LORD CHALDON'S instructive little monologue on the subject of the Hebrew in finance afforded Thorpe a certain pleasure, which was in its character, perhaps, more social than intellectual.
It was both a flattering and striking experience to have so eminent a man at the side of one's desk, revealing for one's guidance the secrets of sovereigns and cabinets. Great names were mentioned in the course of this dissertation—mentioned with the authoritative ease of one who dined with princes and prime ministers—and Thorpe felt that he shared in the distinction of this familiarity with the august. He was in the position of paying a salary to this courtly old nobleman and statesman, who could tell him of his own intimate knowledge how Emperors conversed with one another; how the Pope fidgeted in his ornate-carved chair when the visitor talked on unwelcome topics; how a Queen and an opera-bouffe dancer waged an obscure and envenomed battle for the possession of a counting-house strong box, and in the outcome a nation was armed with inferior old muskets instead of modern weapons, and the girl got the difference expressed in black pearls.
These reminiscences seemed to alter the atmosphere, and even the appearance, of the Board Room. It was almost as if the apartment itself was becoming historic, like those chambers they pointed out to the tourist wherein crowned heads had slept. The manner of the Marquis lent itself charmingly to this illusion. He spoke in a facile, mellifluous voice, and as fluently as if he had been at work for a long time preparing a dissertation on this subject, instead of taking it up now by chance. In his tone, in his gestures, in the sustained friendliness of his facial expressions, there was a palpable desire to please his auditor—and Thorpe gave more heed to this than to the thread of the discourse. The facts that he heard now about the Jewish masters of international finance were doubtless surprising and suggestive to a degree, but somehow they failed to stimulate his imagination. Lord Chaldon's statesmanlike discussion of the uses to which they put this vast power of theirs; his conviction that on the whole they were beneficent; his dread of the consequences of any organized attempt to take this power away from them, and put it into other and less capable hands—no doubt it was all very clever and wise, but Thorpe did not care for it.
At the end he nodded, and, with a lumbering movement, altered his position in his chair. The fixed idea of despoiling Rostocker, Aronson, Ganz, Rothfoere, Lewis, and Mendel of their last sixpence had been in no wise affected by this entertaining homily. There appeared to be no need of pretending that it had been. If he knew anything of men and their manners, his titled friend would not object to a change of topic.
“Lord Chaldon,” he said abruptly, “we've talked enough about general matters. While you're here, we might as well go into the subject of the Company. Our annual meeting is pretty nearly due—but I think it would be better to have it postponed. You see, this extraordinary development of dealing in our shares on the Stock Exchange has occupied my entire attention. There has been no time for arranging the machinery of operations on our property in Mexico. It's still there; it's all right. But for the time being, the operations in London are so much more important. We should have nothing to tell our shareholders, if we brought them together, except that their one-pound shares are worth fifteen pounds, and they know that already.”
The Marquis had listened with a shrewdly attentive eye upon the speaker's face. The nervous affection of his eyelids gave him now a minute of blinking leisure in which to frame his comment. “I have not heard that my shares are worth fifteen pounds,” he said then, with a direct, meaning little smile.
“No,” Thorpe laughed, leaning comfortably back in his chair. “That's what I want to talk to you about. You see, when the Company was started, it was impossible to foresee that this dealing in our ordinary shares would swamp everything else. If things had taken their usual course, and we had paid our attention to Mexico instead of to the London Stock Exchange, my deferred vendor's shares, two thousand of which you hold, would by this time be worth a good bit. As it is, unfortunately, they are outside of the deal. They have nothing to do with the movement of the ordinary shares. But of course you understand all that.”
Lord Chaldon assented by an eloquent nod, at once resigned and hopeful.
“Well—that is contrary to all my expectations—and intentions,” Thorpe resumed. “I don't want you to suffer by this unlooked-for change in the shape of things. You hold two thousand shares—only by accident they're the wrong kind of shares. Very well: I'll make them the right kind of shares. I'll have a transfer sent to you tomorrow, so that you can return those vendor's shares to me, and in exchange for them I'll give you two thousand fully-paid ordinary shares. You can sell these at once, if you like, or you can hold them on over one more settlement, whichever you please.”
“This is very munificent,” remarked Lord Chaldon, after an instant's self-communion. His tone was extremely gracious, but he displayed none of the enthusiastic excitement which Thorpe perceived now that he had looked for. The equanimity of Marquises, who were also ex-Ambassadors, was evidently a deeper-rooted affair than he had supposed. This elderly and urbane diplomat took a gift of thirty thousand pounds as he might have accepted a superior cigar.
A brief pause ensued, and was ended by another remark from the nobleman: “I thought for the moment of asking your advice—on this question of selling,” he continued. “But it will be put more appropriately, perhaps, in this way: Let me leave it entirely in your hands. Whatever you do will be right. I know so little of these things—and you know so much.”
Thorpe put out his lips a trifle, and looked away for an instant in frowning abstraction. “If it were put in that way—I think I should sell,” he said. “It's all right for me to take long chances—it's my game—but there's no reason why you should risk things. But let me put it in still another way,” he added, with the passing gleam of a new thought over the dull surface of his eye. “What do you say to our making the transaction strictly between ourselves? Here are shares to bearer, in the safe there. I say that two thousand of them are yours: that makes them yours. I give you my cheque for thirty thousand pounds—here, now, if you like—and that makes them mine again. The business is finished and done with—inside this room. Neither of us is to say anything about it to a soul. Does that meet your views?”
The diplomat pondered the proposition—again with a lengthened perturbation of the eyelids. “It would be possible to suggest a variety of objections, if one were of a sophistical turn of mind,” he said at last, smilingly reflective. “Yet I see no really insuperable obstacle in the path.” He thought upon it further, and went on with an enquiring upward glance directed suddenly at Thorpe: “Is there likely to be any very unpleasant hubbub in the press—when it is known that the annual meeting has been postponed?”
Thorpe shook his head with confidence. “No—you need have no fear of that. The press is all right. It's the talk of the City, I'm told—the way I've managed the press. It isn't often that a man has all three of the papers walking the same chalk-line.”
The Marquis considered these remarks with a puzzled air. Then he smiled faintly. “I'm afraid we're speaking of different things,” he suggested. “Apparently you refer to the financial papers. I had scarcely given them a thought. It does not seem to me that I should mind particularly what they said about me—but I should care a great deal about the other press—the great public press.”
“Oh, what do they know about these things?” said Thorpe, lightly. “So far as I can see, they don't know about anything, unless it gets into the police court, or the divorce court, or a court of some kind. They're the funniest sort of papers I ever saw. Seems as if they didn't think anything was safe to be printed until it had been sworn to. Why anybody should be afraid of them is more than I can see.”
“Nevertheless,” persisted his Lordship, blandly, “I should greatly dislike any public discussion of our Company's affairs. I hope it is quite clear that that can be avoided.”
“Absolutely!” Thorpe told him, with reassuring energy. “Why, discussions don't make themselves. Somebody has to kick before anything gets discussed. And who is to kick here? The public who hold the shares are not likely to complain because they've gone up fifteen hundred or two thousand per cent. And who else has any interest in what the Company, as a Company, does?”
“Ah, that is a question which has occurred to me,” said Lord Chaldon, “and I shall be glad if it is already answered. The only people likely to 'kick,' as you put it so simply, would be, I take it, Directors and other officers of the Company who find themselves holding a class of shares which does not participate in the present rise. I speak with some confidence—because I was in that position myself until a few minutes ago—and I don't mind confessing that I had brought myself to contemplate the contingency of ultimately being compelled to—to 'kick' a little. Of course, so far as I am concerned, events have put me in a diametrically different frame of mind. If I came prepared—I won't say to curse, but to—to criticize—I certainly remain to bless. But you see my point. I of course do not know what you have done as regards the other members of the Board.”
“I don't care about them,” said Thorpe, carelessly. “You are the one that I wished to bring in on the ground-floor. The others don't matter. Of course, I shall do something for them; they shan't be allowed to make trouble—even supposing that it would be in their power to make trouble, which isn't the case. But it won't be done by any means on the same scale that—” he paused abruptly, and the two men tacitly completed his sentence in the glance they exchanged.
The Marquis of Chaldon rose, and took up his hat and stick. “If you will post it to me—in a registered letter—my town house—please,” he remarked, with a charmingly delicate hesitation over the phrases. Then he put out his hand: “I need not say how fully I appreciate your great kindness to my old friend Fromentin. It was a noble action—one I shall always reflect upon with admiration.”
“I hope you won't mention it, though,” said Thorpe, as they shook hands; “either that or—or anything else.”
“I shall preserve the most guarded—the most diplomatic secrecy,” his Lordship assured him, as they walked toward the door.
Thorpe opened this door, and stepped aside, with a half bow, to facilitate the exit of the Marquis, who bent gracious acknowledgment of the courtesy. Then, with an abrupt start of surprise, the two men straightened themselves. Directly in front of them, leaning lightly against the brass-rail which guarded the entrance to the Board Room, stood Lord Plowden.
A certain sense of confusion, unwelcome but inevitable, visibly enveloped this chance meeting. The Marquis blinked very hard as he exchanged a fleeting hand-shake with the younger nobleman, and murmured some indistinguishable commonplaces. Then, with a graceful celerity, which was more than diplomatic, he disappeared. Thorpe, with more difficulty, recovered a sort of stolidity of expression that might pass for composure. He in turn gave his hand to the newcomer, and nodded to him, and achieved a doubtful smile.
“Come in!” he said, haltingly. “Where did you drop from? Glad to see you! How are all your people?”
A moment later the young Viscount was seated in the chair which the elderly Marquis had vacated. He presented therein a figure which, in its way, was perhaps as courtly as the other had been—but the way was widely different. Lord Plowden's fine, lithe form expressed no deference in its easy postures. His handsome face was at no pains to assume conciliatory or ingratiating aspects. His brilliant brown eyes sparkled a confident, buoyant gaze full into the heavy, lethargic countenance of the big man at the desk.
“I haven't bothered you before,” he said, tossing his gloves into his hat, and spreading his frock-coat out by its silk lapels. He crossed his legs, and sat back with a comfortable smile. “I knew you were awfully busy—and I kept away as long as I could. But now—well, the truth is—I'm in rather of a hole. I hope you don't mind my coming.”
“Why not at all,” said Thorpe, laconically. After a momentary pause he added: “The Marquis has just been consulting me about the postponement of the annual meeting. I suppose you agree with us—that it would be better to put it off. There's really nothing to report. Of course, you know more about the situation than he does—between ourselves. The shareholders don't want a meeting; it's enough for them that their shares are worth fifteen or twenty times what they paid for them. And certainly WE don't need a meeting, as things stand now.”
“Ah yes—how do things stand now?” asked Lord Plowden, briskly.
“Well,”—Thorpe eyed his visitor with a moody blankness of gaze, his chin once more buried in his collar—“well, everything is going all right, as far as I can see. But, of course, these dealings in our shares in the City have taken up all my time—so that I haven't been able to give any attention to starting up work in Mexico. That being the case, I shall arrange to foot all the bills for this year's expenses—the rent, the Directors' fees and clerk-hire and so on—out of my own pocket. It comes, all told, to about 2,700 pounds—without counting my extra 1,000 pounds as Managing Director. I don't propose to ask for a penny of that, under the circumstances—and I'll even pay the other expenses. So that the Company isn't losing a penny by our not getting to work at the development of the property. No one could ask anything fairer than that.—And are your mother and sister quite well?”
“Oh, very well indeed, thanks,” replied the other. He relapsed abruptly into a silence which was plainly preoccupied. Something of the radiant cheerfulness with which his face had beamed seemed to have faded away.
“I'm in treaty for a house and a moor in the Highlands”—Thorpe went on, in a casual tone—“in fact, I'm hesitating between three or four places that all seem to be pretty good—but I don't know whether I can get away much before the twentieth. I hope you can contrive to come while I'm there. I should like it very much if you would bring your mother and sister—and your brother too. I have a nephew about his age—a fine young fellow—who'd be company for him. Why can't you say now that you'll all come?”
Lord Plowden emerged from his brown study with the gleam of some new idea on his face. “I might bring my sister,” he said. “My mother hates Scotland. She doesn't go about, either, even in England. But I daresay Winnie would enjoy it immensely. She has a great opinion of you, you know.”
“I only saw her that once,” Thorpe remarked. Some thought behind his words lent a musing effect to the tone in which they were uttered. The brother's contemplative smile seemed a comment upon this tone.
“Women are curious creatures,” he said. “They take fancies and dislikes as swiftly and irresponsibly as cloud-shadows shift and change on a mountain-side in April. But I happen to know that my sister does like you immensely. So does my mother,” he added, with another little smile. He continued to regard Thorpe's face, but there was an increasing uncertainty in his glance. “You've put on flesh, haven't you?” he ventured, after a brief pause. There was the implication in his voice and manner that he observed changes which disconcerted him.
“Not much, I guess,” replied the other, carelessly. “I've been sticking to the City pretty closely. That's all. There's nothing that a fortnight's rest won't put right. I should like it first-rate to have you and your sister come. I'll let you know which place I decide upon. Very likely you can manage to bring her at the same time that some other ladies will be there. I expect Lady Cressage and Miss Madden, you know.”
Lord Plowden stared at his friend. “Are they back? Have they returned to England?” he asked, confusedly.
“Oh, didn't you know?” Thorpe pursued, with an accession of amiability. He visibly had pleasure in the disclosure of the other's ignorance. “They've been in London for two or three weeks. That is, Miss Madden has been taking flying trips to see cathedrals and so on, but Lady Cressage has stayed in town. Their long journeyings have rather done her up.” He looked Plowden straight in the eye, and added with an air of deliberation: “I'm rather anxious about her health.”
The nobleman frankly abandoned his efforts to maintain an undisturbed front. “You—are—anxious,” he repeated, frowning in displeased wonderment.
“Why yes—why not?” demanded Thorpe, with a sudden growl in his voice. As he covered the handsome Viscount with his heavy, intent gaze, impulses of wrath stirred within him. Why should this fop of a lordling put on this air of contemptuous incredulity? “What is there so amazing about that? Why shouldn't I be anxious?”
The peremptory harshness of his manner, and the scowl on his big, lowering face, brought a sort of self-control back to the other. He shrugged his shoulders, with an attempt at nonchalance. “Why not indeed!” he said, as lightly as he could. With hands on knees, he bent forward as if to rise. “But perhaps I'd better come in another day,” he suggested, tentatively. “I'm interrupting you.”
“No—sit still,” Thorpe bade him, and then, with chin settled more determinedly than ever in his cravat, sat eyeing him in a long, dour silence.
Lord Plowden found it impossible to obtain from this massive, apathetic visage any clue to the thoughts working behind it. He chanced to recall the time when he had discussed with Thorpe the meaning and values of this inscrutable expression which the latter's countenance could assume. It had seemed interesting and even admirable to him then—but then he had not foreseen the possibility that he himself might some day confront its adamantine barrier with a sinking heart. All at once he could bear this implacable sphinx-gaze no longer.
“I'm sure some other day would be better,” he urged, with an open overture to propitiation in his tone. “You're not in the mood to be bothered with my affairs today.”
“As much today as any other,” Thorpe answered him, slowly.
The other sat suddenly upright—and then upon a moment's reflection rose to his feet. “I don't in the least know what to make of all this,” he said, with nervous precipitancy. “If I've offended you in any way, say so, and I will apologize at once. But treatment of this sort passes my comprehension.”
Thorpe in truth did not himself comprehend it much more clearly. Some strange freak of wilfulness impelled him to pursue this unintelligible persecution. “I've said nothing about any offense,” he declared, in a hard, deliberate voice. “It is your own word. All the same—I mention the name of a lady—a lady, mind you, whom I met under your own roof—and you strike attitudes and put on airs as if—as if I wasn't good enough!”
“Oh, upon my word, that's all rubbish!” the other broke in. “Nothing could have been further from my thoughts, I assure you. Quite naturally I was surprised for the moment at a bit of unexpected news—but that was all. I give you my word that was all.”
“Very well, then,” Thorpe consented grudgingly to mutter.
He continued his sullen scrutiny of the man standing before him, noting how the vivacity of his bearing had deteriorated in these few minutes. He had cut such a gallant figure when he entered the room, with his sparkling eye and smile, his almost jaunty manner, his superior tailor's plumage—and now he was such a crestfallen and wilted thing! Remembering their last conversation together—remembering indeed how full of liking for this young nobleman he had been when they last met—Thorpe paused to wonder at the fact that he felt no atom of pity for him now. What was his grievance? What had Plowden done to provoke this savage hostility? Thorpe could not tell. He knew only that unnamed forces dragged him forward to hurt and humiliate his former friend. Obscurely, no doubt, there was something about a woman in it. Plowden had been an admirer of Lady Cressage. There was her father's word for it that if there had been money enough he would have wished to marry her. There had been, as well, the General's hint that if the difficulty of Plowden's poverty were removed, he might still wish to marry her—a hint which Thorpe discovered to be rankling with a sudden new soreness in his mind. Was that why he hated Plowden? No—he said to himself that it was not. He was going to marry Lady Cressage himself. Her letter, signifying delicately her assent to his proposal, had come to him that very morning—was in his pocket now. What did he care about the bye-gone aspirations of other would-be suitors? And, as for Plowden, he had not even known of her return to London. Clearly there remained no communications of any sort between them. It was not at all on her account, he assured himself, that he had turned against Plowden. But what other reason could there be? He observed his visitor's perturbed and dejected mien with a grim kind of satisfaction—but still he could not tell why.
“This is all terribly important to me,” the nobleman said, breaking the unpleasant silence. His voice was surcharged with earnestness. “Apparently you are annoyed with something—what it may be I can't for the life of me make out. All I can say is”—and he broke off with a helpless gesture which seemed to imply that he feared to say anything.
Thorpe put out his lips. “I don't know what you mean,” he said, brusquely.
“What I mean”—the other echoed, with bewildered vagueness of glance. “I'm all at sea. I don't in the least grasp the meaning of anything. You yourself volunteered the declaration that you would do great things for me. 'We are rich men together'—those were your own words. I urged you at the time to go slowly—to consider carefully whether you weren't being too generous. I myself said to you that you were ridiculously exaggerating what you called your obligation to me. It was you who insisted upon presenting me with 100,000 shares.”
“Well, they are here ready for you,” said Thorpe, with calculated coldness. “You can have them whenever you please. I promised them to you, and set them aside for you. You can take them away with you now, if you like. What are you kicking up this fuss for, then? Upon my word!—you come here and suggest to me that I made promises to you which I've broken!”
Plowden looked hard at him, as he turned over in his mind the purport of these words. “I see what you are doing,” he said then. “You turn over to me 100,000 vendor's deferred shares. Thanks! I have already 1,000 of them. I keep them in the same box with my father's Confederate bonds.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Thorpe broke in with explosive warmth, lifting himself in his chair.
“Oh, come now, Thorpe,” Plowden retorted, “let's get this talk on an intelligent, common-sense footing.” He had regained something of his self-control, and keenly put forward now to help him all his persuasive graces of eye and speech. He seated himself once more. “I'm convinced that you want to be good to me. Of course you do! If I've seemed here for a minute or two to think otherwise, it was because I misunderstood things. Don't let there be any further misunderstandings! I apologize for doing you the momentary injustice of suspecting that you were going to play off the vendor's shares on me. Of course you said it—but it was a joke.”
“There seems to be a joke somewhere, sure enough,” said Thorpe, in dryly metallic tones—“but it isn't me who's the joker. I told you you should have 100,000 of my 400,000 shares, didn't I? I told you that in so many words. Very well, what more do you want? Here they are for you! I keep my promise to the letter. But you—you seem to think you're entitled to make a row. What do you mean by it?”
“Just a little word”—interposed Plowden, with strenuous calmness of utterance—“what you say may be true enough—yes, I admit it is true as far as it goes. But was that what either of us had in our minds at the time? You know it wasn't! You had just planned a coup on the Stock Exchange which promised you immense rewards. I helped you to pass a bogus allotment through our Board—without which your coup wouldn't have been worth a farthing. You were enthusiastically grateful to me then. In the excitement of the moment you promised me a quarter of all you should make. 'WE ARE BOTH RICH MEN!' I remember those very words of yours. They have never been out of my mind. We discussed the things that we would each do, when we came into this wealth. It was taken for granted in all our talk that your making money meant also my making money. That was the complete understanding—here in London, and while you were at my house. You know it as well as I do. And I refuse to suppose that you seriously intend to sit there and pretend that you meant to give me nothing but an armful of waste paper. It would be too monstrous!”
Thorpe rapped with his nails on the desk, to point the force of his rejoinder: “How do you account for the fact, my Lord”—he gave his words a chillingly scornful precision of utterance—“that I distinctly mentioned 400,000 vendor's shares of mine, 100,000 of which I promised to turn over to you? Those were the specific terms, were they not? You don't deny it? Then what are you talking about?”
“I account for it in this way”—said Plowden, after a moment's baffled reflection: “at that time you yourself hadn't grasped the difference between the two classes of shares. You thought the vendor's shares would play a part in the game. Ah! I see I've hit the mark! That was the way of it!—And now here, Thorpe! Let all that's been said be bye-gones! I don't want any verbal triumph over you. You don't want to wrong me—and yourself too—by sticking to this quibble about vendor's shares. You intended to be deuced good to me—and what have I done that you should round on me now? I haven't bothered you before. I came today only because things are particularly rotten, financially, just now. And I don't even want to hold you to a quarter—I leave that entirely to you. But after all that's been said and done—I put it to you as one man to another—you are morally bound to help me out.”
“How do you mean?—'all that's been said and done'?” Thorpe asked the question in some confusion of moods. Perhaps it was the ethical force of Lord Plowden's appeal, perhaps only a recurring sense of his earlier affection for the man—but for the moment he wavered in his purpose.
The peer flushed a little, as he looked at the floor, revolving possible answers to this query. His ear had been quick to seize the note of hesitation in Thorpe's tone. He strove anxiously to get together considerations which should tip the fluttering balance definitely his way.
“Well,” he began slowly, “I hardly know how to put it. Of course there was, in the first place, the immense expectation of fortune which you gave me, and which I'm afraid I've more than lived up to. And then, of course, others shared my expectations. It wasn't a thing one could very well keep to oneself. My mother and my sister—especially my sister—they were wonderfully excited about it. You are quite the hero in their eyes. And then—you remember that talk we had, in which you said I could help you—socially, you know. I did it a little, just as a start, but of course there's no end to what could be done. You've been too busy heretofore, but we can begin now whenever you like. I don't mind telling you—I've had some thoughts of a possible marriage for you. In point of blood and connections it would be such a match as a commoner hasn't made before in my memory—a highly-cultivated and highly-bred young lady of rank—and settlements could be made so that a considerable quantity of land would eventually come to your son. I needn't tell you that land stands for much more than money, if you happen to set your mind on a baronetcy or a peerage. Of course—I need scarcely say—I mention this marriage only as something which may or may not attract you,—it is quite open to you to prefer another,—but there is hardly anything of that sort in which I and my connections could not be of use to you.”
Even more by the tone and inflection of these words than by the phrases themselves, Thorpe divined that he was being offered the hand of the Hon. Winifred Plowden in marriage. He recalled vividly the fact that once the shadow of some such thought had floated through his own brain; there had been a moment—it seemed curiously remote, like a dream-phantom from some previous state of existence—when he had dwelt with personal interest upon her inheritance from long lines of noblemen, and her relation to half the peerage. Then, swiftly, illogically, he disliked the brother of this lady more than ever.
“All that is talking in the air,” he said, with abrupt decision. “I see nothing in it. You shall have your vendor's shares, precisely as I promised you. I don't see how you can possibly ask for anything more.” He looked at the other's darkling face for a moment, and then rose with unwieldy deliberation. “If you're so hard up though,” he continued, coldly, “I don't mind doing this much for you. I'll exchange the thousand vendor's shares you already hold the ones I gave you to qualify you at the beginning—for ordinary shares. You can sell those for fifteen thousand pounds cash. In fact, I'll buy them of you now. I'll give you a cheque for the amount. Do you want it?”
Lord Plowden, red-faced and frowning, hesitated for a fraction of time. Then in constrained silence he nodded, and Thorpe, leaning ponderously over the desk, wrote out the cheque. His Lordship took it, folded it up, and put it in his pocket without immediate comment.
“Then this is the end of things, is it?” he asked, after an awkward silence, in a voice he strove in vain to keep from shaking.
“What things?” said the other.
Plowden shrugged his shoulders, framed his lips to utter something which he decided not to say, and at last turned on his heel. “Good day,” he called out over his shoulder, and left the room with a flagrant air of hostility.
Thorpe, wandering about the apartment, stopped after a time at the cabinet, and helped himself to a drink. The thing most apparent to him was that of set purpose he had converted a friend into an enemy. Why had he done this? He asked himself the question in varying forms, over his brandy and soda, but no convincing answer came. He had done it because he had felt like doing it. It was impossible to trace motives further than that.
“EDITH will be down in a very few moments,” Miss Madden assured Thorpe that evening, when he entered the drawing-room of the house she had taken in Grafton Street.
He looked into her eyes and smiled, as he bowed over the hand she extended to him. His glance expressed with forceful directness his thought: “Ah, then she has told you!”
The complacent consciousness of producing a fine effect in evening-clothes had given to Mr. Stormont Thorpe habitually now a mildness of manner, after the dressing hour, which was lacking to his deportment in the day-time. The conventional attire of ceremony, juggled in the hands of an inspired tailor, had been brought to lend to his ponderous figure a dignity, and even something of a grace, which the man within assimilated and made his own. It was an equable and rather amiable Thorpe whom people encountered after nightfall—a gentleman who looked impressive enough to have powerful performances believed of him, yet seemed withal an approachable and easy-going person. Men who saw him at midnight or later spoke of him to their womenkind with a certain significant reserve, in which trained womankind read the suggestion that the “Rubber King” drank a good deal, and was probably not wholly nice in his cups.
This, however, could not be said to render him less interesting in any eyes. There was indeed about it the implication of a generous nature, or at the least of a blind side—and it is not unpleasant to discover these attributes in a new man who has made his half-million, and has, or may have, countless favours to bestow.
It was as if his tongue instead of his eyes had uttered the exclamation—“Ah, then she has told you!”—for Miss Madden took it as having been spoken. “I'm not disposed to pretend that I'm overjoyed about it, you know,” she said to him bluntly, as their hands dropped, and they stood facing each other. “If I said I congratulated you, it would be only the emptiest form. And I hate empty forms.”
“Why should you think that I won't make a good husband?” Thorpe asked the question with a good-natured if peremptory frankness which came most readily to him in the presence of this American lady, herself so outspoken and masterful.
“I don't know that I specially doubt it,” she replied. “I suppose any man has in him the makings of what is called a good husband—if the conditions are sufficiently propitious.”
“Well then—what's the matter with the conditions?” he demanded, jocosely.
Miss Madden shrugged her shoulders slightly. Thorpe noted the somewhat luxuriant curves of these splendid shoulders, and the creamy whiteness of the skin, upon which, round the full throat, a chain of diamonds lay as upon satin—and recalled that he had not seen her before in what he phrased to himself as so much low-necked dress. The deep fire-gleam in her broad plaits of hair gave a wonderful brilliancy to this colouring of brow and throat and bosom. He marvelled at himself for discovering only now that she also was beautiful—and then thrilled with pride at the thought that henceforth his life might be passed altogether among beautiful women, radiant in gems and costly fabrics, who would smile upon him at his command.
“Oh, I have no wish to be a kill-joy,” she protested. “I'm sure I hope all manner of good results from the—the experiment.”
“I suppose that's what it comes to,” he said, meditatively. “It's all an experiment. Every marriage in the world must be that—neither more nor less.”
“With all the experience of the ages against its coming out right.” She had turned to move toward a chair, but looked now over her shoulder at him. “Have you ever seen what seemed to you an absolutely happy marriage in your life?”
Upon reflection he shook his head. “I don't recall one on the spur of the minute,” he confessed. “Not the kind, I mean, that you read about in books. But I've seen plenty where the couple got along together in a good, easy, comfortable sort of way, without a notion of any sort of unpleasantness. It's people who marry too young who do most of the fighting, I imagine. After people have got to a sensible age, and know what they want and what they can get along without, why then there's no reason for any trouble. We don't start out with any school-boy and school-girl moonshine.”
“Oh, there's a good deal to be said for the moonshine,” she interrupted him, as she sank upon the sofa.
“Why certainly,” he assented, amiably, as he stood looking down at her. “The more there is of it, the better—if it comes naturally, and people know enough to understand that it is moonshine, and isn't the be-all and end-all of everything.”
“There's a lover for you!” Miss Madden cried, with mirth and derision mingled in her laugh.
“Don't you worry about me,” he told her. “I'm a good enough lover, all right. And when you come to that, if Edith is satisfied, I don't precisely see what——”
“What business it is of mine?” she finished the sentence for him. “You're entirely right. As you say, IF she's satisfied, no one else has anything to do with it.”
“But have you got any right to assume that she isn't satisfied?” he asked her with swift directness—“or any reason for supposing it?”
Miss Madden shook her head, but the negation seemed qualified by the whimsical smile she gave him. “None whatever,” she said—and on the instant the talk was extinguished by the entrance of Lady Cressage.
Thorpe's vision was flooded with the perception of his rare fortune as he went to meet her. He took the hand she offered, and looked into the smile of her greeting, and could say nothing. Her beauty had gathered to it new forces in his eyes—forces which dazzled and troubled his glance. The thought that this exquisite being—this ineffable compound of feeling and fine nerves and sweet wisdom and wit and loveliness—belonged to him seemed too vast for the capacity of his mind. He could not keep himself from trembling a little, and from diverting to a screen beyond her shoulder a gaze which he felt to be overtly dimmed and embarrassed.
“I have kept you waiting,” she murmured.
The soft sound of her voice came to his ears as from a distance. It bore an unfamiliar note, upon the strangeness of which he dwelt for a detached instant. Then its meaning broke in upon his consciousness from all sides, and lighted up his heavy face with the glow of a conqueror's self-centred smile. He bent his eyes upon her, and noted with a controlled exaltation how her glance in turn deferred to his, and fluttered beneath it, and shrank away. He squared his big shoulders and lifted his head. Still holding her jewelled hand in his, he turned and led her toward the sofa. Halting, he bowed with an exaggerated genuflection and flourish of his free hand to Miss Madden, the while he flashed at her a glance at once of challenge and of deprecation. Through the sensitized contact of the other hand, he felt that the woman he held bowed also, and in his own spirit of confused defiance and entreaty. The laugh he gave then seemed to dispel the awkwardness which had momentarily hung over the mocking salutation.
Miss Madden laughed too. “Oh, I surrender,” she said. “You drag congratulations from me.”
Some quality in the tone of this ungracious speech had the effect of putting the party at its ease. Lady Cressage seated herself beside her friend on the sofa, and gently, abstractedly, patted one of her hands. Thorpe remained on his feet, looking down at the pair with satisfied cheerfulness. He tool, a slip of paper from his pocket, to support a statement he was making.
“I'm forever telling you what a strain the City is on a man in my position,” he said—“and today I had the curiosity to keep an account of what happened. Here it is. I had thirty callers. Of those, how many do you suppose came to see me on my own business? Just eight. That is to say, their errands were about investments of mine, but most of them managed to get in some word about axes of their own to grind. All the rest made no pretence at all of thinking about anybody but themselves. I've classified them, one by one, here.
“First, there were six men who wanted me to take shares of one sort or another, and I had to more or less listen to what they tried to make out their companies were like. They were none of them any good. Eight different fellows came to me with schemes that haven't reached the company stage. One had a scheme for getting possession of a nigger republic in the West Indies by raising a loan, and then repudiating all the previous loans. Another wanted me to buy a paper for him, in which he was to support all my enterprises. Another wanted to start a bank—I apparently to find the money, and he the brains. One chap wanted me to finance a theatrical syndicate—he had a bag full of photographs of an actress all eyes and teeth and hair,—and another chap had a scheme all worked out for getting a concession from Spain for one of the Caroline Islands, and putting up a factory there for making porpoise-hide leather.
“Then there were three inventors—let's see, here they are—one with a coiled wire spring for scissors inside a pocket-knife, and one with a bottle, the whole top of which unscrews instead of having a cork or stopper, and one with an electrical fish-line, a fine wire inside the silk, you know, which connects with some battery when a fish bites, and rings a bell, and throws out hooks in various directions, and does all sorts of things.
“Well then, there was a man who wanted me to take the chairmanship of a company, and one who wanted me to guarantee an overdraft at his bank, and two who wanted to borrow money on stock, and one parson-fellow who tried to stick me for a subscription to some Home or other he said he had for children in the country. He was the worst bounder of the lot.
“Well, there's twenty-seven people—and twenty of them strangers to me, and not worth a penny to me, and all trying to get money out of me. Isn't that a dog's life for one?”
“I don't know,” said Miss Madden, contemplatively. “A lady may have twice that number of callers in an afternoon—quite as great strangers to all intents and purposes—and not even have the satisfaction of discovering that they had any object whatever in calling. At least your people had some motive: the grey matter in their brain was working. And besides, one of them might have had something to say which you would value. I don't think that ever happens among a lady's callers; does it, Edith?”
Edith smiled, pleasantly and yet a little wistfully, but said nothing.
“At any rate,” Thorpe went on, with a kind of purpose gathering in his eyes, “none of those fellows cost me anything, except in time. But then I had three callers, almost in a bunch, and one of them took out of me thirty thousand pounds, and another fifteen thousand pounds, and the third—an utter stranger he was—he got an absolute gratuity of ten thousand pounds, besides my consent to a sale which, if I had refused it, would have stood me in perhaps forty or fifty thousand pounds more. You ladies may thank your stars you don't have that kind of callers!”
The sound of these figures in the air brought a constrained look to the faces of the women. Seemingly they confronted a subject which was not to their liking. The American, however, after a moment's pause, took it up in an indifferent manner.
“You speak of an 'absolute gratuity.' I know nothing of London City methods—but isn't ten thousand pounds a gratuity on a rather large scale?”
Thorpe hesitated briefly, then smiled, and, with slow deliberation, drew up a chair and seated himself before them. “Perhaps I don't mind telling you about it,” he began, and paused again. “I had a letter in my mail this morning,” he went on at last, giving a sentimental significance to both tone and glance—“a letter which changed everything in the world for me, and made me the proudest and happiest man above ground. And I put that letter in my pocket, right here on the left side—and it's there now, for that matter”—he put his hand to his breast, as if under the impulse to verify his words by the production of the missive, and then stopped and flushed.
The ladies, watching him, seemed by their eyes to condone the mawkishness of the demonstration which had tempted him. There was indeed a kind of approving interest in their joint regard, which he had not experienced before.
“I had it in my pocket,” he resumed, with an accession of mellow emotion in his voice, “and none of the callers ever got my thoughts very far from that letter. And one of these was an old man—a French banker who must be seventy years old, but dyes his hair a kind of purple black—and it seems that his nephew had got the firm into a terrible kind of scrape, selling 2,000 of my shares when he hadn't got them to sell and couldn't get them—and the old man came to beg me to let him out at present market figures. He got Lord Chaldon—he's my Chairman, you know—to bring him, and introduce him as his friend, and plead for him—but I don't think all that, by itself, would have budged me an atom. But then the old man told how he was just able to scrape together money enough to buy the shares he needed, at the ruling price, and he happened to mention that his niece's marriage portion would have to be sacrificed. Well, then, do you know, that letter in my pocket said something to me....And—well, that's the story. The girl' s portion, I wormed it out of him, was ten thousand...and I struck that much off the figure that I allowed him to buy his shares, and save his firm, for....It was all the letter that did it, mind you!”
He concluded the halting narrative amid a marked silence. The ladies looked at him and at each other, but they seemed surprised out of their facility of comment. In this kind of flustered hush, the door was opened and dinner was announced.
Miss Madden welcomed the diversion by rising with ostentatious vigour. “I will take myself out,” she declared, with cheerful promptness leading the way. Lady Cressage took the arm Thorpe offered her, and gave no token of comprehending that her wrist was being caressingly pressed against his side as they moved along.
At the little table shining in the centre of the dark, cool dining-room, talk moved idly about among general topics. A thunderstorm broke over the town, at an early stage of the dinner, and the sound of the rushing downpour through the open windows, and the breath of freshness which stirred the jaded air, were pleasanter than any speech. Thoughts roved intuitively country-ward, where the long-needed rain would be dowering the landscape with new life—where the earth at sunrise would be green again, and buoyant in reawakened energy, and redolent with the perfumes of sweetest summer. They spoke of the fields and the moors with the longing of tired town-folk in August.
“Oh, when I get away”—said Thorpe, fervently, “it seems to me that I don't want ever to come back. These last few weeks have got terribly on my nerve. And really—why should I come back? I've been asking myself the question—more today than ever before. Of course everything has been different today. But if I'm to get any genuine good out of my—my fortune—I must pull away from the City altogether sometime—and why not now? Of course, some important things are still open—and they have to be watched night and day—but after all, Semple—that's my Broker—he could do it for me. At the most, it won't last more than another six weeks. There is a settlement-day next week, the 15th, and another a fortnight after, on the 29th, and another on September 12th. Well, those three days, if they're worked as I intend they shall be, and nothing unforeseen happens, will bring in over four hundred thousand pounds, and close the 'corner' in Rubber Consols for good. Then I need never see the City again, thank God! And for that matter—why, what is six weeks? It's like tomorrow. I'm going to act as if I were free already. The rain fills me full of the country. Will you both come with me tomorrow or next day, and see the Pellesley place in Hertfordshire? By the photographs it's the best thing in the market. The newest parts of it are Tudor—and that's what I've always wanted.”
“How unexpected you are!” commented Miss Madden. “You are almost the last person I should have looked to for a sentiment about Tudor foundations.”
Thorpe put out his lips a trifle. “Ah, you don't know me,” he replied, in a voice milder than his look had promised. “Because I'm rough and practical, you mustn't think I don't know good things when I see them. Why, all the world is going to have living proof very soon”—he paused, and sent a smile surcharged with meaning toward the silent member of the trio—“living proof that I'm the greatest judge of perfection in beauty of my time.”
He lifted his glass as he spoke, and the ladies accepted with an inclination of the head, and a touch of the wine at their lips, his tacit toast. “Oh, I think I do know you,” said Celia Madden, calmly discursive. “Up to a certain point, you are not so unlike other men. If people appeal to your imagination, and do not contradict you, or bore you, or get in your way, you are capable of being very nice indeed to them. But that isn't a very uncommon quality. What is uncommon in you—at least that is my reading—is something which according to circumstances may be nice, or very much the other way about. It's something which stands quite apart from standards of morals or ethics or the ordinary emotions. But I don't know, whether it is desirable for me to enter into this extremely personal analysis.”
“Oh yes, go on,” Thorpe urged her. He watched her face with an almost excited interest.
“Well—I should say that you possessed a capacity for sudden and capricious action in large matters, equally impatient of reasoning and indifferent to consequences, which might be very awkward, and even tragic, to people who happened to annoy you, or stand in your road. You have the kind of organization in which, within a second, without any warning or reason, a passing whim may have worked itself up into an imperative law—something you must obey.”
The man smiled and nodded approvingly: “You've got me down fine,” he said.
“I talk with a good deal of confidence,” she went on, with a cheerless, ruminative little laugh, “because it is my own organization that I am describing, too. The difference is that I was allowed to exploit my capacity for mischief very early. I had my own way in my teens—my own money, my own power—of course only of a certain sort, and in a very small place. But I know what I did with that power. I spread trouble and misery about me—always of course on a small scale. Then a group of things happened in a kind of climax—a very painful climax—and it shook the nonsense out of me. My brother and my father died—some other sobering things happened...and luckily I was still young enough to stop short, and take stock of myself, and say that there were certain paths I would never set foot on again—and stick to it. But with you—do you see?—power only comes to you when you are a mature man. Experiences, no matter how unpleasant they are, will not change you now. You will not be moved by this occurrence or that to distrust yourself, or reconsider your methods, or form new resolutions. Oh no! Power will be terrible in your hands, if people whom you can injure provoke you to cruel courses——”
“Oh, dear—dear!” broke in Lady Cressage. “What a distressing Mrs. Gummidge-Cassandra you are, Celia! Pray stop it!”
“No—she's right enough,” said Thorpe, gravely. “That's the kind of man I am.”
He seemed so profoundly interested in the contemplation of this portrait which had been drawn of him, that the others respected his reflective silence. He sat for some moments, idly fingering a fork on the table, and staring at a blotch of vivid red projected through a decanter upon the cloth.
“It seems to me that's the only kind of man it's worth while to be,” he added at last, still speaking with thoughtful deliberation. “There's nothing else in the world so big as power—strength. If you have that, you can get everything else. But if you have it, and don't use it, then it rusts and decays on your hands. It's like a thoroughbred horse. You can't keep it idle in the stable. If you don't exercise it, you lose it.”
He appeared to be commenting upon some illustration which had occurred to his own mind, but was not visible to his auditors. While they regarded him, he was prompted to admit them to his confidence.
“There was a case of it today,” he said, and then paused.
“Precisely,” put in Miss Madden. “The fact that some Frenchwoman, of whom you had never heard before, was going to lose her marriage portion caught your attention, and on the instant you presented her with $10,000, an exercise of power which happens to be on the generous side—but still entirely unreasoning, and not deserving of any intellectual respect. And here's the point: if it had happened that somebody else chanced to produce an opposite impression upon you, you would have been capable of taking $50,000 away from him with just as light a heart.”
Thorpe's face beamed with repressed amusement. “As a matter of fact it was that kind of case I was going to mention. I wasn't referring to the girl and her marriage portion. A young man came to me today—came into my room all cock-a-whoop, smiling to himself with the notion that he had only to name what he wanted, and I would give it to him—and——”
He stopped abruptly, with a confused little laugh. He had been upon the brink of telling about Lord Plowden's discomfiture, and even now the story itched upon his tongue. It cost him an effort to put the narrative aside, the while he pondered the arguments which had suddenly reared themselves against publicity. When at last he spoke, it was with a glance of conscious magnanimity toward the lady who had consented to be his wife.
“Never mind,” he said, lightly. “There wasn't much to it. The man annoyed me, somehow—and he didn't get what he came for—that's all.”
“But he was entitled to get it?” asked Celia Madden. Thorpe's lips pouted over a reply. “Well—no,” he said, with a kind of reluctance. “He got strictly what he was entitled to—precisely what I had promised him—and he wrung up his nose at that—and then I actually gave him 15,000 pounds he wasn't entitled to at all.”
“I hardly see what it proves, then,” Edith Cressage remarked, and the subject was dropped.
Some two hours later, Thorpe took his departure. It was not until he was getting into the hansom which had been summoned, that it all at once occurred to him that he had not for a moment been alone with his betrothed. Upon reflection, as the cab sped smoothly forward, this seemed odd to him. He decided finally that there was probably some social rule about such things which he didn't understand.
In the drawing-room of the house in Grafton Street which he had quitted, the two ladies sat with faces averted from each other, in constrained silence.
Edith Cressage rose at last, and took a few aimless steps, with her hands at her hair. “Well—I'm embarked—fairly under way!” she said, in clear-cut, almost provocative tones.
“I don't at all know what to say,” her companion replied, slowly. “I fancy that you exaggerate my disapproval. Perhaps it ought not even to be called disapproval at all. It is only that I am puzzled—and a little frightened.”
“Oh, I am frightened too,” said the other, but with eagerness rather than trepidation in her voice. “That is why I did not give you the signal to leave us alone. I couldn't quite get up the nerve for it. But would you believe it?—that is one of the charms of the thing. There is an excitement about it that exhilarates me. To get happiness through terror—you can't understand that, can you?”
“I'm trying. I think I'm beginning to understand,” said Miss Madden, vaguely.
“Did you ever set yourself to comprehending why Marie Stuart married Bothwell?” asked Edith, looking down upon the other with illuminating fixity. “You have it all—all there. Marie got tired of the smooth people, the usual people. There was the promise of adventure, and risk, and peril, and the grand emotions with the big, dark brute.”
“It isn't a happy story—this parallel that you pick out,” commented Celia, absently.
“Happy! Pah!” retorted Edith, with spirit. “Who knows if it wasn't the only really happy thing in her life? The snobs and prigs all scold her and preach sermons at her—they did it in her lifetime: they do it now——” “Oh come, I'm neither a snob nor a prig,” put in Celia, looking up in her turn, and tempering with a smile the energy of her tone—“I don't blame her for her Bothwell; I don't criticize her. I never was even able to mind about her killing Darnley. You see I take an extremely liberal view. One might almost call it broad. But if I had been one of her ladies—her bosom friends—say Catherine Seton—and she had talked with me about it—I think I should have confessed to some forebodings—some little misgivings.”
“And do you know what she would have said?” Edith's swift question, put with a glowing face and a confident voice, had in it the ring of assured triumph. “She would have answered you: 'My dearest girl, all my life I have done what other people told me to do. In my childhood I was given in marriage to a criminal idiot. In my premature widowhood I was governed by a committee of scoundrels of both sexes until another criminal idiot was imposed upon me as a second husband. My own personality has never had the gleam of a chance. I have never yet done any single thing because I wanted to do it. Between first my politician-mother and her band of tonsured swindlers, and then my cantankerous brother and his crew of snarling and sour-minded preachers, and all the court liars and parasites and spies that both sides surrounded me with, I have lived an existence that isn't life at all. I purport to be a woman, but I have never been suffered to see a genuine man. And now here is one—or what I think to be one—and I'm given to understand that he is a pirate and a murderer and an unspeakable ruffian generally—but he takes my fancy, and he has beckoned to me to come to him, and so you will kindly get me my hat and jacket and gloves.' That's what she would have said to you, my dear.”
“And I”—said Celia, rising after a moment's pause, and putting her hand upon Edith's arm—“I would have answered, 'Dearest lady, in whatever befalls, I pray you never to forget that I am to the end your fond and devoted and loyal servant.'”