THE WEEK BY THE SEA
Toby thought it wise to call at the Links Hotel on the morning following
his interview with Lord Comber, to make sure of the result of his
interference, while Buck waited and grinned in the garden. They both of
them wanted to bet that the worm had kept his word and gone, and both
were willing to lay odds on it, and thus no wager was possible. Toby's
face was agape with smiles when he came back, and they both laughed for
a full minute behind a laurel-bush.
This was satisfactory, everybody was pleased, and it was not the least
unlikely that Lord Comber himself at that moment was laughing too. He
had heard from Kit the same evening in reply to his telegram that she
would start for Aldeburgh (not Stanborough) next morning. All his neat
and nasty little embroideries and Dresden china, his violet powder,
scent-bottles, manicure brushes, and little vellum-bound indecencies of
French verse, had been packed the same evening by his man, and he left
Stanborough and the bowing proprietor of the Links Hotel in excellent
spirits, with a new number of the Queen. Kit (she really was so clever
about those things) had appeared in a gown exactly like one that was
to-day given as a novelty in the paper a full three months before, and
remarkably well she had looked in it. It was of pale lilac satin--Ted
always knew how dresses were made--trimmed with point-lace, and straps
of narrow black velvet. The bottom of the skirt was outlined with a
scroll-patterned lace insertion, and cut into scallops to fit the lace.
There was a mantle which went with it--perhaps the Queen would get hold
of that in another month or two--which had suited Kit admirably:
whatever Kit wore suited her. He felt quite proud to know a woman who
antedated novelties in this way. Art as reflected in the fashion papers
may be long; art on the same authority was always late if you took your
time from Kit.
Packing and travelling by slow cross-country trains was naturally a
nuisance, but, after all, how right Toby had been, thought Ted, though
for wrong reasons. Stanborough was too full, and full of the wrong sort
of people, those, in fact, who fill their suburban minds with the
movements of the aristocracy, and he did not care at all that he should
be renowned in suburban circles for doing risky things with smart women.
Yes, how right Toby had been, and how marvellously had his scheme
miscarried. Really, that sort of interference ought to be punishable; it
was a brutal moral assault, and people ought to be taken up for such
things, just as if they had kicked their wives. It was a crime with
violence, and the cat, he believed, had been used with success on
ruffians no more dastardly. Toby fully deserved the cat, and Lord Comber
would have laughed to see him get it. Yet there was a distinctly amusing
side to the affair, and it was really not possible to be angry for long
with such feeble and futile attempts to interfere with his liberty and
Kit's. That red-headed, freckle-faced brother-in-law, with his large
hands and idiotic smile, would be violently hitting little golf-balls
over the down this morning, thinking to himself how exceedingly clever
he had been, and what a fine manly fellow he was. Lord Comber hated fine
manly fellows, and they returned the compliment. It would be very
amusing to tell Kit all about it. How she would scream! Perhaps they
might arrange some delicate and devilish revenge together on Toby,
something really nasty which would rankle. And the most amusing thing
was that Kit and he had gained their point, namely, a week at the
seaside together, seeming all the time to have yielded. He had avoided
quarrelling with Toby, and had left him, victorious himself, to think
that all the honours of the field were his.
In his pretty drawing-room way Toby Comber was very artistic, and where
many people would see only a flat green field or a level landscape, he
caught a delicious glimpse of a picture of the Dutch school. He looked
out from his railway carriage window on placid cows standing knee-deep
in pasture, or chewing a lazy cud beneath the narrow noon-day shade of
drowsy elms, with a good deal of appreciation. He cared little either
for cows or elms, except in so far as they reminded him of pictures
which he admired, and which he knew to be valuable, and in the beauty of
a landscape he looked mainly for an illustration of a picture. Like a
large number of the more artistic of his world, he had a genuine respect
for any work of art that was valuable, especially if it was more
valuable than it would naturally appear to someone who did not know. He
had a real reverence for rare first editions, even though he cared not
two straws for what the book was about, and though all subsequent
editions were better printed, and mezzotints which he would not have
given two thoughts to a few years ago had become admirable in his eyes
simply because people had begun to collect them and to pay high prices
for them.
Hurry, so prominent and distressing a factor in our modern world, so
subversive of true progress, is still unknown to cross-country lines,
and they remain invincibly leisurely. By the map he had not many miles
to go, but before his journey was half over he had enjoyed the sweets of
his triumph over Toby and the quiet wayside pictures to the full, and
his thoughts returned to their accustomed abiding-place, himself. He was
a great admirer of personal beauty both in men and women; good looks
always attracted him, and he was a devout admirer of his own. He was, so
he considered, exceedingly nicely and suitably dressed for a hot August
day. He wore a flannel suit of a yellowish-brown tinge, which matched
divinely with the rich chestnut of his boots and the darker chestnut of
his hair, and his tie was bandana, the prevailing tone of which was deep
russet. He had been a little hurried over dressing this morning, and had
not really had time to put a pin in it; but now there was ample leisure,
and, opening his dressing-bag, he took out a looking-glass, which he
propped on the seat opposite, and a little leather box in which he kept
his pins and studs. He took off his straw hat and smoothed his hair once
or twice with his hand, but, being still dissatisfied, got out a
silver-handled brush, and drew it several times upwards across his
front-hair, emphasizing that upward sweep in it which he admired so
much. If he had had the choosing of his hair, he would not have given
orders for a different shade, and for this reason he did not dye it,
though people wronged him. Even natural advantages, if too marked, like
Kit's teeth, have their drawbacks. His eyebrows were much darker, almost
black, and his brown eyes were really fine, large, and liquid. He wore
no moustache, though till lately he had not done so; but young men of
the age which he desired himself to be had ceased wearing them, and now
a moustache meant you were born in the sixties.
Then he smiled at himself, not because he was amused, but for
professional reasons, noting two things, the first (with great
satisfaction) being the whiteness and regularity of his teeth, the
second (with misgiving) the regions round the eye. By daylight it was
impossible not to notice that the outer corners were marked--disfigured
almost--by two lines, hideously styled crow's-feet, and there were
certainly other lines below the eye. However, Kit had told him that
massage had been tried with success for that, and he intended to see
about it when he got back to town.
After another lingering look, he put the glass down and unlocked his
leather jewel-case. In it were pins of all kinds, made with screw heads,
so that they could serve indiscriminately as studs, and he turned them
over. There was a beautiful ruby set in tiny brilliants, which he saw at
once was the proper colour for the tone of his dress. He had worn it as
a solitaire the evening before, and he unscrewed it, and replaced the
back of the stud with a pin. But then he stopped. Not long ago Kit had
given him a charming turquoise of the _vieille roche_, a piece of
noon-day sky, and incapable of turning green. It would be suitable to
wear that when he met her, but unfortunately it did not go at all well
with his clothes. However, sentimental considerations prevailed, and he
put the ruby back, pinned the turquoise into his tie, and looked at
himself again.
"It is rather an experiment," he said half aloud.
He had telegraphed to the Aldeburgh Arms for three rooms, two bedrooms
and a sitting room, and, arriving there, he found they had been given
him _en suite_, the sitting-room in the middle. He felt bound to ask
whether these were the only rooms to be had, and finding there were no
others, he was powerless to alter the arrangement.
Kit would not arrive for two hours yet, and he set his valet to work at
once to make the sitting-room habitable. The Saxe figures he took out
himself, and gave a hand to the draping of embroideries; but the man had
a great deal of taste, and he left him before long to his own ideas.
After giving orders that masses of flowers should be sent up, and some
plants for the fireplace, he went out to stroll by the beach till Kit's
train arrived. There was a fresh breeze off the sea, and he put a light
dust-cloak over his arm, in case he should feel chilly.
Kit's train arrived punctually, and she in the highest spirits. She
laughed till she cried over the immaculate Toby turned missionary, and
it was with difficulty that Ted persuaded her not to write him a line.
"Think of his face," she cried, "if I just send a note!--'DEAR TOBY: How
does Stanborough suit you and your _fiancée_? I meant to come there, as
you know, but only yesterday evening I decided to come to Aldeburgh
instead. Oddly enough, Ted Comber arrived here to-day. It was so
pleasant (and quite unexpected) meeting him, and we shall have the
greatest fun. He has been at Stanborough, he tells me, and had a long
talk with you only yesterday. He is so fond of you.'--Oh, Ted, think of
his face!"
There was very little that was genuine about Ted except his teeth and
the colour of his hair, but his voice had the true ring of sincerity
when he thought of Toby's face.
"Oh, that would spoil it all!" he cried. "Toby must never know--at
least, not for a long time. He would certainly come here, too. How
tiresome that would be! And I should quite lose my temper with him."
Kit laughed.
"I know; that is just it," she said. "It would be so amusing. I love
seeing scenes, and I should like to see you really angry, Ted. What do
you do?"
"Well, you will soon know, if you write to Toby," he said. "Kit, you
simply mustn't. No, I won't say that, or else you will. But please
don't."
Kit laughed again.
"Well, I won't to-night, at any rate," she said. "But I shall keep it as
a hold over you, so you must behave nicely. Oh, Ted, how pretty you have
made your room! And tea is ready; I am so hungry. Really, it is quite
too funny about Toby."
She sat down and poured out tea; then, looking up as she handed him his
cup, saw he was looking at her.
"Well?" she asked.
"When did I not behave nicely to you?" he said.
"Oh, a thousand times--yesterday, to-day, now, even," she said, "in
expecting me to be sentimental. How can a woman who is just dying for
her tea be sentimental?"
She looked at him a moment with her head on one side.
"Yes, you look quite nice to-day," she said, "and, really, I am awfully
pleased to be with you. But what evil genius prompted you to put a
turquoise in a russet tie?"
Ted threw up his hands in half-mock despair.
"I knew it was wrong," he said. "But don't you see?"
Kit looked at it a moment.
"I remember now--I gave it you," she said. "Really, I think that is the
greatest compliment you ever paid me, spoiling your scheme of dress.
Sugar? Yes, you take two lumps, I know."
Ted laughed.
"It was an experiment, I felt," he said. "But I did right."
Kit was silent a moment, for she had just taken a large bite out of
new-made bun.
"_I_ think it will be the greatest fun down here," she said. "Poor dear
Toby could not have played into our hands more beautifully. The poor
child was quite right, and most thoughtful. Stanborough is certainly too
much _du monde_--of the wrong sort, that is to say--in August. He drove
us to Aldeburgh. It is on his head. And he actually threatened to
telegraph to Jack. I wonder if he would have carried it out. Personally,
I don't think he would; but, anyhow, it is all for the best. He couldn't
have suited us better. Dear boy, how nice to have such a careful little
brother-in-law!"
"He threatened me," said Ted plaintively, "in a loud, angry voice, with
'My name is Massingbird,' and all the rest of it. I told him that to
telegraph meant there was a reason for telegraphing, and he had none.
Besides, we did not want Jack. He was not part of the plan."
"Jack's nose has grown since he became a financier," remarked Kit. "That
is the worst of becoming anything. If you become a pianist, your hair
grows. If you become a philanthropist, your front-teeth grow. I never
intend to become anything, not even a good woman," she said with
emphasis.
"I hope not," remarked Ted.
"Oh, how I hate people who are in earnest about things!" said Kit in a
sort of frenzy. "I mean I hate people being in earnest about the things
they ought to be in earnest about. One should only take seriously things
like one's hair and games and dress. For sheer social hopelessness give
me a politician or a divine. Ted, promise me you will never become a
divine."
"Not to-day, at any rate," said Ted; "but I shall keep it as a hold over
you."
Kit laughed uproariously, and got up.
"I've finished for what I have received," she said, "and so we'll go
out. Have you got a spade for me to dig in the sand with as I wade? Oh,
there's the bezique-box. I think we'll play bezique instead. Is there a
_café_ or anything of the sort, where there will be a band. Bezique goes
so well to a Strauss valse."
"There is a draper's shop and a church," said Ted. "That is all."
But after a couple of games the splendour of the evening weaned them
from their cards. It had been a very hot day, but not long before sunset
a cool wind was borne out of the sea, and they strolled out. Sunset was
imminent in the west, and the land enmeshed in a web of gold. High in
the zenith floated a few flushed feathers of cloud, and the sea was
level and waveless--a polished surface of reflected brightness. The
tide was on the ebb, and the smooth sand, wet from its retreat, was a
mirror of the sky, a strip framed in the sea, and the high-water mark.
Southward the land trended away in headland behind folded headland to an
infinite distance of hazy and conjectured distances. The unbreathed air,
a traveller over a hundred horizons of sea, was cool and tonic, and the
whisper of the ripples crisp within the ear. And Kit with her childlike
impressionableness, which was at once her danger and her charm, caught
surely at the spirit of the free large spaces. She had taken off her
hat, and walked firm and lithe along the shining ripple-fringed beaches,
each footstep crushing for a moment the moisture out of the sand in a
circle round her tread, and breathing deep, with open mouth, of the
vivifying air. Like a chameleon she took instinctively the colour of her
surroundings, and just now she was steeped in open air, freedom, and the
great plains of sea and sky. She always gulped things down, camels and
needles alike, thirsty of full sensations.
"Really, one's whole life is a series of mistakes, Ted," she said,
"except in a few short moments like these. Why do we go to that
rabbit-warren of a London, and live in little smoky boxes, when there is
an empty sea-beach, and a great sea-wind within a few hours of us? Oh! I
wish I was a fisherman, or a day labourer, or a gallon of sea-water, to
stop in the open always."
Ted laughed.
"And if to-morrow is wet or cold, you will say, 'Why did we come to this
God-forsaken German Ocean, when we could have stopped in our nice
comfortable houses?'"
"I know I shall; and the worst of me is that I shall feel just as
keenly as I feel this now. Jack called me a parasite once; he said I
always found food in whatever I happened to be on. I dare say he is
right. Oh, look at that bit of red seaweed on the sand! It looks as if
it had been set, as one used to set butterflies; every little fibre is
spread out separately. But if I pick it up, it will be just a stringy
pulp. There are a great many morals to be drawn from that, and one is,
'Don't meddle.'"
"What a lesson for Tobys!" laughed Ted.
The sun set, and with the fading of the light they turned. Moment by
moment the colours paled, and the evening iridescences turned gray and
cold. Kit put on her hat; there was a chill in the air, and they walked
faster. By the time they reached the hotel it was nearly dark, and the
shining window-squares looked inviting and comfortable, and Kit mentally
revoked her desire to be a gallon of sea-water. It was already time to
dress for dinner, and they went up to the sitting-room together. Their
bedrooms were on opposite sides of it, both communicating with it and
with the passage outside, and as they dressed they talked loudly and
cheerfully to each other through doors ajar, their conversation being
punctuated by sounds of the sponge. Ted was ready first, but a few
moments afterwards Kit came out of her room, and went downstairs with
him, still in a fever of high spirits, but with all the cool sanity of
the great expanses driven out of her worthless little soul, and dressed
in red.
They had a table to themselves in a corner of the plushy dining-room,
where they could talk unheard and observe unobserved. Lord Comber, who
always took the precaution of carrying wine with him when he was at
hotels, had some excellent champagne, of which Kit drank her share, and
their talk rose in crescendo with more frequent bursts of laughter as
dinner went on. Toby again demanded their amused comments.
"Oh, if he could see us thus!" said Kit; and the idea was immensely
entertaining, viewed in the light of dinner and wine.
Then followed a _résumé_ of all the things which had not happened since
the two had met, and which, even if they had, should never have been
repeated. The world in which they lived is not noted for charitable
impulses or moments of compassion, and that which should have called out
pity, or if not pity, at least, have been accorded silence, was the
occasion of great laughter. Kit, among her many gifts, was an excellent
mimic; and Jack's shrug of the shoulders, when she really had her boxes
packed to go to Aldeburgh vice Stanborough, was inimitable. But, as she
said, she was no longer married to a man, but a company. Jack was no
longer Jack, but a mixture of Alington, deep levels, and cyanide
process. Then Mrs. Murchison came under review, and Kit improvised a
really first-rate soliloquy.
But eventually the hush that comes with ice overtook them, and it was to
break an appreciable silence that Ted spoke.
"How they stare at one!" he said. "Haven't the people who stay at this
hotel ever seen people before? You would think we were woaded early
Britons. Really, it is much better than Stanborough; there were all
sorts of people there one knew. I am glad we came--and you, Kit?"
He looked up, and caught her eye for a moment.
"I also," she said. "But, Ted, I very nearly did not come. I could not
conceive what your telegram meant; but I trusted you, you see; I
assumed that your excellent reasons were excellent. And when I knew what
they were, I was justified, and you too. They were more than excellent;
they were funny."
Ted laughed.
"They really were," he said. "But I don't know what I should have done
if I had found a telegram here from you saying you were not coming."
"Did you think I should throw you over?" she asked.
He paused before replying, and looked up at the long table where the
most of the people in the hotel were sitting.
"There is a man with a face like what you see in a spoon sitting there,"
he said. "No, I did not."
Kit followed his glance.
"Yes, I see him," she said, "and his mouth opens sideways. But how
modest of you! What reason had you to think that?"
Ted felt his heart thump with a sudden riotous movement. He took up his
glass to finish his champagne, and noticed that his hand shook a little.
He drank the wine at a gulp.
"Because I think you like me a little, Kit," he replied.
He had never spoken to her quite like that before, though, for that
matter, he might have used the identical words to her a score of times;
never before had she given him exactly that sort of opportunity. But the
presence of so many people close at hand of so utterly different a
society to theirs that they might have been Red Indians, gave both him
and her a strangely isolated feeling, as if they had been alone on a
desert island. Both knew also that he by proposing, she by acceding to
this visit to Aldeburgh, had taken another step in intimacy towards each
other.
But without a pause Kit replied; and in spite of her reply, so far from
disavowing it, she felt a sudden inward leap of exultation, and he, in
spite of the lightness of her reply, was confirmed.
"Oh, Ted, don't be serious!" she said. "It is such bad manners. Think of
Toby; think of the man with the spoon-face."
Ted lifted his brown eyes to hers, but she sat with eyes downcast,
playing with her dessert-knife.
"Are you never serious?" he asked.
"Not at dinner. A serious voice carries so. It is audible as far as a
Bishop's hat, if you see what I mean. Have you finished? Shall we go?"
And she lifted her long, fringed eyelashes a moment, and returned his
look.
_BOOK II_
CHAPTER I
KIT'S MEDITATIONS
Kit was sitting in her own room in the Buckinghamshire cottage one day
late in the following December, staring intently into the fire. The
fire, it is true, was worth looking at, for it was made of that adorable
combination, cedar-logs and peat, and it had attained to that fine
flower of existence--a fragrant, molten core of heat, edged by little
lilac-coloured bouquets of flame, smokeless and glowing, the very
apotheosis of a fire. Outside, the world was shrouded and made dizzy in
a trouble of eddying snow, and as the great sonorous blasts trumpeted
and lulled again, the reds of the fire would brighten and fade in a sort
of mysterious sympathy with the bugling riot overhead. But that Kit
should be doing nothing but looking at the fire was an unusual thing; it
was odd that she should be alone, even odder that, if alone, she should
not be occupied. The toes of her bronze-coloured shoes rested on the
fender, and she leaned forward in the low armchair in which she sat,
stretching out her hands towards the heat, and the fire shining through
the flesh of her fingers made them look as if they were lighted from
within--things red and luminous in themselves. It was already growing
dusk, but she had enough light to think by, and quite enough things to
think about.
The room was furnished with great simplicity, but the educated eye could
see how extremely expensive such simplicity must have been. There was a
rug or two on the floor, a few tables and chairs of the Empire on the
rugs, and a few pictures on the crimson satin walls. Kit herself perhaps
was the most expensive thing present, for she wore her pearls, and they
glowed like mist-smoored moons in the fire-light. But she did not look
as happy as the possessor of her pearls or her excellent digestion ought
to look. There was something of the hard, tired look of suffering,
mental and physical, about her face, and though she was alone, she made,
now and then, nervous, apprehensive little movements.
Everything was going wrong, from money upwards, or downwards; for at the
present moment Kit hardly knew how to arrange the precedence of her
various embarrassments. The financial ones were at any rate the most
tangible, though perhaps the least feared, and for the fiftieth time
that afternoon she ran over them.
In the beginning it had been altogether Jack's fault, but Kit was past
finding either consolation or added annoyance in that. She had great
faith in Alington's power of making their fortune, though personally he
was detestable to her, for various excellent reasons, and she had wanted
to invest the famous nest-egg, which from one cause and another had
grown to upwards of three thousand pounds, in these mines under
Alington's advice. After their last private interview she did not like
to go to him straight, and so asked Jack to tell her in what mines to
place a little money she had saved. The word "saved," when used by Kit,
always made Jack smile.
But he was absurd, and strongly opposed to her risking her "savings" at
all. He had told her to make herself quite happy; if she would leave
things to him, and go on "saving" quietly, there would be enough for
both of them, a statement in itself repugnant and almost blasphemous to
Kit, who firmly held the doctrine that there never can be enough money
for one, still less for two.
"You don't know what it all means, Kit," he had said, "and for that
matter I don't either. One day perhaps your shares will go down, and you
will sell out in a panic and lose a lot, or you will not sell out and
you will lose more. It is impossible for me always to be instructing
you; I have not got the data myself. I leave it all to Alington.
Besides, I didn't know you had any money to invest."
"That is my affair," said Kit; "I have been lucky lately."
"Then put it into consols, and don't gamble any more," said Jack, with
the fine inconsistence of the gambling fever on him, "or come and talk
about it some other time; I've got twenty hundred things to do now."
Then in a flare of pride and temper, Kit had determined to manage for
herself, and had put a couple of thousand pounds into Carmel East. This
was in November, at a time when, for some reason, known perhaps to
Alington, but certainly to no one else in the market, Carmel was
behaving in a peculiarly mercurial manner. A week after she had made her
investment the pound shares, which were standing at a little above par,
had declined rapidly to fourteen shillings. It might only be a bear
raid, but she was too proud to ask Jack for advice again, and
remembering his ill-omened remark about not selling and so losing more,
she telegraphed to her broker to sell out at once. This done, the
shares began to rise again, and in less than a fortnight's time, owing
to telegrams and reports from the mine, they stood at nearly two pounds.
She reckoned up, almost with tears, what she had lost, which, added to
what she might have gained, formed a maddening total. Her eighteen
hundred shares, if she had only held on, would have been worth close on
three thousand six hundred pounds; instead, she had sold them when they
stood at fourteen shillings for thirteen hundred pounds. And when Jack,
a few mornings later, came into her room with a cheque for five hundred
pounds, which he gave her, she felt that this only accentuated the
bitterness of it.
"A little present, Kit," he said, "just for you to play about with. What
a good thing you were wise, and did not concern yourself with things you
did not understand! Oh, I bless the day when we went down to the City
dinner and met Alington. You wore an orange dress, I remember: it would
be rather graceful if you paid for it now."
"How much have you made, Jack?" she asked.
"Eight thousand, and I wish it was eighty. But that is the result of
having no capital. I'm going to pay some bills--perhaps; but it is all
very wearing."
Kit was not accustomed to cry over spilt milk, and Jack's present made
up the greater part of what she had actually lost, though it was only a
small proportion of what she might have gained. One learns by
experience, she thought; for experience is a synonym for one's mistakes,
and she had been a consummate fool to be frightened. The mine was still
quite young, and if within a few months the shares were worth double
their original value, it was likely to be a good investment even at the
present price, and again she invested two thousand pounds in it. Since
then the price had steadily gone down, and the shares were quoted a week
ago at nineteen shillings. But this time, though it taxed her admirable
nerve, she was not going to be frightened, and with the object of
averaging she had spent the remaining spoonfuls of her nest-egg in
buying more, thus reducing the whole price to thirty-two shillings per
share. Thus, when they again went up, as she still believed they would
do, she would sell as soon as they touched two pounds, as Jack had sold,
and clear, though not so much as he had done, still, something worth
having. But the averaging had been singularly unsuccessful, and this
morning the abominable things had stood again at fourteen shillings.
This had been too much for Kit's nerves, and she went to Jack with the
whole story. He had simply shrugged his shoulders; he was odiously
unsympathetic. The "I told you so" rejoinder is always irritating, and
the irritation it produces varies directly according to the amount of
damage involved. Kit's irritation, it follows, was considerable.
"Oh, Jack, what is the use of saying that?" she had cried angrily. "I
come to be helped, not to be moralized to. I ask you now as a favour to
telegraph to Mr. Alington. You say you know nothing about these things,
although you are a director. Well, perhaps he does. And I want some
money."
It was not wise, and Kit knew it even as she spoke, to take a fretful,
discourteous tone. It had long been a maxim with her that courtesy was a
duty, the greatest perhaps, which one owned to those with whom one was
intimate, and that it was most foolish to let familiarity breed
brusqueness. Besides, it never paid, except with tradesmen and others,
to put your nose in the air, and, as a rule, she was not guilty of this
breach of prudence. But to-day she was horribly worried, and anxious
about many things, and that Jack should say "I told you so" seemed
unbearable.
He did not reply immediately, and then, taking a cigarette from a table
near him, "You usually do want some money," he remarked.
Kit made a great effort, and recovered her temper and her self-control.
"Dear Jack," she said, "I have been rude, and I apologize. But I very
seldom am rude; do me the justice to admit that. Also I have been stupid
and foolish. I am in an awful hole. Do telegraph to Alington, like a
good boy, and ask him what I am to do. And I should really be very glad
of a little money if you can spare it."
Jack looked at her curiously. It was utterly unlike Kit to behave like
this. Her debts hitherto had sat lightly on her; she had often said that
nothing was so nice as having money, and nothing so easy as to get along
without it. Again, Kit's nest-egg of three thousand pounds seemed to him
a surprising sum. She had not, as far as he knew, played much in the
summer, and all the autumn, except for a fortnight she spent at
Aldeburgh, they had been together, and her winnings certainly could not
have been a fifth of that. He could not conceive how she had got it.
"Look here, Kit," he said, "you shall have some money if you must,
though just now I want literally every penny I can lay hands on for this
mine affair. I am playing for big stakes. If the thing comes off as I
expect--and, what is much more satisfactory, as Alington expects--we
shall be rich, and when I say rich it means a lot. But I think we had
better have a talk. Oh, I will telegraph to Alington about your affair
at once."
Kit felt wretchedly nervous and upset that morning, and while Jack wrote
the telegram, she threw herself into a chair that stood before the fire
and lit a cigarette, hoping to soothe her jangled nerves. Snow had
already begun to fall, the air was biting; she shivered. But after a few
whiffs she threw the cigarette away. It tasted evilly in her mouth, and
she felt an undefined dread of what was coming, and not in the least
inclined for a talk. Luckily, Jack was going up to town in half an hour;
the talk could not last long.
He waited till the servant had taken the telegram, and then came and
stood in front of the fire.
"How did you get that three thousand pounds?" he asked abruptly.
"I won it. I have told you so," said Kit.
"Where? When? It is a large sum. You know, Kit, I don't often pry into
your affairs. Don't be angry with me."
"My dear Jack, I don't keep a book with the names and addresses of all
the people from whom I have won sixpence. Neither of us, if it comes to
that, is famed for well-kept account-books. Where? At a hundred places.
When? This last summer and autumn," and her voice died a little on the
words.
Jack turned and flicked the ash off his cigarette. He knew that Kit
could not have won that amount, and he hated to think that she was lying
to him. True, he was asking the sort of question they did not ask each
other, but he could not help it--the air was ominous. She must have
borrowed it or been given it, and such a suspicion cut him to the quick,
for though he, like her, did not give two thoughts to running up huge
bills at tradesmen's risk, yet it was quite a different thing to borrow
from one's own class (for he knew rightly that Kit would never be so
foolish as to go to a money-lender), or to be given money by one's
friends. And her manner was so strange. He could not avoid the thought
that there was something behind.
"Did Alice Haslemere lend you some?" he asked suddenly.
Kit, taken off her guard, saw a gleam of hope.
"Yes," she said quickly, not meaning to lie. Then, remembering she had
told him that she had won it, "No," she added in the same breath.
Jack made a quick step back to the table at which he had been writing.
"There is no manner of use in talking if you can't tell me the truth,"
he said. "How much money do you want, Kit?"
Kit tried to answer him, but could not. She was only conscious of a
great desolating helplessness, and slowly the sobs gathered in her
throat. Jack, waiting for her answer, heard a quick-taken breath, and in
a moment he was by her, the best of him ready to help, if possible,
forgetting everything except that Kit was in trouble.
"My poor old girl!" he said. "What is the matter? Is there something
wrong, Kit? Won't you tell me? Indeed I am your friend. Don't cry so.
Never mind; tell me some other time if you like. There, shall I leave
you? Will you be better alone?"
Kit nodded her head, and he touched her lightly and kindly on the
shoulder, and turned to go. But before he had got to the door she spoke.
"No, it is nothing, Jack," she said, controlling her voice with an
effort. "I am out of sorts, I think. Never mind about the money. I can
push along."
She got up from her chair and went towards the door.
"Don't worry, Jack," she said.
She went to her own room, where she knew that no one would disturb her,
and shut herself in. Jack would be away all day, and till evening she
would be alone. A few people were coming down with him then from town,
among them Toby and his wife, Ted Comber, and several others of their
set. On the whole, she was glad they were coming; it was better to be
distracted than to brood over things which no brooding will mend. Above
all, she wanted an interval in which Jack and she would not be alone.
Perhaps after a few days he might forget or remember only vaguely the
affair of this morning.
She had lunched alone in her sitting-room off a tray, for it was warmer
there than in the dining-room, and had tried a dozen ways of making the
hours pass. It was impossible to go out; the snow, which had begun
before Jack had left, was getting momently thicker and falling in giddy,
frenzied wreaths. The air was bitterly cold, and she could see but dimly
through the whirling atmosphere the lines of shrubs in the garden,
standing with thick white mantles on. A couple of puffy-feathered
sparrows crouched on her window-sill, and Kit in the bitterness of her
heart hated them, and, going to the window, frightened them away. They
dropped stiffly down on the lawn below, and half walked, half fluttered,
to the shelter of a bush near. Then a sudden compunction came over her,
and, throwing open the window, she flung out the crumbs from her
lunch-tray, but the sudden movement only scared them off altogether. She
stood long at the window, looking out on to the blinding desolation, and
then by a violent effort detached herself for the moment from all the
things that troubled her. They would all have to be taken and dealt
with, but she could do nothing alone. Jack had to be told
something--Jack and another.
The electric light was out of order, and about a quarter past three of
that howling winter's afternoon she left her place by the fire and her
unread book and rang for lamps. Then there were orders also to be sent
to the stables, and she detained the man a minute to give them, knowing
that when he had gone she would be alone again. The omnibus and the
brougham must both meet the train, and the horses must be roughed, and
was there any telegram for his lordship. One had come, and, guessing it
was from Alington, she opened it.
"Bad slump in Carmel East," she read. "Cannot advise."
Kit crumpled the telegram up, and threw it impatiently into the grate.
Here was another thing to be banished from her mind; truly this was a
somewhat extensive exile. She determined not to sell; unless something
happened to send the prices up, it would be a mere reminder of her
losses to rescue so small a salvage from the wreck. She did not want a
little money, she wanted a great deal, and she would just as soon have
none as a little. So, having determined to dismiss the whole subject,
she thought of nothing else for the next half-hour.
Outside the evening grew darker and wilder, and the windows on the
north-east of her room, the quarter from which the wind blew, were
already half blinded by the snow, and every now and then a furious,
unseen hand would rattle their casements as if demanding instant
admittance. The wind, which had been rising and falling and rising again
all day in fitful gusts, now blew with an astonishing and ever
increasing vehemence. The line would be deep in snow, perhaps almost
impassable; in any case the train which should bring Jack and the rest
must be late. Kit felt that the elements, the snow and the storm, were
malignant beings fighting against her; the solitude of the next few
hours became unbearable, and who knew how many hours she might still be
alone? Quick to catch at relief, it seemed to her that to have people
about, to have the ordinary innumerable duties of a hostess to perform,
would be the solution of her troubles, and the omnibus full of folk who
had already left London were so many anchors to her. She would have to
talk, laugh, entertain people, be her normal self, and hours and days
would pass without giving her time or opportunity for thought or regret.
She tried to tell herself that her present difficulties, like the
unanswered letters, would manage and answer themselves. The nights she
did not fear: hitherto she hardly knew what it was to be awake, and even
if one did, there were those convenient things like morphia which one
could always take.
Tea-time came; her room had grown intolerable to her, and she went to
the hall, where they always had tea if there were people with them,
waiting for the snow-muffled sounds of the carriage-wheels. The train
was due half an hour before, and they might be here any moment if it had
been punctual. Punctual she knew it could not be against this
hurly-burly; but still, every minute that passed now was a minute in
which they might have reached the station, less hopeless than those she
had passed since lunch. The tea-things were brought in, and she ate a
piece of bread-and-butter, thinking she would not make tea till they
came, but the minutes went on pushing at the hands of the clock, and at
last she made enough for herself, and drank a cup. But it seemed neither
to warm nor invigorate her; the taste of the cream made her feel sick,
and pouring the half of it away, she left the table, and came to sit
nearer the fire, book in hand.
Outside the storm went on like some senseless lunatic symphony. Now the
long steady note of a horn would blow weirdly in the chimney, and a
choir of shrieking gusts like the violins would break in upon it, rising
and rising higher and higher as if leading to some stupendous climax.
But no climax came; they would die down again with nothing gained, and
the slow sobbing of 'cellos would answer them. Then for a moment there
was hail mixed with the snow, and the sudden tattoo of the kettle-drums
upon the window would seem to announce something, but nothing came
except a long chromatic passage from the strings, leading nowhere,
portending nothing. Then the horn in the chimney would have a bar or
two, repeating its _motif_, as if to emphasize it, and strings and horns
came in simultaneously in crazy music. Then for a moment there would be
a dead, tense pause; the conductor seemed to stand with raised baton
collecting the orchestra for the _finale_, but, instead of some immense
riot of sound, only a flute would wail a broken note, and the whole
movement begin again.
The noise maddened Kit; it seemed to her that her own thoughts were
being made audible. Like the blind, senseless blasts, she would take up
one meaningless strand of her life and try to weave it into some sort of
pattern. But before she could hit on any idea, she would drop it again,
and her mind would fly off now to that evening when she had cheated
Alington at baccarat, now to the week at Aldeburgh, now to the affairs
of Carmel East, and again, and yet again, to the week at Aldeburgh. It
was all in fragments, loud, jangling, terrifying, with hysterical bursts
of false feeling.
Then, for the first time in her life, the horror of the days that were
gone, the horror of the moment, the horror of the future, seized Kit in
their threefold grip, and shook her. She looked back on the years in
which, day after day, she had clutched greedily, ravenously, at the
pleasure of the moment; with both hands she had torn the blossoms off
life, making herself great nosegays like a child in a hayfield, and now
when she looked at them there was not a flower that was not withered and
wilted. Through the past she had arrived at this awful present. She
looked forward; the future was a blank, save for one red spot of horror
in it, which would come closer and closer every day till it was on her.
There was no escape for her.
Just then there was a lull in the mad symphony outside, and in the
stillness she heard the soft thud of snow-clogged wheels pass by the
windows. With a sense of relief, almost painful in its intensity, she
ran to the door and flung it open, letting in a great buffet of
snow-stifled wind that extinguished the lamps, and left only the
misshapen shadows from the fire leaping monstrously on the walls. But
instead of the omnibus she had expected, there was only a postman's
cart, from which the man had already descended, blanketed in snow, with
a telegram in his hand. He had just rung the bell.
Kit ran with it to the fire, and read it by the blaze. It was from
Conybeare, sent off from two stations up the line.
"Blocked by snow," it said. "Line will not be clear till to-morrow
morning."
A footman had come in answer to the bell. He found the door wide open,
the snow blowing dizzily in, and on the hearthrug Kit, in a dead faint.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST DEAL
Mr. Alington was an early riser, and it was barely half-past eight when
he finished his plain but excellent breakfast the morning after he had
received Jack's telegram about Kit's venture in Carmel East. A certain
instinct of perfection was characteristic of him; all his habits of
living were of a finished character. He lived plainly, and he would
sooner have his simple eggs and bacon off fine china, with alternate
mouthfuls of admirably crisp toast and the freshest butter, than have
rioted in the feasts of Caligula with a napkin ever so slightly stained.
The same snowfall which had blocked the line between Tilehurst and
Goring had not spared London, and the streets on this Sunday morning
were dumb and heavy with snow. Gangs of men were out at work clearing it
away, and streaks and squares of brown, muddy pavement and roadway of
contrasted sordidness were being disclosed in the solid whiteness of the
street. Mr. Alington, looking from his window, was afraid that these
efforts were likely to prove but lost labour, for the sky was still
thick and overlaid with that soft, greasy look which portends more snow,
and in spite of the hour, it was but an apology for twilight on to which
he looked out. This thought was an appreciable pang to him. The street
was empty but for the street-clearers, and had attained that degree of
discomfort only realized in London after a snowfall. The gaunt,
gray-faced houses opposite showed lights twinkling in their windows, and
the yellow, unluminous atmosphere was like a jaundiced dream. The palace
clock at the bottom of the street was still lit within, but it was no
more than a blurred moon through the clogged air.
But Mr. Alington, after his first comprehensive glance, gave but little
attention to these atrocities of climate. His reading-lamp shone
cheerily on his desk, and on the very satisfactory papers lying there,
and Carmel basked in a temperate sunshine. For up till now the ways of
the new group had entirely fulfilled his expectations, which from the
beginning had been sanguine, and the best, so he hoped, was yet to be.
The scheme which he had formed in the summer, and which he had talked
over with Jack in September, had been simple, ingenious, and on the safe
side of excessive sharpness. The dear, delightful public, as he had
foreseen, was quite willing to fall in with his scheme, and had seconded
his plans for general enrichment--particularly his own--with openhanded
patronage. The scheme in brief was as follows, had the public only
known:
It will be remembered that he had formed two companies, Carmel, and
Carmel East and West, with capitals respectively of three hundred
thousand and five hundred thousand pounds. Carmel East and West had
exhibited remarkable fluctuations, as Kit knew to her loss, Alington,
and Jack following his advice, to their gain, and the way in which this
had been worked was simplicity itself. The shares had been issued at
par, and had risen almost immediately to twenty-five shillings. This
Alington was disposed to put down partly to his own reputation and as
the result of reports from the mine, but chiefly--for he was modest even
when alone--to the effect of his noble body of directors. He as vendor
had fifty thousand shares fully paid, and at this point he sold out,
unloading very carefully under several names, and taking a very decent
little profit for a man of simple tastes and butler-like appearance. The
natural effect of this extensive sale was to cause the shares to drop,
and the downward tendency was accelerated by unpromising news from the
mine, which followed immediately on his sale. The ore, as stated in the
prospectus, was refractory, and extracting it was both costly and
yielded a very small percentage of gold. Mr. Alington, whom several
large holders and substantial City men consulted about this time, was
not sanguine. The results were bad, there was no denying it. Three weeks
of a dropping market brought the shares to the condition they were in on
that day of November on which Kit sold out for the first time, and they
closed at thirteen and ninepence sellers, fourteen and threepence
buyers. This seemed to Alington to be low enough for his second step, as
he did not want the market to lose confidence altogether. He sent a
telegram out to his manager in Australia, Mr. Linkwood, laconic, but to
that intelligent fellow perfectly comprehensible:
"New process.--ALINGTON," it ran.
He also sent one to Mr. Richard Chavasse:
"Invest."
The next morning he received from Mr. Linkwood the following reply:
"Carmel East. Ninety per cent. of gold extracted by Bülow process.
Strong support by Australian markets.--LINKWOOD."
Now, the evening before certain large purchases in Carmel East had been
made in England, not by the names under which Mr. Alington had
previously unloaded, for the weakness of such a course was obvious, and
he followed them up the next morning by a very large purchase in his own
name, and by the publication of his telegram from Mr. Linkwood. He also
saw several business men, to whom he gave a full explanation. He had
telegraphed, he said with absolute truth, to his manager to try the
Bülow process, and, as they saw, it had yielded admirable results.
Instead of twenty, they got ninety per cent. of the gold out. Concerning
the strong support of the Australian markets, they would no doubt
receive further news by cable. He had no information later than that
telegram which he had published.
The effect of this on a market already predisposed to go a-booming after
Westralians was natural and inevitable. The shares went up nearly a half
during the day, and next morning when a further private cable, instantly
made public, recorded that that shrewdest of financiers, Mr. Richard
Chavasse, had bought to the extent of forty thousand pounds, they ran
past thirty shillings.
A week later they stood at two pounds, owing to steady support from
private investors. There was a spurious report that a dividend might be
expected, so extraordinary successful had the month's crushing proved to
be, and this was the unfortunate moment selected by Kit to make her
second purchase. Simultaneously Alington, who for a week past had been
very carefully unloading, telegraphed to Jack to do the same, and sold
out largely under his own name. A week passed, and the shares moved
slowly back, depressed by these large sales, though there was still a
considerable demand for them in England. Then came another telegram from
Australia, saying the mine looked much less hopeful. The vein which they
had been working so successfully for the past two or three months came
suddenly to an end, owing to a dip in the strata, and if struck again,
it could probably be struck only at a much deeper level. This would
entail considerable development. Following on this came large sales in
Australia, Mr. Richard Chavasse (in consequence of a wire from England)
being among them, and the shares went down to nineteen shillings. Then
the possibility of a war between England and France depressed them still
further, and they subsided quietly to fourteen shillings, where, for all
that Mr. Alington at present cared, they were at liberty to remain. Thus
closed the first act of the great deal, leaving a suspicious market.
Such was the position on this Sunday morning with regard to Carmel East
and West when Mr. Alington looked out on the snow-muffled street. He had
been to a concert the afternoon before, where they had performed
Palestrina's Mass in B flat and fragments of those sweet, austere
melodies still haunted his head. Like many men who have a great aptitude
for figures, he had a marvellous musical memory, and sitting down at his
piano, he recalled gently several of the airs. That was the music which
really appealed to him, pure, simple melody of a sacred kind. No one
regretted more than he the utter decadence of English music, its fall
from its natural genius, which came to perfection, so he considered,
under the divine Purcell. It had become _déclassé_, in the most awful
sense of that awful word. An exotic German growth had spread like some
parasitic plant over it; the native taste was still there, and every now
and then Parry, or some of his immediate school, would give one an air
which was worthy of the English best, but otherwise everyone seemed
emulous of indefinitely multiplying the most chaotic of Wagner, or the
music of those people whose names ended in "owski." Then, and still from
memory, by an act of unconscious cerebration, he played the last chorus
out of "Blest Pair of Syrens," and, closing the piano, got up and went
to his desk with tear-dimmed eyes, in harmony with himself.
He had anticipated events with the precision of a great general. The
market had rushed, like starving folk when a granary is opened, at
Carmel East and West, and after they had reached their highest point,
and the big sales began, there had followed something like a panic. West
Australian mines were still new to the public, and the greater
financiers viewed them with suspicion. This sudden scare over Carmel
East and West suited Mr. Alington exactly, for it would be sure to bring
down the price of the second Carmel group--namely, the North, South, and
Central mines. He had seen this six months ago, and had worked for this
very end. At present he had no holdings in Mount Carmel, except those
shares which he held to qualify as a director, and he had delayed any
purchase in them till the panic created by the mercurial behaviour of
the sister group should have brought down the price. The lower it went,
the better would he be pleased, for he intended to make a coup over this
compared to which what he had pocketed over Carmel East and West should
be a mere bagatelle. But for Carmel he required no adventitious aid from
marquises, and consequently the sudden resignation of Tom Abbotsworthy
from his board, which event had taken place the day before, did not
trouble him at all, nor did he care to know what cause "his regret to
find that press of work prevented him" covered. The mine he knew was a
magnificent property, quite able to stand on its own feet, and in the
prospectus he had purposely understated its probable value. In doing so,
he was altogether free from possible censure; the mine had seemed to him
promising, and he had said so, and when the shares were suitably low he
intended to buy all he could lay hands on. Purposely, also, he had
undercapitalized it; eventually he meant to issue fresh shares. The five
hundred thousand pounds already subscribed was not more than sufficient
to work Carmel North, and both Mount Carmel and Carmel South of the same
group he believed to be as remunerative as the others. The panic over
Carmel East and West had already affected the other group, and yesterday
evening the one-pound shares, after a week's decline, stood at fifteen
shillings. He proposed to let them go down, if they kindly would, till
they had sunk to ten shillings or thereabouts, then buy for all he was
worth, and send a telegram to Mr. Richard Chavasse to do the same. And
at the thought of Mr. Richard Chavasse he put his thumbs into the
armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back in his chair, and laughed aloud
with a great mellowness of sound.
In certain respects Mr. Alington, for all his staid conversation and
butler-like appearance, was a true humorist; in this instance, at any
rate, that he alone should appreciate his own joke was sufficient for
him, and he required no sympathizer. Indeed, it would have spoiled it
all if other people had been able to appreciate it. Though a modest man,
he considered the Chavasse joke very entertaining, and the Chavasse joke
was all his own, and the point of it as follows:
Some years ago, out in Australia, he had a Swiss valet, a clever,
neat-handed rogue in his way, who one night was sufficiently ill-advised
to open the house to burglars. But the alarm was given. Mr. Alington,
with a revolver and pyjamas, came mildly but firmly downstairs, and
though the burglars escaped, he held his valet in the hollow of his
hand. The man stood detected, and, hoping to make the best of his
miscarried job, confessed his complicity to his master. Mr. Alington
made him give his confession in writing, and sent it to his bank for
safe keeping, but for the time took no further steps.
But not long before the formation of this new company, four or five
months only before his own departure for England, he parted company with
his servant, who left Melbourne at once. Three months afterwards a
gentleman with a fine moustache and a short beard appeared--a personal
friend, it would seem, of Mr. Alington's, and a man of wealth,
interested in Australian mines. A few weeks only after his arrival Mr.
Alington left for England. Mr. Richard Chavasse, however, remained,
cultivated and linguistic, and lived in Alington's house at, it was
supposed, a suitable rent. Altogether he may be best described as a
creation.
Here, again, as in so many of the dealings of Providence with man, Mr.
Alington often marvelled to see the working of all things together
towards good. In the first instance there had not been wanting to his
forbearance to give Mr. Richard Chavasse over to the police a vague
feeling of compassion at the thought of those deft, shirt-studding hands
given over bleeding to oakum-picking and the sewing of mail-bags; and
how amply was that sweet pity rewarded! A man bound to him by fear was a
far safer repository for the large sums of money, amounting sometimes to
forty or fifty thousand pounds, over which Mr. Chavasse had control,
than someone over whom he held no such check. Should Mr. Chavasse
attempt to get off with the money, or even--so stringent were Alington's
regulations for the strict and sober conduct of his life--leave the
colony, a wired word from him to the bank would place the ex-valet's
confession of complicity in the burglary in the hands of the police.
Alington, in fact, had speculated largely in Chavasses, and he had the
wit to see from the beginning that the more comfortable position he gave
him, the more man of wealth and mark he made him, the securer he himself
would be. A beggar with power of attorney may easily decamp with the
spoils, and possibly baffle pursuit, but for the solid man interested in
mines, though slightly recluse and exclusive, it is hardly possible to
evade capture. Besides, who in their senses would not prefer to live
delicately than to dodge detectives? Certainly Mr. Chavasse was
completely in his senses, and did not attempt escape. What Alington
meant to do with him after the grand coup in Carmels he had not yet
certainly determined.
In the interval Mr. Chavasse, ex-valet, lived in his house in Melbourne
rent-free, and cost Mr. Alington perhaps eighty pounds a month. But how
admirable an investment was that; and how small a percentage of his
coinings for his master did that eighty pounds a month represent!
Already it had often happened, as in the case of Carmel East, that
Alington in England wanted to run up the price of some mine, and strong
support in Australia was exactly what was needed to give a hesitating
market confidence. Thus he exercised a dual control: here in England, no
doubt, many investors followed his lead, for he was known to be an
extremely shrewd man, with the instinct bred of knowledge equalled by
none, and invariably his purchases seemed to herald a general advance.
For as surely as Mr. Alington bought in London, so surely did a cable go
out to Mr. Chavasse, "Invest balance," or "Invest half balance," and in
due course came the answer, not necessarily to Alington--indeed, seldom
to him--"Strong support in Australia." The plan was simple--all
practical plans are: the valet had his choice between two courses of
life--the one to live extremely comfortably in Alington's delightful
house in Melbourne, passing pleasant, independent days, and
occasionally, as the telegram came from England, making large purchases
for this mine or that, or selling still in obedience; the other, to
leave his comfortable house, and start off in an attempt to outrun the
detectives: for as surely as he tried to escape, so surely would his
confession lying at the bank pass into the hands of the police. Once a
month, indeed, he had to send to England the statement of his accounts,
and now and then he had been told that his cigar-bill was too large, or
that whisky-and-soda for lunch would be a pleasant change from an
expensive Moselle. On leaving Australia, Mr. Alington had transferred to
him absolutely certain shares, certificates and balance at the Melbourne
bank in payment, it was supposed, of some large purchase; and not
infrequently he could, if he chose, draw a cheque for as much as fifty
thousand pounds to self. Thus, for a few weeks, perhaps, he would be
able to career over the world; but from that moment he would be Mr.
Richard Chavasse no longer, that solid, linguistic gentleman, but the
man Chavasse, earnestly wanted by the police for burglary.
There was risk on both sides. Alington knew that to convict the man, if
he was so insane as to try to escape, meant exposure of his own side of
the bargain and good-bye to the dual control. In his heart of hearts,
indeed, he had hardly determined what to do should Chavasse make so
deplorable a blunder. No doubt he could be caught, no doubt his identity
could be proved, and he could be landed in the place of tread-mills and
oakum-picking, but there would be other revelations as well, not all
touching Chavasse. However, he never seriously contemplated such
possibilities, for he did not believe that the man would ever try to
escape. He was comfortable where he was, and comfortable people will
think twice before they risk a prosecution for burglary. Alington was
far too acute to think of frightening him or keeping him continually
cowering; exasperation might drive him to this undesirable ruin.
Instead, he gave him a very fair allowance, and complaints as to the
length of his cigar-bill were few. Indeed, he had gauged the immediate
intentions of his ex-valet very correctly. Mr. Richard Chavasse had no
present thoughts of attempting to liberate himself from his extremely
tolerable servitude, and probably get in exchange something far less
soft, while that confession of his lay at the bank. He had the dislike
of risks common to men who have been detected once. If, however, he
could by any plan, not yet formulated, manage to remove those risks, his
conscience, he felt, would not tell him that he was bound in gratitude
to Mr. Alington never to do anything for himself.
This morning, as Alington sat working in his well-lighted room, or
looked out with kind and absent gaze into the snowy, sordid street, or
laughed with pleasure at the thought of Mr. Richard Chavasse, he felt
extremely secure, and humbly thankful to the Providence which had so
guided his feet into the ways of respectability and wealth. Without
being a miser in the ordinary usage of the word, he had that inordinate
passion (in his case for money) which marks the monomaniac. Yet he
remained extremely sane; his willingness to provide himself not only
with the necessaries but also the luxuries which money will buy,
remained, in spite of his passion for it, unimpaired. He was not
extravagant, for extravagance, like other excess, was foreign to his
mild and well-regulated nature, and had not been induced by the
possession of wealth, but a scarce print he seldom left unpurchased. He
gave, moreover, largely to charitable institutions, and the giving of
money to deserving objects was a genuine pleasure to him, quite apart
from the satisfaction he undoubtedly felt at seeing his name head a
subscription list. In addition to his own great passion also, he had a
thousand tastes and interests, a gift that even genius itself often
lacks, and it may have been these on the one hand pulling against the
lust for money on the other that kept him so well-balanced, just as the
telegraph post is kept straight by the strain on both sides. As well as
the one great thing, the world held for him hundreds of desirable
objects, and the hours in which he was not devoted to his business were
not, as they are to so many, a blank and a pause. He closed his ledger
and opened the passion music; he shut his piano and untied his portfolio
of prints, and his sleek, respectable face would glow with inward
delight at each. A certain kindliness of disposition, which was part of
his nature, it must be confessed, he kept apart when he was engaged in
business. This lived in an attic and never descended the stairs if he
was at his desk. To give an instance, he had not the slightest impulse
to help Kit in her difficulty, though a word from him would have shown
her how in the next few months to make good her losses. She had chosen
to mix herself up in business, and he became a business man from head to
heels. It even gave him a little pleasure to see her flounder in so
stranded a fashion, for he had not effaced, and did not mean to efface,
from his mind the very shabby thing she had chosen to do to him on the
night of the baccarat affair. Being very wealthy, it did not really
matter to him whether she cheated him of a hundred pounds or a
threepenny-bit, but he quite distinctly objected to being cheated of
either. Had the last trump summoned him on the moment to the open
judgment-books, he might have sworn truthfully enough that he had
forgiven her, for he did not ever intend to make her suffer for it, even
if he had the opportunity of doing so. Certainly he forgave her; he
would not ever attempt to revenge himself on her, and he had not told a
soul about it.
But her difficulties aroused no compassion in him, nor would they have
done so even if she had never cheated him at baccarat. Business is
business, and a statue of sentiment has no niche hewn in the mining
market. One can do one's kindnesses afterwards, he said to himself,
and, to do him justice, he often did.
For the present there was a lull in the Carmel transaction, and after a
very short spell at the ledgers Mr. Alington closed them with a sigh.
There were several receipts lying on his table, and he took them up,
read each, and docketed it. One was for a considerable sum of money paid
to a political agency. He hesitated a moment before putting the docket
on it, and finally wrote on the top left-hand corner:
"Baronetcy."
CHAPTER III
LILY DRAWS A CHEQUE
Toby was sitting after breakfast in the dining-room of his house in town
reading the Times. It had been settled for him by Lily before their
marriage that he was to have some sort of a profession, and, the choice
being left to him, he had chosen politics. He was proposing to stand for
a perfectly safe borough in about a month's time, and though hitherto he
had known nothing whatever about the public management of his country's
affairs, since he was going to take a hand in them himself, he now set
himself, or had set for him, day by day to read the papers. He had just
got through the political leaders in the Times with infinite labour, and
had turned with a sigh of relief for a short interval to the far more
human police reports, when Lily came in with a note in her hand.
"Good boy," she said approvingly, and Toby rustled quickly back to the
leaders again.
"A most important speech by the Screamer," he announced, honouring by
this name a prominent member of the Cabinet. "He seems to suggest an
Anglo-Russo-Germanic-French-Italian-American alliance, and says with
some justice that it ought to be a very fairly powerful combination. It
is directed, as far as I can make out, against Mr. and Mrs. Kruger."
Lily looked over his shoulder for a moment, and saw the justice of the
_résumé_.
"Yes, read it all very carefully, very carefully indeed, Toby," she
said. "But just attend to me a moment first; I shan't keep you."
Toby put down the paper with alacrity. The Sportsman tumbled out from
underneath it, but he concealed this with the dexterity bred of
practice.
"What is it?" he asked, vexed at the interruption, you would have said,
but patient of it.
"Toby, speaking purely in the abstract, what do you do if a man wants to
borrow money from you?" she asked.
"In the abstract I am delighted to lend it to him," he said. "In the
concrete I tell him I haven't got a penny, as a rule."
"I see," said Lily; "but if you had, you would lend it him?"
"Yes; for, supposing that it is the right sort of person who asks you
for money, it is rather a compliment. It must be a difficult thing to
do, and it implies a sort of intimacy."
"And if it is the wrong sort of person?" asked Lily.
"The wrong sort of person has usually just that shred of self-respect
that prevents him asking you."
Lily sighed, and pulled his hair gently, rather struck by his
penetration, but not wishing to acknowledge it.
"Door-mats--door-mats!" she observed.
"All right; but why be personal? Who wants to borrow money from you,
Lily?"
"I didn't say anyone did," she replied, throwing the note of her
envelope into the grate. "Don't be inquisitive. I shall ask abstract
questions if I like, and when I like, and how I like. Read the
Screamer's speech with great care, and be ready by twelve. You are going
to take me to the Old Masters."
She went out of the room, leaving Toby to his politics. But he did not
at once pick up the paper again, but looked abstractedly into the fire.
He did not at all like the thought that someone was borrowing money from
his wife, for his brain involuntarily suggested to him the name of a
possible borrower. Lily had held a note in her hand, he remembered, when
she came into the room, and it was the envelope of it, no doubt, which
she had thrown into the grate. For one moment he had a temptation to
pick it up and see whether the handwriting confirmed his suspicions, the
next he blushed hotly at the thought, and, picking up the crumpled
fragment from the grate with the tongs, thrust it into the hottest core
of the fire.
But the interruption had effectually destroyed his power of interesting
himself in this world-wide combination against Mr. and Mrs. Kruger.
There was trouble in the air; what trouble he did not know, but he had
been conscious of it ever since he had gone down one day late in last
December to stay with Kit and Jack at Goring, and they had been blocked
by the snow a couple of stations up the line. He had noticed then, and
ever since, that there was something wrong between Kit and his brother.
Kit had been unwell when they were there: she had hardly appeared at all
during those few days, except in the evenings. Then, it is true, she had
usually eaten and drank freely, screamed with laughter, and played
baccarat till the small hours grew sensibly larger. But underneath it
all lay an obvious sense of effort and the thundery, oppressive feeling
of trouble--something impossible to define, but impossible not to
perceive. In a way, supposing it was Kit who wanted to borrow money from
his wife, it would have been a relief to Toby; he would have been glad
to know that cash alone was at the bottom of it all. He feared--he
hardly knew what he feared--but something worse than a want of money.
He sat looking at the fire for a few minutes longer, and then, getting
up, went to his wife's room. She was seated at the table, writing a
note, and Toby noticed that her cheque-book was lying by her hand. He
abstained carefully from looking even in the direction of the note she
was writing, and stood by the window with his broad back to the room.
"Lily," he said, "will you not tell me who it is who wants to borrow
money from you? For I think I know."
Lily put down her pen.
"Toby, you are simply odious," she said. "It is not fair of you to say
that."
Toby turned round quickly.
"I am not a bit odious," he said. "If I had wanted not to play fair, I
could have looked at the envelope you left in the dining-room grate. Of
course, I burnt it without looking at it. But I thought of looking at
it. I didn't; that is all."
Lily received this in silence. For all his freckles, she admired Toby
too much to tell him so. And this simple act, necessitated by the
crudest code of honour, impressed her.
"That is true," she said. "All the same, I don't think it is quite fair
of you to ask me who it was."
Toby came across the room, and sat down by the fire. The suspicion had
become a certainty.
"Lily, if it is the person I mean," he said, "it will be a positive
relief to me to know it. Why, I can't tell you. I haven't spoken to you
before about the whole thing; but since we went down to Goring on that
snowy day I have had a horrible feeling that something is wrong. Don't
ask me what: I don't know--I honestly don't know. But if it is only
money I shall be glad."
Lily directed an envelope and closed it.
"Yes, it is Kit," she said at length.
"Ah, what have you done?"
"I have done what she asked."
"How much?" The moment after he was ashamed of the question; it was
immaterial.
"That is my own affair, Toby," she said.
Toby poked the fire aimlessly, and a dismal, impotent anger against Kit
burned in his heart.
"Borrowing! Kit borrowing!" he said at length.
"Of course, I haven't let her borrow," said Lily quietly, sealing the
note.
"You have made her a present of it?"
"Oh, Toby, how you dot your i's this morning!" she said. "Shall I unseal
what I have written, and put a postscript saying you wish it to be
understood that so much interest is charged on a loan? No, I am talking
nonsense. Come, it is time to go out. Kit is coming to see me this
afternoon, soon after lunch, so we must be back before two."
"Kit coming to see you? What for?"
"She asked me if I would be in at three. I know no more. Oh, my good
child, why look like a boiled owl?"
The boiled owl got up.
"It is a disgrace," he said; "I've a good mind to tell Jack."
"If you do," remarked Lily, "I shall get a divorce--that's all!"
"I'm not certain about the law in England," said Toby, with emphasis,
"but I don't believe for a moment that they'd give it you for such a
reason. But make the attempt. Try--do try."
"Certainly I should," said she. "But, seriously, Toby, you mustn't think
of telling Jack. He and Kit have had a row, so I believe, and she
doesn't like to ask him for money. I come next: I do really, because you
haven't got any. Besides, you said it was rather a compliment being
asked; I agree with you. But to tell Jack--preposterous!"
She stood in front of him, drawing on her long gloves, her eyes fixed on
her hands. Then she looked up.
"Preposterous!" she said again.
Toby took one of the gloved hands in his.
"I love and honour you," he said simply.
"Thank you, Toby. And how dear it is to me to hear you say that, you
know. So you'll be good, and let me manage my own affairs my own way?"
"For this time. Never again."
"As often as I wish, dear. Oh, am I a fool? You seem to think so."
"It's not that--oh, it's not that," said Toby. "Money--who cares? I
don't care a damn--sorry--what you do with it. It doesn't interest me.
But that Kit should ask you for money--oh, it beats me!"
"I think you are hard on her, Toby."
"You don't understand Kit," he said. "She is as thoughtless as a child
in many things--I know that--but being thoughtless is not the same as
being upscrupulous. And about money she is unscrupulous. Pray God it is
only----" and he paused, "well, it is time for us to go out, if we want
to see the Old Masters. Personally I don't; but you are a wilful woman.
And I haven't even thanked you."
"I should advise you not," remarked Lily.
"Why? What would you do?" said the practical Toby.
"I should call you Evelyn for a month."
Toby was sent to a political meeting directly after lunch, and Lily was
alone when Kit arrived. Fresh-faced as a child, and dressed with an
exquisite simplicity, she rustled across the room, just as she rustled
at church, and in her eye there was a certain soft pathos that was a
marvel of art. A mournful smile held her mouth, and, giving a long sigh,
she kissed Lily and sat down close beside her, retaining her hand. It is
far more difficult to be a graceful recipient than a graceful donor in
affairs of hard cash, and it must be acknowledged that Kit exhibited
mastery in the precarious feat. With admirable grasp of the dramatic
rights of the situation, for a long moment she said nothing, and only
looked at Lily, and even the doubting Apostle might have gone bail that
her feelings choked utterance. That she was very grateful for what Lily
had done is true, if gratitude can be felt without generosity; but it
was not her feelings that choked her utterance, so much as her desire to
behave really beautifully, and express her feelings with the utmost
possible charm. At last she spoke.
"What can I say to you?" she said. "Oh, Lily, if you only knew! What can
you have thought of me? But you must believe I loathe myself for asking.
And you--and you----"
Real moisture stood in Kit's eyes ready to fall. Lily was much moved
and rather embarrassed. Passionate relief was in Kit's voice,
beautifully modulated.
"Please say nothing more," she said. "It gave me real pleasure--I am
speaking quite seriously--to do what I did. So all is said."
Kit had dropped her eyes as Lily spoke, but here she raised them again,
and the genuineness of the eyes that met hers brought her more nearly to
a sense of personal shame than anything had done for years; for even the
most undulating _poseur_ feels the force of genuineness when really
brought into contact with it, for his own weapons crumple up before it
like the paper lances and helmets with which children play. Kit's life,
her words, her works, were and had always been hollow. But Lily's
sincerity was dominant, compelling, and Kit's careful calculated manner,
a subject of so great preoccupation but two seconds ago, slipped
suddenly from her.
"Let me speak," she said. "I want to speak. You cannot guess in what
perplexities I am. In a hundred thousand ways I have been a wicked
little fool; and, oh, how dearly one pays for folly in this world!--more
dearly than for anything else, I think. I have been through
hell--through hell, I tell you!"
At last there was truth in Kit's voice, a genuineness beyond question.
Her carefully studied speech and silences were swept away, as if by a
wet sponge from a slate, and her soul spoke. A sudden unexpected, but
imperative, need to speak to someone was upon her, to someone who was
good, and these past weeks of silence were an intolerable weight.
Goodness, as a rule, was synonymous in Kit's mind with dulness, but just
now it had something infinitely restful and inviting about it. Her life
with Jack had grown day by day more impossible; he, too, so Kit
thought, knew that there was always with them some veiled Other Thing
about which each was silent. Whether he knew what it was she did not
even try to guess; but the small things of life, the eating and the
drinking, the talk on indifferent subjects when the two were alone,
became a ghastly proceeding in the invariable presence of the Other
Thing. To Lily also that presence was instantly manifest, the trouble
about which Toby had spoken that morning. It was there unmistakably, and
she braced herself to hear Kit give bodily form to it, for she knew that
was coming.
Kit dropped her eyes and went on hurriedly.
"I am in unutterable distress and perplexity," she said; "and I
dread--oh, I dread what lies before me! For days and nights, ever since
that snow-storm down at Goring, I have thought only of what I have to go
through--what is within a few months inevitable. I have tried to conceal
it from Jack. But you guess, Lily. You know, I even went to a doctor to
ask if anything could be done----"
Lily looked up with a glance of astonished horror.
"Stop, stop," she said; "you are saying horrible things!"
"Yes, I am saying horrible things," went on Kit, with a strange calmness
in her voice; "but I am telling you the truth, and the truth is
horrible. The truth about a wicked person like me cannot be nice. You
interrupted me. I went, as I told you, but when I got there I drove away
again. I was not so wicked as I thought I was."
Lily gave a great sigh of relief. But she had not seen the Other Thing
yet.
"Oh, my poor Kit," she said; "I am so sorry for you; but--but you see
the same thing lies before me. But fear it? I thank God for it every
moment of my life. Cannot you forget pain, risk, danger of death, even
in that? Nothing in this world seems to me to matter when perhaps soon
one will be a mother. A mother--oh, Kit! I would not change places with
anyone in earth or heaven."
Kit did not look up.
"It is different for you," she said.
"Different? How different?" she asked; but a sudden misgiving shook her
voice. Outlines of the Other Thing were discernible.
A sudden spasm of impatience seized Kit.
"Ah, you are stupid!" she cried. "You good people are always stupid."
There was a long silence, and during that silence Lily knew Kit's
secret, and as with everyone the world of trivial things swarmed into
her mind. She heard the ticking of the clock, the low boom of life
outside, the rustle of Kit's dress as she moved slightly. Something
perfectly direct had to be said by the one or the other; anything else
would be as out of place as a remark on the weather to a dying man.
"What am I to do?" asked Kit at length simply.
And the answer was as simple:
"Tell your husband."
"I think Jack would kill me if I told him," said Kit.
"I am very sure he would not. Besides, what does that matter? Oh, what
does that matter?"
Kit looked up at her in silence, but after a moment Lily went on.
"Don't you see what I mean?" she said. "There are some situations in
life, Kit, and this is one, where no side-issue, like being killed,
comes in. There is, as God is above us, absolutely only one thing to be
done, though there are a hundred arguments against it. What is the use
of telling him? you might ask. Use? Of course there is no use. Why tell
the disgrace? why make him miserable? why make him hate you, perhaps?
Simply because you must--you must! Oh, my poor, poor Kit, I am so glad
you told me! It must be something to tell anyone, even a feeble little
fool like me. How could you have borne it alone? Oh, Kit, Kit!"
Again there was silence. Lily sat leaning forward in her chair, bending
towards the other, with all the pure sweet womanliness of her nature
yearning in her eyes. Perhaps she should have been shocked. She was not,
for pity swallowed up the very ground on which censure should have
stood. The two women, as asunder as the poles, were for the moment
brought close by the Divine identical experience of their sex; yet what
was to be to one the flower of her life and the crown of her womanhood,
was to the other a bitterness ineffaceable, a shuddering agony.
"Oh, it is difficult, it is difficult!" went on Lily; "but when was
anything worth doing easy? Does not all in you that you know to be best
point one way? You cannot imagine going on living with Jack, day by day,
week by week, without telling him. And when it comes----"
Lily broke off suddenly. Here was no question of words. What could
argument do in a case that admitted of none? There was one thing--one
thing only--to be done; all else was impossible. If Kit did not feel
that in her very blood and bones, no words could conceivably make her.
She had been sitting quite still and silent, apathetic apparently,
during Lily's speech. After her outbreak at the beginning, such entire
composure was unnatural. The two might have been talking of Danish
politics for all the interest Kit seemed to take in the subject.
Inwardly storm and tempest raged; old voices, memories, all that was
innocent, called to her; the gales of her soul bugled and shook the
foundations of her building, but as yet the moment had not come. Then
suddenly the slightest tremor seemed to shake her, and Lily saw that she
was beginning to feel, and that some fibre long dormant or numb was
still vital.
"All I say to you seems nothing more than platitude, perhaps?" she went
on; "but platitudes are worth consideration when one touches the great
things of life--when interest, tact, inclination, cleverness, are all
sunk, and we are left with the real things, the big things--goodness,
wickedness, what is right, what is wrong."
Her tone had a pleading wistfulness in it, her eyes were soft with
tenderness, and the simple, homely words had the force of their
simplicity. Kit was drawing on her gloves very slowly, still not looking
up.
"Tell me two things more," she said, with a tremor in her voice. "Do you
shrink from me? And the wrong I have done to--to your unborn child, what
of that?"
Lily rose and kissed her on the forehead.
"I have answered you," she said.
Kit got up, hands trembling and with twitching mouth.
"Let me go," she said. "Let me go at once. Come if I send for you."
She hurried from the room without further good-bye, and Lily was too
wise to try to detain her. Her carriage was still waiting, and she
stepped quickly into it.
"Home," she said.
Outside the air was brisk with spring, the streets clean and dry, and
populous with alert faces. Shop-windows winked and sparkled in the
lemon-coloured sunshine; at a corner was a barrow full of primroses from
the country, and the news of the day lay on the cobbles of the crossing,
with stones to keep it from flying, in scarlet advertisement. A shouting
wind swept down Piccadilly, hats flapped and struggled, errand-boys
whistled and chaffed, buses towered and nodded, hansoms jingled and
passed, but for once Kit was blind to this splendid spectacle of life.
Her own brougham moved noiselessly and swiftly on its India-rubber
tires, and she knew only, and that with a blank heaviness of spirit,
that each beat of the horses' hoofs brought her a pace nearer to her
home, to her husband--a step closer to what she was going to do.
She got out at her own door, and, to her question whether her husband
was in, was told that he was up in his room. He had ordered the
carriage, however, which brought her back, to wait, as he was going out.
Kit went quickly up the staircase and along the parquetted floor of the
passage, not loitering for fear she should not go at all. Jack was
standing in front of his fireplace, an opened letter in his hand. As she
came in he looked up.
Kit had advanced a few steps into the room, but stopped there, looking
at him with eyes of mute entreaty. She had not stopped to think over
what she should say, and though her lips moved she could not speak.
"What is it?" he said.
Kit did not reply, but her eyes dropped before his.
"What is the matter?" he asked again. "Are you ill, Kit?"
Then the inward storm broke. She half ran across the room and flung her
arms round his neck.
"I wish I were dead!" she cried. "Jack, Jack--oh, Jack!"
CHAPTER IV
THE DARKENED HOUSE
Toby was just turning into the Bachelors' Club next morning after
another terrible wrestle with the Screamer, when he ran into Ted Comber.
They had met a dozen times since their interview in the Links Hotel at
Stanborough last August; indeed, they were both of the snowed-up party
which went to the cottage in Buckinghamshire in the winter. Toby, still
in ignorance that his interference had only changed the scene of the
week by the seaside, bore him no ill-will at all; in fact, having been
extremely rude and dictatorial to him, he felt very much more kindly
disposed to him afterwards, and, as usual, on meeting him to-day, he
said "Hulloa!" in a genial and meaningless manner as they passed.
But this morning there was something comparatively dishevelled about
Ted; the knotting of his tie was the work of a mere amateur, and he had
no button-hole. As soon as he saw Toby he stopped dead.
"How is she?" he asked.
Toby stared.
"How is who?"
"Kit. Haven't you heard?"
Toby shook his head.
"I called there this morning," he said, "for Kit and I were going to an
exhibition, and they told me she was ill in bed. And Jack would not see
me."
"No, have heard nothing," said Toby. "Kit called on my wife yesterday,
but I did not see her. Lily did not say anything about her being ill."
Lord Comber looked much relieved.
"I suppose it is nothing, then," he said; "I do hope so. It would be
terrible for Kit to be ill, just when the season is beginning."
Toby stood for a moment thinking.
"Did you say Jack refused to see you?" he asked.
"Yes; I dare say he was very busy. No one sets eyes on him now that he
has become a gold-miner. I am told he lives in the City, and plays
dominoes in his leisure hours with stockbrokers. Probably he was only
busy."
Toby bit his glove.
"Why else should he refuse to see you?" he asked.
"I can't think, because I'm really devoted to Jack. Well, good-bye,
Toby. I'm so glad to have seen you. If there was anything serious, I'm
sure they would have told you. Isn't the morning too heavenly?"
Lord Comber waved his hand delicately, and turned briskly into
Piccadilly. He had really had rather a bad moment before he met Toby,
and it was a great relief that that red-headed barbarian knew nothing of
Kit's illness. It could scarcely be anything serious. One way and
another he had seen almost nothing of her since he was down at the
cottage in December, for he himself had been out of England, and in the
country, until this week, whereas the Conybeares had been almost
entirely in London.
It was a delicious spring morning, and his spirits rose quickly as he
went eastwards. He was proposing to do a little shopping in Bond
Street, since Kit could not come to the exhibition, and visit his
hairdresser and his tailor. A play had just come out at the Haymarket,
in which the men wore very smart coats with a great deal of thick braid
about them, and he intended to order a coat with thick braid at once. He
remembered having seen in an old fashion-book of 1850 pictures of men
with heavily braided coats, and had often thought how smart they looked.
But they belonged to the crinoline age, and till now he had never
seriously thought of getting one made. But this new play had quite
convinced him; though they were the fashion when crinolines were in,
they were not of the same ephemeral stamp as their feminine
counterparts, and the late nineties should see them again.
Just at the corner of Half-Moon Street was a flower-seller, with bunches
and button-holes of spring flowers. The girl who sold them was pretty,
and he looked at her a moment deftly twisting the wire round the stalks,
wondering where the lower orders got their good looks from. There were
yellow jonquils, breathing a heavy incense; creamy narcissi with flaming
orange-coloured centres; exquisite single daffodils, most classic of all
flowers, pure and girlish-looking; double daffodils, which reminded him
of the same girls grown older and rather stout, overdressed, with
fringes; and small fragrant bunches of violets. For violets, except in
so far as they were of a lovely colour, he did not care; they were as
formless as cotton-wool when put together for a button-hole (the object
of flowers), and the scent of them was so precisely like essence of
violets as to be _banale_. But as he was dressed in dark blue serge,
with a violet satin tie and a sapphire pin, he bought a bunch, and put
it in his button-hole, completing his scheme of colour. He gave the girl
a shilling, and when she would have offered him a heavy copper change,
told her to keep it, and walked on with a little warm charitable
feeling, unencumbered by the dead weight of so many pennies.
After his tailor's, a visit to Perrin's was necessary. He had a very
particular hairdresser there, whom he must really take into serious
consultation about certain gray hairs. There were at least a dozen of
them above each of his ears, and they had appeared there during the last
two or three months. All his family went gray early, and it was as well
to face it. It was no use getting hair dyes, which might either ruin
one's hair or be the wrong colour; it was only wise to consult the very
best authorities, and if hair dye was necessary, let it be put on, at
any rate directed, by a professional hand.
These were gloomy reflections; the shadow of age was beginning to peer
over his shoulder, and he did not like it at all. He was as yet only
thirty, but already ten years of being a young man, the only thing in
the world worth being, were gone from him. Five years ago, men of forty,
young for their age, were objects of amusing horror to him; their whole
life, so he thought, must be one effort to retain the semblance of
youth, and their antics were grotesque to the _vraie jeunesse_. But now
both the amusement and the horror were gone; it would soon be worth
while trying to learn a wrinkle or two from them. At twenty-five forty
had seemed beyond the gray horizons; at thirty it had come so near that
already, and without glasses (which he did not need yet), one could see
the details of that flat, uninteresting land. What he would do with
himself when he was forty he could not imagine. Marry very likely.
But forty was still ten years off, thousands of days, and this morning
was a jewel of spring, and he was so happy to think that probably Kit
had nothing much amiss. Really, he had had some bad minutes, but Toby
must have known if there had been anything wrong. So his spirits
rebounded, and he resumed his reflections on age with a strong
disposition towards cheerfulness as regards the outlook. When he looked
over his contemporaries in his own mind, he candidly found himself
younger than they. There was Tom Abbotsworthy, for instance, whose
forehead was already nearly one with the top of his head, separated only
by the most scrannel isthmus of hair, and corrugated with wrinkles on
its lower parts, smooth and shining above. There was Jack Conybeare,
with a visible tinge of gray in his hair, and lines about his eyes which
were plain even by candlelight. Ted congratulated himself, when he
thought of Jack, on his having so promptly gone to the face _masseur_ on
his return from Aldeburgh in September. It had meant a week of tedious
mornings, and an uncomfortable sort of mask at night over the upper part
of the face two or three times a week ever since, but the treatment had
been quite successful. "Not only," as the somewhat sententious professor
of massage had said to him, "had the growth and spread of the lines been
arrested, but some had actually been obliterated." He congratulated Ted
on his elastic skin. Again, his teeth were good, and really the only
reconnoitring-parties of age at present in sight were this matter of
gray hairs and a tendency to corpulency. For the former he was going to
take prompt steps this morning, and he had already begun a course of
gritty biscuits, most nutritious, but entirely without starch, which
promised success in point of the latter.
But while he was making his butterfly way down Piccadilly, occasionally
sipping at a jeweller's, or hovering lightly over a print-shop, Toby,
after a long meditation on the top step of the club, during which time
the hall-porter had held the door open for him, turned away instead of
going in, and went up Park Lane to his brother's house. Kit's bedroom
was directly over the front-door, and, looking up, he saw that the
blinds were still down. Jack was coming into the hall from his room when
Toby entered, and, seeing him, stopped.
"I was just coming to see you, Toby," he said. "I am glad you have
come."
Jack's face looked curiously aged and drawn, as if he had spent a week
of sleepless nights, and Toby followed him in silence, with a heart sunk
suddenly into his boots. There was deadly presage in the air. Jack
preceded him into the smoking-room, and threw himself down in a chair.
"Oh, Jack, what is it?" asked Toby.
* * * * *
The two remained together for nearly an hour, and at the end of that
time came out together again. Toby took his hat and gloves from the
hall-table, and was putting on his coat, when the other spoke.
"Won't you go and see her?" he asked, and his voice was a little
trembling.
"I think I can't," said Toby.
"Why not?"
Toby had thrust one hand through the arm of his coat, and with it
dangling remained a moment thinking.
"For two reasons: she is your wife--yours," he said, "and I am your
brother; also you were a brute, Jack."
"For both reasons see her," he said; and his voice was sorry and
ashamed.
"And it will do no good," said Toby, still irresolute.
"But it will be a pleasure to Kit," said Jack. "Don't, for God's sake,
be always thinking about doing good, Toby! Oh, it maddens me!"
Toby disengaged the coated arm, and leaned against the hall-table.
"I shouldn't know what to say," he replied.
"You needn't know; just go and see her." Jack spoke with some
earnestness. "Go and see her," he went on. "I can't, and I must know how
she is. Toby, I believe you are sorry for both of us. Well, if that is
so, I am sure Kit would like to see you, and certainly I want you to go.
She was asking for you, her maid told me, an hour ago."
"I'm a damned awkward sort of fellow," said Toby. "Suppose she begins to
talk, God knows what I shall say."
"She won't; I know her better than you."
Toby put his hat down, and drew off a glove.
"Very well," he said. "Send for her maid."
Jack laid his hand on Toby's arm.
"You're a good fellow, Toby," he said, "and may God preserve you from
the fate of your brother!"
Jack rang the bell, and sent for Kit's maid. The two brothers remained
together in the hall without speaking till she came down again.
"Her ladyship will see Lord Evelyn now," she said.
Toby went up the staircase behind the woman. They came to Kit's door,
and having tapped and been answered, he entered.
The blinds, as he had seen from the street, were down, and the room in
low half-light. The dressing-table was close in front of the window, and
in the dim rose light that filtered through the red stuff, he could at
first see nothing but a faint sparkle of silver-backed brushes and
bottles. Then to the right of the window the bed became outlined to his
more accustomed gaze, and from it came Kit's voice, rather gentler and
lower-pitched than its wont.
"Toby, it is dear of you to come to see me," she said. "But isn't it
stupid of me? Directly after seeing Lily yesterday I came back here, and
tripped on those steps leading from Jack's room. I came an awful bang. I
must have been stunned, for I remember nothing till I found myself lying
on the sofa here. Oh dear, I've got such a headache!"
Toby found himself suddenly encouraged. Of all moral qualities, he was
disposed to put loyalty the first, and certainly Kit was being
magnificently loyal. Her voice was perfectly her own; she did not say
that she had stumbled over something of Jack's, still less that he, as
Toby knew, had knocked her down. He drew a chair up to the bedside.
"It is bad luck, Kit," he said; "and really I am awfully sorry for you.
Is your head very bad?"
"Oh, it aches!" said Kit; "but it was all my own fault. Now, if anyone
else had been to blame for it, I should have been furious, and that
would have made it ache worse." She laughed rather feebly. "So one is
saved something," she went on, "and even with this head I am duly
grateful. It is a day wasted, which is always a bore, but
otherwise----"
And she stopped abruptly, for the glibness of her loyalty was suddenly
cut short by a pang of pain almost intolerable, which pierced her like a
sword. She bit the bedclothes in her determination not to cry aloud, and
a twenty seconds' anguish left her weak and trembling.
"I wanted to see you, Toby," she said. "Just to tell you how, how----"
And she paused a moment thinking that her insistence on the fact that
her accident was no one's fault but her own, might seem suspicious--"how
glad I was to see Lily yesterday!" she went on. "I wonder if she would
come to see me; ask her. But you must go now; I can't talk. Just ring
the bell as you go out. I want my maid."
She stretched a hand from under the bedclothes to him, and he took it
with a sudden fright, feeling its cold feebleness.
"Good-bye, Kit," he said. "Get better soon."
She could not reply, for another sword of pain pierced her, and he went
quickly out, ringing the bell as he passed the mantelpiece.
Jack was still in the hall when he came downstairs again, and he looked
up in surprise at the speed of Toby's return.
"She fell down, she told me," he said. "You were quite right, Jack--not
a word."
Jack had not time to reply when Kit's maid hurried downstairs into the
hall.
"What is it?" asked Jack.
"Her ladyship is in great pain, my lord," she said. "She told me to send
for the doctor at once."
Jack rang the bell and looked up at Toby blankly, appealingly.
"Go into your room, Jack," he said. "I'll send for the doctor, and do
all that."
A footman was sent off at once for Kit's doctor, and Toby sat down at a
writing-table in the hall and scribbled a note to his wife, to be taken
by a messenger at once to his house. If Lily was not at home, he was to
find out where she had gone and follow her. The note only contained a
few words:
"MY DEAREST: Kit is in trouble--worse than I can tell you. Come at
once to her. She wants you.
"TOBY."
When he had written and sent this, he went back to Jack. The latter was
sitting at his table, his face in his hands, doing nothing. Toby went up
to him.
"Come, Jack," he said, speaking as if with authority, "make an effort
and pull yourself together. Get to your work, or try to. There is a pile
of letters there you haven't looked at. Read them. Some may want
answers. If so, answer them. I have sent for Kit's doctor, and for
Lily."
Jack looked up.
"It isn't fit that Lily should come here," he said.
Toby thought of Kit's visit the afternoon before, and Lily's refusal to
him to say anything of what it had been about. That it had been private
was all she would tell him, and not about money. And as they were
sitting alone in the evening he thought he saw her crying once.
"I think it is very possible she knows," he said. "Kit had a private
talk with her yesterday. Wait till she comes."
Jack rose from his seat.
"Oh, Toby, if you had only telegraphed for me from Stanborough, instead
of packing him off!"
"I wish to God I had!" said Toby drearily.
Jack took up his letters, as Toby had told him, and began opening them.
There was one from Mr. Alington enclosing a cheque. He barely looked at
it. Money, his heart's desire, had been given him, and the leanness of
it had entered into his soul. But seeing the sense of Toby's advice to
do something, he answered some of these letters, mechanically and
correctly.
Before long Lily was announced, and Toby rose quickly, and went out into
the hall to meet her.
"Ah, Toby," she said, "you did quite right to send for me. They just
caught me before I went out. You needn't tell me anything. Kit told me
all."
Toby nodded.
"Will you see Jack?" he asked.
"Yes, if he would care to see me. Ask him whether he will or not."
But Jack had followed Toby, and before he could answer had come out of
his room.
"It is awfully good of you to come, Lily!" he said. "But go away again.
It is not fit you should be here."
"If Kit wants me, I shall see her," she said. "Please let her know that
I am here, Jack."
"It isn't fit," said Jack again.
"I think differently," said Lily gently. "Please tell her at once,
Jack."
Jack looked at her a moment in silence, biting his lip nervously.
"Ah God!" he cried, suddenly stung by some helpless remorse and regret,
and without more words he went upstairs to see whether Kit would see
her. He could not bring himself to go into the room, but asked through
the maid. Soon he appeared again at the head of the stairs, beckoning to
Lily, who was waiting in the hall below, and she went up. He held the
door of Kit's bedroom open for her, and she went in.
The room was very dark, and, like Toby, it took her a few seconds before
she could distinguish objects. From the corner to the right of the
rose-square of the window came a faint moaning. Lily walked across to
the bedside.
"Kit," she said, "my poor Kit! I have come."
There was silence, and the moaning ceased. Then came Kit's voice in a
whisper:
"Lily," she said, "I told him. I told him all. Then--then--I somehow
fell down those stairs leading from his room, and hurt myself awfully.
My fault entirely.... I was not looking where I was going. Oh, I have
felt so terribly ill since this morning, and it is only morning still,
isn't it? Have they sent for the doctor?"
"Yes, they expect him immediately. Oh, Kit, are you not glad you told
him? It was the only way. Now you have done all you can. It would be
worse to bear if you had not told him. Oh, I wish--I wish I could take
the pain instead of you! Hold my hand. Grip it with all your force; it
will make the pain seem easier. And oh, Kit, pray to God without
ceasing."
"I can't--I can't," moaned Kit; "I never pray. I have not prayed for
years."
"Pray now, then. If you have turned your back on Him, He has never
turned His back on you. The Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief, born
of a woman! Only be willing to let Him help you--that is sufficient.
Think of the graciousness of that! And this is the very week of His
Passion."
"I can't pray," moaned Kit again; "but pray for me."
The grip of Kit's hand tightened in Lily's, and she could feel the
stones in her rings biting into her flesh. Yet she hardly felt it; she
was only aware of it. And her whole soul went up in supplication.
"O most pitiful, have pity," she said. "Help Kit in the hour of her
need; deliver her body from pain and death, and her soul, above all,
from sin. Give her amendment of life, and time to amend, and the will to
amend. Make her sorry. Oh, Almighty One, stand near one of Thy children
in her pain and need. Help her--help her!"
The door of the room opened quietly, and Dr. Ferguson entered. He held
in his hand a little bag. He went to the window and drew up the blinds,
letting in a splash of primrose-coloured sunshine; then shook hands with
Lily, who rose at his entrance, in silence.
"You had better leave us, Lady Evelyn," he said. "Please send the nurse
up as soon as she comes."
Lily turned to the bedside once more before leaving the room, and Kit
smiled in answer to her. Her face was terribly drawn and white, and the
dew of pain stood on her forehead. Lily bent and kissed her, and left
the room.
She rejoined Toby and Jack in the smoking-room. Jack got up when she
entered with eyes of questioning.
"The doctor is with her," said Lily. "He will be sure to tell us as soon
as he can."
"Do you think she is very bad?"
"I don't know. She is in dreadful pain. How on earth did she manage to
fall so badly down these steps?"
"Did she tell you that?"
"Yes; she said it was entirely her own fault."
Jack turned away a moment.
"I knocked her down," he said at length.
Lily's eye flashed, but grew soft again.
"Don't let her know that you have told me," she said. "Oh, poor Jack!"
Jack turned to her again quickly.
"Lily, do you think she will die?" he asked. "And will it be that which
killed her?"
"Don't say such things, Jack," said Lily firmly. "You have no right to
say or think them yet. We must hope for the best. Dr. Ferguson will
certainly tell us as soon as he knows."
For another half-hour they sat there, the most part in silence. Lily
took up a book, but did not read it; Jack sat at a table beginning
letter after letter, and tearing them up again, and all waited in the
grip of sickening, quaking suspense for the doctor's report. Footsteps,
which at such times fall with a muffled sound, moved about the house,
and occasionally the ceiling jarred with the reverberation of a step in
Kit's room, which was overhead. Lunch was announced, but still none of
them moved. At last a heavy footstep came downstairs, the door of the
smoking-room opened, and Dr. Ferguson entered.
"It is a very grave case," he said quietly. "I should like another
opinion, Lord Conybeare."
Jack had faced round in his chair, and sat for a moment in silence,
biting the end of his pen. His hands were perfectly steady, but one of
his eyebrows kept twitching, and the colour was struck from his face.
"Please telegraph, or send a carriage to whomever you wish for," he
said.
"A hansom will be quickest," said Dr. Ferguson, "unless you have horses
already in. Excuse me, I will write a note."
Toby got up.
"I'll take it, Jack," he said. "Lily's carriage is still waiting."
"Thank you, Lord Evelyn," said the doctor. "Sir John Fox will certainly
see you if you send your card in. He will be at home now. In fact I need
not write. Bring him back with you, please."
Toby left the room, and Dr. Ferguson got up.
"She is very ill?" said Jack.
"Yes, the condition may become critical in an hour or two. I shall
then"--and he looked at Jack--"I shall then have to try to save Lady
Conybeare at whatever cost."
Jack gave a sudden short crack of laughter, but recovered himself.
"Meanwhile, Lord Conybeare," continued the doctor, "you are to consider
yourself a patient too. I insist on your having lunch."
"I can't eat," said Jack.
"Excuse me, but you have got to. And you too, Lady Evelyn. By the way,
Lady Conybeare tells me she had a fall. That, of course, caused this
premature event. When did it happen?"
For a moment Jack swayed where he stood, and sat down again heavily. He
seemed about to speak; but Lily interrupted him quickly:
"Yesterday afternoon, about four o'clock. Lady Conybeare told me about
it. Please come in to lunch, Dr. Ferguson, unless you are going
upstairs again at once, in which case I will send you some up. Come,
Jack."
Toby returned before long, bringing Sir John with him. The two doctors
had a short consultation together, and then went upstairs again.
* * * * *
Outside the muffled house the spring day ran its course of exquisite
hours. The trees in the Park opposite were already covered with little
green buds, not yet turned black by the soot of the city, and the
flower-beds were bright and heavily fragrant with big, succulent
hyacinths. Up and down Park Lane surged the busy traffic; now a jingling
hansom would cut in front of a tall, nodding bus, now a dray would
slowly cross the Park gate, damming up for a moment the two tides of
carriages passing in and out. The great bourdon hum of London droned
like some overladen bee, still intent on gathering more riches, and the
yearly renewal of the lease of life granted every springtime made gay
the tenants of this goodly heritage of earth. Inside the house Jack and
Lily sat alone, for she had sent Toby away for an hour or two to get
some air. They hardly spoke to each other; each listened intently for a
foot on the stairs.
About four o'clock, just as the sun, still high, was beginning to cut
the rim of the taller trees in the Park, Dr. Ferguson entered. He
beckoned to Jack, who left the room. Outside in the hall he stopped.
"You must decide," he said. "We cannot possibly save the mother and the
child."
"Save the mother!" cried Jack. "Oh, save her!"
His voice was suddenly raised almost to a shriek, and through the
closed door, Lily, hearing it, started up. In another moment he came
back into the room, trembling frightfully, with a wild, scared look.
"Jack! Jack!" she said. "My poor fellow! be brave. What is it?"
"They have to try to save one," said Jack. "Oh, Lily!" And with a sudden
upheaval of his nature, and an uprising of all that was tender and
remorseful, long overlaid by his selfish, unscrupulous life, he gave way
utterly and abandonedly. "Oh, Kit! Kit!" he moaned. "If she dies it will
be my doing. I shall have murdered her. And we have been married six
years! She was not twenty when we married--a child almost. And what have
I done for her? Have I ever made this wicked, difficult business of life
any easier for her? I, too, have been false and faithless, and when
poor, brave Kit came to tell me--what she told me--I did that which may
have killed her. She has to bear it all, and I, brute, bully and coward,
go scot-free. She fell like a log, and I was not sorry, only frightened.
And she told you, she told Toby, she told the doctor, that she had
fallen herself. Poor, loyal Kit! And I am a fine fellow to be loyal to!
O God! God! God!"
He writhed on the sofa, where he had flung himself in dumb, twisted
agony. The pains of hell, a soul knowingly lost, were his. All the love
he had once borne to Kit, all the years of their excellent comradeship
together, rose and filled the cup of unutterable remorse.
Lily, woman to her heart's core, was one throb of pity for them both,
and could scarce find words.
"Oh, Jack!" she said; "there is hope. It is not hopeless. They did not
say that. It is awful; but be strong. We have to wait."
He did not answer her, but lay like a man dead, his face hidden in the
elbow of his arm. Lily saw it was no use attempting to reach him by any
words. For the time he lay outside the range of human sympathy,
inaccessible. The outer darkness of remorse and regret was round him,
not to be illuminated, but unpierceable and of necessity so. He was not
a good man, but an utterly bad one would not have so suffered.
So they sat silent, and the sun sank lower behind the trees, till at
length a few rays through the yet thinly clad branches came in level at
the window. Suddenly Jack sat up.
"I hear a step," he said, and next moment Lily perceived it, too.
"Go into the hall to them, Jack," she said, thinking that he would
rather face the inevitable moment of news alone.
"I can't," said he.
The step came down the stairs, across the flagged hall, and Dr. Ferguson
entered.
"She will pull through," he said. "Unless anything quite unforeseen
happens, Lady Conybeare will do well."
CHAPTER V
TOBY ACTS WITHOUT SPEAKING
Ted Comber had passed an arduous but most satisfactory morning. His own
particular hairdresser had been kind, sympathetic and consoling. Gray
hairs were there, and it was no use denying it; but there was a
wonderful new preparation, not really a hair-dye, but a natural product,
which, like everything else connected with the hair, cost ten and
sixpence the bottle, and was to be confidently recommended. He would
send it round to South Audley Street. A little to be applied with a
brush every day to the parts affected, and the smell was not unpleasant.
From there he had gone to his tailor's, and had a long talk to Mr.
Barrett, who fully appreciated the solemnity of the braid idea, and said
it might be an epoch. Down the edge of the coat--exactly so--and the
waistcoat in the same manner, very broad. And what did his lordship
think about the treatment of the trouser? Braid on the outside of the
leg, or not? And his lordship thought braid. The suit could be ready by
Saturday evening, and so Ted could wear it for the first time on Easter
Sunday, said kind Mr. Barrett.
He came out of the shop humming a tune, very much pleased with himself
and braid and Mr. Barrett. Mr. Barrett always consulted him as if his
advice was worth having, with a bent back. To be a sort of _arbiter
elegantiarum_ in town was one of Ted's nasty little ideals, and he
contrasted himself with a friend of his who was being measured as he
came out, who, making some suggestion, not to Mr. Barrett, but only to
an assistant, received the curt reply, "Not worn like that now, sir."
How different would be the reception of any suggestion of his! Mr.
Barrett would look respectfully thoughtful for a moment or two, and then
say, "Very becoming, very becoming indeed." As likely as not he would
recommend the same innovation to the next customer, endorsing it with,
"Lord Comber has just ordered a coat of that cut, sir."
It was already after one when he left Bond Street, and he turned briskly
homewards. The morning was so lovely that he determined to walk, and he
reached home just before lunch. The inimitable preparation had already
arrived from Perrin's, and he went up to his bedroom to try its
properties. It was dark chestnut in colour, with a curious pungent smell
about it, and he applied it carefully, as directed, to the affected
regions. The affected regions smarted a little at the application, but
the pain could not be called really serious.
Though Ted had passed such assiduous hours since breakfast, the
afternoon was so pleasant that he determined to have another stroll
before tea. He had seen no one he knew that day except Toby, and he
yearned for a little light conversation. So, after changing his blue
suit for a more rigorous costume, soon after four he was on his airy way
to the Bachelors' Club. Tea and toast always tasted so good at the
Bachelors' Club, and he liked to think he was a Bachelor. It was
pleasant also, as he walked up the steps, to contrast the sunny content
of his five o'clock mood with his moment of real anxiousness this
morning.
The reading-room was nearly empty, and he sank peacefully into his
favourite chair by the window, and took up the Pall Mall. He abstained
from the leading article, and from "Silk and Stuff," or something of the
kind, at the bottom of the first page, cast a vague eye over "The Wares
of Autolycus," without any definite idea as to what they might be, and
turned to the small paragraphs to which he bore a closer affinity. Royal
Highnesses were doing various tedious things, race-meetings among them;
the German Emperor had written a hymn, or climbed a tree, or ridden a
locomotive; and about half-way down the page he saw the following:
"The Marchioness of Conybeare is lying in a very critical condition at
her residence in Park Lane."
Ted read it through once, hardly grasping it, and once more, thinking he
must be the victim of some gigantic practical joke. The next moment he
got hastily up from his chair, and at the door ran into an apologetic
waiter, who was bringing his delicious tea and toast. But he did not
pause for that, and going out into the street hailed a hansom, directing
the man to drive him to Toby's house. They would be sure to know there,
and, for private reasons of his own, he did not wish after his repulse
of this morning to make a target of himself again at Park Lane.
Now, barely half a minute before his hansom drew up there, Toby, who had
been sent out by his wife to get air, had come in. He was intending to
see whether there were any letters for either of them, and then walk
back to Park Lane. His straightforward, wholesome soul was full to
brimming, and the ingredients of that cup were sympathy for Jack,
anxiety for Kit, and blind anger and hatred for Ted. He was not a
canting analyst, and could not have said which ingredient usurped
proportion, nor did he cultivate mixed emotions, and the three existed
quite separately and individually, making him as wretched as his nature
permitted him to be. Between them all he felt pulled in pieces; any
conclusion to either would make the other two more bearable.