
Tristram. How lucky we were to get the box next the royal box! I hope it
won't be very hot, for I hear that everybody stops to the end in
'Tristram.' There is a Leitmotif--or is it Liebstod?--at the end, which
is quite marvellous, I am told. However, we can go late. I hope it will
be in Italian. Italian is the only language for singing. I remember when
I was a girl I used to sing 'La donna è nobile.' I forget who wrote it;
those Italian names are so alike. And what did you talk to Lord Evelyn
about, dear? Was he amusing? We might ask him to our box on Thursday to
see 'Tristram.'"
"I don't think he cares about Wagner," said Lily; "indeed, he told me
so."
"How very unfashionable! We all like Wagner now. Personally I think it
is quite enchanting; but it always sends me fast asleep, though I enjoy
it very much until. But there is a great sameness in the operas; they
are like those novels I used to read by Mrs. Austen--'Sense and
Sensibleness,' and all the rest of them about Bath and other
watering-places. I thought them very tedious; but I was told one must
read them. Or was it Sir George Eliot who wrote them? Dear me, how
stupid of me! Sir George was there to-night, and I never once thought
of telling him how much I enjoyed his charming novels!"
"George Eliot was a woman," remarked Lily, leaning back in her corner,
tremulous with heroically-repressed amusement.
"You may be right, dear; but it isn't a common name for a woman. Of
course, there's George Sand. But if you are right, how lucky I did not
speak about his novels to Sir George! He would not have liked being
mistaken for someone else. Some of those literary men are so sensitive."
"But, you see, he did not write any of those novels," said Lily, with a
sudden little spasm of laughter.
"No, dear, that is just what I was saying. How you catch one up! My
dearest, I am so glad you enjoyed yourself this evening. Sometimes I
have thought you looked a little bored and tired. Really, London is
charming! So much _jeu d'esprit_ about it, is there not? And to-morrow
we dine at Lady Conybeare's! How pleasant, and what a wonderful dress
she had on this evening! She made me feel quite a dodo--I should say a
dowdy."
Lily broke into a sudden peal of laughter, and her mother beamed
good-humouredly.
"Laughing again at your poor mother," she said, patting her hand. "You
are always laughing, Lily; you are a perfect _fille de joie_. Dear me!
I'm always saying the wrong word. Here we are, darling. Get out very
carefully, because my dress is all over."
Lily stepped out into a perfect mob of powdered footmen who lined the
steps of the Murchison mansion. Mrs. Murchison, when she took her house,
gave what she called _bête noire_ to a celebrated firm of London
decorators (meaning, it is to be supposed, _carte blanche_) to make it
as elegant and refined as money could. The result was an impression of
extraordinary opulence; and the eminent firm of decorators, wise in
their generation, had pleased Mrs. Murchison very well. Not the smallest
part of her gratification was the immense sum she had to pay them. Money
meant almost nothing to her, but it meant a good deal to other people;
and to be able to say truthfully that one ceiling had cost a couple of
thousand pounds was a solid cause of self-congratulation. Indeed, the
contemplation of the cheque she had drawn pleased her nearly as much as
what the cheque had accomplished.
She paused a moment in the hall, while one footman took off her cloak
and handed it to another, and looked contentedly round on the stamped
leather and the old oak, the Louis XIV. chairs, the Nankin ware, and the
Persian rugs; and her mind went back for a second to the days of
pitch-pine and horsehair, and in her excellent heart there rose a sudden
thrill of thankfulness. Lily was already on the stairs, and her mother's
eye followed her, and rested there so long that the third footman had
closed the door, and stood to attention, waiting for her to move. And
one hair of Lily's head was dearer to her than all the old oak and the
opulence and the powdered footmen. She gave a heavy sigh, all mother.
"Put the lights out, William," she said, "or is it Thomas?"
CHAPTER VII
THE SOLITARY FINANCIER
Mr. Alington had not been present at the ball at the Hungarian Embassy,
although Kit had taken the trouble to get him an invitation. By the
evening mail had come a long report from his Australian manager, and as
the report required considerable digestion, he, as always, put business
before pleasure, especially since he did not dance, and devoted the
evening to digesting it. It was all a report should be, concise, clear,
and full, and since he had hitherto known very little, technically
speaking, about his new venture, it demanded long and solitary
consideration. There was a very careful map sent with it, drawn to
scale, with the reef where found marked in red, where conjectured in
yellow.
West Australian mining at this time was but in its infancy. A few
reports only had reached England about unexplored goldfields of
extraordinary richness, and, as is incident to first reports, they had
gained but slender credence. But Mr. Alington had only just come back
from Queensland; he had seen gold-bearing quartz, he had made a few
tentative experiments to prove the richness of the ore, and had
subsequently bought a very large number of claims at a comparatively low
cost. Some of these he fully expected would turn out to be worthless, or
scarcely worth the working; others he soberly believed would be found
to be very rich. And when he opened his manager's report on the night of
the Hungarian ball, he had no more certain information about them.
The manager advised, consonantly with Alington's own desire, that a
group of five mines should be started, which together embraced all his
claims. In number one (see map) there was, as Alington would recollect,
a very rich vein of gold, which had now been traced in bore-holes
through numbers four and five. Numbers two and three were outliers from
the direct line of this vein, but in both a good deal of outcrop gold
might be profitably worked. All, so said the manager, were, as far as
could be at present seen, well worth working, for the two on which the
deeper vein did not lie had gold in smaller veins close to the surface,
which could be got at with comparatively little cost. It was not yet
known whether there was any deeper vein in them.
Then followed a good deal of technical advice. The main difficulty, as
Mr. Alington would remember, was water, and they must be prepared for
heavy expenses in this item. But otherwise the property could not be
better. Of the specimens sent at random for examination, those from
numbers one, four, and five were very rich, and the yield appeared to be
not less than five ounces to the ton. This was very high, but such were
the results. The reef from which they were taken was five feet thick.
Then followed some discussion as to processes; there was certainly much
to be said for cyanide, but he would not recommend corrosion. It was
tediously long, and there was some talk of prohibiting women from being
employed in it. Certainly the white lead produced by it would bring it
under the head of dangerous trades. In numbers two and three the ore
was very refractory, and it was curious to find a vein so difficult in
the matter of gold extraction close by the vein of one, four, and five.
Hitherto, in spite of repeated experiments, they had only been able to
recover 20 per cent. of the gold it contained. But a new process was
being tried in certain mines in the Rand--the Bülow, was it
not?--perhaps Mr. Alington would go into it and cable results. The worst
of these chemical processes was that they were so expensive.
Mr. Alington looked more than ever like a butler of superior
benevolence, as he sat at his table by a green-shaded reading-lamp, and
made himself master of this excellent report. As he read, he inscribed
from time to time neat little notes in pencil on the margin of the page,
and from time to time jotted down some figures on his blotting-pad. His
rooms, above a gunmaker's in St. James's Street--a temporary premise
only--were admirably furnished for the wants of a business man of
refined tastes and simple desires. A large revolving bookcase full of
works of reference stood at his elbow, and a telephone was on the table
before him. He was something of a connoisseur in pictures, and in his
house on the Sussex Downs, to which he was extensively adding, he had a
really fine collection of English masters. But the London fogs and
corrosive smoke spelled death to pigments, and here in his modest
quarters in London he had only prints. But these were truly admirable.
Reynolds' Lady Crosby undulated over the fireplace; Lady Hamilton smiled
irresistibly on him from under her crown of vine leaves if he looked at
the opposite wall; by her sat Marie Antoinette in an old-gold frame of
French work, and Mrs. Siddons was a first state with the coveted
blotted edge.
But to-night Mr. Alington had no eye for these enchanting ladies; he sat
long and studiously with the report in front of him, his broad,
intelligent face alert with his work. From time to time he reached out a
firm, plump hand to take a cigarette from a silver box which stood by
his telephone, but often he sat with it unlit for ten minutes or so,
absorbed in the page; or, again, he would put it down still only half
smoked, as he made one of his little calculations, forget about it, and
reach his hand out absently for another. In this way before midnight
there were some half-dozen in his ash-tray scarcely touched. A
spirit-case and a siphon stood on a tray to his right, and an hour
before he had mixed himself a mild whisky-and-soda, which he had not yet
tasted.
The silver bell of his Sèvres clock had already struck one when he took
up the report, folded it carefully, and put it back in its registered
envelope. The map, however, he spread out on the table in front of him,
and continued to study it very attentively for ten minutes more. That,
too, he then put in the envelope, and, leaning back in his chair, lit a
cigarette in earnest and smoked it through. He was a little
short-sighted, and for reading, particularly at night, he wore
gold-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a scholastic, almost a theologian
aspect. But these had long ago been pushed up on his forehead; the
theologian had evidently some great matter in debate.
At length he rose, still slowly, and stood for a moment in profound
thought. Then, with a sudden briskness, as of a man who had made up his
mind, he took the envelope, and, putting it into a drawer in his
knee-hole table, turned the key upon it.
"It will be one of the very biggest deals," he remarked to himself.
A grand piano by Bechstein stood at the other side of the room, and
Bach's St. Matthew Passion Music was open upon it. Mr. Alington took it
up and turned over the pages with a loving reverence. He paused a
moment, and hummed in his beautiful tenor voice the recitative of "And
Peter went out," and then, lighting the candles, played a few crescendo
chords, and plunged into the intricacies of the great double chorus of
the lightnings and thunders. The sonorous and terrible fugue grew and
grew under his deft hands, rising from crescendo to crescendo with its
maddened, tumultuous ground-bass. A pause of a bar, and with a great
burst he attacked the second part. He sang the air of "the bottomless
pit" with full voice, while his hands quivered mistily in the frenzied
chromatic accompaniment. The appalling terrors of the music possessed
him; he seemed like a man demented. In the last six bars he doubled the
bass as if written for pedals, and with the tierce de Picardy finished
in a crashing chord.
Mr. Alington pushed his rather scanty hair back from his forehead and
gave a great sigh full of reverential awe, the sigh of a religious
artist. He was a true musician, and his own admirable performance of the
wonderful text moved him; it smelled of the flames. Then after a moment
he turned to the last chorus, the most perfect piece of pathos ever
translated into sound, and played it through with all the reticence and
sobriety of his utmost art. The wailing cadences, the simple phrases,
touched him profoundly. Unlike Mrs. Murchison, he did not consider
himself bound to worship Wagner, although the operas did not sound to
him the least alike. He would have told you that he thought him
artistically immoral, that he violated the canons of music, as binding,
so he considered, on musicians as is the moral code on a civilized
society. "A brilliant savage," he said once of that master; "but I know
I am unfashionable."
He sat for a long minute perfectly still when he had finished the
chorus, as absorbed in the thought of it as he had been in the mines
half an hour before. Unaffected moisture stood in the man's eye; his
face was that of a stout and rapturous saint in a stained-glass window
contemplating some beatific vision. He was alone, and perfectly honest
with himself. At length he shut the piano very softly, as if afraid of
disturbing the exquisite sweetness and melancholy beauty of the music by
any other sound, and, candle in hand, went to his bedroom. An admirable
reproduction of Holman Hunt's "Lux Mundi" hung over his fireplace; the
"Triumph of the Innocents" was directly above his anchorite-looking bed.
They were favourite pictures of his, not only for their subject, but for
the genuineness of their feeling. They seemed to him to have grasped
something of the simplicity of the real pre-Raphaelite school--something
of its soberness, its constant love of form, its childlike
straightforwardness. There was an old oak _prie-dieu_ by his bedside,
with several well-thumbed books of devotion on it, and he knelt there a
full ten minutes before he got into bed. He was thankful for many
things--his health, his wealth, his perseverance, his brains, his power
of appreciating beautiful things; and he prayed for their long
continuance and well-being fervently.
Mr. Alington was a sound sleeper and an early riser, and neither his new
and dizzy schemes nor the pathos of the Passion Music kept him awake. He
had various appointments in the City on the following morning, and was
going to lunch with Lord Conybeare at White's. Jack was not there when
he arrived, and he had to solace his waiting moments with the inspection
of the room set aside for the reception of strangers. It was furnished
with a table, on which stood an empty inkstand and a carafe of
stale-looking water, two horsehair chairs, a weighing-machine, and a row
of hat pegs hung up inside a shelfless bookcase. He hoped, however, that
he would not in the future have to confine himself to the stranger's
room when he made an appointment there, since Jack had put him up for
the membership of the club, got Tom Abbotsworthy to second him, and had
induced a large number of members to append their noble names to his
candidature.
Jack came in before long, looking as he always looked, even in the most
broiling weather--perfectly cool, unharassed, and ill to quarrel with.
He never seemed to get either hot or dirty, even in the underground;
smuts passed him by, and settled on the noses of his less fortunate
neighbours.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," he said. "Let us have lunch at once. You
have not been here long, I hope."
"Only a few moments," said Alington; "and I fancy I was here before my
time."
"A fine habit," murmured Jack. "How punctual we should be between us!"
They entered the dining-room, which was rather empty, and took their
seat at a small table a little removed from other lunchers.
"I did not see you last night at the Embassy," said Jack. "I thought you
were sure to be there. Kit told me she had an invitation sent you, and
busy men like you always seem to have time for everything."
"One has all the time there is," said Alington; "and I meant to go. But
the mail brought me news--important news from Australia."
"Indeed? Good news, I hope."
"Excellent news. We shall very soon require your services."
"Ah! What will you drink?"
"Thanks, I never touch wine at lunch. A little water, please. I am a bit
of an ascetic in certain ways. Yes, the news was excellent. I shall get
out a prospectus at once, and float the companies. Out of the five
mines, the same reef, a very rich one, runs through three. The other two
are outliers from this reef, but there appears to be a good deal of
surface gold. They ought to begin paying at once almost. I propose
making two groups out of these five mines--one comprising the outliers,
the other three the main reef. Or we might amalgamate them later. I
strongly recommend your purchasing these outliers in large quantities.
That, at least, is what I intend to do myself."
Jack laughed.
"It is easy to recommend my making large purchases," he said; "and I
wonder if I could run up a bill for them. But circumstances over which I
have long ceased to have any control----"
Mr. Alington held up his large white hand.
"You will not need to cover," he said. "Pay the first call, or, at most,
the first two calls. I assure you that that will be all that is
necessary. Unless I am much more mistaken than I have ever been in my
life, the price will rise very soon and very considerably. You must
remember that you draw a salary as a director. If you wish, I will
advance that for this year."
"That would be very convenient," observed Jack with truth and candour.
"The first call will be half a crown," continued Alington. "A thousand
pounds will thus enable you to command eight thousand shares."
"It is a long time since I have had eight thousand anythings," remarked
Jack; "Of course, I don't count debts. I never count debts. But what
will happen to me if the shares do not go up?"
"The shares will go up," said Alington dryly. "I should advise you to
put yourself entirely in my hands about this. I simply cannot be wrong.
As a director, you are bound to hold shares. I recommend you to put the
greater part of them into these two outlying mines."
"I ask nothing better than to be guided by you," said Jack. "Many thanks
for the hint."
Mr. Alington waved the thanks away, as if they were disproportionately
large to the favour bestowed.
"And I should like to have a meeting of the directors on Tuesday," he
said, "if that will suit you and Lord Abbotsworthy. I am going to see
him this afternoon. I propose to employ my own brokers, men whom I have
dealt with for years."
By degrees the room filled up, and, as the tables near them had begun to
be occupied, they dismissed for the present the subject of the mines.
Jack was more than content to leave his own financial venture in
Alington's hands, for he felt convinced that he was playing fair with
him. Habitually somewhat cynical, he would have thought twice about
going bail for his most intimate acquaintance; but he believed that
Alington, as he himself candidly said, was acting for his own interests
in making it worth a Marquis's while to join the board. About Alington's
ability he had found no two opinions; extensive inquiries showed him
that on all hands he was considered the shrewdest of the shrewd. The
market had already got hints about the new issue, and was waiting with
some impatience for the publication of its prospectus. And the interest
extended far beyond the professional operators; the British public, as
Alington had said, were nearly ripe to go mad on the subject of
Australian gold, and he had chosen his moment well.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SIMPLY NOBODY
The "quiet dinner, simply nobody," to which Kit had invited the
gratified Mrs. Murchison and her daughter the night before had grown
like a rolling snowball during the hours of the Hungarian ball. If you
are having a quiet dinner, one more does not make any difference or
change the character of the entertainment, and there had been many such.
Among others, Kit had met Alice Haslemere in the Park next morning, and
the latter had made an appeal _ad misericordiam_ to her.
"I am bidden to meet a Serene Transparency or a Transparent Serenity of
some sort to-night," she had said. "Who? Oh, some second-class little
royalty made in Germany, and I don't intend to go, and have said so. I
gave an excuse, Kit; I gave you as my excuse, because you are a sort of
privileged person, and even royalty lets you do as you choose. How do
you manage it, dear? I wish you would tell me. Anyhow, I said that you
asked me to dine to-night six weeks ago. You see, I owe you one over
that disingenuous way you treated me about Jack and the baccarat. So you
did ask me, didn't you?"
Kit slowed down; she was riding a white bicycle picked out with crimson.
"Seven weeks ago, Alice," she said; "and if you had forgotten I should
never have forgiven you. Quite quietly, you know; and so we are quits.
Lady Conybeare's dinner," she said with some ceremony, "will be served
as usual at eight-thirty."
They were both riding the wrong side of the road, and Lady Haslemere
cast an offended look at her father's coachman, who did not recognise
her, and made way for the carriage.
"I knew it was an old, old engagement," she said, with feeling. "And who
is coming? I forget; it is so long since you told me."
"Murchison _mère et fille_," said Kit; "and the _fille_ is going to
marry Toby. You just see. Also Ted and Toby and the baccarat man. Jack
is very thick with him just now, and my ladyship smells money. Oh,
Alice, we might play baccarat again to-night; I was thinking that it
would be rather tiresome having to play gooseberry to Toby all the
evening, but a hand at cards would help to pass the time, would it not?
Let's see, baccarat is the game where you have to try and get nine,
isn't it? How pleasant! There are some other people coming, too, and
there will probably be more before evening. I notice that when there are
dinners for Transparencies people ask me to ask them. I am a sort of
refuge from royalty."
"Yes, and how transparent!" remarked Lady Haslemere.
"Isn't it? and what a bad joke! But wear a tea-gown, Alice, because I
told Mrs. M. to do so. Yes, we'll play detectives on the Alington this
evening. I hope he'll cheat again. It must be so amusing to be a real
detective. I think I shall become one if all else fails. And most things
have failed."
"To see if shopping takes so long, and whether the club accounts for
late hours," quoted Lady Haslemere, with a touch of regret. "But, Kit,
what a blessing it is that one does not feel bound to watch one's
husband! Haslemere is so safe, you know; one might as well watch St.
Paul's Cathedral to see if it flirted with St. Mary Magdalene's. It
would bore me to death watching him. Only once have I seen him at all
excited."
"Who was the happy lady?" asked Kit, with interest.
"It wasn't a lady at all--not even me. It was a wire puzzle, and he said
it was mathematically impossible, and woke me up about three in the
morning to tell me so. He was really quite feverish about it. But in
demonstrating to me how impossible it was he accidentally did it, upon
which he became perfectly normal, and we lived happily ever afterwards."
They turned into the road north of the Serpentine by the Achilles
statue, and quickened their pace.
"One always does live happily ever afterwards," said Kit thoughtfully.
"Truth is quite as strange as fiction. There's the old Duchess--what a
cat! And just look at her wig all sideways! But I am also thankful that
one's husband is not a detective. Jack would make such a bad one. I
should be ashamed of him."
"I suppose he would. He is clever," said Alice, "and criminals are so
short-sighted. They make the obvious mistakes. But Jack would make a
ripping criminal."
"That is just it. As a detective Jack would overlook the obvious things
because they are so obvious. Consequently, he would never find out
anything, because criminals always make stupid mistakes, not clever
ones. Jack never found out that the mine man cheated at baccarat, for
instance. Oh, I forgot, you guessed that. Look, there's Ted. How badly
he rides!"
"And he never finds out about Ted," remarked Lady Haslemere, with
extreme dryness.
"Never. You see, there's nothing to find out. I always tell him what a
darling Ted is, and so he never thinks he is a darling. I'm very fond of
Ted, but--but---- After all, frankness pays better than anything else,
especially when you have nothing to conceal."
Lady Haslemere considered the proposition for a moment, but found
nothing to say about it.
"How is the mine man?" she asked abruptly.
"Green bay-trees. So he must be wicked. A few nights ago, when he dined
with us, I asked him to sing after dinner, and he sang a sort of evening
hymn in four sharps. Don't you know the kind? He has a really beautiful
voice, and it nearly made me cry, I felt so regretful for something I
had forgotten. Now, that shows he must be wicked. Good people only make
me yawn, because they try and adapt themselves to me and talk about
worldly things. And it is only wicked people who sing hymns with real
feeling, who make me want to cry. Luckily, they are rare."
"And the mines?" asked Alice.
"Well, Jack is excited about the mines, like Haslemere with the wire
puzzle, and when Jack is excited it means a good deal. He told me that
if things went decently we should be solvent again--it sounds like a
chemical--in fact, the mines are playing up. For to make Jack and me
solvent, Alice, means a lot."
They had reached the Serpentine, and Kit dismounted and rested by the
rails. It was a typically fine June day. The sky was cloudless, the
trees were comparatively green, large wood-pigeons wandered fatly about,
and childlike old gentlemen were sailing miniature yachts across the
water.
"What a pity one is not a person of simple pleasures!" remarked Lady
Haslemere. "There is an old gentleman there who takes more delight in
his silly little boat than you do in the prospect of solvency, or
Haslemere even in a new wire puzzle. How happy he must be and how dull!
I think dulness is really synonymous with happiness. Think of cows! You
never found an absorbing cow, nor an unhappy one. The old gentleman has
eaten a good breakfast; he will eat a good lunch. And he has probably
got a balance at his bank."
"It's all stomach," said Kit regretfully--"all except the balance, I
mean."
"Yes, that's what it comes to. So we shall play detectives to-night,
Kit."
Kit started; she was absorbed in the toy yacht.
"Detectives? Oh, certainly," she replied. "But I almost wish we were
wrong about the whole concern."
"The mine man cheated," said Alice, with decision. "I was thinking of
asking Tom whether he saw."
"Oh, don't do that," said Kit. "We don't want a scandal. Look!"
A squall shattered the reflections in the calm water, and the old
gentleman's toy yacht bowed to it and skimmed off like a swallow.
"Oh, how nice!" cried Kit, who was rapidly taking the colour of her
surroundings. "Alice, shall we save up our money and buy a little toy
yacht? Think how happy we should be!"
"If you are going to play the milkmaid, Kit," said Alice severely, "I
shall go home. I won't play milkmaid for anybody. Playing gooseberry to
Toby is nothing to it."
Kit sighed.
"Dear old gentleman!" she said. "Alice, I would give anything to be an
old gentleman with white whiskers and a silly little yacht. Yes, I know,
it is an impossible dream. About the baccarat, what were you saying?"
"I have things to say, if you will be so kind as to attend. Try to
forget about your white whiskers, Kit."
"Yes, I will. There were no such white whiskers."
"Last night," said Lady Haslemere, "I lost two hundred and forty pounds
and sixpence."
"How sixpence? What small stakes you must have been playing! Was it the
game where you try to get nine?"
"Yes," said Alice, "and I lost the sixpence because I dropped it on the
floor. I don't know how I got it, and I don't know what happened to it."
"Like Melchisedech," put in Kit.
"Exactly. Anyhow, I dropped it, and it just shows what extraordinary
people people are. We all took candles and grovelled on the ground
looking for that sixpence. Losing it annoyed me more than I can say. I
didn't care so much about the rest."
"I should have cared much more," said Kit very fervently. "But you are
quite right. And it explains to a certain extent how a very rich man
like Mr. Alington can cheat over a few shillings."
"I dreamed about the sixpence too," said Alice. "I thought my salvation
depended on it."
Kit did not reply at once.
"That seems inexpensive," she said at length. "I would go as far as
that. Look at the yacht--oh, I forgot, I mustn't look at the yacht.
Alice, I believe these mines are a big affair. Jack got up this morning
at nine in order to be in the City by half-past eight, and it takes a
lot to make him as punctual as that. Are you going to take a hand in
them?"
"I want to, but Tom says no. He says he has more opportunity of judging,
or something tedious, and will make enough for us both. He is willing to
invest for me, but that is no fun."
"That is so like Jack," said Kit. "He wants me to have nothing to do
with the mines. He expects to make enough for two, which is absurd,
considering that nobody can possibly make enough for one. But I shall
call myself Miss de Rougemont, spinster, care of the Daily Chronicle, or
something, and so invest."
"Have you got a little nest-egg, dear?" asked Alice sympathetically.
"How nice! I always have, but the stupid cards ate a big piece of the
yolk last night."
"I know; they do. But, on the other hand, they fill it up again. I
expect most women have nest-eggs of some sort. It may be money, or
virtue, or vice, or secrets. Well, I'm going to drop mine slap into the
Australian goldfields."
"I intend to be cautious," said Lady Haslemere. "But just to spite Tom I
shall risk something. Tom was most tiresome and interfering. He says
women know nothing about business. A lot he knows himself! If I had to
pick out one man eminently unfitted to be director of anything, it would
be Tom."
"I can't have Jack left out in the cold like that," said Kit.
"They are a pretty pair. Tom's honest; that is all that can be said for
him."
Kit screamed with laughter.
"I bet you that Jack is as honest as Tom," she said. "But that is just
the way with your family, dear. They all think that they have a monopoly
of the cardinal virtues, just as Mr. Leiter thought he could have a
corner in corn. But, seriously, I do hope and trust that Alington's
mines are sound. Think how the Radical papers would shout if
something--well, if something untoward happened. Salaries, you know!
Supposing the British public dropped a lot of money and there was an
inquiry? Personally, I think Jack is rash to be chairman. He is paid for
his name--he knows that perfectly well; but directors are supposed to be
dimly responsible. And his boss cheats at baccarat! Also I think he
shouldn't have a salary as director; that doesn't look well."
"That will surely be periphrased in the accounts, won't it?" asked
Alice.
"I hope so; periphrasis covers a multitude of cheques."
They had got round to Hyde Park Corner again, and rode slowly through
the gate into the roaring street. Kit's eye brightened at the sight of
life; she forgot about her dream of white whiskers.
"I think gold-mines are an excellent form of gambling," remarked Alice.
"You can play directly after breakfast. Now, one can't play cards
directly after breakfast. I tried the other day, but it was a hopeless
failure. Even naturals looked horrid by daylight."
"Gold-mines are a tonic," said Kit "You take them after breakfast like
Easton's syrup, and they pick you up wonderfully. You should see how
brisk Jack is getting in the morning."
"Well, _au revoir_, dear. Half-past eight, isn't it? May Tom come too?"
"Oh yes, and Haslemere if you like," said Kit, turning up Park Lane.
"I don't like," called out Alice shrilly, going straight on.
Kit giggled at intervals all the way home.
Mrs. Murchison's cup of happiness was very full that evening. Though the
quiet little dinner had grown about eighteen, yet everyone was of Kit's
own particular set, and it was what Kit called a "Christian
dinner"--that is to say, everyone called each other by their Christian
names. "So much nicer than a heathen dinner," she said to Mrs.
Murchison. "You may meet cannibals there."
Mrs. Murchison herself was taken in by Tom Abbotsworthy, and it is
doubtful which of them enjoyed their conversation most. She was
enchanted to find herself with him, and her own remarks were really
memorable.
"I just adore English society," she said over the first mouthfuls of
soup. "Our brightest talkers in America cannot be compared with the
ordinary clubmen in London. And the dinners, how charming!"
"You find people amusing?" asked Tom.
"Yes, and the substantiality of it. Not only the viands and the drinks,
but the really improving conversation--the--the _tout à fait_."
Tom had the greatest of all social gifts--gravity.
"You think people have less _tout à fait_ in America?" he asked.
"There's none of it; and now I come to think of it, I mean _tout
ensemble_. How quick of you to see what I meant! But that's just it. My
heart--and I told Mr. Murchison so the first time I saw him--is English.
My head may be American, but my heart is English. Those were my words,
_ipse dixit_."
"Very remarkable," said Tom.
"The air of dignity," continued Mrs. Murchison (soup always thawed her),
"and the simile of tastes which I find in England! The wealth without
ostensity--I should say ostentiousness! The solid comfort and no
gimcrackiness!"
"I am afraid you will find plenty of gimcrackiness if you go to the
suburbs," said Tom.
"I haven't yet projected any trips to the suburbs," said Mrs. Murchison
with some dignity.
"Of course not. The proper definition of suburbs is the place to which
one does not go. They are merely a negative geographical expression."
"Well, I'm an Anglophobe," said Mrs. Murchison with conviction; "and I
believe nothing against England, not even its suburbs. But what would
you say, Lord Abbotsworthy, was the main tendency of the upper classes
in England?"
Tom was slightly puzzled.
"Tendency in what line?" he asked.
"By tendency I mean the direction in which they are advancing?"
"We are advancing towards America," he replied, after a moment's
thought. "That is where our fiction goes, and that is whence our
inventions come."
Mrs. Murchison dropped a large truffle off her fork, and remained a
moment with it poised.
"I guess that's deep," she said. "I shall cable that to Mr. Murchison."
Tom wondered silently whether Mr. Murchison would be as much puzzled by
it as he was himself; but his wife proceeded to elucidate.
"The fictions are the inventions, you mean," she said. "The one goes to
where the other comes from. The oneness of the two countries, in fact.
The brightest thing I've heard this summer," she observed.
Tom was lost in contemplation at the thought of the deep gloom in which
all else that Mrs. Murchison had heard this summer must be involved, and
he was grateful when that lady, after a reflective pause on his dazzling
remark, changed the subject.
"What a lovely man Lord Evelyn is!" she said.
"Lord Evelyn? Oh, Toby! Yes, he's an excellent fellow."
"By lovely, I do not refer to his personal appearance," said Mrs.
Murchison, "for that is homely. But by lovely I refer to his happy and
amiable disposition."
"You have hit him off completely," said Tom. "Happy and amiable is just
what Toby is."
Mrs. Murchison's mind went off for a moment on a maternal excursion at
the sight of Lily and Toby, who were talking eagerly together, but came
quickly back again.
"And the vivacity at present depicted in his face is considerable," went
on Mrs. Murchison in a burst of analytic intuition. "I just adore
vivacity. Vivacity without screaming, Lord Abbotsworthy, is what I just
adore. Mr. Murchison is very vivacious; but to hear him when he is being
vivacious, why,--you'd think he had the chicken-pox--I should say
whooping-cough."
"That must be very alarming until you are used to it," said Tom.
"It is that. And the choking fit which sometimes ensues on his
hilarity--why, I have seen times and again his life hung by a hair, like
the sword of Demosthenes at Belshazzar's feast."
Mrs. Murchison delivered herself of this surprising allusion with the
most touching confidence. She liked a well-turned sentence, and repeated
it softly to herself.
"Such anxieties are inseparable from the union of the married life,"
said Tom in a voice that trembled slightly.
Kit from the other side of the table had just burst out into a loud
meaningless laugh, and he suspected that she had overheard.
"That's what I say," answered Mrs. Murchison; "and that's what the
Prayer-Book says. The joys and the sorrows; the opportunities and the
importunities."
This was slightly cryptic, but it was probable that importunity was to
be taken as the opposite of opportunity. Tom chanced it, though he did
not seem to remember anything in the Prayer-book which suggested the
widest parallel to Mrs. Murchison's quotation. She went ahead in such a
surprising manner in conversation that it was really difficult to keep
up. She positively scoured the plains of thought.
"You find the opportunities, I am sure, much more numerous than the
importunities," he said, faint, yet pursuing. "Yes, champagne."
"And that's just beautifully put, Lord Abbotsworthy," said Mrs.
Murchison.
The tide of conversation changed, and set to opposite sides. Toby and
Lily alone refused to obey the action of the tide, as if they were a
rebel moon, which demanded a system of its own, refusing allegiance
elsewhere, and continued to talk, regardless of the isolated unit they
left on each side of them. Mrs. Murchison, who liked the agreeable
hovering of the mind over first one subject and then another, which
reminded her, she said, of the way in which the puma birds in the
Southern States sucked honey from various flowers without alighting, was
instantly involved in a sort of double-barrelled conversation with Lord
Comber about the check system of baggage, and the relative position of
women in England and the United States of America.
As dinner went on conversation became louder and more desultory. No one
listened particularly to what anyone else was saying; the tendency for
everyone to talk at once (this may have been the tendency of the upper
classes which Mrs. Murchison had inquired about) became more marked, and
the inimitable atmosphere of laughter was abroad. At Kit's house
everyone always left the dining-room together as soon as cigarettes were
handed round, for her excellent social sense told her that when people
were getting on well (and at her house they always did), it was absurd
for a party to go through the refrigerating process of isolation of the
sexes, and waste time in thawing again. Besides, she considered it
obsolete for men to sit over wine; nobody ever drank now, it was only in
England that so absurd a form was kept up.
Some of the party were going on to a vague elsewhere, and Mrs.
Murchison's eye caught Lily's soon after ten. She was most anxious on
this first occasion not to outstay her welcome.
"It's been just too charming, Lady Conybeare," she said; "but Lily and I
must go. We've got to go here and there, on and on till morning."
Kit rose. Her plan was prospering, for Lily and Toby were still talking
together, and she felt particularly pleased with herself and everybody
else.
"Too unkind of you to go," she said; "and if you don't come to see us
again very soon, now that you know the way, I shan't forgive you. Send
me a line any day and come to lunch. I am almost always in for lunch.
And has Toby been making himself pleasant, Miss Murchison? He can when
he likes. I saw him shaking with laughter at something you were telling
him at dinner, and I longed to shout across the table and ask what it
was. Good-night! Too tiresome that you have to go! Conybeare and I are
going to be very domestic this evening, and not set one foot out, but
sit and play cat's-cradle together when the others have gone. Mind, I
only let you go under the distinct understanding that you will come back
very soon, unless we've bored you both beyond forgiveness."
Jack went down with them to the front-door, and Kit as far as the head
of the stairs, where she kissed her hand and looked regretfully after
them, with her head a little on one side. As she expected, Mrs.
Murchison gave one backward glance as she went out, and Kit kissed her
hand again, smiling. Then, as soon as the front-door closed, she hurried
back in a brisk business-like manner to join the others.
CHAPTER IX
THE PLOT MISCARRIES
Some ten or twelve people only remained in the drawing-room when Kit
returned, for several had taken their departure before the Murchisons,
and Toby seemed to be a target at which was being fired some straight,
hard chaff. As usual, he was looking serene and pleasant, but it seemed
to Kit that his smile at this moment was more the result of habit than
of any entertainment that the chaff afforded him.
"Toby has made an impression," explained Alice, "and he's too modest to
acknowledge it."
"Dear Toby, you made an excellent impression," said Kit, taking his arm,
as he stood rather hot and stiff under the chandelier. "I'm very much
pleased with you, and I'll remember you in my will."
"If he'll promise to remember you in his!" said Jack, who had returned
from speeding the parting guest. "That should be worth something."
"Answer them back, Toby," said Kit. "Hit out."
"A lovely man," said Tom, "but homely. A happy and amiable disposition."
"More than can be said for you, old chap," remarked Toby. "Tom, how gray
you are getting!"
"Yes, I've no chance. But you are in luck, Toby. The girl is charming,
and her mother is unique."
"I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about," said Toby,
amid loud laughter and a shrill cat-call from Alice. "Well, I'm going,
Kit. Good-night; and try to teach Tom manners."
And Toby, still smiling genially, went towards the door. But Kit
retained his arm.
"Don't go, Toby," she said. "Stop and play a bit. You like baccarat. And
don't mind what Tom says. You're a credit to the family."
"Toby will bring the family more credit," said Tom, in a low, audible
voice to his sister.
"Tom, be quiet," said Alice. "When you try to chaff people, it is like
an elephant dancing on eggshell china."
"Toby, Alice is calling you eggshell china. Lovely but homely."
"Awfully sorry, Kit," said Toby, "but I must go. I promised to go on to
the Keynes'."
Now, it was to the Keynes' that the Murchisons had gone, and Kit knew
it. She saw also that Toby had had enough of the subject, and, without
any more efforts to detain him, especially since he was rather tiresome
at baccarat, and always won. "Well, if you must go, you must," she said.
"Let's see you again soon, old boy."
Toby smiled and nodded and left the room.
"Dear Toby!" said Kit, "it was hard luck on him. How could you say such
things, Tom? It's serious. The poor boy is head over ears."
"There is a phenomenon in hypnotism called suggestion, Kit," he said, as
she took a seat beside him. "If a thing is suggested to the subject, the
suggestion is followed. Did you suggest it?"
"Oh, in a sort of way. But Toby isn't hypnotized; he's fascinated. I am
delighted he takes it seriously. She is a sweet girl, and I would
sooner have Toby for my husband than anyone. I shall get him to marry
me when Jack dies, like the woman in the parable. Oh, they have just put
out a little green table. How queer of them! And cards! Well, I suppose,
as it is there---- You play baccarat, I think, Mr. Alington?"
Mr. Alington paused, as usual, before replying, and looked benevolently
at Kit and Lady Haslemere in turn.
"I shall be delighted to play," he said. "I find it very soothing after
a tiring day; one does not have to think at all. I used to play a good
deal in Australia, and, dear me, yes! I had the pleasure of playing the
other night at your house, Lady Haslemere. Odd games we used to have in
Australia. One had to keep both eyes open to see that nobody cheated.
Indeed, that was not very soothing work. I have seen five nines on the
table before now, which really is an excessive number. Embarrassing
almost."
He had the manner of taking everybody into his confidence, and as the
others were standing together as he spoke, and he a few steps from them,
he had an easy opportunity to look several people in the face. Kit and
Alice again received a special share of his kind and intelligent glance,
and, as he finished speaking, he laughed in his pleasant voice, as if
with considerable inward amusement. So, when they sat down at the
card-table, out of the dozen of them there were at least two
disconcerted people present, for it was not certain whether Jack had
heard.
"I think he scored," said Alice, in a low voice to Kit; and Kit looked
impatient, and thought so too.
When they had all taken their seats, Alington was found, as Kit and
Alice had wished (and he also, if they had known it), to be opposite
them. There were a few moments' delay, as the table was lined, and,
playing idly with the counters he had purchased, he looked up at them.
"It is so simple to cheat at baccarat, without the clumsy device of five
nines," he said. "One need only lay one's stake just on the white line,
neither over it nor behind it. Then, if you win, the slightest touch and
the counters will go over, and it appears that you have staked; if not,
you leave them as they are. A touch of the cards will do it. So!"
He put a couple of cards face upwards on the table, as if showing his
hand, and as he did it, drew his stake over the line so gently and
imperceptibly that it was impossible to see that the counters moved. Kit
laughed, not very pleasantly. Her laughter sounded a trifle cracked.
"Take care, all of you!" she cried. "There is a brilliant sharper
present. Mr. Alington, how stupid of you to tell us! You might have won
all our money without any of us being the wiser."
Alington laughed, and Alice told Kit in a low voice not to lose her
temper. Alington's laugh was a great contrast to Kit's, pleasant and
amused.
"I make the company a present of the only safe way to cheat at
baccarat," he said. "The bank? Ah, I see Lord Conybeare takes the bank."
Death and baccarat are great levellers, and Kit in her more sententious
moments used to call the latter an escape from the trammels of
civilization, and a return to the natural savage instincts. Certainly
nothing can be simpler; the cave-men, provided they could count as far
as nine, might have played at it. And, indeed, unalloyed gambling is not
a bad second, considered as a leveller, to death itself. Rich men win,
poor men lose; the Countess rubs shoulders (it is not meant that she
did at Kit's house) with the cocotte; Jew spoils Jew, and Gentile
Gentile. The simple turn of the cards is an affair as haphazard as life.
If anyone, it must be the devil who knows where and when the nines will
come up, and he is incorruptible on this point. The brute loses; the
honest man wins; the honest man is made a pauper; the brute a
millionaire. There is certainly something fascinating about what we call
Luck. No virtue or vice invented by the asceticism or perverted
corruptness of man has yet made a bait that she will take.
Mathematicians tell us that she is purely mathematical; yet how emphatic
a denial she gives to this shallow description of her if one tries to
woo her on a system! One might as well make love on the prescriptions of
the "Complete Letter-writer."
On this particular night she showed herself the opposite of all the
epithets with which her unintelligent worshippers have plastered her.
She is called fickle--she was a pattern of devotion; she is called
changeable--she exhibited an immutable face. Wherever Alington sat,
whether to the right or to the left of the dealer, or whether he took
the bank himself, she favoured him with a fixed, unalterable smile, a
smile nailed to her features, as if her photograph was being taken. Like
the two-faced Jannet, as Mrs. Murchison had once called that heathen
deity, she kept the benignant aspect for him.
Now, it is one of the rules without exception in this world, that nobody
likes losing at cards. People have been heard to say that they do not
like winning. This statement is certainly incorrect. It is possible to
play an interesting set at tennis, an enjoyable round of golf, an
entrancing football match, a really memorable game of chess, and lose,
but it is not humanly possible to enjoy losing at baccarat. The object
of the game is to win the money of your friends in an exciting and
diverting manner, but the diversion tends to become something worse than
tedium if they consistently win yours. Excuses and justifications may be
found for most unprofitable pursuits, and perhaps the only thing to be
said in favour of gambling is that there is no nonsense about it, and,
as a rule, no nonsense about those who indulge in it. No one as yet has
said that it improves the breed of cards, or that he has the prosperity
of the card-makers at heart. The card-table is still a place where
hypocrites do not win credence from anybody.
The great goddess Luck ignored Lady Haslemere that night (for she is no
respecter of persons, and cuts people whenever she chooses), merely
letting her lose a few inglorious sovereigns, and devoted her attention
to Alington and Kit. The latter she visited with every mark of her
peculiar disfavour, and the nest-egg in her jewel-case upstairs had to
be heavily unyoked. Kit seldom enjoyed herself less than she did this
evening; as a rule, she had distinctly good luck at cards, and it was
little short of maddening to sit there hour after hour, just to watch
her stake being firmly and regularly taken away. Like most people who
are generally lucky at cards, she was considered admirably good form at
play; but when she was losing in this unexampled manner, she found it
difficult to remain cordial, and more than once she had to force herself
with an effort to remember that a hostess had duties. Alington's mild,
intelligent face opposite her roused in her a kind of frenzy, and his
unassumed quietness and utter absence of any signs of satisfaction at
his huge winnings seemed to her in the worst taste. Both she and Lady
Haslemere had seen how completely their scheme of watching him to see
whether he cheated had miscarried; indeed, from the moment when he gave
his little exhibition of the ease with which it was possible to defraud
the table, they had realized that they might play the detective till
their eyes dropped out of their heads from weariness without catching
him. Lady Haslemere had given it up at once, concluding that Kit and she
must have been mistaken before; Kit continued to watch him furtively and
angrily, but the little detective game was not nearly so amusing as she
had anticipated.
Meantime, as her stakes vanished and revanished, Kit found herself
thinking absently of what Alington had shown them. It was so simple, and
she almost wished that she was one of the people who cheated at cards.
But she was not. Then occurred an incident.
Alington was taking the bank. Nearly opposite him, and belonging to the
party on the dealer's right, was Kit. She had just been upstairs to get
all that remained of her nest-egg, and in front of her lay several small
counters, two of fifty pounds, and two of a hundred. She had just lost
once, and counting up what remained to her, she put all her counters in
a heap near the line. Again she staked fifty pounds, and on receiving
her cards took them up and looked at them. She was rather excited; her
hand trembled a little, and the lower edge of her cards twitched
forward. Then she laid them on the table.
"Natural," she said, and as she said it, she saw that she had flicked
one of her hundred-pound counters over the line, and it was staked.
Almost simultaneously she caught Alington's eye; almost simultaneously
Tom's voice said:
"One fifty. Well done, Kit! You've had the worst of luck all the
evening."
"A fine, bold stroke," said Alington in his precise tones, still looking
at her. "Luck must turn, Lady Conybeare."
For one moment Kit paused, and in that pause she was lost. Alington
counted out her stake, pushed it over to her, and rose.
"A thrilling end to my bank," he said. "The first big stake this
evening. Thank you, Lady Conybeare, for introducing big stakes. The game
was getting a little slow."
And he went to the side-table for a cigarette.
Kit had cheated, and she knew it, and she suspected Alington knew it.
She had neither meant, intended, contemplated, nor conceived possible
such a thing, yet the thing was done. In point of fact, she had done it
quite unwittingly. She had never intended to push her counters over the
line with the edge of her cards. But then had followed--and she knew
this, too--an appreciable moment in which she perceived what had
happened before Tom's voice broke in. But she had not been able to say
_at once_, "I have made a mistake; I only staked fifty." After that each
possible division of a single second made speech infinitely more
impossible. To hesitate then was to be lost. Thirty seconds later her
stake was paid, and to say then what had happened was not only
impossible, but inconceivable. Besides, she thought to herself with a
sudden relief, it was wholly unnecessary. She would tell Alington about
it quite candidly, and return the money. But it was a poor ending to the
evening on which she and Alice were going to watch him to see if he
cheated.
That moment when she did not speak was psychologically more important
than Kit knew. She had lived in the world some five-and-twenty years,
and for five-and-twenty years her instincts had been forming. But during
those years she had not formed an instinct of absolute, unwavering,
instantaneous honesty. Before now she had been in positions where there
was a choice between the perfectly upright course and the course ever so
slightly crooked, and had she known the history of her soul, she would
have been aware that when she had stuck to the absolutely upright line
she had done so after reflection. Then came this moment when there was
no time for reflection, and the habit of looking at her decisions as
ever so faintly debatable had asserted itself. She had paused to
consider what she should do. That, in such circumstances, was quite
sufficient.
That she was ashamed was natural; that she was angry was to her more
natural still. She felt that the thing had been forced on her, and so in
a manner, if we take into consideration all the instincts which were
undoubtedly hers at that moment, it was; how far she was to be held
responsible for those instincts is a question for psychologists and
those who have got to the bottom of the problem of original sin, but not
for story-tellers.
She had a great command over herself, and she gathered up her stakes
with a laugh. There had been no perceptible pause of any kind.
"I was just going to order the carriage to take me to the workhou
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