by E. F. Benson
“It was a matter which I thought you might have preferred to discuss alone,” he said; “but as you seem to wish it, I will tell you here. The other night when I had the pleasure of playing baccarat with you, you won on a natural — —”
A flush of anger rose to Kit’s face. The man was intolerable, insolent, before the servants, too; but as he spoke she felt a sudden fear of him. He looked her full in the face with mild firmness, breaking his toast with one hand, while with the other he manipulated his macaroni on the end of his fork.
“Stop!” said Kit, quick as the curl of a whiplash.
But Mr. Alington did not wince.
“You will be so kind, then, as to give me the opportunity of speaking to you privately about it,” he said. “I am quite of your way of thinking. It is far better discussed so. I quite see.”
Kit felt herself trembling. She was not accustomed to such bland brutality at the hands of anyone. She would have been scarcely more surprised if her stationer or butcher had suddenly appeared in the room, and urged the propriety of a private talk. Alington, it is true, had been to her house, had a right to consider himself a guest; but that made it even more intolerable. Apparently he had no idea of the distinction between guests and guests, and it would be a shocking thing if this were overlooked. Meantime he went on eating macaroni with a superb mastery over that elusive provender, in silence, since Kit did not reply.
The dining-room was one of the most charming rooms in London, rather dark, as dining-rooms should be, the walls of a sober, self-tint green, and bare but for some half-dozen small pictures of the Barbizon school, which, if alienable, would long ago have been alienated to supply the chronic scarcity of money in the Conybeare establishment. They were wonderful examples, but Kit hated them, since they could not be sold. “They make me feel like a man on a desert island with millions of gold sovereigns and no food,” she had said once. The chairs were all armed, and upholstered in green brocade, and the thick Ispahan carpet made noiseless the feet of those “who stand and wait.” Partly this, partly the distraction of her thoughts, brought it about that red mullets were at Kit’s elbow a full ten seconds unperceived. She could not make up her mind what to do. She bitterly repented having said “Stop!” just now to Alington, for the vehemence of her interjection gave herself away. She had practically admitted that something had occurred on the night they played baccarat which she earnestly desired not to have discussed in public. A fool could have seen that, and with all her distaste for the man she did not put this label to him. And with odiously familiar deference he had agreed with her; he had assumed the right of discussing things with her in private.
Again, she could not quarrel with him. Conybeare’s application to business, his early visits to the City, his frequent conferences with Alington, his unexampled preoccupation, all showed for certain that there were great issues at stake, for he would not give himself such trouble for a few five-pound notes. All this passed through her mind very rapidly, and at the end of ten seconds she leaned back in her chair, saw the red mullets, and took two of them.
“Yes, you are quite right,” she said; “we will talk of it afterwards. Ah, here is Jack! Morning, Jack!”
Jack nodded to her and Alington, and took his seat.
“You have heard the news, Kit?” he asked.
“Lots; but which?”
“Toby is engaged to Miss Murchison. The Crœsum told me in the train this morning. She is coming to see you this afternoon.”
Kit for the moment forgot her other worries.
“Oh, how delightful!” she cried. “Dear Toby! And Lily is most charming, and so pretty! Do you know her, Mr. Alington?”
“I have met her at your house, I think. And an heiress, is she not?”
“I believe she has a little money,” said Kit. “One has heard people say so. But mere gossip, perhaps.”
Jack laughed low and noiselessly.
“That will be so pleasant for Toby,” he observed, “if it is true.”
Kit sighed.
“What a pity that it is not the custom for a bride to settle money on her husband’s brother, Jack!” she said.
“Yes, or give it in order to escape death duties. What opportunities for unusual kindness some people have!”
“Well, it is charming, anyhow,” said Kit. “I noticed they went for a stroll in the punt yesterday afternoon, which I thought promising. A punt is so often a matrimonial agency. You aren’t afraid of tipping it up like an ordinary boat. You proposed to me in a racing pair, or something skittish — do you remember, Jack? — and I said I’d do anything in the world if you would only row straight to shore. And you kept me to it. Hardly fair, was it, Mr. Alington?”
Mr. Alington smiled like an elderly clergyman at a school feast, and his smile was suggestive of his liking to see young people happy.
“I wonder the Matrimonial News doesn’t keep a few punts for the use of clients,” went on Kit, in nervous anxiety to get lunch over as quickly as possible. She had made up her mind about Alington in the last half-minute or so, and was desirous of getting a word with him, her intention being to deny his charge point-blank, and in turn accuse him. “Punts and evening hymns do wonders with people who can’t quite make up their minds to propose.”
Mr. Alington looked mildly interested at this surprising information, and he appeared to be weighing it carefully as he ate his quail before giving it his support.
“They might keep a small choir and a harmonium as well,” went on Kit. “I believe all the respectable middle-class go to evening church on Sunday and sing hymns very loud out of one book, and propose to each other afterwards. Dear Toby, how happy he will be! How nice — how exceedingly nice!” she murmured sympathetically.
Alington and Kit had by this time finished lunch, and she rose.
“I can’t stop and see you eat, Jack,” she said. “Come, Mr. Alington; we will go and have coffee, and Jack will join us.”
On these hot July days Kit often sat in the inner hall, which was cooler than the drawing-room. It was a charming place of palms and parquetry, with furniture at angles, and a general atmosphere of coolness and sequestered corners. Coffee came immediately with cigarettes, and Kit took one. Mr. Alington, however, explained that except on Sundays he did not allow himself to smoke till after dinner.
“I find a little abstinence very helpful,” he gave as his modest excuse.
The servants withdrew, and Kit began playing with her subject.
“I am afraid you thought me very abrupt at lunch,” she said, “but I have a great objection to discussing matters, which it is conceivable might be better kept private, before servants, and when you mentioned baccarat I thought it better to stop you, even at the risk of seeming very brusque. You will hardly believe it, Mr. Alington” — here her voice sank to a low confidential murmur— “you will hardly believe it, but only a few weeks ago I saw a man cheat at baccarat at a friend’s house. Very distressing, was it not? I talked it over with a friend, and we found it most difficult to decide what to do. That sort of thing might so easily get about; it is so dangerous to speak before servants.”
“I think you talked it over with Lady Haslemere?” remarked Mr. Alington.
Kit was stirring her coffee and smiling sweetly. She was getting on beautifully. But at these words and their peculiarly calm delivery her hand stopped stirring, and her smile faded.
“I think also you agreed to ask the suspect to play again, in order to watch him,” went on the impassive butler. “Was it not so, Lady Conybeare? And I think the suspect was none other than myself.”
Kit put down her coffee-cup and leaned back in her chair. The thing had gone wrong; she had meant to have got first innings on the subject of baccarat cheating, and she was rather afraid she was clean bowled. Quick as she was, she could not see her answer. Mr. Alington did not, however, look at her, nor did he pause longer than was necessary to sip his coffee.
“Your tactics were a little open, a little obvious, Lady Co
nybeare, if you will allow me to say so,” he went on. “Delicious coffee! You exchanged so many glances with Lady Haslemere, and then looked up at me, that I could not fail to see you were watching for something. No man, I expect, likes to be suspected of so very paltry a crime as cheating at baccarat — a crime so hopelessly void of any grandeur — and no man, I am sure, likes a trap being laid for him by those whom he is entitled to consider his friends. And before I go on to the point I have in my mind I should like to say a word about this.”
He cleared his throat and sipped his coffee again.
“What you and Lady Haslemere saw,” he went on— “did your husband suspect me too? It does not matter — what you saw was this: I had declared a natural, and you saw me, as you thought, push a fifty-pound counter over the line. Was that not so?”
“There is no question of ‘thought,’” said Kit, whom a sense of danger made the more incautious; “we saw you do it.”
“Quite true. If you had observed a little more closely, you would have seen something else. Now, I ask you, the few times we have played baccarat together, did you ever see me fail to stake?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Quite so. If you had looked at the table a moment before, you would have seen I had nothing staked. What happened was this: I had staked four ten-pound counters and two fives; then, seeing that I had no more smaller ones, I withdrew them to substitute one fifty for them. At that moment I received my cards, and, taking them up I forgot for the moment to substitute my fifty. I looked at the cards, declared the natural, and you saw me push forward the fifty-pound counter quite openly, and, so you thought, clumsily. It never occurred to me for a moment there was any need of an explanation.”
Kit’s anger and alarm was growing on her.
“Very clumsily,” she said; “we all saw it.”
“It was stupid of me, no doubt, not to have explained at the time,” he said, “but really I had no idea the company was so suspicious.”
He paused for a moment, and his mild temper was roused at the thought of Kit’s behaviour.
“But perhaps people are right to be suspicious,” he added, with a raised intonation.
The shot went home, and Kit’s face grew a shade paler. But she could not conceivably show that she knew what he meant, for that would be to accuse herself. Instead, she put all the insolence her voice would hold into her reply.
“And what proof have I of the truth of what you say?” she asked, fighting desperately on this battle-ground of her adversary’s choosing.
“The fact that I say it,” said Mr. Alington. “Also, there is corroborative evidence if I choose to adduce it. I showed you the other night, meaning merely to give you a hint, that, had I wanted, I could have cheated very neatly. Is it credible, then, even supposing that I am one of those people who cheat, that I should have done it so clumsily?”
Kit in her heart believed the man, but her superficial woman’s cunning refused to give up the hold she still hoped she might have over him, her only answer to the hold she was afraid he had over her.
“We all make blunders at times,” she said, in her most fiendish manner. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe what you say.”
Mr. Alington sipped his coffee again. His momentary irritation had quite died down; you could not have found a kinder Christian in all England.
“Fortunately, however, that matters very little,” he replied.
“It does not make a man popular among us,” observed Kit, “if he is known to cheat at baccarat. I understood you the other night to say that sort of thing was common in Australia. I should advise you to remember that we think differently here.”
Kit had lost her temper completely, and did not stop to weigh her words. Worse than that, she lost her head, and lashed out insults with foolish defiance.
Mr. Alington crossed one leg over the other, his mouth grew a shade more compressed and precise, and his large pale eyes turned suddenly unluminous and stale like a snake’s. Kit grew frightened again, and when a woman is frightened as well as angry she is not likely to score off a perfectly cool man. There was a moment’s pause.
“Lady Conybeare,” said he at length, “you have chosen to treat me as a knave and as a fool. And I dislike very much being treated as a knave or a fool by you. You accuse me of cheating: that I have reason to believe does not seem to you very shocking.”
“May I ask why?” interrupted Kit.
Mr. Alington held up his hand, as if to deprecate any reply just now.
“And you accuse me of cheating clumsily, foolishly,” he continued. “But can you really think I should be so tragic an ass as to come to you with my mere assertion that I did not cheat? I have given you your chance to believe me of your own free will; you have, I regret to say, refused it. I will now force you to believe me — force you,” he repeated thoughtfully. “I have a witness, a person then present, who saw me withdraw those smaller counters and replace the larger.”
Kit laughed, but uneasily.
“How very convenient!” she said. “What is his name?”
“Lord Abbotsworthy,” remarked Alington. “I even took the precaution of calling his attention to what I had done. It was lucky I did. Ask Lord Abbotsworthy.”
“One of your directors,” said Kit, almost beside herself with anger, and rising from her chair.
“One of my directors, as you say,” he replied, “and your friend. I need hardly remind you that your husband is another of my directors.”
On the moment Jack came out of the dining-room. He cast one glance at Kit’s face, took a cigarette, and strolled discreetly upstairs. When his wife was on the war-path and had not asked his alliance he did not give it.
“I shall be upstairs when you and my wife have finished your talk,” he said over his shoulder to Alington. “Come and see me before you go.”
The pause sobered Kit.
“Yes,” continued Alington, “he had a moment before asked me to change him some money for small counters, and that left me with only a few small ones. Luckily, he will remember seeing me withdraw and substitute my stake. You and Lady Haslemere would have been wise to consult him before taking this somewhat questionable step of watching me. A fault of judgment — a mere fault of judgment.”
Kit, figuratively speaking, threw up her hand. The desperate hope that Alington was lying was no longer tenable.
“And I await your apology,” he added.
There was a long silence. Kit was not accustomed to apologize to anybody for anything. Her indifference to this man, except in so far as he could financially serve them, had undergone a startling transformation in the last hour. Indifference had given place first to anger at his insolence, then to fear. His placid, serene face had become to her an image of some infernal Juggernaut, whose car rolled on over bodies of men, yet whose eyelash never quivered. Pride battled with fear in her mind, fury with prudence. And Juggernaut (butler no longer), contrary to his ascetic habit, lit a cigarette.
“Well?” he said, when he judged that the pause was sufficiently prolonged.
Kit had sat down again in her chair, and was conscious only of two things — this inward struggle, and an absorbing hatred of the man seated opposite her.
“Supposing I refuse to apologize?” she asked at length.
“I shall regret it very much,” he said; “you probably will regret it more. Come, Lady Conybeare, by what right do you make an enemy of me?”
Again there was silence. Kit knew very well how everyone would talk if this detestable business became public, which she understood to be the threat contained in Alington’s words, and knew also that a rupture between Jack and him, which must inevitably follow, would not be likely to lead to their financial success in this business of the mines.
“I shall require you also to tell Lady Haslemere and your husband, if he also has at any time suspected me, into what a deplorable error you have fallen,” continued Alington, dropping out his words as you drop some strong drug into a gradu
ated glass, careful to give neither too much nor too little.
Suddenly Kit made up her mind, and having done that, she determined to act with the best possible grace.
“I apologize, Mr. Alington,” she said; “I apologize sincerely. I wronged you abominably. I will do in all points as you suggest.”
Mr. Alington did not move a muscle.
“I accept your apology,” he said. “And please do me the favour not to treat me like a fool again, for I am far from being a fool.”
This speech was not easy swallowing for Kit, but she had to take what he threw her. Alington got up.
“I have to go upstairs to see your husband,” he said, “because we have a good deal of business — the shares of the new group will be on the market in a few days.”
He paused a moment.
“Do not give another thought to the matter, Lady Conybeare,” he said. “It is much better we should be friends. Ah, by the way, regarding that matter on which I meant to speak to you, that unfortunate affair of the hundred-pound counter — you know what I mean. Do not give another thought to that, either. I assure you that it will not be through me that it goes further. I fully believe you never meant it. Only you did not correct your mistake instantaneously, and so correction became impossible. Was it not so?”
His broad face brightened and beamed, like the face of a father speaking lovingly and consolingly to a son about some petty fault, and he held out his hand to her.
Kit wavered. She would have given anything in the world to say, “What affair of the hundred-pound counter? I don’t know what you mean.” But she could not. She was physically, perhaps morally, incapable of giving the words utterance. Alington had made her afraid; she was beaten, cowed. And the accuracy of his intuition astounded her. Then she gave him her hand; she had no word for him on this subject.
“Good-bye,” she said— “au revoir, rather. You will be in and out a good deal, I suppose, while we are in London. There is always lunch at two. My husband is in his room upstairs. You know the way, I think.”
Many people have their own pet plan of sending themselves to sleep, such as counting imaginary sheep going through a visionary hedge, or marking out a lawn-tennis court, lifting the machine as seldom as possible. Kit’s method, though she usually fell asleep immediately, was to enumerate her dislikes. This was a long and remarkably varied list, beginning “Marie Corelli, parsnips,” and she seldom got to the end of it. To-night she admitted Mr. Alington into the charming catalogue, and getting to his name, she did not continue the list, nor did she immediately go to sleep.