Mammon and Co Part 27

"I've finished for what I have received," she said, "and so we'll go out. Have you got a spade for me to dig in the sand with as I wade? Oh, there's the bezique-box. I think we'll play bezique instead. Is there a _cafe_ or anything of the sort, where there will be a band. Bezique goes so well to a Strauss valse."

"There is a draper's shop and a church," said Ted. "That is all."

But after a couple of games the splendour of the evening weaned them from their cards. It had been a very hot day, but not long before sunset a cool wind was borne out of the sea, and they strolled out. Sunset was imminent in the west, and the land enmeshed in a web of gold. High in the zenith floated a few flushed feathers of cloud, and the sea was level and waveless--a polished surface of reflected brightness. The tide was on the ebb, and the smooth sand, wet from its retreat, was a mirror of the sky, a strip framed in the sea, and the high-water mark.

Southward the land trended away in headland behind folded headland to an infinite distance of hazy and conjectured distances. The unbreathed air, a traveller over a hundred horizons of sea, was cool and tonic, and the whisper of the ripples crisp within the ear. And Kit with her childlike impressionableness, which was at once her danger and her charm, caught surely at the spirit of the free large s.p.a.ces. She had taken off her hat, and walked firm and lithe along the s.h.i.+ning ripple-fringed beaches, each footstep crus.h.i.+ng for a moment the moisture out of the sand in a circle round her tread, and breathing deep, with open mouth, of the vivifying air. Like a chameleon she took instinctively the colour of her surroundings, and just now she was steeped in open air, freedom, and the great plains of sea and sky. She always gulped things down, camels and needles alike, thirsty of full sensations.

"Really, one's whole life is a series of mistakes, Ted," she said, "except in a few short moments like these. Why do we go to that rabbit-warren of a London, and live in little smoky boxes, when there is an empty sea-beach, and a great sea-wind within a few hours of us? Oh! I wish I was a fisherman, or a day labourer, or a gallon of sea-water, to stop in the open always."

Ted laughed.

"And if to-morrow is wet or cold, you will say, 'Why did we come to this G.o.d-forsaken German Ocean, when we could have stopped in our nice comfortable houses?'"

"I know I shall; and the worst of me is that I shall feel just as keenly as I feel this now. Jack called me a parasite once; he said I always found food in whatever I happened to be on. I dare say he is right. Oh, look at that bit of red seaweed on the sand! It looks as if it had been set, as one used to set b.u.t.terflies; every little fibre is spread out separately. But if I pick it up, it will be just a stringy pulp. There are a great many morals to be drawn from that, and one is, 'Don't meddle.'"

"What a lesson for Tobys!" laughed Ted.

The sun set, and with the fading of the light they turned. Moment by moment the colours paled, and the evening iridescences turned gray and cold. Kit put on her hat; there was a chill in the air, and they walked faster. By the time they reached the hotel it was nearly dark, and the s.h.i.+ning window-squares looked inviting and comfortable, and Kit mentally revoked her desire to be a gallon of sea-water. It was already time to dress for dinner, and they went up to the sitting-room together. Their bedrooms were on opposite sides of it, both communicating with it and with the pa.s.sage outside, and as they dressed they talked loudly and cheerfully to each other through doors ajar, their conversation being punctuated by sounds of the sponge. Ted was ready first, but a few moments afterwards Kit came out of her room, and went downstairs with him, still in a fever of high spirits, but with all the cool sanity of the great expanses driven out of her worthless little soul, and dressed in red.

They had a table to themselves in a corner of the plushy dining-room, where they could talk unheard and observe un.o.bserved. Lord Comber, who always took the precaution of carrying wine with him when he was at hotels, had some excellent champagne, of which Kit drank her share, and their talk rose in crescendo with more frequent bursts of laughter as dinner went on. Toby again demanded their amused comments.

"Oh, if he could see us thus!" said Kit; and the idea was immensely entertaining, viewed in the light of dinner and wine.

Then followed a _resume_ of all the things which had not happened since the two had met, and which, even if they had, should never have been repeated. The world in which they lived is not noted for charitable impulses or moments of compa.s.sion, and that which should have called out pity, or if not pity, at least, have been accorded silence, was the occasion of great laughter. Kit, among her many gifts, was an excellent mimic; and Jack's shrug of the shoulders, when she really had her boxes packed to go to Aldeburgh vice Stanborough, was inimitable. But, as she said, she was no longer married to a man, but a company. Jack was no longer Jack, but a mixture of Alington, deep levels, and cyanide process. Then Mrs. Murchison came under review, and Kit improvised a really first-rate soliloquy.

But eventually the hush that comes with ice overtook them, and it was to break an appreciable silence that Ted spoke.

"How they stare at one!" he said. "Haven't the people who stay at this hotel ever seen people before? You would think we were woaded early Britons. Really, it is much better than Stanborough; there were all sorts of people there one knew. I am glad we came--and you, Kit?"

He looked up, and caught her eye for a moment.

"I also," she said. "But, Ted, I very nearly did not come. I could not conceive what your telegram meant; but I trusted you, you see; I a.s.sumed that your excellent reasons were excellent. And when I knew what they were, I was justified, and you too. They were more than excellent; they were funny."

Ted laughed.

"They really were," he said. "But I don't know what I should have done if I had found a telegram here from you saying you were not coming."

"Did you think I should throw you over?" she asked.

He paused before replying, and looked up at the long table where the most of the people in the hotel were sitting.

"There is a man with a face like what you see in a spoon sitting there,"

he said. "No, I did not."

Kit followed his glance.

"Yes, I see him," she said, "and his mouth opens sideways. But how modest of you! What reason had you to think that?"

Ted felt his heart thump with a sudden riotous movement. He took up his gla.s.s to finish his champagne, and noticed that his hand shook a little.

He drank the wine at a gulp.

"Because I think you like me a little, Kit," he replied.

He had never spoken to her quite like that before, though, for that matter, he might have used the identical words to her a score of times; never before had she given him exactly that sort of opportunity. But the presence of so many people close at hand of so utterly different a society to theirs that they might have been Red Indians, gave both him and her a strangely isolated feeling, as if they had been alone on a desert island. Both knew also that he by proposing, she by acceding to this visit to Aldeburgh, had taken another step in intimacy towards each other.

But without a pause Kit replied; and in spite of her reply, so far from disavowing it, she felt a sudden inward leap of exultation, and he, in spite of the lightness of her reply, was confirmed.

"Oh, Ted, don't be serious!" she said. "It is such bad manners. Think of Toby; think of the man with the spoon-face."

Ted lifted his brown eyes to hers, but she sat with eyes downcast, playing with her dessert-knife.

"Are you never serious?" he asked.

"Not at dinner. A serious voice carries so. It is audible as far as a Bishop's hat, if you see what I mean. Have you finished? Shall we go?"

And she lifted her long, fringed eyelashes a moment, and returned his look.

_BOOK II_

CHAPTER I

KIT'S MEDITATIONS

Kit was sitting in her own room in the Buckinghams.h.i.+re cottage one day late in the following December, staring intently into the fire. The fire, it is true, was worth looking at, for it was made of that adorable combination, cedar-logs and peat, and it had attained to that fine flower of existence--a fragrant, molten core of heat, edged by little lilac-coloured bouquets of flame, smokeless and glowing, the very apotheosis of a fire. Outside, the world was shrouded and made dizzy in a trouble of eddying snow, and as the great sonorous blasts trumpeted and lulled again, the reds of the fire would brighten and fade in a sort of mysterious sympathy with the bugling riot overhead. But that Kit should be doing nothing but looking at the fire was an unusual thing; it was odd that she should be alone, even odder that, if alone, she should not be occupied. The toes of her bronze-coloured shoes rested on the fender, and she leaned forward in the low armchair in which she sat, stretching out her hands towards the heat, and the fire s.h.i.+ning through the flesh of her fingers made them look as if they were lighted from within--things red and luminous in themselves. It was already growing dusk, but she had enough light to think by, and quite enough things to think about.

The room was furnished with great simplicity, but the educated eye could see how extremely expensive such simplicity must have been. There was a rug or two on the floor, a few tables and chairs of the Empire on the rugs, and a few pictures on the crimson satin walls. Kit herself perhaps was the most expensive thing present, for she wore her pearls, and they glowed like mist-smoored moons in the fire-light. But she did not look as happy as the possessor of her pearls or her excellent digestion ought to look. There was something of the hard, tired look of suffering, mental and physical, about her face, and though she was alone, she made, now and then, nervous, apprehensive little movements.

Everything was going wrong, from money upwards, or downwards; for at the present moment Kit hardly knew how to arrange the precedence of her various embarra.s.sments. The financial ones were at any rate the most tangible, though perhaps the least feared, and for the fiftieth time that afternoon she ran over them.

In the beginning it had been altogether Jack's fault, but Kit was past finding either consolation or added annoyance in that. She had great faith in Alington's power of making their fortune, though personally he was detestable to her, for various excellent reasons, and she had wanted to invest the famous nest-egg, which from one cause and another had grown to upwards of three thousand pounds, in these mines under Alington's advice. After their last private interview she did not like to go to him straight, and so asked Jack to tell her in what mines to place a little money she had saved. The word "saved," when used by Kit, always made Jack smile.

But he was absurd, and strongly opposed to her risking her "savings" at all. He had told her to make herself quite happy; if she would leave things to him, and go on "saving" quietly, there would be enough for both of them, a statement in itself repugnant and almost blasphemous to Kit, who firmly held the doctrine that there never can be enough money for one, still less for two.

"You don't know what it all means, Kit," he had said, "and for that matter I don't either. One day perhaps your shares will go down, and you will sell out in a panic and lose a lot, or you will not sell out and you will lose more. It is impossible for me always to be instructing you; I have not got the data myself. I leave it all to Alington.

Besides, I didn't know you had any money to invest."

"That is my affair," said Kit; "I have been lucky lately."

"Then put it into consols, and don't gamble any more," said Jack, with the fine inconsistence of the gambling fever on him, "or come and talk about it some other time; I've got twenty hundred things to do now."

Then in a flare of pride and temper, Kit had determined to manage for herself, and had put a couple of thousand pounds into Carmel East. This was in November, at a time when, for some reason, known perhaps to Alington, but certainly to no one else in the market, Carmel was behaving in a peculiarly mercurial manner. A week after she had made her investment the pound shares, which were standing at a little above par, had declined rapidly to fourteen s.h.i.+llings. It might only be a bear raid, but she was too proud to ask Jack for advice again, and remembering his ill-omened remark about not selling and so losing more, she telegraphed to her broker to sell out at once. This done, the shares began to rise again, and in less than a fortnight's time, owing to telegrams and reports from the mine, they stood at nearly two pounds.

She reckoned up, almost with tears, what she had lost, which, added to what she might have gained, formed a maddening total. Her eighteen hundred shares, if she had only held on, would have been worth close on three thousand six hundred pounds; instead, she had sold them when they stood at fourteen s.h.i.+llings for thirteen hundred pounds. And when Jack, a few mornings later, came into her room with a cheque for five hundred pounds, which he gave her, she felt that this only accentuated the bitterness of it.

"A little present, Kit," he said, "just for you to play about with. What a good thing you were wise, and did not concern yourself with things you did not understand! Oh, I bless the day when we went down to the City dinner and met Alington. You wore an orange dress, I remember: it would be rather graceful if you paid for it now."