by E. F. Benson
She took his arm again, and they strolled slowly over the short velvet of the grass.
“Toby, there is another thing I want,” she said after a moment.
“It is yours—you know that.”
“I’m glad of it, then, because I don’t think you will like it. It is this: I want you to see Lord Comber, and just shake hands with him.”
Toby stopped.
“I can’t,” he said—“I simply can’t.”
“Think over it. You see, Toby, it is like this: you are part of me, and before this wonderful thing that is coming comes, I want to be ‘all square’ with everybody in the world. That’s one of your silly golf expressions, so you’ll understand it. And I can’t be while you are not. Don’t misunderstand me; it isn’t that I don’t feel as you do about him, and if I had been you and knocked him down as you did, I think I should have kicked him as he lay on the pavement. But now it is over.”
“Lily, you don’t know what you ask,” said Toby. “If I had any reason to believe the man was sorry, that he had even any idea what a vile worm he is, it would be different. No doubt he had a bad time that day, for, as I told you, his tie was no better tied than mine; but having a bad time is not the same as being sorry, is it?”
“No,” said Lily thoughtfully; “but whether he’s sorry or not is not our concern; it doesn’t affect what we ought to feel. He was vile; if he had not been, there would be nothing to forgive. Besides, you knocked him down. People ought to shake hands after they have fought; and I want you to.”
“That is the best argument you have given me yet,” said Toby.
“I don’t want it to be an argument at all; I don’t want my wish to be any reason at all why you should do it. You must do it because you agree with me.”
“But I don’t,” said Toby.
“Well, tell me when you would shake hands with him,” she said. “Would you this day fifty years?”
“No,” said Toby.
“Would you if he was dying, or if you were?”
“I think I should; yes, I should.”
“Oh, but, Toby, it is far more important to live in charity with people than to die in charity with them! Oh, indeed—indeed it is!” She stopped, and turned round, facing him, and all her soul shone in her eyes. “Indeed it is, Toby!” she said again.
Toby looked at her for a long moment, then drew her nearer him.
“Oh, my love!” he said, “what have I done to deserve any part of you? It is as you wish; how can you doubt it? How can I do otherwise?”
She smiled at him.
“But why do you do as I wish, Toby?” she asked. “It must not be because I want you to.”
Toby was much moved; never before had the wonder and splendour of love so held him.
“Oh, my beloved,” he said, “it is because God has ordained that all you wish is right; I can give you no other reason.”
Dusk began to fall layer on layer over the sky. In the west the sunken sun still illuminated a fleece of crimson cloud that hovered above it, and round them the gray, long English twilight grew more solemn and intense. The outlines of shadows melted and faded into the neutral tint of night, and from the house behind, and from the cottages that clustered together across the river, lights began to twinkle, and the wheeling points of remotest heaven were lit overhead. The crimson in the west died into the velvet blue of the sky, and in the east the horizon was dove-coloured with the imminent moon-rise. And as the two walked they spoke together, as they had not spoken before, of the dear event which June should bring.
To Lily, the happiness which, please God, should be hers lay in depths too abysmal for thought to plumb; and Toby for the first time fully understood how compassion, and no other feeling, had whole possession of her soul, when she had been with Kit and Jack all that terrible day, hardly more than a week ago. For that which had been to Kit a thing to dread was to the other the crown of her life, and that the experience to herself so blessed could be anything different to another woman called for pure pity. And other feelings—amazement, horror, shame—were trivial and superficial compared to that; it swept them utterly out of possibility of existence. The woman, the mother, had been between them a bond insoluble.
And Kit, so Toby thought, had felt something of this. For the five days that had followed, he himself had seen almost nothing of his wife; she had been all day at the house in Park Lane, and had twice slept there. Kit in the weakness and exhaustion of those days had held on, as if to a rock, to the sweet strength and womanliness of the other; that was the force that pulled her back to life.
That evening when they went in, Lily found waiting for her a letter from Jack, saying that the doctor had sanctioned Kit’s being moved in a week’s time, provided she went on as well as she was doing, and that they proposed to come down to Goring. One condition, however, Jack made himself, that Lily should telegraph quite candidly (he trusted her for this) whether she and Toby would rather they did not come. She laughed as she read the note, and sent her answer without even consulting Toby.
CHAPTER VII
THE SECOND DEAL
It was some eight weeks after Easter that Mr. Alington decided to make the next move in the game of Carmel, a move which should be decisive and momentous. He would have preferred for certain reasons to put it off a little while yet, for he had much on his hands, but the balance on the whole inclined to immediate action. During the last four or five months he had done a considerable deal of business as a company-promoter, and at the present moment had some half-million of pounds engaged in other affairs than mines. Motor-cars in particular had much occupied him, and he was the happy possessor of many patents for noiseless tires, automatic brakes, simpler steering-apparatus, and what not. He was a man of really large ideas where money was concerned, and a perfect godsend to patentees, for his policy was to buy up any invention concerning motors which possessed even the most modest merit, in the hopes that, say, in two years’ time every motor-car that was built must probably carry one or more of the patents owned by him. He had, indeed, at the present moment in England not more than twenty thousand pounds which he could conveniently devote to the booming of Carmel, but there was lodged with Mr. Richard Chavasse in Melbourne a sum of not less than fifty thousand pounds, with which it was his purpose to supply the “strong support in Australia,” to the end that Carmel should rise rainbow-hued above the ruck of all other mines. Altogether his position was a good one, for the last six weeks had brought him from his manager the most excellent private accounts of the mine, which for the most part he had saved up till the booming began. Mr. Linkwood also advised very strongly a fresh issue of shares. They had at present, for instance, only an eighty-stamp mill, whereas at the rate at which they were now getting gold out there was easily work for a mill of a hundred and fifty or two hundred stamps.
It was on this “strong support in Australia” by the convenient Mr. Chavasse that Mr. Alington chiefly relied; that at any rate should be the final touch. He intended first of all to make a large purchase of his own in England, ten thousand shares at least, and immediately publish encouraging news from the mine. This he would preface, as he had so often done before, by a wire to Mr. Richard Chavasse, which in a few hours would bring forth the accustomed reply, “Strong support in Australia.”
But though he would have preferred having a somewhat larger sum at his own disposal for the grand coup, he had reason for wishing to start the boom at once. Speculators had recovered from the scare of Carmel East and West, and already, before he had himself moved in the matter, the quotation for Carmel had risen from its lowest price of ten to eleven shillings up to sixteen. This was sufficient in his opinion to show that the public was already nibbling, for professional operators, he knew, were not entering this market, and this was the correct moment to give the fresh impetus. There had been a nineteen days’ account just before Easter, which had made the market dull, but since then it had begun to show more vitality.
Other reasons also were hi
s. He was beginning, for instance, to be a little nervous about the immediate success of his dealings in the motor trade. His patents were floated into companies, but in few instances only had the shares been well supported, and in more than one he had incurred a loss—recoverable no doubt in time—which even to a man of his means was serious. Worse than that, if this ill-success continued, it would not be the best thing for his name, and he was most anxious to get Carmel really a-booming while his prestige was still high. Again, many fresh mines had been started in Western Australia since the original flotation of the Carmel group, and his financial sense led him to distrust the greater part of them. Several had been grossly mismanaged from the first, some grossly misrepresented. Others he suspected did not exist at all, and he wished to hit the psychological moment when speculators were ready, as the improvement in Carmel shares had shown, to invest, and before they had seen too much of West Australian mines to make them shy. That moment he considered had come.
Accordingly he instructed his broker to make his own large purchase. This was ten days before settling day, and he hoped to sell out again before those ten days were passed. He had at first intended to purchase only ten thousand shares, but going over his scheme step by step, and being unable to see how it was possible, with this combination of satisfactory news from the mine, his own purchase, and Mr. Chavasse’s strong support in Australia, that the shares could fail to rise, he decided to purchase five thousand shares more than he could pay for. It was humanly impossible that the shares should not rise. Consequently on Thursday he telegraphed out to his manager to send a long cablegram embodying all the private news he had himself been receiving for two months back, to his broker, made his own purchase on Friday morning, and the same afternoon sent a cipher telegram to Mr. Chavasse, telling him to invest the whole of his capital then lying at Melbourne Bank in Carmel, and another in cipher to the manager, bidding him wire “Strong support in Australia.” Thus in twenty-four hours his coup was made, and he went back to his Passion Music and his prints, to wait quietly for the news of the strong support in Australia. Already in a few hours after his own purchase, backed up as it was with the first of the favourable reports from the mine, the shares had risen three-eighths; the effect on the market, therefore, of the Australian support, he considered, level-headed man of business as he was, to be inevitable.
He was dining out that evening with Lord Haslemere, and was disposed in anticipation to enjoy himself. Lady Haslemere, it is true, was apt to be tedious when she talked about her own transactions in the City, and asked him whether the rise in some mine of which nobody had even heard was likely to continue, and was it not clever of her to have bought the shares at one and a half, for within a week they had risen to two and a sixteenth. She got the tip out of Truth. Mr. Alington, however, had all the indifference of the professional in money matters to the scrannel operations of the amateur, and when in answer to a question of his it appeared that Lady Haslemere had only twenty shares in this marvellous mine, and had worked herself up into a perfect fever of indecision as to whether they should take her certain eleven pounds profit, or be very brave and fly at fourteen, he felt himself really powerless to understand her agitations.
This evening directly after dinner she collared and cornered him, and finance was in her eye.
“I want to have a serious financial talk with you,” she said, “so we’ll go into the other drawing-room, where we shall be alone. Come, Mr. Alington.”
Good manners insisted on obedience, but it was an ill-content financier who followed her. For Lady Devereux, who played Bach quite divinely, was among Lady Haslemere’s guests, and even as he left the room to talk over his hostess’s microscopic operations on the Stock Exchange, he saw her go across to the piano. It is true that he preferred a very large round sum of money of his own to half an hour of fugues and preludes, but he infinitely preferred half an hour of fugues and preludes to about seven and sixpence of Lady Haslemere’s.
She lit a cigarette with a tremulous hand.
“I want to ask your advice very seriously,” she said. “I put three hundred pounds into Carmel a week ago, and since then the shares have gone up a half. Now, what do you advise me to do, Mr. Alington? Shall I sell out, or not? I don’t want to make such a mess as poor dear Kit did. She really was too stupid! She took no one’s advice, and lost most frightfully. Poor thing! She has no head. All her little nest-egg, she told me. But I mean to put myself completely into your hands. Do you expect Carmel will go higher?”
Mr. Alington stroked the back of his head, and tried hard to look genial yet serious. But it was difficult. Lady Haslemere had closed the door between them and the next room, and he could hear faintly and regretfully those divine melodies on the Steinway grand. And here was this esteemed lady, who was quite as rich as anyone need be—certainly so rich as to be normally unconscious of the presence or absence of a fifty-pound note—consulting him gravely (she had let her cigarette go out in her anxiety) about these infinitesimal affairs. If she had had a fortune at stake, he would willingly have given her his very best attention, regretting only that Lady Devereux had chosen this moment for playing Bach; but to be shut off from that exquisite treat for a small sum affecting a woman who was not affected by small sums was trying.
“I can’t undertake to advise you, Lady Haslemere,” he said; “but I can tell you what I have done myself: I have bought twenty-five thousand shares in Carmel today, and have not the faintest intention of selling out tomorrow.”
Lady Haslemere clasped her hands. This was a flash of lightning against her night-light.
“Good gracious! Aren’t you nervous?” she cried. “I shouldn’t be able to eat or sleep. Twenty-five thousand—and they’ve gone up three-eighths today. Why, you’ve scored over nine thousand pounds since this morning!”
“About that—if I sold, that is to say, which I don’t mean to do.”
“And so you are going to chance the mine going still higher?”
“Certainly. I believe in it. I also believe the price will rise very considerably yet.”
Lady Haslemere bit her lip; she was clearly summoning up all her powers of resolution, and Mr. Alington for the moment felt interested. He was, as he might have told you, a bit of an observer. Whether or no Lady Haslemere won eleven pounds or fourteen he did not care at all, but that she should care so much was instructive. Then she struck her knee lightly with her fan.
“I shall not touch my three hundred,” she said, and she turned on Mr. Alington a face portentous with purpose.
Mr. Alington sat equally grave for a moment, but the corners of his mouth lost their sedateness, and at last they both broke out laughing.
“Oh, I know how ridiculous it must seem to you,” said Lady Haslemere; “but if you have never earned a penny all your life, you have no idea how extraordinarily interesting it is to do so. You may think that it can’t matter to me whether I gain ten pounds or lose twenty. But to gain it oneself—oh, that is the thing!”
Mr. Alington smiled with peculiar indulgence. “Well, frankly, it is inexplicable to me,” he said. “Now, if you were playing for a large stake I could understand it, though I seldom get excited myself. Well, that is what I am going to do; I am going to play for a very big stake indeed, and I confidently expect to turn up a natural. Have you anything more to ask me?—for if not, and you will allow me, I shall go and listen to Lady Devereux. I have been so much looking forward to hearing her play again.”
Lady Haslemere rose. She had wanted to have a general financial talk as well about Chaffers and Brownhills and Modder B, but the oracle had spoken about her grand coup, which was the main point.
“Yes, she plays divinely, does she not?” she said. “I knew Lady Devereux would be a magnet to draw you here. How busy you must have been lately, Mr. Alington! One has not seen you anywhere.”
“Very busy indeed. But I intend to take a holiday after the Carmel deal is over.”
“A deal? Do you call it a deal?” she aske
d. “I always thought a deal meant something rather questionable?”
Mr. Alington paused quite as long as usual before replying.
“Oh no; one uses ‘deal’ as quite a general term for an operation,” he said.
They went back into the other drawing-room, and Mr. Alington, with an elaborate softness, drew a chair up near the piano. Lady Devereux played with exquisite delicacy and sobriety, in the true spirit in which to interpret that sweet, formal music. She did not thunder and thump, she did not cover swift, catchy runs with the loud pedal, but let each note fill its own minute, inevitable place. She did not extemporize a rallentando where passages were difficult, and make up for this by hurrying over minims, or give you a general idea of a bar. She played the music exactly as it was written with extreme simplicity. There were some twenty people in the room, some whispering together (for Lady Devereux played so well that nobody talked very loud when she was at the piano), some smoking, some playing cards, some passing under their breath the most screaming scandals; and the music was like a breath of fresh air let into a stuffy room. And by the piano, with his sleek face reposeful, beatific, and wearing an expression of sensual piety about it, sat the only listener—a man whose soul was steeped in money, whose God was Mammon, who could roll on like some Juggernaut-car over the bodies of those he had ruined without one thought of pity or remorse. Yet the melody enchained him; while it lasted he was a child—a child, it is true, with respectable gray whiskers and an expansive baldness on the head, but happy, heedless of anything else in the world except the one exquisite tune, the one delicious moment.
Before long a baccarat table was made up, but he did not move from his place by the piano. Lady Devereux, a pretty, good-natured woman, who got on capitally with everybody except her husband, who, in turn, got on admirably with or without her, was delighted to go on playing to him, for she saw how real and how cultivated his enjoyment of her music was, and though she lost charmingly at baccarat, she really preferred playing even to one appreciative listener. She had an excellent memory, her taste was his, and the two wandered long in the enchanted land of early melody.