Mammon and Co.

by E. F. Benson

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 embarrassments. 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 shillings. 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 shillings 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."