Mammon and Co Part 15

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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.serted, 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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, d.a.m.n!"

Kit was divided between amus.e.m.e.nt 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 circ.u.mstances 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 him 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed a fearful joy from Mrs.

Murchison's conversation. He saw that the flood-gates were opening, and, with a sigh of delighted antic.i.p.ation, 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."

"Threw them what?" asked Toby politely.

"Piazzas and half-piazzas. The small silver coin of the country."

"Oh yes. You must have travelled a good deal."

"Indeed we have: Mr. Murchison was so devoted to it; I used to call him the Wandering Jew. Then from Egypt we went on to the Holy Land, _La Sainte Terre_, you know the French call it--so poetical. And we saw Tyre and Sodom and all those places, and where Cicero was killed at the brook Jabbok, and where Elijah went up to heaven, and Damascus--quite lovely!--and the temples of Baalzac--or was it the temple of Baal?"

"Did you go with one of Cook's tours?"

"Indeed we did not; it would have spoiled all the poetry and romance to me if we had done that. No, Mr. Murchison took his yacht, so we could go where we pleased and when we pleased and how we pleased. Then from there we went to Athens, and on through the Straits of Messina, and saw that volcano--Hecla, is it not?--and got to Rome for Easter."

"Rome is delightful, is it not?" said Toby, still playing the part of Greek-play chorus. "I have hardly travelled at all."

"Most interesting; I quite longed to be one of those poky little professors who spend all their lives hunting for grafficos in the Christian catafalques. I a.s.sure you we had quite a Childe Harold-al-Raschid pilgrimage, what with Egypt and all, quite like the Arabian Knight. It was wonderful. Travelling is so opening to the mind; I am sure I never really understood what 'from Dan even to Beersheba,'

meant until I went and did it too."