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.
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.