Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The great goddess Luck ignored Lady Haslemere that night (for she is no respecter of persons, and cuts people whenever she chooses), merely letting her lose a few inglorious sovereigns, and devoted her attention to Alington and Kit. The latter she visited with every mark of her peculiar disfavour, and the nest-egg in her jewel-case upstairs had to be heavily unyoked. Kit seldom enjoyed herself less than she did this evening; as a rule, she had distinctly good luck at cards, and it was little short of maddening to sit there hour after hour, just to watch her stake being firmly and regularly taken away. Like most people who are generally lucky at cards, she was considered admirably good form at play; but when she was losing in this unexampled manner, she found it difficult to remain cordial, and more than once she had to force herself with an effort to remember that a hostess had duties. Alington’s mild, intelligent face opposite her roused in her a kind of frenzy, and his unassumed quietness and utter absence of any signs of satisfaction at his huge winnings seemed to her in the worst taste. Both she and Lady Haslemere had seen how completely their scheme of watching him to see whether he cheated had miscarried; indeed, from the moment when he gave his little exhibition of the ease with which it was possible to defraud the table, they had realized that they might play the detective till their eyes dropped out of their heads from weariness without catching him. Lady Haslemere had given it up at once, concluding that Kit and she must have been mistaken before; Kit continued to watch him furtively and angrily, but the little detective game was not nearly so amusing as she had anticipated.

  Meantime, as her stakes vanished and revanished, Kit found herself thinking absently of what Alington had shown them. It was so simple, and she almost wished that she was one of the people who cheated at cards. But she was not. Then occurred an incident.

  Alington was taking the bank. Nearly opposite him, and belonging to the party on the dealer’s right, was Kit. She had just been upstairs to get all that remained of her nest-egg, and in front of her lay several small counters, two of fifty pounds, and two of a hundred. She had just lost once, and counting up what remained to her, she put all her counters in a heap near the line. Again she staked fifty pounds, and on receiving her cards took them up and looked at them. She was rather excited; her hand trembled a little, and the lower edge of her cards twitched forward. Then she laid them on the table.

  “Natural,” she said, and as she said it, she saw that she had flicked one of her hundred-pound counters over the line, and it was staked. Almost simultaneously she caught Alington’s eye; almost simultaneously Tom’s voice said:

  “One fifty. Well done, Kit! You’ve had the worst of luck all the evening.”

  “A fine, bold stroke,” said Alington in his precise tones, still looking at her. “Luck must turn, Lady Conybeare.”

  For one moment Kit paused, and in that pause she was lost. Alington counted out her stake, pushed it over to her, and rose.

  “A thrilling end to my bank,” he said. “The first big stake this evening. Thank you, Lady Conybeare, for introducing big stakes. The game was getting a little slow.”

  And he went to the side-table for a cigarette.

  Kit had cheated, and she knew it, and she suspected Alington knew it. She had neither meant, intended, contemplated, nor conceived possible such a thing, yet the thing was done. In point of fact, she had done it quite unwittingly. She had never intended to push her counters over the line with the edge of her cards. But then had followed — and she knew this, too — an appreciable moment in which she perceived what had happened before Tom’s voice broke in. But she had not been able to say at once, “I have made a mistake; I only staked fifty.” After that each possible division of a single second made speech infinitely more impossible. To hesitate then was to be lost. Thirty seconds later her stake was paid, and to say then what had happened was not only impossible, but inconceivable. Besides, she thought to herself with a sudden relief, it was wholly unnecessary. She would tell Alington about it quite candidly, and return the money. But it was a poor ending to the evening on which she and Alice were going to watch him to see if he cheated.

  That moment when she did not speak was psychologically more important than Kit knew. She had lived in the world some five-and-twenty years, and for five-and-twenty years her instincts had been forming. But during those years she had not formed an instinct of absolute, unwavering, instantaneous honesty. Before now she had been in positions where there was a choice between the perfectly upright course and the course ever so slightly crooked, and had she known the history of her soul, she would have been aware that when she had stuck to the absolutely upright line she had done so after reflection. Then came this moment when there was no time for reflection, and the habit of looking at her decisions as ever so faintly debatable had asserted itself. She had paused to consider what she should do. That, in such circumstances, was quite sufficient.

  That she was ashamed was natural; that she was angry was to her more natural still. She felt that the thing had been forced on her, and so in a manner, if we take into consideration all the instincts which were undoubtedly hers at that moment, it was; how far she was to be held responsible for those instincts is a question for psychologists and those who have got to the bottom of the problem of original sin, but not for story-tellers.

  She had a great command over herself, and she gathered up her stakes with a laugh. There had been no perceptible pause of any kind.

  “I was just going to order the carriage to take me to the workhouse,” she said, “but I can still afford to breakfast without the assistance of the poor laws. Must you go, Mr. Alington? Half-past two; is it really? I had no idea. Good-night. I hope Jack is behaving himself on your board. Mind you keep him in order; it is more than I can do.”

  She looked Mr. Alington full in the face as she spoke, trying, but failing, to detect the least shadow of a change in his impassive and middle-class features. But when he looked benevolently at her through his spectacles and bowed with his accustomed awkwardness, she felt a sudden lightness of heart at the thought that he had not seen. She did not examine too closely into what this lightness of heart exactly implied.

  The others soon followed Mr. Alington’s example, and took themselves off. Jack had walked to the front-door with Lady Haslemere, and Kit waited a moment in the drawing-room, after sending Lord Comber, who lingered, away, for him to come up again. Whether she intended to tell him what had happened she scarcely knew; that must depend. But he did not return, and before long servants entered to put out the lights. They would have withdrawn when they saw her, but she got up.

  “Yes, put the lights out,” she said. “Has his lordship gone out?”

  “No, my lady; his lordship went upstairs to his room ten minutes ago.”

  Kit abandoned the idea of telling him that night. If she went to his room, it would imply that she had something to say, and she did not wish to commit herself yet. So she went to her own room, and rang for her maid.

  The hair and unlacing processes seemed interminable this evening, and were intolerable even to the accompaniment of an excellent Russian cigarette. She had been given on her birthday, only a few weeks before, by Lord Comber, a wonderful silver-framed antique mirror, with the old Venetian motto on it, “Sono felice, te videndo,” and it had made dressing and undressing a positive pleasure. Jack also had made himself amusing about it; he had come into her room the day after it arrived, and, seeing the motto on it, said, laughing:

  “God has given you a good conceit of yourself, Kit. Where did you buy it?”

  “I didn’t buy it,” she replied, never having intended to make a mystery about it. “Ted gave it me.”

  “Ted Comber? What damned impertinence!”

  Kit burst out laughing.

  “Jack, you are inimitable as the jealous husband,” she had said. “It is a new rôle. Poor Ted! it must have cost a pot of money.”

  And Jack had permitted himself to leave the room, banging the door behind him.

  Ted and sh
e had laughed over the episode together.

  “So like a man to ask absurd questions, and then be angry because he is told the truth,” Kit had said. “It would have been quite as easy for me to lie.”

  But to-night not even the mirror, with its amusing associations, nor the reflection of herself, nor the Russian cigarette, could beguile the tedium of the toilet. The comb caught in her hair; her maid’s hands were cold, she was clumsy; the evening post was stupid; it was late; Kit was sleepy and discontented. In fact, she was in an abominable temper.

  At last it was over, and her maid left her. She got up from the chair in front of her glass, where she had been sitting in her wonderful lace dressing-gown, and took a turn up and down the room. She felt like a fractious child, out of sorts, out of gear, out of temper. Then quite suddenly she stopped, threw herself face downwards on the bed, and began to cry from sheer rebellion and impatience of this stupid world.

  CHAPTER X. MRS. MURCHISON’S DIPLOMACY

  Mrs. Murchison was sitting on a pile of cushions beneath her crimson parasol. The cushions were in a punt, and the punt was on the Thames, and it was Sunday afternoon, and she and her daughter were spending a Saturday till Monday, the last of the season, with the Conybeares. Toby, in flannels, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, was resting from his labours with the punt pole, and sitting opposite this lady. It was a blazing hot day, but, in spite of the glare of the water, cooler, so Mrs. Murchison has asserted, on the river than elsewhere. In point of fact, she felt positively frizzled with the heat; but she had weaned Toby from his basket-chair under a tree on the lawn to have a private talk with him, ascertain how the land lay, and generally encourage him. This desire to speak to him privately took its birth from two words she had had with Kit the evening before. These two words, again, were the result of a conversation which Toby had had with Kit in the train coming down, and thus the fact that Toby was doomed to punt and swelter under a broiling sun instead of sitting coolly in the shade was indirectly his fault for having said what he had said to Kit.

  For the last fortnight Kit had been in a state of chronic exasperation with her tiresome brother-in-law. Toby was gauging his own gait, and Kit’s efforts to make him march in time with her had brought no results. He was always to be found at the houses to which Lily went, and at those houses he was always talking to her. But Kit could not bring him to the point. Elsewhere his demeanour was absent and slightly idiotic; he appeared to have something on his mind, and dressed with unusual care. Thus, as they travelled down from London on the Saturday, Kit felt herself called upon to try to put the finishing touch to the work she flattered herself she had begun so well. She had not yet told him that the Murchisons were coming. She had, in fact, only asked them the evening before.

  “Who is to be there?” asked Toby, as they left Paddington.

  “Oh, the usual lot: Ted and the rest, and — oh yes, Mrs. Murchison and her daughter.”

  Toby looked fixedly out of the window with the idiotic expression on his face, and the dawnings of a very creditable blush. There was silence a moment, and Kit watched him from behind her paper. Toby turned and caught her eye.

  “Oh bother you, Kit!” he exclaimed.

  Kit laid down the paper and began to laugh.

  “And don’t laugh,” said Toby rudely; “it’s all your fault.”

  “I should say it was Lily Murchison’s,” remarked Kit.

  “Kit, will you be serious a minute?” said he. “I want to say things; I can’t say them, you know, but you are clever — you will understand.”

  Kit laid her hand on his arm with a sympathetic pressure of her fingers.

  “Dear Toby,” she said, “I understand perfectly, and I am delighted — delighted! It is charming.”

  Toby looked very serious.

  “Kit, I wish you had never told me to fall in love with her,” he said; “it has spoilt it all. Of course, it is not in consequence of what you said that I have, but I wish you hadn’t suggested it that evening at the Hungarian dance. That she is rich, and that the world knows it, stands in front of me. It is a vile world; it will say I fell in love with her only because of that. Oh, damn!”

  Kit was divided between amusement and impatience.

  “It has been reserved for you, Toby, to discover that riches are a bar to matrimony,” she observed; “the reverse is usually believed to be the case.”

  Toby shook his head. Kit appeared to him quite as tiresome as he to her.

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  Kit had a brilliant idea. She saw that Toby wanted to talk about it, so she determined not to talk, but to leave in him a little barbed shaft that might do useful work.

  “We’ll not talk about it, Toby,” she said; “I can see you don’t want to. Probably you are not in love at all, just a bit attracted. Get over it as quick as you can, there’s a good boy; it makes you unsocial and distrait. Besides, how often has she seen you? With all your excellent qualities, dear Toby, you are not exactly — well, anything more than quite a poor, pleasant, plain young man. So drop the whole thing; you will neither break your heart nor hers. I have made too much of it, no doubt. I was wrong, I feel sure I was wrong, and I beg your pardon. Oh, there has been a hurricane in Florida! How too terrible!” And she buried herself again behind her paper.

  Toby gave a short preoccupied grunt, and subsided into his corner, frowning angrily at the innocent features of the landscape. With all his native modesty and candour, he was not quite of Kit’s way of thinking. The lover’s devotion, which quite honestly swears that he is not fit to be the doormat to the beloved’s boots, sees all the time that there is another possibility, and even in the ecstasy of humiliation aspires to worthier offices. Even while he swears himself a doormat, yet with a magnificent inconsistence he lifts his eyes higher than her boots. Though Toby was all that those tame reptilia, who think that every woman they meet is in love with them, are not, yet he did not at all accept Kit’s suggestion that Lily could not conceivably have anything to say to him. With perfect sincerity he would say he was not worthy, but he was not at all content to have it said for him. Even more absurd was her suggestion that he was not in love himself. Distrait! he should just think he was. And he glared savagely at the outside page of Kit’s Pall Mall.

  Just about as they went screaming and swaying through Slough, Kit laid her paper down and yawned elaborately. Through her half-closed eyes she saw Toby glowering darkly at her from the seat opposite, and waited with amused satisfaction the working of her darts.

  “Nothing in the paper,” she said.

  “I thought there was a famine in Florida,” he observed dryly.

  Kit regarded him for a moment in irritating silence.

  “Florida is a long way off,” she said at length. “Probably it is only a geographical expression. There are many places and people, Toby, much nearer than Florida.”

  The second link in the chain of circumstances which led to Toby’s going punting in the heat was shorter. It occurred that same evening after dinner. Kit was sitting with Mrs. Murchison in the window of the hall, while the others were out on the lawn, when Lily entered, followed by Toby.

  “I’m going to bed, mother,” she said. “Good-night, Lady Conybeare; good-night, Lord Evelyn.”

  “Let me give you a candle,” said Toby; and they left the room.

  Then said Kit very softly, as if to herself: “Poor Toby! poor dear Toby.”

  Mrs. Murchison heard (she was meant to hear). Hence, on the following afternoon she wished for a private conversation with Toby, and at this moment they were in the punt together. Mrs. Murchison was, considered as a conversationalist, a little liable to be discursive, and heat and a heavy lunch combined to emphasize this tendency; they melted her brains, and a perfect stream of information concerning all parts of the globe came rioting out. Besides this natural bent, she considered it best to approach the subject, on which she particularly wanted to talk to Toby, by imperceptible degrees, not run at hi
m with it as if she was a charging Dervish fighting for Allah. This accounts for her saying that the Thames reminded her so much of the Nile.

  Now, Toby, like many others, snatched a fearful joy from Mrs. Murchison’s conversation. He saw that the flood-gates were opening, and, with a sigh of delighted anticipation, he said that he supposed it was very like indeed.

  “Quite remarkably like, quite,” said Mrs. Murchison, “and the closer you look, the more the simile grows upon you. Dear me, how I enjoyed that winter we spent in Egypt! How often I thought over the psalm, ‘When Israel came out of Egypt’! We spent a fortnight in Cairo first, and what between the dances and the bazaars and the tombs of the Marmadukes, and the excursions, we had plenty to do. I remember so well one ride to the Pyramids of Sahara, where we met a very famous archeologist whose name I forget, but he had red whiskers and a very nervous manner, and showed us over them.”

  “That must have been very pleasant,” said Toby.

  “Most delicious. Then another day we went to see the tree under which the Virgin Mary sat when she went to Egypt, which was really a remarkable coincidence, because my name is Mary, too, and the guide gave us a leaf from it as a Memento Mary. Ah, dear me, how charming and quaint it all was! Then we went up the river in our own private diabetes and stuck on a sandbank for weeks.”

  Toby’s breath caught in his throat for a moment, but he stiffened his risible muscle like a man.

  “Didn’t you find that rather tedious?” he asked.

  “No, not at all; I was quite sorry when we got off, because the air was so fresh, like champagne, and the sunsets so beautiful, and every evening great flocks of ibexes and pelicans used to fly down to the river to drink. But now I come to think of it, we weren’t there for weeks, but only for an hour or two, and very tiresome it was, as we wanted to get on, and Mr. Murchison’s language —— Then at Luxor such sights, the great Colossus of Mammon, and the temples and the hotel gardens. And while we were there some professor or another — not the one with the red whiskers, you must understand — discovered a cylinder covered with cruciform writing, but it seemed to me quite common. And the donkey-boys were so amusing; we used to throw them piazzas, and see them scramble for them.”