The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “She is to understand that I saw nothing?” asked Jack.

  “Of course, of course,” said Kit. “That is the whole point of it. What is your scruple? I am really unable to understand. I know it is not nice to deal with a person who cheats at cards. You have always to be on the watch. You’ll have to keep your eyes open in this business of the mines, but that is your own affair. Clearly it is much better that Alice should imagine you know nothing about the cheating. She might think you ought to break with the man; people are so queer and unexpected.”

  “What about Tom?” asked he.

  They had arrived at Park Lane, and Kit stepped out.

  “Jack, will you or will you not leave the whole matter in my hands—the whole matter, you understand—without interference?”

  He paused for a moment, still irresolute.

  “Yes,” he said at last; “but be careful.”

  Kit hardly heard this injunction; as soon as he had said “Yes” she turned quickly from him, and went into the house.

  It was already after four, and the tops of the trees in the Park had caught the first level rays of the eastern sun. The splendid, sordid town still lay asleep, and the road was glistening from the rain which had fallen earlier in the night, and empty of passengers. But the birds, those fit companions of the dawn, were awake, and the twittered morning hymn of sparrows pricked the air. Kit went straight to her bedroom, where the rose-coloured blinds, drawn down over the wide-open windows, filled the room with soft, subdued light, and rang the bell which communicated with her maid’s room. When she was likely to be out very late she always let her maid go to bed, and rang for her when she was wanted. Often she even made an effort to get to bed without her help, but this morning she was preoccupied, and rang before she could determine whether she needed her. Kit herself was one of those happily-constituted people who can do with very little sleep, though they can manage a great deal, and in these London months four or five hours during the night and a possible half-hour before dinner was sufficient to make her not only just awake, but excessively so at other times. In the country, it is true, she made up for unnatural hours by really bucolic behaviour. She took vigorous exercise every day in any weather, ate largely of wholesome things, hardly drank any wine, and slept her eight hours like a child. In this she was wiser than the majority of her world, who, in order to correct their errors in London, spend a month of digestive retirement at Carlsbad.

  “Live wholesomely six months of the year,” said Kit once, “and you will repair your damages. Why should I listen to German bands and drink salt water?”

  Instead, she fished all August and September, cut down her cigarettes, and lived, as she said, like a milkmaid. It would have been rather a queer sort of milkmaid, but people knew what she meant.

  Before her maid came (Kit’s arrangement that she might go to bed was partly the result of kindness, partly of her disinclination to be waited on by a very sleepy attendant) she had taken off her jewels, and put them into her safe. There also she placed the very considerable sum of money which she had just won at baccarat, to join the rainy-day fund. Jack did not know about the rainy-day fund—it was of Kit’s very private possessions; but it is only fair to her to say that if he had been in a financial impasse it would have been at his disposal. No number of outstanding bills, however, constituted an impasse till you were absolutely sued for debt; the simplest way of discharging them, a way naturally popular, was to continue ordering things at the same shops.

  Kit and her husband did not meet at breakfast, but took that plebeian meal in their own rooms. And she, having told Hortense to open the windows still wider, and bring her breakfast at half-past ten, put the key of her jewel-safe under her pillow, and lay down to sleep for five hours. She would want her victoria at twelve, and she scribbled a note to Lady Haslemere saying that she would be with her at a quarter past.

  Outside the day grew ever brighter, and rivulets of traffic began to flow down Park Lane. The hour of the starting of the omnibuses brought a great accession of sound, but Kit fell asleep as soon as she got into bed, and, the sleep of the just and the healthy being sound, she heard them not. She dreamed in a vague way that she had won a million pounds, but that as she was winning the last of them, which would mean eternal happiness, she cheated some undefined shadow of a penny, which, in the misty, unexplained fashion of dreams, took away the whole of her winnings. Then the smell of tea and bacon and a sudden influx of light scattered these vain and inauspicious imaginings, and she woke to another day of her worthless, selfish, aimless life.

  CHAPTER IV

  KIT’S LITTLE PLAN

  To many people the events of the day before, and the anticipations of the day to come, give with the most pedantic exactness an automatic colour to the waking moments. The first pulse of conscious consciousness, without apparent cause, is happy, unhappy, or indifferent. Then comes a backward train of thought, the brain gropes for the reason of its pleasure or chagrin, something has happened, something is going to happen, and the instinct of the first moment is justified. The thing lay in the brain; it gave the colour of itself to the moment when reasoned thought was yet dormant.

  Bacon and tea were the first savours of an outer world to Kit when she awoke, for she had slept soundly, but simultaneously, and not referring to these excellent things, her brain said to her, “Not nice!” Now, this was odd: she shared with her husband his opinion of the paramount importance of money, and the night before she had locked up in her safe enough to pay for six gowns at least, and a year’s dentist bills, for her teeth were very good. Indeed, it was generally supposed that they were false, and though Kit always laughed with an open mouth, she had been more than once asked who her dentist was. Herein she showed less than her ordinary wisdom when she replied that she had not got one, for the malignity of the world, how incomparable she should have known, felt itself justified.

  Yet in spite of that delightful round sum in her jewel-safe, the smell of bacon woke her to no sense of bliss beyond bacon. For a moment she challenged her instinct, and told herself that she was going to have tea with the Carburys, and that Coquelin was coming; that she was dining with the Arbuthnots, where they were going to play a little French farce so screaming and curious that the Censor would certainly have had a fit if he had known that such a piece had been performed within the bounds of his paternal care. All this was as it should be, yet as the river of thought began to flow more fully, she was even less pleased with the colour of the day. Something unpleasant had happened; something unpleasant was still in the air—ah! That was it, and she sat up in bed and wondered exactly how she should put it to Lady Haslemere. Anyhow she had carte blanche from Jack, and if between half-past ten and a quarter past twelve she could not think of something simple and sufficient, she was a fool, and that she knew she certainly was not.

  With her breakfast came the post. There were half a dozen cards of invitation to concerts and dinners and garden-parties; an autograph note from a very great personage about her guests at the banquet next week; a number of bills making a surprising but uninteresting total; another note, which she read with interest twice, and then tore into very small pieces; and a few lines from Jack, scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.

  “Do the best you can, Kit,” he said; “I am off to the City to see A. I shall behave as if I knew nothing.”

  Kit tore up this also, but not into small pieces, with a little sigh of relief. “Sense cometh in the morning,” she said to herself, and ate her breakfast with a very good appetite.

  Whatever she had been doing, however unwisely she had supped, Kit always “wanted” her breakfast, and as she took it the affair of the night before seemed to her to assume a somewhat different complexion. In her heart of hearts she began to be not very sorry for the lapse in social morality of which Mr. Alington had been guilty on the previous night. It seemed to her on post-prandial consideration that it might not be altogether a bad thing that she should have some little check upon him. It migh
t even be called a blessing, with hardly any disguise at all, and she put the position to herself thus. When you went careering about in unexplored goldfields with the owner, a comparative stranger, harnessed to your cart, it was just as well to have some sort of a break ready to your hand. Very likely it would be unnecessary to use it; indeed, she did not want to have to use it at all, but it was certainly preferable to know that it was there, and that if the comparative stranger took it into his head to bolt, he would find it suddenly clapped on. The only drawback was that Alice knew about it too; at least, Kit was morally certain that she had noticed Mr. Alington’s surreptitious pushing forward of his stake after the declaration of his card, which was very clumsily done, and she would have preferred, had it been possible, that only Jack and she should have known, for a secret has only one value, and the more it is shared the less valuable does each share become, on the simple arithmetical postulate that if you divide a unit into pieces, each piece is less than the original unit.

  Indeed, the more she thought of it, the more convenient did it appear that Mr. Alington should have made this little mistake, and that she should have noticed it. And, after all, perhaps it would save trouble that Alice should have noticed it too, for in all probability it would be necessary to make Alington play again and watch him. For this she must have some accomplice, and as Jack was not to come into the affair at all, there really was no better accomplice to have than Alice. To lay this trap for the bland financier did not seem to Kit to be in any way a discreditable proceeding. She put it to herself that, if a man cheated, he ought not to be allowed to play cards and win his friends’ money, and that it was in justice to him that it was necessary to verify the suspicion. But that it was a low and loathsome thing to ask a man as a friend to play cards in order to see whether he cheated or not did not present itself to her. Her mind—after all, it is a question of taste—was not constructed in such a way as to be able to understand this point of view, and she was not hide-bound or pedantic in her idea of the obligation entailed by hospitality. To cheat at cards was an impossible habit, it would not do in the least; for a rich man to cheat at cards was inexplicable. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that Kit was really shocked at the latter.

  In the course of an hour came an answer from Lady Haslemere. She was unavoidably out till two, but if Kit would come to lunch then she would be at home. Haslemere and Tom were both out, and they could be alone.

  Kit always found Alice Haslemere excellent company, and during lunch they blackened the reputations of their more intimate friends with all the mastery of custom, and a firm though gentle touch. Like some deductive detective of unreadable fiction, Kit could most plausibly argue guilt from cigarette ashes, muddy boots, cups of tea—anything, in fact, wholly innocent in itself. But luckier than he, she had not got to wrest verdicts from reluctant juries, but only to convince Lady Haslemere, which was a far lighter task, as she could without the slightest effort believe anything bad of anybody. Kit, moreover, was a perfect genius at innuendo; it was one of the greatest charms of her conversation.

  After lunch they sat in the card-room and smoked gold-tipped, opium-tainted cigarettes, and when the servants had brought coffee and left them, Kit went straight to the point, and asked Alice whether she had seen anything irregular as they played baccarat the night before.

  Lady Haslemere took a sip of coffee and lit another cigarette; she intended to enjoy herself very much.

  “You mean the Australian,” she said. “Well, I had suspicions; that is to say, last night I felt certain. It is so easy to feel certain about that sort of thing when one is losing.”

  Kit laughed a sympathetic laugh.

  “It is a bore, losing,” she said. “If there is one thing I dislike more than winning other people’s money, it is losing my own. And the certainty of last night is still a suspicion today?”

  “Ye-es. But you know a man may mean to stake, and yet not put the counters quite clear of that dear little chalk line. I am sure, in any case, that Tom saw nothing, because I threw a hint at him this morning, which he would have understood if he had seen anything.”

  “Oh, Tom never sees anything,” said Kit; “he is like Jack.”

  Lady Haslemere’s natural conclusion was that Jack had not seen anything either, and for the moment Kit was saved from a more direct misstatement. Not that she had any prudish horror of misstatements, but it was idle to make one unless it was necessary; it is silly to earn a reputation for habitual prevarication. Lies are like drugs or stimulants, the more frequent use you make of them, the less effect they have, both on yourself and on other people.

  “Well, then, Kit,” continued Lady Haslemere, “we have not yet got much to go on. You, Tom, Jack, and I are the only four people who could really have seen: Jack and I because we were sitting directly opposite Mr. Alington, you and Tom because you were sitting one on each side of him. And of us four, you alone really think that this—this unfortunate moral collapse, I think you called it, happened. And Jack is so sharp. I don’t at all agree that he never sees anything; there is nothing, rather, that he does not see. I attach as much weight to his seeing nothing as to anybody else seeing anything. You and I see things very quick, you know, dear,” she added with unusual candour.

  “Perhaps Jack was lighting a cigarette or something,” said Kit. “Indeed, now I come to think of it, I believe he was.”

  “Jack can see through cigarette smoke as well as most people,” remarked Alice. “But on the whole I agree with you, Kit; we cannot leave it as it is. I believe the recognised thing to do is to get him to play again and watch him.”

  “I believe so,” said Kit, with studied unconcern.

  Here she made a mistake; the unconcern was a little overdone, and it caused Lady Haslemere to look up quickly. At that moment it occurred to her for the first time that Kit was not being quite ingenuous.

  “But I don’t like doing that sort of thing,” she went on, throwing out a feeler.

  “But what else are we to do?” asked Kit, who since breakfast had evolved from her inner consciousness several admirable platitudes. “It is really not fair to Alington himself to leave it like this; to have lurking in one’s mind—one can’t help it—a suspicion against the man which may be quite erroneous. On the other hand, supposing it is not erroneous, supposing he did cheat, it is not fair on other people that he should be allowed to go on playing. He either did cheat or else he did not.”

  There was no gainsaying the common-sense of this, and Lady Haslemere was silent a moment.

  “Tell Jack,” she suggested at length, after racking her brains for something rather awkward to say.

  As a rule she and Kit were excellent friends, and treated each other with immense frankness; but Lady Haslemere this morning had a very distinct impression that Kit was keeping something back, which annoyed her. Doubtless it was something quite trivial and unimportant, but she herself did not relish being kept in the dark about anything by anybody. But Kit replied immediately.

  “I don’t see why we should tell anybody, Alice,” she said; “and poor dear Jack would pull his moustache off in his perplexity, if he were to know,” she added, with a fine touch of local colour. “In any case, the last thing we want is a scandal, for it never looks well to see in the papers that the ‘Marchioness of Conybeare, while entertaining a large baccarat party last night, detected one of her guests cheating. Her ladyship now lies in a precarious state.’ You know the sort of thing. Then follow the names of the guests. I hate the public press!” she observed with dignity.

  “Yes; it is like X rays,” observed Lady Haslemere; “and enables the curious public to see one’s bones. And however charming one may be, one’s bones are not fit for public inspection. Also the papers would put the name of one of the guests with dashes for vowels, and the excited reader would draw his conclusions. Really, the upper class is terribly ill-used. It is the whipping-boy of the nation. Supposing Smith and Jones had a baccarat-party, and Smith cheated, no one would
care, not even Robinson.”

  Kit laughed.

  “That is just why I don’t want to tell anybody,” she said. “If three people are in a secret, the chances of it getting out are enormously greater than if only two are. Not that anyone tells it exactly; but the atmosphere gets impregnated with it. You know what happened before. One has to keep the windows open, so to speak, and let in plenty of fresh air, politics, and so on. Other people breathe the secret.”

  “We can’t tackle the man alone,” said Alice.

  “Why not? A man always hates a scene, because a man is never any good at a scene; and, personally, I rather like them. I am at my best in a scene, dear; I really am ripping.”

  Again Lady Haslemere had a quite distinct sensation that Kit was keeping something back. She seemed to wish to prove her case against Alington, yet she did not want anybody else to know. It was puzzling why she desired a private handle against the man. Perhaps—Lady Haslemere thought she had an inkling of the truth, and decided to take a shot at it.

  “Of course it would be awkward for Jack,” she observed negligently, “to be connected in business with this man, if it became known that he knew that Alington had cheated at baccarat.”

  Kit was off her guard.

  “That is just what he feels—what I feel,” she said.

  She made this barefaced correction with the most silken coolness; she neither hurried nor hesitated, but Lady Haslemere burst out laughing.

  “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.”