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'Are you enjoying yourself, Airey?' called Peggy Ryle.
He nodded to her cordially.
'What a comfort!' sighed Peggy. She looked round the table, laughed, and cried 'Hurrah!' for no obvious reason.
Trix whispered to Airey, 'She nearly makes me cry when she does that.'
'You can feel it?' he asked in a quick low question, looking at her curiously.
'Oh, yes, I don't know why,' she answered, glancing again at the girl whose mirth and exultation stirred her to so strange a mood.
Her eyes turned back to Airey Newton, and found a strong attraction in his face too. The strength and kindness of it, coming home to her with a keener realisation, were refined by the ever-present shadow of sorrow or self-discontent. This hint of melancholy persisted even while he took his share in the gaiety of the evening; he was cheerful, but he had not the exuberance of most of them; he was far from bubbling over in sheer joyousness like Peggy; he could not achieve even the unruffled and pain-proof placidity of Tommy Trent. Like herself then – in spite of a superficial remoteness from her, and an obviously nearer kinship with the company in life and circumstances – he was in spirit something of a stranger there. In the end he, like herself, must look on at the fun rather than share in it wholeheartedly. There was a background for her and him, rather dark and sombre; for the rest there seemed to be none; their joy blazed unshadowed. Whatever she had or had not attained in her attack on the world, however well her critical and doubtful fortunes might in the end turn out, she had not come near to reaching this; indeed it had never yet been set before her eyes as a thing within human reach. But how naturally it belonged to Peggy and her friends! There are children of the sunlight and children of the shadow. Was it possible to pass from one to the other, to change your origin and name? It seemed to her that, if she had not been born in the shadow, it had fallen on her full soon and heavily, and had stayed very long. Had her life now, her new life with all its brilliance, quite driven it away? All the day it had been dark and heavy on her; not even now was it wholly banished.
When the party broke up – it was not an early hour – Peggy came over to Airey Newton. Trix did not understand the conversation.
'I got your letter, but I'm not coming,' she said. 'I told you I wouldn't come, and I won't.' She was very reproachful, and seemed to consider that she had been insulted somehow.
'Oh, I say now, Peggy!' urged Tommy Trent, looking very miserable.
'It's your fault, and you know it,' she told him severely.
'Well, everybody else is coming,' declared Tommy. Airey said nothing, but nodded assent in a manner half-rueful, half-triumphant.
'It's shameful,' Peggy persisted.
There was a moment's pause. Trix, feeling like an eavesdropper, looked the other way, but she could not avoid hearing.
'But I've had a windfall, Peggy,' said Airey Newton. 'On my honour, I have.'
'Yes, on my honour, he has,' urged Tommy earnestly. 'A good thumping one, isn't it, Airey?'
'One of my things has been a success, you know.'
'Oh, he hits 'em in the eye sometimes, Peggy.'
'Are you two men telling anything like the truth?'
'The absolute truth.'
'Bible truth!' declared Tommy Trent.
'Well, then, I'll come; but I don't think it makes what Tommy did any better.'
'Who cares, if you'll come?' asked Tommy.
Suddenly Airey stepped forward to Trix Trevalla. His manner was full of hesitation – he was, in fact, awkward; but then he was performing a most unusual function. Peggy and Tommy Trent stood watching him, now and then exchanging a word.
'He's going to ask her,' whispered Peggy.
'Hanged if he isn't!' Tommy whispered back.
'Then he must have had it!'
'I told you so,' replied Tommy in an extraordinarily triumphant, imperfectly lowered voice.
Yes, Airey Newton was asking Trix to join his dinner-party.
'It's – it's not much in my line,' he was heard explaining, 'but Trent's promised to look after everything for me. It's a small affair, of course, and – and just a small dinner.'
'Is it?' whispered Tommy with a wink, but Peggy did not hear this time.
'If you'd come – '
'Of course I will,' said Trix. 'Write and tell me the day, and I shall be delighted.' She did not see why he should hesitate quite so much, but a glance at Peggy and Tommy showed her that something very unusual had happened.
'It'll be the first dinner-party he's ever given,' whispered Peggy excitedly, and she added to Tommy, 'Are you going to order it, Tommy?'
'I've asked him to,' interposed Airey, still with an odd mixture of pride and apprehension.
Peggy looked at Tommy suspiciously.
'If you don't behave well about it, I shall get up and go away,' was her final remark.
Trix's brougham was at the door – she found it necessary now to hire one for night-work, her own horse and man finding enough to do in the daytime – and after a moment's hesitation she offered to drive Airey Newton home, declaring that she would enjoy so much of a digression from her way. He had been looking on rather vaguely while the others were dividing themselves into hansom-cab parties, and she received the impression that he meant, when everybody was paired, to walk off quietly by himself. Peggy overheard her invitation and said with a sort of relief: —
'That'll do splendidly, Airey.'
Airey agreed, but it seemed with more embarrassment than pleasure.
But Trix was pleased to prolong, even by so little, the atmosphere and associations of the evening, to be able to talk about it a little more, to question him while she questioned herself also indirectly. She put him through a catechism about the members of the party, delighted to elicit anything that confirmed her notion of their independence, their carelessness, and their comradeship. He answered what she asked, but in a rather absent melancholy fashion; a pall seemed to have fallen on his spirits again. She turned to him, attracted, not repelled, by his relapse into sadness.
'We're not equal to it, you and I,' she said with a laugh. 'We don't live there; we can only pay a visit, as you said.'
He nodded, leaning back against the well-padded cushions with an air of finding unwonted ease. He looked tired and worn.
'Why? We work too hard, I suppose. Yes, I work too, in my way.'
'It's not work exactly,' he said. 'They work too, you know.'
'What is it then?' She bent forward to look at his face, pale in the light of the small carriage lamp.
'It's the Devil,' he told her. Their eyes met in a long gaze. Trix smiled appealingly. She had to go back to her difficult life – to Mervyn, to the Chance and Fricker entanglement. She felt alone and afraid.
'The Devil, is it? Have I raised him?' she asked. 'Well, you taught me how. If I – if I come to grief, you must help me.'
'You don't know in the least the sort of man you're talking to,' he declared, almost roughly.
'I know you're a good friend.'
'I am not,' said Airey Newton.
Again their eyes met, their hearts were like to open and tell secrets that daylight hours would hold safely hidden. But it is not far – save in the judgment of fashion – from the Magnifique to Danes Inn, and the horse moved at a good trot. They came to a stand before the gates.
'I don't take your word for that,' she declared, giving him her hand. 'I sha'n't believe it without a test,' she went on in a lighter tone. 'And at any rate I sha'n't fail at your dinner-party.'
'No, don't fail at my party – my only party.' His smile was very bitter, as he relinquished her hand and opened the door of the brougham. But she detained him a moment; she was still reluctant to lose him, to be left alone, to be driven back to her flat and to her life.
'We're nice people! We have a splendid evening, and we end it up in the depths of woe! At least – you're in them too, aren't you?' She glanced past him up the gloomy passage, and gave a little shudder. 'How could you be anything else, living here?' she cried in accents of pity.
'You don't live here, yet you don't seem much better,' he retorted. 'You are beautiful and beautifully turned out – gorgeous! And your brougham is most comfortable. Yet you don't seem much better.'
Trix was put on her defence; she awoke suddenly to the fact that she had been very near to a mood dangerously confidential.
'I've a few worries,' she laughed, 'but I have my pleasures too.'
'And I've my pleasures,' said Airey. 'And I suppose we both find them in the end the best. Good-night.'
Each had put out a hand towards the veil that was between them; to each had come an impulse to pluck it away. But courage failed, and it hung there still. Both went back to their pleasures. In the ears of both Peggy Ryle's whole-hearted laughter, her soft merry 'Hurrah!' that no obvious cause called forth, echoed with the mockery of an unattainable delight. You need clear soul-space for a laugh like that.
CHAPTER VII
A DANGEROUS GAME
There were whispers about Beaufort Chance, and nods and winks such as a man in his position had better have given no occasion for; men told one another things in confidence at the club; they were quite sure of them, but at the same time very anxious not to be vouched as authority. For there seemed no proof. The list of shareholders of the Dramoffsky Concessions did not display his name; it did display, as owners of blocks of shares, now larger, now smaller, a number of names unknown to fame, social or financial; even Fricker's interest was modest according to the list, and Beaufort Chance's seemed absolutely nothing. Yet still the whispers grew.
Beaufort knew it by the subtle sense that will tell men who depend on what people say of them what people are saying. He divined it with a politician's sensitiveness to opinion. He saw a touch of embarrassment where he was accustomed to meet frankness, he discerned constraint in quarters where everything had been cordiality. He perceived the riskiness of the game he played. He urged Fricker to secrecy and to speed; they must not be seen together so much, and the matter must be put through quickly; these were his two requirements. He was in something of a terror; his manner grew nervous and his face careworn. He knew that he could look for little mercy if he were discovered; he had outraged the code. But he held on his way. His own money was in the venture; if it were lost he was crippled in the race on which he had entered. Trix Trevalla's money was in it too; he wanted Trix Trevalla and he wanted her rich. He was so hard-driven by anxiety that he no longer scrupled to put these things plainly to himself. His available capital had not sufficed for a big stroke; hers and his, if he could consider them as united, and if the big stroke succeeded, meant a decent fortune; it was a fine scheme to get her to make him rich while at the same time he earned her gratitude. He depended on Fricker to manage this; he was, by himself, rather a helpless man in such affairs. Mrs. Bonfill had never expected that he would rise to the top, even while she was helping him to rise as high as he could.
Fricker was not inclined to hurry himself, and he played with the plea for secrecy in a way that showed a consciousness of power over his associate. He had been in one or two scandals, and to be in another would have interfered with his plans – or at least with Mrs. Fricker's. Yet there is much difference between a man who does not want any more scandals and him who, for the sake of a great prize risking one, would be ruined if his venture miscarried. Fricker's shrewd equable face displayed none of the trouble which made Chance's heavy and careworn.
But there was hurry in Fricker's family, though not in Fricker. The season was half-gone, little progress had been made, effect from Trix Trevalla's patronage or favour was conspicuously lacking. Mrs. Fricker did not hesitate to impute double-dealing to Trix, to declare that she meant to give nothing and to take all she could. Fricker had a soul somewhat above these small matters, but he observed honour with his wife – for his oath's sake and a quiet life's. Moreover, be the affair what it would, suggest to him that he was being 'bested' in it, and he became dangerous.
A word is necessary about the position of Dramoffskys. They had collapsed badly on Lord Farringham's pessimistic speech. Presently they began to revive on the strength of 'inside buying'; yet their rise was slow and languid, the Stock Exchange was distrustful, the public would not come in. There was a nice little profit ('Not a scoop at present,' observed Fricker) for those who had bought at the lowest figure, but more rumours would stop the rise and might send quotations tumbling again. It was all-important to know, or to be informed by somebody who did, just how long to hold on, just when to come out. Dramoffskys, in fine, needed a great deal of watching; the operator in them required the earliest, best, and most confidential information that he could get. Fricker was the operator. Beaufort Chance had his sphere. Trix, it will be noticed, was inclined to behave purely as a sleeping partner, which was all very well as regarded Dramoffskys themselves, but very far from well as it touched her relations towards her fellows in the game.
Trix was praying for speed and secrecy as urgently as Beaufort Chance himself; for secrecy from Mrs. Bonfill, from Mervyn, from all her eminent friends; for speed that the enterprise might be prosperously accomplished, the money made, and she be free again. No more ventures for her, if once she were free, she declared. If once she were – free! There she would pause and insist with herself that she had given Beaufort Chance no reason to expect more than the friendship which was all that he had openly claimed, nor the Frickers any right to look for greater countenance or aid than her own acquaintance and hospitality ensured them. Had she ever promised to marry Chance, or to take the Frickers to Mrs. Bonfill's or the Glentorly's? She defied them to prove any such thing – and looked forward with terror to telling them so.
At this point Mr. Liffey made entry on the scene with an article in 'The Sentinel.' Mr. Liffey had a terribly keen nose for misdeeds of all sorts and for secrets most inconvenient if disclosed. He was entirely merciless and inexhaustibly good-natured. He never abused anybody; he dealt with facts, leaving each person to judge those facts by his own moral standard. He had no moral standard of his own, or said so; but he had every idea of making 'The Sentinel' a paying property. He came out now with an article whose heading seemed to harm nobody – since people with certain names must by now be hardened to having their patronymics employed in a representative capacity. 'Who are Brown, Jones, and Robinson?' was the title of the article in 'The Sentinel.' As the reader proceeded – and there were many readers – he found no more about these names, and gathered that Mr. Liffey employed them (with a touch of contempt, maybe) to indicate those gentlemen who, themselves unknown to fame, figured so largely in the share list of Dramoffskys. With a persistence worthy of some better end than that of making fellow-creatures uncomfortable, or of protecting a public that can hardly be said to deserve it, Mr. Liffey tracked these unoffending gentlemen to the honourable, though modest, suburban homes in which they dwelt, had the want of delicacy to disclose their avocations and the amount of their salaries, touched jestingly on the probable claims of their large families (he had their children by name!), and ended by observing, with an innocent surprise, that their holdings in Dramoffskys showed them to possess either resources of which his staff had not been able to inform him, or, on the other hand, a commercial enterprise which deserved higher remuneration than they appeared to be enjoying. He then suggested that present shareholders and intending investors in Dramoffskys might find the facts stated in his article of some interest, and avowed his intention of pursuing his researches into this apparent mystery. He ended by remarking, 'Of course, should it turn out that these gentlemen, against whom I have not a word to say, hold their shares in a fiduciary capacity, I have no more to say – no more about them, at least.' And he promised, with cheerful obligingness, to deal further with this point in his next number.
Within an hour of the appearance of this article Beaufort Chance entered Fricker's study in great perturbation. He found that gentleman calm and composed.
'How much does Liffey know?' asked Chance, almost trembling.
Fricker shrugged his shoulders. 'It doesn't much matter.'
'If he knows that I'm in it, that I've – '
'He won't know you're in it, unless one of the fellows gives us away. Clarkson knows about you, and Tyrrwhitt – none of the rest. I think I can keep them quiet. And we'll get out now. It's not as good as I hoped, but it's pretty good, and it's time to go.' He looked up at Chance and licked his cigar. 'Now's the moment to settle matters with the widow,' he went on. 'You go and tell her what I want and what you want. I don't trust her, and I want to see; and, Beaufort, don't tell her about Dramoffskys till you find out what she means. If she's playing square, all right. If not' – he smiled pensively – 'she may find out for herself the best time for selling Dramoffskys – and Glowing Stars too.'
'Glowing Stars? She's not deep in them, is she? I know nothing about them.'
'A little private flutter – just between her and me,' Fricker assured him. 'Now there's no time to lose. Come back here and tell me what happens. Make her understand – no nonsense! No more shuffling! Be quick. I shall hold up the market a bit while our men got out, but I won't let you in for anything more.' Fricker's morals may have been somewhat to seek, but he was a fine study at critical moments.
'You don't think Liffey knows – ?' stammered Chance again.
'About those little hints of yours? I hope not. But I know, Beaufort, my boy. Do as well as you can for me with the widow.'
Beaufort Chance scowled as he poured himself out a whisky-and-soda. But he was Fricker's man and he must obey. He went out, the spectre of Mr. Liffey seeming to walk with him and to tap him on the shoulder in a genial way.
At eleven o'clock Beaufort Chance arrived at Trix Trevalla's and sent up his name. Mrs. Trevalla sent down to say that she would he glad to see him at lunch. He returned word that his business was important, and would not bear delay. In ten minutes he found himself in her presence. She wore a loose morning-gown, her hair was carefully dressed, she looked very pretty; there was an air of excitement about her; fear and triumph seemed to struggle for ascendancy in her manner. She laid a letter down on the table by her as he entered. While they talked she kept putting her hand on it and withdrawing it again, pulling the letter towards her and pushing it away, fingering it continually, while she kept a watchful eye on her companion.
'What's the hurry about?' she asked, with a languor that was not very plausible. 'Dramoffskys?'
'Dramoffskys are all right,' said he deliberately, as he sat down opposite her. 'But I want a talk with you, Trix.'
'Did we settle that you were to call me Trix?'
'I think of you as that.'
'Well, but that's much less compromising – and just as complimentary.'
'Business! business!' he smiled, giving her appearance an approving glance. 'Fricker and I have been having a talk. We're not satisfied with you, partner.' He had for the time conquered his agitation, and was able to take a tone which he hoped would persuade her, without any need of threats or of disagreeable hints.
'Am I not most amiable to Mr. Fricker, and Mrs., and Miss?' Trix's face had clouded at the first mention of Fricker.
'You women are generally hopeless in business, but I expected better things from you. Now let's come to the point. What have you done for the Frickers?'
Reluctantly brought to the point, Trix recounted with all possible amplitude what she considered she had done. Her hand was often on the letter as she spoke. At the end, with a quick glance at Beaufort, she said: —
'And really that's all I can do. They're too impossible, you know.'
He rose and stood on the hearthrug.
'That's all you can do?' he asked in a level smooth voice.
'Yes. Oh, a few more big squashes, perhaps. But it's nonsense talking of the Glentorlys or of any of Mrs. Bonfill's really nice evenings.'
'It's not nonsense. You could do it if you liked. You know Mrs. Bonfill, anyhow, would do it to please you; and I believe the Glentorlys would too.'
'Well, then, I don't like,' said Trix Trevalla.
He frowned heavily and seemed as if he were going to break out violently. But he waited a moment, and then spoke calmly again. The truth is that Fricker's interests were nothing to him. They might go, provided he could show that he had done his best for them; but doing his best must not involve sacrificing his own chances.
'So much for Fricker! I must say you've a cool way with you, Trix.'
'The way you speak annoys me very much sometimes,' remarked Trix reflectively.
'Why do you suppose he interested himself in your affairs?'
'I've done what I could.' Her lips shut obstinately. 'If I try to do more I sha'n't help the Frickers and I shall hurt myself.'
