Mammon and Co Part 31

"Please say nothing more," she said. "It gave me real pleasure--I am speaking quite seriously--to do what I did. So all is said."

Kit had dropped her eyes as Lily spoke, but here she raised them again, and the genuineness of the eyes that met hers brought her more nearly to a sense of personal shame than anything had done for years; for even the most undulating _poseur_ feels the force of genuineness when really brought into contact with it, for his own weapons crumple up before it like the paper lances and helmets with which children play. Kit's life, her words, her works, were and had always been hollow. But Lily's sincerity was dominant, compelling, and Kit's careful calculated manner, a subject of so great preoccupation but two seconds ago, slipped suddenly from her.

"Let me speak," she said. "I want to speak. You cannot guess in what perplexities I am. In a hundred thousand ways I have been a wicked little fool; and, oh, how dearly one pays for folly in this world!--more dearly than for anything else, I think. I have been through h.e.l.l--through h.e.l.l, I tell you!"

At last there was truth in Kit's voice, a genuineness beyond question.

Her carefully studied speech and silences were swept away, as if by a wet sponge from a slate, and her soul spoke. A sudden unexpected, but imperative, need to speak to someone was upon her, to someone who was good, and these past weeks of silence were an intolerable weight.

Goodness, as a rule, was synonymous in Kit's mind with dulness, but just now it had something infinitely restful and inviting about it. Her life with Jack had grown day by day more impossible; he, too, so Kit thought, knew that there was always with them some veiled Other Thing about which each was silent. Whether he knew what it was she did not even try to guess; but the small things of life, the eating and the drinking, the talk on indifferent subjects when the two were alone, became a ghastly proceeding in the invariable presence of the Other Thing. To Lily also that presence was instantly manifest, the trouble about which Toby had spoken that morning. It was there unmistakably, and she braced herself to hear Kit give bodily form to it, for she knew that was coming.

Kit dropped her eyes and went on hurriedly.

"I am in unutterable distress and perplexity," she said; "and I dread--oh, I dread what lies before me! For days and nights, ever since that snow-storm down at Goring, I have thought only of what I have to go through--what is within a few months inevitable. I have tried to conceal it from Jack. But you guess, Lily. You know, I even went to a doctor to ask if anything could be done----"

Lily looked up with a glance of astonished horror.

"Stop, stop," she said; "you are saying horrible things!"

"Yes, I am saying horrible things," went on Kit, with a strange calmness in her voice; "but I am telling you the truth, and the truth is horrible. The truth about a wicked person like me cannot be nice. You interrupted me. I went, as I told you, but when I got there I drove away again. I was not so wicked as I thought I was."

Lily gave a great sigh of relief. But she had not seen the Other Thing yet.

"Oh, my poor Kit," she said; "I am so sorry for you; but--but you see the same thing lies before me. But fear it? I thank G.o.d for it every moment of my life. Cannot you forget pain, risk, danger of death, even in that? Nothing in this world seems to me to matter when perhaps soon one will be a mother. A mother--oh, Kit! I would not change places with anyone in earth or heaven."

Kit did not look up.

"It is different for you," she said.

"Different? How different?" she asked; but a sudden misgiving shook her voice. Outlines of the Other Thing were discernible.

A sudden spasm of impatience seized Kit.

"Ah, you are stupid!" she cried. "You good people are always stupid."

There was a long silence, and during that silence Lily knew Kit's secret, and as with everyone the world of trivial things swarmed into her mind. She heard the ticking of the clock, the low boom of life outside, the rustle of Kit's dress as she moved slightly. Something perfectly direct had to be said by the one or the other; anything else would be as out of place as a remark on the weather to a dying man.

"What am I to do?" asked Kit at length simply.

And the answer was as simple:

"Tell your husband."

"I think Jack would kill me if I told him," said Kit.

"I am very sure he would not. Besides, what does that matter? Oh, what does that matter?"

Kit looked up at her in silence, but after a moment Lily went on.

"Don't you see what I mean?" she said. "There are some situations in life, Kit, and this is one, where no side-issue, like being killed, comes in. There is, as G.o.d is above us, absolutely only one thing to be done, though there are a hundred arguments against it. What is the use of telling him? you might ask. Use? Of course there is no use. Why tell the disgrace? why make him miserable? why make him hate you, perhaps?

Simply because you must--you must! Oh, my poor, poor Kit, I am so glad you told me! It must be something to tell anyone, even a feeble little fool like me. How could you have borne it alone? Oh, Kit, Kit!"

Again there was silence. Lily sat leaning forward in her chair, bending towards the other, with all the pure sweet womanliness of her nature yearning in her eyes. Perhaps she should have been shocked. She was not, for pity swallowed up the very ground on which censure should have stood. The two women, as asunder as the poles, were for the moment brought close by the Divine identical experience of their s.e.x; yet what was to be to one the flower of her life and the crown of her womanhood, was to the other a bitterness ineffaceable, a shuddering agony.

"Oh, it is difficult, it is difficult!" went on Lily; "but when was anything worth doing easy? Does not all in you that you know to be best point one way? You cannot imagine going on living with Jack, day by day, week by week, without telling him. And when it comes----"

Lily broke off suddenly. Here was no question of words. What could argument do in a case that admitted of none? There was one thing--one thing only--to be done; all else was impossible. If Kit did not feel that in her very blood and bones, no words could conceivably make her.

She had been sitting quite still and silent, apathetic apparently, during Lily's speech. After her outbreak at the beginning, such entire composure was unnatural. The two might have been talking of Danish politics for all the interest Kit seemed to take in the subject.

Inwardly storm and tempest raged; old voices, memories, all that was innocent, called to her; the gales of her soul bugled and shook the foundations of her building, but as yet the moment had not come. Then suddenly the slightest tremor seemed to shake her, and Lily saw that she was beginning to feel, and that some fibre long dormant or numb was still vital.

"All I say to you seems nothing more than plat.i.tude, perhaps?" she went on; "but plat.i.tudes are worth consideration when one touches the great things of life--when interest, tact, inclination, cleverness, are all sunk, and we are left with the real things, the big things--goodness, wickedness, what is right, what is wrong."

Her tone had a pleading wistfulness in it, her eyes were soft with tenderness, and the simple, homely words had the force of their simplicity. Kit was drawing on her gloves very slowly, still not looking up.

"Tell me two things more," she said, with a tremor in her voice. "Do you shrink from me? And the wrong I have done to--to your unborn child, what of that?"

Lily rose and kissed her on the forehead.

"I have answered you," she said.

Kit got up, hands trembling and with twitching mouth.

"Let me go," she said. "Let me go at once. Come if I send for you."

She hurried from the room without further good-bye, and Lily was too wise to try to detain her. Her carriage was still waiting, and she stepped quickly into it.

"Home," she said.

Outside the air was brisk with spring, the streets clean and dry, and populous with alert faces. Shop-windows winked and sparkled in the lemon-coloured suns.h.i.+ne; at a corner was a barrow full of primroses from the country, and the news of the day lay on the cobbles of the crossing, with stones to keep it from flying, in scarlet advertis.e.m.e.nt. A shouting wind swept down Piccadilly, hats flapped and struggled, errand-boys whistled and chaffed, buses towered and nodded, hansoms jingled and pa.s.sed, but for once Kit was blind to this splendid spectacle of life.

Her own brougham moved noiselessly and swiftly on its India-rubber tires, and she knew only, and that with a blank heaviness of spirit, that each beat of the horses' hoofs brought her a pace nearer to her home, to her husband--a step closer to what she was going to do.

She got out at her own door, and, to her question whether her husband was in, was told that he was up in his room. He had ordered the carriage, however, which brought her back, to wait, as he was going out.

Kit went quickly up the staircase and along the parquetted floor of the pa.s.sage, not loitering for fear she should not go at all. Jack was standing in front of his fireplace, an opened letter in his hand. As she came in he looked up.

Kit had advanced a few steps into the room, but stopped there, looking at him with eyes of mute entreaty. She had not stopped to think over what she should say, and though her lips moved she could not speak.

"What is it?" he said.

Kit did not reply, but her eyes dropped before his.

"What is the matter?" he asked again. "Are you ill, Kit?"

Then the inward storm broke. She half ran across the room and flung her arms round his neck.

"I wish I were dead!" she cried. "Jack, Jack--oh, Jack!"