IN the noon hour of the following day was enacted the brief final scene in the drama of the “Rubber Consols corner.”
For long weeks, Mr. Stormont Thorpe had given much thought to this approaching climax of his great adventure—looking forward to it both as the crowning event of his life, and as the dawn of a new existence in some novel, enchanted world. It was to bring his triumph, and even more, his release. It was at once to crown him as a hero and chieftain among City men, and transfigure him into a being for whom all City things were an abomination. In his waking hours, the conflict between these aims did not specially force itself upon his attention: he mused upon, and spun fancies about, either one indifferently, and they seemed not at all irreconcilable. But his dreams were full of warfare,—wearily saturated with strife, and endless endeavour to do things which could not be done, and panic-stricken terrors before the shadow of shapeless calamities,—until he dreaded to go to sleep. Then he discovered that an extra two glasses of whiskey-and-water would solve that particular difficulty, and send him into prompt, leaden slumber—but the early mornings remained as torturing as ever. In the twilight he awoke oppressed and sick at heart with gloom—and then dozed at intervals through fantastic new ordeals of anguish and shame and fear, till it was decently possible to get up.
Then, indeed, the big cold sponge on his head and spine scattered these foolish troubles like chaff, and restored to him his citizenship among the realities. He dressed with returning equanimity, and was almost cheerful by the time he thrust his razor into the hot water. Yet increasingly he was conscious of the wear and strain of it all, and increasingly the date, September twelfth, loomed before him with a portentous individuality of its own.
This day grew to mean so much more to him than had all the other days of the dead years together that he woke in the darkness of its opening hours, and did not get satisfactorily to sleep again. His vigil, however, was for the once free from grief. He drowsily awaited the morning in vague mental comfort; he had recurring haphazard indolent glimpses of a protecting fact standing guard just outside the portals of consciousness—the fact that the great day was here. He rose early, breakfasted well, and walked by the Embankment to the City, where at ten he had a few words with Semple, and afterward caused himself to be denied to ordinary callers. He paced up and down the Board Room for the better part of the ensuing two hours, luxuriating in the general sense of satisfaction in the proximity of the climax, rather than pretending to himself that he was thinking out its details. He had provided in his plans of the day for a visit from Messrs. Rostocker and Aronson, which should constitute the dramatic finale of the “corner,” and he looked forward to this meeting with a certain eagerness of expectation. Yet even here he thought broadly of the scene as a whole, and asked himself no questions about words and phrases. It seemed to be taken for granted in his mind that the scene itself would be theatrically impressive, even spectacular.
In the event, this long-awaited culmination proved to be disappointingly flat and commonplace. It was over before Thorpe had said any considerable proportion of the things he saw afterward that he had intended to say. The two men came as he had expected they would—and they bought their way out of the tragic “corner” at precisely the price he had nominated in his mind. But hardly anything else went as he had dimly prefigured it.
Mr. Rostocker was a yellow-haired man, and Mr. Aronson was as dark as a Moor, and no physical resemblance of features or form suggested itself to the comparing eye, yet Thorpe even now, when they stood brusquely silent before him, with their carefully-brushed hats pulled down over their eyes, stuck to it in his own mind that it was hard to tell them apart. To the end, there was something impersonal in his feeling toward them. They, for their part, coldly abstained from exhibiting a sign of feeling about him, good, bad, or indifferent.
It was the man with the fair hair and little curly flaxen beard who spoke: “How do you do! I understand that we can buy eight thousand five hundred Rubber Consols from you at 'twenty-three.'”
“No—twenty-five,” replied Thorpe.
The dark man spoke: “The jobbers' price is twenty-three.”
“To carry over—yes,” Thorpe answered. “But to buy it is twenty-five.”
The two sons of the race which invented mental arithmetic exchanged an alert glance, and looked at the floor for an engrossed instant.
“I don't mind telling you,” Thorpe interposed upon their silence, “I put on that extra two pounds because you got up that story about applying to the Stock Exchange Committee on a charge of fraud.”
“We didn't get up any story,” said Rostocker, curtly.
“You tried to plant it on us,” Aronson declared.
“One of your own Directors put it about. I thought it was a fake at the time.”
This view of the episode took Thorpe by surprise. As it seemed, in passing, to involve a compliment to his own strategic powers, he accepted it without comment. “Well—it is twenty-five, anyway,” he told them, with firmness.
“Twenty-four,” suggested Aronson, after another momentary pause.
“Not a shilling less than twenty-five,” Thorpe insisted, with quiet doggedness.
“We can always pay our creditors and let you whistle,” Rostocker reminded him, laconically.
“You can do anything you like,” was the reply, “except buy Rubber Consols under twenty-five. It doesn't matter a fig to me whether you go bankrupt or not. It would suit me as well to have you two 'hammered' as to take your money.” Upon the spur of a sudden thought he drew out his watch. “In just two minutes' time to a tick, the price will be thirty.”
“Let's be 'hammered' then!” said Aronson to his companion, with simulated impulsiveness.
Rostocker was the older and stronger man, and when at last he spoke it was with the decision of one in authority. “It is your game,” he said, with grave imperturbability. “Eight thousand five hundred at twenty-five. Will you deliver at the Credit Lyonnais in half an hour?”
Thorpe nodded, impassively. Then a roving idea of genial impertinence brought a gleam to his eye. “If you should happen to want more Rubber Consols at any time,” he said, with a tentative chuckle, “I could probably let you have them at a reduced price.”
The two received the pleasantry without a smile, but to Thorpe's astonishment one of them seemed to discern something in it beside banter. It was Rostocker who said: “Perhaps we may make a deal with you,” and apparently meant it.
They went out at this, ignoring ceremony upon their exit as stolidly as they had done upon their entrance, and a moment later Thorpe called in the Secretary, and despatched a messenger to bring Semple from Capel Court. The formalities of this final transfer of shares had been dictated to the former, and he had gone off on the business, before the Broker arrived.
Thorpe stood waiting near the door, and held out his hand with a dramatically significant gesture when the little Scotchman entered. “Put her there!” he exclaimed heartily, with an exuberant reversion to the slang of remote transatlantic bonhomie.
“Yeh've done it, then!” said Semple, his sharp face softening with pleasure at the news. “Yeh've pulled it off at twenty-three!”
The other's big countenance yielded itself to a boyish grin. “Twenty-FIVE!” he said, and laughed aloud. “After you left this morning, it kind o' occurred to me that I'd raise it a couple of pounds. I found I was madder about those pieces in the newspapers than I thought I was, and so I took an extra seventeen thousand pounds on that account.”
“God above!” Semple ejaculated, with a satisfaction through which signs of an earlier fright were visible. “It was touch-and-go if you didn't lose it all by doing that! You risked everything, man!”
Thorpe ponderously shrugged his shoulders. “Well—I did it, anyhow, and it came off,” was his comment. Then, straightening himself, he drew a long, long breath, and beamed down at the little man. “Think of it! God! It's actually all over! And NOW perhaps we won't have a drink! Hell! Let's send out for some champagne!” His finger was hovering over the bell, when the Broker's dissuading voice arrested it. “No, no!” Semple urged. “I wouldn't touch it. It's no fit drink for the daytime—and it's a scandal in an office. Your clerks will aye blab it about hither and yon, and nothing harms a man's reputation more in the City.”
“Oh, to hell with the City!” cried Thorpe, joyously. “I'm never going to set foot in it again. Think of that! I mean it!”
None the less, he abandoned the idea of sending out for wine, and contented himself with the resources of the cabinet instead. After some friendly pressure, Semple consented to join him in a brandy-and-soda, though he continued to protest between sips that at such an hour it was an indecent practice.
“It's the ruin of many a strong man,” he moralized, looking rather pointedly at Thorpe over his glass. “It's the principal danger that besets the verra successful man. He's too busily occupied to take exercise, and he's too anxious and worried to get his proper sleep—but he can always drink! In one sense, I'm not sorry to think that you're leaving the City.”
“Oh, it never hurts me,” Thorpe said, indifferently accepting the direction of the homily. “I'm as strong as an ox. But all the same, I shall be better in every way for getting out of this hole. Thank God, I can get off to Scotland tomorrow. But I say, Semple, what's the matter with your visiting me at my place there? I'll give you the greatest shooting and fishing you ever heard of.”
The Broker was thinking of something else. “What is to be the precise position of the Company, in the immediate future?” he asked.
“Company? What Company?”
Semple smiled grimly. “Have you already forgotten that there is such a thing?” he queried, with irony. “Why, man, this Company that paid for this verra fine Board-table,” he explained, with his knuckles on its red baize centre.
Thorpe laughed amusedly. “I paid for that out of my own pocket,” he said. “For that matter everything about the Company has come out of my pocket——”
“Or gone into it,” suggested the other, and they chuckled together.
“But no—you're right,” Thorpe declared. “Some thing ought to be settled about the Company, I suppose. Of course I wash my hands of it—but would anybody else want to go on with it? You see its annual working expenses, merely for the office and the Board, foot up nearly 3,000 pounds. I've paid these for this year, but naturally I won't do it again. And would it be worth anybody else's while to do it? Yours, for example?”
“Have you had any explanations with the other Directors?” the Broker asked, thoughtfully.
“Explanations—no,” Thorpe told him. “But that's all right. The Marquis has been taken care of, and so has Plowden. They're game to agree to anything. And let's see—Kervick is entirely my man. That leaves Watkin and Davidson—and they don't matter. They're mere guinea-pigs. A few hundreds apiece would shut them up, if you thought it was worth while to give them anything at all.”
“And about the property,—the rubber plantation,—that the Company was formed to acquire and develop. I suppose there really is such a plantation?”
“Oh, yes, it's all there right enough,” Thorpe said, briefly.
“It's no good, though, is it?” the Broker asked, with affable directness.
“Between ourselves, it isn't worth a damn,” the other blithely assured him.
The Scotchman mused with bent brows. “There ought still to be money in it,” he said, with an air of conviction.
“By the way,” it occurred to Thorpe to mention, “here's something I didn't understand. I told Rostocker here, just as a cheeky kind of joke, that after he and Aronson had got their eight thousand five hundred, if they thought they'd like still more shares, I'd let 'em have 'em at a bargain—and he seemed to take it seriously. He did for a fact. Said perhaps he could make a deal with me.”
“Hm-m!” said Semple, reflectively. “I'll see if he says anything to me. Very likely he's spotted some way of taking the thing over, and reorganizing it, and giving it another run over the course. I'll think it out. And now I must be off. Aren't you lunching?”
“No—I'll have the boy bring in some sandwiches,” Thorpe decided. “I want my next meal west of Temple Bar when I get round to it. I've soured on the City for keeps.”
“I wouldn't say that it had been so bad to you, either,” Semple smilingly suggested, as he turned to the door.
Thorpe grinned in satisfied comment. “Hurry back as soon as you've finally settled with Rostocker and the other fellow,” he called after him, and began pacing the floor again.
It was nearly four o'clock when these two men, again together in the Board Room, and having finished the inspection of some papers on the desk, sat upright and looked at each other in tacit recognition that final words were to be spoken.
“Well, Semple,” Thorpe began, after that significant little pause, “I want to say that I'm damned glad you've done so well for yourself in this affair. You've been as straight as a die to me,—I owe it as much to you as I do to myself,—and if you don't think you've got enough even now, I want you to say so.”
He had spoken in tones of sincere liking, and the other answered him in kind. “I have more than I ever dreamed of making in a lifetime when I came to London,” he declared. “If my father were alive, and heard me tell him that in one year, out of a single transaction, I had cleared over sixty-five thousand pounds, he'd be fit to doubt the existence of a Supreme Being. I'm obliged to you for your good words, Thorpe. It's not only been profitable to work with you, but it has been a great education and a great pleasure as well.”
Thorpe nodded his appreciation. “I'm going to ask a favour of you,” he said. “I want to leave the general run of my investments and interests here in your hands, to keep track of I don't want to speculate at all, in the ordinary meaning of the word. Even after I bury a pot of money in non-productive real estate, I shall have an income of 50,000 pounds at the very least, and perhaps twice as much. There's no fun in gambling when you've got such a bank as that behind you. But if there are good, wise changes to be made in investments, or if things turn up in the way of chances that I ought to know about, I want to feel that you're on the spot watching things and doing things in my interest. And as it won't be regular broker's work, I shall want to pay you a stated sum—whatever you think is right.”
“That will arrange itself easily enough,” said Semple. “I shall have the greatest pleasure in caring for whatever you put in my hands. And I think I can promise that it will be none the worse for the keeping.”
“I don't need any assurance on that score,” Thorpe declared, cordially. “You're the one sterling, honest man I've known in the City.”
It was the Broker's turn to make a little acknowledging bow. His eyes gleamed frank satisfaction at being so well understood. “I think I see the way that more money can be made out of the Company,” he said, abruptly changing the subject. “I've had but a few words with Rostocker about it—but it's clear to me that he has a plan. He will be coming to you with a proposition.”
“Well, he won't find me, then,” interposed Thorpe, with a comfortable smile. “I leave all that to you.”
“I suspect that his plan,” continued Semple, “is to make a sub-rosa offer of a few shillings for the majority of the shares, and reconstitute the Board, and then form another Company to buy the property and good-will of the old one at a handsome price. Now if that would be a good thing for him to do, it would be a good thing for me to do. I shall go over it all carefully, in detail, this evening. And I suppose, if I see my way clear before me, than I may rely upon your good feeling in the matter. I would do all the work and assume all the risk, and, let us say, divide any profits equally—you in turn giving me a free hand with all your shares, and your influence with the Directors.”
“I'll do better still,” Thorpe told him, upon brief reflection. “Reconstitute the Board and make Lord Plowden Chairman,—I don't imagine the Marquis would have the nerve to go on with it,—and I'll make a free gift of my shares to you two—half and half. You'll find him all right to work with,—if you can only get him up in the morning,—and I've kind o' promised him something of the sort. Does that suit you?” Semple's countenance was thoughtful rather than enthusiastic. “I'm more skeptical about Lords than you are,” he observed, “but if he's amenable, and understands that his part is to do what I tell him to do, I've no doubt we shall hit it off together.”
“Oh, absolutely!” said Thorpe, with confidence. “I'll see to it that he behaves like a lamb. You're to have an absolutely free hand. You're to do what you like,—wind the Company up, or sell it out, or rig it up under a new name and catch a new set of gudgeons with it,—whatever you damned please. When I trust a man, I trust him.”
The two friends, their faces brightened and their voices mellowed by this serene consciousness of their mutual trust in each other's loyalty and integrity, dwelt no further upon these halcyon beginnings of a fresh plan for plundering the public. They spoke instead on personal topics—of the possibility of Semple's coming to Scotland during the autumn, and of the chance of Thorpe's wintering abroad. All at once Thorpe found himself disclosing the fact of his forthcoming marriage, though he did not mention the name of the lady's father, and under the gracious stress of this announcement they drank again, and clinked glasses fervently. When Semple at last took his leave, they shook hands with the deep-eyed earnestness of comrades who have been through battle and faced death together.
It was not until Thorpe stood alone that the full realizing sense of what the day meant seemed to come to him. Fruition was finally complete: the last winnowing of the great harvest had been added to the pile. Positively nothing remained for him but to enter and enjoy!
He found it curiously difficult to grasp the thought in its entirety. He stood the master of unlimited leisure for the rest of his life, and of power to enrich that life with everything that money could buy,—but there was an odd inability to feel about it as he knew he ought to feel.
Somehow, for some unaccountable reason, an absurd depression hovered about over his mind, darkening it with formless shadows. It was as if he were sorry that the work was all finished—that there was nothing more for him to do. But that was too foolish, and he tried to thrust it from him. He said with angry decision to himself that he had never liked the work; that it had all been unpleasant and grinding drudgery, tolerable only as a means to an end; that now this end had been reached, he wanted never to lay eyes on the City again.
Let him dwell instead upon the things he did want to lay eyes upon. Some travel no doubt he would like, but not too much; certainly no more than his wife would cheerfully accept as a minimum. He desired rather to rest among his own possessions. To be lord of the manor at Pellesley Court, with his own retinue of servants and dependents and tenants, his own thousands of rich acres, his own splendid old timber, his own fat stock and fleet horses and abundant covers and prize kennels—THAT was what most truly appealed to him. It was not at all certain that he would hunt; break-neck adventure in the saddle scarcely attracted him. But there was no reason in the world why he should not breed racing horses, and create for himself a distinguished and even lofty position on the Turf. He had never cared much about races or racing folk himself, but when the Prince and Lord Rosebery and people like that went in for winning the Derby, there clearly must be something fascinating in it.
Then Parliament, of course; he did not waver at all from his old if vague conception of a seat in Parliament as a natural part of the outfit of a powerful country magnate. And in a hundred other ways men should think of him as powerful, and look up to him. He would go to church every Sunday, and sit in the big Squire's pew. He would be a magistrate as a matter of course, and he would make himself felt on the County Council. He would astonish the county by his charities, and in bad years by the munificence of his reductions in rents. Perhaps if there were a particularly bad harvest, he would decline all over his estate to exact any rent whatever. Fancy what a noble sensation that would make! A Duke could do no more.
It was very clear to him now that he desired to have children of his own,—say two at least, a son and a daughter, or perhaps a son and two daughters: two little girls would be company for each other. As he prefigured these new beings, the son was to exist chiefly for purposes of distinction and the dignity of heirship, and the paternal relations with him would be always somewhat formal, and, though affectionate, unexpansive. But the little girls—they would put their arms round their father's neck, and walk out with him to see the pigs and the dogs, and be the darlings of his heart. He would be an old man by the time they grew up.
A beatific vision of himself took form in his mind—of himself growing grey and pleasurably tired, surrounded by opulence and the demonstrative respect of everybody, smiling with virtuous content as he strolled along between his two daughters, miracles of beauty and tenderness, holding each by a hand.
The entrance of a clerk broke abruptly upon this daydream. He had a telegram in his hand, and Thorpe, rousing himself with an effort, took the liver-coloured envelope, and looked blankly at it. Some weird apprehension seized upon him, as if he belonged to the peasant class which instinctively yokes telegrams and calamities together. He deferred to this feeling enough to nod dismissal to the clerk, and then, when he was again alone, slowly opened the message, and read it:
“Newcastle-on-Tyne, September 12. Our friend died at Edinboro this morning. See you at hotel this evening.—Kervick.”
What Thorpe felt at first was that his two daughters had shrunk from him with swift, terrible aversion: they vanished, along with every phase of the bright vision, under a pall of unearthly blackness. He stood in the centre of a chill solitude, staring stupidly at the coarse, soft paper.
The premonition, then, had justified itself! Something had told him that the telegram was an evil thing. A vaguely superstitious consciousness of being in the presence of Fate laid hold upon him. His great day of triumph had its blood-stain. A victim had been needful—and to that end poor simple, silly old Tavender was a dead man. Thorpe could see him,—an embarrassing cadaver eyed by strangers who did not know what to do with it,—fatuous even in death.
A sudden rage at Kervick flamed up. He clearly had played the fool—clumsily over-plying the simpleton with drink till he had killed him. The shadow of murder indubitably hung over the thing. And then—the crass witlessness of telegraphing! Already, doubtless, the police of Edinborough were talking over the wires with Scotland Yard. A reference to a death in Edinborough, in a telegram from Newcastle—it was incredible that this should escape the eye of the authorities. Any minute might bring a detective through that door there—following into the Board Room with his implacable scent the clue of blood. Thorpe's fancy pictured this detective as a momentarily actual presence—tall, lean, cold-eyed, mysteriously calm and fatally wise, the omniscient terror of the magazine short-stories.
He turned faint and sick under a spasm of fright. The menace of enquiry became something more than a threat: he felt it, like the grip of a constable upon his arm. Everything would be mercilessly unravelled. The telegram of the idiot Kervick would bring the police down upon him like a pack of beagles. The beliefs and surmises of the idiot Gafferson would furnish them with the key to everything. He would have his letter from Tavender to show to the detectives—and the Government's smart lawyers would ferret out the rest. The death of Tavender—they could hardly make him responsible for that; but it was the dramatic feature of this death which would inspire them all to dig up everything about the fraud. It was this same sensational added element of the death, too, which would count with a jury. They were always gross, sentimental fools, these juries. They would mix up the death and the deal in Rubber Consols, and in their fat-headed confusion would say “Penal Servitude—fourteen years.” Or no, it was the Judge who fixed that. But the Judges were fools, too; they were too conceited, too puffed up with vanity, to take the trouble to understand. He groaned aloud in a nightmare of helplessness.
The sound of his own voice, moaning in his ears, had a magical effect upon him. He lifted his head, gazed about him, and then flushed deeply. His nerveless cowardice had all at once become unbelievable to himself. With a shamed frown he straightened himself, and stood thus for a long minute, engrossed in the definite task of chasing these phantoms from his mind. Once a manly front was displayed to them, they slunk away with miraculous facility. He poured out some brandy, and sipped it neat, and laughed scornfully, defiantly, aloud.
He had over half a million—with power and force and courage enough to do with it what he liked. He had fought luck undauntedly, unwearyingly, during all those years when his hands were empty. Was he to tremble and turn tail now, when his hands were full, when he was armoured and weaponed at every point? He was amazed and hurt, and still more enraged, at that fit of girlish weakness which had possessed him. He could have beaten himself with stripes for it. But it could never happen again—never, never!
He told himself that with proud, resolute reiteration, as he got his hat and stick, and put in his pockets one or two papers from the desk, and then glanced about the Board Room for what was, most likely, the last time. Here he had won his great victory over Fate, here he had put his enemies under his feet, and if innocent simpletons had wandered into the company of these foes, it mattered not a whit to him that they also had been crushed. Figuratively, he turned his back upon them now; he left them, slain and trampled, in the Board Room behind him. They no longer concerned him.
Figuratively, too, as he walked with firmness to the door, he stepped over the body of old Tavender, upon the threshold, and bestowed upon it a downward mental glance, and passed on. By the time he reached the street, the memory of Tavender had become the merest shred of a myth. As he strode on, it seemed to him that his daughters came again, and took his hands, and moved lovingly beside him—lovingly and still more admiringly than before.
BY the autumn of the following year, a certain small proportion of the people inhabiting the district in Hertfordshire which set its clocks by the dial over the stable-tower of Pellesley Court had accustomed themselves to give the place its new name of High Thorpe. These were for the most part the folk of peculiarly facile wits and ready powers of adaptation, like pushing small tradesmen, and the upper servants in county houses. An indolent and hazy compromise upon Pellesley Thorpe had drifted into use by perhaps a larger number. To the puzzled conservatism of the abiding huge majority nearest to the soil—the round-backed, lumpish men who tie strings round their corduroys under the knee, and the strong, cow-faced women who look at passers-by on the road from the doors of dark little cottages, over radiant patches of blossoming garden—it seemed safest to drop family names altogether, and call it merely the Court.
It stood proudly upon what was rather a notable elevation for those flat parts—a massive mansion of simple form, built of a grey stone which seemed at a distance almost white against the deep background of yews and Italian pines behind it. For many miles seaward this pale front was a landmark. From the terrace-walk at its base, one beheld a great expanse of soft green country, sloping gently away for a long distance, then stretching out upon a level which on misty days was interminable. In bright weather, the remote, low-lying horizon had a defining line of brownish-blue—and this stood for what was left of a primitive forest, containing trees much older than the Norman name it bore. It was a forest which at some time, no doubt, had extended without a break till it merged into that of Epping—leagues away to the south. The modern clearance and tillage, however, which separated it now from Epping had served as a curiously effective barrier—more baffling than the Romans and Angles in their turn had found the original wildwood. No stranger seemed ever to find his way into that broad, minutely-cultivated fertile plain which High Thorpe looked down upon. No railway had pushed its cheapening course across it. Silent, embowered old country roads and lanes netted its expanse with hedgerows; red points of tiled roofs, distinguishable here and there in clusters among the darker greens of orchards, identified the scattered hamlets—all named in Domesday Book, all seemingly unchanged since. A grey square church-tower emerging from the rooks' nests; an ordered mass of foliage sheltering the distant gables and chimneys of some isolated house; the dim perception on occasion that a rustic waggon was in motion on some highway, crawling patiently like an insect—of this placid, inductive nature were all the added proofs of human occupation that the landscape offered.
Mr. Stormont Thorpe, on an afternoon of early October, yawned in the face of this landscape—and then idly wondered a little at the mood which had impelled him to do so. At the outset of his proprietorship he had bound himself, as by a point of honour, to regard this as the finest view from any gentleman's house in England. During the first few months his fidelity had been taxed a good deal, but these temptations and struggles lay now all happily behind him. He had satisfactorily assimilated the spirit of the vista, and blended it with his own. Its inertia, when one came to comprehend it, was undeniably magnificent, and long ago he had perceived within himself the growth of an answering repose, a responsive lethargy, which in its full development was also going to be very fine. Practically all the land this side of the impalpable line where trees and houses began to fade into the background belonged to him; there were whole villages nestling half-concealed under its shrubberies which were his property. As an investment, these possessions were extremely unremunerative. Indeed, if one added the cost of the improvements which ought to be made, to the expenditure already laid out in renovations, it was questionable if for the next twenty years they would not represent a deficit on the income-sheet. But, now that he had laid hold of the local character, it pleased him that it should be so. He would not for the world have his gentle, woolly-minded, unprofitable cottagers transformed into “hustlers”; it would wound his eye to see the smoke of any commercial chimney, the smudge of any dividend-paying factory, staining the pure tints of the sylvan landscape. He had truly learned to love it.
Yet now, as he strolled on the terrace with his first after-luncheon cigar, he unaccountably yawned at the thing he loved. Upon reflection, he had gone to bed rather earlier the previous evening than usual. He had not been drinking out of the ordinary; his liver seemed right enough. He was not conscious of being either tired or drowsy. He looked again at the view with some fixity, and said to himself convincingly that nothing else in England could compare with it. It was the finest thing there was anywhere. Then he surprised himself in the middle of another yawn—and halted abruptly. It occurred to him that he wanted to travel.
Since his home-coming to this splendid new home in the previous January, at the conclusion of a honeymoon spent in Algiers and Egypt, he had not been out of England. There had been a considerable sojourn in London, it is true, at what was described to him as the height of the Season, but looking back upon it, he could not think of it as a diversion. It had been a restless, over-worked, mystifying experience, full of dinners to people whom he had never seen before, and laborious encounters with other people whom he did not particularly want to see again. There had been no physical comfort in it for him, and little more mental satisfaction, for Londoners, or rather people in London, seemed all to be making an invidious distinction in their minds between him and his wife. The fact that she continued to be called Lady Cressage was not of itself important to him. But in the incessant going about in London, their names were called out together so often that his ear grew sensitive and sore to the touch of the footmen's reverberations. The meaning differentiation which the voices of the servants insisted upon, seemed inevitably reflected in the glance and manner of their mistresses. More than anything else, that made him hate London, and barred the doors of his mind to all thoughts of buying a town-house.
His newly-made wife, it is true, had not cared much for London, either, and had agreed to his decision against a town-house almost with animation. The occasion of their return from the hot bustle of the metropolis to these cool home shades—in particular the minute in which, at a bend in the winding carriage-way down below, they had silently regarded together the spectacle uplifted before them, with the big, welcoming house, and the servants on the terrace—had a place of its own in his memory. Edith had pressed his arm, as they sat side by side in the landau, on the instant compulsion of a feeling they had in common. He had never, before or since, had quite the same assurance that she shared an emotion with him.
He was very far, however, from finding fault with his wife. It was in the nature of the life he chose to lead that he should see a great deal of her, and think a great deal about her, and she bore both tests admirably. If there was a fault to be found, it was with himself for his inability to altogether understand her. She played the part she had undertaken to play with abundant skill and discretion and grace, and even with an air of nice good-fellowship which had some of the aspects of affection. He was vaguely annoyed with himself for having insight enough to perceive that it was a part she was playing, and yet lacking the added shrewdness to divine what her own personal attitude to her role was like. He had noticed sometimes the way good women looked at their husbands when the latter were talking over their heads—with the eager, intent, non-comprehending admiration of an affectionate dog. This was a look which he could not imagine himself discovering in his wife's eves. It was not conceivable to him that he should talk over her head. Her glance not only revealed an ample understanding of all he said, but suggested unused reserves of comprehension which he might not fathom. It was as if, intellectually no less than socially, she possessed a title and he remained an undistinguished plebeian.
He made no grievance, however, even in his own thoughts, of either inequality. She had been charmingly frank and fair about the question of the names, when it first arose. The usage had latterly come to be, she explained, for a widow bearing even a courtesy title derived from her late husband, to retain it on marrying again. It was always the easiest course to fall in with usage, but if he had any feelings on the subject, and preferred to have her insist on being called Mrs. Thorpe, she would meet his wishes with entire willingness. It had seemed to him, as to her, that it was wisest to allow usage to settle the matter. Some months after their marriage there appeared in the papers what purported to be an authoritative announcement that the Queen objected to the practice among ladies who married a second time, of retaining titles acquired by the earlier marriages, and that the lists of precedency at Buckingham Palace would henceforth take this into account. Lady Cressage showed this to her husband, and talked again with candour on the subject. She said she had always rather regretted the decision they originally came to, and even now could wish that it might be altered, but that to effect a change in the face of this newspaper paragraph would seem servile—and in this as in most other things he agreed with her. As she said, they wanted nothing of Buckingham Palace.
She wanted equally little, it seemed, of the society which the neighbouring district might afford. There was a meagre routine of formal calls kept in languid operation, Thorpe knew, but it was so much in the background that he never came in contact with it. His own notions of the part he ought to take in County affairs had undergone a silent and unnoted, yet almost sweeping, change. What little he saw of the gentry and strong local men with whom he would have to work, quietly undermined and dismantled all his ambitions in that direction. They were not his sort; their standards for the measurement of things were unintelligible to him. He did not doubt that, if he set himself about it, he could impose his dominion upon them, any more than he doubted that, if he mastered the Chinese language, he could lift himself to be a Mandarin, but the one would be as unnatural and unattractive an enterprise as the other. He came to be upon nodding terms with most of the “carriage-people” round about; some few he exchanged meaningless words with upon occasion, and understood that his wife also talked with, when it was unavoidable, but there his relationship to the County ended, and he was well pleased that it should be so. It gave him a deep satisfaction to see that his wife seemed also well pleased.
He used the word “seemed” in his inmost musings, for it was never quite certain what really did please and displease her. It was always puzzling to him to reconcile her undoubted intellectual activity with the practical emptiness of the existence she professed to enjoy. In one direction, she had indeed a genuine outlet for her energies, which he could understand her regarding in the light of an occupation. She was crazier about flowers and plants than anybody he had ever heard of, and it had delighted him to make over to her, labelled jocosely as the bouquet-fund, a sum of money which, it seemed to him, might have paid for the hanging-gardens of Babylon. It yielded in time—emerging slowly but steadily from a prodigious litter of cement and bricks and mortar and putty, under the hands of innumerable masons, carpenters, glaziers, plumbers, and nondescript subordinates, all of whom talked unwearyingly about nothing at all, and suffered no man to perform any part of his allotted task without suspending their own labours to watch him—an imposing long line of new greenhouses, more than twenty in number. The mail-bag was filled meanwhile with nurserymen's catalogues, and the cart made incessant journeys to and from Punsey station, bringing back vast straw-enwrapped baskets and bundles and boxes beyond counting, the arrival and unpacking of which was with Edith the event of the day. About the reality of her engrossed interest in all the stages of progress by which these greenhouses became crowded museums of the unusual and abnormal in plant-life, it was impossible to have any suspicion. And even after they were filled to overflowing, Thorpe noted with joy that this interest seemed in no wise to flag. She spent hours every day under the glass, exchanging comments and theories with her gardeners, and even pulling things about with her own hands, and other hours she devoted almost as regularly to supervising the wholesale alterations that had been begun in the gardens outside. There were to be new paths, new walls with a southern exposure, new potting sheds, new forcing pits, new everything—and in the evenings she often worked late over the maps and plans she drew for all this. Thorpe's mind found it difficult to grasp the idea that a lady of such notable qualities could be entirely satisfied by a career among seeds and bulbs and composts, but at least time brought no evidences of a decline in her horticultural zeal. Who knew? Perhaps it might go on indefinitely.
As for himself, he had got on very well without any special inclination or hobby. He had not done any of the great things that a year ago it had seemed to him he would forthwith do—but his mind was serenely undisturbed by regrets. He did not even remember with any distinctness what these things were that he had been going to do. The routine of life—as arranged and borne along by the wise and tactful experts who wore the livery of High Thorpe—was abundantly sufficient in itself. He slept well now in the morning hours, and though he remained still, by comparison, an early riser, the bath and the shaving and slow dressing under the hands of a valet consumed comfortably a good deal of time. Throughout the day he was under the almost constant observation of people who were calling him “master” in their minds, and watching to see how, in the smallest details of deportment, a “master” carried himself, and the consciousness of this alone amounted to a kind of vocation. The house itself made demands upon him nearly as definite as those of the servants. It was a house of huge rooms, high ceilings, and grandiose fireplaces and stairways, which had seemed to him like a royal palace when he first beheld it, and still produced upon him an effect of undigestible largeness and strangeness. It was as a whole not so old as the agents had represented it, by some centuries, but it adapted itself as little to his preconceived notions of domesticity as if it had been built by Druids. The task of seeming to be at home in it had as many sides to it as there were minutes in the day—and oddly enough, Thorpe found in their study and observance a congenial occupation. Whether he was reading in the library—where there was an admirable collection of books of worth—or walking over the home-farms, or driving in his smart stanhope with the coachman behind, or sitting in formal costume and dignity opposite his beautiful wife at the dinner-table, the sense of what was expected of him was there, steadying and restraining, like an atmospheric pressure.
Thus far they had had few visitors, and had accepted no invitations to join house-parties elsewhere. They agreed without speaking about it that it was more their form to entertain than to be entertained, and certain people were coming to them later in the month. These were quite wholly of Edith's set and selection, for Thorpe had no friends or acquaintances outside her circle for whose presence he had any desire—and among these prospective guests were a Duke and a Duchess. Once, such a fact would have excited Thorpe's imagination. He regarded it now as something appropriate under the circumstances, and gave it little further thought. His placid, satisfied life was not dependent upon the stir of guests coming and going, even though they were the great of the earth. He walked on his spacious terrace after luncheon—a tall, portly, well-groomed figure of a man, of relaxed, easy aspect, with his big cigar, and his panama hat, and his loose clothes of choice fabrics and exquisite tailoring—and said to himself that it was the finest view in England—and then, to his own surprise, caught himself in the act of yawning.
From under the silk curtains and awning of a window-doorway at the end of the terrace, his wife issued and came toward him. Her head was bare, and she had the grace and fresh beauty of a young girl in her simple light gown of some summery figured stuff.
“What do you say to going off somewhere—tomorrow if you like—travelling abroad?” he called out, as she approached him. The idea, only a moment old in his mind, had grown to great proportions. “How can we?” she asked, upon the briefest thought. “THEY are coming at the end of the week. This is Monday, and they arrive on the 12th—that's this Saturday.”
“So soon as that!” he exclaimed. “I thought it was later. H-m! I don't know—I think perhaps I'll go up to London this evening. I'm by way of feeling restless all at once. Will you come up with me?”
She shook her head. “I can't think of anything in London that would be tolerable.”
He gave a vague little laugh. “I shall probably hate it myself when I get there,” he speculated. “There isn't anybody I want to see—there isn't anything I want to do. I don' t know—perhaps it might liven me up.”
Her face took on a look of enquiring gravity. “Are you getting tired of it, then?” She put the question gently, almost cautiously.
He reflected a little. “Why—no,” he answered, as if reasoning to himself. “Of course I'm not. This is what I've always wanted. It's my idea of life to a 't.' Only—I suppose everything needs a break in it now and then—if only for the comfort of getting back into the old rut again.”
“The rut—yes,” she commented, musingly. “Apparently there's always a rut.”
Thorpe gave her the mystified yet uncomplaining glance she knew so well in his eyes. For once, the impulse to throw hidden things up into his range of view prevailed with her.
“Do you know,” she said, with a confused half-smile at the novelty of her mood for elucidation, “I fancied a rut was the one thing there could be no question about with you. I had the notion that you were incapable of ruts—and conventional grooves. I thought you—as Carlyle puts it—I thought you were a man who had swallowed all the formulas.”
Thorpe looked down at his stomach doubtfully. “I see what you mean,” he said at last, but in a tone without any note of conviction.
“I doubt it,” she told him, with light readiness—“for I don't see myself what I mean. I forget indeed what it was I said. And so you think you'll go up to town tonight?”
A sudden comprehension of what was slipping away from his grasp aroused him. “No—no,” he urged her, “don't forget what it was you said! I wish you'd talk more with me about that. It was what I wanted to hear. You never tell me what you're really thinking about.” She received the reproach with a mildly incredulous smile in her eyes. “Yes—I know—who was it used to scold me about that? Oh”—she seemed suddenly reminded of something—“I was forgetting to mention it. I have a letter from Celia Madden. She is back in England; she is coming to us Saturday, too.”
He put out his lips a trifle. “That's all right,” he objected, “but what has it got to do with what we were talking about?”
“Talking about?” she queried, with a momentarily blank countenance. “Oh, she used to bully me about my deceit, and treachery, and similar crimes. But I shall be immensely glad to see her. I always fight with her, but I think I like her better than any other woman alive.”
“I like her too,” Thorpe was impelled to say, with a kind of solemnity. “She reminds me of some of the happiest hours in my life.”
His wife, after a brief glance into his face, laughed pleasantly, if with a trace of flippancy. “You say nice things,” she observed, slightly inclining her head. “But now that Celia is coming, it would be as well to have another man. It's such dreadfully short notice, though.”
“I daresay your father could come, all right,” Thorpe suggested. “I'd rather have him than almost anyone else. Would you mind asking him—or shall I?”
An abrupt silence marked this introduction of a subject upon which the couple had differed openly. Thorpe, through processes unaccountable to himself, had passed from a vivid dislike of General Kervick to a habit of mind in which he thoroughly enjoyed having him about. The General had been twice to High Thorpe, and on each occasion had so prolonged his stay that, in retrospect, the period of his absence seemed inconsiderable. The master now, thinking upon it in this minute of silence, was conscious of having missed him greatly. He would not have been bored to the extremity of threatening to go to London, if Kervick had been here. The General was a gentleman, and yet had the flexible adaptability of a retainer; he had been trained in discipline, and hence knew how to defer without becoming fulsome or familiar; he was a man of the world and knew an unlimited number of racy stories, and even if he repeated some of them unduly, they were better than no stories at all. And then, there was his matchless, unfailing patience in playing chess or backgammon or draughts or bezique, whatever he perceived that the master desired.
“If you really wish it,” Edith said at last, coldly.
“But that's what I don't understand,” Thorpe urged upon her with some vigour. “If I like him, I don't see why his own daughter——”
“Oh, need we discuss it?” she broke in, impatiently. “If I'm an unnatural child, why then I am one, and may it not be allowed to pass at that?” A stormy kind of smile played upon her beautifully-cut lips as she added: “Surely one's filial emotions are things to be taken for granted—relieved from the necessity of explanation.”
Thorpe grinned faintly at the hint of pleasantry, but he did not relinquish his point. “Well—unless you really veto the thing—I think I'd like to tell him to come,” he said, with composed obstinacy. Upon an afterthought he added: “There's no reason why he shouldn't meet the Duke, is there?”
“No specific reason,” she returned, with calm coolness of tone and manner. “And certainly I do not see myself in the part of Madame Veto.”
“All right then—I'll send him a wire,” said Thorpe. His victory made him uneasy, yet he saw no way of abandoning it with decorum.
As the two, standing in a silence full of tacit constraint, looked aimlessly away from the terrace, they saw at the same instant a vehicle with a single horse coming rather briskly up the driveway, some hundreds of yards below. It was recognizable at once as the local trap from Punsey station, and as usual it was driven by a boy from the village. Seated beside this lad was a burly, red-bearded man in respectable clothes, who, to judge from the tin-box and travelling-bags fastened on behind, seemed coming to High Thorpe to stay.
“Who on earth is that?” asked Thorpe, wonderingly. The man was obviously of the lower class, yet there seemed something about him which invited recognition.
“Presumably it's the new head-gardener,” she replied with brevity.
Her accent recalled to Thorpe the fact that there had been something disagreeable in their conversation, and the thought of it was unpleasant to him. “Why, I didn't know you had a new man coming,” he said, turning to her with an overture of smiling interest.
“Yes,” she answered, and then, as if weighing the proffered propitiation and rejecting it, turned slowly and went into the house.
The trap apparently ended its course at some back entrance: he did not see it again. He strolled indoors, after a little, and told his man to pack a bag for London, and order the stanhope to take him to the train.