Mammon and Co.

by E. F. Benson

Though Ted had passed such assiduous hours since breakfast, the afternoon was so pleasant that he determined to have another stroll before tea. He had seen no one he knew that day except Toby, and he yearned for a little light conversation. So, after changing his blue suit for a more rigorous costume, soon after four he was on his airy way to the Bachelors' Club. Tea and toast always tasted so good at the Bachelors' Club, and he liked to think he was a Bachelor. It was pleasant also, as he walked up the steps, to contrast the sunny content of his five o'clock mood with his moment of real anxiousness this morning.

The reading-room was nearly empty, and he sank peacefully into his favourite chair by the window, and took up the Pall Mall. He abstained from the leading article, and from "Silk and Stuff," or something of the kind, at the bottom of the first page, cast a vague eye over "The Wares of Autolycus," without any definite idea as to what they might be, and turned to the small paragraphs to which he bore a closer affinity. Royal Highnesses were doing various tedious things, race-meetings among them; the German Emperor had written a hymn, or climbed a tree, or ridden a locomotive; and about half-way down the page he saw the following:

"The Marchioness of Conybeare is lying in a very critical condition at her residence in Park Lane."

Ted read it through once, hardly grasping it, and once more, thinking he must be the victim of some gigantic practical joke. The next moment he got hastily up from his chair, and at the door ran into an apologetic waiter, who was bringing his delicious tea and toast. But he did not pause for that, and going out into the street hailed a hansom, directing the man to drive him to Toby's house. They would be sure to know there, and, for private reasons of his own, he did not wish after his repulse of this morning to make a target of himself again at Park Lane.

Now, barely half a minute before his hansom drew up there, Toby, who had been sent out by his wife to get air, had come in. He was intending to see whether there were any letters for either of them, and then walk back to Park Lane. His straightforward, wholesome soul was full to brimming, and the ingredients of that cup were sympathy for Jack, anxiety for Kit, and blind anger and hatred for Ted. He was not a canting analyst, and could not have said which ingredient usurped proportion, nor did he cultivate mixed emotions, and the three existed quite separately and individually, making him as wretched as his nature permitted him to be. Between them all he felt pulled in pieces; any conclusion to either would make the other two more bearable.

He found a couple of letters lying on the hall-table for his wife, and putting them in his pocket to take back to her, he was just turning to leave the house again, when the front-door bell rang. The man who had let him in was still there, and Toby, half-way between unreasonable hope and sickening apprehension, thinking that it might be some news from Park Lane, advanced also towards the door, so that when it was opened he was close to it. Outside, on the topmost of the four steps that led up from the pavement, in the most well-cut of raiment, the glossiest of patent-leather shoes, and the most faultless of hats, stood Ted Comber.

Toby gave one short gasp, licked his lips with the tip of his tongue, took one step towards him, and knocked him backwards down the four steps. A cry of passionate dismay escaped the falling body; the faultless hat rolled under the hansom, the gold-crutched stick flew in a wide parabola into the area, and Toby, smiling for the first time since that morning, and not caring to improve or spoil the situation with words, walked away. The only regret that lingered in his mind was that there had not been a fuller gathering to observe the scene; however, the cabman and his own footman had an uninterrupted view of what had taken place.

So Toby's footsteps went briskly away along the wet pavement—there had been a cool spring shower some half-hour ago—and the footman at the front-door and the cabman on his exalted perch were left staring. The horse had shied and swerved at this considerable commotion on the pavement, and before the driver could stop it had taken a couple of prancing steps forward, bringing the off wheel with devilish precision over Ted's hat, crushing it lengthways. Its unenviable proprietor lay fallen across the pavement, his chestnut curls within a few inches of the curb, for the moment stunned. Returning consciousness reminded him of a severe pain on the side of his head, a really acute anguish in his right elbow, another hardly less distressing in his shoulder, and two more in his leg. Then he picked himself up, and a being more sunk beneath the zones of pity, take him body and mind together, could scarcely have been found in all big London. His frock coat was a fricassée of dirt, his face was vanished in a splash of mud, the elbow of his right sleeve, whence came one of the most excruciating pains, was torn through shirt, and as he got up he could feel the grating of his broken watch-glass. A footman, discreetly but undisguisedly grinning, watched him from the door of Toby's house, a cabman from his perch. Dignity is scarcely compatible with dirt, and Ted knew it. He picked up his hat, which looked as if a drunken man had been trying to fold an opera hat the wrong way, and the battered remnants of what so lately had been so fine climbed into the hansom again, and requested to be driven home. It had not been a very successful visit.

His reflections were not the most enviable. That act of Toby's, for which he was now but a sorry parcel of aches, meant the worst. And at that thought all that was passably decent in the man came to the surface. There was not enough to cover a large surface, but there was a little. He pushed open the trap at the top of the hansom and changed his destination to Park Lane. Aching and bleeding as he was, he would not wait, wait, wait for tardy news. Nor was his anxiety wholly selfish; he had—God knows what proportion this bore to the whole—a fear based on affection. Then, having given the order, he devoted himself to patching up a very sorry object.