Mammon and Co.

"Try to tell me as best you can," said Lily quietly.

"Well, I won't be dishonest with myself, I am sure of that," said Kit. "Just now I have a horror of what – of what is past. But how can I know from what it springs? It may be only because the terrible consequences are still vivid to me. I have been wicked all my life – it is no use pretending otherwise. I have never tried to do good or to be good. Well, I get paid out for a bad thing I have done. Is it not most probable that I have a horror of it only because the punishment is very fresh to me?"

"That is something," said Lily. "If punishment makes you detest what you did, it is doing its work."

"Ah, but the burglar who is caught doesn't detest burglary, really. He may not commit it again, but that is a very different matter. You beat a dog for chasing a cat; when it sees a cat next time, it probably will put its tail down, but you have not eradicated its tendencies, or changed its nature."

Kit paused. She was groping about helplessly in her dim-lit soul.

"You are a good woman, Lily," she said. "You don't and you can't understand a person like me. Oh, my dear, I should never have got through it but for you! I want to be good – before God, I believe I want to be good, but I don't know what it means. I can only say that I will not do certain things again. But how feeble is that! I want to see Ted again – oh, how I want to! – but I believe that I want not to. Is that any good? I want to love Jack again. I did once, indeed I did, and I want him to love me. That is hopeless: he never will."

Lily was puzzled. Kit's difficulties seemed, somehow, so elementary that explanation was impossible. But she knew that it was only through the acknowledgment and the facing of them that her salvation lay. Kit was a child in matters of morals, and perfectly undeveloped; but, luckily, plain simplicity is the one means by which to approach children. Tact, finesse, all the qualities which Kit had and she had not were unneeded here.

"Kit, dear, it doesn't matter, so to speak, whether Jack loves you or not," she said. "Anyhow, it doesn't concern what you must do. Oh, you will not find things easy, and I never heard that one was intended to. You will find a thousand things you want to do, and must not, a thousand things you must do which are hard – harder than the old bazaar-opening, Kit. I am assuming, of course, that, on the whole, you want to be good. There is the great thing, broadly stated."

Kit nodded her head.

"I don't know. I suppose I do," she said.

"Well, there is no master key to it," said Lily. "Separately and simply you have to take each thing, and do it or avoid it. You will need endless patience. I don't want to preach to you, and I don't know how; but you have asked me to help you. Your life has been passed in a certain way: you have told me certain things about it. On the whole, you wish the future to be different. Forget the past, then – try to forget it. Do not dwell on it: it is a bad companion. It will only paralyze you, and you need all your power for what lies in front of you."

"Do you mean I must renounce the world, and all that?" asked Kit.

"No, nor go into a nunnery. You have a duty towards Jack. Do it; above all, keep on doing it, every day and always. Consider whether there are not many things, harmless in themselves, which lead to things not harmless. Avoid them."

"Don't flirt, you mean?" said Kit quite sincerely.

Lily paused a moment. There was a certain coarse simplicity about Kit which was at once embarrassing and helpful. Never were appearances more misleading; for Kit, with her pallor and exquisite face, looked the very image of a refined woman of the world, one who lived aloof from the grossness of life, yet of fine and complicated fibre. Instead, as far as present purposes were concerned, she was as ignorant as a child, but without innocence. She had lost the latter without remedying the former.

"Certainly don't flirt," she said; "but don't do a great deal more than that. Remember that you are a certain power in the world – many people take their tone from such as you – and let that power be on the right side. One knows dimly enough what goodness is, but one knows it sufficiently. I don't want you to be a raving reformer: that is not in your line. Set your face steadily against a great many things which are commonly done by the people among whom you move."

"The things I have done all my life," said Kit.

"Yes, the things you have done all your life."

Kit sat silent, and the gentleness of her face to this straight speech was touching. At last she looked up.

"And will you help me?" she asked. "Oh, Lily! I have been down into hell. And I didn't believe in it till I went there. But so it is – an outer darkness."

She said it quite simply and earnestly, without bitterness, or the egotism which want of reticence so often carries with it. Round them early summer was bright with a thousand blossoms and melodies; the mellow jangle of church bells was in the air; the time of the singing-bird had come.

"But I can't feel – I am numb. I don't know where to go, or where I am going," she went on, her voice rising. "I only know that I don't want to go back to the life I have hitherto led; but there is nothing else. The great truths – God, religion, goodness – which mean so much, so everything to you, are nothing to me. I feel no real desire to be good, and yet I want to be not wicked. One suffers for being wicked. I can get no higher than that."

"Stick to that, dear Kit," said Lily. "I can tell you no more. Only I know – I know that, if one goes on doing the thing one believes to be best, even quite blindly, the time comes that one's eyes are slowly opened. Out of the darkness comes day. One sees from where one has come. Then one look, and on again."

"But for ever, till the end of one's life?" asked Kit.

"Till the end of one's life. And the effort to behave decently has a great reward, which is decent behaviour."

"And Jack – what am I to say to Jack?"

"All you feel."

"Jack will think it so queer," said Kit.

"You did not see Jack when you were at your worst that afternoon. Oh, Kit! it is an awful thing to see the helpless anguish of a man. He will not have forgotten that."

"Jack in anguish?" asked Kit.

"Yes; just remember that it was so. Here's Toby. I thought he was at church. What a heathen my husband is!"

Toby strolled up, with his pipe in his mouth.

"I meant to go to church," he said; "but eventually I decided to take – to take my spiritual consolation at home."

"I, too, Toby," said Kit.

CHAPTER X

TOBY DRAWS THE MORAL

Toby was sitting in the smoking-room of the Bachelors' Club some weeks later on a hot evening in July. The window was open, and the hum of London came booming in soft and large. It was nearly midnight, and the tide of carriages had set westward from the theatres, and was flowing fast. The pavements were full, the roadway was roaring, the season was gathered up for its final effort. Now and then the door opened, and a man in evening dress would lounge in, ring for a whisky-and-soda, and turn listlessly over the leaves of an evening paper, or exchange a few remarks with a friend. As often as the door opened Toby looked up, as if expecting someone.

It had already struck midnight half an hour ago when Jack entered. He looked worried and tired, and by the light of a match for his cigarette, which he lit as he crossed the room to where Toby was sitting, the lines round his eyes, noticed and kindly commiserated a few months before by Ted Comber, seemed deeper and more harshly cut. He threw himself into a chair by Toby.

"Drink?" asked the other.

"No, thanks."

Toby was silent a moment.

"I'm devilish sorry for you, Jack," he said at length. "But I see by the paper that it is all over."

"Yes; they finished with me this afternoon. Alington will have another week of it. Jove! Toby, for all his sleekness and hymn-singing, he is an iron fellow! He's got some fresh scheme on hand, and he's going about it with all his old quiet energy, and asked me to join him; but I told him I'd had enough of directorships. But there's a strong man for you! He is knocked flat, he picks himself up and goes straight on."

He picked up the paper, and turned to the money-market.

"And here's the cruel part of it all," he said, "for both of us: Carmel is up to four pounds again. If they had only given him another month, he would have been as rich as ever, instead of having to declare bankruptcy; and I – well, I should have had a pound or two more. Lord! on what small things life depends!"

Toby was silent.

"About the Park Lane house," he said, after a pause. "I talked it over with Lily, and if you'll let us have it at that price, we shall be delighted to take it. We only have our present house on a yearly lease, which expires in July."

"You're a good fellow, Toby."

"Oh, that's all rot!" said Toby. "Lily and I both want your house. It isn't as if we were doing you a kindness – it isn't really, Jack. But it's such rough luck on you having to turn out. Of course, you and Kit will always come there whenever you like."

Jack lit another cigarette, flicking the end of the old one out of the window.