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 workhouse,"
she said, "but I can still afford to breakfast without the assistance of
the poor laws. Must you go, Mr. Alington? Half-past two; is it really?
I had no idea. Good-night. I hope Jack is behaving himself on your
board. Mind you keep him in order; it is more than I can do."
She looked Mr. Alington full in the face as she spoke, trying, but
failing, to detect the least shadow of a change in his impassive and
middle-class features. But when he looked benevolently at her through
his spectacles and bowed with his accustomed awkwardness, she felt a
sudden lightness of heart at the thought that he had not seen. She did
not examine too closely into what this lightness of heart exactly
implied.
The others soon followed Mr. Alington's example, and took themselves
off. Jack had walked to the front-door with Lady Haslemere, and Kit
waited a moment in the drawing-room, after sending Lord Comber, who
lingered, away, for him to come up again. Whether she intended to tell
him what had happened she scarcely knew; that must depend. But he did
not return, and before long servants entered to put out the lights. They
would have withdrawn when they saw her, but she got up.
"Yes, put the lights out," she said. "Has his lordship gone out?"
"No, my lady; his lordship went upstairs to his room ten minutes ago."
Kit abandoned the idea of telling him that night. If she went to his
room, it would imply that she had something to say, and she did not wish
to commit herself yet. So she went to her own room, and rang for her
maid.
The hair and unlacing processes seemed interminable this evening, and
were intolerable even to the accompaniment of an excellent Russian
cigarette. She had been given on her birthday, only a few weeks before,
by Lord Comber, a wonderful silver-framed antique mirror, with the old
Venetian motto on it, "Sono felice, te videndo," and it had made
dressing and undressing a positive pleasure. Jack also had made himself
amusing about it; he had come into her room the day after it arrived,
and, seeing the motto on it, said, laughing:
"God has given you a good conceit of yourself, Kit. Where did you buy
it?"
"I didn't buy it," she replied, never having intended to make a mystery
about it. "Ted gave it me."
"Ted Comber? What damned impertinence!"
Kit burst out laughing.
"Jack, you are inimitable as the jealous husband," she had said. "It is
a new _rôle_. Poor Ted! it must have cost a pot of money."
And Jack had permitted himself to leave the room, banging the door
behind him.
Ted and she had laughed over the episode together.
"So like a man to ask absurd questions, and then be angry because he is
told the truth," Kit had said. "It would have been quite as easy for me
to lie."
But to-night not even the mirror, with its amusing associations, nor the
reflection of herself, nor the Russian cigarette, could beguile the
tedium of the toilet. The comb caught in her hair; her maid's hands were
cold, she was clumsy; the evening post was stupid; it was late; Kit was
sleepy and discontented. In fact, she was in an abominable temper.
At last it was over, and her maid left her. She got up from the chair in
front of her glass, where she had been sitting in her wonderful lace
dressing-gown, and took a turn up and down the room. She felt like a
fractious child, out of sorts, out of gear, out of temper. Then quite
suddenly she stopped, threw herself face downwards on the bed, and began
to cry from sheer rebellion and impatience of this stupid world.