Mammon and Co.

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."