TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early morning train for Geneva—homeward bound.
It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration that urgent business summoned him to London, yet Julia and Alfred, when they chanced to exchange glances after the announcement, read in each other's eyes the formless impression that there were other things beside business. Their uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large and probably venturesome enterprises; but it did not fit with their conception of his character that commercial anxieties should possess the power to upset him. And upset he undeniably was.
They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the morning following the excursion up to Glion and Caux. He told them then that he had slept very badly, and that they must “count him out” of their plans for the day. He continued to be counted out of what remained of their stay at Territet. He professed not to be ill, but he was restless and preoccupied. He ate little, but smoked continuously, and drank spirits a good deal, which they had not seen him do before. Nothing would induce him to go out either day.
Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's equanimity synchronized with an apparent change in the attitude of their new friends on the floor below. This change was, indeed, more apparent than definable. The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly and affable as ever, but the sense of comradeship had somehow vanished. Insensibly, the two parties had ceased to have impulses and tastes in common. There were no more trips together—no more fortuitous luncheons or formal dinners as a group.
The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel on this morning of departure, after they had clambered over the drifts into the snow-bedecked train, and opened the window of their compartment. They made sure that they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite, and that the curtains were drawn aside—but there was no other token of occupancy discernible. They had said good-bye to the two ladies the previous evening, of course—it lingered in their minds as a rather perfunctory ceremony—but this had not prevented their hoping for another farewell glimpse of their friends. No one came to wave a hand from the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked somewhat dubiously at each other as the train moved. Then intuitively they glanced toward their uncle—and perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and was staring with a kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite.
“Fortunately, it is a clear day,” said Julia. “We shall see Mont Blanc.”
Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound in her own ears. Neither her uncle nor her brother answered her.
At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which the young people had turned their farewell gaze in vain, Miss Madden sipped her coffee thoughtfully while she read a letter spread upon the table beside her.
“It's as they said,” she observed. “You are not allowed to drive in the mountains with your own horses and carriage. That seems rather quaint for a model Republic—doesn't it?”
“I daresay they're quite right,” Lady Cressage replied, listlessly. “It's in the interest of safety. People who do not know the mountains would simply go and get killed in avalanches and hurricanes—and all that. I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent.”
“And you're on the side of the Government,” said the other, with a twinkle in her brown eyes. “Truly now—you hated the whole idea of driving over the Simplon.”
Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent as she nodded.
“But do you like this Russian plan any better?” demanded Celia. “I wish for once you would be absolutely candid and open with me—and let me know to the uttermost just what you think.” “'For once'?” queried the other. Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance of the quotation to be marked.
“Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking,” Miss Madden declared. She put on a smile to alleviate the force of her remarks. “It is not you alone—Edith. Don't think that! But it is ingrained in your country-women. You can't help it. It's in your blood to keep things back. I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready to believe, would be incapable of telling an untruth. But I've never met one of whom I could be sure that she would tell me the whole truth. Don't you see this case in point,” she pursued, with a little laugh, “I could not drag it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea, so long as there was a chance of our going. Immediately we find that we can't go, you admit that you hated it.”
“But you wanted to go,” objected Lady Cressage, quietly. “That was the important thing. What I wanted or did not want had nothing to do with the matter.”
Celia's face clouded momentarily. “Those are not the kind of things I like to hear you say,” she exclaimed, with a certain vigour. “They put everything in quite a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you should be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough. I've said it a thousand times—and have I ever done anything to disprove it? But I never can find out what you do want—what really will please you! You never will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank about the things I propose. It's only by watching you out of the corner of my eye that I can ever guess whether anything is altogether to your liking or not.”
The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. “That is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago,” said Lady Cressage, passively—“that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak. I thought it was a very logical opinion then, and, from my own point of view, I think so now. But if it does not work in practice, at least the responsibility of defending it is not mine.”
“Delightful!” cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put down her cup again. “You are the only woman I've ever known who was worth arguing with. The mere operation makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford—or passing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows, I would get up arguments with you every day, for the pure enjoyment of the thing—if I weren't eternally afraid of saying something that would hurt your feelings, and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound in silence in the dark, and I should know that something was wrong, and have to watch you for weeks to make out what it was—and it would all be too unhappy. But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. You don't tell me things!”
Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a wistful reserve. “It is a constitutional defect—even national, according to you. How shall I hope to change, at this late day? But what is it you want me to tell you?—I forget.”
“The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get our passports, and then to Cracow, and through to Kief, which they say is awfully well worth while—and next Moscow—and so on to St. Petersburg, in time to see the ice break up. It is only in winter that you see the characteristic Russia: that one has always heard. With the furs and the sledges, and the three horses galloping over the snow—it seems to me it must be the best thing in Europe—if you can call Russia Europe. That's the way it presents itself to me—but then I was brought up in a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort of thing—in its proper season. It is different with you. In England you don't know what a real winter is. And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would like the Russian experiment.”
The other laughed gently. “But if I don't know what a real winter is, how can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes—truly—I should like very much to go.”
Miss Madden sighed briefly. “All right,” she said, but with a notable absence of conviction in her tone.
A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through another note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark. She pouted her lips over the contents of this missive, and raised her eyebrows in token of surprise, but as she laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her companion.
“It's from our young friend,” she explained, genially—“the painter-boy—Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me of a promise he says I made—that when I came to London he should paint my portrait. I don't think I promised anything of the kind—but I suppose that is a detail. It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone by this time—they were to go very early, weren't they?”
Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. “It was 8:40, I think—fully half an hour ago,” she answered, with a painstaking effect of indifference.
“Curious conglomeration”—mused the other. “The boy and girl are so civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather effective—but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example, never altered in the slightest degree the habits he formed when he was a poor workman. To the day of his death, blessed old man, he remained what he had always been—simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and thrifty—a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out of the path he had been bred to walk in. But such nobility of mind and temper with it all! He never dreamed of suggesting that I should walk in the same path. From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible and generous. I must have been an extremely trying daughter, but he never said so; he never looked or acted as if he thought so.—But I never stop when I begin talking of my father.”
“It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him,” Lady Cressage put in. “One knows so few people who feel that way about their fathers!”
Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon something that had been left unsaid. The sight of the young artist's note recalled her earlier subject. “Of course there is a certain difference,” she went on, carelessly,—“this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant, as the phrase goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having been educated.”
“Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me,” said the other, with interest. “And his people were booksellers—somewhere in London—so that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly has more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very well indeed—in a direct, practical sort of way. I don't quite follow you about his niece and nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that they have had a great effect upon him. He sees it himself—and he's very proud of it. He told me so, quite frankly. But why shouldn't it be a nice effect?”
“Oh, I don't know,” Celia replied, idly. “It seemed to me that he was the kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't to be shaved and polished and taught drawing-room tricks—I feel that merely in the interest of the fitness of things. Have you looked into his eyes—I mean when they've got that lack-lustre expression? You can see a hundred thousand dead men in them.”
“I know the look you mean,” said Lady Cressage, in a low voice.
“Not that I assume he is going to kill anybody,” pursued Miss Madden, with ostensible indifference, but fixing a glance of aroused attention upon her companion's face, “or that he has any criminal intentions whatever. He behaves very civilly indeed, and apparently his niece and nephew idolize him. He seems to be the soul of kindness to them. It may be that I'm altogether wrong about him—only I know I had the instinct of alarm when I caught that sort of dull glaze in his eye. I met an African explorer a year ago, or so, about whose expeditions dark stories were told, and he had precisely that kind of eye. Perhaps it was this that put it into my head—but I have a feeling that this Thorpe is an exceptional sort of man, who would have the capacity in him for terrible things, if the necessity arose for them.”
“I see what you mean,” the other repeated. She toyed with the bread-crumbs about her plate, and reflectively watched their manipulation into squares and triangles as she went on. “But may that not be merely the visible sign of an exceptionally strong and masterful character? And isn't it, after all, the result of circumstances whether such a character makes, as you put it, a hundred thousand dead men, or enriches a hundred thousand lives instead? We agree, let us say, that this Mr. Thorpe impresses us both as a powerful sort of personality. The question arises, How will he use his power? On that point, we look for evidence. You see a dull glaze in his eye, and you draw hostile conclusions from it. I reply that it may mean no more than that he is sleepy. But, on the other hand, I bring proofs that are actively in his favour. He is, as you say, idolized by the only two members of his family that we have seen—persons, moreover, who have been brought up in ways different to his own, and who would not start, therefore, with prejudices in his favour. Beyond that, I know of two cases in which he has behaved, or rather undertaken to behave, with really lavish generosity—and in neither case was there any claim upon him of a substantial nature. He seems to me, in fact, quite too much disposed to share his fortune with Tom, Dick, and Harry—anybody who excites his sympathy or gets into his affections.” Having said this much, Lady Cressage swept the crumbs aside and looked up. “So now,” she added, with a flushed smile, “since you love arguments so much, how do you answer that?”
Celia smiled back. “Oh, I don't answer it at all,” she said, and her voice carried a kind of quizzical implication. “Your proofs overwhelm me. I know nothing of him—and you know so much!”
Lady Cressage regarded her companion with a novel earnestness and directness of gaze. “I had a long, long talk with him—the afternoon we came down from Glion.”
Miss Madden rose, and going to the mantel lighted a cigarette. She did not return to the table, but after a brief pause came and took an easy-chair beside her friend, who turned to face her. “My dear Edith,” she said, with gravity, “I think you want to tell me about that talk—and so I beg you to do so. But if I'm mistaken—why then I beg you to do nothing of the kind.”
The other threw out her hands with a gesture of wearied impatience, and then clasped them upon her knee. “I seem not to know what I want! What is the good of talking about it? What is the good of anything?”
“Now—now!” Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone had reference, apparently, to something understood between the two, for Lady Cressage deferred to it, and even summoned the ghost of a smile.
“There is really nothing to tell,”—she faltered, hesitatingly—“that is, nothing happened. I don't know how to say it—the talk left my mind in a whirl. I couldn't tell you why. It was no particular thing that was said—it seemed to be more the things that I thought of while something else was being talked about—but the whole experience made a most tremendous impression upon me. I've tried to straighten it out in my own mind, but I can make nothing of it. That is what disturbs me, Celia. No man has ever confused me in this silly fashion before. Nothing could be more idiotic. I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with people of—well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,—but this man, who is of hardly any intellectual rank at all, and who rambled on without any special aim that one could see—he reduced my brain to a sort of porridge. I said the most extraordinary things to him—babbling rubbish which a school-girl would be ashamed of. How is that to be accounted for? I try to reason it out, but I can't. Can you?”
“Nerves,” said Miss Madden, judicially.
“Oh, that is meaningless,” the other declared. “Anybody can say 'nerves.' Of course, all human thought and action is 'nerves.'”
“But yours is a special case of nerves,” Celia pursued, with gentle imperturbability. “I think I can make my meaning clear to you—though the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one. The finest thoroughbred dog in the world, if it is beaten viciously and cowed in its youth, will always have a latent taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity—call it what you like. Well, it seems to me there's something like that in your case, Edith. They hurt you too cruelly, poor girl. I won't say it broke your nerve—but it made a flaw in it. Just as a soldier's old wound aches when there's a storm in the air—so your old hurt distracts and upsets you under certain psychological conditions. It's a rather clumsy explanation, but I think it does explain.”
“Perhaps—I don't know,” Edith replied, in a tone of melancholy reverie. “It makes a very poor creature out of me, whatever it is.”
“I rather lose patience, Edith,” her companion admonished her, gravely. “Nobody has a right to be so deficient in courage as you allow yourself to be.”
“But I'm not a coward,” the other protested. “I could be as brave as anybody—as brave as you are—if a chance were given me. But of what use is bravery against a wall twenty feet high? I can't get over it. I only wound and cripple myself by trying to tear it down, or break through it.—Oh yes, I know what you say! You say there is no wall—that it is all an illusion of mine. But unfortunately I'm unable to take that view. I've battered myself against it too long—too sorely, Celia!”
Celia shrugged her shoulders in comment. “Oh, we women all have our walls—our limitations—if it comes to that,” she said, with a kind of compassionate impatience in her tone. “We are all ridiculous together—from the point of view of human liberty. The free woman is a fraud—a myth. She is as empty an abstraction as the 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' that the French put on their public buildings. I used to have the most wonderful visions of what independence would mean. I thought that when I was absolutely my own master, with my money and my courage and my free mind, I would do things to astonish all mankind. But really the most I achieve is the occasional mild surprise of a German waiter. Even that palls on one after a time. And if you were independent, Edith—if you had any amount of money—what difference do you think it would make to you? What could you do that you don't do, or couldn't do, now?”
“Ah, now”—said the other, looking up with a thin smile—“now is an interval—an oasis.”
Miss Madden's large, handsome, clear-hued face, habitually serene in its expression, lost something in composure as she regarded her companion. “I don't know why you should say that,” she observed, gently enough, but with an effect of reproof in her tone. “I have never put limits to the connection, in my own mind—and it hadn't occurred to me that you were doing so in yours.”
“But I'm not,” interposed Lady Cressage.
“Then I understand you less than ever. Why do you talk about an 'interval'? What was the other word?—'oasis'—as if this were a brief halt for refreshments and a breathing-spell, and that presently you must wander forth into the desert again. That suggestion is none of mine. We agreed that we would live together—'pool our issues,' as they say in America. I wanted a companion; so did you. I have never for an instant regretted the arrangement. Some of my own shortcomings in the matter I have regretted. You were the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen, and you were talented, and you seemed to like me—and I promised myself that I would add cheerfulness and a gay spirit to your other gifts—and in that I have failed wofully. You're not happy. I see that only too clearly.”
“I know—I'm a weariness and a bore to you,” broke in the other, despondingly.
“That is precisely what you're not,” Celia went on. “We mustn't use words of that sort. They don't describe anything in our life at all. But I should be better pleased with myself if I could really put my finger on what it is that is worrying you. Even if we decided to break up our establishment, I have told you that you should not go back to what you regard as poverty. Upon that score, I had hoped that your mind was easy. As I say, I think you attach more importance to money than those who have tested its powers would agree to—but that's neither here nor there. You did not get on well on 600 pounds a year—and that is enough. You shall never have less than twice that amount, whether we keep together or not—and if it ought to be three times the amount, that doesn't matter.
“You don't seem to realize, Edith”—she spoke with increased animation—“that you are my caprice. You are the possession that I am proudest of and fondest of. There is nothing else that appeals to me a hundredth part as much as you do. Since I became independent, the one real satisfaction I have had is in being able to do things for you—to have you with me, and make you share in the best that the world can offer. And if with it all you remain unhappy, why then you see I don't know what to do.”
“Oh, I know—I behave very badly!” Lady Cressage had risen, and with visible agitation began now to pace the room. “I deserve to be thrown into the lake—I know it well enough! But Celia—truly—I'm as incapable of understanding it as you are. It must be that I am possessed by devils—like the people in the New Testament. Perhaps someone will come along who can cast them out. I don't seem able to do it myself. I can't rule myself at all. It needs a strength I haven't got!”
“Ah!” said Celia, thoughtfully. The excited sentences which Edith threw over her shoulder as she walked appeared, upon examination, to contain a suggestion.
“My dear child,” she asked abruptly, after a moment's silence, “do you want to marry?”
Lady Cressage paused at the mantel, and exchanged a long steadfast glance with her friend. Then she came slowly forward. “Ah, that is what I don't know,” she answered. Apparently the reply was candid.
Miss Madden pursed her lips, and frowned a little in thought. Then, at some passing reflection, she smiled in a puzzled fashion. At last she also rose, and went to the mantel for another cigarette. “Now I am going to talk plainly,” she said, with decision. “Since the subject is mentioned, less harm will be done by speaking out than by keeping still. There is a debate in your mind on the matter, isn't there?”
The other lady, tall, slender, gently ruminative once more, stood at the window and with bowed head looked down at the lake. “Yes—I suppose it might be called that,” she replied, in a low voice.
“And you hesitate to tell me about it? You would rather not?” Celia, after an instant's pause, went on without waiting for an answer. “I beg that you won't assume my hostility to the idea, Edith. In fact, I'm not sure I don't think it would be the best thing for you to do. Marriage, a home, children—these are great things to a woman. We can say that she pays the price of bondage for them—but to know what that signifies, we must ask what her freedom has been worth to her.”
“Yes,” interposed the other, from the window. “What have I done with my freedom that has been worth while?”
“Not much,” murmured Celia, under her breath. She moved forward, and stood beside Edith, with an arm round her waist. They looked together at the lake.
“It is Lord Plowden, is it not?” asked the American, as the silence grew constrained.
Lady Cressage looked up alertly, and then hesitated over her reply. “No,” she said at last. Upon reflection, and with a dim smile flickering in her side-long glance at Celia, she added, “He wants to marry you, you know.”
“Leave that out of consideration,” said Celia, composedly. “He has never said so. I think it was more his mother's idea than his, if it existed at all. Of course I am not marrying him, or anybody else. But I saw at Hadlow that you and he were—what shall I say?—old friends.”
“He must marry money,” the other replied. In an unexpected burst of candour she went on: “He would have asked me to marry him if I had had money. There is no harm in telling you that. It was quite understood—oh, two years ago. And I think I wished I had the money—then.”
“And you don't wish it now?”
A slight shake of Edith's small, shapely head served for answer. After a little, she spoke in a musing tone: “He is going to have money of his own, very soon, but I don't think it would attract me now. I like him personally, of course, but—there is no career, no ambition, no future.”
“A Viscount has future enough behind him,” observed Celia.
“It doesn't attract me,” the other repeated, vaguely. “He is handsome, and clever, and kind and all that—but he would never appeal to any of the great emotions—nor be capable of them himself He is too smooth, too well-balanced, too much the gentleman. That expresses it badly—but do you see what I mean?”
Celia turned, and studied the beautiful profile beside her, in a steady, comprehending look.
“Yes, I think I see what you mean,” she said, with significance in her tone.
Lady Cressage flushed, and released herself from her companion's arm. “But I don't know myself what I mean!” she exclaimed, despairingly, as she moved away. “I don't know!—I don't know!”
ON the last day of February, Mrs. Dabney was surprised if not exhilarated by a visit from her two children in the little book-shop.
“It's the last day in the world that I should have thought you'd 'a' come out on,” she told them, in salutation—and for comment they all glanced along the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. A gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain slanting through the discredited remnants of a fog, which the east wind had broken up, but could not drive away, and with only now and again a passer-by moving across the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward with chin buried in turned-up collar. In the doorway outside the sulky boy stamped his feet and slapped his sides with his arms in pantomimic mutiny against the task of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers, which nobody would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift.
“I don't know but I'd ought to let the boy bring in the books and go home,” she said, as their vague gaze was attracted by his gestures. “But it isn't three yet—it seems ridiculous to close up. Still, if you'd be more comfortable upstairs—”
“Why, mamma! The idea of making strangers of us,” protested Julia. She strove to make her tone cheerful, but its effect of rebuke was unmistakable.
The mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly at her daughter. The pallid flicker of the gas-jet overhead made her long, listless face seem more devoid of colour than ever.
“But you are as good as strangers, aren't you?” she observed, coldly. “You've been back in town ten days and more, and I've scarcely laid eyes upon either of you. But don't you want to sit down? You can put those parcels on the floor anywhere. Or shall I do it for you?”
Alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against a heap of old magazines tied in bundles. He sprang up now and cleared the chair, but his sister declined it with a gesture. Her small figure had straightened itself into a kind of haughty rigidity.
“There has been so much to do, mamma,” she explained, in a clear, cool voice. “We have had hundreds of things to buy and to arrange about. All the responsibility for the housekeeping rests upon me—and Alfred has his studio to do. But of course we should have looked in upon you sooner—and much oftener—if we had thought you wanted us. But really, when we came to you, the very day after our return, it was impossible for us to pretend that you were glad to see us.”
“Oh, I was glad enough,” Mrs. Dabney made answer, mechanically. “Why shouldn't I be glad? And why should you think I wasn't glad? Did you expect me to shout and dance?”
“But you said you wouldn't come to see us in Ovington Square,” Alfred reminded her.
“That's different,” she declared. “What would I be doing in Ovington Square? It's all right for you to be there. I hope you'll be happy there. But it wouldn't add anything to your happiness to have me there; it would be quite the other way about. I know that, if you DON'T. This is my place, here, and I intend to stick to it!”
Julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn maternal countenance, hardened beyond their wont. “You talk as if there had been some class war declared,” she said, with obvious annoyance. “You know that Uncle Stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice to you as he is to us.”
“Uncle Stormont!” Mrs. Dabney's repetition of the words was surcharged with hostile sarcasm. “But his name was Stormont as much as it was Joel,” broke in Alfred, from his dark corner. “He has a perfect right to use the one he likes best.”
“Oh, I don't dispute his right,” she replied, once more in her passionless monotone. “Everybody can call themselves whatever they please. It's no affair of mine. You and your sister spell your father's name in a way to suit yourselves: I never interfered, did I? You have your own ideas and your own tastes. They are quite beyond me—but they're all right for you. I don't criticize them at all. What I say is that it is a great mercy your uncle came along, with his pockets full of money to enable you to make the most of them. If I were religious I should call that providential.”
“And that's what we DO call it,” put in Julia, with vivacity. “And why should you shut your doors against this Providence, mamma? Just think of it! We don't insist upon your coming to live at Ovington Square at all. Probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself—at least for the present. But when Uncle St—when uncle says there's more than enough money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do things for you—why, he's your own brother! It's as if I should refuse to allow Alfred to do things for me.”
“That you never did,” interposed the young man, gayly. “I'll say that for you, Jule.”
“And never will,” she assured him, with cheerful decision. “But no—mamma—can't you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us to do. You sent us both to much better schools than you could afford, from the time we were of no age at all—and when uncle's money came you sent us to Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we behaved ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason to suppose that you would be—I won't say proud, but at least well satisfied with us—and then it turned out that you didn't like us at all.”
“I never said anything of the sort,” the mother declared, with a touch of animation.
“Oh no—you never said it,” Julia admitted, “but what else can we think you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that—and I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go——”
“But I did want you to go,” Mrs. Dabney affirmed.
“Well, then, when I come back—when we come back, and tell you what splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,—why, you won't even come and look at the house!”
“But I don't want to see it,” the mother retorted; obstinately.
“Well, then, you needn't!” said Alfred, rising. “Nobody will ask you again.” “Oh yes they will,” urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper. That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own will of everybody—and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a Thorpe.
After his disappearance from the scene—unlamented, to the best of Julia's juvenile perceptions—there had been relatively peaceful times in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and her father—a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories—Julia and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons, who would not expect to have their own way.
Alfred and his mother were Thorpes—that is to say, people who necessarily had their own way. Their domination was stained by none of the excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. Their surface temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. Underneath, however, ugly currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a potential existence—and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe temper. A sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument, immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried the Dabney patience. It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her soothing influence between these jarring forces, that she had spent whole years of her life in personal interventions of this sort.
“Oh yes they will,” she repeated, and warned her brother into the background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. “We are your children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be absurd to let anything come between you and us.”
“How could I help letting it come?” demanded the mother, listlessly argumentative. “You had outgrown me and my ways altogether. It was nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and live here again, over the shop. I couldn't think for the life of me what I was going to do with you. But now your uncle has taken all that into his own hands. He can give you the kind of home that goes with your education and your ideas—and what more do you want? Why should you come bothering me?”
“How unjust you are, mamma!” cried Julia, with a glaze of tears upon her bright glance.
The widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly straightening herself, looked down upon her daughter. Her long plain face, habitually grave in expression, conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the fingers of the large, capable hands she clasped before her writhed restlessly against one another, and there was a husky-threat of collapse in her voice as she spoke:
“If you ever have children of your own,” she said, “and you slave your life out to bring them up so that they'll think themselves your betters, and they act accordingly—then you'll understand. But you don't understand now—and there's no good our talking any more about it. Come in whenever it's convenient—and you feel like it. I must go back to my books now.”
She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter. Her children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. With some murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.
Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off Strandward beneath it. She continued to look for a long time, in an aimless, ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the glass of the door. The premature night was closing in miserably, with increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner. At last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet, and striding to the door, rapped sharply on the glass.
“Bring everything in!” she called to the boy, and helped out his apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.
Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the oilskins, Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.
“I think you may go home now,” she said to him, with the laconic abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. “You have a home, haven't you?”
Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people had made about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job, he could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. In confusion he nodded assent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.
“Got a mother?” she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.
“And do you think yourself better than she is?”
The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the fell acuteness of the Dials. “I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't,” he answered, in swift, rasping accents. “She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave—” “Go home!” she bade him, peremptorily—and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the shop.
Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book—the wretched day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history—but loitered about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk, altering the position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily through others. Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the rain-soaked street. A tradesman's assistant, opposite, was rolling the iron shutters down for the night. If business in hats was over for the day, how much more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted with shutters—for what reason she could not guess. The opened pages of numerous volumes were displayed close against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane to get at them. Apparently literature raised no desires in the criminal breast. To close the shop there was nothing to do but lock and bolt the door and turn out the lights. At last, as the conviction of nightfall forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent to put her hand to the key. Then, with a little start of surprise, she stood erect. Someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway, preparatory to entering the shop.
It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. There was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder, she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.
Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. “Do mind what you're about!” she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.
“Shut up the place!” he answered, with lordly geniality. “I've walked all the way from the City in the rain. I wanted the exertion—I couldn't have sat in a cab. Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a talk. God! What things I've got to tell you!”
“There isn't any fire down here,” she said, apologetically, as they edged their way through the restricted alley to the rear. “The old fireplace took up too much room. Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I have an oil-stove in. Usually the gas warms it enough. You don't find it too cold—do you?—with your coat on? Or would you rather come upstairs?”
“Never mind the cold,” he replied, throwing a leg over the stool before the desk. “I can't stay more 'n a minute or two. What do you think we've done today?”
Louisa had never in her life seen her brother look so well as he did now, sprawling triumphantly upon the stool under the yellow gas-light. His strong, heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace. It had acquired an individual distinction of its own. He looked up at her with a clear, bold eye, in which, despite its gloss of good-humour, she discerned a new authority.
The nervous and apprehensive lines had somehow vanished from the countenance, and with them, oddly enough, that lethargic, heavy expression which had been their complement. He was all vigour, readiness, confidence, now. She deemed him almost handsome, this curious, changeable brother of hers, as he beat with his fist in a measured way upon the desk-top to emphasize his words, and fastened his commanding gaze upon her.
“We took very nearly twenty thousand pounds to-day,” he went on. “This is the twenty-eighth of February. A fortnight ago today was the first settlement. I wasn't here, but Semple was—and the working of it is all in his hands. He kept as still as a mouse that first day. They had to deliver to us 26,000 shares, and they hadn't got one, but we didn't make any fuss. The point was, you see, not to let them dream that they were caught in a trap. We didn't even put the price up to par. They had to come to Semple, and say there didn't seem to be any shares obtainable just at the moment, and what would he carry them over at? That means, to let them postpone delivery for another fortnight. He was as smooth as sweet-oil with them, and agreed to carry them over till today without any charge at all. But today it was a little different. The price was up ten shillings above par. That is to say, Semple arranged with a jobber, on the quiet, d'ye see? to offer thirty shillings for our one-pound shares. That offer fixed the making-up price. So then, when they were still without shares to-day, and had to be carried over again, they had to pay ten shillings' difference on each of twenty-six thousand shares, plus the difference between par and the prices they'd sold at. That makes within a few hundreds of 20,000 pounds in cash, for one day's haul. D'ye see?”
She nodded at him, expressively. Through previous talks she had really obtained an insight into the operation, and it interested her more than she would have cared to confess.
“Well, then, we put that 20,000 pounds in our pockets,” he proceeded with a steady glow in his eyes. “A fortnight hence, that is March 14th, we ring the bell on them again, and they march up to the captain's office and settle a second time. Now what happens on the 14th? A jobber makes the price for Semple again, and that settles the new sum they have to pay us in differences. It is for us to say what that price shall be. We'll decide on that when the time comes. We most probably will just put it up another ten shillings, and so take in just a simple 13,000 pounds. It's best in the long run, I suppose, to go slow, with small rises like that, in order not to frighten anybody. So Semple says, at any rate.”
“But why not frighten them?” Louisa asked. “I thought you wanted to frighten them. You were full of that idea a while ago.”
He smiled genially. “I've learned some new wrinkles since then. We'll frighten 'em stiff enough, before we're through with them. But at the start we just go easy. If they got word that there was a 'corner,' there would be a dead scare among the jobbers. They'd be afraid to sell or name a price for Rubber Consols unless they had the shares in hand. And there are other ways in which that would be a nuisance. Presently, of course, we shall liberate some few shares, so that there may be some actual dealings. Probably a certain number of the 5,000 which went to the general public will come into the market too. But of course you see that all such shares will simply go through one operation before they come back to us. Some one of the fourteen men we are squeezing will snap them up and bring them straight to Semple, to get free from the fortnightly tax we are levying on them. In that way we shall eventually let out say half of these fourteen 'shorts,' or perhaps more than half.”
“What do you want to do that for?” The sister's grey eyes had caught a metallic gleam, as if from the talk about gold. “Why let anybody out? Why can't you go on taking their money for ever?”
Thorpe nodded complacently. “Yes—that's what I asked too. It seemed to me the most natural thing, when you'd got 'em in the vise, to keep them there. But when you come to reflect—you can't get more out of a man than there is in him. If you press him too hard, he can always go bankrupt—and then he's out of your reach altogether, and you lose everything that you counted on making out of him. So, after a certain point, each one of the fourteen men whom we're squeezing must be dealt with on a different footing. We shall have to watch them all, and study their resources, as tipsters watch horses in the paddock.
“You see, some of them can stand a loss of a hundred thousand pounds better than others could lose ten thousand. All that we have to know. We can take it as a principle that none of them will go bankrupt and lose his place on the exchange unless he is pressed tight to the wall. Well, our business is to learn how far each fellow is from the wall to start with. Then we keep track of him, one turn of the screw after another, till we see he's got just enough left to buy himself out. Then we'll let him out. See?”
“It's cruel, isn't it?” she commented, calmly meditative, after a little pause.
“Everything in the City is cruel,” he assured her with a light tone. “All speculative business is cruel. Take our case, for example. I estimate in a rough way that these fourteen men will have to pay over to us, in differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand pounds—maybe eight hundred. Well, now, not one of those fellows ever earned a single sovereign of that money. They've taken the whole of it from others, and these others took it from others still, and so on almost indefinitely. There isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been through twenty hands, or fifty for that matter, since the last man who had done some honest work for it parted company with it. Well—money like that belongs to those who are in possession of it, only so long as they are strong enough to hold on to it. When someone stronger still comes along, he takes it away from them. They don't complain: they don't cry and say it's cruel. They know it's the rule of the game. They accept it—and begin at once looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings to recoup themselves on. That's the way the City goes.”
Thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with ruminative slowness. As he lapsed into silence now, he fell to studying his own hands on the desk-top before him. He stretched out the fingers, curved them in different degrees, then closed them tight and turned the bulky hard-looking fists round for inspection in varying aspects.
“That's the kind of hand,” he began again, thoughtfully, “that breaks the Jew in the long run, if there's only grit enough behind it. I used to watch those Jews' hands, a year ago, when I was dining and wining them. They're all thin and wiry and full of veins. Their fingers are never still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's feelers. But there aint any real strength in 'em. They get hold of most of the things that are going, because they're eternally on the move. It's their hellish industry and activity that gives them such a pull, and makes most people afraid of them. But when a hand like that takes them by the throat”—he held up his right hand as he spoke, with the thick uncouth fingers and massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful muscular tension—“when THAT tightens round their neck, and they feel that the grip means business—my God! what good are they?”
He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with a noise which made his sister start. Apparently the diversion recalled something to her mind.
“There was a man in here asking about you today,” she remarked, in a casual fashion. “Said he was an old friend of yours.”
“Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now,” he observed with beaming indifference. “I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and dances and all that. One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter for some salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. I told him I couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will write to remind me. Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in, they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something tremendous. But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth, d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square—that'll be good enough for me. By the way—you haven't been out to see us yet. We're all settled now. You must come at once—why not with me, now?”
Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to lift the lid and search about for something inside.
“He left a card for you,” she said, as she groped among the desk's contents. “I don't know what I did with it. He wrote something on it.”
“Oh, damn him, and his card too,” Thorpe protested easily. “I don't want to see either of them.”
“He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He seemed to act as if you'd want to see him—but I didn't know. I didn't tell him your address.”
Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest, but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention. He sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked sharply up at his sister.
“What was his name?” he asked with abruptness.
“I don't in the least remember,” she made answer, holding the desk-top up, but temporarily suspending her search. “He was a little man, five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair—a kind of Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got back here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether you were in England or not!”
Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of green-bound cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head. “You must find that card!” he told her now, with a vague severity in his voice. “I know the name well enough, but I want to see what he's written. Was it his address, do you remember? The name itself was Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it a woman never knows where she's put anything? Even Julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! They've got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!”
“Oh, I have a good few other things to do,” she reminded him, as she fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. “I can put my hand on any one of four thousand books in stock,” she mildly boasted over her shoulder, “and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell if a single book is missing—and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever knew to do that.”
“Oh of course, you're an exception,” he admitted, under a sense of justice. “But I wish you'd find the card.”
“I know where it is,” she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. “I'd stuck it in the little mirror over the washstand,” she explained.
He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it under the gas-light. “Where is Montague Street?” he asked, with rough directness.
“In Bloomsbury—alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street—I don't know how many others there may be.”
Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat. “Yes—Bloomsbury,” he said hurriedly. “That would be his form. And you say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts—nothing about the Company, eh?” He looked at his watch as he spoke. Evidently the presence of this stranger had excited him a good deal.
“No,” she assured him, reflectively; “no, I'm sure he didn't. From what he said, he doesn't know his way about London very well, or anywhere else, for that matter, I should say.”
Thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a meaning look. “No—he's a shade off in the upper story,” he told her in a confidential tone. “Still, it's important that I should see him,”—and with only a hasty hand-shake he bustled out of the shop.
By the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him on the pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling with his umbrella for a cab.