Mammon and Co Part 6

"My dear Kit!" she said.

Kit sat silent a moment, and then perfectly naturally she laughed too.

"Oh, Alice," she said, "how sharp you are! Really, dear, if I had been a man and had married you, we should have been King and Queen of England before you could say 'knife.' Indeed, it was very quick of you, because I didn't correct myself at all badly. I was thinking I had carried my point, and so I got careless. Now I'll apologize, dear, and I promise never to try to take you in again, partly because it's no use, and partly because you owe me one. Jack does know, and he, at my request, left me to deal with it as if he didn't. It would be very awkward for him if he knew, so to speak, officially. At present, you see, he has only his suspicions. He could not be certain any more than you or I. As you so sensibly said, dear, we have only suspicions. But now, Alice, let us leave Jack out of it. Don't let him know that you know that he knows.

Dear me, how complicated! You see, he would have to break with Alington if he knew."

Lady Haslemere laughed.

"I suppose middle-cla.s.s people would think us wicked?" she observed.

"Probably; and it would be so middle-cla.s.s of them," said Kit. "That is the convenient thing about the middle cla.s.s; they are never anything else. Now, there is no counting on the upper and lower cla.s.s; at one time we both belong to the criminal cla.s.s, at another we are both honest labourers. But the middle cla.s.s preserves a perpetual monopoly of being shocked and thinking us wicked. And then it puts us in pillories and throws dirt. Such fun it must be, too, because it thinks we mind. So don't let us have a scandal."

Lady Haslemere pursed her pretty mouth up, and blew an excellent smoke-ring. She was a good-humoured woman, and her detection of Kit took the sting out of the other's attempted deception. She was quite pleased with herself.

"Very well, I won't tell him," she said.

"That's a dear!" said Kit cordially; "and you must see that it would do no good to tell anybody else. Jack would have to break with him if it got about, and when a reduced marquis is really wanting to earn his livelihood it is cruel to discourage him. So let's get Alington to play again, and watch him, you and I, like two cats. Then if we see him cheat again, we'll ask him to lunch and tell him so, and make him sign a paper, and stamp it and seal it and swear it, to say he'll never play again, amen."

Lady Haslemere rose.

"The two conspirators swear silence, then," she said. "But how awkward it will be, Kit, if anyone else notices it on this second occasion!"

"Bluff it out!" said Kit. "You and I will deny seeing anything at all, and say the thing is absurd. Then we'll tell this Alington that we know all about it, but that unless he misbehaves or plays again the incident will be clo-o-o-sed!"

"I should be sorry to trust my money to that man," said Alice.

"Oh, there you make a mistake," said Kit. "You are cautious in the wrong place, and I shouldn't wonder if you joined us Carmelites before long.

For some reason he thinks that Conybeare's name is worth having on his 'front page,' as he calls it, and I am convinced he will give him his money's worth. He may even give him more, especially as Jack hasn't got any. He thinks Jack is very sharp, and he is quite right. You are very sharp, too, Alice, and so am I. How pleasant for us all, and how right we are to be friends! Dear me! if you, Jack, and I were enemies, we should soon make London too hot to hold any of us. As it is, the temperature is perfectly charming."

"And is this bounder going to make you and Jack very rich?" asked Lady Haslemere.

"The bounder is going to do his best," laughed Kit; "at least, Jack thinks so. But it would need a very persevering sort of bounder to make us rich for long together. Money is so restless; it is always flying about, and it so seldom flies in my direction."

"It has caught the habit from the world, perhaps," said Alice.

"I dare say. Certainly we are always flying about, and it is so tiresome having to pay ready money at booking-offices. Jack quite forgot the other day when we were going to Sandown, and he told the booking-office man to put it down to him, which he barbarously refused to do."

"How unreasonable, dear!"

"Wasn't it? I'd give a lot to be able to run up a bill with railway companies. Dear me, it's after three! I must fly. There's a bazaar for the prevention of something or the propagation of something at Knightsbridge, and I am going to support Princess Frederick, who is going to open it, and eat a large tea. How they eat, those people! We are always propagating or preventing, and one can't cancel them against each other, because one wants to propagate exactly those things one wants not to prevent."

"What are you going to propagate to-day?"

"I forget. I believe it is the anti-propagation of prevention in general. Do you go to the Hungarian ball to-night? Yes? We shall meet then. _Au revoir!_"

"You are so full of good works, Kit," said Lady Haslemere, with no touch of regret in her tone.

Kit laughed loudly.

"Yes, isn't it sweet of me?" she said. "Really, bazaars are an excellent policy, as good as honesty. And they tell so much more. If you have been to a bazaar it is put in the papers, whereas they don't put it in the papers if you have been honest. I often have. Bazaars are soon over, too, and you feel afterwards as if you'd earned your ball, just as you feel you've earned your dinner after bicycling."

Kit rustled pleasantly downstairs, leaving Alice in the card-room where they had talked. That lady had as keen a scent for money as Kit herself, and evidently if Kit denied herself the pleasure of causing a scandal over this cheating at baccarat (a piquant subject), she must have a strong reason for doing so. She wanted, so Lady Haslemere reasoned, to have Alington under her very private thumb, not, so she concluded, to get anything definite out of him, for blackmail was not in Kit's line, but as a precautionary measure. She followed her train of thought with admirable lucidity, and came to the very sensible conclusion that the interest that the Conybeares had in Alington was large. Indeed, taking into consideration the utter want of cash in the Conybeare establishment, it must be immense; for neither of them would have considered anything less than a fair settled income or a very large sum of money worth trying for. This being the case, she wished to have a hand in it, too.

Tom, she knew, had been approached by Mr. Alington and Jack on the subject of his becoming a director, and she determined to persuade him to do so. At present he had not decided. Anyhow, to win money out of mines was fully as respectable as to lose it at cards, and much more profitable. Besides, the daily papers might become interesting if it was a personal matter whether Bonanzas were up or Rands down. Tom had a large interest as it was in Robinsons--whatever they were, and they sounded vulgar but rich--and she had occasionally read the reports of the money market from his financial paper, as an idle person may spell out words in some unknown language. The "ursine operators," "bulls,"

"flatness," "tightness," "realizations"--how interesting all these terms would become if they applied to one's own money! She had often noticed that the political outlook affected the money market, and during the Fashoda time Tom had been like a bear with a sore head. To know something about politics, to have, as she had, a Conservative leader ready to whisper to her things that were not officially supposed to be whispered, would evidently be an advantage if you had an interest in prices. And the demon of speculation made his introductory bow to her.

It is difficult for those who dwell on the level lands of sanity to understand the peaks and valleys of mania. To fully estimate the intolerable depression which ensues on the conviction that you have a gla.s.s leg, or the secret majesty which accompanies the belief that one is Charles I., is impossible to anyone who does not know the heights and depths to which such creeds conduct the holder. But the mania for speculation--as surely a madness as either of these--is easier of comprehension. Only common-sense of the crudest kind is required; if it is supposed that your country is on the verge of war, and you happen to know for certain that rea.s.suring events will be made public to-morrow, it is a corollary to invest all you can lay hands on in the sunken consols in the certainty of a rise to-morrow. This is as simple as A B C, and your gains are only limited by the amount that you can invest. A step further and you have before you the enchanting plan of not paying for what you buy at all. Buy merely. Consols (of this you must be sure) will rise before next settling-day, and before next settling-day sell.

And thus the secret of not taking up shares is yours.

But consols are a slow gamble. They may conceivably rise two points in a day. Instead of your hundred pounds you will have a hundred and two (minus brokerage), an inglorious spoil for so many s.h.i.+ning sovereigns to lead home. But for the sake of those who desire to experience this fascinating form of excitement in less staid a manner there are other means supplied, and the chiefest and choicest is mines. A single mining share which, judiciously bought, cost a sterling sovereign may under advantageous circ.u.mstances be worth three or four in a week or two. How much more stirring an adventure! When we estimate this in hundreds and thousands, the prospect will be found to dazzle comparatively sober eyes.

Now, of the people concerned at present in this story, no less than five, as Kit drove to her bazaar, were pondering these simple things.

Alington was always pondering them and acting on them; Jack had been pondering them for a full week, Kit for the same period, and Tom Abbotsworthy was on the point of consenting to become a director. And Lady Haslemere, thinking over her interview with Kit, said to herself, with her admirable common-sense, that if there was a cake going, she might as well have a slice. She had immense confidence in the power of both Kit and Jack to take care of themselves, and knew well that neither would have stirred a finger for Mr. Alington, if they had not quite clearly considered it to be worth their while. And Kit was stirring all her fingers; she was taking Alington about as constantly as she took her pocket-handkerchief; she took him not merely to big parties and large Grundy dinners, but to the intimate gatherings of the brightest and best. For she was a good wife to Jack, and she at any rate believed that there was a cake going.

CHAPTER V

TOBY

Lord Evelyn Ronald Anstruther D'Eyncourt Ma.s.singbird was not usually known as all or any of this, but as Toby. It would have been a difficult matter, requiring a faith of the most preposterous sort, to have stood in front of him and seriously said, "I believe you to be Lord Evelyn Ronald Anstruther D'Eyncourt Ma.s.singbird," and the results of so doing might have been quite disconcerting. But having been told he was Toby, it would have been impossible to forget or to doubt it. The most vivid imagination could not conceive a more obvious Toby; the ident.i.ty might almost have been guessed by a total stranger or an intelligent foreigner. He was about twenty-four years old (the usual age of Tobys), and he had a pleasantly ugly face, with a snub nose, slightly freckled.

Blue eyes, in no way beautiful, but very white as to the white and blue as to the blue, looked honestly out from under a typically unintellectual forehead, above which was a shock head of sandy hair, which stood up like a terrier's coat or a doormat, and on which no brush yet invented had been known to exert a flattening tendency. He was about five foot ten in height, and broad for that. His hat had a tendency to tilt towards the back of his head, and he had big, firm hands, callous on their insides with the constant use of weapons made for the violent propulsion of b.a.l.l.s. He always looked comfortable in his clothes, and whether he was adorning the streets of London, immaculately dressed and hot and large, or trudging through heather in homespun, he was never anything but Toby.

A further incredible fact about him, in addition to his impossible baptismal name, was that he was Jack Conybeare's younger brother, and Kit's brother-in-law. Nature, that exquisite humorist who turns so many dissimilar little figures out of the same moulds, had never shown herself a more imaginative artist than when she ordained that Jack and Toby should have the same father and mother. The more you considered their relations.h.i.+p, the stranger that relations.h.i.+p appeared. Jack, slim, aquiline, dark, with his fine, taper-fingered hands and the unmistakable marks of breeding in face and form, was sufficiently remote to all appearance from Toby--fair, snub-nosed, squat, with his big gloves and his big boots, and his chair-filling build; but in character they were, considered as brothers, perfectly irreconcilable. The elder had what we may call a spider-mind. It wove a thread invisible almost to the eye, but strong enough to bear the weight of what it was meant to bear.

Obvious issues, the natural consequences of things, Jack pa.s.sed by in the manner of an express rus.h.i.+ng through a wayside station, and before Toby, to continue the metaphor, had drawn up, flushed and panting, at the platform, and read the name on the station board, Jack would be a gray streamer of smoke on the horizon. But Toby's grasp of the obvious was as sure as Jack's keen appreciation of subtleties, and though he made no dragon-fly dartings through the air, nor vanished unaware on horizon points, he went very steadily along, right in the middle of the road, and was never in any danger of falling into obvious ditches, or colliding with anyone who did not unquestionably get in his way, or where he might be expected to go.

Toby was a person who got continually slapped on the back--a lovable habit, but one which no amount of diplomacy or thread-spinning will produce. To slap Jack on the back, for instance, must always, from his earliest years, have been an impossibility. This was lucky, for he would have resented it. That n.o.body ever quarrelled with either of them appears at first sight a point in common; in reality it ill.u.s.trates their dissimilarity. It was dangerous to quarrel with Jack; it was blankly impossible to quarrel with Toby. You dare not try it with the one; it was useless to try it with the other.

At the present moment his sister-in-law was trying her utmost to do so, and failing pitiably. Kit was not accustomed to fail or to be pitiable, and it irritated her.

"You have no sense, Toby," she was saying. "You cannot see, or you will not, where your interest lies--yes, and your duty, too."

Now, when Kit talked about duty Toby always smiled. When he smiled his eyes wrinkled up till they closed, and he showed a row of strong, clean, useful teeth. Strength, cleanliness, and utility, in fact, were his most salient features.

Kit leaned back in her chair, waiting for his answer, for Toby got confused unless you gave him time. They were sitting in the tented balcony of the Hungarian Emba.s.sy, and from within came the rhythm of dance music and a delicious murmur of voices. It was the evening of the day of the bazaar, and Kit felt that she had earned her ball. The night was hot, and as she attempted the hopeless task of quarrelling with Toby she fanned herself, partly, no doubt, for the sake of the current of air, but to a psychologist, judging by her face, not without the intention of fanning the embers of her wrath. She had sat out this dance with him on purpose, and she was beginning to think that she was wasting her time.

Toby's smile broadened.

"When did you last do your duty, Kit?" he asked.

"My duty?" said Kit sharply. "We are talking about yours."

"And my duty is----"

"Not to go to that vulgar, stupid music-hall to-morrow night with that loutish friend of yours from Oxford, but to dine with us, and meet Miss Murchison. You seem to forget that Jack is your elder brother."