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The Market-Place

by Harold Frederic · English · Gutenberg #298 · 692,322 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Market-Place

Author: Harold Frederic


        
Release date: July 9, 2008 [eBook #298]
                Most recently updated: March 14, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/298

Credits: Produced by John Hamm, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARKET-PLACE ***




Produced by John Hamm





THE MARKET-PLACE

by Harold Frederic




CHAPTER I


THE battle was over, and the victor remained on the field--sitting alone
with the hurly-burly of his thoughts.

His triumph was so sweeping and comprehensive as to be somewhat
shapeless to the view. He had a sense of fascinated pain when he tried
to define to himself what its limits would probably be. Vistas of
unchecked, expanding conquest stretched away in every direction. He held
at his mercy everything within sight. Indeed, it rested entirely with
him to say whether there should be any such thing as mercy at all--and
until he chose to utter the restraining word the rout of the vanquished
would go on with multiplying terrors and ruin. He could crush and
torture and despoil his enemies until he was tired. The responsibility
of having to decide when he would stop grinding their faces might come
to weigh upon him later on, but he would not give it room in his mind
to-night.

A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself out of the flames
in the grate. They were moulded in a family likeness, these phantom
visages: they were all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright.
They implored him with eyes in which panic asserted itself above rage
and cunning. Only here and there did he recall a name with which to
label one of these countenances; very few of them raised a memory of
individual rancour. The faces were those of men he had seen, no doubt,
but their persecution of him had been impersonal; his great revenge was
equally so. As he looked, in truth, there was only one face--a composite
mask of what he had done battle with, and overthrown, and would trample
implacably under foot. He stared with a conqueror's cold frown at it,
and gave an abrupt laugh which started harsh echoes in the stillness of
the Board Room. Then he shook off the reverie, and got to his feet. He
shivered a little at the sudden touch of a chill.

A bottle of brandy, surrounded by glasses, stood on the table where the
two least-considered of his lieutenants, the dummy Directors, had left
it. He poured a small quantity and sipped it. During the whole eventful
day it had not occurred to him before to drink; the taste of the neat
liquor seemed on the instant to calm and refresh his brain. With more
deliberation, he took a cigar from the broad, floridly-decorated
open box beside the bottle, lit it, and blew a long draught of smoke
thoughtfully through his nostrils. Then he put his hands in his pockets,
looked again into the fire, and sighed a wondering smile. God in heaven!
it was actually true!

This man of forty found himself fluttering with a novel exhilaration,
which yet was not novel. Upon reflection, he perceived that he felt as
if he were a boy again--a boy excited by pleasure. It surprised as much
as it delighted him to experience this frank and direct joy of a
child. He caught the inkling of an idea that perhaps his years were an
illusion. He had latterly been thinking of himself as middle-aged; the
grey hairs thickening at his temples had vaguely depressed him. Now all
at once he saw that he was not old at all. The buoyancy of veritable
youth bubbled in his veins. He began walking up and down the room,
regarding new halcyon visions with a sparkling eye. He was no longer
conscious of the hated foe beneath his feet; they trod instead elastic
upon the clouds.

The sound of someone moving about in the hallway outside, and of trying
a door near by, suddenly caught his attention. He stood still and
listened with alertness for a surprised instant, then shrugged his
shoulders and began moving again. It must be nearly seven o'clock;
although the allotment work had kept the clerks later than usual that
day, everybody connected with the offices had certainly gone home. He
realized that his nerves had played him a trick in giving that alarmed
momentary start--and smiled almost tenderly as he remembered how notable
and even glorious a warrant those nerves had for their unsettled state.
They would be all right after a night's real rest. He would know how to
sleep NOW, thank God!

But yes--there was somebody outside--and this time knocking with
assurance at the right door, the entrance to the outer office. After a
second's consideration, he went into this unlighted outer office, and
called out through the opaque glass an enquiry. The sound of his voice,
as it analyzed itself in his own ears, seemed unduly peremptory. The
answer which came back brought a flash of wonderment to his eyes. He
hurriedly unlocked and opened the door.

“I saw the lights in what I made out to be the Board Room,” said
the newcomer, as he entered. “I assumed it must be you. Hope I don't
interrupt anything.”

“Nothing could have given me greater pleasure, Lord Plowden,” replied
the other, leading the way back to the inner apartment. “In fact, I
couldn't have asked anything better.”

The tone of his voice had a certain anxious note in it not quite
in harmony with this declaration. He turned, under the drop-light
overhanging the Board-table, and shook hands with his guest, as if to
atone for this doubtful accent. “I shake hands with you again,” he
said, speaking rapidly, “because this afternoon it was what you may call
formal; it didn't count. And--my God!--you're the man I owe it all to.”

“Oh, you mustn't go as far as that--even in the absence of witnesses,”
 replied Lord Plowden, lightly. “I'll take off my coat for a few
minutes,” he went on, very much at his ease. “It's hot in here. It's by
the merest chance I happened to be detained in the City--and I saw your
lights, and this afternoon we had no opportunity whatever for a quiet
talk. No--I won't drink anything before dinner, but I'll light a cigar.
I want to say to you, Thorpe,” he concluded, as he seated himself
“that I think what you've done is very wonderful. The Marquis thinks so
too--but I shouldn't like to swear that he understands much about it.”

The implication that the speaker did understand remained in the air
like a tangible object. Thorpe took a chair, and the two men exchanged a
silent, intent look. Their faces, dusky red on the side of the glow from
the fire, pallid where the electric light fell slantwise upon them
from above, had for a moment a mysterious something in common. Then
the tension of the glance was relaxed--and on the instant no two men in
London looked less alike.

Lord Plowden was familiarly spoken of as a handsome man. Thorpe had even
heard him called the handsomest man in England--though this seemed in
all likelihood an exaggeration. But handsome he undoubtedly was--tall
without suggesting the thought of height to the observer, erect yet
graceful, powerfully built, while preserving the effect of
slenderness. His face in repose had the outline of the more youthful
guardsman-type--regular, finely-cut, impassive to hardness. When he
talked, or followed with interest the talk of others, it revealed almost
an excess of animation. Then one noted the flashing subtlety of his
glance, the swift facility of his smile and comprehending brows, and saw
that it was not the guardsman face at all. His skin was fresh-hued, and
there was a shade of warm brown in his small, well-ordered moustasche,
but his hair, wavy and worn longer than the fashion, seemed black. There
were perceptible veins of grey in it, though he had only entered his
thirty-fifth year. He was dressed habitually with the utmost possible
care.

The contrast between this personage and the older man confronting him
was abrupt. Thorpe was also tall, but of a burly and slouching figure.
His face, shrouded in a high-growing, dust-coloured beard, invited no
attention. One seemed always to have known this face--thick-featured,
immobile, undistinguished. Its accessories for the time being were even
more than ordinarily unimpressive. Both hair and beard were ragged with
neglect. His commonplace, dark clothes looked as if he had slept in
them. The hands resting on his big knees were coarse in shape, and
roughened, and ill-kept.

“I couldn't have asked anything better than your dropping in,” he
repeated now, speaking with a drag, as of caution, on his words.
“Witnesses or no witnesses, I'm anxious to have you understand that I
realize what I owe to you.”

“I only wish it were a great deal more than it is,” replied the other,
with a frank smile.

“Oh, it'll mount up to considerable, as it stands,” said Thorpe.

He could hear that there was a kind of reservation in his voice; the
suspicion that his companion detected it embarrassed him. He found
himself in the position of fencing with a man to whom all his feelings
impelled him to be perfectly open. He paused, and was awkwardly
conscious of constraint in the silence which ensued. “You are very kind
to put it in that way,” said Lord Plowden, at last. He seemed also to be
finding words for his thoughts with a certain difficulty. He turned
his cigar round in his white fingers meditatively. “I gather that
your success has been complete--as complete as you yourself could have
desired. I congratulate you with all my heart.”

“No--don't say my success--say our success,” put in Thorpe.

“But, my dear man,” the other corrected him, “my interest, compared with
yours, is hardly more than nominal. I'm a Director, of course, and I'm
not displeased that my few shares should be worth something instead of
nothing, but----”

Thorpe lifted one of his heavy hands. “That isn't my view of the thing
at all. To be frank, I was turning over in my mind, just awhile ago,
before you came in, some way of arranging all that on a different
footing. If you'll trust it to me, I think you'll find it's all right.”

Something in the form of this remark seemed to restore to Lord Plowden
his accustomed fluency of speech.

“I came here to say precisely that thing,” he began--“that I do trust
it to you. We have never had any very definite talk on the subject--and
pray don't think that I want to go into details now. I'd much rather
not, in fact. But what I do want to say to you is this: I believe in
you. I feel sure that you are going to go far, as the saying is. Well,
I want to tie myself to your star. Do you see what I mean? You are going
to be a power in finance. You are going to be able to make and unmake
men as you choose. I should be very much obliged indeed if you would
make me.”

Thorpe regarded the handsome and titled man of fashion with what seemed
to the other a lethargic gaze. In truth, his mind was toiling with
strenuous activity to master, in all its bearings, the significance of
what had been said. This habit of the abstracted and lack-lustre eye,
the while he was hard at work thinking, was a fortuitous asset which he
had never up to that time learned that he possessed. Unconsciously, he
dampened the spirits of his companion.

“Don't imagine I'm trying to force myself upon you,” Lord Plowden said,
growing cool in the face of this slow stare. “I'm asking nothing at all.
I had the impulse to come and say to you that you are a great man, and
that you've done a great thing--and done it, moreover, in a very great
way.”

“You know how it was done!” The wondering exclamation forced itself from
Thorpe's unready lips. He bent forward a little, and took a new visual
hold, as it were, of his companion's countenance.

Lord Plowden smiled. “Did you think I was such a hopeless duffer, then?”
 he rejoined.

For answer, Thorpe leant back in his chair, crossed his legs, and patted
his knee contentedly. All at once his face had lightened; a genial
speculation returned to his grey eyes.

“Well, I was in a curious position about you, you see,” he began to
explain. The relief with which he spoke was palpable. “I could not for
the life of me make up my mind whether to tell you about it or not.
Let's see--this is Thursday; did I see you Tuesday? At any rate, the
scheme didn't dawn on me myself until toward evening Tuesday.
But yesterday, of course, I could have told you--and again this
afternoon--but, as I say, I couldn't make up my mind. Once I had it on
the tip of my tongue--but somehow I didn't. And you--you never gave me a
hint that you saw what was going on.”

Again Lord Plowden smiled. “I voted with you,” he put in softly.

Thorpe laughed, and relit his cigar. “Well, I couldn't have asked
anything better than this,” he declared once again. “It beats all the
rest put together, to my mind.”

“Perhaps I don't quite follow your meaning,” commented the other
tentatively.

“Why man,” Thorpe explained, hesitating a little in his choice of words,
but speaking with evident fervour; “I was more anxious about you--and
the way you'd take it--than about anything else. I give you my word I
was. I couldn't tell at all how you'd feel about the thing. You might
think that it was all right, and then again you might round on me--or
no, I don't mean quite that--but you might say it wasn't good enough for
you, and wash your hands of the whole affair. And I can't tell you what
a relief it is to find that you--that you're satisfied. Now I can go
ahead.”

“Ah, yes--ahead,” said the younger man, thoughtfully. “Do you mind
telling me--you see I'm quite in the dark as to details--how much
further ahead we are likely to go? I comprehend the general nature of
our advance--but how far off is the goal you have in sight?”

“God knows!” answered Thorpe, with a rising thrill of excitement in his
voice. “I don't give it any limit. I don't see why we should stop at
all. We've got them in such a position that--why, good heavens! we can
squeeze them to death, crush them like quartz.” He chuckled grimly at
the suggestion of his simile. “We'll get more ounces to the ton out of
our crushings than they ever heard of on the Rand, too.”

“Might I ask,” interposed the other, “who may 'they' be?”

Thorpe hesitated, and knitted his brows in the effort to remember names.
“Oh, there are a lot of them,” he said, vaguely. “I think I told you
of the way that Kaffir crowd pretended to think well of me, and let me
believe they were going to take me up, and then, because I wouldn't give
them everything--the very shirt off my back--turned and put their knife
into me. I don't know them apart, hardly--they've all got names like
Rhine wines--but I know the gang as a whole, and if I don't lift the
roof clean off their particular synagogue, then my name is mud.”

Lord Plowden smiled. “I've always the greatest difficulty to remember
that you are an Englishman--a Londoner born,” he declared pleasantly.
“You don't talk in the least like one. On shipboard I made sure you
were an American--a very characteristic one, I thought--of some curious
Western variety, you know. I never was more surprised in my life than
when you told me, the other day, that you only left England a few years
ago.”

“Oh, hardly a 'few years'; more like fifteen,” Thorpe corrected him. He
studied his companion's face with slow deliberation.

“I'm going to say something that you mustn't take amiss,” he remarked,
after a little pause. “If you'd known that I was an Englishman, when
we first met, there on the steamer, I kind o' suspect that you and I'd
never have got much beyond a nodding acquaintance--and even that mostly
on my side. I don't mean that I intended to conceal anything--that is,
not specially--but I've often thought since that it was a mighty good
thing I did. Now isn't that true--that if you had taken me for one of
your own countrymen you'd have given me the cold shoulder?”

“I dare say there's a good deal in what you say,” the other admitted,
gently enough, but without contrition. “Things naturally shape
themselves that way, rather, you know. If they didn't, why then the
whole position would become difficult. But you are an American, to all
intents and purposes.”

“Oh, no--I never took any step towards getting naturalized,” Thorpe
protested. “I always intended to come back here. Or no, I won't say
that--because most of the time I was dog-poor--and this isn't the place
for a poor man. But I always said to myself that if ever I pulled it
off--if I ever found my self a rich man--THEN I'd come piking across the
Atlantic as fast as triple-expansion engines would carry me.”

The young man smiled again, with a whimsical gleam in his eye. “And you
ARE a rich man, now,” he observed, after a momentary pause.

“We are both rich men,” replied Thorpe, gravely.

He held up a dissuading hand, as the other would have spoken. “This is
how it seems to me the thing figures itself out: It can't be said that
your name on the Board, or the Marquis's either, was of much use so far
as the public were concerned. To tell the truth, I saw some time ago
that they wouldn't be. Titles on prospectuses are played out in London.
I've rather a notion, indeed, that they're apt to do more harm than
good--just at present, at least. But all that aside--you are the man who
was civil to me at the start, when you knew nothing whatever about my
scheme, and you are the man who was good to me later on, when I didn't
know where to turn for a friendly word. Very well; here I am! I've made
my coup! And I'd be a sweep, wouldn't I? to forget to-day what I was so
glad to remember a week ago. But you see, I don't forget! The capital
of the Company is 500,000 pounds, all in pound shares. We offered the
public only a fifth of them. The other four hundred thousand shares are
mine as vendor--and I have ear-marked in my mind one hundred thousand of
them to be yours.”

Lord Plowden's face paled at the significance of these words. “It is
too much--you don't reflect what it is you are saying,” he murmured
confusedly. “Not a bit of it,” the other reassured him. “Everything that
I've said goes.”

The peer, trembling a little, rose to his feet. “It is a preposterously
big reward for the merest act of courtesy,” he insisted. “Of course it
takes my breath away for joy--and yet I feel I oughtn't to be consenting
to it at all. And it has its unpleasant side--it buries me under a
mountain of obligation. I don't know what to do or what to say.”

“Well, leave the saying and doing to me, then,” replied Thorpe, with a
gesture before which the other resumed his seat. “Just a word more--and
then I suppose we'd better be going. Look at it in this way. Your
grandfather was Lord Chancellor of England, and your father was
a General in the Crimea. My grandfather kept a small second-hand
book-shop, and my father followed him in the business. In one sense,
that puts us ten thousand miles apart. But in another sense, we'll say
that we like each other, and that there are ways in which we can be of
immense use to each other, and that brings us close together. You need
money--and here it is for you. I need--what shall I say?--a kind of
friendly lead in the matter of establishing myself on the right footing,
among the right people--and that's what you can do for me. Mind--I'd
prefer to put it all in quite another way; I'd like to say it was
all niceness on your part, all gratitude on mine. But if you want to
consider it on a business basis--why there you have it also--perfectly
plain and clear.”

He got up as he finished, and Lord Plowden rose as well. The two men
shook hands in silence.

When the latter spoke, it was to say: “Do you know how to open one of
those soda-water bottles? I've tried, but I can never get the trick. I
think I should like to have a drink--after this.”

When they had put down their glasses, and the younger man was getting
into his great-coat, Thorpe bestowed the brandy and cigars within a
cabinet at the corner of the room, and carefully turned a key upon them.

“If you're going West, let me give you a lift,” said Lord Plowden, hat
in hand. “I can set you down wherever you like. Unfortunately I've to go
out to dinner, and I must race, as it is, to get dressed.”

Thorpe shook his head. “No, go along,” he bade him. “I've some odds and
ends of things to do on the way.”

“Then when shall I see you?”--began the other, and halted suddenly
with a new thought in his glance. “But what are you doing Saturday?”
 he asked, in a brisker tone. “It's a dies non here. Come down with me
to-morrow evening, to my place in Kent. We will shoot on Saturday,
and drive about on Sunday, if you like--and there we can talk at our
leisure. Yes, that is what you must do. I have a gun for you. Shall we
say, then--Charing Cross at 9:55? Or better still, say 5:15, and we will
dine at home.”

The elder man pondered his answer--frowning at the problem before him
with visible anxiety. “I'm afraid I'd better not come--it's very good of
you all the same.”

“Nonsense,” retorted the other. “My mother will be very glad indeed to
see you. There is no one else there--unless, perhaps, my sister has some
friend down. We shall make a purely family party.”

Thorpe hesitated for only a further second. “All right. Charing Cross,
5:15,” he said then, with the grave brevity of one who announces a
momentous decision.

He stood still, looking into the fire, for a few moments after his
companion had gone. Then, going to a closet at the end of the room, he
brought forth his coat and hat; something prompted him to hold them up,
and scrutinize them under the bright light of the electric globe. He put
them on, then, with a smile, half-scornful, half-amused, playing in his
beard.

The touch of a button precipitated darkness upon the Board Room. He made
his way out, and downstairs to the street. It was a rainy, windy October
night, sloppy underfoot, dripping overhead. At the corner before him, a
cabman, motionless under his unshapely covered hat and glistening rubber
cape, sat perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep. Thorpe hailed
him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the brusque order, “Strand!” as he
clambered into the hansom.




CHAPTER II


“LOUISA, the long and short of it is this,” said Thorpe, half an hour
later: “you never did believe in me, as a sister should do.”

He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather
dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering
gasjets. They sat somewhat apart, confronting a fireplace, where only
the laid materials for a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate.
Above the mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals to this
portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon him of responsibility
for the cheerlessness of the room. There were other pictures on the
walls of which he was dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about
Dido and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back to him out
of the mists of his childhood.

Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with
quaint inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The
peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained like
snuff in his nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at
the side, he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it the same
rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used to keep him awake nights,
in one of the rooms next to this, with that same foolish noise, when he
was a boy?

“I know you always say that,” replied Louisa, impassively.

She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace of artifice
or intention, contrived to look the younger of the two. Her thick hair,
drawn simply from her temples into a knot behind, was of that palest
brown which assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in
contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years. Long and spare of
figure, she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, with her large,
capable hands on her knees.

“I believed in you as much as you'd let me,” she went on, indifferently,
almost wearily. “But I don't see that it mattered to you whether I did
or didn't. You went your own way: you did what you wanted to do. What
had I to do with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the world
you were in more than once in two or three years. How should I know
whether you were going to succeed, when I didn't even know what it
was you were at? Certainly you hadn't succeeded here in London--but
elsewhere you might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover, I
don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown into something very
different from the boy Joel that left the shop--it must be twenty years
ago. I can only know about you and your affairs what you tell me.”

“But my point is,” pursued Thorpe, watching her face with a curiously
intent glance, “you never said to yourself: 'I KNOW he's going to
succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich man before he dies.'”

She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed fatigued
failure to comprehend why he was making so much of this purposeless
point.

“No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself,” she admitted,
listlessly. Then a comment upon his words occurred to her, and she spoke
with more animation: “You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was
very important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were always talking
about getting rich; you kept the idea before you of sometime, at a
stroke, finding yourself a millionaire. That's been the idea of your
life. But what do I know about all that? My work has been to keep a roof
over my head--to keep the little business from disappearing altogether.
It's been hard enough, I can tell you, these last few years, with the
big jobbers cutting the hearts out of the small traders. I had the
invalid husband to support for between three and four years--a dead
weight on me every week--and then the children to look after, to clothe
and educate.”

At the last word she hesitated suddenly, and looked at him. “Don't think
I'm ungrateful”--she went on, with a troubled effort at a smile--“but I
almost wish you'd never sent me that four hundred pounds at all. What
it means is that they've had two years at schools where now I shan't
be able to keep them any longer. They'll be spoiled for my kind of
life--and they won't have a fair chance for any other. I don't know what
will become of them.”

The profound apprehension in the mother's voice did not dull the gleam
in Thorpe's eyes. He even began a smile in the shadows of his unkempt
moustache.

“But when I sent that money, for example, two years ago, and over,” he
persisted, doggedly--“and I told you there'd be more where that came
from, and that I stood to pull off the great event--even then, now, you
didn't believe in your innermost heart that I knew what I was talking
about, did you?”

She frowned with impatience as she turned toward him. “For heaven's
sake, Joel,” she said, sharply--“you become a bore with that stupid
nonsense. I want to be patient with you--I do indeed sympathize with you
in your misfortunes--you know that well enough--but you're very tiresome
with that eternal harping on what I believed and what I didn't believe.
Now, are you going to stop to supper or not?--because if you are I must
send the maid out. And there's another thing--would it be of any help to
you to bring your things here from the hotel? You can have Alfred's room
as well as not--till Christmas, at least.”

“Supposing I couldn't get my luggage out of the hotel till I'd settled
my bill,” suggested Thorpe tentatively, in a muffled voice.

The practical woman reflected for an instant. “I was thinking,” she
confessed then, “that it might be cheaper to leave your things there,
and buy what little you want--I don't imagine, from what I've seen, that
your wardrobe is so very valuable--but no, I suppose the bill ought to
be paid. Perhaps it can be managed; how much will it be?”

Thorpe musingly rose to his feet, and strolled over to her chair. With
his thick hands on his sister's shoulders he stooped and kissed her on
the forehead.

“You believe in me now, anyway, eh, Lou?” he said, as he straightened
himself behind her.

The unaccustomed caress--so different in character from the perfunctory
salute with which he had greeted her on his arrival from foreign parts,
six months before--brought a flush of pleased surprise to her plain
face. Then a kind of bewilderment crept into the abstracted gaze she was
bending upon the fireless grate. Something extraordinary, unaccountable,
was in the manner of her brother. She recalled that, in truth, he was
more than half a stranger to her. How could she tell what wild,
uncanny second nature had not grown up in him under those
outlandish tropical skies? He had just told her that his ruin was
absolute--overwhelming--yet there had been a covert smile in the
recesses of his glance. Even now, she half felt, half heard, a chuckle
from him, there as he stood behind her!

The swift thought that disaster had shaken his brain loomed up and
possessed her. She flung herself out of the chair, and, wheeling, seized
its back and drew it between them as she faced him. It was with a stare
of frank dismay that she beheld him grinning at her.

“What”--she began, stammering--“What is the matter, Joel?”

He permitted himself the luxury of smiling blankly at her for a further
moment. Then he tossed his head, and laughed abruptly.

“Sit down, old girl,” he adjured her. “Try and hold yourself together,
now--to hear some different kind of news. I've been playing it rather
low down on you, for a fact. Instead of my being smashed, it's the other
way about.”

She continued to confront him, with a nervous clasp upon the chair-back.
Her breathing troubled her as she regarded him, and tried to take in the
meaning of his words.

“Do you mean--you've been lying to me about--about your Company?” she
asked, confusedly.

“No--no--not at all,” he replied, now all genial heartiness. “No--what
I told you was gospel truth--but I was taking a rise out of you all the
same.” He seemed so unaffectedly pleased by his achievement in kindly
duplicity that she forced an awkward smile to her lips.

“I don't understand in the least,” she said, striving to remember what
he had told her. “What you said was that the public had entirely failed
to come in--that there weren't enough applications for shares to pay
flotation expenses--those were your own words. Of course, I don't
pretend to understand these City matters--but it IS the case, isn't it,
that if people don't subscribe for the shares of a new company, then the
company is a failure?”

“Yes, that may be said to be the case--as a general rule,” he nodded at
her, still beaming.

“Well, then--of course--I don't understand,” she owned.

“I don't know as you'll understand it much more when I've explained it
to you,” he said, seating himself, and motioning her to the other chair.
“But yes, of course you will. You're a business woman. You know what
figures mean. And really the whole thing is as simple as A B C. You
remember that I told you----”

“But are you going to stop to supper? I must send Annie out before the
shops close.”

“Supper? No--I couldn't eat anything. I'm too worked up for that. I'll
get something at the hotel before I go to bed, if I feel like it. But
say!”--the thought suddenly struck him--“if you want to come out with
me, I'll blow you off to the swaggerest dinner in London. What d'ye
say?”

She shook her head. “I shall have some bread and cheese and beer at
nine. That's my rule, you know. I don't like to break it. I'm always
queer next day if I do. But now make haste and tell me--you're really
not broken then? You have really come out well?”

For answer he rose, and drew himself to his full height, and spread his
bulky shoulders backward. His grey-blue eyes looked down upon her with a
triumphant glow.

“Broken?” he echoed her word, with emphasis. “My dear Louisa, I'm not
the sort that gets broken. I break other people. Oh, God, how I shall
break them!”

He began pacing up and down on the narrow rug before the fender,
excitedly telling his story to her. Sometimes he threw the words over
his shoulder; again he held her absorbed gaze with his. He took his
hands often from his pockets, to illustrate or enforce by gestures the
meaning of his speech--and then she found it peculiarly difficult to
realize that he was her brother.

Much of the narrative, rambling and disconnected, with which he prefaced
this story of the day, was vaguely familiar to her. He sketched now for
her in summary, and with the sonorous voice of one deeply impressed with
the dramatic values of his declamation, the chronicle of his wanderings
in strange lands--and these he had frequently told her about before.
Soon she perceived, however, that he was stringing them together on a
new thread. One after another, these experiences of his, as he related
them, turned upon the obstacles and fatal pitfalls which treachery and
malice had put in his path. He seemed, by his account, to have been a
hundred times almost within touch of the goal. In China, in the Dutch
Indies, in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless
waste when he knew them and might have owned them, and now were
yielding fabulous millions to fellows who had tricked and swindled
him--everywhere he had missed by just a hair's breadth the golden
consummation. In the Western hemisphere the tale repeated itself. There
had been times in the Argentine, in Brazil just before the Empire fell,
in Colorado when the Silver boom was on, in British Columbia when the
first rumours of rich ore were whispered about--many times when fortune
seemed veritably within his grasp. But someone had always played him
false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the
temptation of profitable treason.

But he had hung dauntlessly on. He had seen one concession slipping
through his fingers, only to strain and tighten them for a clutch at
another. It did not surprise his hearer--nor indeed did it particularly
attract her attention--that there was nowhere in this rapid and
comprehensive narrative any allusion to industry of the wage-earning
sort. Apparently, he had done no work at all, in the bread-winner's
sense of the word. This was so like Joel that it was taken for granted
in his sister's mind. All his voyages and adventures and painful
enterprises had been informed by the desire of the buccaneer--the
passion to reap where others had sown, or, at the worst, to get
something for nothing.

The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last
it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and
crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that
place that Joel had sent her the amazing remittance over two years ago.
Curiously enough, though, it was at this point in his narrative that he
now became vague as to details. There were concessions of rubber forests
mentioned, and the barter of these for other concessions with money
to boot, and varying phases of a chronic trouble about where the true
boundary of Guatemala ran--but she failed clearly to understand much
about it all. His other schemes and mishaps she had followed readily
enough. Somehow when they came to Mexico, however, she saw everything
jumbled and distorted, as through a haze. Once or twice she interrupted
him to ask questions, but he seemed to attach such slight importance to
her comprehending these details that she forbore. Only one fact was
it necessary to grasp about the Mexican episode, apparently. When
he quitted Tehuantepec, to make his way straight to London, at the
beginning of the year, he left behind him a rubber plantation which he
desired to sell, and brought with him between six and seven thousand
pounds, with which to pay the expenses of selling it. How he had
obtained either the plantation or the money did not seem to have made
itself understood. No doubt, as his manner indicated when she ventured
her enquiries, it was quite irrelevant to the narrative.

In Mexico, his experience had been unique, apparently, in that no
villain had appeared on the scene to frustrate his plans. He at least
mentioned no one who had wronged him there. When he came to London,
however, there were villains and to spare. He moved to the mantel, when
he arrived at this stage of the story, and made clear a space for his
elbow to rest among the little trinkets and photographs with which it
was burdened. He stood still thereafter, looking down at her; his voice
took on a harsher note.

Much of this story, also, she knew by heart. This strange, bearded,
greyish-haired brother of hers had come very often during the past
half-year to the little book-shop, and the widow's home above it, his
misshapen handbag full of papers, his heart full of rage, hope, grief,
ambition, disgust, confidence--everything but despair. It was true, it
had never been quite real to her. He was right in his suggestion that
she had never wholly believed in him. She had not been able to take
altogether seriously this clumsy, careworn, shabbily-dressed man who
talked about millions. It was true that he had sent her four hundred
pounds for the education of her son and daughter; it was equally true
that he had brought with him to London a sum which any of his ancestors,
so far as she knew about them, would have deemed a fortune, and which he
treated as merely so much oil, with which to lubricate the machinery of
his great enterprise. She had heard, at various times, the embittered
details of the disappearance of this money, little by little. Nearly a
quarter of it, all told, had been appropriated by a sleek old braggart
of a company-promoter, who had cozened Joel into the belief that London
could be best approached through him. When at last this wretch was
kicked downstairs, the effect had been only to make room for a fresh
lot of bloodsuckers. There were so-called advertising agents, so-called
journalists, so-called “men of influence in the City,”--a swarm of
relentless and voracious harpies, who dragged from him in blackmail
nearly the half of what he had left, before he summoned the courage and
decision to shut them out.

Worse still, in some ways, were the men into whose hands he stumbled
next--a group of City men concerned in the South African market, who
impressed him very favourably at the outset. He got to know them by
accident, and at the time when he began to comprehend the necessity of
securing influential support for his scheme. Everything that he heard
and could learn about them testified to the strength of their position
in the City. Because they displayed a certain amiability of manner
toward him and his project, he allowed himself to make sure of their
support. It grew to be a certainty in his mind that they would see him
through. He spent a good deal of money in dinners and suppers in their
honour, after they had let him understand that this form of propitiation
was not unpleasant to them. They chaffed him about some newspaper
paragraphs, in which he was described as the “Rubber King,” with
an affable assumption of amusement, under which he believed that he
detected a genuine respect for his abilities.

Finally, when he had danced attendance upon them for the better part
of two months, he laid before them, at the coffee-and-cigars stage of a
dinner in a private room of the Savoy, the details of his proposition.
They were to form a Syndicate to take over his property, and place it
upon the market; in consideration of their finding the ready money for
this exploitation, they were to have for themselves two-fifths of the
shares in the Company ultimately to be floated. They listened to these
details, and to his enthusiastic remarks about the project itself, with
rather perfunctory patience, but committed themselves that evening to
nothing definite. It took him nearly a week thereafter to get an answer
from any of them. Then he learned that, if they took the matter up at
all, it would be upon the basis of the Syndicate receiving nine-tenths
of the shares.

He conceived the idea, after he had mastered his original amazement,
that they named these preposterous terms merely because they expected
to be beaten down, and he summoned all his good nature and tact for
the task of haggling with them. He misunderstood their first show of
impatience at this, and persevered in the face of their tacit rebuffs.
Then, one day, a couple of them treated him with overt rudeness, and
he, astonished out of his caution, replied to them in kind. Suddenly, he
could hardly tell why or how, they were all enemies of his. They
closed their office doors to him; even their clerks treated him with
contemptuous incivility.

This blow to his pride enraged and humiliated him, curiously enough, as
no other misadventure of his life had done.

Louisa remembered vividly the description he had given to her, at the
time, of this affair. She had hardly understood why it should disturb
him so profoundly: to her mind, these men had done nothing so monstrous
after all. But to him, their offense swallowed up all the other
indignities suffered during the years of his Ishmaelitish wanderings. A
sombre lust for vengeance upon them took root in his very soul. He hated
nobody else as he hated them. How often she had heard him swear, in
solemn vibrating tones, that to the day of his death his most sacred
ambition should be their punishment, their abasement in the dust and
mire!

And now, all at once, as she looked up at him, where he leant against
the mantel, these vagabond memories of hers took point and shape. It was
about these very men that he was talking.

“And think of it!” he was saying, impressively. “It's magnificent enough
for me to make this great hit--but I don't count it as anything at
all by comparison with the fact that I make it at their expense. You
remember the fellows I told you about?” he asked abruptly, deferring to
the confused look on her face.

“Yes--you make it out of them,” she repeated, in an uncertain voice. It
occurred to her that she must have been almost asleep. “But did I miss
anything? Have you been telling what it is that you have made?”

“No--that you shall have in good time. You don't seem to realize it,
Louisa. I can hardly realize it myself. I am actually a very rich man.
I can't tell how much I've got--in fact, it can be almost as much as I
like--half a million pounds, I suppose, at the start, if I want to make
it that much. Yes--it takes the breath away, doesn't it? But best of
all--a thousand times best of all--practically every dollar of it comes
out of those Kaffir swine--the very men that tried to rob me, and
that have been trying to ruin me ever since. I tell you what I wish,
Louise--I wish to God there could only be time enough, and I'd take it
all in half-sovereigns--two millions of them, or three millions--and
just untwist every coin, one by one, out from among their heart-strings.
Oh--but it'll be all right as it is. It's enough to make a man feel
religious--to think how those thieves are going to suffer.”

“Well” she said, slowly after reflection, “it all rather frightens me.”

As if the chill in the air of the cheerless room had suddenly
accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-box from the mantel, and,
stooping, lit the fire.

He looked down at the tall, black-clad figure, bent in stiff awkwardness
over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened. Then he took fresh note
of the room--the faded, threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that
had seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste, the dingy walls and
begrimed low ceiling--all pathetic symbols of the bleak life to which
she had been condemned.

“Frightens you?” he queried, with a kind of jovial tenderness, as she
got to her feet; “frightens you, eh? Why, within a month's time, old
lady, you'll be riding in the Park in your own carriage, with niggers
folding their arms up behind, and you'll be taking it all as easy and as
natural as if you'd been born in a barouche.”

He added, in response to the enquiry of her lifted brows: “Barouche?
That's what we'd call in England a landau.”

She stood with a foot upon the fender, her tired, passive face inclined
meditatively, her rusty old black gown drawn back by one hand from the
snapping sparks. “No,” she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling
with pride in her voice. “I was born here over the shop.”

“Well, good God! so was I,” he commented, lustily. “But that's no reason
why I shouldn't wind up in Park Lane--or you either.”

She had nothing to say to this, apparently. After a little, she seated
herself again, drawing her chair closer to the hearth. “It's years since
I've lit this fire before the first of November,” she remarked, with the
air of defending the action to herself.

“Oh, we're celebrating,” he said, rubbing his hands over the reluctant
blaze. “Everything goes, tonight!”

Her face, as she looked up at him, betrayed the bewilderment of her
mind. “You set out to tell me what it was all about,” she reminded him.
“You see I'm completely in the dark. I only hear you say that you've
made a great fortune. That's all I know. Or perhaps you've told me as
much as you care to.”

“Why, not at all,” he reassured her, pulling his own chair toward him
with his foot, and sprawling into it with a grunt of relief. “If you'll
draw me a glass of that beer of yours, I'll tell you all about it. It's
not a thing for everybody to know, not to be breathed to a human being,
for that matter--but you'll enjoy it, and it'll be safe enough with
you.”

As she rose, and moved toward a door, he called merrily after her: “No
more beer when that keg runs dry, you know. Nothing but champagne!”




CHAPTER III


THORPE took a long, thoughtful pull at the beer his sister brought him.

“Ah, I didn't know I was so thirsty,” he said, when he put the glass
down. “Truth is--I've lost track of myself altogether since--since the
big thing happened. I seem to be somebody else--a comparative stranger,
so to speak. I've got to get acquainted with myself, all over again. You
can't imagine what an extraordinary feeling it is--this being hit every
few minutes with the recollection that you're worth half a million.
It's like being struck over the head. It knocks you down. There are such
thousands of things to do--you dance about, all of a flutter. You don't
know where to begin.”

“Begin where you left off,” suggested Louisa. “You were going to tell me
how--how 'the big thing' happened. You're always coming to it--and never
getting any further.”

Nodding comprehension of the rebuke's justification, he plunged
forthwith into the tale.

“You remember my telling you at the time how I got my Board together.
I'm speaking now of the present Company--after I'd decided to be my own
promoter, and have at least some kind of 'a look-in' for my money. There
wasn't much money left, by the way; it was considerably under three
thousand. But I come to that later. First there was the Board. Here was
where that Lord Plowden that I told you about--the man that came over on
the ship with me--came in. I went to him. I--God! I was desperate--but I
hadn't much of an idea he'd consent. But he did! He listened to me, and
I told him how I'd been robbed, and how the Syndicate would have cut my
throat if I hadn't pulled away,--and he said, 'Why, yes, I'll go on your
Board.' Then I told him more about it, and presently he said he'd get me
another man of title--a sky-scraper of a title too--to be my Chairman.
That's the Marquis of Chaldon, a tremendous diplomatic swell, you know,
Ambassador at Vienna in his time, and Lord Lieutenant and all sorts of
things, but willing to gather in his five hundred a year, all the same.”

“Do you mean that YOU pay HIM five hundred pounds a year?” asked the
sister.

“Yes, I've got a live Markiss who works for me at ten quid a week, and a
few extras. The other Directors get three hundred. This Lord Plowden
is one of them--but I'll tell you more about him later on. Then there's
Watkin, he's a small accountant Finsbury way; and Davidson, he's a
wine-merchant who used to belong to a big firm in Dundee, but gets along
the best way he can on a very dicky business here in London, now. And
then there's General Kervick, awfully well-connected old chap, they say,
but I guess he needs all he can get. He's started wearing his fur-coat
already. Well, that's my Board. I couldn't join it, of course, till
after allotment--that's because I'm the vendor, as they call it--but
that hasn't interfered at all with my running the whole show. The Board
doesn't really count, you know. It only does what I want it to do. It's
just a form that costs me seventeen hundred a year, that's all.”

“Seventeen hundred a year,” she repeated, mechanically.

“Well, then we got out the prospectus, d'ye see. Or first, there were
other things to be done. I saw that a good broker's name counted for
a lot on a prospectus. I picked out one that I'd heard was
reasonable--it'd been a splendid name if I could have got it--but he
calmly said his price was two thousand pounds, all cash down--and I came
away. Finally I got a fellow who hadn't done much of anything yet, and
so wasn't so stiff about his figure. He agreed to take 500 pounds cash,
and 2,000 in shares. It was God's luck that I hit on him, for he turned
out, at the pinch, to be the one man in a million for me. But I'll tell
you about him later. He's the Broker, mind; you mustn't forget him.
Well, then, he and I got a Solicitor--he took 200 pounds cash, but he
had to have 2,000 shares--and the firm of Auditors--they were 100 pounds
cash and 1,000 shares. Every company has to have these people pasted on
to it, by law. Oh yes, and then you must have your Bankers. You
don't pay them anything, though, thank God! Well, then, there was
the machinery complete, all ready to start. I took a handsome set of
offices, and furnished them up to the nines--but that I was able to do
pretty well on credit. You see, ready money was getting short.

“And now came the biggest pull of all. There was the press to be
worked.”

He spoke as if there were no other papers in London but the financial
journals.

“I didn't sleep much while that was being fixed up. You've got no more
idea of what the press means, Louisa, than you have of--of a coil of
snakes thawing out hungry in the spring. Why, if one blackmailer came
to me, I swear a hundred did. They scared the life out of me, the first
month or so. And then there's a swarm of advertising agents, who say
they can keep these blackmailers off, if you'll make it worth their
while. But they all wanted too much money for me--and for a while I was
at my wits' ends. At last I got a fellow--he's not behaved so badly, all
things considered--who had some sporting blood in his veins, and he was
willing to do the whole thing for 5,000 pounds, if I could pay 1,500
pounds down, and the rest in shares. But that was just what I couldn't
do, you see, so finally he took 1,000 pounds down and 5,000 in
shares--and as I say he's done it tolerably well. There was one editor
that I had to square personally--that is to say, 100 pounds cash--it
had to be in sovereigns, for notes could be traced--and a call of 2,000
shares at par,--he's the boss pirate that everybody has to square--and
of course there were odd ten-pound notes here and there, but as a rule
I just opened the door and fired the black-mailers out. The moment a
fellow came in, and handed me his card, and said he had proofs of two
kinds of articles in his pocket, one praising me, one damning me, I told
him to go and see my advertising agent, and if he wouldn't do that, then
to go to hell. That's the way you've got to talk in the City,” he added,
as if in apologetic explanation.

Louisa looked impassively at her brother. “Oh, I've heard the expression
as far west as the Strand,” she remarked.

“Well, then came the issue. That was last Saturday. You saw the
prospectus in Saturday morning's papers, and in the weeklies. The
list was to be kept open, it said, till Wednesday morning--that was
yesterday. That is to say, during all that time, people could apply for
shares.”

“Which they didn't do--according to your account,” the sister suggested,
dryly.

Thorpe passed his fingers through his roughened hair, and eyed her with
a momentary quizzical gleam in his eye. Then he became serious again.
The recollection of what he was now to narrate brought a frown to his
brows.

“On Tuesday afternoon,” he began, with portentous deliberation--“Or no,
first I must explain something. You see, in bringing out a company, you
can't put up too stout a bluff. I mean, you've got to behave as if
you were rolling in wealth--as if everything was coming your way, and
fortunes were to be made by fastening to you. I don't know that it often
fools anybody very much, but it's part of the game, and you must play
it. Well, accordingly, my Broker goes on 'change Saturday morning, and
has his jobber shout out that he'll buy 'Rubber Consols'--that's what
our shares are called on the street--at an eighth premium; that is to
say, he offered to buy for twenty-two-and-six what we were offering to
the public for twenty shillings. Of course, you see, the object of that
was to create the impression that there was a regular God-almighty
rush for our shares. As I say, I don't know whether that ever fooled
anybody--but at least there was the chance that it might start up some
dealing in the shares--and all those things help. Besides, you got the
sales noticed in the papers, and that might start up applications from
the public. Well, the Broker bought 1,000 shares this way on Saturday.
On Monday, when it might still be possible to change the luck, he bought
3,500 more, still at that premium of an eighth. He bought some Tuesday
morning too--say 4,000. Well, now, keep those figures in your head, and
keep an eye on the Broker. He's worth watching--as you'll see.”

“What's his name?” asked the sister, with an accession of alertness in
her face. “You call him 'Broker'--and that doesn't mean anything to me.
They're all brokers, aren't they?”

“Semple--Colin Semple, that's his name. He's a young Scotchman--father's
a Presbyterian minister. He's a little, insignificant runt of a chap to
look at--but I learned a long time ago not to judge a singed cat by his
looks. However--where was I?”

“You were going to tell about Tuesday afternoon, weren't you?”

He nodded gravely, and straightened himself, drawing a long breath in
preparation for the dramatic recital before him. “On Tuesday afternoon,”
 he began again, with impressive slowness, “I was walking on Throgmorton
Street, about four o'clock. It was raining a little--it had been raining
on and off all day--a miserable, rotten sort of a day, with greasy mud
everywhere, and everybody poking umbrellas into you. I was out walking
because I'd 'a' cut my throat if I'd tried to stay in the office another
ten minutes. All that day I hadn't eaten anything. I hadn't slept worth
speaking of for three nights. The whole game was up for me. I was worse
than ruined. I had half a crown in my pocket. I had ten or twelve pounds
in the bank--and they wouldn't let me overdraw a farthing. I tell you, I
was just plumb busted.

“There came along in the gutter a sandwich-man. I'd seen the cuss before
during the day, walking up and down near my offices. I took notice
of him, because he was the raggedest, dirtiest, most forlorn-looking
cripple you ever saw in your life. Now I read what was on his boards. It
was the bill of a paper that I had refused to be bled by, and there
it was in big letters: 'The Rubber Bubble Burst!' 'Thorpe's Audacity
Punished!' Those were the words. I can see them with my eyes shut. I
stood there, looking at the fellow, and I suppose there was something in
the way I looked, for he stopped too. Of course, he didn't know me from
Adam, but all the same, I'm damned if he didn't wink his eye at me--as
if we two had a joke between us. And at that I burst out laughing--I
simply roared with laughter, like a boy at a pantomime--and I took that
last half-crown out of my pocket, and I gave it to the sandwich-man.
God! you should have seen his face.”

“I don't particularly mind, Joel,” said his sister, “but I never heard
you swear so much before.”

“Oh, what the--what the deuce!” he protested, impatiently. “Don't
interrupt me now! Well, I went on down the street. The members of the
Stock Exchange were coming out of 'the house,' and making up little
groups on the pavement. They do business inside, you know, until closing
time--this day it happened to be four o'clock--and then they come out
and deal in the street with one another, with the kerb-stone mob, who
are not allowed inside, standing round to watch the thing. I came along
into the thick of these fellows; they were yelling out all sorts of
things--'East Rands,' 'Oroyas,' 'Lake View Centrals,' and what not, but
these went in one ear and out the other. If there ever was a man with no
stomach for the market it was me. But then someone roared out:

“'At seven-eighths, sell Rubber Consols! Sell five hundred Rubber at
seven-eighths! Sell five hundred at three-quarters! At three-quarters
you have 'em! Rubber Consols! Sell a thou. at three-quarters!'

“This thing went into my brain like a live coal. I stopped and looked
up at the fellow--and by God, it was one of the men I've been
talking about--one of those Kaffir scoundrels. I wish I was better at
remembering names--but I knew his face. There were some of the others
around him, and they laughed at me, and he laughed at me. Oh, they had
a heap of fun out of me--for a minute or two. Pretty good fun, too! I
guess they'll remember it quite a while.”

“Go on!” Louisa adjured him. The obvious proximity of the dramatic
climax drew her forward in her chair, and brought a glow of expectation
to her eyes.

“I got myself away from that crowd somehow--I think I was afraid if I
stayed I'd strangle the one who was shouting on the steps--and I went
toward my office. But when I got to the door, I didn't have the courage
to go in. I'd furnished it better, I suppose, than any other office
in Austin Friars, and I had a kind of feeling that the sight of those
carpets, and oak-tables and desks, and brass-railings and so on would
make me sick. I owed for 'em all, bear in mind----”

“But--Joel,” the sister interposed. “One thing I don't understand. How
many people had applied for shares? You haven't mentioned that.”

A fleeting smile lighted up the saturnine gloom of his present mood. “It
was hardly worth mentioning,” he answered, with bitter mirth. “Between
five and six thousand shares were subscribed, all told. I think the
withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to practically five thousand.
We offered a hundred thousand, you know.--But let me go on with my
story. I stood there, in front of our street-door, in a kind of trance.
The words of that Jew--'Sell Rubber Consols at three-quarters!'--buzzed
inside my head as if they would burst it open. I turned--and I happened
to see my Broker--the Scotchman, Semple, you know--coming along toward
me. Right at that minute, like a flash, something dawned on me. In less
than a second, I saw the whole damned rotten outfit turned upside down,
with me on top. I made a jump, and ran to meet Semple.

“'How many shares of ours have you bought?' I asked him, with a grip
tight on his arm.

“The little chap was looking mighty sick. He figured up in his mind.
'I'm afraid it's eight thousand five hundred, all told,' he said, in a
sort of Presbyterian whimper.

“'Well--how would these gentlemen go about it to deliver their
goods--that is, supposing we got a settlement?'

“I asked him this, and kept my eye on his face. He looked puzzled for a
minute. Then he put out his lip. Then he shot me a glance as sharp as a
razor, and we looked into one another's eyes.

“'They were shouting them out to me at three-quarters, a minute ago,' I
told him.

“He was onto the game like lightning. 'Wait for me in the office,' he
whispered. 'We'll go nap on this!'

“With that he was off like a streak. He stopped running just before he
got to the corner, though, and began walking slowly, sauntering along,
you know, as if his mind was on nothing but second-hand books. I watched
him out of sight--and then I went back, and up to the offices. The
furniture didn't scare me a bit this time. Why, I stopped and felt
of the brass-railing just outside the Board Room, and I said to
myself--'Pshaw! We could have you of solid gold, if we wanted to.'”

He paused here, and regarded his sister with what she felt was intended
to be a significant look. She shrank from the confession that its
meaning was Greek to her. “Well--and what next?” she asked, guardedly.

“Semple came back in twenty minutes or so--and the next morning he was
at it again--and what with him and his jobber, by George, on the quiet,
they picked up nearly eighteen thousand of our shares. Some they paid
fifteen shillings for, some they got at twelve-and-six and even ten.
That doesn't matter; it's of no more importance than the coppers you
give to crossing-sweepers. The thing was to get the shares--and by God
we've got them! Twenty-six thousand two hundred shares, that's what
we've got. Now, do you see what that means?”

“Why yes,” she answered, with a faint-hearted assumption of confidence.
“Of course, you know the property is so good that you'll make a profit
on the shares you've bought far below their value. But I don't think I
quite see----”

He interrupted her with an outburst of loud laughter. “Don't think you
quite see?” he gurgled at her, with tears of pleasure in his eye. “Why,
you dummy, you haven't got the faintest glimmer of a notion of what it's
all about. The value of the property's got nothing in the world to
do with it. That's neither here nor there. If there wasn't any such
property in existence, it would be just the same.”

He had compassion upon her blank countenance, at this, and explained
more gently: “Why, don't you see, Lou, it's this way. This is what has
happened. We've got what's called a corner on the bears. They're caught
short, and we can squeeze them to our hearts' content. What--you don't
understand now? Why, see here! These fellows who've sold twenty-six
thousand of our shares--they haven't got them to sell, and they
can't get them. That is the point--they can't get them for love nor
money--they must pay me my own price for them, or be ruined men. The
moment they realize the situation, they will begin offering a premium
for Rubber Consols. The price of a one-pound share will be two pounds,
then four--six--ten--twenty--thirty--whatever I want to drive it to.”

Louisa stared up at him with wide open eyes. It seemed to her that she
understood now. It was very exciting.

“You see,” he went on, taking approving note of the new light of
comprehension in her glance, “we did something that Tuesday afternoon
beside buy up these shares. Semple rushed off to his office, and he and
his clerks got up a lot of dummy applications for shares, made out in
all the different names they could be safe in using, and they put these
into the bank with the application money--Semple found that--and next
day he went and saw the advertising agent and the solicitor and the
auditors--and got them to pool the shares that I've promised to give
them. A pool? That means they agree to transfer their shares to me
as trustee, and let me deal with them as I like--of course to their
advantage. In any case, their shares are vendor's shares, and couldn't
be dealt with in this transaction. So you see the thing is hermetically
sealed. Nobody can get a share except from me, and at my price. But
these fellows that have sold them--they've got to have them, don't you
see. They had their little temporary joke with me on the street that
afternoon--and now they must walk up to the captain's office and settle.
They've got to pay me at least half a million pounds for that few
minutes' fun of theirs. I may make it a good deal more; I don't know
yet.”

“Oh, Joel!” she groaned at him, in awed stupefaction. His rather
languid indecision as to whether half a million was going to be enough,
impressed her more powerfully than had any detail of his narrative.

In a few comprehensive sentences he finished up for her what there was
to tell. “This afternoon my Board met to allot the shares. They saw the
applications, amounting in all to over ninety thousand shares. It took
their breath away--they had heard that things were going quite the
other way with us. They were so tickled that they asked no questions The
allotment went through like a greased pig. About 5,000 shares went to
those who had actually applied for them, and 88,000 were solemnly given
to the dummy applicants. Of course, there wasn't a whisper about these
dummies. Nobody winked so much as an eyelash. But I've found since that
one of the directors--that Lord Plowden I told you about--was onto
the thing all the while. But he's all right. Everybody's all right. Of
course the dummies' shares still stand in their names--on paper--but in
reality I've got them all in my safe--in my pocket you might say. They
are really mine, you understand. So now there's nothing for us to do
but to apply to the Stock Exchange for a special settlement date, and
meanwhile lie quiet and watch the Jews stew in their own juice. Or fry
in their own fat, eh? That's better.”

“But,” she commented slowly, “you say there are no shares to be
bought--and yet as I understand it, there are those five thousand that
were sent out to the people who really applied.”

“Bravo, Lou!” he answered her jovially. “You actually do understand the
thing. You've put your finger straight on the point. It is true that
those shares are out against us--or might be turned against us if they
could be bought up. But in reality, they don't count at all. In the
first place, you see, they're scattered about among small holders,
country clergymen and old maids on an annuity and so on--all over the
country. Even if these people were all traced, and hunted up, suppose
it was worth the trouble and expense, they wouldn't sell. The bigger the
price they were offered, the more mulish they would be about holding.
That's always the way with them. But even if they did all sell, their
five thousand would be a mere drop in the bucket. There would be over
twenty thousand others to be accounted for. That would be quite enough
for my purposes. Oh, I figured all that out very carefully. My own first
notion was to have the dummies apply for the whole hundred thousand, and
even a little over. Then, you see, we might have allotted everything
to the dummies, and sent back the money and applications of the genuine
ones. But that would have been rather hard to manage with the Board. The
Markiss would have said that the returns ought to be made pro rata--that
is, giving everybody a part of what they applied for--and that would
have mixed everything up. And then, too, if anybody suspected
anything, why the Stock Exchange Committee would refuse us a special
settlement--and, of course, without that the whole transaction is
moonshine. It was far too risky, and we didn't send back a penny.”

“It's all pretty risky, I should think,” she declared as she rose. “I
should think you'd lie awake more than ever now--now that you've built
your hopes so high and it'd be so awful to have them come to nothing.”

He smilingly shook his head. “No, it can no more fail than that gas
can fail to burn when you put a light to it. It's all absolute. My
half-million is as right as if it were lying to my credit in the Bank of
England. Oh, that reminds me,” he went on in a slightly altered
tone--“it's damned comical, but I've got to ask you for a little money.
I've only got about seven pounds at my bank, and just at the minute it
would give me away fearfully to let Semple know I was hard up. Of course
he'd let me have anything I wanted--but, you can see--I don't like to
ask him just at the moment.”

She hesitated visibly, and scanned his face with a wistful gaze. “You're
quite sure, Joel?”--she began--“and you haven't told me--how long will
it be before you come into some of this money?”

“Well,”--he in turn paused over his words--“well, I suppose that by next
week things will be in such shape that my bank will see I'm good for an
overdraft. Oh heavens, yes! there'll be a hundred ways of touching some
ready. But if you've got twenty or thirty pounds handy just now--I tell
you what I'll do, Lou. I'll give you a three months bill, paying one
hundred pounds for every sovereign you let me have now. Come, old lady:
you don't get such interest every day, I'll bet.”

“I don't want any interest from you, Joel,” she replied, simply. “If
you're sure I can have it back before Christmas, I think I can manage
thirty pounds. It will do in the morning, I suppose?”

He nodded an amused affirmative. “Why--you don't imagine, do you,”
 he said, “that all this gold is to rain down, and none of it hit you?
Interest? Why of course you'll get interest--and capital thrown in. What
did you suppose?”

“I don't ask anything for myself,” she made answer, with a note of
resolution in her voice. “Of course if you like to do things for the
children, it won't be me who'll stand in their light. They've been
spoiled for my kind of life as it is.”

“I'll do things for everybody,” he affirmed roundly. “Let's see--how old
is Alfred?”

“He'll be twenty in May--and Julia is fourteen months older than he is.”

“Gad!” was Thorpe's meditative comment. “How they shoot up! Why I was
thinking she was a little girl.” “She never will be tall, I'm afraid,”
 said the literal mother. “She favours her father's family. But Alfred is
more of a Thorpe. I'm sorry you missed seeing them last summer--but of
course they didn't stop long with me. This was no place for them--and
they had a good many invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in
the country. Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age:
he's got the same good opinion of himself, too--and he's not a bit
fonder of hard work.”

“There's one mighty big difference between us, though,” remarked Thorpe.
“He won't start with his nose held down to the grindstone by an old
father hard as nails. He'll start like a gentleman--the nephew of a rich
man.”

“I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head,” she replied,
with visible apprehension. “You mustn't encourage him to build too high
hopes, Joel. It's speculation, you know--and anything might happen to
you. And then--you may marry, and have sons of your own.”

He lifted his brows swiftly--as if the thought were new to his mind. A
slow smile stole into the little wrinkles about his eyes. He opened his
lips as if to speak, and then closed them again.

“Well,” he said at last, abruptly straightening himself, and casting an
eye about for his coat and hat. “I'll be round in the morning--on my way
to the City. Good-bye till then.”




CHAPTER IV


IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by
the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon.
This deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the
last possible moment did not take him by surprise. He smiled dryly, aud
nodded to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some
quaint novelty. This getting to the station ahead of time was of a
piece with what had been happening all day--merely one more token of the
general upheaval in the routine of his life.

From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that
his old manners and usages and methods of thought--the thousand familiar
things that made up the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to
him. They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now,
as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all
disappeared--been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With
the two large bags which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat and shining
hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage of
discovery in the unknown.

Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible impulse had led him to
the barber-shop in his hotel at the outset; he could not wait till after
breakfast to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld it in
the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring. The over-long, thin,
tawny moustasche which survived the razor assumed an undue prominence;
the jaw and chin, revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen
years, seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way,
misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office, at the restaurant
where he lunched, at various outfitters' shops which he had visited, he
had pursued the task of getting reconciled to this novel visage in the
looking-glass. The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most
in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image so different from all
the others--some cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous
distortion of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike an
average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.

His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he entered the old
book-shop to get the money promised overnight, but in the City his
own clerks had not known him at first. There was in this an inspiring
implication that he had not so much changed his appearance as revived
his youth. The consciousness that he was in reality still a young man
spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt that it was effacing
all earlier impressions. Why, when he thought of it, the delight he
had had during the day in buying new shirts and handkerchiefs and
embroidered braces, in looking over the various stocks of razors,
toilet articles, studs and sleeve-links, and the like, and telling the
gratified tradesmen to give him the best of everything--this delight had
been distinctively boyish. He doubted, indeed, if any mere youth could
have risen to the heights of tender satisfaction from which he reflected
upon the contents of his portmanteaus. To apprehend their full value one
must have been without them for such a weary time! He had this wonderful
advantage--that he supplemented the fresh-hearted joy of the youth in
nice things, with the adult man's knowledge of how bald existence could
be without them. It was worth having lived all those forty obscure and
mostly unpleasant years, for this one privilege now of being able to
appreciate to the uttermost the touch of double-silk underwear.

It was an undoubted pity that there had not been time to go to a good
tailor. The suit he had on was right enough for ordinary purposes, and
his evening-clothes were as good as new, but the thought of a costume
for shooting harassed his mind. He had brought along with him, for
this eventful visit, an old Mexican outfit of yellowish-grey cloth and
leather, much the worse for rough wear, but saved from the disreputable
by its suggestion of picturesque experiences in a strange and romantic
country. At least it had seemed to him, in the morning, when he had
packed it, to be secure in this salvation. Uneasy doubts on the subject
had soon risen, however, and they had increased in volume and poignancy
as his conceptions of a wardrobe expanded in the course of the day's
investigations and purchases. He had reached the point now of hoping
that it would rain bitterly on the morrow.

It was doubly important to keep a close look-out for Lord Plowden, since
he did not know the name of the station they were to book for, and time
was getting short. He dwelt with some annoyance upon his oversight in
this matter, as his watchful glance ranged from one entrance to another.
He would have liked to buy the tickets himself, and have everything in
readiness on the arrival of his host. As it was, he could not even tell
the porter how his luggage was to be labelled, and there was now
less than two minutes! He moved forward briskly, with the thought of
intercepting his friend at the front of the station; then halted, and
went back, upon the recollection that while he was going out one way,
Plowden might come in by the other. The seconds, as they passed now,
became severally painful to his nerves. The ringing of a bell somewhere
beyond the barrier provoked within him an impulse to tearful profanity.

Then suddenly everything was all right. A smooth-faced, civilly-spoken
young man came up, touched his hat, and asked: “Will you kindly show me
which is your luggage, sir?”

Thorpe, even while wondering what business of his it was, indicated the
glaringly new bags--and then only half repressed a cry of pleasure at
discovering that Lord Plowden stood beside him.

“It's all right; my man will look out for your things,” said the latter,
as they shook hands. “We will go and get our places.”

The fat policeman at the gate touched his helmet. A lean, elderly man
in a sort of guard's uniform hobbled obsequiously before them down the
platform, opened to them a first-class compartment with a low bow and a
deprecatory wave of the hand, and then impressively locked the door upon
them. “The engine will be the other way, my Lord, after you leave Cannon
Street,” he remarked through the open window, with earnest deference.
“Are there any of your bags that you want in the compartment with you?”

Plowden had nodded to the first remark. He shook his head at the second.
The elderly man at this, with still another bow, flapped out a green
flag which he had been holding furled behind his back, and extended it
at arm's length. The train began slowly to move. Mr. Thorpe reflected to
himself that the peerage was by no means so played-out an institution as
some people imagined.

“Ho-ho!” the younger man sighed a yawn, as he tossed his hat into the
rack above his head. “We shall both be the better for some pure air.
London quite does me up. And you--you've been sticking at it months
on end, haven't you? You look rather fagged--or at all events you did
yesterday. You've smartened yourself so--without your beard--that I
can't say I'd notice it to-day. But I take it every sensible person is
glad to get away from London.”

“Except for an odd Sunday, now and then, I haven't put my nose outside
London since I landed here.” Thorpe rose as he spoke, to deposit his hat
also in the rack. He noted with a kind of chagrin that his companion's
was an ordinary low black bowler. “I can tell you, I SHALL be glad of
the change. I would have bought the tickets,” he went on, giving words
at random to the thought which he found fixed on the surface of his
mind, “if I'd only known what our station was.”

Plowden waved his hand, and the gesture seemed to dismiss the subject.
He took a cigar case from his pocket, and offered it to Thorpe.

“It was lucky, my not missing the train altogether,” he said, as they
lighted their cigars. “I was up late last night--turned out late this
morning, been late all day, somehow--couldn't catch up with the clock
for the life of me. Your statement to me last night--you know it rather
upset me.”

The other smiled. “Well, I guess I know something about that feeling
myself. Why, I've been buzzing about today like a hen with her head cut
off. But it's fun, though, aint it, eh? Just to happen to remember every
once in a while, you know, that it's all true! But of course it means a
thousand times more to me than it does to you.”

The train had come to a stop inside the gloomy, domed cavern of Cannon
Street. Many men in silk hats crowded to and fro on the platform, and a
number of them shook the handle of the locked door. There was an effect
of curses in the sound of their remarks which came through the closed
window. Mr. Thorpe could not quite restrain the impulse to grin at them.

“Ah, that's where you mistake,” said Plowden, contemplating the mouthful
of smoke he slowly blew forth. “My dear man, you can't imagine anybody
to whom it would mean more than it does to me--I hope none of those
fellows have a key. They're an awful bore on this train. I almost
never go by it, for that reason. Ah, thank God we're off!--But as I was
saying, this thing makes a greater difference to me than you can think
of. I couldn't sleep last night--I give you my word--the thing upset me
so. I take it you--you have never had much money before; that is, you
know from experience what poverty is?”

Thorpe nodded with eloquent gravity.

“Well--but you”--the other began, and then paused. “What I mean is,”
 he resumed, “you were never, at any rate, responsible to anybody but
yourself. If you had only a sovereign a day, or a sovereign a week, for
that matter, you could accommodate yourself to the requirements of
the situation. I don't mean that you would enjoy it any more than I
should--but at least it was open to you to do it, without attracting
much attention. But with me placed in my ridiculous position--poverty
has been the most unbearable torture one can imagine. You see, there is
no way in which I can earn a penny. I had to leave the Army when I was
twenty-three--the other fellows all had plenty of money to spend, and it
was impossible for me to drag along with a title and an empty pocket. I
daresay that I ought to have stuck to it, because it isn't nearly so bad
now, but twelve years ago it was too cruel for any youngster who had any
pride about him--and, of course, my father having made rather a name in
the Army, that made it so much harder for me. And after that, what was
there? Of course, the bar and medicine and engineering and those things
were out of the question, in those days at least. The Church?--that was
more so still. I had a try at politics--but you need money there as
much as anywhere else--money or big family connections. I voted in
practically every division for four years, and I made the rottenest
speeches you ever heard of at Primrose League meetings in small places,
and after all that the best thing the whips could offer me was a billet
in India at four hundred a year, and even that you took in depreciated
rupees. When I tried to talk about something at home, they practically
laughed in my face. I had no leverage upon them whatever. They didn't
care in the least whether I came up and voted or stopped at home. Their
majority was ten to one just the same--yes, twenty to one. So that door
was shut in my face. I've never been inside the House since--except once
to show it to an American lady last summer--but when I do go again I
rather fancy”--he stopped for an instant, and nodded his handsome head
significantly--“I rather fancy I shall turn up on the other side.”

“I'm a Liberal myself, in English politics,” interposed Thorpe.

Plowden seemed not to perceive the connection. They had left London
Bridge behind, and he put his feet up on the cushions, and leant back
comfortably. “Of course there was the City,” he went on, speaking
diagonally across to his companion, between leisurely intervals of
absorption in his cigar. “There have been some directors' fees, no
doubt, and once or twice I've come very near to what promised to be a
big thing--but I never quite pulled it off. Really, without capital what
can one do?--I'm curious to know--did you bring much ready money with
you to England?”

“Between six and seven thousand pounds.”

“And if it's a fair question--how much of it have you got left?”

Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this was a fair question,
but he smothered them under the smile with which he felt impelled to
answer the twinkle in Plowden's eyes. “Oh, less than a hundred,” he
said, and laughed aloud.

Plowden also laughed. “By George, that's fine!” he cried. “It's
splendid. There's drama in it. I felt it was like that, you know.
Something told me it was your last cartridge that rang the bell. It was
that that made me come to you as I did--and tell you that you were
a great man, and that I wanted to enlist under you. Ah, that kind of
courage is so rare! When a man has it, he can stand the world on
its head.” “But I was plumb scared, all the while, myself,” Thorpe
protested, genially. “Courage? I could feel it running out of my boots.”

“Ah, yes, but that's the great thing,” insisted the other. “You didn't
look as if you were frightened. From all one could see, your nerve was
sublime. And nothing else matters--it was sublime.”

“Curious--that thing happened to me once before,” commented Thorpe, with
ruminating slowness. “It was out on the plains, years ago, and I was
in pretty hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north, and
some cowboys held me up, and were going to make kindling wood of me,
they being under the impression that I was a horse-thief they were
looking after. There was five or six minutes there when my life
wasn't worth a last year's bird's-nest--and I tell you, sir, I was the
scaredest man that ever drew the breath of life. And then something
happened to be said that put the matter right--they saw I was the wrong
man--and then--why then they couldn't be polite enough to me. They half
emptied their flasks down my throat, and they rode with me all the way
to the next town, and there they wanted to buy everything liquid in the
place for me. But what I was speaking of--do you know, those fellows got
a tremendous notion of my nerve. It wasn't so much that they told me
so, but they told others about it. They really thought I was game to the
core--when in reality, as I tell you, I was in the deadliest funk you
ever heard of.”

“That's just it,” said Plowden, “the part of you which was engaged in
making mental notes of the occasion thought you were frightened; we will
say that it was itself frightened. But the other part of you, the part
that was transacting business, so to speak--that wasn't in the least
alarmed. I fancy all born commanders are built like that. Did you ever
see General Grant?”

Thorpe shook his head.

“What reminded me of him--there is an account in his Memoirs of how he
felt when he first was given a command, at the beginning of the Civil
War. He was looking about for the enemy, who was known to be in the
vicinity, and the nearer he got to where this enemy probably was, the
more he got timid and unnerved, he says, until it seemed as if cowardice
were getting complete mastery of him. And then suddenly it occurred to
him that very likely the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of
the enemy, and that moment his bravery all returned to him. He went in
and gave the other man a terrible thrashing. It doesn't apply to your
case, particularly--but I fancy that all really brave men have those
inner convictions of weakness, even while they are behaving like
lions. Those must have been extraordinarily interesting experiences of
yours--on the plains. I wish I could have seen something of that part
of America when I was there last year. Unfortunately, it didn't come my
way.”

“I thought I remembered your saying you'd been West.”

Plowden smiled. “I'm afraid I did think it was West at the time. But
since my return I've been warned that I mustn't call Chicago West. That
was as far as I went. I had some business there, or thought I had. When
my father died, that was in 1884, we found among his papers a lot of
bonds of some corporation purporting to be chartered by the State of
Illinois. Our solicitors wrote several letters, but they could find out
nothing about them, and there the matter rested. Finally, last year,
when I decided to make the trip, I recollected these old bonds, and
took them with me. I thought they might at least pay my expenses. But
it wasn't the least good. Nobody knew anything about them. It seems they
related to something that was burned up in the Great Fire--either that,
or had disappeared before that time. That fire seems to have operated
like the Deluge--it cancelled everything that had happened previously.
My unhappy father had a genius for that kind of investment. I shall
have great pleasure in showing you tomorrow, a very picturesque and
comprehensive collection of Confederate Bonds. Their face value is, as I
remember it, eighty thousand dollars--that is, sixteen thousand pounds.
I would entertain with joy an offer of sixteen shillings for the lot.
My dear father bought them--I should not be surprised to learn that he
bought them at a premium. If they ever touched a premium for a day, that
is certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy. Oh, it was too
rare! Too inspired! He left nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of
paper--that is, on its face--upon which the solicitors realized, I
think it was thirteen hundred pounds. It's hard to imagine how he got
them--but there were actually bonds among them issued by Kossuth's
Hungarian Republic in 1848. Well--now you can see the kind of
inheritance I came into, and I have a brother and sister more or less to
look after, too.”

Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost exaggerated
expression of sympathy upon his face. The voice in which he spoke now
betrayed, however, a certain note of incredulity.

“Yes, I see that well enough,” he remarked. “But what I don't perhaps
quite understand--well, this is it. You have this place of yours in the
country, and preserve game and so on--but of course I see what you mean.
It's what you've been saying. What another man would think a comfortable
living, is poverty to a man in your position.”

“Oh, the place,” said Plowden. “It isn't mine at all. I could never have
kept it up. It belongs to my mother. It was her father's place; it has
been in their family for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you
know, was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him. He left three
daughters, who inherited his estates, and my mother, being the eldest,
got the Kentish properties. Of course Hadlow House will come to me
eventually, but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it as
my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't necessary to
explain to everybody that it's my mother's. It's my home, and that's
enough. It's a dear old place. I can't tell you how glad I am that
you're going to see it.”

“I'm very glad, too,” said the other, with unaffected sincerity.

“All the ambitions I have in the world,” the nobleman went on, sitting
upright now, and speaking with a confidential seriousness, “centre round
Hadlow. That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens are
things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor, began in a very
small way, and was never anything more than a clever lawyer, with a loud
voice and a hard heart, and a talent for money-making and politics.
He got a peerage and he left a fortune. My father, for all he was a
soldier, had a mild voice and a soft heart. He gave a certain military
distinction to the peerage, but he played hell-and-tommy with the
fortune. And then I come: I can't be either a Chancellor or a General,
and I haven't a penny to bless myself with. You can't think of a more
idiotic box for a man to be in. But now--thanks to you--there comes
this prospect of an immense change. If I have money at my back--at once
everything is different with me. People will remember then promptly
enough that I am a Hadlow, as well as a Plowden. I will make the party
whips remember it, too. It won't be a Secretary's billet in India at
four hundred a year that they'll offer me, but a Governorship at six
thousand--that is, if I wish to leave England at all. And we'll see
which set of whips are to have the honour of offering me anything. But
all that is in the air. It's enough, for the moment, to realize that
things have really come my way. And about that--about the success of the
affair--I suppose there can be no question whatever?”

“Not the slightest,” Thorpe assured him. “Rubber Consols can go up to
any figure we choose to name.”

Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more helped
himself after he had given his companion a light. Then he threw himself
back against the cushions, with a long sigh of content. “I'm not going
to say another word about myself,” he announced, pleasantly. “I've had
more than my legitimate innings. You mustn't think that I forget for a
moment the reverse of the medal. You're doing wonderful things for me. I
only wish it were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that I can
do for you.”

“Oh, that'll be all right,” said the other, rather vaguely.

“Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your mind
just what you want to do,” Plowden reflected aloud. “Of course it has
come suddenly upon you--just as it has upon me. There are things in
plenty that we've dreamed of doing, while the power to do them was a
long way off. It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we
shall proceed to do, when the power is actually in our hands. But have
you any plans at all? Do you fancy going into Parliament, for example?”

“Yes,” answered Thorpe, meditatively. “I think I should like to go into
Parliament. But that would be some way ahead. I guess I've got my plans
worked out a trifle more than you think. They may not be very definite,
as regards details, but their main direction I know well enough. I'm
going to be an English country gentleman.”

Lord Plowden visibly winced a little at this announcement. He seemed
annoyed at the consciousness that he had done so, turning abruptly first
to stare out of the window, then shifting his position on the seat, and
at last stealing an uneasy glance toward his companion. Apparently his
tongue was at a loss for an appropriate comment.

Thorpe had lost none of these unwilling tokens of embarrassment. Plowden
saw that at once, but it relieved even more than it surprised him to see
also that Thorpe appeared not to mind. The older man, indeed, smiled in
good-natured if somewhat ironical comprehension of the dumb-show.

“Oh, that'll be all right, too,” he said, with the evident intention
of reassurance. “I can do it right enough, so far as the big things are
concerned. It'll be in the little things that I'll want some steering.”

“I've already told you--you may command me to the utmost of my power,”
 the other declared. Upon reflection, he was disposed to be ashamed
of himself. His nerves and facial muscles had been guilty of an
unpardonable lapse into snobbishness--and toward a man, too, who
had been capable of behaviour more distinguished in its courtesy and
generosity than any he had encountered in all the “upper circles” put
together. He recalled all at once, moreover, that Thorpe's “h's” were
perfect--aud, for some occult reason, this completed his confusion.

“My dear fellow”--he began again, confronting with verbal awkwardness
the other's quizzical smile--“don't think I doubt anything about you. I
know well enough that you can do anything--be anything--you like.”

Thorpe laughed softly.

“I don't think you know, though, that I'm a public-school man,” he said.

Plowden lifted his brows in unfeigned surprise. “No--I didn't know
that,” he admitted, frankly.

“Yes, I'm a Paul's Pigeon,” Thorpe went on, “as they called them in
my day. That's gone out now, I'm told, since they've moved to the big
buildings in Hammersmith. I did very well at school, too; came out in
the first fourteen. But my father wouldn't carry the thing any further.
He insisted on my going into the shop when I left St. Paul's and
learning the book-business. He had precisely the same kind of dynastic
idea, you know, that you fellows have. His father and his grand-father
had been booksellers, and he was going to hand on the tradition to me,
and my son after me. That was his idea. And he thought that Paul's would
help this--but that Oxford would kill it.

“Of course, he was right there--but he was wrong in supposing there was
a bookseller in me. I liked the books well enough, mind you--but damn
the people that came to buy them, I couldn't stand it. You stood two
hours watching to see that men didn't put volumes in their pockets, and
at the end of that time you'd made a profit of ninepence. While you
were doing up the parcel, some fellow walked off with a book worth
eighteen-pence. It was too slow for me. I didn't hit it off with the old
man, either. We didn't precisely quarrel, but I went off on my own hook.
I hung about London for some years, trying this thing and that. Once I
started a book-shop of my own--but I did no good here. Finally I turned
it up altogether, and went to Australia. That was in 1882. I've been in
almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known what it was to be
shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've lain down in a desert not expecting
to get up again, with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger--but
I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in my father's
book-shop.”

Plowden's fine eyes sparkled his appreciation of the other's mood.
He was silent for a moment, then lifted his head as if something had
occurred to him. “You were speaking of the plan that you should succeed
to your father's business--and your son after you--you're not married,
are you?”

Thorpe slowly shook his head.

“Our station is the next,” said the younger man. “It's a drive of
something under two miles. You'd better light another cigar.” He added,
as if upon a casual afterthought: “We can both of us think of marrying
now.”




CHAPTER V


FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied
with various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed
suddenly to have been transported to some region populated exclusively
by clean-shaven men in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited
horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken the reins,
and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his knees and feet, this menial
silently associated himself with the young man who had accompanied them
from town, on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close
behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation was out of the
question. Indeed, talk of any sort was not invited; the big horse burst
forth with high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight,
once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies
to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the
animal--“So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--so--easy, my beauty---so--so”--and
his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of
strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth
of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a
modified pleasure in the drive. The road along which they sped seemed,
in the gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good
deal as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. But silence
was such a law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could
not so much as hear them sigh or gasp.

It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the
most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily
developed into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower
than ever. Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all
at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel
road, and halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse.
Thorpe, as he stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a
low, pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind
curtains in several widely separated windows; what he had taken to be a
conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the
front of the central portion of this house.

A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles in brackets among the
vines against the trellised wall--gave to this outlying entrance what
the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor,
comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside.
There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books
and a lady's work-basket. Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were
massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the
broad doorway of the house proper stood open--with warm lights glowing
richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.

What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to
swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived
somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. All at once
there were a number of young men--at the horse's head, at the back
and sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second, and
beyond--each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid, brown-clad replica
of all the others that Thorpe knew he should never be able to tell them
apart.

Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to look at
his watch. “We did it in a bit over eight minutes,” he remarked, with
obvious satisfaction. “With four people and heavy roads that's not so
bad--not so bad. But come inside.”

They moved forward through the wide doorway into an apartment the like
of which Thorpe had not seen before. It was a large, square room, with
a big staircase at the end, which separated and went off to right and
left, half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of inlaid woods, old
and uneven from long use, and carpeted here and there by the skins of
tigers and leopards. There were many other suggestions of the chase
about the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands of archaic
weapons caught the eye at various points; the heads of foxes and deer
peeped out on the blackened panels of the walls, from among clusters of
hooks crowded with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a
fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low
chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic
occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside--the great table in
the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books,
flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers,
and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides--all this
self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a
profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch--and
to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman, filled to
overflowing with servants, amazed him.

The glances that he cast about him, however, were impassive enough. His
mind was charged with the ceaseless responsibility of being astonished
at nothing. A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat.
Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags.

“If you will follow Pangbourn,” said his host, indicating this second
domestic, “he will look after you. You would like to go up and change
now, wouldn't you? There's a fire in your room.”

Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake of his portmanteaus,
taking the turning to the left, and then proceeding by a long, low
passage, round more than one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing
of the house. The servant ushered him into a room--and, in despite of
himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. The prettiest and
most charming of rooms it seemed to him to be--spacious and quaintly
rambling in shape, with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty
effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and bed-hangings and
chair-covers, and with a bright fire in the grate throwing its warm,
cozy glow over everything. He looked at the pictures on the walls, at
the photographs and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high
posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in the averted
face of the servant, smiled richly to himself.

This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened the new bags. Thorpe
looked to see him quit the room, this task accomplished, and was
conscious of something like dismay at the discovery that he intended to
unpack them as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one paper parcel
after another and to assort their contents in little heaps on the sofa
beside him. He did it deftly, imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he
had ever seen carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.

Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words on the tip of
his tongue--but he did not utter these words. After circling idly, hands
in pockets, about the man and the bags for a little time, he invented
something which it seemed better for him to say.

“I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things,” he remarked,
casually. “My man has been buying them today--and I don't know what he
mayn't have forgotten. My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray
or was stolen at some station or other--the first part of the week--I
think it must have been Leeds.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pangbourn, without emotion. “They're very careless,
sir.”

He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments and spreading
them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie beside them, and arranging
the razors, strop, and brushes on the dressing-table. He seemed to
foresee everything--for there was not an instant's hesitation in the
clock-like assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs, in
one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire, and set
the patent-leather pumps against the fender. Even the old Mexican
shooting-suit seemed in no way to disconcert him. He drew forth its
constituent elements as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up,
sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall, they had the
trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle look as if it had been
fashioned expressly for them.

Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his admiration for
Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. The delighted thought that now
he would be needing a man like this for himself crossed his mind.
Conceivably he might even get this identical Pangbourn--treasure though
he were. Money could command everything on this broad globe--and why not
Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket, as it became
apparent that the man's task was nearing completion--and then frowned
at himself for forgetting that these things were always reserved for the
end of a visit.

“Will you dress now, sir?” asked Pangbourn. His soft, distinct
enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries of training.

“Eh?” said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind the other's
thought.

“Shall you require me any further, sir?” the man reframed the question,
deferentially.

“Oh! Oh--no,” replied Thorpe. “No--I'll get along all right.”

Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving and dressing.
The candles on either side of the thick, bevelled swinging mirror
presented a somewhat embarrassing contrast to the electric light he
was used to--but upon second thought he preferred this restrained
aristocratic glimmer.

He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the bay-window, with
his shoulder holding back the edge of the curtain, looking out upon the
darkened lawn and wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait
for someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. Before
he could answer, the door opened, and he made out in the candle-and
firelight that it was Lord Plowden who had come in. He stepped forward
to meet his host who, clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a
cigarette.

“Have they looked after you all right?” said Plowden, nonchalantly.
“Have a cigarette before we go down? Light it by the candle. They never
will keep matches in a bedroom.”

He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire, as he spoke, and
stretched out his shining slippers toward the grate. “I thought I'd tell
you before we went down”--he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the
mantel, looked down at his handsome head--“my sister has a couple of
ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know. Do you remember on
shipboard a Miss Madden--an American, you know--very tall and fine, with
bright red hair--rather remarkable hair it was?”

“I remember the lady,” said Thorpe, upon reflection, “but we didn't
meet.” He could not wholly divest his tone of the hint that in those
days it by no means followed that because he saw ladies it was open to
him to know them.

Lord Plowden smiled a little. “Oh, you'll like her. She's great fun--if
she's in the mood. My mother and sister--I had them call on her in
London last spring--and they took a great fancy to her. She's got no
end of money, you know--at least a million and a half--dollars,
unfortunately. Her parents were Irish--her father made his pile in the
waggon business, I believe--but she's as American as if they'd crossed
over in--what was it, the 'Sunflower'?--no, the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous
country for assimilation, that America is! You remember what I told
you--it's put such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you
were English.”

Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence.
This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was
not altogether grateful to his ears.

“The other one,” continued Plowden, “is Lady Cressage. You'll be
interested in her--because a few years ago she was supposed to be the
most beautiful woman in London. She married a shocking bounder--he
would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived--but he was
drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. Oh! by the way!” he
started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face--“it didn't in
the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick. How
did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?”

Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. “Why, you introduced me to him
yourself, didn't you?” he asked, slowly.

Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it
over in his mind. “By George! I think you're right,” he said. “I'd quite
forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see--oh yes, I reconstruct it
readily enough now. Poor old chappie--he needs all he can get. He was
bothering her about money--that was it, I remember now--but what an
idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying--there's no one else but
my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster--twenty or
thereabouts--and he purports to be reading for his exams for the Army.
If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but
cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well--that's the
party. I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance. If
you've finished your cigarette”--he threw his own into the grate, and
rose as he spoke--“we may as well be moving along. By the way,” he
concluded, as they walked toward the door, “I've an idea that we won't
say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to
keep it as a little surprise--for my mother and sister, you know.”

Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored
equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He
had become temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in
the big drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much
at his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had
feared. He stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had
wandered in examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with
serenity the five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious
of the conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a
new footing of assured equality. He knew now the exact measure of
everything.

The Hon. Balder Plowden--a tall, heavily-built youth, with enormous
shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows
and eyelashes--had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for
his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery
connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of terriers
toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering ruddy
firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated
at the piano, playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe bent
his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he listened
to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano. His thoughts were
concentrated jealously upon his own position in this novel setting. He
said to himself that it was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed
to like him from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted,
motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet anchor
throughout the evening. She had not once failed to nod her head and
smile and twinkle her little kind eyes through their spectacles at him,
whenever by word or look he had addressed her. Nor did his original
half-suspicion, that this was her manner to people in general, justify
itself upon observation. She was civil, even excessively civil, to the
other two guests, but these ladies did not get the same eager and intent
smile that he could command. He reasoned it out that Plowden must have
said something pleasant to his mother about him--perhaps even to
the point of explaining that he was to be the architect of their
fortunes--but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable warmth
to that. It was dear to him to believe that she liked him on his own
merits--and he did believe it, as his softened glance rested upon her
where she sat almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair--small,
white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating a kind of
alert placidity which somehow made him feel at home.

He had not been as much at home with the others. The Honourable Balder,
of course, didn't count; nobody paid attention to him, and least of all
a busy Rubber King. He gave not much more heed to the American--the tall
young woman with the red hair and the million and a half of dollars. She
was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner
life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired
to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate
aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken his few
words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve
close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only
that she felt herself out of her element, just as he did--but to him,
really it did not matter what she felt. A year ago--why, yes, even a
fortnight ago--the golden rumour of millions would have shone round
her auburn hair in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed.
Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune shrank to a
mere three hundred thousand pounds. It was a respectable sum for a woman
to have, no doubt, but it did nothing to quicken the cool indifference
with which he considered her.

The two other young women were different. They were seated together on a
sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view, that he saw only in
part the shadowed profiles of the faces they turned toward the piano.
Although it was not visible to him, the posture of their shoulders told
him that they were listening to the music each holding the other's
hand. This tacit embrace was typical in his mind of the way they hung
together, these two young women. It had been forced upon his perceptions
all the evening, that this fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady
Cressage, and the small, swarthy, round-shouldered daughter of the
house, peering through her pince-nez from under unduly thick black
brows, formed a party of their own. Their politeness toward him had been
as identical in all its little shades of distance and reservation as if
they had been governed from a single brain-centre. It would be unfair
to them to assume from their manner that they disliked him, or were even
unfavourably impressed by him. The finesse of that manner was far too
delicate a thing to call into use such rough characterizations. It was
rather their action as a unit which piqued his interest. He thought he
could see that they united upon a common demeanour toward the American
girl, although of course they knew her much better than they knew
him. It was not even clear to him that there were not traces of this
combination in their tone toward Plowden and the Honourable Balder. The
bond between them had twisted in it strands of social exclusiveness, and
strands of sex sympathy.

He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts, but the
impressions of it were distinct enough to him. He rather enjoyed
these impressions than otherwise. Women had not often interested him
consecutively to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole. He
had formulated, among other loose general notions of them, however, the
idea that their failure to stand by one another was one of their gravest
weaknesses. This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed
his attention. It became apparent to him, all at once, that his opinions
about women would be henceforth invested with a new importance. He had
scarcely before in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle
which included ladies--certainly never in the presence of such
certificated and hall-marked ladies as these. His future, however,
was to be filled with experiences of this nature. Already, after this
briefest of ventures into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of
the great subject springing up in his thoughts. In this matter of women
sticking together, for example--here before his eyes was one of the
prettiest instances of it imaginable. As he looked again at the two
figures on the sofa, so markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit
to each other in such a sisterly bond, he found the spectacle really
touching.

Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more toward the
piano. Thorpe was not stirred at all by the music, but the spirit of
it as it was reflected upon this beautiful facial outline--sensitive,
high-spirited, somewhat sad withal--appealed to something in him. He
moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen restricted paces,
and halted again at the corner of a table. It was a relief that the
Honourable Balder, though he followed along, respected now his obvious
wish for silence. But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that
the music said less than nothing to his ears--that it was the face that
had beckoned him to advance.

Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him, he studied
this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall
beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the
thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and
chin. It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he
could not be sure.

So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had lived! He said
to himself that he had never seen before, or imagined, a face which
belonged so indubitably beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in
diamonds. The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy, of
the great lady--they were all there in their supreme expression. And
yet--why, she was no great lady at all. She was the daughter of his
old General Kervick--the necessitous and haughtily-humble old military
gentleman, with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat, who did
what he was told on the Board without a question, for a pitiful three
hundred a year. Yes--she was his daughter, and she also was poor.
Plowden had said so.

Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving her from her
father's importunities? He must have had it very much at heart, to
have invented the roundabout plan of getting the old gentleman a
directorship. But no--there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even
forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. It would have
been his sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady
Cressage, who gave him the hint to help the General to something if he
could. And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
military men and so on, had no other notion of making money save by
directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it. Plowden had remembered
Kervick's name, when the chance arose to give the old boy a leg up, and
then had clean forgotten the circumstance. The episode rather increased
his liking for Plowden.

He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought, to where the peer
sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair before the fire. He was so
nearly recumbent in it, indeed, that there was nothing to be seen of
him but an elbow, and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender.
Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of General Kervick's
daughter. He wondered if she knew about the Company, and about him,
and about his ability to solidify to any extent her father's financial
position. Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was very
fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful to one who should
render him securely comfortable for life? Miss Madden rose from the
piano before Thorpe noted that the music had ceased. There came from
the others a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity and
enthusiasm of which made him a little ashamed. He had evidently been
deaf to something that deeply moved the rest. Even Balder made remarks
which seemed to be regarded as apposite.

“What IS it?” asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling. “I don't know
when anything has touched me so much.”

“Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai in Paris for a franc or
two,” replied Miss Madden. “I arranged and harmonized them--and, oddly
enough, the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?”

“We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music--and musicians--like
this,” affirmed Lord Plowden, who had scrambled to his feet.

With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined the
conversation.




CHAPTER VI


THORPE'S life-long habit of early rising brought him downstairs next
morning before anybody else in the house, apparently, was astir. At all
events, he saw no one in either the hall or the glass vestibule, as he
wandered about. Both doors were wide open, however, to the mild,
damp morning air. He found on one of the racks a cap that was less
uncomfortable than the others, and sauntered forth to look about him.

His nerves were by no means in so serene a state as his reason told him
they ought to be. The disquieting impression of bad dreams hung about
him. The waking hour--always an evil time for him in these latter days
of anxiety--had been this morning a peculiarly depressing affair. It had
seemed to him, in the first minutes of reviving consciousness, that he
was a hopelessly ruined and discredited man; the illusion of disaster
had been, indeed, so complete and vivid that, even now, more than an
hour later, he had not shaken off its effects.

He applied his mental energies, as he strolled along the gravel paths,
to the task of reassuring himself. There were still elements of chance
in the game, of course, but it was easy enough, here in the daylight,
to demonstrate that they had been cut down to a minimum--that it was
nonsense to borrow trouble about them. He reviewed the situation in
painstaking detail, and at every point it was all right, or as nearly
all right as any human business could be. He scolded himself sharply for
this foolish susceptibility to the intimidation of nightmares. “Look at
Plowden!” he bade his dolorous spirit. “See how easy he takes things.”

It was undeniable that Lord Plowden took things very easily indeed.
He had talked with eloquence and feeling about the miseries and
humiliations of a peerage inadequately endowed with money, but no traces
of his sufferings were visible to Thorpe's observant eye. The nobleman
himself looked the very image of contented prosperity--handsome,
buoyant, light-hearted, and, withal, the best-groomed man in London.
And this ancestral home of his--or of his mother's, since he seemed to
insist upon the distinction--where were its signs of a stinted income?
The place was overrun with servants. There was a horse which covered a
distance of something like two miles in eight minutes. Inside and out,
Hadlow House suggested nothing but assured plenty. Yet its master told
the most unvarying tales of poverty, and no doubt they were in one sense
true. What he wished to fix his mind upon, and to draw strength for
himself from, was the gay courage with which these Plowdens behaved as
if they were rich.

The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by high hedges and
trees from what seemed to be a public road beyond, were fairly spacious,
but the sleek decorum of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was
scarcely interesting. He liked better to study the house itself, which
in the daylight revealed itself as his ideal of what a historic English
country-house of the minor class should be.

There had been a period in his youth when architecture had attracted him
greatly as offering a congenial and lucrative career. Not much remained
to him now of the classifications and phraseology which he had gone to
the trouble of memorizing, in that far-off time, but he still looked at
buildings with a kind of professional consciousness. Hadlow House
said intelligible things to him, and he was pleased with himself for
understanding them. It was not new in any part, apparently, but there
was nothing pretentious in its antiquity. It had never been a castle,
or a fortified residence. No violent alteration in habits or needs
distinguished its present occupants from its original builders. It
had been planned and reared as a home for gentle people, at some
not-too-remote date when it was already possible for gentle people to
have homes, without fighting to defend them. One could fancy that its
calm and infinitely comfortable history had never been ruffled from that
day to this. He recalled having heard it mentioned the previous evening
that the house stood upon the site of an old monastery. No doubt that
accounted for its being built in a hollow, with the ground-floor on the
absolute level of the earth outside. The monks had always chosen these
low-lying sheltered spots for their cloisters. Why should they have done
so? he wondered--and then came to a sudden mental stop, absorbed in a
somewhat surprised contemplation of a new version of himself. He was
becoming literary, historical, bookish! His mind had begun to throw open
again, to abstract thoughts and musings, its long-closed doors. He had
read and dreamed so much as a lad, in the old book-shop! For many years
that boyhood of eager concern in the printed page had seemed to him to
belong to somebody else. Now, all at once, it came back to him as his
own possession; he felt that he could take up books again where he had
dropped them, perhaps even with the old rapt, intent zest.

Visions rose before him of the magnificent library he would gather for
himself. And it should be in no wise for show--the gross ostentation of
the unlettered parvenu--but a genuine library, which should minister
to his own individual culture. The thought took instant hold upon his
interest. By that road, his progress to the goal of gentility would be
smooth and simple. He seemed not to have reasoned it out to himself in
detail before, but now, at all events, he saw his way clearly enough.
Why should he be tormented with doubts and misgivings about himself, as
if he had come out of the gutter?

Why indeed? He had passed through--and with credit, too--one of the
great public schools of England. He had been there on a footing of
perfect equality, so far as he saw, with the sons of aristocratic
families or of great City potentates. And as to birth, he had behind him
three generations at least of scholarly men, men who knew the contents,
as well as the commercial value, of the books they handled.

His grandfather had been a man of note in his calling. The tradition of
Lord Althorp's confidence in him, and of how he requited it by
securing Caxton's “Golden Legend” for the library of that distinguished
collector, under the very nose of his hot rival, the Duke of
Marlborough, was tenderly cherished as an heirloom in the old shop.
And Thorpe's father, too, though no such single achievement crowned his
memory, had been the adviser and, as one might say, the friend of many
notable writers and patrons of literature. The son of such forbears
needed only money to be recognized by everybody as a gentleman.

On his mother's side, now that he thought of it, there was something
perhaps better still than a heritage of librarians' craft and tastes.
His mother's maiden name was Stormont, and he remembered well enough the
solemnity with which she had always alluded to the fact, in the course
of domestic discussions. Who the Stormonts were he could not recall that
he had ever learned, but his mother had been very clear indeed about
their superiority to the usual ruck of people. He would ask his sister
whether she knew anything about them. In the meantime there was no
denying that Stormont was a fine-sounding name. He reflected that it
was his own middle name--and, on the instant, fancy engraved for him a
card-plate on which appeared the legend--“Mr. Stormont Thorpe.”

It was an inspiration! “Joel” he had not used for so many years that now,
after six months' familiarity with it on his sister's lips, he could not
get accustomed to it. The colourless and non-committal style of “J. S.
Thorpe,” under which he had lived so long, had been well enough for the
term of his exile--the weary time of obscure toil and suspense. But now,
in this sunburst of smiling fortune, when he had achieved the right to a
name of distinction--here it was ready to his hand. A fleeting question
as to whether he should carry the “J” along as an initial put itself
to his mind. He decided vigorously against it. He had always had a
prejudice against men who, in the transatlantic phrase, parted either
their hair or their names in the middle.

He had made his unheeding way past the house to the beginning of the
avenue of trees, which he remembered from the previous evening's drive.
To his right, an open space of roadway led off in the direction of the
stables. As he hesitated, in momentary doubt which course to take, the
sound of hoofs in the avenue caught his ear, and he stood still. In a
moment there came into view, round a curve in the leafy distance, two
horses with riders, advancing at a brisk canter. Soon he perceived that
the riders were ladies; they drew rein as they approached him, and then
it was to be seen that they were the pair he had judged to be such close
friends last night--Lady Cressage and the daughter of the house.

They smiled and nodded down at him, as he lifted his cap and bowed.
Their cheeks were glowing and their eyes sparkling with the exhilaration
of their ride. Even the Hon. Winifred looked comely and distinguished
in his eyes, under the charm of this heightened vivacity. She seemed to
carry herself better in the saddle than she did out of it; the sweep of
her habit below the stirrup lent dignity to her figure.

But her companion, whose big chestnut mount was pacing slowly toward the
stepping-block--how should he bring within the compass of thought the
impressions he had had of her as she passed? There seemed to have been
no memory in his mind to prepare him for the beauty of the picture she
had made. Slender, erect, exquisitely-tailored, she had gone by like
some queen in a pageant, gracious yet unapproachable. He stared after
her, mutely bewildered at the effect she produced upon him--until he saw
that a groom had run from the stable-yard, and was helping the divinity
to dismount. The angry thought that he might have done this himself rose
within him--but there followed swiftly enough the answering conviction
that he lacked the courage. He did not even advance to proffer his
services to the other young lady, while there was still time. The truth
was, he admitted ruefully to himself, they unnerved him.

He had talked freely enough to them, or rather to the company of which
they made part, the previous evening. There had been an hour or more,
indeed, before the party broke up, in which he had borne the lion's
share of the talk--and they had appeared as frankly entertained as the
others. In fact, when he recalled the circle of faces to which he
had addressed his monologue of reminiscences--curious experiences and
adventures in Java and the Argentine, in Brazil and the Antilles and
Mexico and the far West--it was in the face of Lady Cressage that he
seemed to discern the most genuine interest.

Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight? The whimsical theory
that the wine at dinner had given him a spurious courage occurred
to him. He shrugged his shoulders at it, and, with his hands in his
pockets, turned toward the stables.

The stable-yard is, from some points of view, the prettiest thing about
Hadlow. There is a big, uneven, grass-grown space, in the centre of
which, from a slight mound, springs an aged oak of tremendous girth
and height. All around this enclosure are buildings of the same pale
yellowish brick as the mansion itself, but quaintly differing one
from another in design and size. Stables, carriage-houses, kennels, a
laundry, a brewery, and half a dozen structures the intention of which
is now somewhat uncertain--some flat-topped, some gabled, others with
turrets, or massive grouped chimneys, or overhanging timbered upper
stories--form round this unkempt, shadowed green a sort of village, with
a communal individuality of its own.

A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great
house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices
of this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge
themselves into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the
enquiring gaze a specific character, of as old a growth, one might
think, as the oak itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since
man first learned the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck.
Plainly enough, the monks' servants lived and worked here; half the
buildings on the side nearest the house belong to their time, and one
of them still bears a partially-defaced coat of arms that must have
belonged to an Abbot. And when lay lord succeeded cleric, only the garb
and vocabulary of servitude were altered in this square. Its population
crossed themselves less, and worked much harder, but they remained in a
world of their own, adjacent aud subject to the world of their masters,
yet separated from it by oh! such countless and unthinkable distances.

Thorpe sauntered along the side of the stables. He counted three men
and a boy who visibly belonged to this department. The dog-cart of the
previous evening had been run out upon the brick-pavement which drained
the stables, and glistened with expensive smartness now beneath the
sponge of one of the hostlers. Under cover, he discerned two other
carriages, and there seemed to be at least half a dozen horses. The
men who, in the half gloom of the loose-boxes, were busy grooming these
animals made a curious whistling noise as they worked. Everybody in the
yard touched a forelock to him as he passed.

From this quaint, old-world enclosure he wandered at his leisure,
through an open gate in the wall at the back, into the gardens behind
the house. There was not much in the way of flowers to look at, but
he moved about quite unconscious of any deprivation. A cluster of
greenhouses, massed against the southern side of the mansion, attracted
his listless fancy, and he walked toward what appeared to be an entrance
to them. The door was locked, but he found another further on which
opened to his hand. The air was very hot and moist inside, and the place
was so filled with broad-leaved, umbrageous tropical plants that he had
to stoop to make his way through to the end. The next house had a more
tolerable atmosphere, and contained some blossoms to which he gave
momentary attention. In the third house, through the glass-door, he
could see a man--evidently a gardener--lifting some pots to a shelf
overhead.

The thought occurred to him that by entering into conversation with this
man, he might indirectly obtain a hint as to the usual breakfast-hour at
Hadlow. It was now nearly ten o'clock, and he was getting very hungry.
Would they not ring a bell, or sound a gong, or something? he wondered.
Perhaps there had been some such summons, and he had not heard it. It
might be the intelligent thing for him to return to the house, at all
events, and sit in the hall where the servants could see him, in case
the meal was in progress.

Looking idly through the glass at the gardener, meanwhile, it suddenly
dawned upon him that the face and figure were familiar. He stared more
intently at the man, casting about in his memory for a clue to his
identity. It came to him that the person he had in mind was a fellow
named Gafferson, who had kept an impoverished and down-at-the-heels
sort of hotel and general store on the road from Belize to Boon Town, in
British Honduras. Yes, it undoubtedly was Gafferson. What on earth was
he doing here? Thorpe gave but brief consideration to this problem.
It was of more immediate importance to recall the circumstances of his
contact with the man. He had made Gafferson's poor shanty of an hotel
his headquarters for the better part of a month--the base of supplies
from which he made numerous prospecting tours into the mountains of the
interior. Had he paid his bill on leaving? Yes, there was no doubt about
that. He could even recall a certain pity for the unbusiness-like
scale of charges, and the lack of perception of opportunity, which
characterized the bill in question. He remembered now his impression
that Gafferson would never do any good. It would be interesting to know
what kind of an impression he, in turn, had produced on his thriftless
host. At any rate, there was no good reason why he should not find out.
He opened the door and went in.

The gardener barely looked up from his occupation, and drew aside to
let the newcomer pass with no sign of a gesture toward his cap. Thorpe
halted, and tried to look at the pots on the staging as if he knew about
such things.

“What are you doing?” he asked, in the tentative tone of one who is in
no need of information, but desires to be affable.

“Drying off the first lot of gloxinias,” answered the other. “Some
people put 'em on their sides, but I like 'em upright, close to the
glass. It stands to reason, if you think about it.”

“Why, certainly,” said Thorpe, with conviction. In his mind he
contrasted the independence of Gafferson's manner with the practised
servility of the stable-yard--and thought that he liked it--and then
was not so sure. He perceived that there was no recognition of him. The
gardener, as further desultory conversation about his work progressed,
looked his interlocutor full in the face, but with a placid, sheep-like
gaze which seemed to be entirely insensible to variations in the human
species.

“How did you ever get back here to England?” Thorpe was emboldened to
ask at last. In comment upon the other's stare of puzzled enquiry, he
went on: “You're Gafferson, aren't you? I thought so. When I last saw
you, you were running a sort of half-way house, t'other side of Belize.
That was in '90.”

Gafferson--a thick-set, squat man of middle age, with a straggling
reddish beard--turned upon him a tranquil but uninformed eye. “I suppose
you would have been stopping at Government House,” he remarked. “That
was in Sir Roger Goldsworthy's time. They used to come out often to see
my flowers. And so you remembered my name. I suppose it was because of
the Gaffersoniana hybrids. There was a good bit in the papers about them
last spring.” Thorpe nodded an assent which it seemed better not to put
into words. “Well, it beats all,” he mused aloud. “Why, man, there's
gold in those mountains! You had an inside track on prospecting, placed
as you were. And there's cocoa--and some day they'll coin money in
rubber, too. All that country's waiting for is better communications.
And you were on the spot, and knew all the lay of the land--and yet here
you are back in England, getting so much a month for messing about in
the mud.”

He saw swiftly that his reflections had carried him beyond his earlier
limit, and with rapidity decided upon frankness. “No, I wasn't in the
Governor's outfit at all. I was looking for gold then--with occasionally
an eye on rubber. I stopped at your place. Don't you remember me? My
name's Thorpe. I had a beard then. Why, man, you and one of your niggers
were with me three or four days once, up on the ridge beyond the Burnt
Hills--why, you remember, the nigger was from San Domingo, and he was
forever bragging about the San Domingo peppers, and saying those on the
mainland hadn't enough strength to make a baby wrinkle his nose, and you
found a pepper coming through the swamp, and you tipped me the wink,
and you handed that pepper to the nigger, and it damned near killed him.
Hell! You must remember that!”

“That would have been the Chavica pertusum,” said Gafferson,
thoughtfully. He seemed to rouse himself to an interest in the story
itself with some difficulty. “Yes--I remember it,” he admitted, finally.
“I shouldn't have known you though. I'm the worst in the world about
remembering people. It seems to be growing on me. I notice that when I
go up to London to the shows, I don't remember the men that I had the
longest talks with the time before. Once you get wrapped up in your
flowers, you've got no room in your head for anything else--that's the
way of it.”

Thorpe considered him with a ruminating eye. “So this is the sort of
thing you really like, eh? You'd rather be doing this, eh? than making
your pile in logwood and mahogany out there, or floating a gold mine?”
 Gafferson answered quite simply: “I wasn't the kind to ever make a pile.
I got led into going out there when I was a youngster, and there didn't
seem to be any good in trying to get back, but I wasn't making more than
a bare living when you were there, and after that I didn't even do that
much. It took me a good many years to find out what my real fancy was. I
hated my hotel and my store, but I was crazy about my garden. Finally an
American gentleman came along one day, and he put up at my place, and
he saw that I was as near ruined as they make 'em, and he says to me,
'You're no good to run a hotel, nor yet a store, and this aint your
country for a cent. What you're born for is to grow flowers. You can't
afford to do it here, because nobody'll pay you for it, but you gather
up your seeds and roots and so on, and come along with me to Atlanta,
Georgia, and I'll put fat on your bones.'

“That's what he said to me, and I took him at his word, and I was with
him two years, and then I thought I'd like to come to England, and since
then I've worked my way up here, till now I take a Royal Horticultural
medal regular, and there's a clematis with salmon-coloured bars that'll
be in the market next spring that's named after my master. And what
could I ask more 'n that?”

“Quite right,” said Thorpe. “What time do they have breakfast here?”

The gardener's round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild
glow of animation during his narrative. It relapsed into lethargy at the
advent of this new topic.

“It seems to me they eat at all hours,” he said. “But if you want to see
his Lordship,” he went on, considering, “about noon would be your best
time.”

“See his Lordship!” repeated Thorpe, with an impatient grin. “Why I'm a
guest here in the house. All I want is something to eat.”

“A guest,” Gafferson repeated in turn, slowly. There was nothing
unpleasant in the intonation, and Thorpe's sharp glance failed to detect
any trace of offensive intention in his companion's fatuous visage. Yet
it seemed to pass between the two men that Gafferson was surprised, and
that there were abundant grounds for his surprise.

“Why, yes,” said Thorpe, with as much nonchalance as he could summon,
“your master is one of my directors. I've taken a fancy to him, and I'm
going to make a rich man of him. He was keen about my seeing his place
here, and kept urging me to come, and so finally I've got away over
Sunday to oblige him. By the way--I shall buy an estate in the country
as soon as the right thing offers, and I shall want to set up no end of
gardens and greenhouses and all that. I see that I couldn't come to a
better man than you for advice. I daresay I'll put the whole arrangement
of it in your hands. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

“Whatever his Lordship agrees to,” the gardener replied, sententiously.
He turned to the staging, and took up one of the pots.

Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the further door,
which he could see opened upon the lawn. He was conscious of annoyance
with this moon-faced, dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a
splendid chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship--it might even
be called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship--and who had so
clumsily failed to rise to the situation. The bitter thought of going
back and giving him a half-crown rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he
paused for an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over. The
gratuity would certainly put Gafferson in his place, but then the spirit
in which it was offered would be wholly lost on his dull brain. And
moreover, was it so certain that he would take it? He had not said “sir”
 once, and he had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist. The
rules were overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting a tip, of course,
but if there was no more than one chance in twenty of it, Thorpe decided
that he could not afford the risk.

He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his steps toward
the front of the mansion. As he entered the hall, a remarkably tuneful
and resonant chime filled his ears with novel music. He looked and saw
that a white-capped, neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him
beside the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune with two
padded sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on a stand of Indian
workmanship. The sound was delightful, but even more so was the
implication that it betokened breakfast.

With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he had been
fingering in his pocket, and gave it to the girl as she turned. “That's
the kind of concert I like,” he declared, bestowing the patronage of a
jovial smile upon her pleased and comely face. “Show me the way to this
breakfast that you've been serenading about.”

Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued to regard blankly
the shrivelled, fatty leaves of the plant he had taken up. “Thorpe,”
 he said aloud, as if addressing the tabid gloxinia--“Thorpe--yes--I
remember his initials--J. S. Thorpe. Now, who's the man that told me
about him? and what was it he told me?”




CHAPTER VII


THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed. Thorpe
found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of
embarrassment at this discovery, it filled him with surprised delight
to note how perfectly he was at his ease. He could never have imagined
himself seated with four ladies at a table--three of them, moreover,
ladies of title--and doing it all so well.

For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner, so to
speak, which differed widely from the impressions he had had of their
deportment the previous evening. They seemed now to be as simple and
fresh and natural as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with
an air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled at the right
places; they acted as if they liked him, and were glad of his company.

The satisfied conviction that he was talking well, and behaving well,
accompanied him in his progress through the meal. His confession at the
outset of his great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which
had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place, proved a most
fortuitous beginning; after that, they were ready to regard everything
he said as amusing.

“Oh, when we're by ourselves,” the kindly little old hostess explained
to him, “my daughter and I breakfast always at nine. That was our hour
yesterday morning, for example. But when my son is here, then it's
farewell to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then, as a kind
of compromise between our own early habits and his lack of any sort of
habits. Why we do it I couldn't say--because he never comes down in any
event. He sleeps so well at Hadlow--and you know in town he sleeps
very ill indeed--and so we don't dream of complaining. We're only too
glad--for his sake.”

“And Balder,” commented the sister, “he's as bad the other way. He
gets up at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a sandwich from the
still-room, and goes off with his rod or his gun or the dogs, and we
never see him till luncheon.”

“I've been on the point of asking so many times,” Miss Madden
interposed--“is Balder a family name, or is it after the Viking in
Matthew Arnold's poem?”

“It was his father's choice,” Lady Plowden made answer. “I think the
Viking explanation is the right one--it certainly isn't in either
family. I can't say that it attracted me much--at first, you know.”

“Oh, but it fits him so splendidly,” said Lady Cressage. “He looks the
part, as they say. I always thought it was the best of all the soldier
names--and you have only to look at him to see that he was predestined
for a soldier from his cradle.”

“I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long look at him, then,”
 put in the mother with earnestness underlying the jest of her tone. “The
poor boy will never pass those exams in the world. It IS ridiculous,
as his father always said. If there ever was a man who was made for a
soldier, it's Balder. He's a gentleman, and he's connected by tradition
with the Army, and he's mad about everything military--and surely he's
as clever as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter
of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory--and yet that
suffices to prevent his serving his Queen. And all over England there
are young gentlemen like that--the very pick of the hunting-fields,
strong and brave as lions, fit to lead men anywhere, the very men
England wants to have fighting her battles--and they can't get places
in the Army because--what was it Balder came to grief over last
time?--because they can't remember whether it's Ispahan or Teheran
that's the capital of Persia.

“They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both places at the
point of the bayonet--and find out their names afterward--but it seems
that's not what the Army wants nowadays. What is desired now is superior
clerks, and secretaries and professors of languages--and much good they
will do us when the time of trouble comes!”

“Then you think the purchase-system was better?” asked the American
lady. “It always seemed to me that that must have worked so curiously.”

“Prefer it?” said Lady Plowden. “A thousand times yes! My husband made
one of the best speeches in the debate on it--one do I say?--first and
last he must have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept
the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched Radical outcry, it
would have been those speeches. He pointed out all the evils that
would follow the change. You might have called it prophetic--the way
he foresaw what would happen to Balder--or not Balder in particular, of
course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.

“As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind of people the lower
classes naturally look up to and obey and follow. Will they be ordered
about by a man simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do
they respect the village schoolmaster, for example, on account of his
learning? Not in the very slightest! On the contrary, they regard him
with the greatest contempt. The man they will serve is the man whose
birth gives him the right to command them, or else the man with money in
his pockets to make it worth their while. These two are the only leaders
they understand. And if that's true here in England, in times of peace,
among our own people, how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away
from England, in a time of war?”

“But, mamma,” the Hon. Winifred intervened, “don't you see how badly
that might work nowadays? now that the good families have so little
money, and all the fortunes are in the hands of stockjobbing people--and
so on? It would be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions--and I'm
sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot.”

Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness. “You see so
little of the world, Winnie dear, that you don't get very clear ideas of
its movements. The people who make fortunes in England are every whit
as important to its welfare as those who inherit names, and individually
I'm sure they are often much more deserving. Every generation sniffs
at its nouveaux riches, but by the next they have become merged in the
aristocracy. It isn't a new thing in England at all. It has always been
that way. Two-thirds of the peerage have their start from a wealthy
merchant, or some other person who made a fortune. They are really the
back-bone of England. You should keep that always in mind.”

“Of course--I see what you mean”--Winnie replied, her dark cheek
flushing faintly under the tacit reproof. She had passed her
twenty-fifth birthday, but her voice had in it the docile
self-repression of a school-girl. She spoke with diffident slowness,
her gaze fastened upon her plate. “Of course--my grandfather was
a lawyer--and your point is that merchants--and others who make
fortunes--would be the same.”

“Precisely,” said Lady Plowden. “And do tell us, Mr. Thorpe”--she turned
toward where he sat at her right and beamed at him over her spectacles,
with the air of having been wearied with a conversation in which he
bore no part--“is it really true that social discontent is becoming more
marked in America, even, than it is with us in England?”

“I'm not an American, you know,” he reminded her. “I only know one or
two sections of the country--and those only as a stranger. You should
ask Miss Madden.”

“Me?” said Celia. “Oh, I haven't come up for my examinations yet. I'm
like Balder--I'm preparing.”

“What I should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us,” suggested Lady Cressage,
mildly, “is about the flowers in the tropics--in Java, for example, or
some of the West Indies. One hears such marvelous tales about them.”

“Speaking of flowers,” Thorpe suddenly decided to mention the fact; “I
met out in one of the greenhouses here this morning, an old acquaintance
of mine, the gardener, Gafferson. The last time I saw him, he was
running the worst hotel in the world in the worst country in the
world--out in British Honduras.”

“But he's a wonderful gardener,” said Lady Cressage. “He's a magician;
he can do what he likes with plants. It's rather a hobby of mine--or
used to be--and I never saw his equal.”

Thorpe told them about Gafferson, in that forlorn environment on the
Belize road, and his success in making them laugh drew him on to other
pictures of the droll side of life among the misfits of adventure. The
ladies visibly dallied over their tea-cups to listen to him; the
charm of having them all to himself, and of holding them in interested
entertainment by his discourse--these ladies of supremely refined
associations and position--seemed to provide an inspiration of its own.
He could hear that his voice was automatically modulating itself to
their critical ears. His language was producing itself with as much
delicacy of selection as if it came out of a book--and yet preserving
the savour of quaint, outlandish idiom which his listeners clearly
liked. Upon the instant when Lady Plowden's gathering of skirts, and
glance across the table, warned him that they were to rise, he said
deliberately to himself that this had been the most enjoyable episode of
his whole life.

There were cigar boxes on the fine old oak mantel, out in the hall, and
Winnie indicated them to him with the obvious suggestion that he was
expected to smoke. He looked her over as he lit his cigar--where she
stood spreading her hands above the blaze of the logs, and concluded
that she was much nicer upon acquaintance than he had thought. Her
slight figure might not be beautiful, but beyond doubt its lines were
ladylike. The same extenuating word applied itself in his mind to her
thin and swarthy, though distinguished, features. They bore the stamp
of caste, and so did the way she looked at one through her eye-glasses,
from under those over-heavy black eyebrows, holding her head a little
to one side. Though it was easy enough to guess that she had a spirit of
her own, her gentle, almost anxious, deference to her mother had shown
that she had it under admirable control.

He had read about her in a peerage at his sister's book-shop the
previous day. Unfortunately it did not give her age, but that was not so
important, after all. She was styled Honourable. She was the daughter
of one Viscount and the sister of another. Her grandfather had been
an Earl, and the book had shown her to possess a bewildering number
of relationships among titled folks. All this was very interesting to
him--and somewhat suggestive. Vague, shapeless hints at projects rose in
his brain as he looked at her.

“I'm afraid you think my brother has odd notions of entertaining his
guests,” she remarked to him, over her shoulder. The other ladies had
not joined them.

“Oh, I'm all right,” he protested cordially. “I should hate to have
him put himself out in the slightest.” Upon consideration he added: “I
suppose he has given up the idea of shooting to-day.”

“I think not,” she answered.” The keeper was about this morning, that
is--and he doesn't often come unless they are to go out with the guns. I
suppose you are very fond of shooting.”

“Well--I've done some--in my time,” Thorpe replied, cautiously. It did
not seem necessary to explain that he had yet to fire his first gun on
English soil. “It's a good many years,” he went on, “since I had the
time and opportunity to do much at it. I think the last shooting I did
was alligators. You hit 'em in the eye, you know. But what kind of a
hand I shall make of it with a shot-gun, I haven't the least idea. Is
the shooting round I here pretty good?”

“I don't think it's anything remarkable. Plowden says my brother
Balder kills all the birds off every season. Balder's by way of being
a crack-shot, you know. There are some pheasants, though. We saw them
flying when we were out this morning.”

Thorpe wondered if it would be possible to consult her upon the question
of apparel. Clearly, he ought to make some difference in his garb, yet
the mental vision of him-self in those old Mexican clothes revealed
itself now as ridiculously impossible. He must have been out of his mind
to have conceived anything so preposterous as rigging himself out, among
these polished people, like a cow-puncher down on his luck.

“I wonder when your brother will expect to start,” he began, uneasily.
“Perhaps I ought to go and get ready.”

“Ah, here comes his man,” remarked the sister. A round-faced,
smooth-mannered youngster--whom Thorpe discovered to be wearing
cord-breeches and leather leggings as he descended the stairs--advanced
toward him and prefaced his message by the invariable salutation. “His
Lordship will be down, sir, in ten minutes--and he hopes you'll be
ready, sir,” the valet said.

“Send Pangbourn to this gentleman's room,” Miss Winnie bade him, and
with a gesture of comprehensive submission he went away.

The calm readiness with which she had provided a solution for his
difficulties impressed Thorpe greatly. It would never have occurred to
him that Pangbourn was the answer to the problem of his clothes, yet how
obvious it had been to her. These old families did something more than
fill their houses with servants; they mastered the art of making these
servants an integral part of the machinery of existence. Fancy having a
man to do all your thinking about clothes for you, and then dress you,
into the bargain. Oh, it was all splendid.

“It seems that we're going shooting,” Thorpe found himself explaining, a
few moments later in his bedroom, to the attentive Pangbourn. He
decided to throw himself with frankness upon the domestic's resourceful
good-feeling. “I haven't brought anything for shooting at all. Somehow I
got the idea we were going to do rough riding instead--and so I fetched
along some old Mexican riding-clothes that make me feel more at home
in the saddle than anything else would. You know how fond a man gets of
old, loose things like that. But about this shooting--I want you to fix
me out. What do I need? Just some breeches and leggings, eh? You can
manage them for me, can't you?”

Pangbourn could and did--and it was upon his advice that the Mexican
jacket was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its shape was beyond doubt
uncommon, but it had big pockets, and it looked like business. Thorpe,
as he glanced up and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe,
felt that he must kill a large number of birds to justify the effect of
pitiless proficiency which this jacket lent to his appearance.

“We will find a cap below, sir,” Pangbourn announced, with serenity, and
Thorpe, who had been tentatively fingering the big, flaring sombrero,
thrust it back upon its peg as if it had proved too hot to handle.

Downstairs in the hall there was more waiting to be done, and there was
nobody now to bear him company. He lit another cigar, tried on various
caps till he found a leathern one to suit him, and then dawdled about
the room and the adjoining conservatory for what seemed to him more than
half an hour. This phase of the aristocratic routine, he felt, did not
commend itself so warmly to him as did some others. Everybody else,
however, seemed to regard it as so wholly a matter of course that
Plowden should do as he liked, that he forbore formulating a complaint
even to himself.

At last, this nobleman's valet descended the stairs once more. “His
Lordship will be down very shortly now, sir,” he declared--“and will you
be good enough to come into the gun-room, sir, and see the keeper?”

Thorpe followed him through a doorway under the staircase--the existence
of which he had not suspected--into a bare-looking apartment fitted like
a pantry with shelves. After the semi-gloom of the hall, it was almost
glaringly lighted. The windows and another door opened, he saw, upon a
court connected with the stable-yard. By this entrance, no doubt, had
come the keeper, a small, brown-faced, brown-clothed man of mature
years, with the strap of a pouch over his shoulder, who stood looking at
the contents of the shelves. He mechanically saluted Thorpe in turn, and
then resumed his occupation. There were numerous gun cases on the lower
shelf, and many boxes and bags above.

“Did his Lordship say what gun?” the keeper demanded of the valet. He
had a bright-eyed, intent glance, and his tone conveyed a sense of some
broad, impersonal, out-of-doors disdain for liveried house-men.

The valet, standing behind Thorpe, shrugged his shoulders and eloquently
shook his head.

“Do you like an 'ammerless, sir?” the keeper turned to Thorpe.

To his intense humiliation, Thorpe could not make out the meaning of the
query. “Oh, anything'll do for me,” he said, awkwardly smiling. “It's
years since I've shot--I daresay one gun'll be quite the same as another
to me.”

He felt the knowing bright eyes of the keeper taking all his
measurements as a sportsman. “You'd do best with 'B,' sir, I fancy,” the
functionary decided at last, and his way of saying it gave Thorpe the
notion that “B” must be the weapon that was reserved for school-boys. He
watched the operation of putting the gun together, and then took it, and
laid it over his arm, and followed the valet out into the hall again, in
dignified silence. To the keeper's remark--“Mr. Balder has its mate with
him today, sir,” he gave only a restrained nod.

There were even now whole minutes to wait before Lord Plowden appeared.
He came down the stairs then with the brisk, rather impatient air of a
busy man whose plans are embarrassed by the unpunctuality of others.
He was fully attired, hob-nailed shoes, leggings, leather coat and cap,
gloves, scarf round his throat and all--and he behaved as if there was
not a minute to lose. He had barely time to shake perfunctorily the
hand Thorpe offered him, and utter an absent-minded “How are you this
morning?”

To the valet, who hurried forward to open the outer door, bearing his
master's gun and a camp-stool, he said reproachfully, “We are very late
today, Barnes.” They went out, and began striding down the avenue of
trees at such a pace that the keeper and his following of small boys and
dogs, who joined them near the road, were forced into a trot to keep up
with it.

Thorpe had fancied, somehow, that a day's shooting would afford
exceptional opportunities for quiet and intimate talk with his host,
but he perceived very soon that this was not to be the case. They walked
together for half a mile, it is true, along a rural bye-road first and
then across some fields, but the party was close at their heels, and
Plowden walked so fast that conversation of any sort, save an occasional
remark about the birds and the covers between him and the keeper, was
impracticable. The Hon. Balder suddenly turned up in the landscape,
leaning against a gate set in a hedgerow, and their course was deflected
toward him, but even when they came up to him, the expedition seemed
to gain nothing of a social character. The few curt words that were
exchanged, as they halted here to distribute cartridges and hold brief
consultation, bore exclusively upon the subject in hand.

The keeper assumed now an authority which Thorpe, breathing heavily over
the unwonted exercise and hoping for nothing so much as that they would
henceforth take things easy, thought intolerable. He was amazed that
the two brothers should take without cavil the arbitrary orders of this
elderly peasant. He bade Lord Plowden proceed to a certain point in one
direction, and that nobleman, followed by his valet with the gun and
the stool, set meekly off without a word. Balder, with equal docility,
vaulted the gate, and moved away down the lane at the bidding of the
keeper. Neither of them had intervened to mitigate the destiny of their
guest, or displayed any interest as to what was going to become of him.

Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this--and though afterward,
when he had also climbed the gate and taken up his station under a
clump of trees at the autocrat's behest, he strove to soothe his ruffled
feelings by the argument that it was probably the absolutely correct
deportment for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced.
Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped a blunt injunction
about firing up or down the lane, the tone even more than the matter of
which nettled him.

To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a little from
the spot on which he had been planted, he caught a glimpse against the
skyline of the distant Lord Plowden, comfortably seated on the stool
which his valet had been carrying. It seemed to Thorpe at that moment
that he had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life--and he
turned on his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure.

This mood vanished utterly a few moments later. The remote sounds had
begun to come to him, of boys shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses
of the strip of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he
hastened back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place, and when
he heard the reports of guns to right and left of him, and nothing came
his way, he liked it less than ever; it had become a matter of offended
pride with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom of the
responsibility he had taken upon himself. If Lord Plowden's guest had
no sport, the blame for it should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant
keeper. Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears,
punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of “mark!” These cries,
and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied
and heralded, became all at once a most urgent affair of his own.
He strained his eyes upon the horizon of the thicket--and, as if by
instinct, the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and
followed automatically the thundering course of the big bird, and then,
taking thought to itself, leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe's first
pheasant reeled in the air, described a somersault, and fell like a
plummet.

He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand shaking for
joy. From where he stood he could see the dead bird; there could never
have been a cleaner “kill.” In the warming glow of his satisfaction in
himself, there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden
and Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour of his life, a novel
delight of indescribable charm. There came to him, from the woods, the
shrill bucolic voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was
conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper--and again the
cry of “mark!” rose, strenuously addressed to him.

Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe saw the rest
of the party assembling by the gate. He did not hurry to join them, but
when Lord Plowden appeared he sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with
as indifferent an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously
that no one had thought it worth while to approach the rendezvous by
way of the spot he had covered. His eye took instant stock of the game
carried by two of the boys; their combined prizes were eight birds and a
rabbit, and his heart leaped within him at the count.

“Well, Thorpe?” asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell of gunpowder and
the sight of stained feathers had co-operated to brighten and cheer his
mood. “I heard you blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?”

Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note. “Let some of the
boys run over,” he said slowly. “There are nine birds within sight, and
there are two or three in the bushes--but they may have got away.”

“Gad!” said Balder.

“Magnificent!” was his brother's comment--and Thorpe permitted himself
the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming sigh of triumph.

The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really to tint everything
that remained of Thorpe's visit. He set down to it without hesitation
the visible augmentation of deference to him among the servants. The
temptation was very great to believe that it had affected the ladies of
the house as well. He could not say that they were more gracious to him,
but certainly they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred
little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally
at arm's length as a stranger to their caste. Of course, his own
restored self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to
the whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the
man of the pheasants.

Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of the house. He was
alone again with the ladies at breakfast, and during the long day he was
much in their company. It was like no other day he had ever imagined to
himself.

On the morrow, in the morning train by which he returned alone to town,
his mind roved luxuriously among the fragrant memories of that day.
He had been so perfectly at home--and in such a home! There were some
things which came uppermost again and again--but of them all he dwelt
most fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses
and conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his
guide, and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. Of
what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music
of the voice lingered in his ears.

“And she is old Kervick's daughter!” he said to himself more than once.




CHAPTER VIII


IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London
nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in
indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be
so brief a journey. In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage
irony of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged
dark prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which
the line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke
about people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed
to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid
gloomy approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South
Eastern or the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its
wake, and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however, upon
this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said
he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the
idea that any other railway could be half so bad.

The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the
champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up
additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay
and mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the
newcomer. He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing
a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and
inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues,
was to be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive
and resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed
either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the
Dover line at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.

But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough--almost too short.
The conversation interested him not at all; if he had ever known the
Southern lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the
window, and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit
from which he was returning.

When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his
mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to
him, ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform,
superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags. He turned it over
and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself
with its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at
the mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street
through towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.

Colin Semple was happily in his office--a congeries of small, huddled
rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a
corner of the court--and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like
one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.

The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk
who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish
this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in
a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the
personification of business--without an ounce of distracting superfluous
flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary
politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine
perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a
joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke
cigarettes, with a natural air, if these exercises seemed properly to
belong to the task he had in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing
anything for the mere human reason that he liked to do it. There was
more than a touch of what the rustic calls “ginger” in his hair and
closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had the complementary florid
skin. His eyes--notably direct, confident eyes--were of a grey which had
in it more brown than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close,
and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.

He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin
lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting. “Well?” he asked,
impassively.

“Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?” asked Thorpe in turn. “I want a
talk with you.”

For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute or two,
he remarked, “Go ahead till we're stopped,” and seated himself on the
corner of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig.
Thorpe unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.

“I've worked out the whole scheme,” he began, as if introducing the
product of many sleepless nights' cogitations. “I'm going to leave
England almost immediately--go on the Continent and loaf about--I've
never seen the Continent.”

Semple regarded him in silence. “Well?” he observed at last.

“You see the idea, don't you?” Thorpe demanded.

The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. “Go on,” he said.

“But the idea is everything,” protested the other. “We've been thinking
of beginning the campaign straight away--but the true game now is to lie
low--silent as the grave. I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular
is said about it, of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that
I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody else--and so
there gets to be the impression that things haven't gone well with me,
d'ye see? On the same plan, I let all the clerks at my office go. The
Secretary'll come round every once in a while to get letters, of
course, and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show,
but practically the place'll be shut up. That'll help out the general
impression that I've gone to pieces. Now d'ye see?”

“It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of,” commented Semple.

“Of course. The fellows that we're going to squeeze would move heaven
and hell to prevent our getting that Settlement, if they got wind
of what was going on. The only weak point in our game is just there.
Absolutely everything hangs on the Settlement being granted. Naturally,
then, our play is to concentrate everything on getting it granted. We
don't want to raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion of what we're
up to, till after we're safe past that rock. So we go on in the way
to attract the least possible attention. You or your jobber makes the
ordinary application for a Special Settlement, with your six signatures
and so on; and I go abroad quietly, and the office is as good as shut
up, and nobody makes a peep about Rubber Consols--and the thing works
itself. You do see it, don't you?”

“I see well enough the things that are to be seen,” replied Semple, with
a certain brevity of manner. “There was a sermon of my father's that I
remember, and it had for its text, 'We look not at the things which are
seen, but at the things which are not seen.'”

Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head. “Semple,” he said,
bringing his chair forward to the desk, “that's what I've come for. I
want to spread my cards on the table for you. I know the sum you've laid
out already, in working this thing. We'll say that that is to be paid
back to you, as a separate transaction, and we'll put that to one side.
Now then, leaving that out of consideration, what do you think you ought
to have out of the winnings, when we pull the thing off? Mind, I'm not
thinking of your 2,000 vendor's shares----”

“No--I'm not thinking much of them, either,” interposed Semple, with a
kind of dry significance.

“Oh, they'll be all right,” Thorpe affirmed. He laughed unconsciously as
he did so. “No, what I want to get at is your idea of what should come
to you, as a bonus, when I scoop the board.”

“Twenty thousand pounds,” said Semple, readily.

Thorpe's slow glance brightened a trifle. “I had thought thirty would be
a fairer figure,” he remarked, with an effort at simplicity.

The broker put out his under-lip. “You will find people rather disposed
to distrust a man who promises more than he's asked,” he remarked
coldly.

“Yes--I know what you mean,” Thorpe hurried to say, flushing awkwardly,
even though the remark was so undeserved; “but it's in my nature. I'm
full of the notion of doing things for people that have done things
for me. That's the way I'm built. Why”--he halted to consider the
advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do for Lord Plowden,
and decided against it--“why, without you, what would the whole
thing have been worth to me? Take one thing alone--the money for the
applications--I could have no more got at it than I could at the Crown
Jewels in the Tower. I've wondered since, more than once--if you don't
mind the question--how did you happen to have so much ready money lying
about.”

“There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to invest for
them,” the broker explained. “If they get five per cent. for the four
months, they'll be very pleased. And so I shall be very pleased to take
thirty thousand instead of twenty--if it presents itself to your mind in
that way. You will give me a letter to that effect, of course.”

“Of course,” assented Thorpe. “Write it now, if you like.” He pushed his
chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped a pen in the ink. “What
I want to do is this,” he said, looking up. “I'll make the promise for
thirty-two thousand, and I'll get you to let me have two thousand in
cash now--a personal advance. I shall need it, if I'm to hang about on
the Continent for four months. I judge you think it'll be four months
before things materialize, eh?”

“The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events, would come
shortly after the Christmas holidays. That is nearly three months. Then
the work of taking fort-nightly profits will begin--and it is for you to
say how long you allow that to go on.”

“But about the two thousand pounds now,” Thorpe reminded him.

“I think I will do that in this way,” said Semple, kicking his small
legs nonchalantly. “I will buy two thousand fully-paid shares of you,
for cash down, NOT vendor's shares, you observe--and then I will take
your acknowledgment that you hold them for me in trust up to a given
date. In that way, I would not at all weaken your market, and I would
have a stake in the game.” “Your stake's pretty big, already,” commented
Thorpe, tentatively.

“It's just a fancy of mine,” said the other, with his first smile. “I
like to hold shares that are making sensational advances. It is very
exciting.”

“All right,” said Thorpe, in accents of resignation. He wrote out two
letters, accepting the wording which Semple suggested from his perch on
the desk, and then the latter, hopping down, took the chair in turn and
wrote a cheque.

“Do you want it open?” he asked over his shoulder. “Are you going to get
it cashed at once?”

“No--cross it,” said the other. “I want it to go through my bankers.
It'll warm their hearts toward me. I shan't be going till the end of the
week, in any event. I suppose you know the Continent by heart.”

“On the contrary, very little indeed. I've had business in Frankfort
once, and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice. That is all.”

“But don't you ever do anything for pleasure?” Thorpe asked him, as he
folded the cheque in his pocket-book.

“Oh yes--many things,” responded the broker, lightly. “It's a pleasure,
for example, to buy Rubber Consols at par.”

“Oh, if you call it buying,” said Thorpe, and then softened his words
with an apologetic laugh. “I didn't tell you, did I? I've been spending
Saturday and Sunday with Plowden--you know, the Lord Plowden on my
Board.”

“I know of him very well,” observed the Scotchman.

“Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That isn't the usual
form with guinea-pigs.”

“Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all,” Thorpe asserted,
warmly. “He's really a splendid fellow--with his little oddities, like
the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place?
I should think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old
country-houses you ever saw--older than hell, you know--and it's kept
up as if they had fifty thousand a year. Do you happen to know what his
real income is supposed to be?”

Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly
with the palm of his hand.

“I asked,” Thorpe went on, “because he had so much to say about his
poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his
doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all
over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of
England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how I
knocked the pheasants!” A clerk showed his head at the door, with a
meaning gesture. “I must go now,” said Semple, briskly, and led the way
out to another room. He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the
brief injunction, “Don't go away without seeing me.”

It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City's
slaves were in the streets on the quest for cheap luncheons. Thorpe
noted the manner in which some of them studied the large bill of
fare placarded beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him
luxuriously to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket. He had
been as anxious about pence as the hungriest of those poor devils, only
a week before. And now! He thrust up the door in the roof of the cab,
and bade the driver stop at his bank. Thence, after some brief but very
agreeable business, and a hurried inspection of the “Court” section of
a London Directory, he drove to a telegraph station and despatched two
messages. They were identical in terms. One sought General Kervick
at his residence--he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover Square
country--and the other looked for him at his club. Both begged him to
lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.

There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab at his
hotel--an unpretentious house in Craven Street, and sent his luggage to
his rooms. There were no letters for him on the board in the hallway,
and he sauntered up to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned
presently into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient book-shop
of his family.

In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide, the blacks
and roans and smoked drabs of the low old brick front looked more dingy
to his eye than ever. It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a
dismal and graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift.
It was so little like the antiquity, for example, of Hadlow House, that
the two might have computed their age by the chronological systems of
different planets. Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and
she had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years, the sign over the
doorway bore still its century-old legend, “Thorpe, Bookseller.”

He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run an eye over the
books and placards exposed on either side of the entrance. A small boy
guarded these wares, and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious
recollections of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that
very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish and sullen face; its
expression could not have been more devoid of intellectual suggestions
if he had been posted in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with
a rattle, instead of being set here in the highway of the world's
brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers. Thorpe wondered
if in his time he could have looked such a vacant and sour young
fool. No--no. That could not be. Boys were different in his day--and
especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of
what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague
as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those
days there still were bookmen--widely-informed, observant, devoted old
bookmen--who loved their trade, and adorned it.

Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better able to
apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed race of literature's
servants. Indeed, it seemed that he had never adequately realized before
how proud a man might well be of descending from a line of such men.
The thought struck him that very likely at this identical doorway, two
generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young law-student named
Plowden had stood and turned over pages of books he could not dream of
buying. Perhaps, even, he had ventured inside, and deferentially picked
acquaintance with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice and
friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real significance that the
law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor, and the bookseller remained a
book-seller; in the realm of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as
the Plowdens.

A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in, squeezing his way
along the narrow passage between the tall rows of books, to the small
open space at the end. His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a
high desk. She did not look up.

“Well--I visited his Lordship all right.” He announced his presence thus
genially.

“I hope you're the better for it,” she remarked, turning to him, after a
pause, her emotionless, plain face.

“Oh, immensely,” he affirmed, with robust jocularity. “You should have
seen the way they took to me. It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe'
there, all over the place. Ladies of title, mind you--all to myself at
breakfast two days running. And such ladies--finer than silk. Oh, it's
clear as daylight--I was intended for a fashionable career.”

She smiled in a faint, passive way. “Well--they say 'better late
than never,' you know.” “And after all, IS it so very late?” he said,
adopting her phrase as an expression of his thought. “I'm just turned
forty, and I feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there,
the other day--and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger than the first
Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer? Why he didn't even get into
the House of Commons until he was seven-and-forty.”

“You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain,” she commented.

“I might have worse things. You've no idea, Lou, how nice it all is. The
mother, Lady Plowden--why she made me feel as if I was at the very
least a nephew of hers. And so simple and natural! She smiled at me,
and listened to me, and said friendly things to me--why, just as anybody
might have done. You'll just love her, when you know her.”

Louisa laughed in his face. “Don't be a fool, Joel,” she adjured him,
with a flash of scornful mirth. He mingled a certain frowning impatience
with the buoyancy of his smile. “Why, of course, you'll know her,” he
protested. “What nonsense you're thinking of! Do you suppose I'm going
to allow you to mess about here with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in
your window of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,' while I'm
a millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou. You annoy me by supposing such a
thing!”

“There's no good talking about it at all,” she observed, after a little
pause. “It hasn't come off yet, for one thing. And as I said the other
night, if you want to do things for the children, that's another matter.
They're of an age when they can learn whatever anybody chooses to teach
them.”

“Where are they now?” he asked. Upon the instant another plan began to
unfold itself in the background of his mind.

“They're both at Cheltenham, though they're at different places, of
course. I was recommended to send Julia there--one of our old customers
is a Governor, or whatever it's called--and he got special terms for
her. She was rather old, you know, to go to school, but he arranged it
very nicely for her--and there is such a good boys' college there,
it seemed the wisest thing to send Alfred too. Julia is to finish at
Christmas-time--and what I'm going to do with her afterward is more than
I know.”

“Is she pretty?” the uncle of Julia enquired.

“She's very nice,” the mother answered, with vague extenuation in her
tone. “I don't know about her looks--she varies so much. Sometimes I
think she's pretty--and then again I can't think it. She's got
good features, and she holds herself well, and she's very much the
lady--rather too much, I think, sometimes--but it all depends upon what
you call pretty. She's not tall, you know. She takes after her father's
family. The Dabneys are all little people.”

Thorpe seemed not to care about the Dabneys. “And what's Alfred like?”
 he asked.

“He wants to be an artist!” There was a perceptible note of apprehension
in the mother's confession.

“Well--why shouldn't he--if he's got a bent that way?” demanded Thorpe,
with reproof in his tone. “Did you want him to be a shop-keeper?”

“I should like to see him a doctor,” she replied with dignity. “It was
always my idea for him.”

“Well, it's no good--even as an idea,” he told her. “Doctors are like
parsons--they can't keep up with the times. The age is outgrowing them.
Only the fakirs in either profession get anything out of it, nowadays.
It's all mystery and sleight-of-hand and the confidence trick--medicine
is--and if you haven't got just the right twist of the wrist, you're not
in it. But an artist stands on his merits. There is his work--done by
his own hands. It speaks for itself. There's no deception--it's easy
enough to tell whether it's good or bad. If the pictures are good,
people buy them. If they're bad, people don't buy them. Of course, it
won't matter to Alfred, financially speaking, whether his pictures sell
well or not. But probably he'd give it up, if he didn't make a hit of
it.

“I don't know that there's any crying need that he should do anything.
My own idea for him, perhaps, would be the Army, but I wouldn't dream of
forcing it on him against his will. I had a bitter enough dose of that,
myself, with father. I'd try to guide a youngster, yes, and perhaps
argue with him, if I thought he was making a jack of himself--but I
wouldn't dictate. If Alfred thinks he wants to be an artist, in God's
name let him go ahead. It can be made a gentlemanly trade--and the main
thing is that he should be a gentleman.”

Louisa had listened to this discourse with apathetic patience. “If you
don't mind, I don't know that I do,” she said when it was finished.
“Perhaps he wouldn't have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick
temper. He reminds me of father--oh, ever so much more than you do. He
contradicts everything everybody says. He quite knows it all.”

“But he's a good fellow, isn't he?” urged Thorpe. “I mean, he's got his
likable points? I'm going to be able to get along with him?”

“I didn't get along with him very well,” the mother admitted,
reluctantly, “but I daresay with a man it would be different. You see,
his father was ill all those four years, and Alfred hated the shop as
bad as you did, and perhaps in my worry I blamed him more than was fair.
I want to be fair to him, you know.”

“But is he a gentleman? That puts it in a word,” Thorpe insisted.

“Oh, mercy yes,” Louisa made ready answer. “My only fear is--whether you
won't find him too much of a gentleman.”

Thorpe knitted his brows. “I only hope we're talking about the same
thing,” he said, in a doubtful tone. Before she could speak, he lifted
his hand. “Never mind--I can see for myself in ten minutes more than you
could tell me in a lifetime. I've got a plan. I'm going on the Continent
in a few days' time, to stay for three or four months. I've got nothing
special to do--just to travel about and see things and kill time--I
shall probably go to Italy and Switzerland and Paris and the Rhine
and all sorts of places--and it occurred to me that I'd take the two
youngsters with me. I could get acquainted with them, that way, and
they'd be company for me. I've been lonesome so long, it would feel good
to have some of my own flesh and blood about me--and I suppose they'd be
tickled to death to go.”

“Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas,” Mrs. Dabney
objected, blankly.

“Bah!” Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into something
good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. “What on earth
difference does that make? I could go and buy their damned colleges, and
let the kids wear them for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl
was going to quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn more in four
months travelling about on the Continent, than she would trotting around
in her own tracks there at Cheltenham?

“And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age when he ought
to see something of the world, and I ought to see something of him.
Whatever he's going to do, it's time that he began getting his special
start for it.” He added, upon a luminous afterthought: “Perhaps his
seeing the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him of
wanting to be an artist.”

The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather than conviction.
“Well--if you really think it's best,” she began, “I don't know that
I ought to object. Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way.
Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds, it hasn't seemed as if
they were my children at all. They've scarcely listened to me. And now
you come, and propose to take them out of my hands altogether--and all
I can say is--I hope you feel entirely justified. And so, shall I write
them to come home? When do you think of starting? Julia ought to have
some travelling clothes.”

“I can wait till you get her ready--only you must hurry up about it.”

Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book, and spread it on
the desk. “I will give you back that thirty,” he said, as he wrote, “and
here's a hundred to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time,
will you? and if you want more tell me.”

A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it the occasion for
leaving.

His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in her hand,
was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell itself out in visible
letters before her mental vision. “Even now I don't believe in him,” the
impalpable legend ran.




CHAPTER IX


GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe found him
hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the
luncheon-room when he arrived. It indeed still lacked a few minutes of
the appointed hour when they thus met and went in together. They were
fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony, sufficiently
removed from any other to give privacy to their conversation.

By tacit agreement, the General ordered the luncheon, speaking French to
the waiter throughout. Divested of his imposing great-coat, he was seen
to be a gentleman of meagre flesh as well as of small stature. He had
the Roman nose, narrow forehead, bushing brows, and sharply-cut mouth
and chin of a soldier grown old in the contemplation of portraits of the
Duke of Wellington. His face and neck were of a dull reddish tint, which
seemed at first sight uniformly distributed: one saw afterward that
it approached pallor at the veined temples, and ripened into purple in
minute patches on the cheeks and the tip of the pointed nose. Against
this flushed skin, the closely-cropped hair and small, neatly-waxed

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