Mammon and Co.

by E. F. Benson

Alington took off his hat and let the wind lift his rather scanty hair. It was an extreme pleasure to him to get out from the overheated stagnation of London streets into this unvitiated air, and he wondered at the keenness of his enjoyment. He had never been a great lover of the country, but it seemed to him to-day as if a heavy accumulation of years had been lifted off him, disclosing capacities for enjoyment which none, himself perhaps least of all, had suspected could be his. He gently censured himself in this regard. He had made a mistake in thus stifling and shutting up so pure and proper a source of pleasure. He would certainly take himself to task for this, and put himself under the tuition of country sights and sounds.

They had tea under the twinkling shade of a pine copse at the end of the lawn, and presently after Mr. Alington again took his straw hat, with the design of a stroll in the fresh cool of the approaching evening. The other two ladies preferred to enjoy it in inaction, waiting for the arrival of the adventurous slip-carriage guests, about whose fate Mrs. Murchison reiterated her anxiety.

So Mr. Alington, secretly not ill-pleased, started alone. He was about half-way down the drive, when he met a telegraph-boy going towards the house, and, in his expansive, kindly manner, detained him a moment with a few simple questions as to his name and age. Finally, just as he turned to walk on, he asked him for whom he was delivering a telegram, and the boy, drawing it out of his pouch, showed him the address.

Mr. Alington opened it slowly, wondering, as he had often wondered before, why the envelope was orange and the paper pink. It was from his brokers, and very short; but he looked for some considerable time at the eight words it contained:

"Terrible panic in Carmels. Shares unnegotiable.
Wire instructions."

At first he read it quite blankly; it seemed to him that the words, though they were simple and plain enough, conveyed nothing to his mind. Then suddenly a huge intense light, hot and dazzling beyond description, appeared to have been uncovered somewhere in his brain, and the words burned and blinded him. He let the pink paper fall, bowing and sidling on the gravel of the drive, then stooped down with a curious groping manner and picked it up again. He put it neatly back inside the envelope, and asked the boy for a form, on which he scribbled a few words.

"Do nothing," he wrote. "I will come up immediately."

He gave the boy a shilling, waving away the change, and then, going to the grassy bank that bounded the drive, he sat down. Except for that moment, when his brain, no doubt instantaneously stunned, refused to tell him the meaning of the words, it had been absolutely composed and alert. The telegram gave no hint as to the cause of this panic, but without casting about for other possibilities, he put it down at once to his one weak point, Mr. Chavasse. That determined, he gave it no further thought, but wondered idly and without much interest what he felt. But this was beyond him. He had no idea what he felt, except that he was conscious of a slight qualm of sickness, so slight and so purely physical, to all seeming, that he would naturally have put it down, had it not appeared simultaneously with this news, to some small error of diet. Otherwise his brain, though perfectly clear and capable of receiving accurate impressions, was blank. There was a whisper of fir-trees round him, and little points of sunlight flickered on the yellow gravel of the drive as the branches stirred in the wind. Lady Haslemere's voice sounded thin and high from the lawn near—he had always remarked the unpleasant shrillness of her tones—and his straw hat had fallen off. He was conscious of no dismay, no agony of regret that he had not sold out two hours ago, no sense of disaster.

He sat there five minutes at the outside, and then went back to the lawn. The ladies looked up in surprise at the quickness of his return, but neither marked any change in his sleek features nor uncertainty in his step. His voice, too, when he spoke, was neither hurried, unsteady, nor differently modulated.